To write notes or not to write notes, that is the question. I am very tempted to pen an explanation/exculpation/vindication of my actions to my nearest and dearest and pop them in the post when I land in Glasgow. But it’s just not very me. In spite of the fact that what I intend to do tomorrow is impregnated, electroplated and modified-atmosphere packaged with drama, I have never been one of those people who likes drawing attention to himself or enjoys the spotlight. But, but, but . . . after I am gone I don’t want certain people thinking the worst of me. Although they probably will anyway.
“He just upped and left to Scotland and topped himself,” they might say. “Just went nuts. Just lost it.”
Or: “Selfish prick. Left his family in the lurch. Two young girls who needed their father. Coward.”
So, who’s in for a note? Who’s on my macabre mailing list? Shell and the girls, of course. Might Sergeant Psych and Ruth get a note? Perhaps. After her performance (or lack thereof) the other night I am beginning to think Ruth doesn’t deserve one. But maybe just to put her reading skills in Irish to the test I may pen her a few wee lines.
I’m going to tell them all the same thing, essentially. I’ll water the language down for the girls, naturally. Sanitise and simplify. But the message will be this: I was diagnosed with cancer; the odds were it wasn’t treatable; I didn’t want to put myself or those around me through needless suffering; so I hung on in there for a few months saying goodbye to people and places in my own way; and then walked into the sea in Scotland.
I will tell the girls that I love them and that I am sure they will turn out to be wonderful adults. I will not tell them that I will be watching over them as they make their way through life, or that my spirit will be present every time they see they a starling or a robin. I refuse to put mawkish tripe in my notes. I will go easy on giving them advice. I will tell them to find something they love doing and attempt to make a living from it. To maintain the closeness they have now. To love big, keep their friends close. Find a real community to live in. And drink lots of water and use sunscreen.
I will tell Shell the truth about how our saw our relationship. That I used to love her with the strength and single-mindedness of a Kerry Blue terrier, but that the fire went out over the years. I will not put the guilts on her. The loss of ardour was as much down to my weakening grip on passion, vitality, enthusiasm and energy as the changes brought about in her by maturing into a serious, ambitious and responsible adult. I will express regrets that we could not keep our relationship in that place where it seemed we couldn’t live without one another, couldn’t spend a moment apart, and spent hours every day exploring each other’s bodies and minds. I will tell her to go and enjoy life, forget about me. I will not tell her that I know about Bit O’Rough.
My note to Sergeant Psych will consist of a short thank you. For steadying my ship during these past weeks. For giving me perspective, strength, wisdom. And friendship. I will tell him I enjoyed his company, his stories, his attitude to life. I will tell him I admire his cheerful grit and his taking of life’s hardships on the chin.
My last night at home is a curious affair — from my vantage point. The other members of the family no doubt consider it a normal school night and will do so until they begin to pick over details of it from the perspective of knowing what they will know in a few days.
I collect the girls, with Sergeant Psych as chauffeur. After getting them a snack upon arrival at home they set about doing their homework. The radio plays, set as always to a pop music station, while they pencil answers into workbooks or compose little paragraphs in answer to questions. I owe my familiarity with the hits of the day to this hour or so, with Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, Sia, Ed Sheeran and all the rest of them forming the soundtrack while I prepare our evening meal. I have elected to cook one of the girls’ favourites this evening — tortellini. As I roll and cut the dough, an expression of my father’s comes to mind: it is far from tortellini I was reared. This is true. I did not even know what tortellini were until midway through college, when I picked them almost at random from a menu at an expensive Italian restaurant I had gone to with a girl I was trying to impress. I got a liking for them and, later on when I began to cook, learned to make them so that they became part of the regular dozen or so staple meals in our household.
I open a good bottle of wine to mark the evening that’s in it. Just as with whiskey, I have been collecting a stock of wine to be opened on special occasions. Under the stairs, at the very back, deliberately out of easy reach, where the upright plank of the first stair rises from the concrete, and far, far away from temptation, there nestles perhaps the best part of a thousand euro worth of Ribera del Dueros, Riojas, Corton-Charlemange and the like. I crawl past shoes and shopping bags and long-forgotten toys and shine a torch over the dusty labels. Some of the bottles have been under here for ten years. There are a handful of Grand Reservas from each of the years of the girls’ births, which are intended to be opened on occasions such as their eighteenth or twenty-first birthdays. I choose a wine which is not among these — a Teso la Monja Toro. Bull’s blood. Somehow apt.
I try to time the meal for Shell’s arrival. Most days there is a round or two of text tennis at this time of the evening. She gives me advance warning that she may be late. I answer OK. She will then tell me that she has fifteen minutes to go — she’s just finishing such and such an account. I send her a thumbs-up. She tells me when she’s leaving. I send her another thumbs-up. I might then get a message alerting me to the fact that she’s stuck in traffic or that she’s had to drop someone home or pull in for petrol, to which I might send another OK. At this stage, having timed the meal for her appearance in ten minutes’ I will start to take things off the heat; she won’t be in for another twenty perhaps. Sometimes, Shell being delayed will mean soggy broccoli or crumbly potatoes or slightly leathery Cajun chicken. Or a father who has had a couple of glasses of wine too many as he says to himself “what the hell” looking out the window into a rain-soaked garden.
Tortellini are easy in this regard. After closing the dough around the filling, they require only ten minutes in boiling water before they are ready to eat. I won’t put them on until Shell is in the door.
After the Toro has breathed for twenty minutes I pour myself a glass and mooch between the kitchen and sitting room. The girls are stuck in one of their Disney series. I might as well be a ghost. A couple of sips into the glass, I am dying for a cigarette. I decide to take the risk and have a couple of sneaky puffs out the back. It is a clear night, extremely cold. My exhalations fill the garden while I study the almost full supermoon that is rising to the south east. The radio and newspapers have been dripping with pieces explaining the phenomenon, but I have not been interested until now. The moon is indeed huge. Ripe. Swollen. It will be full tomorrow night. Its light will witness my last moments on earth.
Shell arrives home, just a little later than usual, and kisses each of the girls on the forehead, not that they notice. They are engrossed in a programme called Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir, about a pair of teenage superheroes who wear garish skintight costumes as they battle an evil so incompetent that each episode is guaranteed to end in their victory. There is no kiss for me; Shell bustles out of her shoes and coat and rushes upstairs to our bathroom. Kiss and piss; that’s her routine when she lands home.
When she has relieved herself she comes into the kitchen, sees the open bottle of wine and pours herself a glass, something that is out of character for her. She usually likes to keep a clear head for the few hours’ work she will be doing after we eat.
“I need this,” she says to me after her first sip. “It’s been a rough day.”
I nod comprehendingly. She puckers up her mouth a little.
“It’s strong,” she says. “Harsh. What is this?”
She picks up the bottle and studies the label.
“It’s from Lidl,” I lie. “Plonk. I wouldn’t get it again.”
Shell knows very little about wine. It is one of the few topics she defers to me on. In company she will even make a big show of insisting that I pick the wine for the table. This embarrasses me: it was also far from wine that I was reared! She picks an olive from the bowl I have laid out on the table and then takes another sip.
“Actually, It’s not that bad with an olive. Masks the flavour.”
I am loving the wine. Well worth the small fortune it cost. It has everything one would want in a Toro: body, intensity, hints of berry, jasmine and liquorice.
Shell tells me all about her day while I cook the tortellini. Standing close by, facing me, backside against the kitchen counter, in her comfy home socks and taking the odd sip of Toro, it feels a bit like the old days. Normally she would be studiously answering emails or paying bills on-line; doing anything but sharing her news with me. The details of her complaints wash over me. She is having some tussle with a government body concerning a tender her company lost and the whole thing is threatening to become legal. I make sympathetic sounds at regular intervals as she spills her frustration over the steaming pot.
“If everybody did their jobs,” she says. “This would never have happened. We’re in this position because of incompetent government pen-pushers.”
This is a theme that runs through Shell’s conversation. Incompetence and lack of commitment and hard work are responsible for much of the woes of the business world — indeed the world in general. I would never make it with Shell as my boss. My lackadaisical attitude, the going through the motions that has characterised my last ten years at work, would have me on her hit list as fast as you could say “P45”. She regularly culls her “team”, ruthlessly firing those who she deems to be dead wood.
As I stir the tortellini I wonder what she talks to Bit O’Rough about. It is all business talk, as it mostly is with me these days, or does he bring out the human being in her? Does she talk about the biggies with him — her passions, her hopes and dreams, her thoughts on life?
Shell keeps up the chatter during the meal — my last supper. She brings the girls into the conversation, asking them about their days and their opinions on her “situation” at work. It is one of the liveliest meals we have had in a while. And it’s all down to her. In spite of her work worries, she is in great form; bubbly and funny. And it’s nothing to do with the wine. She is happy. Shell is happy! I study her as she smiles across at the girls, laughing at their little jokes or expressing shock at their gossip about teachers and classmates. Her eyes have a twinkle in them that has been missing for years. The mouth is turning up instead of down. Her smile tests the elasticity of her foundation (which does not crack, by the way). Bit O’Rough has made her happy. Perhaps she is even in love with him. More than ever, I feel like I will be doing her a favour by stepping out of the way tomorrow.
Shell surprises me even more by pouring herself a second glass of wine while we tidy up. She’s still all talk. Even turns the radio on to an oldies station. And hums along while she bounces from the table to the fridge and back. I ask her what’s come over her, a gentle feeler.
“Oh, nothing,” she says. “Just happy and relaxed for a change, I suppose.”
“That’s great, Shell. I’m happy for you. I really am.”
I tuck the girls into bed for what will be the last time. The older one, who takes after me in being a bookworm, will read for a half an hour after this. The younger one will be asleep before I reach the bottom stair. I debate with myself whether to give them a little speech or not. My note to them covers everything I wish to say, but . . . I am finding this moment hard. I kiss them on the forehead and tell them I love them — something I regularly do anyway — and linger at the door for a while looking at them. Their bodies seem so tiny and fragile in the reading lamp’s wan light. Long shadows are cast on the soft cheeks I have kissed a million times, the hair that smells so sweet and pure, the duvet-covered curves and lumps and bumps that I know as intimately as the hummocks and dips in my garden. The love between the three parties in the room is unconditional and will endure all the travails of existence, even death. They will still love me after my death, however angry or confused they may be, and, more importantly, will continue loving one another, no matter what silly rows crop up between them. Holding back tears, I tell them to look after each other no matter what. They don’t answer.
I am astounded when I arrive back down to the sitting room: Shell is neither on her laptop nor phone. When I express this surprise she tells me that she is taking a break tonight.
“I’ve done enough today. I just want to chill out. I think I deserve to put my feet up once in a blue moon.”
“Never a truer word spoken,” I reply.
We watch TV together — together — for the first time in an age. There is conversation, mainly comments on the current affairs programme we have chosen to watch. Nothing spectacular or earth-shattering, but not the usual stony silence that hangs over the sitting room of an evening. There is even laughter from Shell’s armchair and we finish the bottle of wine off between us. She has been so different this evening that I am having pangs of conscience about some of the things I have written in my note to her. And, indeed, I am mulling over whether to postpone tomorrow’s date with the waves.
Don’t be weak, I tell myself. You’ve got to go through with your plan.
I study Shell slyly as she watches the TV. She has that tipsy look — eyebrows slightly raised, squinty eyes, goofy half-grin — and perhaps because of this looks more like the young woman I fell in love than she has for a while. I wonder how Bit O’Rough sees her, not having known the woman she was, just judging her on her present self. I have a go at putting myself in his shoes.
He sees a woman who is very together. Tough. Independent. No-nonsense. Successful. And not bad-looking for her age. Leggy, thin, a thick head of hair. She can talk at any level. Her job has brought out that skill. She can do small talk with secretaries and delivery boys. The faux-profound water-cooler stuff with equals and superiors. The Sunday Business Post bullshit at staff dos, family get-togethers and weddings. All that superficial plámás that is necessary for one to be considered good company. I’m sure, not matter what Bit O’Rough is — tortured sculptor, craft brewer or drain cleaner — she can pull out some sort of genuine-sounding conversation to keep the man interested and entertained. She’s obviously showing a bit of her long-buried wild side with the man: the mid-morning drinking and sex. He must see her as fun.
The whole package isn’t bad, really, whether the man cuckolding me is in it for the sex and free whiskey or love.
It is a pity that the new Shell isn’t enough for me, or me for her. But that’s all water under the bridge now.
When the credits flash up Shell announces that she’s off to bed.
“Me too,” I say, and these are the final words I say to my wife on our last night together.
I take our wine glasses to the kitchen and rinse them out. When I go upstairs Shell is performing her ablutions in the en-suite. I change into my pyjamas and when she emerges I perform my own. She is asleep by the time I have finished. I land a final kiss on her cheeks and go to sleep myself.
Get Behind the Muse 