Diamonds and Golf

Later that night my girlfriend joined us. Lisa was a patient woman. She wanted more than I ever wanted to give, and she waited years to be with me forever. But that forever wasn’t coming any day soon. I bought the engagement ring from a cheap jewellers in Connswater Shopping Centre and was paying it off over twelve months. I kept it in my bedroom junk drawer – to me it signified only sparkly debt – letting her wear it only when we were alone. If she was sleeping over she could wear it the entire night: she had reluctantly agreed to take it off before venturing to the bathroom the following morning. I had little intention of marriage for years yet, many years, if ever, so going as far as to buy a ring was not something that sat easily with me, if at all. She showed the patience of a saint, that woman, for putting up with the shit I put her through. But fifty-three weeks beyond this night and she would decide that she had had enough, that her fortune-teller’s predictions that I would be successful someday were never going to come true, and she needed to move on to better prospects. I heard them speak on the tape the sooth-sayer supplied her clients, and they were talking of some bright future I was destined for, somewhere, at sometime, somehow. She knew not where or when or how, but she knew it, she could see it in Lisa’s palm, or her own tea-leaves or her crystal ball, or in the tarot cards, or whatever vehicle she used to cruise the dark corners of the netherworlds. But it would never come soon enough for Lisa, and off she went, leaving me with a copy of the tape and a video recording of her dancing as sexily as any woman could wearing a thick checked shirt in a sweaty bar in Dublin’s Temple Bar to remember her by.

For a week or maybe eight or nine days I watched the tape, and dreamed of what may have been: as Lisa dances to a rock band called The Daisy Plague the movement slows, and my thoughts and memories of her and our time together come to me again. I can see our engagement; our wedding, like Linda and Andy’s in Belfast Castle, all warm hor d’oeuvres and cold, ancient stone; vignetted pictures in the grounds; the incessant ching-chinging of champagne flutes; the first pregnancy and the cooing of family and colleagues; holding hands in a maternity ward in the City Hospital; the kids she wanted so desperately; the beautiful house somewhere in south Belfast, close to her parents, in a safe, respectable and affluent neighbourhood, where the cars cost as much as The Vatican and the kids can wear bright-coloured clothes, the type she bought from that godawful store in Castle Court; golf with her brothers; “If you insist on having a beer then drink it from a glass. Drinking from the bottle is just uncivilised”; my unremitting consciousness of what was deemed civility and how I just wasn’t fitting in, even with these mostly wonderful, accepting people; the wakening to a nightmare; “Jesus! I play fucking golf!” the endless arguments, many about me now being a fucking golfer and where did I, me, Eamonn, myself get lost in all this shit?; the divorce; the acrimony; “I want my life back!” that’s all mine, that’s all yours, and we’re halving that; that’s not paid for yet, so half the debt is yours, bitch!; “You’re a selfish bastard!”; sign this, not that; meetings with bank managers; here’s my solicitor’s card; I’ll take the kids every Monday, Wednesday and weekend mornings because I sure as hell won’t be going fucking golfing any more, now will I?; leave your fucking keys when you …  Slam. I never gave her keys to the flat, and that was always the intention. She wasn’t for coming back anyway. Four fun years, but, romantically, wasted time. I didn’t want romance. I didn’t want children. I couldn’t tell one end of a golf bat from the other. I wanted more. Much more.

We weren’t suited. I knew it, but I was too egocentric and too concerned with my own pleasures to let her go. Life was tough and I wanted fun, that I knew. I left Carrick to have that fun. I wanted the fucking and the drinking and the searching for, keeping, or suppressing of memories the morning after.  I pretended for four years to be happy in that relationship, but it came too early and at exactly the wrong time.