Here was the place I’d bought the lime-green mules I’d been wearing the first night I got off with Luke, there was the building where Brigit worked, up that way was the Old Shillayleagh, down there was the nasty garage where Brigit, Luke and I had gone to see Jose’s sister in the crappy ‘installation’.
I lurched around, staggering under the weight of memories. Crippling nostalgia washed over me with every step I took.
I passed what used to be The Llama Lounge, but was now a cybercafé. I walked by The Good and Dear that Luke had taken me to, and nearly fell to my knees with the agony of what might have been.
I walked and walked in ever-decreasing, ever more excruciating, circles until I was eventually able to enter the street where Luke used to live. Slightly pukey from nerves – although it might just have been the heat – I stood outside the building where he once lived, perhaps still did even. And I thought about the first time I’d ever been there, the night of the knees-up in the Rickshaw Rooms. Then I thought about the last time I’d ever been there, the Sunday night before my overdose. I hadn’t known then it was my last time; if I had, maybe I would have treated the occasion with a bit more gravitas. If I had, maybe I would have taken steps to ensure it wasn’t my last time.
I stood in the baking street and pointlessly, powerlessly ached to be able to change things. I wanted to go back and make the past different. I wanted to be still living in New York, to never have left, to not have been an addict, to still be Luke’s girlfriend.
I lingered for a while, half-hoping Luke would appear, half-hoping he wouldn’t. Then I realized if anyone saw me they’d think I was a stalker, so I moved off.
At the end of the street, I stopped. I had to. Tears blurred my vision so much I was a danger to myself and to others. I leant up against a wall and I cried and cried and cried and cried. Mourning the past, mourning the other life I might have lived if things had been different.
I might still be there now, roaring my head off, had not a Spanish-speaking woman come out and with energetic waves of a sweeping brush invited me to piss off and stop lowering the tone of the neighbourhood.
I hoped my little walkabout had laid to rest any lingering feelings for Luke. It would have to, because I couldn’t pluck up the courage to actually contact him.
Instead, I focused my attention on constructing the rudiments of a life. The first thing I did was get a job. It was very easy to get a job in New York.
If you’d no objection to being paid slave wages, that is. It was in a hotel, a small, Italian, family-run one. Quite nice, apart from the poxy money. Looking back, I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever let myself work in somewhere as awful as the Barbados Motel.
Then I rang Brigit, nervous yet excited about seeing her. But, irony of ironies, she’d gone home to Ireland for her summer holidays.
Over the next couple of weeks things kind of got into a routine. Albeit a very dull one. I went to work and I went to meetings and that was about it.
The girls in the hostel were mostly wholesome farmhands from one of those down-South states that was the incest capital of the world. They answered to great names like Jimmy-Jean and Bobby-Jane and Billy-Jill. I was mad-keen to make friends with them, but they seemed a bit frightened and suspicious of everyone except each other.
The only ones who were friendly to me were Wanda, a nine-foot, peroxided, gumchewing Texan, who was having a lot of trouble coming to terms with not living in a trailer. And a beefy, short-haired, moustachioed woman, who answered to the name of Brad. She was very friendly, but, frankly, I suspected her motives.
It was a strange time. I felt alone, apart, separate. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
Except that the feelings brought about by my being back in New York were still overpowering. At times the nostalgia nearly killed me.
And also the horror. I remembered going home with total strangers, and I felt panicky fear for myself. I could have been raped and murdered so many times. I remembered how I used to feel that the entire city was evil. Going back had unleashed an entire new dimension of memories. The Luke-nostalgia, in particular, showed no sign of abating. It got worse. I started to dream about him. Terrible dreams that it was two years previously and my life hadn’t gone apocalyptically off the rails, and he still loved me. Of course, it wasn’t the dreams that were terrible. The waking up was.
I knew I had to see him. At least I had to try. But I didn’t want to because he was probably going out with someone else and I didn’t think I could bear that. I tried to console myself that he mightn’t have a girlfriend. But why wouldn’t he? I asked myself. Even I’d kind of had sex with someone, and I was supposed to have been celibate at the time.
The days passed in a kind of dreamscape. I had an unpleasant task hanging over me and, being me, I preferred to turn a blind eye to it.
Old habits die hard.
I tried to use the excuse that I didn’t have his number. But, unfortunately I did. What I mean is, I still knew it off by heart. Home and work. Always assuming he was still working and living where he had been a year and a half previously. That wasn’t guaranteed, New York had a lot of through trade.
One night, when I’d been back about five weeks, and was lying on my bed reading, I suddenly felt filled with the courage to ring him. With no warning, it seemed like an outrageously feasible thing to do and I couldn’t see what all the fuss had been about. Quickly, before the urge passed or I talked myself out of it, I rushed, purse in hand, to the phones in the hostel hall, almost knocking people to the ground in my haste.
Ringing from there was slightly inhibiting, what with Bobby-Ann and Pauley-Sue queueing up behind me to talk to their pet lambs back home. But I didn’t care. Fearlessly I pressed out Luke’s number, then when it began to ring I went into a panicky spin about what I’d say to him. Should I say ‘Luke, prepare yourself for a shock’? Or, ‘Luke, guess who?’ Or, ‘Luke, you may not remember me…’? Or was it more likely to be ‘Luke, please don’t hang u…’?
I was so hyper I could hardly believe it when I got his machine. (‘Living on a Prayer’, Bon Jovi.) After all the trouble I’d gone to, he wasn’t even there.
Bitterly disappointed, yet undeniably relieved, I hung up.
At least I knew he was still living at the same address. However, the whole ordeal of ringing had depleted me something ferocious, so I decided it might be better for my nerves to write to him instead. Also, it meant less chance of him hanging up on me.