Chapters (48)
The deed was done and he had a bag of frozen peas held to his vasectomy scar the day the IRA announced a three-day ceasefire in the wake of John Major and Albert Reynolds’s Downing Street Declaration which demanded that it would permanently renounce violence if peace was ever to be delivered between the main midwives of Dublin and Westminster. It was the kind of news that would have stopped me in my tracks on a normal day but this was no normal day. This was the day that he shut me out forever, the day he denied me the chance to heal my shattered heart.
Bridie was having a little snivel, cracking on that she was glad that there was a break in the Troubles, but there was to be no break in my troubles and that’s all I cared about in this moment. I had to know how he could ignore me and the rock in my chest with such seeming ease.
– Why didn’t you tell me? I said.
– What difference would it have made?
I would never be his. I hid my disappointment with every ounce of brilliance as he did. I had let him down and he had let me down: we were both flat as pancakes. There was nothing to add; our rage leached into the stone floor instead of ripping the roof off. We turned our attention to the television and the talk of Gerry Adams being allowed to go to the USA at some stage: Bill Clinton was keeping his visa under review. Bridie jawed constantly from her armchair that she would never live to see peace in this ridiculous life and we had to agree with her, it seemed like a pot of fool’s gold at the end of a rainbow.
After a while, John turned again to face me in the bedroom but the pleasure of it is not without its pain. He has stopped kissing me and keeps his eyes closed. He won’t forgive me anytime soon for making out that he was my jailer when the half-door to Johns Farm has always been on the latch. Though I paw at his skin I am still blocked out. It’s a lonely, cruel business but neither of us seems able to put it aside. We never referred to our little Roisin-that-never-was again, though she treads the air between us on gossamer wings, getting more ragged by the day. I paid for her with more than half of my heart. Does his ache as much as mine?
