The Apologist
By Geraldine Walsh
Listen to Geraldine reading her story:
His flight is grounded. There is dirt in the air, and he doesn’t know when he will be home.
He calls from a payphone in the lounge of the airport bar because he packed his phone charger without noting the banner warning him there was 15% battery left. The phone is old. The battery is always dying. The noise of travellers, Tannoy’s, and rumbling cases rise behind him despite it being 2 am and the airport emptying itself of schedules and people. A baby cries somewhere. It howls. He strains to hear what little I say, so he uses the minutes to speak what he is unlikely to say to my face. He apologises for four things and intimates the probability of a fifth at some stage before the dirt above America clears to a fresh path back home. He mutely apologises for his battery dying, but as he often apologises for this, I let it hang.
One: He withdrew an extra €500 from our joint account – the equivalent of $550 – using his debit card and hopes it won’t affect the bills. He explains this away by telling me he left his credit card in his trouser pocket that is also packed in the suitcase that has long been boarded onto the plane, the plane that idles on the tarmac with all the lights buzzing in the cabin. He plugs his other ear with his finger to hear the echo of silence a little better. He was told by a stewardess to make plans for a hotel nearby because he was not allowed to sleep in the airport. She said a room can be expensive there, but he looked like he could afford it. And she winked at him. She smiled and winked. He awkwardly laughs as he tells me this story, as though regretting the details. He says we should never be without cash and that this is a lesson learned. ‘Is that ok?’ he asks. I’m unsure what he would do if I said, ‘No. Put it back. Sleep on the metal chairs in the airport or the room the airport police lock you away in.’ This is probably what I should say if I were in the slightest bit mindful of our direct debits and the other things he would soon apologise for. But I’m not, so I let it slide and say, ‘Fine.’
Two: He let slip to Alistair that we are expecting. ‘He’s happy for us,’ he says. ‘But he texted Ciara before I knew it. It’s probably too early for her to get on to you yet.’ The phone line crackles as though he moved the receiver to check his watch or turned to find a clock somewhere. ‘Has she been on to you?’ he asks. No, I reply with as much punch as a word allows through a distorted phone line. ‘I told him we’re only twelve weeks so not to go saying it to anyone.’ Eight weeks, I think, without correcting him. We’re at eight weeks, a single ripe raspberry, fleshy and easily damaged.
Three: After a few staggering sentences about how conferences are never as entertaining as they promise to be, he apologises for the third time. He stumbles over the words as though looking for some kind of escape, but there is none. He says she is quite beautiful, the stewardess, and as she leaned over the aisle seat to tip his shoulder and encourage him off the flight with the rest of the passengers, he misplaced his decency and lingered at the sight of her cleavage. After sitting on the tarmac for two hours, the plane was hot, and the sheen of sweat settled on her skin beneath the loosened buttons of her blouse. She smiled. He smiled back. He cries when he tells me he thought of how her lip curved more to the right towards a shallow dimple and how she winked at him. He imagined her naked and masturbated to her in the airport toilets as the Tannoy pinged, and a woman’s voice alerted a final call for a flight to Michigan at Gate 342. He gives too many details and apologises for them all. The line crackles again. I imagine he shields his face from the people who may be watching. There is nothing much else to do but watch people in airports and wonder where they are going and where they are not going, for that matter. I do not say anything but wonder if the quickening I feel beneath my ribcage is the raspberry, even though they say the tiny threads of movement can’t be felt so early.
And Four: He apologises for being drunk, on a Wednesday, at an hour when he should be halfway home, for being in a country far away from me, where anything could happen. The slur of him drips down the phone line as I sip lemon water, the early morning sun leaking through the kitchen window of our terraced house, boxes piled high in the corner of the undecorated adjoining dining room. He continues to apologise as I wonder how dirt in the air can ground a plane, but then I imagine tipping through a cloud heavy with the grit of the earth, the debris clinging to the grooves of my skin, and how cumbersome and heavy it would make me feel, how very heavy I already feel, the dirt of him on me.
His voice distorts as he covers the handset. I make out Alistair’s voice calling to him. Something about bags and rooms and ‘the captain said…’ A woman’s voice laughs with Alistair. A shy titter rises through the air. ‘Looks like we have a place for the night,’ he says.
The phone line disconnects midway through saying goodbye. I keep hold of the receiver to my ear, listening to the flatlining of the call.
I imagine the sweat of her.
Of him.
The dirt in the air.
The messiness of it all.
Geraldine Walsh is an author, editor, and journalist who frequently contributes to The Irish Times. Her debut non-fiction, Unraveling Motherhood, was published in 2023 by Hatherleigh Press. Geraldine is a facilitator with the Irish Writers Centre, teaching non-fiction, editing, and writing. Her fiction has appeared in The Storms, Aimsir, and Agenda, amongst others. She is working on her debut literary fiction and was a 2024 awardee of the Irish Writers Centre National Mentoring Programme. Her work has been shortlisted in various competitions and her novel extract placed in the Top 100 of the Bridport Novel Prize 2024.
This one really got me in the gut. Made me feel sick. Brilliant writing.
Really enjoyed this. Has real bite to it.