Over Our Heads

Everything

Dark clouds had followed us from Dublin to central Meath. When finally they broke on Saturday morning, neighbours telephoned Melissa’s parents with news of flooding. In the early gloaming, Ciarán and I hauled sandbags to the milking shed, and then, while he spun the Land Rover into town, Melissa and I ate a three-hour lunch with Siobhán and covered invites, footwear, cake.

‘We’d better be leaving early tomorrow if we’re going to get yous home,’ Ciarán said that night over dinner (boutonnières, placecards, flower girls’ dresses).

But on Sunday morning there was a break in the rain. I sat on the edge of the bed to tie my trainers. Melissa yawned and rolled over, baring a white shoulder. The sheets caught in the crook of her knee and tautened against her back. I bent to place a kiss at her ear and at once I felt cunning and ashamed: what I’d really wanted, when I’d packed my running gear for the weekend, was to ensure some time alone.

A bank of swollen cloud loomed over the puddled driveway. The wind had stilled and the countryside was eager and delirious. Above the blackberry bushes a swarm of greenflies hummed a crazy music. A flock of starlings burst from the telephone line and squawked at nothing. A narrow road took me under a canopy of dripping trees, to the crest of a brief hill and down into a flooded gully. I came to a stile and looked beyond it: rolling, quiet gold. I clambered over. Tongues of corn applied their slaver to my shins.

Melissa was waiting for me in the hallway at the foot of the staircase, wearing only the mock-Victorian nightgown I’d bought for her the previous Christmas. Its hanging collar framed a hard nub of breastbone; its tail hit just above the jagged scar sunk into her left thigh — mark of a refusing mare and of a shattered femur that ached still whenever the barometer dropped.

‘They’re away at Mass, you know,’ she said, narrowing her eyes.

‘Are they, now?’ I said.

I watched Melissa climb the stairs, and for a moment — the fall of her feet, the flex of her calves — it was as though I were nineteen again and back in the fusty hallway of her Rathmines digs. My hands were sweating, I realized, not from the run but from her, as they had done back then — so much so, once, that I’d dropped the cheap bottle of red wine I’d spent half an hour selecting.

In the bedroom I found her naked, the nightdress flung on the floor. She stood in front of the full-length mirror squeezing the flesh at her ribs. I struggled out of my gear and crept across the room, but when Melissa felt me against her back she tensed.

‘Shower first,’ she said. ‘You stink.’

I reached my hands around her waist.

‘I thought you liked my stink.’

‘That’s disgusting,’ she laughed. ‘When did I say a thing like that?’

‘Before.’

‘Before! Before, I pretended to like a lot of things — before I knew better!’

‘Like what?’

‘Your singing.’

‘What else?’

‘Your dancing!’

‘Be honest, now, you like my dancing.’ And I danced, flesh slopping back and forth on its loose tethers to my bones.

Melissa turned and laid her hands on my chest. Her hair smelled of fruit.

‘I liked it in a boyfriend.’ She bit the corner of a smile. ‘But my husband will have to be a better dancer.’

‘Oh, really?’ I fumbled for her hips but she skittered away from me and disappeared into the wardrobe crammed with her teenage clothes. I planted my bare arse on her desk. ‘Well, then, maybe I’m just not husband material after all.’

‘If you say you’re not, you’re not.’ I heard the click of many hangers. ‘But I’ll tell you one thing: you’d better not embarrass me for our first dance.’

‘And if I do?’

‘Then I’ll be forced to get a divorce.’

‘On what grounds?’

‘Clumsiness.’

‘ “Your honour, I can no longer in good conscience remain married to this man, for he is clumsy”?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Seems a bit extreme.’

‘It is what it is.’

Melissa emerged from the wardrobe holding in each hand a blue polka-dot party frock, nearly identical. She laid them both on the bed and turned to finger through the necklaces arranged on hooks in her travelling jewellery box. Her hand moved quickly, stopped, and rose to rub the notches at the base of her neck.

‘Have you seen my little Claddagh earrings?’

‘No,’ I sighed. ‘But I’m sure they’ll turn up. We’ll look for them after.’

‘After?’ In her eyes there was a glimmer of gleeful cruelty. ‘After what now, exactly?’

Whenever I stayed at Melissa’s parents’ house, I liked to take long showers in the screened, claw-footed tub. Then I’d sit on the toilet, leaf through the copies of Old Moore’s Almanac arranged on the cistern and study their alien world of weather lore and sheep dip. I rooted through the medicine cabinet to check the progress of Siobhán’s anxiety treatment, cracked the frosted window and looked out over moving fields. The sky above them was murderous but the fields were reconciled and quiet. I leaned my elbows on the window sill and endured for as long as I could.

The air in the kitchen was sharp with the tang of bleach and the tiles were tacky underfoot. Melissa’s eyes were riveted to the screen of the wall-mounted TV, where a grave-faced meteorologist laid hands on the country’s centre. At the opposite end of the room, Siobhán busied herself unloading things from shopping bags. The bite marks of elastic across her stomach made her look as though she’d been assembled in a hurry.

‘Need a hand, there?’ I asked and Melissa turned on me, her tongue a spike between crooked teeth.

‘No, you’re grand,’ Siobhán said.

Rain resumed its beat against the kitchen window. Water bubbled at the base of the sliding door. Outside, beneath the eaves of the milking shed, a herd of sheltering cattle moaned.

‘Squalling out there, ha Mel?’ Siobhán said, stacking beans on top of peas on top of corn.

Melissa studied the television.

‘Looks like,’ I said.

‘Melissa.’ Siobhán could not be deterred. ‘I forgot to tell you who I ran into — only Mary McConvey of all people. Has a voucher for glycolic peels over at Alchemy that Christy gave her for her birthday — subtlety, as ever, not exactly being Christy’s strong suit. Face on her of recent, to be honest, like a bumpy road. Herself and myself are considering one before the wedding. Interested?’

‘So, she’s coming too?’

Siobhán finished her task in silence. When everything was put away she made a beeline for me, took my stubbled jaw in her hand as she strode past and said:

‘You’ll do.’

I gathered breakfast things from the cupboards and seated myself beside Melissa. When I reached for the white plastic flower she’d pinned to the side of her head, she recoiled, her face pinched.

‘I’m not in the mood,’ she said.

What had happened, I knew, was what always happened: Melissa had fought with her mother out of fear and frustrated love. She wanted the reception to be elegant and intimate; Siobhán wanted to invite a mob of family and friends.

My head slid into my hands. The pulse in my thumb met that in my temple.

‘Okay, look,’ I said, ‘I mean, they are paying … Would it really be the end of the world —’

‘Stop defending her! You’re supposed to be on my side. When we’re married you’ll have to agree with me in everything, even when I’m wrong.’

I could see the full circumference of Melissa’s blue irises, the whites around them glaring.

‘Why even when you’re wrong?’

‘Because if I’m wrong then who the hell else is going to agree with me?’ She covered her face with her hands and mumbled, ‘Oh, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this. Maybe this is all just a huge mistake. Maybe you’re not ready.’

I laid my hand between her warm shoulder blades.

‘Hey, hey, Mel,’ I said, ‘of course we should, you know we should. I agree with you, okay? And I’ll talk to your mother, okay?’

‘You don’t understand.’ Melissa’s voice had emptied out. ‘It’s none of those things. It’s everything.’

‘What do you mean everything?’

‘I mean everything.’

I took my hand from Melissa’s back and spooned a nugget of cereal towards my face.

Ciarán leaned over the banister and shouted, ‘Are we right there so, are we?’ He crossed his arms and frowned, lips rehearsing the shapes of words.

‘So, come here to me, so,’ he said, sidling closer but with his gaze still fixed on the banister’s carved volute. ‘Have you given any more thought to what we talked about the other night?’

‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’m really grateful. I’m sure we both are but —’

‘Say no more. You have your pride. You’re an eejit but I can understand that.’

Ciarán bent to inspect a flake of varnish. I watched him work it with a nail and thought about the smells of a thousand dinners breathing from the house’s pores. Siobhán appeared on the landing, tottering in heels.

‘Here’s Miss Ireland, now,’ Ciarán said.

‘He’s terrible,’ Siobhán beamed.

Melissa followed, wearing now, I thought, the other polka-dot dress. I felt the urgency of a hair’s sweep, of a tooth-print on a lip — mark of sadness. Ciarán dug a hand into his jacket pocket and Melissa smiled when she saw what he offered.

‘Just cleaning out the car,’ Ciarán said as she affixed the earrings. ‘Came across them.’

Blasts of wind shook the trees and tore at the bushes. A hungry pool of water swallowed the drops that slashed its face.

‘Brollies,’ Ciarán said and took two golf umbrellas from the stand by the door. ‘Bring the car around, son?’

‘Very funny,’ I said.

‘I just can’t understand it,’ Siobhán said. ‘How does someone get by at your age having never learned to drive?’

‘City boy.’ I lifted our bags. ‘Never the need, I suppose.’

‘Suburban boy.’ Siobhán sucked her teeth. ‘Your mother.’

‘Will you leave him alone,’ Ciarán told her as we braved the driveway. ‘Sure, there’ll be need enough soon enough when the children start arriving.’

The Land Rover was cold, its carpets spotless. I squeaked close to Melissa on the leather seat but she leaned away from me. Siobhán and Ciarán bundled in and Ciarán set the wipers fighting.

‘My Christ,’ he said. ‘Have you ever seen anything like this? We’ll be rounding up the animals two by two in a minute.’

The Land Rover jolted over the cattle grid and sloshed to the centre of town. Cars stood abandoned by the kerb at hasty angles. Old women and teenagers avoided each other beneath the Pricebuster’s awning. We revolved slowly at a roundabout and slipped on to a ramp for the dual carriageway. I peered out through the windscreen and the rain and saw two lines of slow red lights.

‘I know what we can do to pass the time,’ Ciarán said. ‘Why don’t we play a little game?’

‘Because, Dad, that’d be tedious.’

‘Well, what better ideas do you have?’

‘Turn on the radio,’ Siobhán said.

Ciarán tuned through static to a wall of hysterical pop, against which Siobhán objected; then on to a murmur of lachrymose country, against which Melissa did. He found a GAA match report: Siobhán and Melissa groaned in unison.

‘Well, then.’ Ciarán snapped the radio off. ‘If that’s going to be your attitude then we can just sit here in silence.’

Melissa’s legs were crossed and she was staring straight ahead, eyes fixed, jaw set. What was her expression?

‘All right, Mel?’ I said. ‘Are you warm enough, there?’

‘Fierce weather altogether,’ Ciarán said. ‘Fierce.’

I wiped my window and looked out at heavy branches tilting over a rusted guiderail. A single shoe scudded by on the current. I groped in the footwell for my umbrella.

‘I think I’ll get out,’ I said, ‘and go see what the problem is.’

‘Good man, yourself,’ Siobhán said.

‘Are you serious? You’ll be drownded.’ Ciarán swivelled in his seat. ‘Will you stop him, Melissa?’

‘He’s free to do what he wants.’

The sky twisted grey into black, and thundered. Water surged in the ditch beyond the shoulder and the trees and hedges shook. Would we ever make it back to Dublin? And if we did, would Melissa stay angry with me all the way? In front of her parents? What was her expression?

The umbrella made little difference: rain seeped into my shoes and trousers and found its way to the corners of my eyes. I pushed on, squinting in through fogged windows at bouncing children and stone-eyed parents. Engines ticked away frustrated. Headlights lit the rain. At the head of the jam, at a dip in the road, a pond had formed across all four lanes. Traffic moving in the opposite direction slowed and waded through, but the pond was deeper on our side. In the fast lane a van sat spluttering. In the slow lane a Mercedes hunkered, dark and vacant. A man and two children stood marooned nearby.

The man hopped and waved. Was he calling for me? I picked my way towards him through the tangle of clamouring bonnets.

‘Hey.’ The man had to shout above the rain. ‘Hey, I need some help.’ His shoulders were stooped from cold or worry but his clothes promised a comfortable room in which later to discuss all this. ‘I have to get back to the car and fetch my phone. We bailed out when the water started coming in the doors and I forgot it. Can you watch these two for just a minute? Please.’

The children gawped up at me. They both wore scarlet raincoats. The little girl’s nostrils were muzzled in snot. The little boy’s teeth were tiny.

‘This is Gráinne,’ the man said. ‘And this is Michael.’

Michael lunged for me and took me by the hand. His skin was soft but through it his bones felt oddly strong. Gráinne edged closer and installed a finger in a nostril. I angled my umbrella over the children’s heads. Behind us car horns honked a low lament and somewhere an aeroplane added its whine to the sizzle and gurgle. The man waded into the water, knees high, arms spread. My arm jerked as Michael dropped into a series of high-energy squat thrusts. The man reached the car, hauled its passenger door open and ducked inside. Michael rose and fired a toe deep into his sister’s shin. An anguished vowel escaped her lips and she buckled but didn’t fall. The torturer resumed his calisthenics. Gráinne pressed her face against my hip.

The man waded back holding his phone aloft in triumph. He ignored the children — one sobbing, one smirking.

‘Thanks a lot,’ he said.

‘You’re grand,’ I said. ‘But you should know that Michael —’

‘Thanks a lot,’ the man said again.

He dialled a number and raised the rescued phone to his ear. Michael waved a manic goodbye and Gráinne crept up behind her brother, wrapped her ankle around his and shoved. The boy fell on his face with a splash and a hollow pop.

‘Jesus!’ The man dropped to his hunkers.

I backed away and put the width of a bonnet between us. Michael writhed in the water. Gráinne tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and bent to help her brother to his feet. The man returned to his phone.

I traipsed back along the length of the jam and looked again through windows. Brows were furrowed, knuckles strained. The furious and the panicked were pulling U-ies in the reservation. Beyond the seething treeline, the fields accepted water.

After a while I found the Land Rover. Through the windscreen I could see Ciarán gazing into his lap and Siobhán staring straight ahead. Between them I could make out a sliver of Melissa’s shoulder.

I looked back towards the trees. Their leaves fitted together, shook apart, rejoined.

I thought about running.

I didn’t run.