Two Sisters

Eva O’Connor | Tolka, Issue One, May 2021

7.35 a.m. Running, not walking. By necessity, not choice. My bones still infused with sleep, wound and bound in layers of ancient T-shirts. Leggings exhausted, puckered at the knees. Puffa jacket oozing feathers as I pant, spliced open that time I drunkenly slid down a pebble-dash wall outside some nightclub. Back when there were nightclubs. The shins on me are screaming with the splints.

R. is dressed for work. Black on black on black. Everything declares neat. Mary Poppins boots, double-knotted with precision, at her slender ankles (she has always had ankles like baby trees). In her proximity I am blurry and vague. She blinks at me, X-raying my soul, and her face scrunches into a smile. Suddenly R. is six again, grinning up from a Coco Pops bowl, peering down from a gnarled apple tree, side-eying me from behind a pair of legs – my mother’s, probably.

Growing up, R. was small, waist-height and mostly an inconvenience to me – a cautious, quick-to-cry sister-girl I litter-trained in my spare time. Last week R. WhatsApped me a photo of us, ten and five. Me, in full Cruella de Vil dressing gown (biro as a cigarette); R., crouched as my submissive Dalmatian. The photo goaded me with its grainy powers of time travel. Remember this?! No recollection at all. Too busy eating the future to be concerned with younger sister.

We coffee before work these days. Two pounds seventy-four we hand over – beep, says contactless – in a hip place with a number for a name. 711. 666. 112. I can never remember. The brickwork is exposed, distressed. The barista is a Born Slippy man, trainspotting at all hours. He doesn’t ask me about work. Sweet relief. Had to sever ties with a café lad down the road who obsessively how’s work’ed me.

Me and R. sip sip from takeaway receptacles and do laps of the dead. Abney Cemetery. A graveyard of dissenters, reads the plaque at the front. Here lie those who thought religion was fuckery. Fair play to them, the eighteenth-century rogues. Slabs of swirly marble jut out, all awkward angles, a mouthful of cramped and crooked teeth. We keep an ear open for the dead. We trek atop their layers of dirt and bones. The dissenters don’t seem to mind. We’re fucking dead, they’d say, if they were alive. You’re grand, like.

R. gives me life updates: the walls of her flat are damp, saturated, wet to the touch. Moist as the underbelly of the Aillwee Caves. In skin affairs, she’s forked out eighty quid for a hocus-pocus consultation with the Queen of Invisible Pores. Instructions: cleanse six times a day and eat a plate of vitamin D tablets for breakfast. She is halfway through a trauma course, funded by work.

Fascinating, she reports. Only minorly traumatizing. Grief is not linear, the course has told her. The stages are just a marketing ploy.

R. is younger. Five years less wrinkly. Baffled by her, so I am. I blink and she has morphed into a woman. Armed with agency, compassion, tasteful jewellery.

I find it discombobulating, how old you are, I tell her. She winks at me, confirming my suspicions: it’s a conspiracy.

R.’s job is along the lines of criminal justice system, counselling, outreach. Words weighty and adult. A noble profession, mumbles our father down the phone. While R. is busy supporting vulnerable people, I dabble in ideas: bend words into shape on pages; step blinded onto stages and marvel at how fast a heart can beat; pour my soul into scripts; dance like a monkey for a pocketful of funding; limb-slather myself with condiments; make work inspired by my cat; perform at cabaret nights, in theatres, before cameras; venture to far-flung corners of the world to tell the same story, different every time.

Or used to.

These days I deal mostly in tears. These walks are for me. Designated meeting point close to my house, because mornings I am glued to the bed. This month is pain behind my eyes. Tears spring me by surprise. Thoughts assault me while I’m canal-jogging. Punch and wind me with a force that steals my breath for days. Assault me like the villains from the Batman cartoons R. and I watched religiously on childhood Saturday mornings. Wham, Bam, Pow and, just like that, I am drowning in quicksand.

Characters in books misplace their appetites at the first head-rear of stress. It’s a thing in literature. A whisper of a break-up and let the Hunger Games begin. Scarcely nibbled croissants are abandoned, the art of rearranging untouched pasta refined. (Spear, stir, sideways scrape.) Meals skipped with absent-minded abandon. Collarbones massaged for reassurance.

It’s hip not to eat under pressure. Hip and haunting and, as a recovered person, completely infuriating to read. I swore, once I won back my sanity – once I relearnt, painstakingly, to stomach full-sized meals – I would never dabble in it again. Would never indulge in idle restriction, no matter how tough the going. Yet, for the first time in my handful of recovered years, I am finding it hard to eat.

It’s different this time. My disinterest in food is unrelated to my permanent desire to be thin. More of a by-product of can’t be fucked. Of absolute effort of spooning food into my mouth. But, either way, it’s a slippery slope. And so eat your fucking porridge, mate, I out-loud announce to myself these mornings. The mate for emphasis. Sometimes it works. I blink and there’s a cupful of oats lining my stomach. Small wins.

My name is E. I am an artist. What would you be if not that? a journalist asked once. The question threw me. Flummoxed me into silence. Hadn’t a half-baked notion. A clean-smelling dental nurse? A vet with a Fairy Liquid arm up a cow’s backside? A tacky-shoed estate agent selling basements on the merit of their extractor fans?

Like most of my kind there was never a plan B, no get-out-of-jail-free card.

As an artist, my bedfellow is a lad called Self Doubt. He cradles me, hot and close, a possessive lover. Tickle-whispers in my ear at all hours of the night, ASMR vibes. You absolute joke, he breathes.

Occasionally, I court another lad. Goes by the name of Conviction. Sneaks up behind me when I’m washing up, kicks me firm in the bend of my knees. Playful, like, but with an edge of sinister. Places his hand on the small of my back, reminds me, You must keep going. There is nothing else.

I split my time between these two lovers. Dancing, flirting, begging. I tightrope between them, perfectly balanced on the balls of my feet. Recently, though, Conviction has upped and vanished. Sick of falling on deaf ears, he said.

And with Conviction went the highs. The post-show moments of Waterford Crystal clarity. With him went the adrenaline, the ecstasy, the joy, the banter, the triumph. He rolled them, Marie Kondo-style, into a small suitcase and abandoned me.

For weeks and days afterwards, I wept. Down came the curtains, velvety and mothballed. Down came the slow drip, drip, drip of realization: what I do is not essential. Never was. I am redundant now as a mini-disc player. Time to learn to code?

You could try couselling, R. suggests. She tiptoes in her boots through mossy graves and the landmines of my rage.

Can’t afford it. I am smug in the comfort of my half-poverty. I dare her to serve up Can’t put a price on mental health, but she washes it back with a slug of Americano.

I know she’s half-right. But to talk to someone would be to split down the middle. I can see it clear: a crack down my centre parting, a fault line slicing through till I am halved. Besides, I have clocked hundreds of hours under the gaze of professionals. To slip back into a sea of tears is unthinkable.

I’ve been there, done that. Remember my endless hours working through my fear of potatoes, butter, grapes, even? Can you believe I used to be afraid of grapes? State of me.

I don’t really remember you being sick.

You were young.

It would be different this time. You could talk about other things, apart from . . . grapes?

Why would I go to therapy when I can have graveyard coffees with you?

You’re exploiting me.

I bought the coffees.

Fair.

Extracted from ‘Two Sisters’, published in full in Issue One of Tolka (May 2021). Issue One is now sold out on our website, but may still be available from certain stockists.