Chapter 2: The Past is a Foreign Country
Derry woke early, as he did every morning. Sleep felt like an enemy most nights, one he tried to subdue but who fled from him and then, when finally captured, wreaked vengeance on him with violent, troubled dreams. Awake, his thoughts weren't much calmer but at least he could force them into submission so long as he kept busy. He got straight out of bed and went into the living room of his apartment, a room almost bare except for a weight bench, dumbbells and jump ropes which were neatly lined up against the wall.
He picked up a rope and started to jump, numbing the pain in his mind with the monotony of the exercise. Sometimes finding release took a long time, and he had to push himself almost to the point of collapse before the noises in his head would subside, and he would sink down, retching with effort, onto the floor. Today was a good day, though, and in just thirty minutes he was dripping with sweat and calm enough to face the world.
After eating breakfast and showering, he shaved, using the one small sliver of mirror in the apartment, which was propped up high above the bathroom sink at chin level to him. If he was careful, he could avoid seeing his reflection for days on end, and sometimes even began to believe that he was 'Derry'. When he did catch sight of his reflection, so familiar from mugshots and press stories, it was an unwelcome reminder of who he really was and that however far he ran, he could not escape his past.
Today, though, was still a good day, and he shaved around his closely cropped goatee without catching his own eyes in the mirror. There was a slight warmth in the air, even at this time in the morning, and the Californian in him couldn't help but feel his spirits lifted after the long New Hampshire winter. Still, he pulled on a long-sleeved shirt, as he did every day, over his ever-present undershirt.
His apartment was over the bar, and he let himself out of the door in the small kitchen and down the stairs to that led to the office area behind the bar. He put coffee on to brew and started on an inventory of stock. It was nearly the end of the college year, but there would be plenty of parties after final exams and then new students coming in for the summer programmes. He sighed; there was always plenty of demand for alcohol among the crowds of young people thronging around the campus. He would watch them all with a mixture of jealousy and censure, living carefree lives, devoted to studying and partying, seemingly oblivious to the suffering in the world beyond their college walls.
He heard the sound of keys rattling in the lock of the outer door; she was here early today. He schooled his expression into careful neutrality and took a deep breath before going through to the bar area. Niamh was standing in the doorway, just as she had that day, bringing a whiff of something alien and alluring in with her, which he should have known would only bring confusion and pain into his carefully ordered existence. She was wearing a light-coloured dress over a pair of jeans and he was glad to see she had a cardigan over the dress. Sometimes it was too much effort to keep his hard-won cool when she wore that kind of thing, straining to keep his eyes averted from the swelling curves and flashes of bare flesh that she almost seemed to deliberately flaunt in front of him. He shook his head to clear the thought; he knew it was good for business to have someone who looked and sounded like Niamh at the bar and her tips at the end of a night proved it. The few times they had run into each other outside of the bar, she was mostly swaddled in baggy sweats and hooded tops, hair scraped back and glasses on. It's a professional camouflage, he reminded himself, she's not doing it for you.
She smiled at him brightly, but there was something off, something too bright and somehow nervous in her smile.
'Hey,' she said. 'How was the weekend?'
'Good,' he replied. 'You know, busy.'
Busy, he was always busy.
'Well, things should be calming down now though, right?' she suggested, her smile still too fixed.
He shrugged, not sure what this was leading but slightly unsettled by her manner.
'Coffee?' he asked, heading back behind the bar.
'Sure,' she said, following him through the bar and into the staff room. He poured her a cup and winced when he turned round and noticed her cardigan was already off. Dammit, it was that dress again – the one that tied up around her supple neck, showing off her smooth back and a slipping dangerously to the side when she moved around. Today is a good day, he reminded himself. I've got this.
'You're here early,' he commented, focussing back on desk and the inventory papers. Her shift wasn't due to start until 11 on a Monday.
'Well, you know, I have to submit my first chapter next week so anything to get me out of the dorm,' she said with a smile.
Derry frowned. He was always taking her to task for indulging in pointless displacement activity when work on her PhD got too much for her. It frustrated him, she was so gifted, with such an agile mind that flew lightly and ably around complex topics and always managed to spot new arguments to take him by surprise. But she was always so disorganised and last minute about everything. She claimed she worked best when she was under time pressure so there was no point trying to do anything until the panic was on, but he found himself wishing he could make her be more disciplined. He realised she was looking at him intently, and that he was still frowning, so he smoothed his features into his usual impassive mask and returned to his papers.
'So, Der,' she said. 'Can I ask you something?'
It still jolted him when she shortened his name like that; Der was what Danny had always called him. He wished he'd asked her not to; it was disconcerting and pulled him back into the identity he was so desperate to escape. Sometimes his ears played tricks on him and he could swear she called him Derek, making his heart leap into his throat and a hot sweat prickle its way down his neck. It wasn't just the normal fear that his past could catch up with him, he'd lived for years now with the knowledge that his name was on the hit list of every Neo-Nazi hate group from here to Berlin. No, it was the idea that she of all people would uncover him, know who he really was, and see the monster beneath his carefully constructed façade of normality that made him feel sick to his stomach.
He glanced up and saw her looking questioningly at him.
'So?' she said. 'What do you think? Isn't it a great idea?'
He cursed himself inwardly for not paying attention.
'Umm, I guess it could be.'
He tried to sound non-committal.
'So it's a yes?' Her face lit up and she bounced towards him, and for a split second he thought she might be about to hug him. 'That's amazing, thank you, it's going to be so much fun!'
Shit, what had he just agreed to?
'I can't wait to bring everyone over so you can meet them,' she went on. 'I'm sure half of them are starting to think I'm making you up! It makes so much more sense to do it here than to go out somewhere where you don't know who'll be there and what the place might be like.'
'Um, yeah sure,' he said trying desperately to figure out what she meant and how to get out of this. Why would she bring people to his bar? And why would they want to meet him?
'So, um, explain to me again how this is going to work?' was the best he could come up with.
'Well, I was thinking because it's a Monday we won't be busy, so I can take the night off and go meet everyone and get ready. And then we can come here and just have the place to ourselves?' she asked. 'Hugo said he could bring his decks and do a DJ set, we can use the lights we use on open mic night, and Stefania said she would do a cake. I mean of course they would all have to buy their own drinks, but it should be about 30 of us so it wouldn't be much down on a normal Monday night, right?'
She was looking at him pleadingly, her eyes begging him not to disagree. He looked away desperately trying to think of a way of putting her off without looking like a total arsehole.
'Um, okay, but if you're not working… I'm gonna have to check the rotas that day, I think Lamont may be off.' He could speak to Lamont later and get him to back this up.
'Oh, it's okay, I already checked with him. He's definitely around that night as Sandra is working at the Y.'
Double shit. How was he going to get out of this?
'Oh Der, thank you so much, this means so much to me. It's my first birthday since I got here and I'm feeling kind of weird about not having any family around,' she smiled.
Oh Christ, of course yes, it was her birthday. How could he have forgotten? There was no backing out of this now. He tried to smile, while his stomach sank at the thought of a night with her and her friends from the grad school. At least if they were here at the bar he could put himself into professional mode and keep out of their way. A few of her friends sometimes dropped by when she was working and he was intensely uncomfortable in their company.
Niamh had clearly found it hard to settle into a social group when she arrived, not fitting neatly into any of the existing cliques. She had slowly surrounded herself with an eclectic group of people, most of whom were from overseas and whose only unifying characteristics seemed to be extreme intelligence mixed with a strong streak of pretentiousness. They smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and dropped names of European philosophers into the most mundane of conversations, swapping stories of travels to remote tribal regions in South East Asia as easily as reminiscing about how plebeian the crowds had been at the Venice Biennale the year before. He wondered how Niamh, who wore her own intelligence so lightly and with so little arrogance, could enjoy their brittle, overwrought conversations and feigned ennui for life. If he was completely honest with himself, he probably could have borne them with more patience if he hadn't felt so judged by them. The few he had tried to speak to clearly dismissed him as a knuckle-headed barkeeper, and never spoke to him as an intellectual equal in the way Niamh always did.
He had sensed from that first day she walked into the bar that her confidence was just an act. She held herself well, speaking her mind with a slightly clumsy self-possession that he found intriguing and endearing. But behind her bravado there was a wariness in her eyes that spoke of pain in her past, something he knew too much of to miss in someone else. She was so quick to try and own the contradictions in her identity that he instinctively knew that somewhere in her past they had been used against her and that she was determined not to allow it to happen again. He felt a desire to protect her, even though he knew she would find the idea abhorrent and patronising. And then with a hot rush of shame he would remind himself that it was probably people exactly like him who had caused this pain to a mixed-race Irish Catholic girl from Ulster, a community divided on sectarian lines and scarred by violence.
Nope, there was no way of getting out of hosting this party. She looked so happy and excited as she gabbled on about the arrangements that he felt almost reconciled to the idea. How bad could it actually be? And anyway, who was he to deny her something that would clearly give her so much pleasure?
