‘I cast my bread upon the waters,’ he said.
My mother rang to tell me that I wasn’t at work.
‘You’re not at work,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘It’s Saturday,’ I said. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, because we both lie the same way. ‘Any news?’
‘Nothing much,’ I said (there is an angel in the kitchen, breaking the toaster), ‘and yourself?’
‘Oh nothing new here.’ (Your father is dying, but so are we all.) So we hung up.
Stephen watched the television. He sat on the sofa and laughed. When the weather forecast came on he looked at the satellite picture, said ‘Wrong again! Ha ha ha.’ He told me about an angel of his acquaintance who had killed himself three different ways at once. His death, when it came, was so violent, that he was still scattering and now, instead of walking, he fell like the rain.
And then there was the guy, he said, who died to the sound of sex in the next room, which was, he thought, quite a nice way to go.
‘He specialises in the sound of kisses and their colour.’
‘Really,’ I said thinking about red.
We sat there all day, fighting over the remote control, waiting to see which one of us would snap. He cried at the news, or laughed inappropriately. I did the same at Little House On the Prairie. He annoyed me by pointing out an actor in the crowd.
‘I know him. Cyanide. 1964. Lovely guy. Specialises in the mothers of homosexual men and shoes.’
Then there was the show I was working on. It was called the LoveQuiz. I said ‘Have you ever seen anything so awful in all your life?’ and Stephen said ‘It’s about Love, isn’t it?’
So I went into work and made people love each other for a while.
The next weekend I took him into town. I was hoping he would bump into someone more needy and snag on to their grief in the crowd.
I had to hold his arm walking down the street to get him through all the pain between the GPO and O’Connell Bridge. He knelt down outside Clery’s and took some dirt up off the street like a child. So I brought him inside, down to the hardware department and explained toasters to him, just to make the effort. I could tell by his enthusiasm that he missed the passage of time, he missed his body, more than he missed the body of his wife.
By the time we got to the river I loved him. He sang the Canadian Boat Song for me. The rain didn’t wet him and the wind blew right through.
We looked down into the water and I said that maybe we could make a go of it after all. I would give up money if he liked, and lust, if he had to be old-fashioned. I said that there was something between us that was real and strange and just because he denied it, didn’t mean that it wasn’t there. The end of his nose went white. He said to me ‘If dying wasn’t enough, how do you think that sex would help?’
‘You’re just like the last man I went out with,’ I said. ‘At least he put out.’
He began to sing.
He was still singing when my mother called to the house with some food in a Tupperware box. They seemed to get on fine.
‘No-one sang like that for me,’ she said.
‘If you want him, you can have him,’ I said.
‘Thanks for the chicken,’ she said. ‘It’s nice to see you still care.’
‘Don’t be so bloody sarcastic,’ I said and left them both in the kitchen, talking about God.
I went into the sitting room and turned on the television to cover the sound of their voices. For a shy woman, my mother is remarkably loud. She said ‘I feel sorry for young women these days, so much is denied them.’ She said ‘It is a pity that she can’t sing. I always thought that a singing voice was the best gift of all. Never mind all the rest.’ I turned up the television and started banging my head off the wall.
‘You know what I think,’ she said as I showed her out, ‘about you and men?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Now fuck off Ma and leave me alone.’
Stephen came into the hall. She turned to him. ‘Where did I go wrong?’ she said. ‘The summer I was pregnant with this young woman, I swam in the sea every day, in the sun and in the rain. And I said to God that this would be my prayer for the child — whoever it was, whoever it turned out to be. And now,’ she said, ‘now look at her.’
That night I kicked Stephen out of the bed. When I got up to go to the toilet I found him naked, hanged by the neck in the shower. He said it helped him to think, but his small wings were a bit forlorn. By morning he was cheerful again. He announced that he had half an answer at least. It was not his place, he said, to care.
I rang my mother and told her we were not to blame.
Keeping It Wet
Keep it wet, says Frank, the director on the LoveQuiz, because he thinks we work in a whorehouse. I say Thank you Frank, but I work in a professional organisation.
OK. So I work on the LoveQuiz. Pass the barfbag. I work on the LoveQuiz. I believe in the LoveQuiz. To an extent. I get drunk and defend the LoveQuiz and I defend what people do and what we make people do on the LoveQuiz which is, after all, a matter for their own free will.
Stephen has ideas about free will, being an angel and full of shit.
The LoveQuiz is pink. It is a success. It has a cosy and dangerous host, fake games, real sex and a lot of laughs. It is a great and embarrassing show. Sometimes it is just embarrassing, but there you go, we usually get drunk on a Friday.
The office is a mess, full of the clatter-bang and howlaround of airwaves in crisis. People run around like it was a labour ward for the blind. They shout to make themselves clear, they whisper that the baby has no eyes. The phones are ringing, the vases stand empty, a male pin-up is stuck to the filing cabinet, ripped at the waist. In the corner is the hiss of an empty television, switched on, with nothing coming through. It is not simple.
On the wall is a board that says:
We used to knife each other a lot but we don’t bother any more. It never made any difference anyway.
Most things soak away and are forgotten. Marcus and I have forgotten that we had a carnal moment, or didn’t have a carnal moment or nearly had a carnal moment back in the good old, bad old days when everyone drank too much and said too much and ended up in hospital or in Channel 4; the days when we used to stay in the office to help shove the show out on the air, like crashing a truckload of carrier pigeons. We’d get a crate of beer and shout at the food and the mud and the water and the money. Then we’d shout at each other while I stole a bottle of whiskey from the Love Wagon’s office and tried to persuade either Marcus or Frank to piss in her bottom drawer, because I couldn’t do it all by myself.
These days we just work together and have a bit of a laugh. The show rolls on and doesn’t care. We blame the Love Wagon, because she is the boss. Not that she is ever there, but someone has to be getting something out of all of this.
The Love Wagon stands in the middle of Marcus and Frank’s mezzanine. They are always running up the down-escalator towards her, or sailing past on their way to the wrong floor. They discuss her like she was a person; her clothes, her decisions, her breasts, her lies,