REMNANT
I’m a tag-a-long from the start, but it’s this or take-out and Come Dine With Me in a hotel room with only the couple next door for company. Last night I’d called to reception to complain, each word clearly articulated through the wall, “You’re a loser, a fuckin’ LOSER!” the woman shouted.
So, I go to the bar where his cousin kisses me on the ear, saliva wetting the side of my face. He’s gargantuan, sloppy, beloved. The Liverpool match is on and a gang of them watch, pint glasses warming in meaty hands. Hours pass and to leave or stay is the ticking question, but just after midnight, enough is enough. I say my goodbyes while the group moves on to the Palace. It’s a night out. The first in years.
The hotel is a five-minute distance and his offer to walk me back perfunctory. Alone, I pass a group of boys sheltered by one another, bored for some focus. I keep my gaze down and enter the corner store. Under florescent lights I eye chips and chocolate, pay and then walk down the hill, away from the boys.
I’m turned around and end up at the part of the street where the river chokes the town. Traffic from the road is quiet at this hour and I hear the rush of water for the first time, then look up from where I came. He’d be on his way with his cousin, all of them middle-aged, on a campaign for youth. I peer at the black river, crests flecked by the moonlight. A bridge crosses over it and I walk to the middle and notice there are no houses on the other side. This is where the town ends.
In the hotel lobby I pass the young couple from the night before, him on his phone, her chewing at a plastic straw suspended in a few melting ice cubes. On my way to breakfast that morning the man was getting dressed in the corridor, barefoot, his clothes in a pile. He’d glanced up as he fit his thin arms into the sleeves of a striped button-front shirt and smiled, sure, you know how it goes.
I consider taking my gin and tonic up to the room, but too sad, I think. Though I’m not in the mood for being on display either and the bar is filled. A wedding. Young women and their newish boyfriends in shiny suits, pants too tight, bulging bits visible. I can’t see the bride or groom anywhere.
I find a seat in the lobby where a newspaper from the morning sits on a table nearby, though that was yesterday already.
It’s fifteen years since I first visited this town: a tour of the church, his growing- up house, the bar where his cousin works a side-hustle selling pills and coke to the regulars. It wasn’t the town of American ideas of Ireland – not the country or the city, just an in-between place. Nothing especially quaint about it, just some pebble-dash estates, a carpet factory, a Mine which closed recently.
“Zinc maybe,” he’d said when I asked, “Copper? Not sure.”
I thought then, what happens to a giant hole in the earth?
The couple is still there beside the electric screen displaying a crinkle of flames. The silver strap on the woman’s left shoe is sticking out noticeably from her ankle – the bit of elastic meant to hold it in place has broken off. The young man wears the striped shirt from the morning, fully buttoned now. From my distance I feel her impatience simmering. He remains focused on the phone. Some of the wedding crowd filter out to the lobby and the woman with the partially broken shoe looks up, assessing fashion.
I finish the gin and tonic and think of my flight from America, when I’d ordered a plastic bottle of white from the drink cart and the attendant said, “One for later?” handing out a second before I’d asked.
I wonder when he’ll return.
Will he wake me? (likely) Will I pretend to be asleep? (for a time) Will he be full of nostalgia, confession, affection, then resentment, in that exact order? (routinely, predictably, yes)
Will I wake early, look at him sprawled, sheets twisted, slight urine stain on his boxers, face sweaty, jeans heavy on the floor with loose change in the pockets. Him in oblivion, I’ll pull his phone from his coat and check messages while sitting on the toilet. Had he rung an ex-girlfriend during the night? The one with the frizzy blonde hair and nose ring, from long past, left behind in the move to America only to grow in prominence, this imagined alternative story, one where he remained.
It is early morning when I leave the hotel. I pass the veterans at breakfast, ready for the first serving of sausages before they wrinkle under the heat lamps. How many weddings have these old pairs attended together? Their arguments behind them, their disappointments well buried.
By the river there is a man with a dog, others on their way to the shop for the morning paper, a fresh pint of milk, getting in their steps. They are all a distance from me and it doesn’t take long to cross the bridge and rid myself of the confines of the town. Soon I feel myself part of this landscape beyond the river. I pass a cemetery and beyond this are open fields. The horizon here is untold, the sky a wash of grey met by distant, spindly trees. It’s hard to tell from which direction the sun rose and I keep going. At various places along my walk, fenced in at geometric angles, are shaggy fields peppered with lone sheep, each of them distant from any herd. They punctuate the landscape, these cottony balls of white, animals gnawing at the earth.
Cynthia Olson is an American writer living in Ireland. She received a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland and a Bachelors in Literature from George Mason University in Virginia. Her short fiction has appeared in publications in America, Ireland and the U.K., including Umbrella Factory, Gettysburg Review, and The Hackney.
