Over Our Heads

A Vigil

Whenever things got too much for me, during those bad years when we lived on Harrington Street, I used to leave the flat and go out walking for as long as it took to get my head together. Usually a quick stomp around the block would do the trick, but sometimes I would be gone for hours, marching in aimless fury or boarding buses with a vague desire to spread my anger thin over distance.

No matter where my rambling took me, though, I’d always finish up in the same place. Before going home I’d buy a pack of cigarettes and sit on a bench by the Grand Canal to smoke a few, end to end. I had a favourite spot: just beyond Baggot Street Bridge, where the towpath sinks below the level of the road and is separated from the pavement by a tall black fence. There I could expect to find the silent company of a drunk embracing a bottle of strong cider, or on weekends that of an unimaginative father watching a son or daughter pelting the swans with bits of bread. I liked it down there. It was a place where you could be by yourself without having to suffer the horror of being alone.

Laura, my wife, was an actor, and she was beautiful. If you had seen us together on the street you would have wondered what she saw in me. The answer was that we shared a secret — call it faith or fantasy. What had bonded us in college was a resolution to deny the signs that neither of us was meant for greatness, and it was this commitment that had tightened us together throughout the ruin of our twenties. What did we fight about? The usual, I suppose. Sex, money, selfishness. Why we fought is a far more interesting subject, and a problem that I have never quite been able to solve. It certainly didn’t help that we were both only ever partially employed, but I think it went deeper than that. I think it had something to do with needing someone to hate every now and then. It also might have had something to do with needing someone to forgive you. Let’s just say that in our own ways we were a source of comfort for each other, through our failures and through our shared loss of youth, and that of lesser things are lasting marriages made.

During the week I turned thirty, I studied the Facebook accounts of old friends who had become actuaries or engineers. That weekend Laura arranged for us to spend a few days in her uncle’s caravan in Wexford. We drank spiced rum, played songs on my guitar and ate ice cream topped with hundreds and thousands by the beach. We had a decent time. But on the train home on Sunday afternoon we both were dangerously hung-over. We got to sniping and, as soon as we had climbed the stairs to the flat, we fell into a fight. Laura had left her phone behind in the caravan and, as was her wont whenever faced with a problem that lacked an easy solution, she started stomping around the place, slamming doors and working herself into a tantrum.

‘But you don’t understand,’ she said in response to my attempts at soothing her. ‘I’m expecting a call this week. I’m expecting my agent. I’m expecting work. Remember work?’

‘Sure I remember work,’ I said. ‘It’s the place I go to every day. And where I’ll be tomorrow while you’re crying over your fucking phone.’

For these were our established starting positions, the pattern we had well rehearsed. Whichever one of us had a job at any given moment would — as well as paying off the credit cards and buying too much shopping from the good supermarket — assume it as his or her right to lord it over the other. Every now and then, I was a productive member of society while she was a spoiled little girl with silver-screen delusions. And occasionally, she was a pillar of financial stability while I was a fantasist who had never quite got over the time his band had opened for — whoever.

Laura moved to the window and began to smoke violently, her chin thrust forward in her customary challenge to the world. She was wearing a pair of my jeans and her skin still smelled of the beach. Stray strands of her hair seemed to glow in the weakening sunlight.

‘I’d hardly call what you’re doing work,’ she said. ‘Little office boy. That’s fucking drudgery.’

I closed my eyes and breathed slowly through my nose. Something in my jaw was clicking back and forth. I struggled for eloquence. I knew where we would be in a few minutes’ time but I forged ahead regardless.

‘Sweetheart,’ I said as my hand sought warmth at the small of her back. ‘Look, it’s fine. We’ll figure it out. Why don’t you just call him?’

‘Oh, right. Yeah, sure. Perfect.’ I could tell that Laura was close to tears. ‘You really haven’t a fucking clue about the world, have you? You really don’t know anything about how things work.’

The traffic noise from the street outside had risen to a horrible pitch. It came like a flood through the open window, pulling with it its grime and its threat and forcing me to see my home for what it was. I looked around at the cheap sticks of inexpertly repaired furniture, the battered TV, the maniac watercolours that Laura and I had made together in a shared fit of painterly enthusiasm as — wham! — a bus tore past and filled the room with its roar.

In a blind rage I hit the street and walked without direction. The faces of the people walking towards me — strangers on their way to their evening’s destinations, where they would be happy, or not — seemed to possess knowledge of how I was living my life. I retreated to a pizza place on Merrion Row and was reassured for a while by the easy comfort of cheese and grease and dough. I ordered beer and moved on to wine and finished with amaretto.

When the waitress came over with my bill she smiled in a way that I thought spoke of pity born from a kindred sadness. She had eyes that looked as though they might never be too far away from crying. I noticed that she was wearing a coat.

‘You’re finished with your shift,’ I said.

Her eyes darted to the door.

‘Will you have a drink with me, then? It’s my birthday. One drink? I even know a place.’

I could see the rest of the night laid out before us. We would go to the canal together with a bottle and talk until dawn, confess our sins and be reborn in one another’s mercy. But of course the waitress wouldn’t come with me. What she did was call the manager — a fat, oily little creature with a thick bunch of keys hanging from his belt and a name tag that read ‘Eugene’ pinned over one of his breasts — who escorted me from the premises and suggested that it might be best if I never returned.

So I bought a bottle of supermarket Cabernet and went alone to the canal. There was no one else on the towpath. It was getting dark but the sky held no hope of stars. I found my usual bench and sat down and opened the bottle. The wine was of the kind that coats your tongue and makes you spit blue for hours. I watched the swans, counting and recounting them, and felt as though I had arrived at a moment of great decision. The feeling had an intensity the like of which I had known only once before. That had been many years earlier, but it was a moment to which my mind often returned while sitting by the canal. Laura and I were still spending our Sunday afternoons in bed back then. I had money, and had just returned from the good supermarket with lunch things I knew she’d like. I found her asleep, the sheets pulled back to reveal her narrow shoulder blades and her head resting on an arm, her face turned towards me. I knew for certain that she was my life and decided right then that I would commit myself to the service of her happiness. Now, as I drank, I tried to picture the way Laura’s face had looked that day that made me love her. I focused my mind on trying to pull that image forward from my lost years. But it wouldn’t come.

The swans moved off together downstream but one stayed where he was. I watched him closely. An enormous cob, his neck was as long as my arm and above his beak there was a fat black bulge that might have been the source of his power. Soon I began to think that he must be trapped or snagged on something. I walked to the edge of the bank and peered down into the dark water, looking for a snarl of rope or wire or a spear of steel broken from a shopping trolley. There was nothing there, and then there was something. Floating into focus, I began to make out another swollen curl of breast and feather on the bed of the shallow canal. I could see an orange foot, a silt-brown tail. I studied the way the water rocked her neck.

The cob circled slowly, his head tucked tightly to his breast. I decided to make an observance. I sat back down and finished my wine and kept him company until dawn. All night he kept up his slow circling and I was glad that I could be with him. In the morning, as I walked home to end my marriage, I felt as though I might have made a difference in the world. Never since has my life been any better.