‘Are you going to sit here all day, Brendan, staring at the laptop and humming to yourself?’
Maura was standing in the doorway, her hands in her pockets, her jacket on. She was ready to go.
‘What’s happening now?’ His wrist was sore. For two weeks he had been trying to exercise it each day, raising it heavily and putting it gently on the arm of a chair, but it didn’t stop the aching. He was bored. Going out made him tired, but he was stifled within the walls of their small hotel room. Maura had taken on the role of nurse and her voice had become the banging of nails in his head. And their funds were dwindling. He balanced his laptop on his knee and finished an email with his good hand.
His staccato tapping seemed to be giving Maura a headache too. She put a hand to her eyes and said, ‘We agreed to go to the little night market. It starts at seven. We said we’d go.’ She sounded tired.
He went back to the keyboard, finished an email and pressed send. ‘You go.’
‘By myself, Brendan? Oh, come on. It’s not as if you’ve broken your leg, is it?’
He wanted to snap at her, but he stopped himself and smiled instead. He went back to the laptop. Penny Wray had sent him a lovely photograph of a place she’d visited in Mexico. It was called Xel-Há, and it was a huge Mayan archaeological site where there were water sports such as snorkelling, scuba-diving and swimming with dolphins. He wondered who was pointing the camera at Penny and sharing her holiday with her. Penny, in the crystal-blue waters, wore a snorkelling mask, her hair wet, and her face tanned and smiling. Maura breathed out through an angry mouth with crimson lipstick, a frown line between her eyes.
‘Let’s go to the market, Brendan. We have hardly been anywhere all day.’
He flicked through the other photos: Penny on a catamaran, her hair blowing back; climbing an ancient pyramid called Chichén Itzá, in bright shorts; a parrot on her shoulder, a splash of feathers in blues and reds and her broad smile filling the frame. Brendan pressed save and changed the screen.
‘All right, Maura. Let’s go to the night market.’ He rose wearily and she had his jacket, held out with the arm ready for him to slide in his wrist, which was held stiffly within a plaster cast.
She buttoned it. ‘Let’s go for a drink later, maybe find a nice little bar and have a wine each and a stroll.’
He raised his shoulders. He thought about saying, ‘Whatever you like,’ but he had no enthusiasm even to speak a few words. He moved towards the door, thinking of Penny Wray snorkelling in Mexico, his mother basking in the sunshine of the south and he wondered why, even outside the room, he felt like he couldn’t breathe. Of course it was the throbbing pain in his wrist and the weeks of being too often inside a stifling hotel room. But it was something else, not just Maura; he couldn’t blame her. He wondered sadly if he was just simply incapable of being happy.
The following day at breakfast Maura announced that she wanted to go to Spain. Brendan lifted a cup of coffee with his good hand and sat back in his seat.
‘Oh, come on Brendan, we’re on holiday. We might not be down this way again.’ She stopped talking and thought for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was soft. ‘I saw this article in a local magazine about the Picos Mountains. There’s a coach trip where you cross the border to Spain and have an overnight in the Picos. Spain, Brendan – imagine. We could have paella and go up the mountains on one of those chairlifts. There is snow up there, even this time of year, and we could try Spanish wine. We could get a nice meal, see the sights and stay over. It won’t be too expensive. We’ll manage. We need a trip out anyway. I’m fed up with looking at these walls. What do you think? It’d be great fun.’
Brendan marvelled at her enthusiasm. He was feeling listless. The coffee was cold and filled his mouth with bitterness. He swallowed and put the cup down carefully. ‘I suppose you’ve already booked it on the credit card?’ He sounded miserable.
She feigned surprise. ‘Not without discussing it with you first.’ She leaned over and grabbed his bandaged hand in a moment of excitement. ‘What do you say, Brendan? Let’s go.’ She pulled her hand back.
The waiter took away his half-filled cup. ‘All right. You organise it, Maura, and we’ll go.’
She was smiling and full of excitement, a child who had got her own way. He pressed his lips together. He remembered how he had felt when they were cycling in Soustons. He had glimpsed a possibility that their intimacy would come back, that the spark would flicker again. It didn’t have to be love or passion, but a remembrance of what they once had, the mutual liking for each other. But since his injury, he had felt numb and distant. Her constant enthusiasm annoyed him, made his wrist throb more. She was now fully in charge, as if his broken wrist had taken away his capacity to decide for himself. She had even tried to spoon soup into his mouth one night, feeding him morsels of bread as if he were a child. He felt like something else had snapped with his wrist; any hope of finding what they once had now seemed distant and unlikely. Brendan wondered if there was a way back for him and Maura; if, when they returned to Ireland, they could pick up with their old life together. He felt his wrist throb and doubted it.