Maggie Armstrong

Fiction

---

Featured Writer || Issue Eight

Margaret and Bram had been on mattresses in Dad’s almost six months when the thing was declared a pandemic but you still had to go to work and everything. Didn’t you? The show must go on, all that. Margaret was of this mind cycling over the bridge into town. The day was dry, heavily clouded and inviting, and she was about two hours late when she noticed J. Abraham & Sons Modern & Traditional Shoe Repairs tidied in between the dog grooming salon and the super-pub. Her boots did need smartening.

Standing shoeless while Mr Abraham resoled her right boot, she let her eyes rest on a display of shoe polish, gleaming along the countertop like tins of boiled sweets. Something made her gather up three colours. Black, dark brown and beige, though her dislike for these moments was great. Almost eleven and she hadn’t reached the office, Wednesday already. Her article was due Thursday.

Mr Abraham twisted her boot in the air for her approval, then added up the polish, and for each tin, picked out a wooden horsehair brush. He also recommended a protective leather cream. She strapped her purchases into the baby seat and cycled up Harcourt Street with the traffic swarming at her. 

Dad would call this a ‘company expense’. Clothes were ‘investment pieces’. For Fran, he wanted a romantic partner with a ‘pensionable job in the civil service’. For Margaret, he seemed to want only security, and this meant a safe return to Sergio and his girls. Six months they had been separated; six months on the mattresses, and the pull to return was great.

The news in her earphones would not relent. First it was Wuhan and now Lombardy, the terrible ICUs. Even the morning presenter sounded friskily elated by the situation. What Margaret did not want to see close were the schools. Bram was still little but the girls were securely schooled five days a week from 8.30 to 2pm barring occasional colds or holiday interruptions and the routine should not be tampered with. 

How long did a pandemic last? Some were saying three months. 

On Buckingham Street she tied the bike to the usual pole and carried her purchases up the steps. Number 12 wasn’t an office like her sister’s, with chairs and desks and lunch coupons for its employees, great printers, a foyer of lush tropical plants. She’d been treated to one of Lina’s lunch coupons and she adored the place. Margaret’s office was more of a hiding place or a dumping ground. A Georgian edifice, former in its grandeur, four storeys tall with frazzled Turkish rugs creeping through the doorways and dust-clogged stucco on the ceilings, and, when you reached the top, a little brown attic. It was here William had installed a desk and let a pregnant Margaret share the rent, three years ago. William ran a teenage climate action group and ‘global warming’ consultancy he’d rebranded to an ‘emergency advice clinic’. The clinic was the desk in the corner, covered in books and folders, unknown electrical items, a kettle, a bag of Tesco apples. On the wall, photographs of his kids in a meadow, a poster of a glacier, fallen at one corner. Margaret was always pleased to think she had never had feelings for William. Three whole years they had worked up here, ever since that Sunday Sergio had spent carrying her desk up piece by piece, then screwing it back together with his power tools. He’d carried up her desk chair, computer and printer, all the while pursued by the girls, who’d jumped into his arms and begged him for gelato when he was done. He’d sat with them on the sunken armchair while Margaret had arranged her pens and pencils in an old Pommery mustard jar. She’d separated her plays from her novels and put all the books in an alphabetical row, sandwiched between two Virginia Woolf tea mugs. A Room of One’s Own. Mrs Dalloway. 

Everything was bad, that day. It was all so much worse than they were even able to decipher.

Only four weeks had passed since the girls’ mother’s death. Sergio was a fresh widow and Margaret a practical stepmother and the thing between them, no longer an affair. The baby due in a month. Sprawled on the chair, he gleamed with sweat and his broad features looked slack with irritation. She could barely get up the stairs to her own desk and her chaos was no longer charming to him. But they were having a baby now so what could you do. 

Bram, their little boy, was three now and the girls, seven and nine. She’d already had her doubts about their ability to handle things but in the end, her presentiments were mild. Sergio had this habit, during an argument, of showing her his bank balance. He would swipe at his phone then brandish the figure with a satisfied expression and it was always a minus number. 

‘I deserve love’, she told him and he said ‘Go find a lover then, go on.’ Days could pass without a word exchanged between them. One night he’d prodded his phone and showed her another figure, very long. Six figures.  

‘This is what you’ll get,’ he’d told her. ‘From the insurance company.’

‘Insurance company, what are you talking about?’

They were in the kitchen. He looked out at the night streaked with rain. 

‘I think sometimes when I’m alone coming home from work how it would only take a twist of the wheel.’ 

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Her voice was quiet.

‘You know what I mean.’ 

She left the room. That night she stood with a 10k suitcase open on the floor. 

She knew she had to be the one to go. Sergio couldn’t leave his daughters, unthinkable, but she had her family, so she’d called her dad, filling the case as she waited. He arrived wearing his quilted jacket with his trapper down over his ears and pointed his key at the car jutting onto the road. She pulled Bram from his bed and carried him into the back. 

There were no bedrooms left at Dad’s but they’d set up mattresses in the TV room. Her brother Fran was in his room, and her sister Lina in her room, and a series of tenants had been occupying the attic to help with the bills that were high in a houseful of grown children that had always come and gone. 

The break-up was incomplete whatever way you looked at it. Every day, usually at mealtimes, Margaret would bring Bram home to see his father and sisters. She had very traditional ideas about family. Margaret tried talking to Sergio, even sitting in the same room. One evening after a toenail procedure she sat on the sofa and watched the rain outside, and all the despair to which she was ever entitled swelled through her. She swallowed two painkillers with the dregs from her water bottle and asked Sergio to make her  an omelette. It was how he had always taken care of her, by way of an omelette bubbling with cheese, flipped into a crescent, served on a plate with a twist of black pepper. He was very attractive to her that evening, very domesticated. The father of her child, nourishing her like she mattered. It happened only once during that time, the making of the omelette. The rest of the time they just avoided each other and argued over WhatsApp. For six months she dropped and collected Bram and by night they argued and warred over the niceties of money and work and the facts of the incidents that had led in the first place to their implosion. 

Brutally unfair, she’d think, pressing up the hill with the wind pushing her away. Not all that bad actually, washing the dishes in a tipsy daze while her dad dried up. Now that he was retired, he walked out and bought a bottle of white wine in the off license every day and chilled it. When winter set in he switched to red wine. The mornings were late and chaotic but the evenings were almost enchanting. Margaret felt that every night should be an elegant soirée with a filmic lustre, a French film, its heroine slinking around in dark clothing. Every night began with arias pealing from the radio, olives by the sofa and a jigsaw on the floor, and ended at the sink with Bram at her feet saying ‘Mama!’ He wanted blocks and gadgets, but once he saw it was time for bed he pulled at her shirt until she carried him inside and lay down with him, took out her right breast and let him have a go on it. There was no more milk in the left one, but he was getting a few last drops from the right, like sucking on a flat soda through a crushed straw. He was too big for this but it meant she didn’t have to read him a stupid story or talk to him at the end of the day and he fell asleep instantly. He was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Then on a Friday night, she sat at her mother’s old dressing table wielding a mascara wand at her eyes, Janis Joplin screaming from her phone. She put on gold hoop earrings and fun fur, and a bright red lipstick which invariably, she removed after some thought. Lipstick was over the top. But it was nice to be let loose in the world again, who could tell what might happen. With the free babysitting from Lina or Fran or Dad she could go out whenever she pleased, even if there weren’t a lot of friends to choose from anymore. She spun into the kitchen and dad might tell her she’d be perished in that cold, or he might say something like ‘The glitz and the glam, that’s all this one cares about’. 

William was coming down the attic stairs hastily carrying two cardboard boxes. He wore a white paper duck-beak mask and his blue eyes seemed preternaturally large. 

‘He-ey!’ She stood back in a flamboyant performance of the two-metre guideline. 

‘You’re coming in?’  

‘Yeah. Just need to do a few hours.’ 

‘You’ll have it to yourself. You heard the latest? Sorry, I’ve a lift waiting, talk soon, yeah?’ His phone was ringing and he answered and was gone. For years he’d been looking forward to the apocalypse but he didn’t seem himself. Margaret listened at her desk as his footsteps faded. 

‘Just because there’s a pandemic doesn’t mean I can’t come into this dump,’ she said aloud. By herself, she felt unusual. She opened her laptop to the piece of work her editor needed by tomorrow. This week it was an interview with the actor playing 

Aunt Lizzy in Philadelphia Here I Come! 

‘She has had an astonishing career on the British stage and made some serious TV to boot.’ The sight of what she had written made Margaret feel uncomfortable. Before she knew it another tab was open and the search bar was offering a prediction of the name as she typed it. The name was Mick Dineen. She ran her fingertips over the keys and closed her eyes. A minute later she clicked back to the interview.

It was hard to want to write about another person.

The bag of shoe polish was at her feet. She took out a tin, unscrewed the lid and inhaled its toxic perfume, shutting her eyes. A flash of ankle moved onto a stage, cut by a stiff black hemline. The slick and radiant competence of the professional woman, glimpsed in silhouette. 

Her dad used to polish his shoes at the armchair by the front door before going off to work. When she was leaving for her first job, he’d looked at her shoes and said, ‘Really?’ 

‘What’s wrong with them?’ 

‘Well,’ said Dad. ‘OK for going around the house. Not sure about the real world though.’ He then got out his box of polish, bent down and shone her shoes for her. He taught her how to do it, section by section, running the brush with such care he might have been soothing an animal. She knew it would make her late by a margin of five minutes she could not afford, and yet, the smell of it. That was her last job in the Real World, as she’d come to remember it. A ribald carnival of sexual opportunity that began with shoeshine and dry-cleaning, absolutely, and ended bent over the company president’s desk with a man who was not quite the company president though he did seem important. 

Then the rented desks, top of Buckingham Street, sound of seagulls from a lavender sky, an unending newspaper deadline.

Her dad was always showing her how to do things. How to apply superglue. Or how to look for field mushrooms. How to plant a potato, or sand a table. He kept hand-cut rectangles of recycled sandpaper in a cardboard box on which he’d written Sandpaper. 

He’d shown her how to change a tyre after she’d driven over a kerb in a rush to pick 

up the charcuterie for her 21^st birthday party. 

Afterwards, she had retained only loose words, broken mental footage. Jack. Wrench. Spare tyre. Clockwise. Spinning motion. She would always remember the bounce of the spare tyre on the road, dad catching it in his arms. Nothing stuck or cohered into a set of instructions. The smell of burning rubber on the road to the Samuel Beckett festival in Enniskillen, rainclouds above and sodden fields lumbering by. She’d rung Dad in a panicked haze. ‘I don’t know what to do, the car is shaking, there’s burning rubber — it’s like the car’s about to explode.’ 

‘OK,’ he said, his crackly voice mixing with the gentle kitchen sounds; dinner time, the cutlery drawer jingling open, the breezy chatter of Lyric FM. He would have been setting the table, her mother stirring something, opening the roasting oven door. 

‘Could it be a puncture?’ he asked. 

She pulled in off the road. He was right – shredded to its metal skeleton. 

‘But what will I do?’ 

‘Well. Are you parked?’ 

‘I’m on the side of the road.’ 

‘Find a man.’ 

‘Right.’ 

Find a man. She’d stood at the side of the road waving her arms until the first of them came, elderly and limping, but ultimately not going to leave her on her own – a Man. Freeing the spare tyre from its foam ring in the boot, kneeling in the gravel, spluttering out a rough smoker’s cough. It took the Man about ten minutes and she was on the road again and back in Dublin to find her mum and dad watching the 9 o’clock news at the fireside in their TV room.

In her Dad’s home this was the same room to which they’d lugged the stupid spiny mattresses to which they’d consigned themselves in the temporary arrangement. There were loose LPs in one corner, a destroyed record player, a cabinet of China never used, giant vases, and heavy photo albums that came toppling out when you opened the doors. There was no free storage so their clothes were kept in stacks that grew into tall heaps the less they were tidied. Books on top of coffee table books, broken Digestive biscuits on the carpet, coffee cups, the odd turd. Bram was still in nappies and one of his games was to run away when Margaret tried to deal with him. She shrieked at the discoveries she made in the carpet, but they did their best, going about a regime that made no great sense but kept the family from collapse. Dad had never worried anything like enough on her behalf. Take the time she stopped leaving the house, years ago. She was seventeen during the emergency.

‘But what if I go mad?’ She’d asked him.

‘Well, if you do, will you not still be OK?’ 

‘I mean what if I go mad and kill myself?’ 

‘What if you do?’ 

‘I mean I’d be lying in my coffin, dead.’ 

‘I don’t see how you wouldn’t be OK in that event.’ 

She wished he took more time to worry, even to lose all sleep over the predicament that had them in his house. Creeping through the hallway in his dusty quilted jacket with his tools and his portable radio, the look on his face suggested a more widespread annoyance with everything in his midst than a particular concern for her. When they met on the stairs, he looked up and took her in with weary confidence and only the vaguest misgiving in his eyes.

The romance of returning to Sergio in forgiveness and trust and finally having her wardrobes back was appealing. Sometimes she found him profoundly handsome. 

Sometimes she was afraid of him. One of the days when she went back he had stood in his kitchen watching her layer a lasagne and she thought perhaps death would be a comfort. Was it your typical paranoia, or did he produce the fear? She hoped to tackle the quandary in her self-search, and in the evenings with Bram asleep by her side she transcribed feelings in her notebook. 

She found his attitude lousy, cold and indifferent, with a performative bluster. Did he mean to perform this lousy attitude, and if so, why? His good moods were over the top. Mostly she found him loyal and affectionate. Then came the lonely times, the cyclical blow-ups. Is he one of the bad ones? She had to wonder. She wrote late at night listening to rainfall and the practice made her feel deranged, loosed from the world, but in another way part of it, like she’d broken into a house where she’d been warmly welcomed, something like that.

Noticing the day was gone, she added her own, superior words to one of Aunt Lizzy’s quotes. She moved a weak paragraph to the middle of the piece where it wouldn’t be read, then set off to pick up Bram.

Playschool had packed all his art pieces in a brown envelope with his name on it. ‘That’s it, we’re on our own now,’ a mum in leggings said to another mum in leggings. In the carpark, mums and dads stood talking in loud voices. ‘Self-isolation, tell you I wouldn’t mind a week in bed!’ a mum said, and a lot of them laughed. Margaret walked through the gates holding her son’s hand with her eyes fixed on her polished boots.

On the Thursday, she sat in Butler’s Chocolate Café with a cold cup of chocolate and a frosted cronut on a plate. It was past the time to go home, and she half-watched as a man stuck red plastic strips along the floor using a tape measure. The strips were intended to demarcate the boundaries for social distancing but apparently restaurants and cafes were closing anyway. Her laptop was open on the Philadelphia Here I Come! piece, due an hour and a half ago. She was struggling to convey Aunt Lizzy’s personal warmth and knew this was a vacuous problem one should treat with indifference, and just do the job. Her typing muscles ached – a thorny dig at the right shoulder blade, clicky feel under the ringed skin of her wrist. She was experiencing a loathing for herself. Why did she avoid real problems? 

Lack of empathy for sure, tied up with the unending bilious jealousy, the terrible resentment. Minced attention span. Fear could be to blame, or simply the IQ. It just wasn’t right. 

Today the work of three hours amounted to a scattering of text she wanted badly to abandon. Sentences trailed off, the facts were guessed or lifted from entertainment sites and likely to be spurious. She scoured the lines for stupidities she’d let slip. What relevance had this to anything? ‘Philadelphia Here I Come! opens on 2 April on the Abbey Stage and runs from,’ she typed, smarting underneath her shirt. She wore a clean pressed shirt to work when possible but this one was so old the sweat of many years had stained the armpits. They were cancelling all sports and musical gatherings either way. The show was not to go on.

The man was now spraying liquid from a bottle and running a cloth around the nearby tables. Catching her eye, he smiled tolerantly. She pulled off a piece of cronut and took it between her teeth. It tasted very stale. She was the only customer left.

That night she lay on her mattress in the dark with her eyes open. Over seven months she’d been wondering about going back to him. The problem was at last out of her hands.

On the Friday she worked alone on Buckingham Street again but the rooms were making rasping noises and she ran out of the empty building terrified. She unlocked the bike with an unsteady hand. Her mudguards had been broken some five years and brackish water sprayed her polished boots as she peddled home fast as she could. She felt in need of a glass of cold wine but Dad had bolted himself into his room, afraid of catching something.

On Saturday Margaret gave Bram to Lina and packed up everything. Dad offered her his car – ‘I’ll hardly need it now’. He laughed dryly. Fran carried everything out, filling the back seats with cases, stuffed Lidl bags, Pampers boxes of toys and clothes, wooden fruit boxes jumping with books. The last thing they packed in was an antique card-table that might serve as a home office for Margaret. The legs were carved into ornate twists, one crumbling at the joint and bound to break off any moment.

The boy was clipped into a car seat for a smaller baby and she felt guilty every time, but this was the final journey. Dad came down the steps with cable ties and fastened the boot as far as it went, then took a long step back from her. 

‘Well, I won’t hug you,’ he said. 

‘No’. 

‘Bye-bye, we’ll be seeing you!’ Through the glass, Bram stared back in farewell. 

‘Stay safe,’ said Margaret and the phrase, cribbed from the morning bulletins, made her feel a fool. She blew Dad a kiss and got in the car. 

They drove through the empty streets, past the shuttered pubs and the riverside kiosk where two policemen stood drinking coffee, and past the high stone walls of the Central Mental Hospital. 

Sergio opened the door with his big arms wide and cruciform – ‘Benvenuta a quarantina bellissima!’ She and Bram sat on the stairs, his legs dangling across her knees, Sergio and the girls thumping in and out, unloading the car. That evening she fed the children spaghetti and joined a game of Old Maid by the fireside; it seemed the pack wasn’t shuffled and she kept being the Old Maid. The children enjoyed that. They read stories together and put out the lights, then Margaret and Sergio came down and wandered around the kitchen finishing the clear-up. Sergio lit a joint out the back door and Margaret inspected wine labels and stood at the open cupboard of snacks. He suggested a movie, and she agreed, eager not to regress into the kind of people they had been.

It was a sci-fi crime drama, with heavily dolled up detective women and bland male parts. She and Sergio sat at either end of the sofa. She was in her dirty cream sheepskin slippers; he wore his unfortunate navy crocs. On a table pulled in front of them stood a bottle of Tesco Valpolicella Ripasso and two full glasses. In the stove, a blazing amber log burned too quickly. It was a cold house, single-paned windows all over, vast crevices in the wooden floorboards. Any faint heat they could create seemed to escape immediately.

The fruit boxes had been stacked underneath the bookcases and she wanted to get her books back on the shelves rather than watch anymore trash. That, or add another log to the fire. 

She felt she could do neither. When she moved, a muscle below her shoulder picked like a knife under the layers of her flesh. It had been a long day. She wondered should she run one of those disappointing baths the house had to offer, throw in some lavender and salt crystals and just soak in her own broth. 

Sergio paused the film and said he had a question for her. He placed his vape on the table and studied her as if some amusing thought had occurred to him. What way was he studying her? Meanly, lasciviously, unless it was in her head.  

‘So. Did you take a lover?’

‘Sergio.’ 

‘Well? You had seven months, didn’t you.’ He laughed and vaped, but his laugh was cut with something. 

‘Did you?’ As she returned the question her face filled with heat. 

It began a long time ago, back when there was no Sergio. Mick Dineen was jumping around a stage in the dilapidated basement of The International Comedy Club when Margaret laid eyes on him. The sketch group called themselves The Three Fiends. He was waving and clapping his hands and she forgot herself laughing, and felt embarrassed, checking around her. She wondered where he’d come from, why he was so tall. The stage was about as big as a Twister mat, she could practically dive into it. At the bar, he didn’t talk to her. Freed from his attention, she ruthlessly observed him. Intense shadows were collected under his eyes. He looked relaxed in himself, but sensitive, with a crooked, grinding underbite. The Three Fiends then started turning up everywhere. They played in pubs, not comedy or plays but things called ‘read-throughs’ in black box spaces. Shoddy dark abysses of the subterranean evening. Ten people in the world saw a Three Fiends play and one of them would be Margaret, with a plastic cup of beer in one hand and a pen in the other, slashing out her best phrases in a notebook she couldn’t see. Her first review of Mick raged with feelings she hadn’t known to have formed in her. ‘In woollens that look knitted in thatched cottages, he’s got this long, crooked nose and square jaw, and if you dared look in his blue eyes, you might never get out of there.’ It was a review of a face, obsessive, and he never thanked her for it – probably never even read it. She wondered could Dublin not do better for her. In this bunched grey fist of a city she considered herself an influential critic and Mick considered himself a struggling, burgeoning importance culturally, never deigning to be understood. He wrote all the work and cast himself the lead and sometimes there was stage sex. On the Peacock stage he made unspeakable movements against an actor named Tanya Jones while she looked on indifferently, elbows on a sofa back, her breasts lowered to the audience. Margaret had no language to explain what she was seeing. She let her pen fall to the floor and watched, awed and scandalised by his coarse fornications. She met him later on and introduced herself for the third time.  

‘You were,’ she said, ‘Amazing. I mean it.’ He accommodated her praise, stroking the bone-work of his chin. 

‘Yeah, it was good to get through it.’ He had a deep voice, an accent from the country. She would have felt superior with her cut glass south county Dublin elocution only for the way he looked at her. 

‘Opening is so tough,’ she said.

‘Oh, yeah’.

He looked exhausted. She smiled in a way she hoped he would find literary and pleasant, her eyes something to sink into. He could read into it what he wanted but it was how she felt with him, an open book, fresh and exhilarated. 

She had always assumed that it would all end easily and loveably, back in some house together. She had made assumptions about the speed at which such a conclusion might come about, and every week felt long, her office very solitary. 

For some reason, it was going to involve a longer process, finding someone to fall for and maybe marry. People came and went, and not all encounters were bad ones. But over a year or two she fashioned an interest in Mick that did not abate, getting at him in a hybrid technique of email, Twitter, bum on seat, the odd flirtatious text. She imagined they could be described as friends. One night they went drinking, a whole company of actors, Mick Dineen and Tanya Jones and Margaret. Tanya wore a strawberry printed blouse and long leather skirt with a slit up the side and peacock feather earrings. She seemed a nice person, though a little spunky maybe, a little overbearing with Mick. 

Margaret was saved when she met Sergio. She fell in love and got pregnant and moved in. The baby was born. They lived together as a family. And when the baby didn’t need her every night she’d cycle into town and stomp up to her office in the attic and daydream and think yes. She felt her blood course in her body and the sunlight warm her skin as she sauntered through the city in the afternoons. She saw Mick as a mystery. On bad nights with Sergio, as an escape plan. She fancied him a lot. Thought of him monotonously often. Masturbated to the hoarse murmurs of his conversation on RTÉ Arts Tonight. Felt abject and listless, spread out at her swivel chair in the lonely attic in the impending dusk. He was freakily tall and steep at the forehead, with crystal eyes and a facial structure that lent prestige to the freckles on his white skin, the looming nose. He wore rough wool sweaters with traditional knit patterns and his jeans were too short, showing bright socks. She ran into him seldom and always strictly at the theatre, and then, always, she had to get home to the baby. She wished she could tell him about the baby. She so much missed the baby and felt restless without him. Then Sergio, complaining about house and money. Sergio, denting the sofa, happy to see her. 

‘How was work my amore?’ 

Well, if only you knew. 

Mick surged in her and made her live, flung open doors of possibility, and yet, she never dared enter into any darker deception. She told nobody, kept her secret carefully bound, and that way no harm could come to her.

Then it was that she had left Sergio. She was free and alone. The world hadn’t yet closed up shop. But Mick was neither of these things. He’d got married in August to Tanya, Margaret learnt that evening by way of Lina’s Instagram.

It was November 2019. She’d been in her dad’s a month when she saw the piece in the paper about Mick taking Chekov to New York. She felt they should really be friends. Married or whatever, he was in Dublin. The first surprise was that she hadn’t in some fit of prudence deleted his number. She typed quickly. 

‘Mick, I heard great things about your festival show, just can’t get out to anything at all these days, baby sets a curfew!’ 

The second surprise was that he replied, right away. Normally he let several days pass. Third and craziest of all was that he wanted to see her. 

‘Mags. The very same. Hey, we should get together and talk?’

‘Great. This might be mad but how is tonight? I have a babysitter.’

‘Tonight is actually very good.’ 

He suggested a Korean-Irish hospitality near the Gate theatre, and he was waiting at a table by the window cradling a beer mug. A smile broke across his face when he saw her entering. He bent down to kiss her, pressing a hand into her waist, then went to order her a beer. The atmosphere was close and warm, and she took the beer from him like one who had never seen a pint of beer before. They sat facing one another and both talked at once, then laughed; he tossed his hair. Earlier he had left a bad play at the interval. You always want the play to end, he told her, even the best play. You’re still forced to sit in a space you are not allowed to leave. No one really wants to see a play. His physicality surrounded her, one long arm draped across the empty chair beside him. He was back from touring his deconstructed Chekhov in New York, Berlin, and Munich, but his true preoccupation was the film. He explained the film, set in a slaughterhouse in the midlands owned by Ireland’s richest meat baron. He stroked along his flank with spread fingers, she noticed the gold claddagh ring with the heart, the gold wedding band on the next finger. They drained their pints and he ordered more, soon telling anecdotes from off-off Broadway, stories of New York, Berlin, Munich.  

‘Wow,’ she kept saying, shaking her head. ‘You’re going up and up, aren’t you? Sorry, I feel a bit starry-eyed. I never go anywhere. My son’s got me under lock and key.’ 

Don’t, she thought, don’t boast about my son’s love for me. That’s tragical. 

The light in his pupils was in a way evil, and she wondered had he been drinking earlier. She couldn’t put an age on him. It was a mystery why he’d come to meet her. 

‘Are we having another?’ she asked and he said absolutely, but not without putting something in their stomachs. He summoned the waiter, who dropped two sticky laminate menus on their table.

By the time the trays of sushi came, bedazzled with red fish eggs, Margaret had been down to the ladies’, touched up her eye make-up, lipstick, powder. She’d texted Lina and told her she would pay her to mind Bram just a little longer. 

‘I don’t need money, I need sleep,’ Lina replied. 

True, it wasn’t fair. 

‘Pick him up and put him in your bed. He won’t wake you. Back soon.’ 

Margaret put her phone away. 

She felt so good, she couldn’t remember any reason for doubt or despair or any of that stuff. Her body had not been touched in months and months. No one had undressed her. Whenever it happened, she would be entered differently. Imagine. 

‘Oh, how’s Tanya,’ Margaret asked. ‘Congratulations by the way.’ 

Mick nodded kindly and sighed, creating a lull. The lull enhanced as if by a roving spotlight his handling of chopsticks, the way he could garnish and catch a disk of sushi in one gliding gesture, then devour it, and she admired his dexterity in this regard. Tanya was in Amsterdam at a big movie thing where writers pitched their screenplays and won producers. 

‘My wife takes off, weekends,’ he said. He raised a thick brow, and her eyes widened with a dawning complicity. He drew in a long sip of his beer. 

‘And, and is that fine with you?’ All she could think to ask. 

He leaned in and spoke in a tone of dismay. ‘Marriage is broken, Victorian. What a repressive throwback, ha! We don’t need it, just no one has thought of anything better. There’s no vision is there. Well. How’re you doing.’ He put down his beer and laid a hand on Margaret’s thigh. He was roaring drunk. Her eyes filled with love. 

The drama was frozen on the screen. Margaret was on her feet packing books into the bookcase, no order, just forcing them in left and right.

‘Do you not want to watch this?’ Sergio asked.

‘I do want to watch this.’

She lunged over and took a gulp from her wine then folded back on the sofa. He pressed play. Badged jackets, an icy duck pond, footsteps tapping on concrete. Margaret was thinking of Mick again, thinking in panic now, about Mick. It was always the same picture, his naked shoulders glowing silver underneath the skylight, fringe dropping in his eyes. 

Then Bram standing in the darkened room in his white pyjamas crying ‘Mama, Mama!’ with his eyes shut, spinning around as she rushed to her knees and squeezed him in her arms. Hours having passed since her sister had written to tell her she was going to sleep, and come home now.

Mick, his slanted shoulder rocking above her, one hand pressed on the pillow. Prints on the walls, Tanya’s blocked up fireplace, wedding cards displayed on the mantlepiece. 

‘Class,’ Mick said, in one expiring breath. Class. She guessed he meant it by way of a compliment. He would always have said it. She gazed up into the beady dark skylight and he clambered off her to go and wash himself. Class, she thought, really? And wondered with whom she would share the joke. 

Back at the sofa, the question waited. Did I take a lover? She had to explain herself. And she felt it coming, the rush of truthfulness. You couldn’t stop it if you tried.

Maggie Armstrong’s debut collection of stories Old Romantics was published by Tramp Press and Biblioasis and nominated for Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and the Kate O’Brien award. A former journalist, she has written fiction and essays for the Dublin Review, Stinging Fly, Irish Times, Banshee, Paper Visual Arts and more. She lives in Dublin.

Photo Credit: Jessica Denzer