When They Kissed They Really Kissed
- Did you know that?
The engagement video had been online for six hours when it started. Isobel and Louis read the comments to each other from their laptops as the light fell in geometric shadows from the evening and the night, pouring in the window, filled the kitchen to the ceiling. Isobel lit four white candles with an extra-long wooden match, blowing out its flame with an O from her red lips and tinging the air with sulphur.
She topped up their glasses with wine and stood up to look out the window at the garden. She had been quiet for ten minutes. The silence gathered into a wisp of a question mark and hung in the candlelight. He pretended to hum a tune. She sat down and closed her laptop.
Put on a song.
Louis played the first ten seconds of ‘Do you Realize?’
Turn it off. Please.
He did. He laughed in his throat to make a noise.
Heard enough of it today I suppose?
She rested her arms along the table and picked at a black knot in the wood with her fingernails. She was smiling to herself. She said.
Did you know, some women stay in abusive relationships because the sex is too good to leave?
He tapped the mouse on his laptop. He opened tabs and closed them again. He played the engagement video, muting the sound before the band started to play.
Did you know that?
She said. He blew a laugh out his nose and closed the laptop. He laid his arm along the table in a mirror of the way she had lain hers. He said.
They’re a contact sport. Relationships.
The candle flamed, waving in a draught, lighting first his face then hers. A neighbour flushed a toilet. She looked up from the knot in the wood and smoothed away with her hand the bits she had picked off. She started to tidy up, scraping the plates they had earlier eaten cheese and cured meats and crackers off. He said.
Thank you. That was lovely.
To make a joke of it, but she continued on like a waitress at the end of her shift, filling the dishwasher and leaving those expensive knives and forks too delicate for it to dry on the silver draining board. She left the tea-towel hanging evenly from the silver tap and turned on the dishwasher and sat back down. He stood up and turned it off. The kitchen was silent again in the black and white candlelight.
It’s too loud.
Is it.
The dishwasher.
Isobel walked to the window and opened it. The summer air, warm and damp, blew in as if on her breath. From the window—her face eyeless and cheek-boned and framed in the half-dark by her hair—she said.
Would you do it?
What?
She sat back down across from him, took a drink of wine and spun the glass around in a circle by its base so it made a low growling sound against the wooden table-top.
Hit me?
He laughed. She stretched her arms out, moving them from her knees to above her head. The ring sparkled in the oval candle-flame.
Of course you wouldn’t.
A bird clapped its wings in the pool of dark beyond the open window. Trees fidgeted in a breeze. The laptop screen shone on him when he turned it on again.
Don’t.
He didn’t. They sat reading their phones, their heads bowed, absorbed in their private fates like captured soldiers. They stopped when they both noticed what the other was doing and became embarrassed by how it might look if someone had been watching. She squeezed the stem of her wine glass between her finger and thumb. He went outside for a cigarette.
He stood on the grass stirring smoke into the air, inhaling the cigarette and along with it the garden and the dry heat of the city. He touched the wall of their house with his hand, did one wandering lap of the garden and stopped for a minute in the darker shade of the trees. He finished his cigarette as he walked back up, flicking it in an ellipsis of sparks into the mound of mulch and bark and soil where Isobel had wanted to grow vegetables to use in the kitchen. He sat back down in the candlelit silence and called her a pet-name.
Bearface.
She smiled and moved in her seat. He pulled an empty chair beside her and sat down. She rested her elbow on the table and rested her cheek on her fist and closed her eyes. She put one foot on top of his. He pulled her leg across him so more of her rested, deadweight, on his thighs. He put his arm around her chair. She got up and went to the window and pushed it further open, out as far as it would go.
This sky reminds me of something. I’m sorry.
She walked out the back door and into the garden. He followed her. The heat and the cigarette smoke were still stale in the air. He said.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
She sat down in the white chair under the trees and looked back at the dark house and the ocean of sky that flowed over it. She said.
You skipped over a lot of things in your video.
2. The Big Chorus
You skipped over a lot of things in your video. You never listened to why that was my favourite song, you actually didn’t even ask. So.
In your video you say we’ve been together since that first Christmas. I know you know that’s not true.
The thing with the song is that it was my first week back in Galway after Christmas at home. It was a guy I met at a party. Someone turned over a table that was covered in empty bottles, he was smoking out the window and turned because of the noise and saw that I was staring at him. He walked towards me over the broken glass. It must have been loud but I remember it like it was total silence until he asked me to leave with him.
We left and went into the college, walking from building to building and looking in the windows where the lights were on all night for people who wanted to study. Cars beeped at us when we kissed in front of the cathedral. On a narrow lane where a busker was playing the violin in the cold he grabbed me by the waist as we listened and kissed me again and we walked by where the river went into the sea to the western part of the city where he was staying, the houses there were full of alternative people and the lights in the windows were red and green and orange and the streets were foggy and salty and slinky and tight like an old Spanish fishing village and we kept walking, past the old city and into Salthill the old sea-side resort, most of it closed for the winter, just that strip of tarmac path really to walk on where you could watch the rain sweep in with the waves, we walked on the path until it ran out and we walked on the loose stones and shells that came after it.
It was darker there and I could only see him out of the corner of my eye in the headlights of cars, and eventually we were walking on just sand, completely alone on a beach with the city back behind us burning at the bottom of the sky. He spread his coat down over the lumps of beach and we lay down on it and looked at the stars and talked to each other about the universe because we were eighteen and later when we stood where the waves were breaking he found some dried washed up sticks and lit a fire, and we smoked a joint, another thing you don’t know I’ve done, on his coat in front of it and talked until it was almost morning.
It got colder the brighter the sky got and we went back to the city when it was time for the traffic to queue up and people beeped at us again because I was dressed up and wearing his coat and he sang “oh my morning’s coming back, the whole world’s waking up” to himself and to me kind of and that’s probably my second favourite song, by the way, if you want to make another video, for our wedding maybe, and take that away from me too, because ‘Do You Realize’ is my favourite song because when we went through a wooden door to his apartment in the west of the city that he was sharing with a painter guy above a tattoo place across from a jazz bar we took our clothes off as the electric heater warmed up our ears and while I waited for him on the bed, my back arched so I looked as well as I could, he turned on ‘Do You Realize’ and walked towards me with the song playing and the morning beginning outside the window behind him, and my life it felt like beginning too.
I felt something like love lying there, obviously I don’t love him now, I don’t even know him, but when he pressed his forehead against my forehead during the big chorus…when we kissed we really kissed, that’s what I mean. And I want to be able to listen to those songs sometimes and go back to there and you’re trying to take that away from me, it’s not even that much I want to keep, just the boy-smell of his room, him walking towards me as the song played, the way he grabbed me, leaving the mark of his fingers and palm on my ribs.
Obviously I love you. But I’m allowed to think of him too. I’m not even in control of it sometimes a day or two will pass and I’ll notice I haven’t thought about him and I’ll congratulate myself, although obviously because I’ve noticed not thinking about him I am thinking about him. Does he think about me as much as I think about him? Does anyone think about their past as much as that? Maybe I’m just a bad person but I want to remember him, naked by the window, looking through his CDs, asking me what to put on and putting on The Flaming Lips and walking back towards me his eyes closed singing along. It’s just those seconds, honestly, that I need to keep, the city waking up all around us, him getting on top of me. I’m really sorry it seems so much, sometimes seconds mean more to people than years.
3. The Garden
Dew had thickly settled like sweat upon Louis as he listened silently to her story without moving. He walked noiselessly back to the kitchen in brittle kitten steps, turning on the yellow light to locate their house in the flat of the sky, adding its glow to the lemony glow of the docklands. He turned off the light and cupped his hands against the window to look out at her. Isobel was still sitting in the white chair under the tongue tips of leaves, still staring up above the kitchen at the sky that was the blue of menstrual blood in television ads.
The path of flattened footsteps he made on his way back uncurled, teasingly, blade by blade from the warm ground. Her legs were tautly joined at the knees as if she were knowingly listening to someone she was enchanted by telling a story. The words she had said earlier in the garden exploded in his stomach. It was the not the story exactly but the glazed, distant, blazed way her eyes lit when she said particular words—“grabbed”, “ribs”, “kissed”, “arched”, “him”—a private fire was burning inside her and it seemed wrong for him to have glimpsed the tips of it like that, the way it would be wrong for him to watch her with someone else, waiting on the bed as the music starts to play.
Nightly, as she sleeps or pretends to sleep beside him, her thoughts must darkly turn to some shaded midnight touch, or to some moment when the foggy night became foggy morning, kissing in the watery reds and greens of Galway at dawn, the rivers and buildings and streets lowly lit like the first of the colour films. What a fool he must look in the engagement video, half-drunk in the half-dark garden, cigarette smoking between his lips, talking about her as she slept guiltily upstairs, some part of her flashing dreams forever devoted to someone else, forever unknown to him.
He sat down in the dark kitchen to watch the video again, to see if, as he thought, her smile was too full of teeth to be real, straining through too much of something else to be joy. He sat before the laptop screen and let the internet touch his face like a soothing sea breeze. The blogs were right. They were watching the video everywhere. They were watching it in the moist cities of Hong Kong and Singapore, in the hastily arranged streets of Santiago, in the steamed neon of Manhattan. They were watching it on breaks from the Inca trail, on the white beaches of Thailand, in the old stone apartments of Paris, on the sardined streets of Moscow, in the internet cafes of Lagos, in the middle class bedrooms of Beijing.
They were watching it in Galway too, by the mismatches of streets where she walked with him—whoever he was—hand in hand under suddenly appearing streetlights draped in rectangles of fog. They were watching the video in the west of the city where they went as it fully became day, normality coming down like a curtain from the sky to end the hypnotic drama made of mixing night and morning.
They were watching the video in the apartment where, Louis was in no doubt now, she had slept with him in his room among the twinkly Christmas lights and the posters for cult films and the cold ringing in the walls and the sound of local businesses coming alive outside and the bells walking children to school and the pubs being cleaned with sweet smelling bleach and the barrels of stout thundering into open hatches and the delivery men calling tunefully out to each other and the band in the tattoo place below playing around before practice and a lecturer whistling as he cycled out his driveway and along the canal overgrown with bare trees in full death bloom, and the song in his room playing.
After they must have lain there until late into the morning, waking with the noises outside to the sudden surprise of another’s skin. They would have been lying there, half dreaming of the other as they touched again in sleep, while Louis was on the train as it poked across Dublin, on his way to college, listening to music and hoping, to pass the time, that he would marry her; hoping that something exactly like what did happen would happen.
Everyone, he thought, getting up to watch her through the window again, must all be only a bottle of wine and the wrong mix of night, music and heat from taking to the garden and diving into the blue sky. He pictured her in Galway, all those years ago, dancing in laneways, lying on that guy’s coat by the fizzing clicking rhythm of a wood fire, and then later in his room, the music softly swirling in the cold air, guitar strings, ripe with feeling, rippling through the dark sharp dawn as she lay on the bed with her back arched, just in from the up all night cold that must have been as thick as wool, as tangible as water, against their faces and hands and skin which must too have been warm and raw and freezing and goose pimpled and tasting earthily on the tongue of coal fire smog.
Isobel was still sitting in the chair, prettily sad, drunkenly serious. Louis turned on the light and clicked out the blue of the garden. He was sure now that everything he had believed was wrong—that the wrong way to treat her was the right way, the right way was the wrong way, that she enjoyed not enjoying, took pleasure in pain, preferred tears to laughter, punches to kisses, short term to long term, loneliness to companionship, poverty to money, roughness to tenderness, the past to the future, submitting to deciding, remembering to living, silence to eloquence, passion to planning, the sky to the ceiling, feelings to facts, dreams to reality, heartbreak to happiness, seconds to years, nothing to something, somewhere else to there, someone else to him.
She walked deliberately in the door and watched herself as she kissed his cheek in the window reflection. She smelled of summer grass and wine and tears. She poured another glass and turned off the light on her way out so he could watch her—her head tilted lovingly to the sky—put one foot in front of the other and almost dance in a circle around the garden. I should take down the video, he thought, but I won’t. I should go to bed, he thought, but I won’t. I should slap her until she falls on her knees in the garden, he thought.