‘Witness’ by Dearbhaile Houston

I came home to find my parents in love. They were holding hands at the arrivals gate. It was disorientating, really. It’s not as if my parents weren’t in love before. I’m sure in the early days of their relationship they were. Neither of them ever mentioned it so it’s hard to say. I thought they would break up as soon as I left, or at least one would have an affair – something. They needed a third person. They needed me. It’s how they generally communicated throughout my life, with me going between the two, separating and joining them. Our favourite subject was whoever wasn’t in the room at the time. Even as a trio we could talk about the other through winks or knowing raises of the brow. Now the two of them regarded me steadily, as if out of one set of eyes. They’d taken up smoking, in the way some couples might take up golf. They shared one pack throughout the week. You’d swear they were the first to do this – be in love – the way they exhaled at each other across the living room. Not that either of them cared to ask but I had also been in love. He was very nice, very Canadian. It was all new for me. The boys I knew before were the types who couldn’t look at you unless they were three pints in. But there was this tall solid thing chatting me up – politely, mind you, so much so that I almost didn’t cop what was going on – in the fiction section of the Bloor St. BMV. So yes, I think I fell in love. I fell in love with his life, at least. He was second-generation Slovenian, good Catholic stock. Every few weekends were spent out in Mississauga, the place swarming with tetas and little old babica at the top of the table. It was quite Irish, actually. I bundled into his world and I loved it even when he was annoying or distant or wore socks with pool sandals. But the whole thing was, at times, a little too jovial. The sex had a puppyish, back-slapping quality to it. It was more like we were players on the same team. Neither of us were too upset when I told him my visa was running out. We had a laugh on the drive to the airport and he kissed me sweetly before I joined the queue for security. I thought it was right to go home.

*

I am in the shop, buying their cigarettes no less, when I see him. The urge to slip away unnoticed takes over as it usually does when I am confronted with anyone I used to know from school. But there is limited space to hide here between the sliced pan and the small, dated display of toiletries. He’s there in the queue, a basket in one hand and a little girl gripping on to the leg of his trousers. She looks up at me.

‘Hello,’ I say to her, thinking it best to disarm the situation this way. He turns around and stares at me.

‘Jesus! How are you?’ He can’t remember my name. I knew he wouldn’t.

‘Caroline,’ I say.

‘Caroline, of course. How’re things? How’s college going? Say hello to Caroline, Sive.’

I smile at her. She continues looking at me, hand bunched around corduroy. ‘I graduated two years ago, actually. I’m just back from Canada.’

He turns to walk to the counter and puts his basket down. ‘Very nice. Very nice indeed. Cold, though?’

‘You get used to –’

‘Listen.’ He tucks his purchases (paltry; lurid sliced ham and a box of eggs) under his arm and pockets his change. ‘I’d better be going. This one gets a bit fussy if we don’t keep moving. Good to see you, Caroline. Say bye-bye, Sive.’ 

Sive says nothing. He shrugs at me and smiles. A soft smile. A good smile. I remember that.

I put my carton of milk down on the counter. ‘Twenty Mayfair as well please,’ I say to the cashier. She looks beyond me to the door.

‘God,’ she breathes. ‘That poor man.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘His wife was killed in a car accident about six months ago. Left him behind with that small girl. Terrible stuff.’ She leans forward conspiringly as if to tell me more. ‘Now. Ten ninety-five, please, when you’re ready.’

As I walk home I think there’s something about a man who has been touched by sadness. It makes them different. You’ll never find him in a pair of cargo shorts down by the prom with the child, his soft wife looking on at them from the rocks. No talk of au pairs or DIY projects around the barbeque. A man like that is different. You see him walking down the street and you know. You just know.

He had been a teacher at my school. Higher level English. He was young enough, newly qualified when he started, which was in my final year. We couldn’t help but love him, obviously. You could tell he loved us back too. The homework handed in on time, laughing at his jokes, the way we looked at him. Not that he ever took advantage of it. There was one girl, Natalie, the year below. She wrote him a letter asking him to run away with her to England in secret. He was so kind, handled it very well. We were furious of course. She wasn’t right in the head at all. Remember what she did with Alan Heaney on the retreat to Knock in second year, somebody asked. We did. We remembered. She moved to a different school after Christmas. We loved him even more after that but in a slightly dampened way because by then it was time for us to move on. Some of us to university or a hairdressing course or the job at the Montessori. I’m not trying to justify anything here. These are just things that I think should be noted: background, evidence.

I text Claire to tell her who I’ve met. A fellow survivor of that cinderblock hell, she’s just back from Sydney and I’m trying to stay away from those ones who had the gall to get a good job straight out of college. The ones who come home on weekends with their pastel-shirted Deloitte boyfriends. She wants all the details so we decide to go for a drink. My father has gone away for a conference and my mother has become unbearable, smoking her half of the pack despondently. Our conversation at the dinner table was lopsided and she started every sentence with ‘Your father and I…’ I had to get out of there. I’m at the pub five minutes early. Claire texts me twice more and each message adds another fifteen minutes to her arrival time. I sit at the bar, nursing a drink.

‘Long time, no see,’ someone behind me says. I turn around. It’s him.

‘Hello, Mr –’

He cuts me off. ‘Would you ever call me by my first name, you’ve been out of that place long enough.’

‘Sorry,’ I say.

‘Not to worry, not to worry.’ He pats my leg. ‘Would you like a drink?’

I smile at him. My front-of-class smile.

We end up down the back, couched low in one of the booths. His head is bent towards me and he speaks to my collar bone, hand on my leg.

‘We should do this again sometime, we should,’ he says.

I don’t know how to respond. I look up to see Claire come in the door and although this scene would give us plenty of fodder for the next few hours, I feel caught out. Bold.

‘I should really go now.’ I point to Claire. ‘My friend is here.’

‘Hold on. I’m not just saying that.’

‘Okay,’ I say to him, straightening up. ‘When?’

It is his turn to look away. I don’t ask about the fussy, motherless child. I just want a time and a place.

*

His house. 5pm. In the quiet of the bus my back aches. I feel big boned and clumsy. I pull my shoulders back and sit up straight, counting the stops. When I am around him my spine will relax, I hope. That’s how he’ll want me to be, I imagine. Malleable. All men want something they can shape with their hands. It’s obscene really, when he lets me in the front door: his bald living room and the child’s toys badly hidden behind the couch. We say how we are glad that we have met each other again. We say how it’s strange that I have grown up so much. But it all feels a bit stale. I want him to say he noticed me before. How he thought of me every day, standing at the blackboard or in the staff room. At night in bed with his wife when she was still very much pulsating and alive and beautiful in the present tense. And he would have been thinking of me. I see her picture on the dresser. She was a fair wisp of a woman, thin of wrist and hair. I can see why he’d like her. I bet he liked how small she was, how delicate. How he could love her and then a moment later hurt her, only to switch back before she noticed.

He sits down beside me on the couch. His eyes have that soft look about them. As he lays me on my back I want to ask him if he believes in ghosts. Does he think that his wife is watching us from the top of the dresser? Will she swoop down and demand repentance as we take off our clothes and do not look each other in the eye? I want that. What I want is someone to witness this. Me, in love.

From issue #3: autumn/winter 2016

About the Author
Dearbhaile Houston’s fiction and poetry has been published in Wordlegs, The Incubator and Icarus. She is currently completing an M.Phil in Gender Studies at Trinity College Dublin.