Endings

(For On Display)

Tuesday, 30 September 2003

It's ten years this month since my first big relationship ended. Ten years and a week. Approximately. Although who's counting? I was nineteen, and we'd been going out for two years and nine months. Two years and nine months of intensity, tension and passionate unpleasantness.

We met when we were sixteen. I was drawn to his intelligence, his warped view of the world. His refusal to bow to convention. (We were a very unconventional couple: never did the things you do, like, oh, enjoying each other's company. Being nice to each other. Hanging out. To illustrate: I think we went to the cinema twice during our relationship.)

We got together on a crisp December evening. We'd been in town with some others, a group of people who didn't know each other very well. We'd got the same train home, walked up from the village in the cold silence. This germ of an understanding, this need, hanging in the air. On a quiet corner I took a deep breath and asked him out, knowing that if he said yes it would be the start of something big.

He said yes. It was big. We tortured each other. He held me at arm's length; I bombarded him with fierce demands. He paid me compliments swathed in layers of indirection, left poetry tucked under the windscreen wiper of my parents' car, took me on long walks to his favourite places. He gave me Pink Floyd and Radio 4 and sexy underwear. I wrote to him, and for him, and about him. In an appallingly twisted way, we loved each other. Underneath it all, there was a genuine connection. We were too scared to explore it. We were too young.

We were unhinged, looking back on it. We used to have phone conversations five, six hours long, deep into the night (although we lived within twenty minutes' walk of each other), composed mainly of taut silences, whispers. All the time we were struggling, testing each other. He'd play mind games; I'd defiantly refuse to play - take him at face value and see where it led. He left me after the first nine months; came back three months later with no explanation. No story. I wrapped myself in the gothic drama of it all. Thought of little else.

Communication was strained and difficult. We never did anything as simple as tell each other about our lives, what we'd been doing, reading, thinking. Typically, we'd meet at Blackrock Park gates at noon on a Saturday, and walk together in a screaming silence. After maybe an hour or so the atmosphere would have softened sufficiently for us to hold hands. We'd strike up a conversation about death, or mathematics, or literature. We'd walk maybe to Dún Laoghaire and back. (Once from Dundrum all the way up into the Dublin mountains.) We'd find a coffee shop in the early evening and sit with our heads together, drinking tea and illustrating our points on napkins. We'd end up back at my house long after the family dinner. We'd eat, go to bed, have fraught sex. He'd get up at five or six and walk home, so as to be there for his father to wake him up at seven to go and play golf.

Seriously. This is how it was.

We went to college. Things got worse. We almost never met on campus, and when we did it was generally horrible. In the spring of my first year - his second - he withdrew from me. Stopped phoning at all (and I had in any case always been the one who phoned more often). Divulged minimal details about his life. In retrospect, he was going through a very bad patch. Things at home can't have been pleasant. At the time I was too close to it. It was all about me.

We descended into nastiness, outrageous and deliberate misunderstandings. We were preparing for exams, seeing less of each other. I was studying at home, waking up and staring at the clock for half the morning before I could bring myself to get out of bed. Watching the angles between the hands change for two or three hours at a time. On the day my exams finished I went to the pub, got drunk, ended up with some fourth-years I knew vaguely, crashing a party in Ranelagh, having sex with one of my friends on a pile of coats in the box-room.

Then back to the misery. My parents didn't intervene. It isn't their style. One memorable day my mother, perhaps coming into my room when I was crying, said, "It's a pity you're so bound up in him."

"You can't tell me that!" I insisted, red-eyed and desperate.

"I know, I know," she said, backing away, and there was an end of it.

I made him a birthday card that June, a calligraphy medley of fragments from love poems, song lyrics, phrases that had meaning for us. I still have a copy of it somewhere, taken on thermal fax paper. I had taken to transcribing my letters to him before sending them, too.

I was going to Paris for the summer. We met a few days before I went. Things almost broke then - we shouted at each other, on the road leading towards his parents' house. He wouldn't talk to me. I remember yelling, "Do we have a relationship?" - thinking god, I sound like I'm in a badly written soap.

I went away. Sent him three gnomic postcards, without giving an address. (It must have been a relief, after my customary avalanche of purple prose.) Had a minor fling with one of the waiters in the hotel where I was working (and living). A twenty-one-year-old with a credit card and a taste for fancy dinners. And a motorbike.

By September the pain had dulled a little, and I began to develop some small sense of perspective. I knew things had to change. We made contact again when I got back to Dublin, and saw each other once, maybe twice. It did not go well. He was sullen, mean. I was beginning to understand that this behaviour did not have to be borne.

Then one afternoon, on the phone, I plucked up my courage and began to put my case. We batted around the issue, in our usual style. My parents were making lunch, calling me to help. My father wanted to use the phone. The tension was rising. I was not getting through. I said, "I'm not telling you how to behave, but if you want to continue to have me in your life things need to change."

He blocked me. I insisted that we continue. "Will I come over to your house and we'll discuss it?" I asked.

"That's what she says you can't do." he said.

Confused. "Who says?"

"My mother."

I controlled my irritation. "Well, then, will you come over here?"

"She says I can't do that either."

"And are you happy with this?" I was crying - had been crying for most of the conversation.

"Yes, pretty much."

And that was it. We said goodbye. I went downstairs to the kitchen, where my parents were laying the table. Lunch was very late. They were waiting for me. I said, "The phone is free. And so, it appears, am I."

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