CC 54: Nationwide Songs

The plug belonged to the CD player I’d bought for her as a birthday present during her first year of college.  Nothing special about it, but it had stayed with us ever since those early days; when we first moved in after the wedding, she would play her Bryan Adams or Garth Brooks CD’s on it, but then she stopped using it as her job scratched away the old joys.  It was often plugged in anyway because I tended to have the radio on in the afternoons to listen to chat shows in which all the people of Ireland phoned in to file a collective complaint for the national record. (Maybe it was about a cowboy kitchen fitter who’d charged them a fortune and done a shitty job prompting others to phone in to say they’d been stung by the same chancer and a drama none of us knew about before was revealed.)

 

‘You still want that?’

‘Of course,’ (She leans in behind the cabinet where the socket is, unplugs it and says)  ‘It’s mine.’

‘Right.  You don’t use it anymore.  I’m surprised you’d want to be lumbered with it.  You might as well leave it here.’

‘It’s mine.’

‘Yes, it is.’

(She brings the decaying old CD player over to her suitcase and tries to fit it in down the sides but it won’t go in as the case is already packed)

‘Shit.’

‘Your bag’s full already.’

‘I know.’

‘Just leave it here. You can come back some other time for it.’

(She tries to slide it down the other side of the case but she can’t manage it and says)  ‘Okay, fair enough, leave it here. (putting it on the floor) You can keep it.’

 

That day Emer left with her stuff was not the last I saw of her as later on the same day I bumped into her awkwardly at the checkout in Tesco.  I was standing right behind her. 

‘Hello again,’ I said.

‘Hey.’

She still had her suitcase with her and seemed to be stocking up on groceries for wherever she was planning to move to (she hadn’t told me – I guessed she was going to her parents).  Her items included some pasta, mineral water and......and I looked up from surveying her purchases as it probably looked a bit mad of me.  The situation was uncomfortable enough.  I was clutching a bottle of whiskey.  She clocked that in an instant.

‘Do you have a clubcard, love?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Thanks.’

I wondered if any other marriages were coming to an end that day in Tesco.  There was passive aggression to be seen along the aisles as various misters and missuses handled changes in that year’s budget, but nothing so apparent as a sacrament angered. 

‘Bye,’ she said to me.

‘Talk to you later,’ I said, as though we were courtesy-keepers in clockwork supermarket encounters.

‘Do you have a clubcard, love?’

‘No,’ I said, presenting my whiskey to be scanned. 

Tesco was the last I’d see of Emer for some time.  The bottle of whiskey was not the last I’d buy.

 

Earlier that day, when she came to pack her bags, the house never felt so fragile and weightless.  All that we had built and been now lay milled and scattered like sawdust. 

‘We shouldn’t have got into that fight,’ I told her.

‘Which fight?  There were many.’

‘You know, with the young fellas.’

‘Oh?  No, no, no.  But that was something.’

‘It was all the fights.’

‘The fighting was real.  There are always fights.  Oh, I don’t know what to say to you about this.’

‘Come on, try.  You’re doing this.  I’m not.  I don’t want this.’

‘I don’t want it either.’

‘Then why?’

‘It has to be done…my mind isn’t peaceful with you anymore, if I’m honest.  I don’t want to say it.  I really don’t.  You’re a huge part of my life, but it’s been hard all along.  I’m not in the right place.  The right place for me.’

‘What’s the right place for you?  Is this because I haven’t been working for so long.  You know, I’ll be in work again soon.  It’s just a matter of time.’

‘It’s not just that.’

‘I know I may have been lazy recently.  But I will do it.  I will be more aggressive.  I’ll find a job.  I’ll fix this.’

‘It’s not that.  It’s more.  I can’t do this.  I’ll send you an e-mail.’

‘An e-mail?  What good’s an e-mail?’

‘I don’t know.  I just don’t know what to say now.’ 

I became aware of my bellyaching, and tried to suck it in.  But the belly ached, no matter.

‘We fucked up, didn’t we?’ I said. 

‘I know.’

‘I love you, you know.’

  

I rinsed the razor, mopped up the spikes with an old Megadeth T-shirt, and headed for the bedroom to boil the year behind me in a frothy quixotic slumber – boil the year of uncertainty in a house with the lights off.  Lights that only came on to pick out the memories I’d rather have delivered in beautiful songs sung by the sincerest of singers.  But I didn’t want to hear songs in those moments of truth that the lights picked out, though they were perhaps the only things that could provide comfort.  I’d been fighting off the songs, deliberately muffling their melodies.  I wasn’t willing to let them get through to me.  An astral year behind me, disembodied from the natural, earmarking enigmas, going from tale to tale with no sight of meaning or end.  All I wanted was the myth – the tale gently dipped in truth, but easily dried from it.  To live in the wonderful harmless deceit of the woven. But in these moments with the lights on, I could see through the fantasies I reclined in, and clearly apprehend the negative parts of what made me be, the parts Emer had seen, and suffered.                  

 I knew that before I shut my eyes to sleep I would see Emer again, and I would see her with another, with Paidi Farron, and I knew the picture was not a far cry from the truth anymore.  

 As I passed through the living room, before I switched off the light, I saw that her CD player still lay on the living room floor where she left it.  Maybe I’d turn it on tomorrow, listen to Megadeth, or connect to a radio chat show in the afternoon and lie back and listen to myself sing a nationwide song.