The Split

It was four months before I looked for someone to move into Brian’s old room. He’d left it bare and smelling of bleach, but I still liked to sit on his bed sometimes and think about him and cry. I’d looked into getting a flat by myself, but I couldn’t afford any of the hovels the Dublin rental market had to offer. Even the dingiest bedsit cost twelve hundred a month. I was hoping to find someone clean who did lots of overtime and went away a lot at weekends. I’d been sharing the house for seven years at that stage and I knew that clean meant different things to different people, and that mostly it meant filthy. Brian was different, of course, but that doesn’t matter anymore.

No one replied to my first ad so I posted it a second time with fewer details—a description of the room, the price, the area, my name. Clare was the first person to reply, in a message typed entirely in capital letters, as if she were shouting at me. LET ME MOVE IN, she was saying, both figuratively and in those exact words. I told myself I wasn’t bothered by it, that some people just don’t care about that kind of thing, but it was a sign and I ignored it.

I’d spent the weekend before she came to see the room drinking sparkling wine and doing automatic writing exercises by candlelight. It’s a technique I discovered in the self-help books I’d taken to reading after Brian moved out. I’d think of questions like Who are you really? Who do you want to be? What’s the point of it all? and then I’d write down whatever came into my head. Sometimes I’d turn the lights off and stare at the candle flame until I couldn’t see anymore, and then I’d scribble away, doing my best to pretend I wasn’t actively thinking about it, although I inevitably was. I used the fountain pen my mother had bought me from one of the discount supermarkets at Christmas. I was big into calligraphy when I was ten, and she thought I might want to give it a bash again. She handed me the box with a pitying look and said, “He might get bored of her and come back.”

“Might he,” I said.

“Imelda’s daughter just bought a house. With her husband.” Imelda is my mother’s hairdresser. ”It’s a terrible pity.”

“What’s a pity, Mother?”

“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head.

*

It was Brian who told my parents about us. They’d turned up at the house one night and Brian invited them in. They were just passing, they said, and thought they’d drop by to say hello. They’d brought a packet of custard creams. I wasn’t home, so Brian made them tea and told them everything.

“Are you ashamed of me?” he asked me later.

“No, I’m not ashamed of you,” I said. I could tell he didn’t believe me though, because afterwards he brought it up every time we argued.

“Do your friends know about me?”

“Everyone knows.”

“Well, not everyone.” He’d get upset then. “I thought your parents knew but look how that one turned out.”

“I never said I’d told my parents about us.”

“You never said you hadn’t.”

“I don’t tell my parents anything.”

“Well, that’s just weird.”

*

It wasn’t until after he moved out that I realised Brian hadn’t cared whether I’d told people about us or not. He was just looking for an excuse to leave. When he finally got around to telling me about it, the thing with Charlene had been going on for months. He’d been going to the gym more often, ironing his shirts, coming home late, but apart from that I hadn’t noticed anything unusual. The night he told me, he picked a fight about a mug of herbal tea I’d left on my nightstand.

“You’re filthy,” he said. “That teabag is going mouldy.”

I knew it couldn’t have been going mouldy because it was the last week of November and my bedroom was so cold we could see our breath when we exhaled. I looked into the mug and said, “I’ll bring it down in the morning,” and that’s when he said it.

“I’m moving out. I’ve found somewhere else.”

He didn’t tell me about Charlene until the next morning. When I woke up his arm was around my waist.

“Where are you going to live then?” I asked him.

“I’ve met someone. She lives in Inchicore.”

When he moved out, he left an envelope on the kitchen counter with his share of three months rent. I’d gone to the park to walk around the scraggly flower beds while he packed his things. I was afraid if I stayed I’d end up begging him not to go, or worse, telling him I couldn’t live without him. He’d stuck a Post-it note to the envelope that said he was keeping his promise to help me. I promised to help you, it said, Love Brian.

*

“Is Charlene her real name?” I asked him, a few days after he told me. He was back sleeping in his old bedroom at that point.

“Yes.”

“Brian and Charlene. It has a nice ring to it.” I’d meant it kindly, but Brian thought I was making fun of Charlene. He was very protective of Charlene.

“You said you didn’t want anything serious anyway,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Until we got serious.”

“How was I supposed to know you’d change your mind?”

“You’ve had two years to ask me whether I’d changed my mind.”

“It hasn’t been two years.”

“A year and ten months,” I said, counting quickly on my fingers. “So the evidence suggested I had changed my mind, really, didn’t it?”

He pretended not to hear that.

*

I was upset after posting the ad the second time, so as soon as I’d done it I went to the bakery around the corner and got a pain au raisin and an almond croissant. I ordered two coffees so the girl behind the counter would think I had a friend who was going to eat one of the pastries. Brian always said I ate too many pastries.

“You’re addicted,” he’d say, and pick flakes of pastry off my chest. I’ve always been a messy eater. “That’s why you’re tired all the time,” he’d say, as he collected the crumbs in his palm. “It’s probably why you fart so much.”

*

Besides Clare, two other people replied to my ad, but they didn’t respond when I invited them to come and view the room. I arranged for Clare to come over on a Tuesday evening, and I took the day off work so I could clean the house before she arrived. I tidied the pantry cupboard and disinfected the counter tops in the kitchen. I looked for a scented candle in the cupboard over the fridge and found one shoved in behind some antibacterial spray. The label said it was green tea and juniper berry. It made me think of Charlene. Brian said she did yoga. She was training to be a fitness instructor. She drank iced green tea.

“Why?” I asked him when he told me.

“I just don’t want to be with you anymore,” he said. I’d meant about the green tea.

Clare was five minutes early. She rang the doorbell, and when I opened the door she stood back, apologised for being early, and offered to wait in the street until I was ready.

“Don’t be silly,” I said, and I leaned against the wall in the hallway and gestured for her to come in. We sat at the dining table and I asked her where she was from and where she worked and how long she wanted the room for, things like that. But mostly it was Clare asking me questions, as if she were the one interviewing me to be her housemate, which I suppose she was. I showed her the spare bedroom, and she nodded as I pointed to the holes in the floorboards and the speckles of damp around the window frame. I’d found one of Brian’s old T-shirts in the bottom of the wardrobe when I’d cleaned it out that morning. I’d sunk my face into it and cried and then brought it downstairs and cut it into strips for cleaning with. I walked Clare through the kitchen, showed her the bathroom, the bins.

“The bins go out on Sunday night,” I said.

Of all the housemates I’d had, Brian was the only one who ever put the bins out when it was his turn. It made me feel respected. I think that’s why we ended up together.

We sat back at the table, and Clare showed me letters from her employer and her landlord, even though I hadn’t asked to see either. Both pieces of paper were folded neatly in her purse, which was in the shape of a cat’s head with a cat’s face printed on it.

“Do you like cats?” I asked, for something to say.

“I suppose so,” she said. “Do you?”

“No.”

They were always prowling around the rooftops, looking in windows, yawning. Clare looked hurt.

“I don’t hate them,” I said. I was worried she thought I was insulting her taste in purses. ”The room’s available from the first of May,” I said, when she said nothing. It was the middle of April then, but I needed a few weeks to get used to the idea of living with another person again.

“Fine.”

“Perfect. I’ll be in touch.”

I emailed her the next morning to tell her the room was hers if she wanted it. She emailed me back immediately. IM SOOOO HAPPY YAY THANK U. I knew no good would come of it.

I met her at Stephen’s Green a few weeks later to give her the keys. I’d suggested meeting in Temple Bar so I wouldn’t have to take a whole hour for lunch, but Clare said it didn’t suit her and the Green would be more convenient, so we met there instead. I’d spotted her in the crowd as she walked up Grafton Street, her arms swinging, her head bobbing. She walked very slowly, and I had to slow down so I wouldn’t catch up with her. She was wearing a long, knitted dress and I could see the outline of her thong cutting into her hips as she walked. It made me think of sex. It made me think of Brian. Brian was always pinching me in odd places when we were in bed. He’d grab at the flesh of my thighs or my belly until the skin puckered into a gelatinous whirlpool. Sometimes I’d claw at his back to pretend I was into it. I imagined him pinching Charlene’s hips, her backside, her arms above the elbows, pulling her hair, whispering in her ear, telling her how beautiful she was, grunting, falling asleep.

Clare and I reached the entrance at almost exactly the same time, and she waved cheerfully at me and suggested we go get tea together. I pretended I was in a rush to get back to work.

“I’m in a rush,” I said, and handed her the keys.

*

I arrived home from work the next day to find her sitting in the living room, stroking the head of a tawny-coloured cat, surrounded by plastic containers, her belongings spilling out of them. When I came through the door at first, I thought the thing on her lap was some kind of teddy bear, but then it looked up at her and yawned and I felt sick.

“Hey, there,” she said. “I’m just getting settled in.” She flung her arms to either side and stared at me.

“Do we have a visitor?” I asked, nodding at the cat.

“This is Deirdre,” she said, cooing at it, nuzzling its head with her nose.

“Whose is it?” I asked, although the answer was both obvious and terrifying.

“Mine.”

“You didn’t mention you had a cat,” I said.

Her mouth stiffened. She rested her head on the back of the sofa. She wrapped her arms around the cat and then let them drop to her sides again. She narrowed her eyes. She looked like a robot pretending to be a person.

“Oh, I must have forgotten. But you said you like cats.”

“I said I didn’t like cats.”

“That’s not the impression you gave me.” I didn’t know what to say. “Dee-Dee is such a sweetheart,” she said. “You’ll fall in love with her in no time.” I knew that wasn’t possible. The cat stood on Clare’s lap and arched its back before collapsing into a vigorous arse-licking exercise, its leg cocked in the air.

“Don’t move,” Brian shouted at me once when we were in bed. “I can’t do it properly if you move.” I lay back, still, until he gave up. I made a whimpering noise and said, “Thanks, that was wonderful.” I often told Brian he was wonderful.

“I don’t want it in my bedroom or the kitchen,” I said to Clare who was looking at me impassively but with eyes that said she’d become spiteful if she didn’t get her own way. As I stood in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil I knew I should just tell her to leave. There was no reason for me to put up with it, but I’ve never been good at confrontation—I get shrill and sweaty and afterwards I hate myself.

Within a week, Clare’s stuff was everywhere. It was as if she couldn’t be in a room without leaving bits of herself behind in it. She left her dishes in the sink for days. She made coffee every morning and didn’t wash out the coffee press. She used things and put them back in the wrong place.

“I have a really delicate aesthetic,” she said to me one evening, when I asked her where she’d put the Joan Miró print I’d stuck to the wall at the bottom of the stairs.

“Art should be calming not chaotic,” she said, as if she’d learnt it by heart. She shifted on her stool.

“Right. Where did you put it?”

“I’ll get it for you,” she said, and then the cat sidled up to me and ripped my tights with her claws.

“She’s so mischievous,” Clare said, laughing at my laddered tights.

*

The cat shit on the carpet outside my room. It shit on the rug in the living room. It shit on the sofa. It was a weird gummy colour and rubbery consistency, containing something that looked suspiciously like human finger. I stared at it for far too long.

“She likes fabric,” Clare said, when I pointed it out to her. “She hates using her litterbox.”

“Maybe you should keep her outside then.”

“You said you were okay with this,” she said, which confused me because I knew I’d never say something stupid like that.

The house got dirtier. There were small piles of cat kibble in various places downstairs, on the floor, around the bookshelves, on the arm of the sofa. I swept them onto the dustpan and threw them into the bin. There were brown streaks along the side of the bath; exfoliator debris crunched underfoot in the shower; there was green slime on the tiles. Personal hygiene was very important to Brian. He washed himself with Dettol every day, sometimes twice. He’d stand in the shower and pour it, undiluted, onto his chest and let it dribble down to his belly. One time, the skin along his pelvic bone cracked and peeled because he’d used too much and let it sit on his skin too long.

“Why don’t you just use soap?” I asked him.

“Any sort of mucus disgusts me.”

I didn’t know what he meant by that. I still don’t.

Sometimes when he kissed me, his lips shuddered as if he were getting electric shocks from my face. He’d put his hand between my head and the headboard as if I’d been bludgeoned and it was all he could do to hold my brains in. I’d cry sometimes when he wasn’t looking. I got a pathetic thrill out of letting the tears roll down my cheek as Brian pressed my head into the pillow with his chest.

“Don’t you want to have a shower,” he’d say, if I tried to touch him afterwards.

“In a bit,” I’d say, and pretend to fall asleep.

*

One morning, about a month after she moved in, I heard Clare banging around hours before she usually got up. The front door slammed at around seven, and when I went downstairs I found a note on the table in the sitting room, held in place by the green tea candle. Off to London for the week. As we discussed my friend Ger will feed Dee-Dee and clean out the litterbox while I’m away. I know you hate doing it!!! She’d scribbled out a feeding schedule and signed off with a smiley face. I was sure we’d never discussed her going away, mostly because I’d been doing my best to avoid her.

I went to the front door and put the latch on the top lock and turned the key in the bottom lock. I called work and told them I was too ill to come in. Whoever Ger was, she probably had Clare’s keys. I was afraid she’d let herself in without knocking first. I imagined her walking in on me in the shower, seeing my pubic hair, my dimpled thighs, laughing at me, telling Clare I was fatter than I seemed with my clothes on.

Later that evening, the cat sat outside my bedroom door scratching at the skirting board and yowling at me as if in some great emotional pain. I ignored it for as long as I could and then when it got too much, I opened the door.

“What do you want?” I said.

It meowed threateningly. The doorbell rang and I tiptoed downstairs so I could look through the peephole. The cat nipped at my feet the whole way down like some impotent vampire. At the bottom of the stairs it wrapped itself around my ankles and tried to wrestle me to the ground. I yelped loudly as I tried to shake it off. I couldn’t help myself. The doorbell rang again and I opened it, stupidly, unforgivably, and there she was looking up at my gormless face.

“Ger,” I said, but it sounded as if I were clearing my throat rather than saying her name.

She was smaller than Clare and her hair was lank and greasy as if she hadn’t washed it for a week. Some people just have hair like that, I know.

“Hi,” I said, as she fiddled with a strand of dank hair. We both looked down at the cat. “Clare said you’d be here at some stage to take care of the cat,” I said, “I didn’t know what time to expect you.” I always talk too much when I’m anxious.

“What’s the cat’s name?” she asked.

“Deirdre.”

“Weird name for a cat.”

She did a little bouncy step into the hallway. She had very small breasts. I could never just bounce casually like that. She was wearing a swimsuit-type thing, navy and white stripe. The material warped slightly, each stripe bleeding into the one below it. She stepped into the living room and swung both arms behind her. Her breastbone jutted out when she did that. I wished my breastbone jutted out. I wished I had tiny breasts and huge nipples and didn’t need to wear a bra.

“You don’t need to lose weight,” Brian said, a number of times, “Just tone up. You’re not fat, just loose.” He suggested we join a gym together. “It’s cheaper for couples,” he said. “You could do a class. Yoga or something. We could go after work.”

“We could get matching headbands,” I said.

“I’m trying to be helpful.” Brian never enjoyed my sense of humour.

“Do you want a cup of tea, while you’re here?” I asked Ger, hoping she’d say no.

“Why not,” she said, her hands on her hips then doing a jerky kind of rotating motion, side to side and back and forth. Her hair was definitely just dirty.

“I’ll just close the door so the cat doesn’t get out,” I said. I put on the latch and turned the key again. I walked through to the kitchen, filled the kettle, and boiled it. Ger had picked the cat up, something I couldn’t bring myself to do, and it rested its paws against her chest and purred placidly.

“Hello, Cat,” she said a number of times.

“How do you know Clare?” I asked, for something to say, as I took down two cups from the cupboard. She looked thoughtful for a couple of seconds and said, “I met her in the street.”

“So you live around here,” I said, relieved.

“Sometimes.”

Her tongue poked through a huge gap in her middle teeth when she spoke.

“I have mint or chamomile,” I said then.

“Chamomile, please. Do you have any honey?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Nice,” she said to nothing in particular.

She deposited the reluctant cat onto the tiles and I took out the packet of biscuits I’d started and nearly finished after breakfast. Ger climbed onto one of the stools at the breakfast bar and undid the top button of her jeans. She broke up a biscuit, dropped it into her tea and took a sip. She swished it around her mouth before swallowing. I wasn’t looking forward to washing the cup.

“I have to do some work before I go to bed,” I said. I sometimes enjoy pretending to be more important than I am.

“Coolabula,” she said.

“Are you staying or did you just pop in to check on Deirdre?”

“Deirdre,” she said, to me or the cat, I wasn’t sure.

The light from the window cast a gauzy shadow on the right side of her face. She looked like one of those Victorian death photographs, the sepia seeping out of her. She crunched her knuckles.

“Clare never said whether you were staying or just popping in to check on the cat,” I tried again.

“I don’t have any stuff with me,” she said, forlornly, indicating her top, her jeans.

“I’m sure Clare has something you could borrow,” I said.

“Maybe. It’s very noisy at my place right now. And this cat is very cute,” she said, pointing at Deirdre.

I didn’t know how to show her that I really didn’t want her to stay, so I took a towel off the boiler and put it on the shelf outside the bathroom for her. I showed her how the shower worked. She picked at something on her scalp and then flicked the scab or whatever it was onto the ground. I showed her where the cat food was, handed her Clare’s note, which she read and handed back to me. She followed me upstairs, and I told her to look where she was walking in the morning because the cat liked shitting on carpet.

“Don’t we all,” she said, and I laughed, but Ger just stared at her feet.

“I’ll let you get settled in,” I said.

I pointed at the door to Clare’s bedroom and went downstairs. I felt jittery, so I made some more chamomile tea. I rinsed out the cups and left them to dry on the draining board. We didn’t leave things draining when Brian lived here. It wasn’t something we ever discussed; it wasn’t a rule exactly, it was just the way we did things. It was a couple of months before Brian suggested I disinfect myself too.

“Better safe than sorry,” he said.

I did it once to stop him nagging. I went down to the bathroom and he stood in the doorway and watched as I wiped myself between the legs with a damp facecloth soaked in Dettol. “Don’t you feel better now?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said, sniffing, “I think this might be what hypochondria smells like.”

“You’re funny sometimes,” he said, and put his arms around my shoulders and I dropped the facecloth into the sink and hugged him and we stood like that for minutes on the ice-cold tiles.

“I’m glad we’re doing this,” he said.

*

Ger banged down the stairs and I felt like I might vomit.

“I borrowed this,” she said, as she strolled towards me, draped in a silky black thing with a flower embroidered on the back. “It’s beautiful.”

“Okay,” I said.

“The cat scratched me.” She held her arm out for me to inspect it.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

I held my cup of tea close to my chest. Ger looked from the cup to my face. She stared right into me, the eyelid of her left eye pulsating. She looked like a little bird in a frenzy. She reached out and I thought she might touch me so I leaned backwards against the breakfast bar until her hand stopped mid-air.

“He’s not worth it,” she said, pointing at me.

“Who?”

“Him,” she whispered, and she looked over her shoulder as if whoever it was might be listening. I suddenly wanted to tell her about Charlene, tell her what I hadn’t told anyone, that I’d never loved Brian. I hadn’t even liked him very much. He was drunk and I was sad. That’s how it started.

“I’m not really looking for anything serious,” I said, the first time.

Brian flinched and I felt sorry for him. I thought I’d hurt his feelings. In hindsight, he was probably just relieved.

“Okay,” he said, “I understand,” and he pulled me against his chest and fell asleep.

“I’m having a shower,” Ger said.

“Use anything you need.”

“Thanks. I will.”

She opened and closed the kitchen door and went into the bathroom. She whistled to herself, something poppy and out of tune, and then the shower groaned into life and I couldn’t hear her anymore. The doorbell rang and I ignored it until whoever it was started to bang on the letterbox. I walked through the sitting room and opened the door a couple of inches. A man with reddish hair and dark rimmed glasses stood on the path outside. He stroked his chin and then shoved his hands into his pockets as if waiting for me to speak.

“I’m Ger,” he said, when I said nothing, “Clare asked me to check on the cat, if that’s all right with you.”