RTÉ Short Story Competition 2024: Turncoat by David Ralph

About Turncoat, David says: "This story is about a man who has acted against his better nature, or simply followed it, and is now paying the consequences for his actions."

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Laoise's side of the bed was empty when I woke. She’d gone to a Halloween party last night, her face painted as a zombie. I didn’t want to go to the party. I’m lying low these days. Anyway, I wasn’t even sure I’d been invited. When I got up I saw that Laoise had lain down in the spare room, bed throws covering her.

Through the window I see the concierge emerge from his cabin. He starts fussing at a bicycle locked to a lamppost. The concierge, who I think is Eastern European, is as fastidious as a sheriff about the apartment complex’s rules. No ballgames. No alcohol outside. No parking here, no parking there. The twitch below my right eye flares up. I put a finger over the skin to stop it.

I look away from him to the sky. The massed clouds are a milky spread, and a string of geese is crossing in a loose V.

Laoise is from a Gaeltacht, a place so steeped in Irish it doesn’t even have a name in English, and she grew up speaking only Gaelic at home. We were still just friends when we started playing our little language game. Laoise would feed me a word a day, our select FOCAL AN LAE, and I would try the word out, see if I could make it work. Soon enough FOCAL AN LAE became more than a daily vocabulary dose. Noticing a watch she was wearing with simple Roman numerals, I made a circle of Laoise’s wrist with my hand and asked what the Gaelic for elegant was. She smiled a little and said, GALÁNTA. Laoise is as GALÁNTA a woman to ever walk around this city. To walk around any city. I don’t know, maybe I’ve always been insecure about this. Once strolling through the Green and passing a pair of teens necking, I wondered aloud what the term for desire was. That’s complicated, she laughed lightly, explaining that it was DÚIL for the female, for the male RAGÚS.

That was before all this business with my colleague.

I was out with the work crowd. I fell in beside a female colleague whom I’d mentored as a fresh recruit on our graduate training programme. There had been mutual grumblings around the office about our respective domestic set-ups, lingering embraces goodbye on other nights out, and that sort of thing. I thought it all innocent enough. Soon everyone was gone from the bar, just the two of us left. The rest of the story I’d rather forget, an old bone I just wanted buried.

Bells from a church on the quays clang upon my heart. Midday. I take a shower, run the water hot as I can bear it.

As she was fixing her mask last night, I’d asked Laoise what the Irish for zombie was. We hadn’t played FOCAL AN LAE in a long time. She was in the bathroom, before the mirror. She didn’t answer me, she just kept applying daubs of anthracite and slashes of crimson like I wasn’t there.

When I cut the water off I can hear her moving about the living-room. I dress quickly.

'Hey,’ I say.

Laoise is still in the silver lamé jumpsuit she’d gone out in. And, bizarrely, her zombie face is still on too. She hasn’t yet looked at me. How the mask hasn’t smudged I can’t understand.

‘Good night?’

When she doesn’t say anything I ask if she’d like breakfast. She produces a hipflask from her handbag on the table.

‘I have some here,’ she says. She takes a pull and sits down.

‘Hair of the dog, eh?’ Laoise is not in the habit of drinking first thing in the morning.

‘Dogs were barking at me on the way back.’

‘So, tell me. What was the best costume?’

She is studying the grain of the table’s wood like she’s expecting it to speak to her. ‘Oh, something you’d like.’

‘Yeah?’

Laoise lets out a small hard laugh. Her eyes are rimmed in thick bands of kohl. She has painted exactingly realistic sore and cuts and contusions across her cheeks, her forehead. ‘Your favourite, in fact.’

I lean back against the sideboard. I don’t like where this is going. ‘Want some coffee? There’s coffee on the hob.’

‘She arrived after midnight,’ Laoise continues. ‘Pigtails. A pinafore. These patent leather pumps.’ Laoise lifts her stare from the table and for the first time today she looks at me. ‘She was there as a school girl, darling.’

I curse under my breath. The woman, my colleague from the office, is, in her mid-twenties, a good number of years my junior. For a time Laoise was making all these vinegary digs about adolescents, about millennials, about anything to do with budding young women. But nothing like this has come up in weeks and I’d thought we were making progress, that things were salvageable. I’ve got a transfer to a new division within the company. More nights than not we’ve been sharing the same bed.

But now there’s this bloody school girl business. ‘Laoise,’ I begin but I can hear the pleading in my voice.

A silence develops.

‘Come on,’ I try at last, ‘let’s wash your mask off.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I prefer it to my real face.’

‘But you can’t wear that thing forever.’

‘Who says I can’t?’ She laughs that small hard laugh again. She has another pull off the hipflask. ‘I actually think it’s quite fitting.’

Sometimes this terrible dread strikes me that a switch is about to be flicked and I will drop stone dead to the floor. It’s the world’s worst feeling. Now the feeling is flickering at the edges of my thoughts, threatening disaster. I rub at my ribs, my sternum, my neck. I love Laoise. We’ve made promises, plans. We’ve been saving hard to move south. There’s the site her parents gifted her on the edge of their lake. An architect did us up blueprints. The builders are set to come in and break ground. I need to do something, there’s a constriction in my chest.

I step into the kitchenette. ‘Right, I’m making your special breakfast.’

A smidgen of brandy into the egg-milk mix is the secret to my French toast. Laoise was blown away first time she tasted it. I cut slices from the batch, soak them in a bowl. I’m banking on us making it to Christmas. Because if we make it to Christmas, then we’ll make it to the New Year. And if we make it to the New Year, then I feel anything is possible.

She goes to the bathroom.

A friend of Laoise’s spotted me round town with my colleague. Word made its way back to Laoise; there were observations about her age, about mine. My mistake was I didn’t leave it at a solitary slip-up. But I couldn’t help myself, the heat between her long legs would warm a whole room, there was no innocence to any of our carry-on that first time. I had bruising on my balls after. I went back for seconds. And thirds. And more. My RAGÚS got the better of me. Laoise dragged a confession of sorts out of me, eventually. The lies. The sneaking around. The hotels. There have been frightful scenes in this apartment. One night the concierge appeared at our door. He’d received complaints about the noise, he said. There were rules that had to be respected, he said.

The things that come back.

I remember the smell of Laoise’s skin after rain, fresh and soft, almost like a newborn.

I remember the way she still talks about old family dogs that are dead for decades. Fleur. Bo. Mimi.

I push the griddle from the blue flame, arrange the French toast on a platter.

Laoise is now gone for what feels a long time. I call down the hallway that breakfast is ready. Moments later I call again. When I hear nothing I go check.

She’s leaning over the sink into the bathroom mirror, removing her make-up with cotton pads. The left side of her face is clean, the right still masked.

She turns to take in her left profile. Then her right.

‘LIOM LEAT,’ she says and dabs at her nostril with a pad.

‘Come again.’

A sly smile edges across her mouth. ‘DUINE LIOM LEAT,’ she says.

‘So we’re playing FOCAL AN LAE again?’

‘Not of the day—the week! The month! In fact this is FOCAL NA BLIANA.’

I twine my arms round her waist. ‘Is that how you say zombie? DUINE is a person, right?’

She nods. She turns her clean face left, then her zombie face right in the mirror again.

‘A ghost?’ I guess.

Her face keeps turning.

‘No. A make-up artist?’

She turns her face again.

‘No. Right. What about a thespian?’

Abruptly, she stops. She stops turning her face. Her eyes bore into mine in the mirror, her smile gone. Then she starts talking. She starts talking in the Irish she speaks at home. I pick up phrases, sentences. I drop my arms from her. I get it alright, I understand enough. She isn’t playing any games. I break under her gaze. She keeps talking. She keeps saying things. A tinge of acid enters her tone. I leave her there in the mirror, talking.

Breakfast lies cold on the countertop. I bite into a cut of the toast but the crispness is gone. I spit the soggy bread into the sink and go to the window. The geese are still at it. Those geese have been migrating for weeks now. I can’t stop picturing Laoise’s face turning left, turning right. I have a strong sense I know what LION LEAT means. Another string of geese appears, and another, and another.

Strings of geese are filling the sky.

That’s what she was doing in the mirror. Showing me. That’s her word of the year, I’m sure of it.

The sky has thickened to a charcoal wash. Below, the concierge is out on his patrols again, the angular planes of his face fixed in a permanent reproach. I turn to the room and the twitch returns to my eye. My life. In this city. In this dismal squat of an apartment. I suppress an urge to tear violently at my eyeball and just let the skin spasm.

I go back to watching the geese. The last of them are on their passage south to winter somewhere warm and now I’m back in high summer remembering the first time I knew Laoise loved me. We were camping on the site on the lake, the smell of the spruce from the nearby hills invading the thin tarp. It wasn’t yet dawn, Laoise was asleep beside me, and I was listening to her breathing. Then out of nowhere, out of a dream, she said my name. And next thing she said it, she said she loved me. In Gaelic. That’s how I knew it to be true. That morning in the tent I wanted to shake Laoise awake by her slender shoulders and tell her I felt the same. But I let her sleep on. I told myself there was no rush. I told myself we had all day, and the whole long weekend. I told myself we had the entire rest of our lives together.

I move away from the window. I go to call out. I reach inside me for words that will ring right and proper. But instead of words it’s Laoise’s face I’m picturing again, turning left, turning right in the bathroom mirror.

David Ralph is originally from Tipperary and now lives in Dublin. His stories and essays have been published in Dublin Review, Southword, Banshee, New Irish Writing, Litro, Fish Anthology, Channel. He won a New Irish Writing Award in 2020, and placed third in the 2022 Fish Memoir Prize. He works as an academic in Trinity College Dublin.