A Flat of One's Own

Author's note for American readers: "Flat" is a British term for "apartment"; "lad" is an informal term for a boy or man; "feck" is a mild expletive in Irish-English; to be "from the country" is an Irish term for someone from a rural area.

A Flat of One’s Own

My husband left me three months ago, so today I’m doing something that I have never done before — I’m collecting the keys to a flat. It’s my flat, the first place that is truly my own, and, standing outside an apartment block in Dublin, I feel nervous. The nerves are small shocks that work their way through my system like insects — down my arms into my fingertips so my hands shake and it’s hard to hold my Styrofoam cup of tea steady; then they zoom around again, shoot up my arms and straight down into my belly, unsettling my stomach so I want to throw up. I feel something else, too, something stronger. Underneath the nerves I can feel my age like I’ve never felt it before. I feel it lurking in my bones like a stranger. I am forty-two. I am forty-two years old, and I have never lived by myself, and I am nervous and tired.

The events leading up to today have been long and exhausting, and, in retrospect, they’re all somehow related, but I can’t quite figure out how. Six months ago, just at the turn of the millennium, my father died, and my mother followed him dutifully a few months later. At my mother’s wake my grandmother sat with a cigarette and told anyone who would listen that it was the way things should be. She said a husband should never outlive his wife, and a wife should not outlive her husband longer than a year.

My brother Pierce tried to rile her. “Granny, you’re ninety-two. Sure didn’t your own husband die twenty-five years ago?”

She nodded, threw the butt of her cigarette into the fire, and said, “He did, pet, and that’s my own tragedy. Why do you think I smoke thirty a day? I’m trying, love. But God’s a busy man: He has more important things to do than listen to the troubles of old women.”

A few weeks later — the end of May, or the beginning of June maybe — Shane, my husband, ex-husband I mean, rang me to tell me he was leaving. He called me in the afternoon during an episode of Oprah.

“I’m at work,” he said.

“Do you want me to put on dinner, or will you pick something up from the chipper?”

“I won’t be home.”

“Are you going out with the lads?”

“No, I won’t be home.”

“Why not?”

“You know why.”

I did know why.

***

My brother Pierce and I picked out my mother’s gravestone. Pierce decided on the wording. It read:

VIVIAN O’HARA
18TH JUNE, 1928 – 5th APRIL, 2000.
BELOVED WIFE, MOTHER, DAUGHTER, SISTER, AUNT AND FRIEND.
DEARLY MISSED BY ALL WHO KNEW HER.
R.I.P.

The gravestone annoyed me, and it was only a few weeks later that I realized why. It was the order of the roles that defined her: Wife, mother, daughter, sister, aunt, and friend. Not ‘friend, daughter, mother, wife, sister, and aunt’ or any of the other variations, but a wife first, a mother second… And in any case, my mother did many things: she read a lot; she went mountain climbing, and she liked country music. Why couldn’t she be remembered for those things? I made up a new gravestone for her in my head:

VIVIAN O’HARA
18TH JUNE, 1928 – 5TH APRIL, 2000.
AVID READER, MOUNTAIN CLIMBER, COUNTRY MUSIC LOVER.
DEARLY MISSED BY ALL WHO KNEW HER.
R.I.P.

I would have put a picture of a rose on it too, because she loved to grow them. She planted them all over the garden, and they’d bloom every April in magnificent bursts of red, burgundy and lilac. Her secret was eggs; she used egg yolks in the soil to help them grow. My father complained that there were never any eggs for breakfast. One night he fell into her favourite rose bush — the purple one by the gate — when he was drunk. In the morning it looked as though a cloud had scattered fuchsia raindrops all over the lawn.

“Did you have to drink so much you couldn’t walk straight?” my mother asked him while she made breakfast.

“A man is entitled to a drink,” he replied.

“A man is entitled to a drink. But he’s not entitled to come crawling into bed at night with my rose thorns sticking out of his arse.”

My father laughed. We all did; we couldn’t help it.

***

My landlord arrives in the afternoon. She’s a woman; this surprises me at first, and for that I feel naïve. She’s young, too; a slip of a thing with blonde hair, and an air of confidence about her that is intimidating more than infectious.

“Hi,” she says, and rummages in her bag. “Constance, is it? I hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long. I’ve had a crazy morning; busy busy. You know how it is.”

I nod as I follow her through the apartment block’s outer door, but I don’t really know how it is. I’ve never been so busy that I turn up late and say, “Busy busy”. I envy her, but I’m going to get a job too, and I make a mental note to say, “Busy busy”.

“Here we are, number nine,” she says and opens the door. “It’s small but in good nick; you’re the first person to live here. It’s fully furnished, anyway. Are you from nearby?”

“No, I’ve just moved up from the country. I’ve never lived by myself before.”

She pauses, looks at me and I feel stupid. I wish I didn’t say that; it’s the nerves talking. I must look like a sad country-bumpkin spinster. Maybe she thinks I’m a lesbian? That at least would be better than thinking I’m a spinster.

“Well,” she says, “Phibsboro’s nice; you’ll like the area. The money’s sorted. Call me if you need anything.”

She leaves, shutting the door behind her. The flat suddenly feels very big.

***

I miss Shane’s smell — the smell of his sweat in the morning. He’d give me a hug some mornings if he wasn’t too hung-over, and I’d rest my head on him and smell the dried sweat that had congealed in his chest hair while he slept. It’s the smell I most associate with a man.

But I think he was a habit, a bit like smoking. I missed that too when I gave it up, but I did it. It’s hard to give someone up when you’ve known them that long. I’ve known him nearly as long as I’ve known myself.

We started in the Tech in the same year, and Shane sat beside me in Mr. Loftus’s English class. (He told me years later that he sat there because I was the only girl in our year.) Mr. Loftus was overweight with a moustache that made him look like a walrus. He only taught books by authors whom he considered real men. No Englishmen fell into this category, so I went through five years of English classes without reading Shakespeare. His favourite author was Hemingway. He came into class one day, held a copy of Men without Women above his head, and then smashed it down on his desk.

“Lads lads lads,” he shouted in such a frenzy that spit mottled the tables at the front of the room.

“Say it, don’t spray it, sir!”

“Shut it, Murphy. Lads, this is Hemingway, a real man.”

But I didn’t understand Hemingway, even if he was a real man. His books were full of lost men, men who killed bulls, and lost men who killed bulls. In one of his stories a man is castrated in a war, so his tragedy is that he can never truly be with the woman he loves. I suppose it was romantic in a weird way.

Mr. Loftus explained castration to a class of rowdy boys and me: “It means to cut a man’s thing off. It’s the worst thing you can do to a man. Hitler castrated the English, boys. Hitler did many terrible things, but he castrated the English. He took their land away from them, their empire, and a man without land is nothing.”

“Sir, is that why the English invaded Ireland? Because they had no things and they wanted the Irishmen’s things?”

“That is correct, O’Leary.”

All the boys laughed.

Shane stopped me in the hall when the lesson was over.

“Constance?”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“The Germans never got their hands on my thing, just so you know. They never cut it off. Ya can take a look at it later if ya want, just to make sure.”

“That’s filthy, Shane,” I said. “Feck off away from me.”

***

Pierce visits me later to drop off my stuff from the old house. He has a car, so it’s just easier that way. I make him tea while he unloads the car and gives the flat a onceover. He inspects the walls, knocks on the floorboards, and switches the boiler on and off a few times.

“It’s small,” he says after careful consideration.

“Rent in Dublin is expensive.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Why don’t you come home? Shane’s in an awful state; he doesn’t say anything, but I can tell. You know that girl he was —”

“I’m okay by myself, Pierce.”

“I know ya are. But a man without a woman, it’s just not right. Don’t waste twenty-two years of marriage over something silly.”
Pierce has one more cup of tea and then he has to go because it’s a long drive home and he has to get back to the kids. He pauses at the door.

“It’s small, Constance, but it’s a flat of your own. I wish you all the best with it. I’ll give ya a call durin’ the week.”

He leaves, but his words stay behind, etched on the place like wallpaper. I repeat them aloud and let them hang in the air: “A flat of my own.”

It’s almost poetic.

And you know, it really is a flat of my own now. A kitchen of my own with a sink of my own. A cupboard of my own with cups and glasses of my own, and a drawer with knives, forks and spoons of my own. Four whole rooms of my own, and a bedroom with a bed of my own. More than that, a double bed of my own, so no more pretending to be asleep when Padraic stumbles home at three in the morning to ask me, “Are ya up for it, Constance?” Even the rubbish and dirty dishes are mine alone and, in a funny way, that’s the best part because there’s only myself to clean up after.

When it gets dark I go outside to look at the sky, but you can’t see the stars from Dublin, so I go back inside. I iron and fold the laundry, wash and put away the dishes, and sweep and mop the floors. I feel like a domestic goddess. A place for everything and everything in its place, but everything is new here so I’m just beginning to find a place for it. I walk from room to room just to smell the newness. It’s so palpable I can almost inhale it like a drug that makes me feel dizzy. It shoots into me, into my blood, and makes me feel fresh again.

I’ve decided to make everything in the flat white. The walls will be white, and I even got some white dinner plates at the market. They were only a tenner. I bought bed sheets, too. They’re white Egyptian cotton and embroidered with lace frills, so the bed looks like a wedding cake before it’s been sliced by the bride and groom with a bridal knife. Just before I go to bed I take some time to smooth out all the wrinkles and creases, even though I know they’ll be back by morning.