“What are we fucking meant to do?” Billy bellows. “Leave the calf there for it to grow up enough so Mammy and son can start riding each other? Is that what we should do? Fucking inbred, deformed cattle is what we’re aiming for? Herds of bovine, royal families and exploding udders and mastitis to beat the band? Ha?”
“Just ignore it, Billy,” I say.
Mam nudges me. “We’re going past the GPO in a minute. That will calm him down.”
* * *
Mam is unimpressed with the Spire. “And Joyce like a dwarf beside it,” she tuts, drifting toward the frozen Joyce with his walking stick, hand on hip, hat cocked, and nose in the air. Mam gazes up at him. “My love, my love, my love. Why have you left me alone?”
Billy and I look at each other.
“We’ll get a decent bit of grub in there,” Billy says, nodding at the revolving door of the Kylemore.
“What did you say you wanted to buy, Mam?” I ask.
“I need a new pair of shoes for Midnight Mass.”
“Great, sure there’s loads of places to look,” I say, cajoling her away from the statue.
* * *
After spending an hour and a half hemming and hawing in Arnotts shoe department, Mam buys a pair of boots. They are black patent leather ankle boots with a modest-size heel and a gold buckle. She wears them out of the shop and walks halfway down the street in them. Then she winces, takes them off, and announces that she wants to return them.
The sales assistant is furious.
As soon as we enter the next shop, Mam takes off her shoes and traipses around in her bare feet looking at the stock. We’re all starting to flag now. Billy is sulking. He refuses to go into shops and stands with his arms folded outside them, striking up conversations with security men.
I spot a pair of silver lace-up boots Xanthe said she got in a charity shop for a tenner. These cost 145 euro. They look like the kind of footwear you’d need for a rave on the moon.
I turn around and Mam isn’t there. Her shoes are though. She can’t have gone far. I spend another ten minutes browsing, waiting for her to reappear.
* * *
I go out to Billy, carrying Mam’s empty shoes. He’s talking to a painfully gregarious man who works for Amnesty International, one of the people in yellow coats whom I have learned to avoid.
“Debbie! You’ll never guess who this man is. We’re related to him.”
“She isn’t with you either,” I say, beginning to feel dizzy. “Billy, I think I’ve lost her.”
Billy’s face drops. “Maeve?”
“Oh sugar, is that your daughter?” the yellow-coated man says. “If you go to the customer service desk in Debenhams they’ll call her name out over the intercom.”
* * *
Five customer service desks and two hours later, we find Mam lying in a doorway on Moore Street, spooning a homeless teenage boy. Billy grabs her by the scruff of the neck and tries to drag her up but she’s zipped into the sleeping bag with the boy. The boy moans. His eyes roll around in his head.
“Sorry, sorry,” Mam apologizes like she’s slept in or forgotten to get up for mass.
I offer to put on her shoes but Billy tells me to leave it. “She’s gotten this far without them.”
* * *
No one speaks the whole way home. I check my phone. There’s a message from Xanthe:
Hope you’re having the cutest day in the city with your mam and Billy. You all deserve it x
Billy pulls into the yard. We’re getting out of the car when he says, “Do you reckon Pats will give me my money back?”
I think he’s joking but then Mam starts to cry.
“This is FUCKING BULLSHIT,” he shouts at her. “You are FUCKING BATSHIT.” He’s spitting in her face. “And I’m fucking tired of all of it.”
“We’re all tired,” I say. “It’s too late to do this. Can we please just all go to bed?”
* * *
I put Mam to bed and leave a glass of water beside her.
“Do you want me to stay with you?” I ask.
Her lip trembles. “Could you?”
I climb into the bed with her.
“Leave the lamp on,” she says, wrapping her arms around my waist and putting her head on my chest.
“Why did you do it, Mam?”
She sighs. “When you came to collect me from the hospital, I wanted a normal, nice day out in town with my family. I was looking forward to it. I was ready for it. I imagined coffee in Bewley’s and shopping . . .”
“Mam, we did all that.”
“It was those fucking boots. I was never going to find the right pair. It sent me into a spiral. I thought it was one of those anxiety dreams. And so I just, tried to break away from it, change the direction of the dream. So I did. I just, drifted away.”
“And do you remember what happened?”
“Oh yeah. But I remember nearly all of my dreams. Sometimes, I feel like I’m only alive when I’m asleep. So this didn’t seem so different. The boy asked for money and I just sat down beside him. We got talking . . .”
“Mam, did you let him . . . did you sleep with him?”
“The boy?” Mam smiles. “He surprised me. When we fell asleep, he had the most beautiful dreams.”
Alice in the Arcade
“So, it was a cute day?” Xanthe asks.
“Really cute,” I say. “We went to Bewley’s, saw the lights, did a bit of shopping . . .”
“Did you go to the Long Room?”
“Where’s that?”
“Ah Debbie, the Long Room? The Book of Kells? The thing that all the tourists queue in the rain for?”
“Oh, well Mam doesn’t really have the attention span for queues.”
“You don’t have to queue! We get in free because we’re students and you’re allowed to bring two guests in with you.”
“Oh, I’ve never been.”
“One of the most beautiful places in the world at your feet, and you’ve never been?”
“I’ll bring them next time.”
“Promise me you’ll go there soon. I feel like dragging you along right now.”
“I will, I will.”
* * *
We’re in George’s Street Arcade waiting for Orla to get her septum pierced. Orla wanted Xanthe to come along for moral support, and Xanthe has dragged me along with her.
“I swear to God, she goes to Workmans once and thinks she’s alternative,” Xanthe mutters to me. We just left Orla with the woman at the stall to help her pick out a ring.
“If Billy caught me with a bull ring in my nose, it would be the end of me.”
“How’s your mam finding being back at home?”
“Good, yeah.”
Xanthe stops by another stall to flick through some posters. I look at the badges stuck to a corkboard—the faces of Coco Chanel, Frida Kahlo, Charlie Chaplin, and Che Guevara stare back at me. I can’t decide which one I should start worshipping enough to wear.
Xanthe is smoothing her hand over a poster for Pocahontas.
“My first crush was on John Smith from Pocahontas,” she says. “I liked the way he gave Miko the raccoon biscuits and I liked his yellow hair. I used to fantasize about our wedding. I was a cartoon too, of course. I converted over, for his sake. Then I got older and found out he was a pathological liar.”
“And voiced by Mel Gibson of all people.”
“Yeah. Not a great choice.”
She flicks past the Pocahontas poster and lands on The Witches by Roald Dahl.
“What a book,” she says.
“It’s amazing.”
“The film ruined it by turning him back into a boy at the end,” she says.
“It really did. Mouse and grandmother contemplate their looming death. The happily ever after we all deserve.”
“What’s your favorite book?” Xanthe asks.
“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. No wait . . . actually no, I’ll sound like a dick.”
“No,
go on,” she says.
“My favorite book is a specific Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland pop-up book that Mam used to read to me. I’ve never actually read Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I’ve tried like, I just . . . I don’t like the way he narrates her story. I know it sounds wanky but it’s like she’s trapped in his narration.”
“Well, Alice owes her existence to an oddball mathematician who had a penchant for befriending little girls,” Xanthe points out.
“Exactly,” I say. “But really, she shouldn’t belong to anyone, least of all Lewis Carroll. She exists independently of him.”
“Except that he made her up,” she argues.
“He didn’t though.”
“He actually did though, if you think about it,” Xanthe says. “Anyway, I think you’re complicating your relationship with Alice.”
“Maybe. It was Billy who got me thinking this way. It started with the Greek myths. He said that they didn’t belong to anyone.”
“Myths are different though. They famously don’t belong to anyone.”
“They must have at some point though. Anyway, he’d tell me the stories of the Greeks all the time, only they were his own stories. And then he got me to retell his stories. And he said that’s what stories were. They didn’t belong to anyone.”
“Billy sounds like a legend.”
“He has his moments.”
Xanthe grabs a top hat from one of the stands, a pocket watch from another, and places a pipe to her mouth. “Mad Hatter,” she says, pointing at the hat, “the White Rabbit’s pocket watch and the Caterpillar’s hookah, or close enough. Pick one.”
“Why?”
“I’m getting you one for Christmas.”
“No you’re not. We’re not doing Christmas presents.”
“Don’t be a Grinch,” she scolds.
“I have a feeling the Grinch was just broke.”
“Fine,” she says and sighs, putting the hat back on the stand.
I wonder what she’s getting her boyfriend for Christmas. A new hurl? Socks and jocks? No, Xanthe is better than that. What would he get her? I can’t imagine he would be any good at buying gifts.
“What are you thinking about?” Xanthe asks.
“What’s your favorite book?” I ask her.
“That’s an impossible question.”
“You just asked me!”
“I didn’t expect you to answer.”
“Look at it this way. If you only had one book to read for the rest of your life, what would it be?”
“Just Kids, by Patti Smith.”
“Who’s Patti Smith?”
“Oh, Debbie . . .”
* * *
We’ve nearly done the full loop of the arcade when we see the photography stall. There are the standard tourist photos of Dublin—a view from the Ha’penny Bridge, the Georgian doors, the Oscar Wilde statue. Then the display branches into photos of the sea. A clatter of cockles and mussels washed up on a gray, seaweed-strewn beach. In the corner of the photo—grinning—is a set of false teeth.
“Most people don’t notice them at all,” the man at the stall says when Xanthe points them out to me.
She grins at him.
“Have you ever heard of the Glass Beach?” he asks.
He points out another bigger, more expensive panoramic photo of a beach surrounded by snow, only instead of pebbles, there are glistening jewels shining in the bay.
“Holy crap,” Xanthe says.
“Ussuri Bay in Russia. In the Soviet era, it was a dumping ground for broken bottles and cracked porcelain.”
“Wait, this is all just glass?”
The guy nods.
The photo of the beach transforms into a kaleidoscope of time—a collage of years of erosion. I imagine the sea cradling the empty glasses—polishing and buffing them like the hair and makeup team around an actor getting ready for their red carpet appearance. Finally, they are ready to be presented as jewels—beauty frozen in time.
“You took the photo?”
“Yeah, on my way back from Japan. I spend a lot of time there. I specialize in photographing snow, actually.” He points to a selection of other photos of snowflakes.
“These are glass too?”
“No, these are snowflakes.”
“No way!”
“It’s macrophotography.”
“Wow.”
Xanthe buys the framed photo of the Glass Beach and a couple of the snowflake ones.
“They make great Christmas presents,” the guy tells her. He acts like he’s giving her a bargain while he wraps them up for her. “I’ll throw in my business card if you have any questions,” he says with a wink.
The framed photo is so big I have to help her carry it. “That guy was undressing you with his eyes,” I say.
“Ew, no he wasn’t!”
“Xanthe, he couldn’t have been more obvious.”
“He just wanted to sell his work. They’re so cool. I never knew snowflakes really looked like that,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“I thought they only looked like that in cartoons.”
“Wait, what?”
“Yeah, like the way they put smiley faces on animals, or dress them in human clothes. I thought snow was just a dot.”
I burst out laughing.
“What?” Xanthe asks.
“You’re being serious?”
“Yes!”
“I can’t believe the only person who got a first in our year doesn’t know what a snowflake looks like.”
Xanthe laughs. “I just thought it was a cartoon.”
“It would be a fairly elaborate design for a cartoon.”
“That’s true.”
“I can’t imagine someone going through life without grasping the concept of the iconic six-armed snow crystal,” I say.
“OK, I’m an idiot, sorry.”
We browse a rail of T-shirts in silence for a while.
“My mam used to read me a story about a snowflake who didn’t believe in snow,” I say.
“I can’t wait to meet your mam.”
“Well, you will. Billy is already making the joke that Santy’s coming for Christmas.”
“Haha brilliant. I can’t wait.”
A woman comes out of the piercing stall with Orla traipsing after her.
“Your friend, she fainted,” the woman says.
“Oh God, are you OK?” Xanthe asks.
Orla winces. “I fainted before the needle went in.”
* * *
We stop in the shop on the way back for Orla to get Lucozade.
“Do you want to go to the Long Room now?” Xanthe asks.
“No, I’ve that doctor’s appointment,” I say.
“What’s wrong with you?” Orla asks.
“Ah it’s just for the pill,” I say, hoping she doesn’t see me blush.
* * *
Xanthe had a bit of a meltdown the last night we went out. She drank too much at pre-drinks and got sick in the taxi on the way in, so we went straight home. She was crying a lot—she kept saying how much she hated herself. I got her out of her new playsuit and into her pajamas. Griff made her drink a pint of water. We tucked her up in bed and we were both trying to cheer her up—telling her she had no reason to hate herself. She was gorgeous and talented and smart and funny.
Then Griffin went a little too far. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. Debbie, you’re attractive in a culchie, girl-next-door kind of way but Xanthe, you could be a Victoria’s Secret model. There is no contest.”
“I appreciate your honesty and agree wholeheartedly,” I said.
Xanthe made a face.
“Why are you getting thick? We’re complimenting you.” I said.
“I mean, you’ve a lot to thank her for, Debs,” Griffin said, continuing to dig. “Lads come over to get with Xanthe and end up sleeping with you.”
“Except I don’t sleep with them,” I said, flicking my hair over m
y shoulder. “I’m a lady.”
“Yeah, you keep telling yourself that.”
“What? I’m not joking. I don’t sleep with them. I’ve never had sex before.”
There was an odd, confused silence and then Griff laughed. “Ah here. Xanthe you hear that? This one’s trying to tell me she’s a virgin when she’s slept with a different guy every time we’ve gone out.”
“I go home with them,” I corrected him. “I don’t sleep with them though.”
“Debbie,” Xanthe said, hiccupping. “You kiss very . . . passionately. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just the guy gets very excited and that generally leads to action in the bedroom . . . and you drag him toward the bedroom so . . .”
“But I always warn him before we go that it’s not going to happen.”
“Wow.” All of a sudden, Xanthe was sober. “OK, Debbie, you have had sex before. I’ve witnessed it. You had sex on that couch.”
“Lads, I haven’t. I swear. We do things but it never goes in.”
“I’ve seen it go in,” Xanthe said.
“What? Do you’ve night goggles and a pair of binoculars?”
“I didn’t need them! Jesus Christ, Debbie. I thought you were using protection. You should get yourself checked.”
“I don’t need to!”
It strikes me then how rude it is to bring lads back to Xanthe’s place. I do it because I’m terrified that her boyfriend is going to be there when we get back. I imagine the scenario often, me trying to sleep on the couch with them in the next room.
“I don’t know why I bring them back here. I’m really sorry,” I mumbled.
“Oh God, I’m not giving out to you for bringing them back.”
“It’s out of order,” I said.
“No, it’s grand. It’s just—it’s worrying you don’t remember what happens.”
“I do though. Nothing happens.”
“Debbie, go to the doctor. Make an appointment. Get yourself checked for STIs.”
“I’m not a prostitute.”
“I think you should see a doctor too, Debbie. Just to make sure,” Griff said. He seemed both amused and embarrassed for me.
“No one’s calling you a prostitute,” Xanthe said. “But you need to know what happens when you’re drunk. You’re blocking things out. I’m only saying this because I love you. Please book the appointment. For me.”
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