Cornerstones

“In all the years I’ve worked here, I’ve never seen anyone do that, not even a child.”

I don’t know whether I’m being offered praise or opprobrium. I’m happy either way.

I sense Christopher feels differently. He’s smiling mutely, not fighting like I am to suppress the giggles threatening to rock me into convulsions. The pink-cheeked security guard follows us onto the street and stands in a wide-legged stance at the entrance to his dominion, dedicated to his important task of defending the integrity of a small chemists on a corner off a side street in Dublin. Christopher turns back to wish him a good day. He’s a very polite young man.

I wonder if the guard will respond, if he wants this to escalate. This is a break in his routine: he has declared he’s just seen something he’s never seen before, and he might not want this moment to end. Instead he pauses, mouth flopped open, petrified by Chistopher’s charm. Turning back from offering the guard his disarming smile, Christopher mutters to me: “That’s not restored my faith in Dublin.”

I’m still full of bravado. “I know what I’d like to say to him!”

“What?”

“I’d tell him to lighten up. Life’s too short.”

I don’t tell Christopher what I would have really said, that I would have shouted “I only wanted a bit of fun. I’m waiting for a biopsy, mate.”

Let’s pretend it’s not happening, just for today.

We continue our walk in silence. What we’re supposed to be doing is taking my mind off things, but this was an unwelcome deviation, and I can feel Christopher’s unspoken embarrassment lingering as he examines the paving stones. It’s an almost-autumn day. The air is fresh and cooling, and ahead of us Stephen’s Green is preparing to turn to rust. I take it all in, and there’s no need for conversation.

But Christopher gives it a go anyway. “How worried are you?”

“I…reasonably.”

“Worried you might actually have, have…it?”

“Not really. More worried that the test’s going to be painful.”

“Mmm.”

He stops to study the ivy beginning to bloom on the townhouses, and I notice its roots merging with the porous bricks. A parasite. When he is ready to speak, he says: “But it’s all political. They’re pulling people in for examinations for any mild abnormality, even if it’s mild. You know, after the scandals.”

“Mmmm. They won’t make the same mistakes again.”

“But that’s good. It’s good to be thorough. Good to catch these things early.”

I love him for his optimism, but it is not infectious.

Today, we will go to all our favourite places. We have been to the National Museum to view what the exhibit tag describes as a ‘ritual object’, though it’s clearly a dildo, but it is unexpectedly on loan to the British Museum. “Typical” says Christopher, “the Brits taking all our best stuff.” We browse the shelves of Hodges Figgis, him scanning for the new stock that’s come in since his last weekly visit; me keeping one eye on the time to make sure we get to the Iveagh Gardens for the last of the late-summer sun. Christopher the Kerryman has not been there before, and I’ve talked big about the wonders of the maze, and he will get there and see that it is not even thigh-high on him, and he will laugh, and I will feign getting lost in it, and pretend to be trapped, and he will lift me and pull me over the hedge row, and we will walk around the rest of the garden, we will admire the rockery, and read every plaque on every monument, and sit on the bench by the fountain.

But then I remember I need something from the chemist, because I always need something from the chemist: something to induce sleep, to aid wakefulness, to dull pain, to encourage or lull a fever. The automated checkout gives us orders in her gentle, standard British voice: “please place your item in the packing area. Please place your item in the packing area”, and Christopher mimics her, poking me in time with each syllable, until I say, “am I the item, should I be in the packing area?”, and submit to high spirits, and hop onto the metal plate, and wait for the machine to say “unexpected item in the bagging area”.

That’s when the security guard pipes up. I perceive him as being an old man: joyless with experience and heavy-set, calcifying, not a body in its prime. On sobering scrutiny I realise he’s around the same age as me. I want to get away from him. I pretend to acquiesce to the man’s authority and spring off the checkout and out of the exit. He calls after me: “You should know better!” But I don’t. I don’t apologise, because I am not sorry. But I notice Christopher is not laughing.

I should have known better, and I am sorry. I know how I ended up here. But I won’t dwell on that, not here in the company of this pleasant young man, a pleasant young man who is even polite to a jobsworth, a pleasant young man who is being a rock. But it is a lot of weight to put on young shoulders. Me. I’m a lot. It is in any case too late to try to settle with an age-appropriate partner now, now that they’re going to be chipping bits off my ossifying cervix. What use will I be then?

We turn away from the Green and along Grafton Street. We’d walked this route on our first date. The year was cooling then too, the same kind of weather as today, so we must have met this time last summer. I will remember that first date everytime I walk past here, the stones of the city eroding with overlayering memories. I remember other dates too, less golden with honey, the dates that led to interviews and consultations and internal inspections in hospital beds, all exposed by fluorescent light. In future, if I have one, if I walk past here, I will remember today. I’ll think about the sour guard, the exuberance I couldn’t suppress sufficiently to feign contrition, Christopher’s sweet and dignified face as he wished the guard well, covering for the small moment of mania he had encouraged. Eventually, I won’t be able to distinguish that first date from this last one, a continuum of happy memories I select to retain from the story of this relationship. Yes, the gap between that first day and today must be nearly a year. This is an anniversary.

Christopher had asked me, on that first day, how my mother had ended up in Britain. “She went on a boat”, I said, though I knew that’s not what he’d meant. He knew the answer to the question he was asking anyway. I began a well-practiced rant: “how awful it was the men in the pale sent inspectors to the real Ireland to test if children could speak their own language. How terrible that those children knew — knew! — there would be funding coming for their parents, their neighbours, if they could impress the men well enough when the State knew — knew! — that these children would leave, and that they’d be needing English when they left, and the whole thing was a farce, a failure, wasn’t it, because she didn’t stay and have seven Irish-speaking kids, did she? She went to London, she had one child, who has no Irish, she did what she could afford to do. But we returned. Because it’s the UK now that’s cutting itself off from the world, and Ireland’s different now, isn’t it, because you can earn six figures in Dublin, if you get yourself in with one of the American companies, they’re paving the city gold, I mean just look at the cost of rents, of pints!” He listened politely, and asked thoughtful questions, even though I was being deliberately provocative. But Christopher also does not speak Irish; it is German that is more useful now. He will soon graduate, and he isn’t going into one of the American companies. He has been raving about the opportunities he will have in Berlin: the people, the work, the nightlife, the adequate public transport. Nothing is different, and he will be leaving, and he tells me he feels like he’s being chucked out of Ireland.

Where to go from here? We could walk to the port from which my mother left when she was younger than Christopher is now. Perhaps he will come back too, as people do, when they’re my age, and feel the pull to home. We could take a train to his home land, to see the ocean crashing against rocky cliffs where Europe is submerged by water, a trip we will never now get around to taking. The sun is fading to dusk, so we will go to the pub I like, where the waiters wear bow ties, where music is not played, where you may spend an afternoon nursing a pot of tea, where the marble worktops are cool and clinical and calming, but remind me that Christopher will leave before my procedure is scheduled and that I will be attending it on my own.

As we turn the corner onto Chatham Street a man approaches us. “Hello” he says to Christopher, “how are you?” Christopher takes him in, looking him up and down, trying to recall if he knows him, realising he doesn’t, wondering what he wants. The man wants a cigarette. Christopher explains he doesn’t smoke, and the man calls him a gowl. We laugh. “Don’t you know they’re not even good for you — ” I want to shout, “they give you cancer!”. It’s a proper Dublin afternoon alright.

Later we leave the tipsy warm atmosphere of the pub and meet the chill of an evening that was colder than we were expecting. We pull our coats around us, Christopher turning up his collar, and he looks down at me and asks if I will go to Berlin to visit. “Of course I will,” I say. It’s not far. Flights are cheap. Europe’s a tiny place really. We’re all interconnected.

It depends though, doesn’t it? Because I’m waiting for a biopsy, mate.