Movement, that’s what she needed. If she were busy she wouldn’t be able to dwell on him. She couldn’t even allow herself to think his name, although sometimes she said it aloud for the sheer pleasure of shaping her mouth around the syllables. Helen loved his name, the pattern of the K sounds in his Christian name and surname, the evenness of the double syllables in both. One time she’d been driving through Balbriggan and thought she was hallucinating because she’d passed a hardware shop and there was his name above the door. She’d had to retrace her steps to check whether there was actually a shop painted yellow and green on the corner of the main street with the name of the man she loved above it. There was. And it had made her laugh aloud with pleasure. She’d gone inside and felt herself suffused with joy as her eyes drifted along the shelves stacked with colour charts and tools whose purpose she couldn’t begin to fathom. Helen had bought a paintscraper to prolong the euphoria and kept it, unused, in a kitchen drawer alongside spare batteries and scissors.
But there wasn’t much gladness in her heart now as she dropped two red wine bottles into her recycling bin and recorked a third with only a glass or so eked from it. Although her feet were leaden, she knew there’d be little enough sleep that night.
‘Bring some hot chocolate to bed and read the new Maison Belle interiors magazine you’ve been saving for a treat,’ she urged herself. ‘That’ll make you feel better.’
Molly, who renamed everything, called it the Maison Smelly magazine, partly because Helen loved to lower her nose to the pristine scent of its unopened pages. Also because it inevitably offered free samples of potpourri refresher or fabric conditioner. Helen willed herself to believe that Maison Belle and a bedtime drink would reverse the decline in her flagging spirits. She knew all the tactics to manipulate a slump in mood – it was essential she did. Imagine if he contacted her on a day when she was feeling vulnerable and she succumbed to temptation and … Helen’s face crash-landed on her hands. She wished. She hardly knew what she wished for. Careful, don’t even think it, don’t let the narrowest scintilla of possibility edge around your mind. She leaped up and washed and wiped, perfecting her home; she’d as soon wedge the front door open with an All Burglars Welcome Here neon sign as retire to bed leaving dishes on the worktop or CDs separated from their holders.
At the bottom of the stairs, magazine under an arm and mug in hand, she cast an eye back over her immaculate domain. At least some aspects of life were under her control. Control. It was what rendered existence manageable. When she reached the top stair the phone rang. She counted as its bells pealed twelve times. Her fingers itched to lift it but she willed them to cup her drinking chocolate, breathing suspended as she waited for the jangling to cease. When all was silent she walked into the bedroom and pressed a button to read the confirmation – he was calling. The magazine slipped to the floor and she placed the drinking chocolate sightlessly on her bedside table, toppling the alarm clock. Her uncharacteristic clumsiness flung tongues of milky liquid from the mug but Helen didn’t notice the pool’s inching progress towards the table’s edge, or the way it dribbled onto her chrysanthemum-embroidered duvet cover. She curled, foetal fashion, with a pillow clutched to her cheek, too distressed to weep. Longing washed over her. And remembering.
He throws himself onto the ground and subsides against a tree trunk, mute with misery. Sweating from his headlong pelt, he tugs open his shirt buttons to create a current of air against his torso. His pain is so intense she reaches out instinctively, chafing his inert hand. Helen searches for words of comfort – lies or truth, no matter so long as they soothe – but can find none. Every angular line of his body exudes desolation and it gashes her to witness it almost as much as it wounded her to watch the scene five minutes earlier between the boy and his rabid father.
Impulsively she slides onto her knees in front of him, the leaves crackling on impact, and takes his face between her hands. He’s no longer sprawling, disconsolate, but watching her now, mesmerised, as she edges ever closer, bridging the gap between their bodies. Helen’s unaware of what she’s about to do until it happens. Her pulse is erratic, her body curves forward of its own accord; her lips sink onto his and cling there for the space of a heartbeat. There’s a momentary hesitation, then she feels his lips move under hers, warm and moist.
Pinpricks of perspiration flare around the pulse-point map of Helen’s body. She’s tingling and the intensity of her reaction causes her to waver – she pulls back and looks at him, leaning on one hand to steady herself. An indefinable gleam in his expression touches her immeasurably. She subsides towards his mouth, even as he moves towards hers. Their lips collide, his chin rubs against hers and she experiences surprise at the grating of his stubble, then has no further conscious thought.
The two are subsumed by sentience, mouths softening into one another, captivated by the delirium of pleasure. Her hand cradling his head scrapes against the abrasive texture of the tree trunk but the pain does not register. She presses against him, winding her arms around his neck, and her body against his incites a change of mood for his mouth is no longer whispers; there’s urgency in his serrated breathing and in kisses that clash teeth against teeth.
She disengages and rests her face in the hollow of his shoulder. A smattering of hairs clump in the sternum hollow between the salmon-pink nipples and her own hair tickles him as she kisses her way along his chest until she arrives at the downy belly button. And stops. She’s paralysed by a mole an inch to the left of his navel which she recognises as the twin to one she has on her own body. He pulls her to him, attempting to reignite her fire with his, but it’s too late. Reality has doused her and she’s dripping from it. She pushes him away and runs as though flight alone can promise expiation.
‘It didn’t happen,’ she moans, grinding to a halt. But the sensations whirling through her body are a contradiction.
‘Ready to come out and play?’
It was Molly on the doorstep, encased in a calf-length black Afghan coat, collar pulled high against the wind.
‘You look like Snow White in that collar,’ said Helen. ‘I thought we were meeting in the Life Bar. Anyway, we’re not supposed to be there for another forty-five minutes.’
‘I used to be Snow White but then I drifted.’ Molly’s hip-jutting Mae West impersonation backed Helen directly into the living room of her house – the hallway was knocked down to maximise space – and she kicked the door shut behind her with ankle-strapped heels so spindly Helen was amazed she could stand upright, let alone manoeuvre in them.
‘I can tell from those shoes you’re aiming for slut appeal tonight,’ remarked Helen. Only half-critically.
She was still in her bathrobe, although she’d invented a face and drawn it on and her dark Cleopatra bob was blow-dried into symmetrical perfection. Throwing on clothes was always the shortest component in the exercise, providing the brain-squeezing decision about what to wear had been reached. She’d solved that conundrum lying in the bath in her seaweed solution, bought on a weekend trip to Enniscrone when she’d luxuriated in the seaweed baths that had been a tourist attraction in the seaside town since Victorian times. It had taken a few minutes to overcome her repugnance when initially she’d seen the massive cast-iron bath really was packed with seaweed; somehow she’d imagined a sanitised version. But after a while she’d stopped noticing she was sharing the water with an excess of vegetation – and it had velvet-coated her skin like no other softening agent. Helen had balked, however, at obeying the notice which invited her to empty out her seaweed into the bucket provided.