Evenings and Weekends

by Oisín McKenna

that was the thing with words: you only knew they were the wrong ones once you’d already said them, and by that time it was too late.

His relationship with his entire body is distant. He doesn’t exactly hate it, but he doesn’t relate to it either.

Cynicism is a safety valve: if you accidentally place too many eggs in an unfashionable basket, you need to be able to pretend that the relationship between eggs and basket is, and always has been, part of an ironic metanarrative.

If the object of your desire were within perpetual reach, it would be worthless. You must only ever graze it. A whiff of perfume on a busy street: gone before you knew it was there, and then, you look around in dismay, in ecstasy, thinking: Wait, did something just happen here? You’ll spend the rest of your days wanting that feeling back.

She always thinks that I’m judging her. Going to university, London, being gay, liking art: she thinks that by virtue of having a different life from her, I’m necessarily saying that her life is shit.

Whenever he looks at art or nature with friends, he feels obliged to express feelings on it even when he has none, and this discrepancy between feelings spoken and feelings felt gives him the sensation of not existing at all.

She has caught air kisses blown by pudgy fingers. She has placed the air kisses so delicately in her pocket for safekeeping, and then, boarding the bus back towards her life, thought Why do I feel like crying? There was nothing like a baby to make you doubt every decision you’d ever made.

Phil looks to karaoke to be a profound tool of communication, a sacred exchange, when really, it’s no more than casual fun on a night out. Phil is always demanding that mundane activities take on a significance above their station.

He ascends the escalator, lump in throat. Halfway up, he looks back and sees her dawdling alone on the concourse, a little flustered, rubbing her face. She tries to open her handbag, but drops it, and clambers to pick it up. She walks in one direction, then walks in another, then back again. She doesn’t know where to go. He wants to go back and help her. He wants to shout, Where are you trying to get to, Mum? Well, what’s he waiting for then! He’ll go to her now and he’ll help her find whatever it is she needs.

She remembers thinking that she’d talk to him, be there for him, get to the bottom of it. She’d ask if he wanted to do a bit of shopping and go for a coffee and cake, and she remembers how she left the kitchen, went through the hall and up the stairs, but by the time she reached his room, she felt silly for thinking he’d go to town with his mother – at his age! – and instead, knocked on his door and said, ‘Have you eaten? There’s cheesy coleslaw in the fridge.’

evenings and weekends

Not for the first time today, he asks: why am I like this?

‘Mate!’ he says, slurring.

For the life of me, I cannot understand how one might slur the word "mate"

Today has been one of those rare days – only one or two each year – where time works differently, where the day is so long that it can house each of your desires.

She learned as a child that things can be tolerated. All you have to do is focus on the details of each second, which are nearly always easier to take than the bigger picture. The bigger picture, of course, is hard to stomach.

She would never forget the pleasure her father took in taking her down a peg. There are adults who thrive off the puncturing of children’s fantasies. Who did those children think they were? said the adults. What right had a child to their own happiness?

Their wordlessness is a symptom of their intimacy, so attuned to each other that they are beyond verbal language altogether. Barely saying a word, these two are understood.

She accepts that being turned on or turned off is delicate alchemy, mysterious and necessarily beyond our understanding, and not only determined by what’s happening here in the room – by the shape of her body, for example, or whether or not he wants to fuck a pregnant woman – but determined by things that happened last week, or twenty years ago, or things that haven’t happened yet at all but which have tunnelled like time-travellers into the present moment and come into your bedroom and messed up your bed and said No sex for you today!

There had been times when he’d been glad to be coerced – he didn’t always know what he wanted until he had it – but this wasn’t one of those times.

He thought about the events of the day, the mould in his bathroom, the curry sauce he’d have to make at work tomorrow, how he’d like to go to Glasgow one day. Phil was only getting fucked – or raped, he wondered – by the man in Burgess Park in the physical sense. Emotionally, mentally, psychologically, even spiritually, he was somewhere else. From then on, this would happen to Phil nearly every time he had sex: during sex, he would cease to have a body at all. All he had was abstract trains of thought. Of course, it was still painful, in the physical sense. In the physical sense, it had been painful before he was even touched.

He buys a beer to drink on the Tube.

Can you just drinkanywhere you want in London?

He is desperate, and therefore optimistic.

He is overly serious, austere, dull. He is, quite literally, Posh Spice: he never smiles and never sings lead. He didn’t even join the band for the reunion tour.

It is not unusual for Louis to plunge his existence into the realm of soap opera.

She finds a receipt and pen in her purse; a small part of her wonders if years from now this old receipt will fossilise and be retrieved by an archaeologist.

Even when she wants something, her first instinct is to say that she doesn’t. Even when hungry, her first instinct is to say that she’s full. When she goes to someone’s house, she has to be offered food five times before accepting. The words ‘Ah no, I’m fine’ spill from her mouth with automatic ease.

She’s been in this pit for decades. This pit is where she lives. Sometimes she tries to claw her way out of it. Sometimes she bashes her body off its walls in fury at her inability to climb them. Sometimes she simply accepts the pit and tries to decorate it as best she can. Sometimes, she has stood at the base of the pit and shouted for help. Sometimes, she has stood at the base of the pit and whispered for help, too, and felt hurt and abandoned when no one responded because her whispers were too soft to be audible to anyone but herself. On the times when people have offered to help, she has been envious of the fact that they weren’t in the pit with her and responded bitterly. Then, sensing she didn’t want their help and feeling their own egos bruised, they have left her, and she has missed them, and she has wished that she could have climbed up to be near them, and to say she was sorry.

she booked a singing lesson without telling anyone. She left the boys at the creche and walked up to the building where the lesson was due to take place. She slowed down her pace as she approached, and then she walked past. She thought: it’s not for me. She thought: they’ll think I’m a fool. Even then, she was nervous. Even then, she thought: what’ll the people on this street think of me, doddering around with nothing to do? In a panic, she walked into the nearest shop and bought the first item to hand: a cabbage, a loose and lonely cabbage, which she did not need, which did not fit with her dinner plans for that week, which she would then have to boil and salt and serve on a plate, and she’d have to wash those plates afterwards because this was in the days before they had a dishwasher, and her hands were raw-red and cracked with the washing-up.

Toads crawl. They might manage the odd hop. He knows about it because a few summers ago he volunteered with something called the Toad Patrol, who went to popular toad spots during the busy season and helped the poor little fuckers cross safely.

Love that this exists haha

Ed is never sure if he is a man anyway. Sometimes, he’s certain he’s a woman. Other times, he feels like nothing at all. When it comes down to it, Ed isn’t sure if he wants to belong, not to gay clubs, or queer spaces, or straight bars. He doesn’t want to decide on his pronouns with confidence and clarity, and he doesn’t want to announce them to the world via his Twitter bio or email signature or when introducing himself at parties. He doesn’t want his identity to be valid. He doesn’t want his feelings to matter. He doesn’t want to change his name, or his life, and to say, ‘I feel so seen,’ because Ed doesn’t want to be seen at all.

He wants to be nothing, by which he means not only that he wants to die, but that he wants to have not ever existed at all, for his body and every person’s memory of his body to be instantly and utterly erased from the world.

‘But that’s what it means to love someone. It means to lose things. It means to have deep needs that go unfulfilled, because the person you love is most important. That’s love.’

evenings, weekends,

At a certain point, she realises that she is no longer narrating to the abstract audience in her mind, but rather, she is narrating to her hypothetical child, this formerly possible baby, this baby that could have been hers. Maggie, your hypothetical mother. Maggie, who would have loved you as best she could, if she could. Maggie, who can’t. Maggie, who’s sorry. Maggie, who was not able to make you feel real, even though she badly wanted to guide you by the hand to your first day at school and be nervous for you, restless, so afraid you wouldn’t make friends. She wanted to bite her nails at the school gate until she saw you run towards her, delighted. She wanted to scoop you into a hug and kiss you and feed you sugary foods that made you squeal in joy even though the nutritionists would call this bad parenting. She wanted to take your happiness so seriously.

She didn’t just want the choice to have an abortion. She wanted the choice to have a baby as well.

Does a dying person need to be convinced that they might not die, or do they need to be helped to accept that they will?

Ed’s life is amiss. The only time of day he feels OK is the two or three minutes after he wakes up, because that’s the only time he doesn’t remember where he is or what’s happened.

The priest says that love isn’t a feeling. It’s not the butterflies in your tummy you get in the giddy early days of a relationship. The butterflies don’t last, he says. Love is something you deliberately decide to do through repeated actions of care. Love is something you make.

Sometimes, she wonders why she and Ed couldn’t settle together into a sexless but pleasant marriage. Hadn’t that been what their grandparents did, and their grandparents before that? Why was it that her generation had to demand transformation, sex, adventure, comfort, stability, romance, conversation, intimacy, all from the one person? What’s so bad about settling?