Page 12 of Love Unlocked

‘Not that it affects your life,’ she says, almost snapping, as if this marriage of twenty-three years has been nothing to Melody. Belinda and Derek had married when Melody was fifteen years old and not at all interested. She found their lovey-dovey carry-on repulsive, and Derek annoying, and then over the years it became less repulsive, and safe and stable, and even though Derek was still bothersome, he was a part of her life. It hurts Melody that her mother wouldn’t consider this a loss to her. She’s in shock. Belinda and Derek’s love for each other was so strong, it would be like Belinda suddenly telling Melody she doesn’t love her. Which would be the ultimate heartbreak.

‘How did it happen?’

‘I ended it. I just had enough, Melody, I don’t want to go into it.’

‘Enough of what?’

‘Of it all.’

All Derek ever did was love her. Melody doesn’t understand. What had been going on that she’d missed?

‘Did you break up on Thursday?’

‘What a peculiar question.’

‘Well? Did you?’

Belinda thinks about it. ‘Yes, we did. Why?’

Why indeed.

7

AL

Al taps play on ‘The Sound of Silence’ by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel which was featured on their debut album Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. It’s not an outright break-up song but it sounds to Al like a poem; chilling, sad, haunting with lyrics that reach into his soul and sit with his loneliness. Loneliness having a companion doesn’t pacify it but amplifies it.

Today Al would prefer not to go to work. He would very much like to stay in bed and take refuge in the darkness and silence. He would like to cry. He would like to sob in the way he did as a child, no holding back, ugly as can be. Snots, tears, drool, soaking his pillow until his eyes are raw and he doesn’t know what he’s crying about anymore.

But he can’t. He is thirty-eight years old and he has a job.

Heartbreak is for the young, it’s a full-time job, it’s an all-consuming physical and mental breakdown that doesn’t allow for any other aspects of life to come into play. Heartbreak must be front and centre, it cannot be interfered with. It should be listed as a disability, an indemnity on a contract along with force majeure and negligence. It must play out, like a course of antibiotics, if interrupted then the heart rot recurs and you have to go back to the start. Pass go, pick up two hundred. He’s really in it right now.

He stands on the tram, his eyelids feeling heavy as he listens to the song for the third time. It has a hypnotic effect on him, surrounded by people but no one connected. No one meets his eye. Human bodies physically crammed together but nobody seeing or hearing each other. And isn’t that representative of the entire world, the whole of humanity. The Luas is like the UN. He can’t stop or change the song. This is the melancholic casserole that he must stew in today, simmering in it until his meat falls off his bones. This is how he woke up feeling, this is how he will fall asleep feeling.

At work he calls for the lift, the song still playing. He hits the sixth floor. It descends to the basement level. Of course it does. The doors open on the dark cold car park. Nobody is there. The doors close and it ascends. He can’t even communicate with the lift.

Natasha is back at her desk after being out last Friday. She’s blowing her nose and her eyes are red. The last thing he needs is to get sick on top of everything else, a spot of pneumonia to really take him out. He’ll die like the women in the old black and white movies, of heartbreak and fever. He sits at his desk and finally removes his headphones. A busy office. Phones ringing. Things to do, emails to be answered, decisions to be made. He wants to cry.

Natasha raps lightly on the door and enters with a dish in her hands. Natasha doesn’t look like Natasha. He can see her skin, she has pores, a few freckles across her nose and redness, a lot of it around her nostrils. Her eyes are smaller than usual and bloodshot. Her short lashes are no longer thick Venus flytraps and her lips are thin instead of the large heart-shaped cushions. He has never seen her without make-up before. She sounds like Natasha but she doesn’t look anything like Natasha with make-up.

He scans her face for bruises. Sometimes she comes in with lumps and bumps from her weekend fights, which range in colour from yellow to purple and give away their time frame. He has almost mastered the art of knowing what day her fight was by the colour of her bruises.

He eyes the dish in her hands suspiciously.

‘Helen Hanratty came by this morning. She baked you an apple tart as a thank you for removing the love locks.’

Al’s heart is momentarily warmed, perhaps human connection isn’t dead after all. Sun breaks through the grey clouds, until she slams the dish down on his desk and gives him a shrivelling look.

‘Am I supposed to know what’s wrong?’ he asks.

‘You took the love locks off the bridge,’ Natasha says ­snappily, and folds her arms. ‘I told you not to take my lock off.’

He’s her boss and she shouldn’t be speaking to him like this but, frankly, he’s intimidated by her. He has always felt that she could eat him alive, or know people in her dad’s boxing club who could and would snap him in two. He’s a country boy, she’s a Dublin inner-city girl. They’re made of different stuff. She doesn’t show outward love towards anyone or anything, apart from, all of a sudden, love locks on a pedestrian bridge.

‘But you wanted me to meet the woman—’

‘Helen Hanratty, say her name,’ she says, as if she’s one of those women in a protest standing on a box with a megaphone.