Page 15 of The Elements

I catch the barman’s eye and raise my eyebrows to indicate that I’d like to order another round. When it arrives, Tim downs the final quarter of his Guinness, before standing up and carrying our empty glasses to the bar. I like the fact that he’d never make another barman clear up after him.

“You’ve been to prison, haven’t you?” I ask when he returns. I’m determined to keep my voice steady, even if his crime was something heinous. I don’t want him to think that I’m frightened of him. I refuse to be frightened of men anymore.

“I spent six years in Mountjoy,” he admits. “I came here the day after my release.”

“Do you mind if I ask what you did?”

“No. Most people on the island know anyway. I’m surprised no one’s told you, to be honest.”

“I find that people here are very discreet.”

“True enough. Drink-driving.” He looks down at the table that separates us and scratches the woodwork with the nail of his thumb.

“My wife and I had been out for the night and I was supposed to leave the car behind and collect it the next day, but we’d had a row about something stupid and when she tried to take the keys off me, I got lairy with her and insisted on driving us home.

She should have refused to come with me and took a taxi home instead, but no.

I don’t remember anything after that. All I know is I woke up in St. James’s Hospital the next day to be told that I’d escaped the crash with barely a scratch but that my wife was dead.

Which explained why my left wrist was handcuffed to the bedframe and a young Garda was sitting next to the bed reading The Da Vinci Code . ”

I wonder should I offer condolences but decide not to. He is the author of his own misfortune, after all. Is it any wonder he looked so distressed in the church that day?

“And you loved her,” I say, uncertain whether I mean this as a question or a statement.

“I did,” he replies.

“Did you have children?”

“A young lad, yeah. Well, not so young anymore. He lives with his aunt. My wife’s sister. He won’t see me. I don’t blame him. You lost a daughter too, am I right?”

This unsettles me. An estranged son and a dead daughter are not the same thing. Also, it’s starting to grate on me that he knows so much about my life.

“My daughter took her own life,” I tell him. “I have another, Rebecca. But right now, she’s not talking to me either.”

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“I hoped this time apart would be good for us,” I continue. “That she would miss me. Worry about me, even. But I don’t think she does. I think she’d prefer that I never return.”

“Does she talk to your husband?”

“Ex-husband. And no, she doesn’t. And whether or not she ever reconciles with me, I know she’ll never speak to him again. I know that with absolute certainty.”

“She blames him, then.”

“For abusing all those children? Of course she does. Why wouldn’t she?”

“No, I mean she blames him for her sister’s suicide.”

I’m surprised to find myself having such a personal conversation with a relative stranger.

I’ve never had such a conversation before.

And yet, I keep going. At this point, I have nothing to lose.

And it feels good to speak about something that I’ve been hiding since boarding the ferry in Galway all those months ago.

“Yes,” I say.

“She thinks he did it to her too.”

“Yes.”

“And do you?”

“Yes.”

“So she blames you for that?”

“Yes.”

He breathes heavily through his nose, as if all the pain of the world is bottled up inside him, desperate for release, then stands up and goes to the bar, where he orders more drinks without bothering to ask whether I want one.

I still have almost a full glass of wine before me, but I drink it down, enjoying how it numbs me from the inside. I don’t want him to outpace me.

“It’s a terrible thing, guilt,” he says, when he sets the drinks down before us. “I have nightmares sometimes. Do you?”

“No,” I lie.

“I thought everyone who suffered a trauma did.”

“Not me.”

We remain silent for a few moments.

“What was it like?” I ask eventually.

“What was what like?”

“When you woke up in the hospital and they told you what you’d done. How did you feel?”

He looks out into the center of the bar and considers it.

A few more people have come in by now. Some I recognize from my wanderings around the village.

Some are strangers to me. Two, I think, are tourists, for the summer season has just begun.

They are, without question, American, and seem to think they’ve walked onto a film set.

The woman immediately takes her camera out and starts snapping photographs.

When she turns and aims it in our direction, I tell her, in no uncertain terms, not to press that button.

“How did I feel?” says Tim, when the Americans have scattered to the other end of the pub in fright.

“I felt as if my entire life had been leading toward that moment. The truth is, I was always what might be called a dissolute youth. I drank. I took drugs. I womanized. I was not always kind to people. I was certainly not kind to my parents, God rest them. I stole from my employer and got away with it. Just small amounts, but they added up over time. I cheated on my wife for no other reason than I could and because I believed I was entitled to as much sex as I could get, with as many people as would have me. When I was in my late twenties, I was rougher with a girl in this regard than I should have been. She lodged no complaint with the Gardaí, but I remember what I did, and I think about it often. And the party we were at, the night of the accident, was a birthday party for the wife of a good friend, and I’d been seeing that woman secretly for months.

My problem is, I don’t think I ever understood how to be an adult.

In my heart, I still feel like a teenage boy.

So you ask how did I feel? I feel that there was an inevitability to it all.

The moment I was told what I had done, I made my peace with the fact that I would be going to prison and, even then, lying in that hospital bed, I began to think about the changes I would make when I was eventually released. I resolved to be a better man.”

He returns to his pint now and glances up at me cautiously as if he expects me to reach across and place my hand atop his, to commend him for his honesty and tell him that he must forgive himself, that his wife would not want him to live with such guilt, and that he must learn to live again.

I can see this in his face and wonder whether he has told this same story to other women, and they have comforted him in this way.

But I refuse, I absolutely refuse, to comply.

He can anticipate his cathartic moment all he likes, but I won’t be providing it.

“ I don’t think I ever understood how to be an adult ,” I say, mimicking him.

“ In my heart, I still feel like a teenage boy . But that’s the problem with men like you, isn’t it?

You refuse to accept that you’re not, in fact, a teenage boy, any more than you’re a cow or a sheep.

You’re nearly sixty, for God’s sake. You think the world has treated you cruelly by forcing you to age.

But the women, we’re not allowed to act like teenage girls, are we?

No, we become wives and mothers and we try to keep our families together and we make excuses for these infantilized beings we call husbands.

Have you listened to yourself? Your first thought when you woke up in that hospital was to fast-forward to years after your trial, years after your imprisonment, all the way to your release, and who you would be then and what you would do.

Not a thought in your head for the poor woman you’d killed and to whom you’d, presumably, once offered words of love and a lifetime of fidelity.

Just the endless selfishness of the middle-aged man who does whatever he wants and leaves his wife to pick up the pieces.

I don’t doubt your grief, Tim, or your guilt.

But God Almighty, will men like you ever stop telling stories like this and asking the world to excuse you, because you still feel like a teenage boy and, somehow, you can’t help yourself?

You could help yourself if you just grew the fuck up and behaved like an adult, which is what you are.

But you choose not to. Do you hear what I’m telling you?

Tim? Are you listening to me? Do you hear what I’m saying? ”