Surviving Michael Read Free Page A

all these I can smell and even taste in the air; smells that I never even noticed for years, ironically enough.
    People have asked me why I don’t move out of such a big house, but I know what they mean is away from her memory. Away from the past. How do I explain to them that it’s her memory that keeps me here? If I moved to a small apartment then my sense of loss would have nowhere to hide and could quite possibly smother me.
    We’d also been together so long that I never had a chance to hang out with myself, and I’m not so bad a person to live with after all, despite her complaints. She’s been gone for almost a year now, and there’s still lots of her stuff around the place, but I don’t mind.
    They’re right though that the house is too big for just one person, but I’d hate to have to rent out a room. Liam’s mother once walked in on him ‘mid-stroke’ in front of his computer and there was much talk of him finally moving out of his parents’ house. He asked me if he could move in here with me, and to be honest, I wish that I hadn’t just laughed at him. It was around the time that the banks were throwing mortgages at anyone who walked by them on the street, even Liam. But then after many debates, a solution was agreed with all parties in the form of a two euro lock from B&Q for his bedroom door.
    I generally don’t work at the weekends, unless there’s a big order that needs to get out, but there aren’t a lot of them anymore. Not these days. It’s funny how long the weekends are when you’re not going out with anyone. I usually have a few pints with the lads on a Friday night, but then when Saturday morning comes around, it sometimes seems like a desert of time before Monday. I particularly hate bank holiday weekends. My sister thinks I should get a hobby. I thought hobbies were something teenagers did. You spend so long with someone, they sort of become your hobby. We used to argue a lot in the last year. Maybe that was my hobby.
    To be honest, I’m happy enough at this stage to just plod along. Years ago, while in the abyss of possibility that is youth, I’d had other ambitions. I’d even toyed with the thoughts of a journalist’s or a writer’s life. Unfortunately, I spent too much time battling the torments of my own aging life and found little energy to wrangle with that of a writer’s. So I neither wrangled nor wrote, and resigned myself to years of merely aging.
    When I still lived in my parents’ house, over ten years ago, my brother jumped ship and moved to Boston. The house just wasn’t the same after that. Aoife and I tried it out over there ourselves for a couple of years, but eventually life there became as routine as life here. At least here you could get a decent pint, so we came home. It was worse living back with my parents. They had their own kind of shared companionship of silent routine that I felt I was intruding on, so Aoife and I got our own place.
    We used to rent a great apartment near Fitzwilliam Square when we got back from the States, but when we finally decided to buy a place, she wanted somewhere with a garden and near her mother’s, so I guess I’m stuck out in the sticks for the time being.
    My mam and dad had married quite young, then one day, like most couples, romance deserted them and they ran out of things to talk about so they did what most couples do - have children and talk about them, and then talk to other people who have children and like to talk about their kids too. They’d lived and loved once, though. I’ve seen some old black and white photos of a holiday in Galway. Their honeymoon, I think it was. Her in a long white dress that was probably yellow, sitting on a tall black horse that was probably brown, and himself, proudly standing with broad shoulders and smiling with big white teeth; and the dark grey mountains in the background looming benevolently over them. I wonder which he lost first, his teeth or his smile.
    I try to call around