Lifesaving for Beginners

remembers.
    I arrive late so he’s already there, in the best seat in the house. He turns his head, looks behind him, smiles when he sees me. A benign sort of a smile. As if nothing had ever happened between us. Nothing good. Nothing bad. I don’t smile back. All of a sudden, I am seething with resentment. We were so close. He’s the one who said that, not me. That day on the farm. Only a couple of weeks before the accident. The bloody miracle. I was wearing a pair of one of his sisters’ wellington boots. Three sizes too big. They all have massive feet, the Cunninghams. Massive hands too. Even the tiny one, God help her.
    I was in a field. We were making hay. Thomas said it would be ‘fun’. Later, he said, ‘Do you fancy a roll in the hay?’ And I said, ‘All right.’ So we rolled in the hay and I made sure that I was on top because hay turns out to be prickly and not as pliable as you might think, and afterwards I sat on Thomas’s jacket and leaned against a stack of hay – a hayrick, he calls it – and smoked a cigarette. Thomas said, ‘You shouldn’t smoke around the hay,’ and I said, ‘Shut your mouth,’ and he said, ‘I love this time of the year when everything’s at full tilt,’ and I slapped at a mosquito and said, ‘I fucking well hate it,’ and he took my hand and held it and I pulled it away and then I put it back into his hand and we sat there like that for a while and then he kissed my mouth, even though I tasted like cigarettes and he hates cigarettes, and I kissed him back and my eyes were closed and I could feel the heat of the day in my bones and the softness of his mouth on mine and, for a moment, I was so happy I thought I might cry. So I stopped kissing him and I looked away, and that’s when he said, ‘You’ll get used to it eventually,’ and I said, ‘What?’ and he said, ‘Us. Being all coupled up, like Minnie and Maurice.’
    ‘We are nothing like Minnie and Maurice.’ The very idea.
    He said, ‘We are. We’re close. I’m sorry but that’s the way it is.’ He spread his hands in front of him and shook his head as if he were sorry, but there was nothing he could do about it.
    I punched him in the arm. I said, ‘You dirty-looking eejit.’ And we sat there, with our backs against the hayrick, and we watched the sun spill her gold into his five stony fields in Monaghan and we didn’t say much. We didn’t say anything. There was no need.
    Now Thomas smiles a benign sort of a smile, as if we are two people who might have known each other a long time ago.
    He stands up and people in the rows behind click their tongues and crane their necks. He shuffles along the row saying, ‘Sorryexcusemesorryexcuseme . . .’ as he goes. He is careful not to stand on anyone’s toe. The last time he did that, it cost him three hundred and twenty-four euro in surgeon’s fees and a four-and-a-half-hour wait with a peevish woman in A&E.
    He looks . . . the same as always. Casual. Smiley. Easy. There’s something so easy about Thomas Cunningham. If he were a sum, he’d be two plus two. I’m more like algebra.
    His clothes are terrible, but that’s to be expected. And there’s a bit of a dog smell on him. Or goat, maybe. And his hair could do with a cut. But apart from that, he looks . . . well. Healthy. He looks like someone who never smoked but would just say, ‘No, thanks,’ when you offered him a cigarette and never ‘I don’t smoke,’ in that smug way that non-smokers have. Or reformed smokers. Thank Christ, I’m never going to be one of those. They’d do your head in with the smugness.
    The hair is the same; the grey curls are more knots now where the weather has twisted and tossed them. I always told him his eyes were the colour of the mud in his five fields in Monaghan. But that’s not true. They are grey from a distance but they change to green the closer you get. Or blue sometimes, depending on the light.
    Today, they are grey.
    He says, ‘Hello, Kat.’
    I say, ‘Hello.’
    He says, ‘Ed’s on in five minutes, I think.’ He looks at the pool. Ed sees him and waves. Thomas smiles and waves back. When he turns to me, his smile has faded, like wallpaper in a house where nobody lives anymore.
    The thing is, I never said sorry. I wanted to. Lots of times. But I just couldn’t say it. And time rolled on, the way it does, and now, if I say anything, it’ll come under the category of ‘picking the scab off an old wound’. I’m pretty sure there is