You've read Cat Person, now read this Irish bad-

sex short story

'What Feminism Is': the 2017 Séan Ó Faoláin

Competition winning piece by Louise Nealon
concerns the fallout from a sexual encounter

Tue, Jan 23, 2018, 06:39 Updated: Tue, Jan 23, 2018,
09:19
Louise Nealon

Louise Nealon: winner of the 2017 Séan Ó Faoláin

Competition

Our sweaty skins are stuck together in my single bed. I

make myself smaller than him, sneak under his arm and
trace the tattoos on his biceps. I ask about them and he
gives me a lazy answer. He got them when he was young
and stupid. They make no sense. Every girl he sleeps
with probably asks the same. I have a compulsion to do
something weird in case he thinks I’m boring, so I poke
my finger in his ear.

“What the fuck?” He stares at me while I roll around the

bed cackling. “The fuck you do that for?”

“I wanted to see how you’d react,” I shrug. They all act as

if they have been violated. I don’t even go that far in. All
I have to do is stroke the tiny white fuzz on the outside
crevices, or maybe lean my little finger against the inside
of the tragus. I like to watch their eyes for the moment of
realization.

The hairs on his chest are smoother, more innocent than

the curls on his head all crispy from hairspray. I can
picture him sprucing himself up inside the frame of a
mirror, pursing his small mouth and flirting with his
own eyes. Whenever I try to visualize men with no
clothes on, they’re mostly Ken dolls, but he carries
himself so well that I could imagine it before I saw him
naked. That’s how I knew I was attracted to him.

As the tempo of his breathing gains momentum in one

ear, I hear my mother’s voice in the other telling me not
to look at him: A watched kettle never boils

The sex is supposed to make me feel better. I close my

eyes and wait for him to bash me into the corners of my
head, but it feels like he’s trying to shove a sleeping bag
into the corner of a hot press and it keeps sagging and
falling out. As the tempo of his breathing gains
momentum in one ear, I hear my mother’s voice in the
other telling me not to look at him: A watched kettle
never boils. My eyes stay closed. I’m finally beginning to
take my mother’s advice. She has an encyclopedic
knowledge of the phrases that are written under the red
and white tear-off calendars she keeps on the window
ledge of her kitchen and enjoys applying them to my life
whenever I’m in the midst of an existential crisis.

I pretend to enjoy myself until it’s over and I get what I

really want: a chance to fall asleep listening to the waves
of somebody else’s breathing, his arms wrapped around
me like a bouncer guarding my dreams.
He keeps fidgeting. I play dead, knowing that my only
hope is to bore him into going to sleep. He jigs my
shoulder and whispers loudly, “Any chance of a few tins?”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

I bend over and reach under the bed to fish for two cans
of Heineken that have been rolling around there for God
knows how long. He spanks my backside and I wince,
embarrassed.

We push open our tins and slug down the warm suds
that bulwark us from thoughts of the morning. He
examines my collection of postcards and quotes I have
scrawled on scraps of paper and blu-tacked to my
bedroom wall. This makes me feel more exposed than if I
whipped the duvet off the bed and gave him a lap dance,
but I’m glad he notices them.

“Why are there so many women writers who stop?” He

looks at me with his big brown eyes until I realize he
expects me to answer him. I whip down the postcard of
Heath Ledger playing the Joker in The Dark Knight and
hold it over my face as a mask. “Why so serious?” I ask.
He laughs.

His desert island book is Anna Karenina. There’s a quote

from it stuck on the headboard of his bed. I was too
drunk to read it the last time I ended up back in his
house, so he read it out to me.

“There are no conditions to which man cannot grow

accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around
him lives in the same way.” He cracked open a can of
fancy craft beer and said, “It’s good, innit?”
I wanted to ask if all translations say man and not
people, or he and not they. I think it’s ironic that in a
story about the differences between men and women
sleeping around, it’s translated that way.

I already know that I’m repeating unhealthy habits, but

I get sick of being lonely and well-behaved, waiting for
sexy Godot. I don’t fit into his life, but I’ll try anyway, an
ugly sister masquerading as Cinderella, hoping he won’t
see my butchered feet. He plays along and says cute
things, ramping up his singsong Belfast accent and
slagging my provincial one. I never described myself as
being from down south until I moved here, and it makes
me feel exotic. My family slag me off that I’m going to
lose my accent, but if anything, I exaggerate my culchie
status because it makes people like me more. He throws
his head back on the pillow like a dog howling to exorcise
his republican alter ego: “Do you accept euros?” I laugh
and he starts to tickle me. The tips of his fingers dig
until they find giggles that aren’t fake.

He kisses me goodbye the way a happy husband pecks

his wife before he leaves for work. I’m annoyed that he’s
leaving me alone with my thoughts as if they’re
unwanted visitors I have to entertain by myself. As soon
as he’s gone, I roll yellow rubber gloves over the sleeves
of my pyjamas. You can tell a lot about my sex life by
looking at my bathroom. Within twenty-four hours of a
one- or two-night stand, I’m attacking the enamel of the
tiles with the same gusto a kid uses to scrub their teeth
before a dentist appointment. I soak in the bath until my
skin shrivels up, change into a fresh pair of pyjamas,
dress the bed in new sheets and swaddle myself in a
cloud of duvet with a cup of tea and the Keira Knightley
version of Pride and Prejudice lighting up my laptop
screen. By the time Elizabeth is walking across the field
at dawn to meet Darcy, I feel clean again.

Five days pass and he isn’t messaging back. I tell myself

that he is busy with his PhD. My mother’s voice wafts
into my head like a draught: Patience is a virtue, have it
if you can. I message him three, four, five times in a row
before deleting the conversation from my phone.

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I see him again, a week later. He is holding hands with

his friend. She rests her head on his shoulder. We are at
the launch of a literary magazine they have co-edited
together. They are standing side by side like proud
parents at a graduation and I can’t believe I shaved my
body from head to toe on the off chance that he would
want me again. He squeezes my shoulders hello as if to
squash me back into the friend zone and now I know how
psychopaths are made.

“How are you?” He grins.

“I’m great.” I smile to stop my lips from trembling.

“You’re not bothered, are you?” my gay friend asks as we

make our way to the bar.

“Of course I’m bothered. It’s rude.”

“I suppose,” he says. “But what is he meant to tell you?

He’s riding someone else?”

“Yes! That’s exactly what he’s supposed to do.”

“That’d be a bit awkward, though.” He pauses. “Are you
thick with me for saying that?”

“No.”

“You’re thick with me.”

“No I’m not, just leave it.”

She has been published in every literary journal on

campus, despite parading her mental illness around on
social media. I think it’s unfair that she is able to be both
sick and successful at the same time

I’m angry with myself for losing the conversation when I

clearly have the right to take the moral high ground. I
look around the room and notice the girl he had been
flirting with the night he went home with me. She is
wearing a white t-shirt which has a drawing of boobs on
it, like huge cartoon eyes with dots of nipples staring out
of her chest. She has been published in the magazine.
She has been published in every literary journal on
campus, despite parading her mental illness around on
social media. I think it’s unfair that she is able to be both
sick and successful at the same time. I want to hold them
out to her like a mother in a shop and ask her to choose
between them.

I nod in her direction. “Emma Clarke hates me.”

My friend rolls his eyes. “Why?”

“Because if I hadn’t been there that night he was flirting

with her, he would have gone with her instead.” I don’t
say that I’m glad he chose me over her.
“And, she would be in the position you are in now. So
you’ve probably done her a favour.” He realizes what he’s
said. “What I mean is, you’re overreacting.”

“I feel like apologizing to her,” I say.

“Jesus,” He squeezes my hand. “Don’t do that, pet. That’s

crazy talk.”

He tells me to just be nice to the girl the next time I see

her. I wonder if that’s what feminism is.

As the pints flow, I don my vigilante cape on behalf of the

casually jilted women of Belfast. It isn’t that I like him, I
insist. I am happy that he is in what seems to be a loving
and caring relationship only days after sleeping in my
bed. It would have been completely fine if he granted me
the courtesy of letting me know. It would have been all
gravy, I say, using the phrase that was considered cool
among my secondary school friends three years ago. I
accost randomers in the queue for the bathroom to
inform them of the offence committed against me. They
rub my back and agree that men are bastards. I brush up
against them like a satisfied cat. I don’t tell anyone
about the nude pictures he has of me on his phone. I’m
not half as humiliated about them as I am about the
short story I sent him that is still sitting in his inbox,
lonely and unread.

My friend puts me into a taxi, gives the driver an extra

fiver, and shouts, “Make sure she gets into the house,
ok?” Then he slams the door.

I wave the taxi man goodbye like he’s a long-lost uncle.

The next morning, I wake up early and begin to wrap my
thoughts around a story. I email the story to him, along
with a note of explanation proclaiming madness, fobbing
insanity off as a quirky personality trait. The story could
be good enough to publish, I think. I fantasize about
reading it aloud at the launch of the next issue of his
literary journal. I do a heel-click on my way out to the
kitchen to make a cup of tea, giddy at the thought of
revenge.

He messages back three days later. He tells me with the

composure of a priest that he’s glad I am writing about
it, but he can’t fathom what would possess me to send it
to him. He has already apologized. He could have
handled the situation better, and he should have said
sorry without me having to prompt him. Most of all, he’s
pissed off at how I describe the sex: “I don’t understand
why you’ve skipped over the sheer amount of sex we had.
We had a lot of sex, morning and night, and both of us
were very much involved in that respect.” I don’t
remember having that much sex. I’ve blocked out the
other attempts he made to knock the numbness out of
me, the one time it worked and I felt the hot pain of
nothing rising up in my throat, surfing on a wave of
relief. I couldn’t let him see me cry so I squeezed my legs
together and rolled over. He threw a towel at me to wipe
away the dampness down there. I used the corner of it to
wipe away tears.

My mind and body have a silent understanding that if I

ever get pregnant, I will kill myself. The process will be
long and drawn out. I think I will have the abortion first.
Unsex myself. I’ll turn up on the doorstep of Positive
Options like a lost child hoping to make the idea of
murder feasible. Then I will get on the inconvenient
flight to England and after it’s done, I’ll wander around
for a bit, bored and inhuman. I’ll have nothing to do with
this decision since I have lost control of my thoughts.
Sometimes, I make a half-hearted attempt to reassert
authority over them like a mother trying to find her
misbehaving children in a jungle gym. Most of the time,
it feels like there’s not enough of me left to argue with
them.

It has been two months since my last period. The app on

my phone that keeps track of my monthly appointments
informs me that I have a forty per cent chance of
pregnancy. I start imagining my own funeral.

I decide to read my story to the woman who my family

pays fifty pounds an hour to listen to me. My woman.
That’s what I call her if anyone asks me where I’m going
on Saturday mornings. If I use the word therapist, I say
it ironically with a wry smile and make a joke about
being in a Woody Allen movie. She is a soft-spoken, older
lady who looks like she shops in Marks and Spencer and
smells of talcum powder and scented candles. She always
asks me how I am when I sit down in the chair opposite
her, and I smile and say, “I’m grand, how are you?” as if
to trick us both into thinking it’s a normal conversation.

I read the story aloud from trembling pages. I’m nervous

because I don’t want her to think that I’m a slut, so I
demote having sex to a kiss. I’ve rehearsed the reading
so many times that I skip over the words with the
bravado of a kid who is good at hopscotch. The crease
lines on her forehead bow in sympathy and she speaks to
me in hushed tones as if I have suffered a bereavement. I
was expecting this. She is being paid to take my side. I
need more from her though. The wrinkles on her
forehead scrunch together, crippling the lines of
sympathy.

“I don’t understand why you are relating your situation

to feminism,” she says, pursing her mauve Clarins lips. I
notice a white crust around the corners of her mouth that
might be dry skin or toothpaste. “Feminism has always
struck me as a very strident position to take.”

I am flushed and embarrassed, the way I used to be in

primary school when a teacher corrected me. It takes me
a moment to steady myself. I spend the rest of my forty
minutes attempting to explain what feminism is, until
my time is up and she is forced to squash the
conversation. She wraps up the vomit of my thoughts in
psychological rhetoric and gives them to me to take home
to fish through later, like a doggy bag from a restaurant.
She opens the window, repositions the box of tissues on
the coffee table and refills my glass of water so that the
room is fresh for the rest of her clientele.

I went to a poetry reading once, and listened to an old

man tell us in a seal-proof narrative about the time he
was lectured about women’s rights by a nineteen-year-
old student in the common room of a hostel in Prague. It
was a funny poem. I remember laughing. He listened to
her with the bemusement of a grandfather indulging his
granddaughter in a wrestling match. He congratulated
himself on his performance. She didn’t know that he was
letting her win.
Louise Nealon is a 26- year-old writer from Co Kildare.
She studied English literature in Trinity College Dublin,
and then completed a Masters in Creative Writing at
Queen’s University Belfast in 2016. She lives on her
family farm where she divides her time between reading,
writing and milking cows. This is her first published
story.
The healing power of island life on Inis Oírr, an Irish
Times travel piece by Louise Nealon

Read the other shortlisted stories chosen by The Good Son

author Paul McVeigh
Louise Nealon on winning the Séan Ó Faoláin
Competition

When an email with the subject title, “You Won the Seán
Ó Faoláin Prize,” lands in my inbox, I think it’s spam.
My life isn’t particularly adventurous so I enjoy hearing
from FBI agents, or lotteries that I didn’t enter but
apparently won. This spam has no spelling mistakes. It
is concise, well-written correspondence that asks me to
phone a number to confirm I have received the news. The
first thing I say to Patrick Cotter – the director of the
Munster Literature Centre and the voice at the end of
the phone – is: “It can’t be me. I haven’t even been
published before.”

Two weeks later, I’m having breakfast in the Maldron

Hotel in Cork, eating a slice of watermelon with a knife
and fork. I amuse myself by trying to match the faces of
the fellow guests with writers I admire, like a nerdy
version of Guess Who. I’m giddy at the thought of what I
could do. I know that I can’t really interrupt David
Means while he is eating a croissant to inform him that I
know who he is but it’s thrilling to have to restrain
myself from doing so.

I have been invited down for the week of the Cork

International Short Story Festival. I sit in on Claire
Keegan’s creative writing workshop every morning and
after class we go across to the English Market for lunch.
The evenings are spent at various readings organised by
the festival, including the wonderful Fiction at the Friary
hosted by Danielle McLaughlin and Madeleine D’Arcy. It
is not quite possible to say how happy this makes me –
imagine Harry’s first day at Hogwarts.

I read my story at a prize-giving ceremony in Cork City

Library. I get my photo taken with Liadain O’Donovan,
Frank O’Connor’s daughter. Danielle McLaughlin shakes
my hand. I watch my family and friends taking turns to
thank the judge, Paul McVeigh. There’s too much
happening to be happy – that will come later. For now, I
feel the same sense of relief that I felt when I passed my
driving test, that moment before I left the driving centre
and, overconfident of my parking skills, crashed the car
in an underground car park. I know that winning a prize
won’t make me a better writer anymore than getting my
full license made me a better driver, but it’s nice to think
that every now and again, when someone reads a
sentence that I string together, it might pass the test.