‘Well So She Says’ by Lucy Sweeney Byrne

BOOK ONE

I. INTRODUCTION: THE CURE

I am searching for a cure. A cure for this. Gift. I’d imagine that if I were braver, and knew drugs better, I wouldn’t have resorted to sex.

(I’m talking about class A drugs, of ungodly colours; perfect bridal white, or rainbow shades, like Skittles. Do they come like that? I’d imagine they provide something of a distraction, at least. A laughing riotous far-away time-leaning- sideways sort of thing. Although being, in this area, virginal, I could be wrong. Let me know, would you?)

As it is, I’m too afraid to find out for myself; because I want to live, fully, in my body. I think. Here, now. Everything that can happen to a person happens now, is happening to me, now. So sex has been my method of choice. It is the fist-scrunching climax of the now. It’s what makes me a person, being.

But, I worry constantly about being addicted to anything I enjoy. That’s the way, with people like me. As you may know already. I tend to take things too far. But I’m glad I’m that way, now. In the now.

Glad the way car-crash victims and junkies are glad, with time. The ones who’ve only lost an arm, or the ability to walk, or the respect of loved ones. Battle scars are useful for perspective. It’s always unfortunate people insisting upon how grateful they are for life. Those simpering overweight mothers with paraplegic kids, saying every day is a blessing! or abusive mad bastards in prison who’ve seen the light. Fucking up is great for all that, later.

Yes, I am glad. Now.

II. THE DRINK

I suppose I ought to have applied the same panic-stricken wariness I have towards drugs to alcohol, but nobody warned me. Or I didn’t listen. Six of one. Hi my name is and I’m a pre-alcoholic. Hi-ii!

Pralcoholic /pralkəˈhɒlɪk/; Someone whose youthful lifestyle allows problematic drinking to seem merely gregarious.

I’m fun now. Later I’ll be pathetic. I’m enjoying lounging in the meantime of my life, suspended between the tripping, and the landing. I’ve learned a bit. Like the fact that nothing kills pride and opens you up to the skin-scraping sensations of shame and despair like being an utter fucking disgrace in your teens. It’s character-building.

(Late sub-heading: That Waking Feeling, or, The Fear)

Regresst /r I ’grɛst/: a feeling of sadness, repentance, or disappointment over an occurrence or something that one has done when attempting to minimise mature consciousness. (See pralcoholic.)

Regret for sentences discharged unexpectedly from my syrupy mucous mouth. Idly flirting through Bulmers hiccups with a friend’s father, from the back of the car on a lift to the train, God, you’re such a wonderful driver Mr. Molloy! Aren’t you so good to us? Catching his eye in the rear-view mirror as I fix my hair, chest pressed forward against the back of his head rest, bulging.

(Even then sex was the thing, really) 

Rogue, bold words would be conceived rutting on my tongue and sluggishly birthed out out out, without any say from me.

Regret for passing out in veiled corners of dark rooms at parties whose hosts had groaned inwardly when they saw me walk through the door a few hours before, quiet and smiling with my hair all curled, tits up tummy in, raring to go, bottle in hand.

The centre couldn’t hold. Leakages occurred. Tell-tale seepage at the seams. Then craaaack! Tears and wailing caoining tears unleashed. For all and any of the young men ever flung out of currachs off the coast of Mayo whom I could’ve birthed or loved, táim ag caoineadh! Flooding insides out out out onto humming electric-lit suburban footpaths, dull-achingly safe, patterned knickers down precariously plopped on cold pavement (tired, resigned, finished with all this now, for good this time!), somewhere on the brink of the soundly sleeping real.

What a fucking idiot.

Regret for stains on remains of clothes, abandoned over hedges mornings after, down icing-frosted laneways in the back-arse of nowhere. Shuffling crippled pilgrimages to bus stops on exposed roadsides, with women’s mini marathon t-shirts or faux-leather jackets or animal-print pyjama bottoms, Penneys, borrowed from reluctant acquaintances with shuttered behind-your- back eyes.
Regret for the disgusted underside glances of those cuntish morning dog- walkers with to-do lists and errands and intentions.

Christ, that time your grandparents, off out for lunch and a stroll, why not sure, life’s good sure, saw you meandering back to the house with only one shoe and yesterday’s make-up, sluttish now under God’s good sun, and said nothing of it, which was only worse, of course. That discomforting smell of matted hair off your pillow, hair never to be clean again. Not the way it was, once, when washed by a mother’s expert fingers in the bath before bedtime.

(For times when there was a bedtime)

Oh Christ Almighty, and let’s not forget, regret for cherry-bloodied sheets from first piercing time that night with yerman, you know the one, just because he said he loved you back; bundled up in a school backpack and stuffed in restaurant bathroom’s sanitary bin, at brunch the day after, with the whole fucking family there. Your baby brother’s birthday maybe? Yuh filty hoor. Little did they – ah but sure no bother, never happened, now. Only now.

These are some of the actions I could regret, were I the type. As it stands, I have a beautifully clear conception of my inconsequentiality, which allows me bounteous freedom, to not. Everything that can happen to a person happens in the present alone and is happening to me now, and now, those things are not happening. They are all gone, dead things, now. Going going …

Gone /gɒn/: no longer present; departed; non-existent; gone.

III. THOSE DRUGS

Still, drugs, they seemed different, somehow. Pills and powders; potions cooked up in filthy labs by glistening caramel-skinned stocky people in South America, wearing your dad’s old football t-shirt, with scars across their eyes and growling short-haired dogs.

We’d all been told, in hand-me-down scéals of terror and giddy whispers (at the back of bowling alleys and en route to bonfires, over naggins decanted in fat 50%-extra-free Pepsi bottles, from the raw, nicotine-diffusing lips of girls older and wiser than ourselves) that drugs, immediately upon ingestion, could result in a sudden, ignominious death. How humiliating. Hard drugs were for dropouts, failures. For girls with ‘baggage’ or ‘emotional shit’. Only those idiot boys with no apparent futures ever did proper drugs, and actually got away with it. Boys could do what they liked.

Ah, you know them; those long-haired ones who’d spend parties discussing FIFA and Fender versus Gibson in the corner over Dutch Gold, before the pills kicked in. Then the shirts’d come off, as they, in unblinking rapture, crowded together in humid condensation-coated rooms to bang sweaty heads to their friends’ amazing next-big-thing bands – Almost Cliche, Skeptic Tank, IX Lives and After the Math – revealing children’s pale and pimpled jagged torsos.

We pitied them, we mother superiors, and scorned their openness to experience. Their freedom.

You see, young women have so much more to prove. They have to project themselves into the future. Their physicality – let alone their history – insists upon it. They bulge forward foreward fore-ward with fertile potentiality. And besides, young women always know they’re being watched, so can’t let themselves go. Not properly. So we watched those boys, listened, and hid our unease in the presence of that great unknown beneath an itchy woollen coverlet of unwavering disapproval and grimacing disgust.

Fuck, how I envied them.

IV. THIS SEX

Sex holds more thrilling risks anyway, for the female. No, I don’t mean in matters of the fucking heart. I mean in matters of that disingenuous bitch, the womb. People are so terrified by the scene in that film Alien. Well, imagine watching that as a young woman. When it’s not a nightmare, but more than likely an inevitability. That there’s our fate, handed down, from our loving mothers, if we choose to succumb. To suck. To come.

I’d imagine, although feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, that one great difference in those trepidatious masturbatory years between a boy and a girl, is that sex is virtually always available to a girl, if she wants it, and not to a boy. I suppose that’s one of the reasons why girls are conditioned to believe, not only that they most certainly shouldn’t desire sex, but should actively reject it, while boys have been coerced into seeking it out as though their lives depended on it, through whatever means. Although, that’s a bit of a chicken/egg hypothesis.

Sex in ideal circumstances is dependent on a willing partner. Luckily, I’m young and free, and can apply the appropriate laces and lacquers and silty salt-water lighting to disguise myself as a creature desirable to the male of the species. All that is required of me as a female, is to ensure I am not entirely repulsive. Luckily, my person is irrelevant. *

On that note, I’m amazed at how ugly a whore can be, while still being able to make a living. It is the monetary exchange that is strange to me. There are so many willing, beseeching, ugly women in the world. Why not pick one up for free? Or masturbate? Why pay for an overweight, bulging creature, line-drawn and roughly coloured-in, excreting chicken meal deals and daytime television from her pores, whispering savoury nothings? I suppose it’s for the freedom of it, the guarantee. I guess buying an ugly prostitute’s services is the sexual equivalent of purchasing rental car insurance. You’re covered for all incidentals, accidents and oddities.

Actually, now that I think about it, I can definitely see the attraction in that, for a man. Yes, I can, really. To be free to do anything, any whim or grave-buried notion, and have no fear of admonition. Of disgust. The control of ownership. The idea arouses me, here where I sit; that sudden awareness of myself, down there, the burst of heat, the convulsion.

I shift in my seat, and make a mental note to masturbate under the warm cover ofdarkness later. Yes. All for now.

Ugly gigolos wouldn’t do so well. Surely they couldn’t? From what I’ve heard, it seems women like to create fantasies, to avert their frantic thoughts from the wretched raw meat of their own brutality. From nails-on-blackboard fucking.** Perhaps then, in my tastes, I am more the cigar-wielding gentleman’s club male than the winsome young female (on wind-beaten hilltop, yearning) than I care to admit. I have, after all, often summoned up, in my single child’s bed in the attic of my family home, a sticky, fat, russet and greying man, greased-up with paper notes in sweaty inside pockets and the trickling buttered blood of the rarest steak, taking me, taking my body, and fucking it. Chortling in rolling rolls of cloying laughter as I – me, in this body, now – fulfil his outermost desires.

I’ve always loved to be objectified. Always. From having to sing songs by heart for my grandmother at the kitchen table, to violin recitals, to dancing up against the taut trousers of a stranger under coquettishly diverted lights, fluttering and drowsy, in some swaying basement in the bowels of the city.

* It does not take much, for any woman, to fuck a man, externally.
** According to popular belief, women want men to make love to them, although I have never, in reality, found a smidgen of evidence to confirm this claim.

V. FORGIVE ME FATHER: AN AMATEUR’S PSYCHOANALYTIC DIAGNOSIS

Last year I had sex with twenty-four men. Or was it twenty-seven? I can’t remember. I chewed them up and swallowed them down, and a person simply doesn’t remember all the meals they’ve had in a year. Sex gives me an incredible sense of calm. Of achievement. I feel my worth through it, consummated. This is presumably a terrible reason to derive pleasure from something. But, well. Fuck it. It feels good now. I love to give myself to a man, and to know that, through this coupling, whatever he has inside him, whatever there may be about him that’s superior, I’ve stolen. Taken it between my legs up inside me, for safekeeping. His knowledge, his passion, his eyes, his laugh, his art, his hope. Mine. I’ve reduced him to this animal quivering urge, pressing itself against me. His vulnerable, piteous erection, seeking out its home, blindly, like a mole exposed above ground. You can’t help but want to torture it, slowly; it’s so helpless.

The act itself is a pleasure, in a way, but also an infinite desert nothing. Men seem very keen on giving head nowadays, licking and sucking and offering. I suppose it’s their way of apologising. Supplications: here I’m sorry take it here have this all for you. I’m a selfish lover. Although I do allow them to do what they will with my body. I’m there to be enjoyed, in return for their more precious submission. To demean themselves, reveal themselves like that, simply for!

In the act, I’m not present. I’m observing, waiting. It is a fiction. Playing on visceral tactile 3D screens, all around me. Simulated stimulation, live. Now. It is not dissimilar to the disinterested half-watching of dogs humping in the street from the misty window of a bus in traffic. I watch myself, in the act, and try to angle my body accordingly, for maximum impact. *

* According to a currently disused and little-known text of the O.E.D., sex is in fact two people compiling memories for future masturbation in the same room.

BOOK TWO

VI. CASE STUDY: THE ANOMALY

(Sub-heading: A Man Descended)

I met a man recently, and knew, from the capability of his mind, that I wanted to bring him down to fuck me. Down down down and with that crude ejaculation he’d be mine and so we’d be down here, in the pits, together, and I’d have taken his power in my body.

Then I’d be able to escape the fear of him, of his knowledge. His other, out there, beyond me.

This man was tall and solid and unfleshed. He had a lurching, crooked voice which pondered over words as though squeezing their skins for ripeness. He had black rat’s eyes which I found hard to meet without tipping forward.

He was, frankly, too much for me. I should’ve seen it then.

This man’s squid ink seeped into my white aqueous mind and left a stain, indelible. He knew things I didn’t, and made me nakedly aware. Of my naïveté. My lacks, my gaps. I didn’t like how translucent his searchlights made my skin. So I sought him out, using my greatest grandmother’s imparted methods, shape-shifting my self towards him. Interlaced, we wove our way through reams of cross-hatched streets back to a bedroom hanging off the edge of the city.

He fucked me, and I took it. He fucked me again, and again, and I took it, and it hurt, which was all the better. All the more a real thing. He smoked finger-rolled, seam-licked cigarettes in the lulls between and told me he had a girlfriend, an open relationship. They were both accomplished artists, on the up and up. It was all very complicated, but oh so simple, if you only knew.

He was older than me, and lorded his years on earth prior to my conception over me, with relish. He’d seen the world and come home to bathe in the glory of one returned from an odyssey. He’d read authors whose names I couldn’t pronounce, seen sights I couldn’t dream up, and felt things my chest had not yet developed the capacity to withstand. Because of this, his sheets were threadbare on my skin, and I shivered. I adored and despised this man upon impact.

This was not how I had known my sex to be. He was winning. I took all I could, grasping, frenzied, yet gained nothing. He was liquid in my hands. He made me come, and then forced me to come again. He’d pierced a hole in the side of me, and all my potency was leaking out across the sheets and drip drip dripping down between the floorboards.

This man drank well, and had no fear of drugs, and I resented him his apparent future; for all I’d foregone, and endured, only to end up lagging, still. We discussed books and he taught me various things until I thought my ribs would crack under the weight of them. I hated him for my ignorance, and for knowing that all I could ever do, would be this.

To be stood by his guiding hands late at night in a dimly-lit living room before the mantelpiece while he fucked me from behind, groaning, alone, all the while keeping his best secrets to himself, locked tight away. There was a mirror before me, and so I closed my eyes, not wanting to look, or to be seen looking. This was not my now. I muttered ‘no’ beneath my breath, lamenting the poor bargain I had struck, but he kept furiously his rhythm, all for himself, until the final shudder and collapse, and panting, rested his hot hollow cheek on my maternal, patient back. And I bit my lip and abhorred myself for wanting it all again.

AFTERWORDS

VII. AND SO

I left that night and caught the train home, to my father’s house. On the way I thought about sex. I know that to be true, because it always is.

You could smell it off me. The well-meaning brightness growling to a halt before me stung my redraw bitten face and, blinking, I pulled my coat tight around me, as I boarded. I sat directly across from a sucked-tight junkie, unabashedly lost in her own roving, labyrinthine narrative. I felt the urge to pat her deflated leg, but stopped myself just in time. I pitied myself for being lonelier than she was. I watched her eye-whites, star-gazing. Only just inaudible mumbled affirmations. Messages from on high. Say what we like, she must have great craic on it, all the same, I thought.

I crossed my legs and leaned my head on cold glass. I comforted myself with thoughts of future unsuspecting conquests awaiting me, so many to be had! Forward forward and out there somewhere now, across Sandymount Strand and the lights of Howth and the big dark sea, somewhere, breathing, now. Waiting, right now.

Ones that’d prove more successful than that tricksome black hole of a man, back there, who bore me no gifts, in return. Gone now.

I sighed, my lungs’ moisture blossoming white short-lived blooms on blackened yellow-streetlight speckled glass. Earth stars. If I were not such a coward, I could use drugs to be here, now, and then I reckon I wouldn’t need this sex of mine so much. As it stands, my options are limited, and sex is my current method of choice. *

* As all the while out of me his seed spilled forth, seeping lazily into my black lace underwear, causing a warm, moist unpleasant itch, in the meeting place of my body.

From issue #1: autumn/winter 2015

About the Author
Lucy Sweeney Byrne is a writer of short stories, essays and poetry. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, Grist, and the anthology Stinging Fly Stories (2018). Her debut collection of short stories, Paris Syndrome (Banshee Press, 2019), was shortlisted for the Kate O’Brien Award and the John McGahern Annual Book Prize. From Greystones, Co. Wicklow, she currently lives in London.