He has six months to live according to the prognosis, he writes. His wife has been amazing throughout. So much so he hasn’t mentioned that he knows she’s having an affair with a neighbour. His post concludes: He’s a nice guy, this neighbour. The thought she won’t be alone after I’m gone makes me happy.
For the first time his neighbour who sees the post is tempted to write a response to something online: salute this man, his decency, seek to connect with him for he has reached a plateau of empathy and understanding that feels beyond his neighbour.
He, the neighbour, per doctor’s advice, needs to up his vitamin D intake, and he decides today rather than lounge in the back garden and catch some rays which, in any event, would bore him, he’ll paint the kerbstones at the front of the house. Enamel-white, he’s thinking, against the green of the lawn for contrast. He gears up in earnest. He opens a tin of paint and stirs it with the end of an old brush pole he snaps in half. He uses discarded slats from the parquet floor he pulled up in his bedroom a while ago to demarcate kerb from lawn, kerb from walkway, catch spatters from the roller he’s going to use.
All in order, under a gentle sun he hunkers down and begins. Soon after, a woman, raucous terrier in tow, trudges up the walkway toward him. Half-facing him, she jabs a finger behind her, clearing her throat as she prepares to speak. He stops painting and gives her his attention. The woman shushes her terrier who ignores her till she stamps her foot in front of it. Breathless, she says, There’s a dead dog on the road.
Dead? he says.
Dead! she says.
He looks over her right shoulder then her left but doesn’t see anything on the road behind her. The woman gawps as if she expects him to act on what she’s just said. Her eyes, shimmering beads of brown, are oddly distant. It’s as if she sees him but doesn’t quite. She wheezes as she talks. She stops talking and her lips keep moving. Deprived oxygen at birth, circles his mind.
There! She says, pointing behind her again. The terrier woofs, pulls on the leash, she yanks it back and shocked by the force of the pull, it is silent.
Where? he asks.
Down the road there. She whips her head back for emphasis. Dead.
He nods. Spittle coats her top lip, with a swipe of her tongue, she licks it clean. He thanks her for letting him know, unsure what else to say. She eyes him blankly, straightens as if miffed, then says, Thank you. Thank you.
You’re welcome, he says.
Nodding, the woman hastens on, repeating the story to herself and her hound, still in shock at being yanked so roughly. It scurries alongside her, painfully muted. He watches her go and feels heartened that she stopped to tell him, the eagerness in her voice, the excitement. She spoke to him like he wasn’t a stranger. None of the wearying awkwardness he might expect from those who weren’t deprived oxygen at birth.
On one knee, back arched, neck bent, he resumes. He’ll feel this in his tailbone tomorrow. A balmy breeze carries the whistles of starlings, the cries of gulls from the estuary five minutes walk from her lives. Behind his house from the garden that backs up to his, he hears the yelps of greyhounds that unlike the woman’s dog will not be silent until they’re fed.
A man in a serge red coat stomps up the walkway a short while later. A neighbour from several further down the row, he giddies to a halt and watches him like he’s never seen a paint roller before.
Hello Fred, he says.
You’re painting, Fred says, bald pate shining in the mid-morning sun.
I am, Fred, he says. You’re always walking, Fred.
I am. No rest for the wicked, Fred says.
You’re expecting bad weather? He gestures Fred’s coat.
Way things are, Fred says, I hafta assume the worst. I won’t be back till evening. Fred pushes the sleeves of his coat up to his elbows and looks at his watch without reading the time. What time is it at all? Fred wonders aloud.
He lays down the roller, rises, stretches himself, setting off cracks along his spine like a series of controlled demolitions. What are you up to anyway, Fred?
Fred tells him about the Dominican church in tow where he’s resident bell-ringer during certain masses. He brings the gifts to the altar if there’s no one in position, he says. He tends the garden of a brother of one of the priests. The priest’s brother likes to walk naked in his garden sometimes, Fred says without colour.
He lets that pass unremarked. He tells Fred he’s doing a fine job tending the flowerbeds that the residents’ association planted around the neighbourhood recently.
I don’t tend those anymore, Fred says, a little glum. My sister told me I was doing too much around the estate. I’ll only hurt my back.
Fred’s sister thinks her brother’s being exploited. He’s never heard it confirmed in all the years he’s been living in the neighbourhood, but as it’s on his mind, he suspects Fred might also have been deprived oxygen at birth. Two in one morning, he thinks. He almost laughs at the thought. Then he wonders is there’s something to such synchronicity? You’re dead right, Fred, he says.
I wouldn’t say that to my sister. She thinks she’s right about everything, Fred says and laughs nervously like she might be listening. When he laughs his arms bend inward like the limbs of an old tree. When he walks he pitches on the balls of his feet like there’s glass in his shoes. You must walk four miles a day do you, Fred?
Five, Fred says. I better leave you to it, he says.
Gluck, Fred. He picks up the roller and wets it. He turns and watches Fred shuffling away, jouncy as a boxer, head swivelling for people to salute. He feels a twinge of envy watching him go till the twinge becomes an all-too familiar ache and he turns and begins a new stretch of kerb.
He tells her about these conversations when she calls to him that evening.
I heard it was a fox was dead at Leary’s corner, she says.
Not a dog? he says.
A fox is what I heard, she says, from missus Rohan and she hears everything, she says
He’s never seen a fox around here. He wishes to expand on this, but she’s moved on to talking about her husband.
Kevin had a bad day today, she says. Lot of pain, but he never complains. He regrets his life’ll end just when he’s just made it to fifty, not seeing our son become a teenager. Having to accept his plans, our future’s…what’s the word?
He knows the word, but it won’t come.
Are…void, she says, is that it?
I know what you mean, he says.
The urge for a nip of the Ballantine’s scotch he keeps in his bedside locker settlers over him like a cloud as she repeats the word. Saying it leaves an aftertaste and she screws up her face as she unbuttons her blouse. What she wants, what she needs, she doesn’t beat around the bush. He admires her pragmatism as much as anything else and the cloud passes over him as she unclasps her bra.
She doesn’t know anything that her husband posts online. Kevin posts under the handle, Confession Hole.
He found out about Confession Hole when he met Kevin at a Paddy’s Day bash in in the Grand Hotel a few months back. Kevin was fairly on it at the time. He’d never encountered his neighbour soused like that before and he wondered if it had anything to do with his wife not being with him. Had they had an argument, and Kevin had decided to tie one on? Apropos of nothing, Kevin told him it was important to have an outlet to vent this day and age, all the shit going on in the world. A man needs to speak! Anonymity means freedom to express. Say hello to Confession Hole! He said. He told him on which site he could find him. He opened his mouth wide and he thought Kevin was going to tell him something about his wife, then he clicked his fingers as if remembering and said he had to go to the jacks. He waited, but Kevin didn’t come back.
Kevin would’ve known about his diagnosis at that time, but word wasn’t out yet. It made sense to him when he thought about it later, Kevin saying what he had, the fact he was drunk, alone. He couldn’t put any of it together at the time because when he looked up Confession Hole that night on the site he’d mentioned, he saw that his neighbour followed no one, wasn’t followed by anyone, had made zero posts.
As far as his lover’s concerned, her husband—a proud millennial—is a devout non-resident of the cyber jungle as she calls it. He doesn’t tell her therefore that after painting the kerbstones today, under a bunch-of-numbers handle he creates specifically for the purpose, he writes his first online comment under Confessions Hole’s post. He commends his open-heartedness, generosity of spirit. Confession Hole responds almost immediately: You see things differently, for what they are from the departure lounge. X.
Confession Hole’s wife slips out of her skin-toned underwear, which he likes because it bothers him, and straddles him deep. She clenches his shoulders, digs her heels into his buttocks like he’s a raft adrift in an ocean and she’s holding on for life.
They make it to his bed after the fact. They lay there imagining cigarette smoke swirling above them. Through the sash window he doesn’t have to curtain because it faces the back of the house, they spy Mars, unmistakeable by its rusty shimmer, studded like a pearl in the eastern sky.
Imagine, she says.
I know, he says.
He doesn’t know what he thinks about looking after her and her son when her husband’s gone. What that might mean. The kerbstones look good, she says interrupting his thought. Clean. That white’s going to be a bastard to keep clean, though.
If they lived together he wonders would she be do diplomatic. It’ll be worth it, he says.
Mm, she says.
Every day—up from every other day—Confession Hole posts to his several thousand followers. He’s keyed into life in a way that without such a sword of Damocles hanging over his head, his neighbour struggles to grasp. He posts of things he sees channelling the awe of Keats: the fox he saw in his garden that held him rapt, made him forget he was done for. (The fox found dead at Leary’s Corner? his neighbour wonders) He posts of the robin that perches on the handle of the backdoor, eyes him in the kitchen when he’s forcing toast down his throat. Whenever he enters the kitchen it knows, he writes. Its arrival coincided with news that his diagnosis was terminal. All my years living here, I’ve never seen a robin perch at the backdoor and peer in. And keep coming back. When his wife becomes aware, she is unable to deny what it likely portends. It’s given her clarity, he tells his followers, the sense there’s a grand scheme, helped relieve her of false hope.
Confession Hole’s life perspective, permeated with a deeper understanding of love—the gist of his posts—makes him wise in ways his cuckolding neighbour can’t conceive. There is a price to being unafflicted by stage 4 osteosarcoma, his cuckolding neighbour concedes.
His posts are attracting more likes, reposts. His follower numbers are surging. The one about his happiness his wife’s having an affair with a neighbour because the neighbour’s a good man who’ll look after her is going viral. If Confession Hole had mentioned his son in that post, his neighbour wonders, would the response of followers be so empathic. Did Kevin exclude mention of his son for that reason? The thought of another man raising him—one having an affair with his wife, even if he’s a nice guy—is something Kevin can’t bring himself to accept, his deeper understanding of love notwithstanding.
She says her husband is insistent he’ll not end his days in a hospital bed. He’s determined to die at home, she says. A hospice nurse ensures he’s getting the medication he needs. She’s shown me how to administer morphine intravenously when the time comes. I don’t want to see him suffer, obviously.
A glimmer of uncertainty penetrates the look of resolution in her eyes when she says this, and he looks away. He recalls Confession Hole posting about wanting to live as long as he can because death is forever. How he doesn’t want to leave his son a moment sooner than he must.
She says: You can’t control these things, when she tells him she’s developed feelings for him.
It wasn’t long after word about her husband began to spread around the neighbourhood they chanced to meet on the canal bank one evening when both were out walking. He was circling the bank clockwise with the setting sun, she counter as if it to wind back time. It would become a regular thing, meeting like this. They’d talk—she would talk, he’d listen. She’d tell him things about her husband, how he wakes at night drowned in sweat, she’d say, how he’s started praying again, how their son doesn’t know how to say how he feels about the situation and she doesn’t know what to say to him, to unburden the boy. A giant iceberg has appeared in our little sea out of nowhere.
One evening on the bank, eyes locked on each other, neither noticed it had started to pour rain. When he did he ushered her toward the partial shelter of a fuchsia bush. They huddled close as they rain fell harder, laughed as they surrendered to a ducking. She caught him unawares when, calmly, amid the downpour, she asked if he was seeing anyone. Out of pride, he paltered: I’ve just come out of a relationship.
A knock came to his door a few nights later like the pecking of a little bird. He knew it was her before he was up out of his chair. She’d just come from the hospital. She was allowed longer visiting hours because it seemed certain, then, after treatment to give him more time had wiped his immune system and he needed to be quarantined, Kevin wouldn’t be coming home.
He’d been watching something mindless on the box to take his mind off the ache he could feel running through him that evening, most evenings now, when she called. A dull insistent pulse he was wont to palliate with measures of scotch. When he did he would drift off and the ache would abate and he would not dream.
She offered no pretext for knocking on his door at that hour. She said, I wasn’t sure if you’d be up. He said, If I go to bed early my body gets confused. She said, I know what you mean. She wet her lips with her tongue and rolled them. He waited for her to say something else and noticed he was holding his breath, as was he.
They’d been neighbours for nearly a decade. He’d never invited her inside his front door. On what pretence, him being single, she being a married woman, could he? It’s not like they were next-door neighbours.
He closed the door behind her. They stood in the dim-lit hall. He breathed in the smell of Shalimar that came from her. Light from the tv flashed on the walls around them, in her eyes. He stood square on like he was blocking her way. Then she put a hand on his chest, touching not pushing. It happened quickly, but not unnaturally. There, in his hall, standing on their feet.
He asks himself if he can still feel the ache when they’re together. Does being with her silence it, the question?
He feeds two cats that hold the status of half-stray, half-his. When they see him in the backyard they mewl, one deep, the other high-pitched. He lowers to his knees and they roll to their backs to have their bellies rubbed. One has a shaggy black coat, the other’s brindle with a white mouth like a snow leopard. He strokes one then the other which makes each of them jealous and they hiss at each other. He strokes them at the same time, they roll onto their sides and miaow, so he won’t stop. They slink between his legs when he rises, rub their tails against his shins to trip him if he makes to go back inside. Attending to them, he forgets about the ache.
Some days it’s like a rat gnawing on his bones. Sometimes he’ll stand in the garden and call the cats. setting off the greyhounds in the garden behind the poplars at the end of his. One day he called them for a solid half hour and they didn’t come. Their affection, as if he didn’t know, being entirely self-serving.
He’s always liked being alone. He can’t help asking what’s the point when you’re not as active as you were when you were young. It’s just you.
He posts this, his second post, and Confession Hole replies: Know that you are loved. If you know this, you don’t need anything else. Take it from me. X.
Standing at his bedroom window, he covers Mars with his thumb and thinks if he was deprived oxygen at birth maybe he wouldn’t feel as much, or if he did he wouldn’t care as much, he could continue his journey, bouncing along the road. He half-turns, then, asks his lover if she loves her husband.
Yes, she says.
How can you? he says.
She draws the floral counterpane over her breasts as she sits up in bed. It’s complicated, she says.
But he thinks you love him.
I do, she says. Her lips narrow to a point. But…. this has happened.
This?
Yes.
Me?
Her chest rises and falls, she says, I should feel guilty….
If you loved him, surely you would? he says, and moves to the locker on his side where the bottle of Ballantine’s is, pours himself a dram and downs it.
I told him, she says.
He pours another dram. Told him what?
About this. He said nothing for a day then…
Then?
He said he was happy for me. That’s why I love him. He’s a good man. You’re a good man. That’s why he’s happy.
She rises to her knees. I want to be honest with you, she says.
What about your son?
What about him?
Is Kevin happy for him?
He doesn’t have to say it, she says. I understand why he can’t. I’m not going to ask him to.
He puts down the glass and returns to the window. He rises on the balls of his feet like Fred, moves up and down without his heels hitting the parquet. The creaking floor sound like the distant cry of a wounded animal.
Can you love me and my son? she asks.
He comes to rest. Through his naked reflection, he looks out into the garden, washed in crepuscular shades of blue and thinks he knows why he’s never seen a fox.