Eileen was half-smiling. Self-sabotage, then, Eileen answered. Alice was smiling too, cocking her head to one side. That’s arguable either way, she said. He does love you, though. Eileen glanced around at her then, saying: What, he said that to you? Alice shook her head. No, I just mean it’s obvious, she replied. Eileen bent forward over her crossed legs, planting her hands down on the rough pink-patterned towel in front of her, the little ridges of her spine showing through the thin synthetic cloth of her swimsuit.
Right, in a way he loves me, she said. Because I’m a little idiot who can’t do anything for myself, that’s his big thing. She straightened up again and rubbed her eyes with her hands. Earlier in the year, around January or February, I started getting really bad headaches, she said. And one night I went down this rabbit hole online looking up my symptoms, and I convinced myself I had a brain tumour. This is a completely stupid story, by the way. Anyway, I called Simon at like one in the morning to tell him I was scared I had brain cancer and he got a taxi over to my apartment and let me cry on him for like an hour. He didn’t even seem annoyed, he was just very chilled out. Not that I wanted him to be annoyed. But would I ever do that for him? If he called me in the middle of the night saying, oh hey Eileen, what’s up, I’ve irrationally convinced myself I have a rare form of cancer, do you want to come over and let me cry on you until I tire myself out and fall asleep? There’s no point even imagining how I would react, because it’s just something he would never do. In fact if he did that, I would assume there genuinely was something wrong with his brain. Alice was laughing. You have all these stories where you’re a hypochondriac, she said. But you never come across that way to
me. Eileen had taken her sunglasses from her bag and was cleaning them absent-mindedly on a corner of the sweater she had taken off. No, that’s what I’m saying, she said. Simon gets the absolute dregs of my personality. I don’t know why I’m criticising him, I should be criticising myself. What adult woman would behave like that? It’s awful. Alice was digging her elbows down into the towel contemplatively. After a moment she said aloud: You mean you don’t like who you are, when you’re with him.
Eileen frowned to herself then, inspecting the sunglasses under the light. No, not that, she said. I just feel like our relationship is very one-way. Like he’s always fixing things for me and I never fix anything for him. I mean, it’s great that he’s so helpful. And I need that, in a way. But he doesn’t need anything back from me. After a pause she added: Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He has this twenty-three-year-old girlfriend who everyone says is great. Alice lay back down on the beach towel. The figures of Simon and Felix were no longer visible from where Eileen was sitting, just the vast haze of light and water, thin waves breaking like thread. Behind them the village glittered white along the coast, as far as the lighthouse, and to the left were the empty sand dunes.
Alice put the back of her hand to her forehead as if to cool it. Could you really live here, do you think? Eileen asked. Alice looked over at her with no surprise. I do live here, she said. A frown flickered over Eileen’s features and instantly receded. No, I know that, she said. But I mean in the long term. Mildly Alice replied: I don’t know. I’d like to.
Behind them a young family made their way down from the caravan park, two children toddling ahead in matching dungarees. Why? asked Eileen. Alice gave a smile. Why not? she said. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? In a low tone Eileen answered: Sure, obviously.
She was looking down at the towel then, smoothing out creases with her long fingers, while Alice watched her. You could always come and live with me, Alice replied.
Eileen shut her eyes and opened them again. Unfortunately I have to work for a living, she said. Alice hesitated for a moment, and then answered lightly: Don’t we all. The men were coming out of the water then, glistening wet, reflecting the light of the sun, and they were speaking to one another, at first inaudibly, their shadows cast behind them on the sand, dappled blue, and the women fell silent and watched them.
/
At two o’clock, Felix went out to work and the other three walked around the village. It was a hot afternoon, black patches of tar softening on the roads, school exam students dawdling in their uniforms. In the charity shop beside the church Eileen bought a green silk blouse for six euro fifty. Felix meanwhile was wheeling a tall stillage trolley through the aisles of the warehouse, angling his body against the mechanism of the trolley in a certain precise manner in order to guide it around corners, placing his left foot just behind the back wheels while his hands loosed and then regripped the handles.
He carried out this action identically again and again, never seeming to think about it except when he miscalculated and the weight of the trolley slipped briefly out of his control. In Alice’s kitchen, Simon was making dinner, and Alice was encouraging Eileen to write a book. For some reason Eileen was holding in her lap the silk blouse she had purchased earlier in the day. Occasionally while Alice spoke she petted the blouse absent-mindedly as if it were an animal. She seemed in one sense to be giving her conversation with Alice a very deep and sustained attention, but in another sense she hardly seemed to be listening at all. She looked down at the tiles, apparently thinking, her lips sometimes moving silently as if to form words, but saying nothing.