Elsewhere, p.12
Elsewhere, page 12
Like everyone else, I’m troubled by my life but cannot pin down specific issues. I was once accused of being self-absorbed. A girl I used to go out with told me this.
‘You think you’re a woman,’ she said. ‘But no, you are just a man trapped in a woman’s body and horrendously straight. Cliona, you are shifting your sexual identity at your own convenience – so you can slip in and out of relationships. It’s ridiculous and … exhausting.’ She closed her eyes when the tears escaped. The timing was impeccable, making me feel she was rehearsing for a play.
It was sad, and to some extent moving. But she was wrong. My biggest problem is neither that I’m a man trapped in a woman’s body nor that I have trouble committing to my sexual identity. My biggest problem is I’m naturally sceptical of binaries: man-slash-woman, straight-slash-gay, single-slash-taken, occidental-slash-oriental, and more fundamentally, past-slash-present.
My father says I’m too smart for my own good. My mother says I’m just an ungrateful little brat.
‘Won’t you just get your bloody life together, Cliona?’ she says, usually when she sees me in the kitchen, munching another bowl of corn flakes. ‘Just get out of the house and get a life, for Christ’s sake.’
‘She has just come back, Fiona,’ my father says.
‘From a bloody five-year long holiday!’
My mother swears a lot at home. It is quite unusual considering she is a well-educated, upper-middle-class woman whose life has been nothing but comfortable. She is alright when she’s under the gaze of friends and acquaintances, but once left with us, the poor woman can’t help but spew streams of obscenities. My father says it’s her way of releasing energy. ‘We all need to find a way to let it out,’ as he puts it.
I understand. Years of relocating and dislocating have injured each one of us in this family. Everyone except my little brother Ian. Ian lives in Porto with his girlfriend Sara and is as happy as a goldfish.
In response to my mother’s accusation, I have been trying to get my bloody life together. It is one of the reasons I want to write.
It happened in Chiang Mai, just a few weeks before I returned to Ireland. It was near dusk and I was sitting on the rooftop terrace of Sunset Lodge with Mama Mei, me drinking a bottle of Beer Lao, her smoking. It was my favourite time of a day, when the temperature had finally decreased and the city had gone quiet. The nuns in the nearby convent were chanting some Buddhist sutra while pigeons circled aimlessly in the coral-purple sky.
‘Doesn’t this feel extremely repetitive, in the way such repetition forms eternity?’ I said to Mama Mei.
‘Oh, not now, Cliona, not another round of your philosophising. It’s been a long day for me.’ She shook her head and took a drag.
I shrugged. ‘I’m just saying.’
‘Although I do like what you said the other day about the brushes.’
‘Not brushes. I was saying we don’t really engage, we are merely brushing against each other. It’s all transient and superficial,’ I corrected her.
‘Yes, yes.’ She nodded along. ‘I heard you and Junjun are over?’
I shrugged again.
‘What was wrong? She is a very nice girl,’ she said. ‘And you too.’
I drank a mouthful of beer. ‘She wouldn’t like to be called “a very nice girl”. She’d probably say niceness is one of the stigmas that oppress women and go on for hours – but no, nothing is wrong. It’s just not working any more. Have you ever had this feeling, that we can’t really be with another person even when we are physically with them? We’re essentially dealing with ourselves all the time. And it’s all repetitive. It haunts me, this idea that I’m just an object and she’s a mirror through which I see increasingly only all the absurdity in myself …’
‘Your body is not happy, so your mind keeps itself busy,’ Mama Mei said.
‘That’s true,’ I agreed. ‘There is too much going on here. It’s like the bus to Bangkok.’ I pointed at my head.
Mama Mei laughed. ‘You have such energy in you,’ she said, ‘thoughts, ideas, memories … And you’re a bit fixated with all of them, you know? It’s important to forget. Forgetting is a gift.’
‘I know.’ I sighed. ‘Remembering is the perpetual curse. The recollections are colossal, ambiguous and changeable. For instance, every time I think of the past, I essentially create a new version of it. It’s an endless loop. A panopticon. I’m just trapped—’
‘Why don’t you write it all down?’ Mama Mei interrupted me again. ‘The way I keep a book for the Lodge. Who checks in when. Who drinks how much beer. I write everything down so I don’t need to remember it all. On paper, out of head.’
‘On paper, out of head,’ I repeated as if it were a proverb.
‘Exactly. Now if you excuse me, I need to go check on the dinner. Shall I get you another beer?’ She finished her cigarette, stood up and went down to the kitchen.
It was the end of August. The tourists were fleeing South-East Asia and people in Ireland began to realise the summer was over. ‘Your mother wonders if you will be home for Christmas,’ my father wrote in his email, and said he’d be happy to book the ticket home for me.
It was the first time this offer had come up since I had been fired from the language school for dating students and, that same night, had told my parents I was gay. My father even came to pick me up at Dublin Airport. ‘Welcome home, Cliona,’ he said with a broad smile as he took my luggage.
‘How is Mam?’ I said.
‘She’s cooking you a full Irish at home. We’re both glad you’re back,’ he said.
Ever since, I’ve been living at my parents’ house. My sole mission is to write, to go down into my memories like a miner, get my hands dirty and dig out the nasties. I stare at my computer screen and type words, sentences, paragraphs. Things that happened. My opinions about the world. Terms, explanations, distinctions. And then I realise: I am actually not able to write.
One of the reasons could be Gemma. It had always been like this since we were in secondary school. Gemma wrote poetry. I replied with broken sentences.
The last time I met her was in Paris. Having just handed in my thesis for the postgraduate programme, I flew there on a fifteen-euro Ryanair ticket.
I stayed in this miniature hotel room not far from the Sorbonne and texted to tell her I was there. For four days she didn’t show up, saying she was busy with her essay. Every day, I walked up and down Boulevard Saint-Michel for hours in the whooshing February wind. I remembered she’d mentioned she usually got the bus on Boulevard Saint-Michel to go to the university and I was hoping I would bump into her somewhere. It didn’t happen.
The fifth day she emerged. After ‘pulling two all-nighters in a row’ she looked as glamorous as a new sports car. She smiled when she saw me and reached out her arms. ‘Hi, Cliona.’
I walked up and hugged her. She was soft and smelled like fresh apricots.
‘How’s life?’ she said.
‘Not bad.’
‘And how’s Fiona and Anthony? How’s Ian?’
‘They’re all doing better than me to varying degrees,’ I assured her.
We then stopped talking. It was very cold. I looked at the top of my boots.
‘Burgers?’ she suggested.
‘Sure.’ I nodded.
Gemma was obsessed with American fast food when we lived in Shanghai. She’d usually skip dinner at home and go to McDonald’s with me. She could eat five spicy chicken burgers in a row, no problem.
That night in Paris we went to a Burger King near Luxembourg Gardens where we ate six double cheeseburgers and countless chips. Afterwards, we walked across the road to a McDonald’s and bagged ten discounted chocolate croissants to go. We shared the croissants as she walked me back to my hotel.
‘This could be Shanghai,’ I said.
‘Shanghai forever,’ she said in a sing-song voice, as if we were in a TV commercial.
We were both hiccupping when we arrived outside my hotel. It was numbingly cold so I asked her if she wanted to go up.
‘Sure. I need to puke anyway,’ she said. ‘You do have a bathroom in your room, right?’
We went upstairs. I pointed her to the bathroom and gave her a fresh towel. Then I sat on the bed, listening to her gagging loudly behind the door. It sounded like she was throwing up a baby.
She’d had bulimia for years. I thought she probably still did. Having missed it for quite a few years, I was slightly nauseated by the noise of vomiting. At the same time I felt hopeful. I thought when she finished, we would have sex.
Eventually she came out. She looked very pale and sat down on the armchair.
‘Can I have some water?’ she asked.
I poured a glass and gave it to her.
She drank. ‘Believe it or not. I haven’t done this for ages.’ She started to sob. Her face was in her hands and she said: ‘Why are you here?’
‘Well.’ I felt my throat was excessively dry. ‘I miss you, I miss us.’
She snorted out a short laugh and raised her head. ‘You’re mistaking the pain coming from your personal failure for nostalgia. Last June, when I had an abortion, I thought about you a lot, the way you would always talk about those big deep ideas, your scepticism and how you said, after we slept together for the first time, that you wished you had never been born, at least not to your parents …’
I wanted to tell her about the fight I had with my father before this trip but instead I walked towards her, kneeled down in front of her and began to unbutton her jeans.
‘What are you doing?’ she shouted.
‘It’s okay,’ I said, clutching her hand. I pressed my face in between her legs.
‘Have you lost your mind?’ She kicked me away. ‘Oh my God, you’re so self-absorbed!’
I thumped back on the floor and she continued. ‘I really wanted to be nice to you. I told James I didn’t want to see you but he said I should go. How stupid of me to listen to him, to think you might have changed!’
‘Who is James?’ I said.
‘He is my fiancé,’ she said. ‘He is in my present and will be in my future. And what happened between us is all in the past. There is no point holding on to the past. It has nothing to do with the present. It’s just in your head. And it’s in everybody’s best interest if you just keep it in your head.’
She was wrong. Gemma Wong-Laurent is an extremely bright young woman but she was totally wrong on this. The past has everything to do with the present. In fact, the past and the present are a set of interdependent notions. The past only establishes itself as the past of the present. And the present needs the past as its reference so it can be defined. We can only determine whether today is the present if we check it against yesterday, or if this minute is the present based on the minute just gone. In other words, the past and the present are inseparable. The line between them is only relative and always in flux.
After Paris, I posted Gemma the full three volumes of Time and Narrative by Paul Ricœur, along with a fifteen-page introduction I drafted. As a result, I missed the job interview my father set up for me and ended up working in a language school near Parnell Square. To which my mother commented: ‘I told you to stay away from the Laurents. They are an awful bunch.’
Blaming Gemma or not, the situation is that I am just not able to write. I find everything dubious, bland and problematic. In order to feel inspired, I eat as much as I can, day and night, awake or half-asleep. Propelled by an extraordinary sense of urgency, I hold a snack bar in my hand while I read about the origins of tribes, the structures of hegemony, the anatomy of animal bodies, etc.
It is when my mother finds out that I’ve been forcing myself to vomit at least three times a day that she decides we need to get help.
After consulting old colleagues, my father contacts a reputable psychoanalysis institute in Malahide. He drives me there for an interview.
A short-haired woman in her forties leads me into a room. Her handshake is affirmative, her smile alluring. She asks me my name, date of birth and my history of allergies. She chats with me for about forty minutes in a soft and sympathetic voice. Two days later she phones me, telling me my application is accepted. I need to go in on Tuesday at 2 p.m.
On Tuesday, my father drives me to the institute, and I am directed to the same room. Behind the door, seated on the same chair across the room, is not the woman but a fifty-something man.
‘Hello, Cliona. My name is Noel. Come in and sit.’ The man nods at me.
I am not sure if the institute changed doctors or I totally made up the woman in my last appointment. I walk over and sit down, put my handbag on the floor.
‘Hi, Noel,’ I greet him.
‘We had a meeting on Friday, deciding who would be the most suitable person to work with you.’ He speaks very slowly, as if somebody is typing in his stomach and the voice comes out from his mouth. ‘We think I might be the best person and I am happy to be here, to help you.’
I want to ask him who we are. ‘Thank you.’
‘Good. So, let’s start. First, can you tell me why you are here?’ he asks me.
I explain the reasons.
‘I see. Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship with your parents? What is it like with your mother, and with your father?’
I answer the questions.
‘Right. Then let’s talk about your father first. Tell me more about him. What does he do? What’s he like?’
I speak for a while, gesturing with my hands and laughing the odd time.
Noel waits until I finish, and then he says: ‘I’ve noticed one thing since you came in, Cliona. You withdraw your feelings. Every time that you’re about to get emotional, you pull back. You analyse and ridicule yourself. Why do you do it?’
It’s a tough question. I think about it and suggest a few possibilities.
‘I don’t know the answers,’ he says. ‘I’m just asking the questions. Now let’s continue. Do you want to talk a bit more about what happened in Shanghai? How did you feel about what your father did?’
I speak. This time I pay more attention to the emotional flow. I poise and pace my words carefully.
‘You are kind,’ he says. ‘Another person would have been very angry. Or at least would have let him know how she felt.’
I respond to his comments.
‘I’m not the judge here. If you think your decision is right then it is the right one for you,’ he says. ‘However, if I might point out, I want you to note that it’s important for us to cry and to feel angry. There is no shame in it. Happiness, sadness, jealousy, anger, they are all discharges of our body. Is earwax better than snot?’
I lift up the corners of my mouth into a smile.
He looks at the wall behind me. ‘I’m afraid our session is about to finish. Now, Cliona, I want to ask you for one more thing. When you go back, can you write down what happened today? What you said to me, can you write it down? You don’t have to show it to anyone. Just write, type it up on your computer and delete everything afterwards if that feels easier. But write first.’
‘I’ll try,’ I say.
I leave the institute and walk to the Costa near Malahide Castle to meet my father. He is reading the Independent and puts down the paper when he sees me.
‘How did it go?’ he asks.
‘Not bad,’ I say.
He folds up the newspaper, leaves it on the chair and picks up his coat. We walk towards the exit. He places his hand on my shoulder briefly and says: ‘I’m very proud of you.’
——
What is so significant about writing? Why is there this omnipresent and ceaseless craving to write, as if it were a ritual? Let’s go back to the notion of randomness and our species’ hopeless struggle against it. Randomness is the fundamental law of the universe and it compels us to forget. It is our nature to forget and it’s also in our nature to resist forgetting. Writing is the opposite of forgetting. It’s the ultimate manifestation of remembering. To concretise it with language, to engrave it on stone, to encapsulate it in books, to pass it on and make it eternal.
It sounds incredibly appealing. But still, I find myself uneased by any kind of order. Because it turns everything into signifiers and silences and obliterates all of us who are not in the centre. All order is a system to rule. By whom? I don’t know. I will stay vigilant and discover the answer.
I have trouble falling asleep and when I finally do I have trouble staying asleep. As a result, I’m awake all the time. It prolongs the days and makes life more intolerable. In order to get myself going, I consume more victuals.
I go to the kitchen in the middle of the night and devour whatever we have in the fridge before making myself throw up. One morning, my mother rises and finds no bread, no milk, no cereal – no nothing. She becomes extremely upset, especially since she usually wakes up with low blood sugar.
‘Can’t you just leave a scrap for me, for Christ’s sake,’ she bellows. ‘I need to eat right now! Jesus, I can’t breathe!’
Her face turns pale, lips purple. She sags into an armchair and pants with her mouth open. ‘Anthony!’ she calls my father. ‘Anthony! Anto!’
Nobody answers. It seems my father is not in the house.
‘Let me find something for you. I’m sure we have food somewhere.’ I open the cupboards and start searching. Finally, behind the gas meter, I find a half-finished Mars bar. I smell it.
‘Here, have this first. I’ll go to the shop now to get you some breakfast. But eat this now.’ I hand her the bar.
