I could not have written this without you

Sam Furlong - The Pig’s Back, Issue Six

Edward Hopper, Two on the Aisle, 1927, Toledo Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA..

Tailte liked the look on Martin’s face when she told him she was certain that, soon enough, she would be the victim of domestic abuse. It was a desirable combination of horrified and concerned. Part of him seemed to believe her.

See, she said, I’ve had it too good for too long—a series of unlabeled, obsessive relationships ending in no contact. I need a horror story before I meet the love of my life.

Shortly after she said this, she pretended to look away while he paid the bill for his steak, her calamari, the bottle of white wine he ordered for the table, and the three mojitos she drank instead. It was a great end to a good first date.

Later, she wished she had taken a picture of that expression and printed it out. She wished she could keep it in her wallet or put it in a silver frame beside her bed. It would be the last time they would meet without a camera. 

In the studio, Tailte pulls her gas mask on and burns a hole onto Martin’s face with a disposable lighter. The top layer of the polaroid gasps and bubbles and the plastic begins to swim through the air. She puts the photo down before the burn has time to spread. It looks like a fresh blister with small rainbows surrounding it. The only parts of Martin that remain recognisable are the mahogany quiff of his hair, and the signet ring wrapped around his middle finger, itself wrapped around a half-empty glass of red wine.

Eric watches her from across the studio and smiles.

He’s getting what he deserves, he says.

Tailte rolls her eyes. Eric had been the chairperson of the I Hate Martin Kegney Club since Tailte first mentioned him and his age. That protective fervour has only ramped up since she started bringing photos of him to the studio. 

Tailte takes off her mask, inhales the fumes, and wanders over to Eric’s work in progress—it’s only half completed, but already promising. He’s painting a large, photorealistic portrait of his mother, for which he uses a different reference picture every day. One day, a selfie she sent him from her holiday in Rome; another, an old photo of her at a disco in 1982. She doesn’t age linearly on his canvas, but wears every stage of life on her face, youth mingling with maturity on a cheekbone. Tailte has privately thought that if his mother were to die during the process, the piece would be significantly more interesting and maybe even sell to a gallery.

How’s it looking? he asks.

Good, she says. I like the lips. She’s a good choice to paint.

Not fucking the subject helps.

Martin’s not my subject, Tailte says. He’s my boyfriend.

They never move in together, but soon the only two important locations in Tailte’s life are her studio and Martin’s apartment. She tries to work with Eric every day in the studio until five, experimenting with polaroids and pyrotechnics, before getting the bus to his for the evening. She keeps her house share in Portabello, but only returns on the weekends to do her laundry and trim her pubic hair.

The apartment is large and tidy and peopled by a cleaner who comes twice a week, as well as his assistant Amanda.

Tailte arrives about ninety minutes before she is needed. She uses the spare key to let herself in, takes a sparkling water from the fridge, and makes herself comfortable on the couch. She reads a book or watches videos on her phone until Martin emerges from his study at 7 pm. This is Martin’s preferred dynamic: all the pleasures of a wife, but only when he wants it and only when he needs it. The illusion of complete availability.

On the bus one Wednesday, Tailte receives an email she has to read twice:

Dear Tailte,

I hope this email finds you well. We read your proposal and would be delighted to put on your work in our temporary gallery space for our festival in August. We will send more details in the coming weeks, but for now could you confirm the work is still available to be shown?

All the best,

Sandra 

Tailte squeals into her hand to muffle her excitement. She looks around the bus, at the commuters and the tourists and the couples and thinks: I cannot wait to tell Martin. I cannot wait to tell Martin. I’m on the bus to my boyfriend’s beautiful apartment where I will tell him that I am a real photographer, someone who has a show and someone who will stand by his side and belong there.

Amanda is in the kitchen, leaning her elbows on the marble island, hunched over a stack of papers, when Tailte gets in. On his living room walls there are framed posters of every play he had directed since his debut at a small black-box theatre in 1999, including one with a large tear down the side because it was drunkenly pulled off the wall of the theatre bar in 2003.

Hello, Tailte says. Am I okay to hang in here?

Amanda looks up from her paper absentmindedly and nods. Actors, producers, and casting directors mill around all day, but Amanda is always the last person to leave Martin’s apartment before he emerges from his study, often with a stack of his clothes for the laundry and a number of his documents to file away. Tailte spends more time in her quiet, busy presence than with her roommates, but despite this pseudo-cohabitation, they have never engaged in anything Tailte could comfortably call a conversation.

Though Martin often watches home improvement shows and Netflix documentaries about bludgeoned women in bed on his laptop, he doesn’t believe there is any place for a television in an adult’s apartment. Tailte kicks off her shoes and stretches her body across his leather couch, watching Amanda run a red pen through her pages, which Tailte can’t read but are formatted like a script, which must be in the proofing stage, because Amanda—as thin and loudly competent as she is—would hardly be actually editing Martin’s work.

Afraid of getting caught gawking again, Tailte stares at the ceiling fan and decides she likes it here. She likes Martin and all the interesting, funny things that come along with him, including his cold assistant. She likes being the girlfriend, the one on the couch, staring at the ceiling fan, watching it spin and spin until dreams of cherry-red cartwheels descend upon her.

When she wakes up, there are two cups of hot tea on the coffee table beside her. She rolls onto her stomach and feels an absence of underwear beneath her skirt. Her temple is heavy with the suds of dreams. There are no clocks in the apartment by design, like a reality television show. Martin is leaning against the kitchen island, her purple thong is on the counter beside her phone, which is plugged in.

Tailte pushes herself up by her elbows. Good morning, she says.

It’s 10.45pm, Martin says.

You found a way to keep yourself busy.

You don’t mind? You’re a hard person to wake up.

She shakes her head no. And she doesn’t mind. She is acutely aware that she should, and it’s not like she’d admit it to any of her friends, but she made a decision some time ago to enjoy the idea of this violation: his fumbling hands, a desperate energy, unable to control himself, the little boy who can’t wait until morning to unwrap his Christmas presents.

Her preference, really, would be that Martin never mention it. But when he does, as he insists on doing in moments like these, she makes the decision again, feels her body fill with the warmth of being desired, and changes the subject.

Are you ready for round two? she asks.

Do you mind if we talk about—he pauses and Tailte braces. It is impossible to have a serious conversation with Tailte without her bursting into tears, a fact that she is very aware of. She’s also aware that this habit bores Martin rather than making him feel guilty for breathing, an intention she only occasionally admits to herself. She’s been trying to stop. She can feel the tears rise anyway.

Do you mind, he repeats, if I ask you a question?

He’s being very careful. There are a lot of corollaries to the question. Tailte is presented with many reasons why she should say yes before the question itself has left Martin’s mouth. I just think you’re perfect for it, Tal. And I think it would be really good for your career, better than whatever you’re doing with your camera. You don’t have to say yes, of course. You never have to say yes to anything you don’t want to. But I think you’d be excellent, just perfect.

Can I see the script? she asks.

No, he says.

Rain begins to beat onto the windows outside and Tailte can feel this thunder in the space between her brain and her skull, in the space between what she wants and what she will do. She stands up and raises her arms into a stretch, feeling Martin’s eyes on her body. She loves her boyfriend, she supposes, but she isn’t sure if she loves him enough to become his actress. She meets him at the counter, balls up the purple thong and puts it into her mouth. She needs more information. 

 After the sex, Tailte tip-toes to the bathroom with her camera, feeling the new marks on her thighs, her neck, her chest as she walks. She slips off the thong and lays it on the edge of the bathtub. She lifts the camera and, framed in the viewfinder, the purple lace looks more like evidence than art. Without taking her eye from the machine, she moves her gaze to the mirror and watches her body as a subject, raw and glowing, the wounds themselves winking at the lens. 

Martin and Tailte made things official on the opening night of his previous play. It also happened to be Tailte’s twenty-fourth birthday, but she didn’t tell him that.

According to the brochure, it was not a play at all, it was a theatrical experience. Tickets still cost twenty euro even though the programme notes credited “the audience” as a lead creative, alongside Martin and the sound designer. When she walked into the small theatre in Temple Bar, a staff member gave her a black robe and a headset, and asked her to join the line.

There were about fifteen people already there, including Martin, who was milling around in the space, moving impersonally between various members of the opening night audience. It seemed he knew all of them.

It was the first time Tailte had seen him in a group setting and she immediately noticed that he spoke to men and women entirely differently. He was all gesticulation and loud laughter with the men he knew: a distinguished theatre critic Tailte recognised from twitter; a tall actor with a beard that she had seen in something in The National. When he spoke to the people Tailte assumed were those men’s wives, his body seemed to collapse in on itself. He was quieter and more attentive. He leaned in close. She didn’t want to make herself known to him or the important men he laughed with, so she pulled the robe over her head and watched. At twenty-five past seven, Amanda interrupted his conversation, handed him his own headset and robe, and gestured slightly to Tailte, who was caught then in the sin of voyeurism. He smirked at this, and walked over to her.

Well, you look lovely, he said.

Thank you, someone special picked out my robe.

Someone special? I hope you don’t have a boyfriend.

I think I might, she said.

I’m so sorry to hear that.

He kissed her on the cheek and the experience began. They walked in single file through the city centre while Martin’s words drummed through the audience’s headsets.

After the show, they went to a bar with Martin’s colleagues and held hands under the table. Whenever he went to the bathroom or got caught in a quiet conversation, somebody would ask Tailte what she did, and she told them she was an actor, though that had not been true for a number of years. Then, they would ask where she trained, and when she named a small college outside of Dublin, they would stop asking questions.

When Eric texts Tailte to say that he had a family emergency a few days ago, he wouldn’t be in the studio for a week or two, would she mind putting away his stuff, it occurs to her that maybe they weren’t as close as she thought, maybe she’s more of a logistical necessity than a friend to confide in. She tries to suppress that first response, and texts:

Aw Eric I hope you’re ok. Of course I’ll sort that out. Lmk if you need anything else okay?

Because he is her only friend, after all.

Martin set her up with the head shots. She was reluctant, because she doesn’t really like speaking to people, but it’s good money. The last of her small Arts Council grant is running out and she has less to show for it than she would have liked: the solo show is promising, yes, but it’ll be a while before she sees any money from that, if at all.

About half of her clients are direct recommendations from Martin—actors mostly, some writers, lots of young women. The other half find her from Instagram and are significantly more difficult to predict. She got a clown, once. He was nice.

This one is a Martin recommendation. Absolutely divine, he’d said, and very pliable—you’ll have no trouble. Characteristically, he didn’t give her any other details.

Tailte sets up the space with some ring lights and a lilac backdrop. She puts a wobbly stool in the centre of the floor. The stool was the only piece of furniture in the studio when she began to rent it, and the landlord said they could skip it if they wanted, but she likes throwing the actors off kilter. She could definitely afford a plastic chair for these headshots, but there is something about watching those actors wriggle around in front of her camera that offsets the client-product dynamic. And anyway, she always apologises profusely and tells them there’s an IKEA delivery that literally just got delayed, can you believe that? She absolutely cannot believe it.

The actor knocks on the door five minutes early. They look soft, shorter than Tailte expected, and they’re wearing a black compression binder under a white open shirt. They’ll look nice against the backdrop.

Tailte? they ask.

Yes.

They extend a hand, which Tailte shakes.

I’m going to run to the bathroom, do you want to make yourself comfortable?

Tailte stands in the small, damp bathroom staring at herself in the mirror. She feels a familiar jealousy creep upon her. Who is this person and how does Martin know them? Does Martin like them? Do they act well? Does Martin ever think about having sex with them? She imagines this, and in her mind the actor is on top of him, the actor is smiling, and crucially, the actor is awake. She looks at her own reflection and sees herself on Martin’s couch, face soft and mouth slightly open. The actor, she remembers, is waiting outside. She splashes her face with water and reminds herself that this is her space and she is in control.

When she returns, the actor is looking at Tailte’s stack of polaroids.

Is this Martin? they ask.

Not all of the photographs are of him, and his face has been rendered invisible by some physical means in each of them, but the actor has picked him out—presumably by his body. He’s at the pub—as he is in many of them—an unlit cigarette between his fingers and a young woman’s hand on his arm. The girl’s face is out of frame.

It is, she says, picking up her camera. Do you want to begin?

Yes, but that chair is kind of uncomfortable. Do you mind if I sit on the floor.

Whatever you’d like.

They sit down and spread their legs out like a scissors. Their thighs look soft, they have thick hair running from the hemline of their denim shorts to their ankles. Their waistband is visible. It’s red. Tailte feels like blushing, but doesn’t, can’t, won’t.

Instead, she raises the camera and takes a picture of the actor on the ground. Another. A third. Ten at once—all very slightly different angles of the same basic composition: red lips poking out of the top of the frame, their torso in the top half, and their denim crotch in the very centre of the picture. She exhales.

Can I see? they ask.

When I’m done, Tailte says. Tip your head back.

They do, and with it, their lips slip out of the frame. They’re just a body.

Tailte does not like to think of herself as someone who is jealous or malicious. She does not like to think of herself as someone who is cold. She takes a break to look at the gratuitously sexual pictures she has taken and imagines Martin looking at them. She imagines Martin smiling.

Extend your hand, she says.

They bring their hand into the middle distance. Pliable.

Grab my ankle, she says.

The actor folds over themself to do this, and the next picture is a birds eye view of their ass, their back, and the crown of their head against the hardwood floor. They dig two nails into Tailte’s ankle. Martin is in her head again. Martin watching his actor touch Tailte. The actor’s hand around Martin’s ankle. Martin smiling.

Good, she says.  

Tailte crouches down and—with her right hand holding the camera—puts two fingers under their chin, lifting their head so they are staring directly at the lens. The actor releases their grip on Tailte’s ankle, and puts two palms on the floor. Tailte takes an unfocused picture, fumbling slightly with only one hand. Her fingers move to the actor’s mouth, and she feels hard lining of liquid lipstick over their skin. Is this how Martin directs his plays?

 She smears the make-up across their face. Pliable. Silent. The actor smiles, and puts Tailte’s thumb in their mouth. She takes another picture, and then lets go of the camera. The strap around her neck catches the machine.

Amanda meets Tailte at the door to Martin’s apartment with a caseless iPhone in one hand. Her hair is slicked into a tight bun and she’s wearing yet another small black dress. It seems as if she has an infinite amount of those dresses. Tailte imagines them all hung up in an infant-sized wardrobe for maximum space efficiency.

Tailte? she says, as if they do not see each other three times a week.

Yes.

Martin isn’t available tonight.

What do you mean?

He’s on a socials blackout for his practice, and needs to be in a state of deep mindfulness to finish his project.

I wanted to ask him about the audition.

He’ll be available on Thursday.

The audition is tomorrow.

Yes.

Could you ask him, and Tailte sighs from the degradation of it all, Could you please ask him to email me back?

Amanda raises an eyebrow and smirks.

Sure.

It is not Tailte’s first time in Martin’s office. She knows its architecture and has been fucked over its small desk. It is far too small for the number of people at the audition, all of whom are waiting when Tailte arrives five minutes early. There’s Martin, of course; a pretty and severe stage manager wearing all black; a small man that Tailte has been promised is a very sensitive director, though she has not seen his work; and the producer whose theatre company is bankrolling the project. Most of the group are sitting on a collection of disharmonious chairs borrowed from other studios in the building, but the director is standing. There’s no chair for Tailte.

Thanks for coming Tailte, the stage manager says, you can put your bag down anywhere. She just leaves it by her feet.

Everybody is all smiles and manilla envelopes. There’s a small stack of audition sides on the desk.

I haven’t actually read the script, Tailte says. Martin looks at the floor.

Yes, the director says. We were chatting and thought it would be better if you read cold, to capture the intensity of the scene. Would you like some context?

Tailte would absolutely like some context. She has been begging Martin for a synopsis or any character detail for days, but he has been unyielding in his desire to retain professionalism, which Tailte finds odd coming from someone who was known to go down on her in his writing studio, or in his greenroom, or while on the phone with his agent.

Okay, he says. So you’re Jennifer, and you’ve been seeing your boyfriend, Manus, for about a year. You go to his place to break up with him because you’ve found out he’s seeing someone else. It’s the emotional climax of the play. This is that conversation.

Tailte nods. She looks at Martin, who now has his eyes on the wall behind her.

Yeah, that sounds excellent, she says. It doesn’t really—the plot sounds unoriginal and stale. It will have to be saved by stylistic writing. 

Are you ready to go? the stage manager asks.

Tailte reaches into her bag and takes a sip from her water. It’s been a while since she’s had to embody someone else. Yeah, she says.

Wonderful, we’ll have Martin read for Manus, the boyfriend.

Tailte looks directly at her boyfriend and asks, What ages are the characters?

Twenty-three and forty-seven, he says.

Do they have jobs?

Manus is a writer, and Jennifer is still figuring it all out.

Right, she says.

The stage manager hands her the audition sides and she doesn’t have time to even skim them before Martin, who has had his own script in his hands from the beginning, begins to speak.

“Jennifer,” he says. “hat are you doing here? You were told I wasn’t available today.”

She reads directly from the script, no idea what tone or cadence she should be going for; as concerned with the contents of the script as she is with how she will perform the only script of Martin’s she hasn’t read.

“I wanted to surprise you,” she says.

“I hate surprises.”

“Well, surprise: I know you’re fucking your assistant,” she reads, stunned initially by the weak dialogue. Couldn’t this parody of herself be a little less obvious? Then she thinks about the name Amanda. Her hands are suddenly wet.

“How do you.”

“I read your emails.” 

“How dare you.” Martin looks up from the script for the first time, directly into her eyes. He’s no actor, but there is credibility here: not angry, not spitting. He is pleading.

“Was she,” there’s a pause written into the stage directions, “was she better than me?”

“Better?” He’s making her ask the question, he’s making her spell it out. If this is true, it’s so like him. But this is a new kind of cruelty—there are so many bodies in the room. The director is now crouching, staring up into Tailte’s performance.

Without breaking eye-contact with Martin, she whispers, “Was she better in bed?” That’s not what I’d ask, she thinks, that’s not the first thing she would ask, it never would be.

“I can’t believe that’s the first thing you would ask me, Jennifer.”

“I—,” her vision is blurry. The director is nodding vigorously. She wipes her eyes and looks down at the script again, “I have a right to know.”

“You don’t have a right to anything,” Martin says. “You think you are the executor of my life, but you’re just a girl who believes her only path to love is through fucking and being fucked. You can’t believe that forever, you really can’t. Availability is not the same thing as love.”

Tailte is shaking. She thinks about all the times they have ended an argument in bed, with her slipping onto or into him and whispering, I love you, into his ear. How this was a learned routine; proven over and over again to be the only way to calm him down. She takes her hair down and runs her fingers through its thickness, letting her left-hand rest on the side of her neck. She laughs a little, and begins to read the lines Martin wrote just for her with an irony not implied by any stage direction:

“You’re right baby, you’re really right. And I’m sorry—not about the emails but for all I’ve become; for all I am now and for all I was when I met you. I thought I could fuck you out of realising who I really am, but I see now that that’s not true. You’re right. Of course you’re right. You’ve always been right.” She looks up at him and he’s smiling like he has a mouth full of blood. The director reads, “Jennifer now speaks directly to the audience.” She flips the page.

“When I was a little girl I used to play with dolls and make them fuck. I used to tie up the girl-doll with shoelaces and make the boy-doll kiss her, pull the laces tighter around her plastic waist and pretend he was touching her. I didn’t know what I was doing. When I was a little older I played with my friend Roisin and always said: you be the bad witch and you punish me for being good.”

Tailte can’t breathe, she rushes through this augmented memory, watching it swell up and leak out inside herself, wanting to run out of the room but aware of all the bodies gorged within it. She goes on, quickly but without stammering; she barely needs the lines.

“I wanted her to suffocate me with blankets and heavy objects. I wanted to be punished. I would whine and whine until she agreed to call me ugly names and punish me. All this is to say that I am not your fault, I know that now. Nothing you did to me was your fault because I asked it of you.”

She thinks of the lilac thong on the kitchen island and the steaming tea on the coffee table. She doesn’t think that she did ask for that, but in this small room, with all these people diligently accepting Martin’s version of Tailte’s pain as scenography, she cannot be sure. The stage manager is writing something in her notebook, the producer is checking her phone, the director is so consumed by this performance that he has let his script fall to the ground. Everything in Tailte’s head is begging Martin to take one step closer, to let her fall into his arms while he whispers: none of it is true, I promise, this is just a game. It’s just one of my games.

He doesn’t do that. He reads the lines.

“Thank you for saying that, Jennifer.”

I think you’re a truly evil person, Tailte says.

The director is hurtled back into focus by the deviation and slides into a cross-legged position to retrieve his script, but Martin is calm; this is a writing exercise.

No, Martin smiles, you don’t.

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