“But you are still upset about them, aren’t you?”
“I wish you wouldn’t call them Them, like they’re Martians or something.” She lowered her voice again as a cluster of raucous footballers went past, banging on the end lockers.
“I know their names, that’s not the point.” Yvonne stretched her arms above her, then readjusted the shoulder pads in her blouse. “The point is, they got a month’s rent out of you on false pretences.”
“Ah, for god’s sake, it wasn’t a financial scam or anything.” Maria rubbed out a crooked line. “They probably assumed I knew.”
“That’s outrageous. I mean, it’s not the first thing that’s going to spring into your head when you go house-hunting, is it? I mean, you don’t say to yourself, oh, yes, must check whether my flatmates are lesbian lovers, just in case!”
Maria placed the pencil on the concrete and looked her in the eye. “I appreciate your looking after me, I really do. Now, will you kindly lay off? I’ve been busy with my job; four evenings this week. I haven’t had time to think whether I’ll be moving out or not.”
“What’s to keep you there?”
“For one thing, I like them.”
“I know you do, Maria, you’re a very friendly person.” Yvonne hugged her knees in exasperation. “But they’re hardly your sort. I mean, don’t you find them a bit, you know?”
“A bit what?”
She squirmed slightly. “Butch and ranty.”
“I can’t believe I’m listening to such clichés. You’ve never even met them.”
“Well, I know a girl who had one in her school, and apparently she was really aggressive. Like Martina Navratilova.”
Maria stared down at the careful sketch; she was sorely tempted to rip it up, but that would be immature. She tried again. “Jael wears mascara sometimes. And Ruth is a dote, I wish you knew her. OK, they’re feminists, well, Ruth is anyway, but they don’t rant. Like, the other night for example, they had no objection to my watching the Miss World contest.”
“Well of course.”
“What do you mean, of course?”
Yvonne leaned toward her and cooed, “All those semi-naked women.”
“You’re sick.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I just can’t believe you’re being so naive about this, Maria. You’re defending them as if they’ve been your bosom pals for years.”
“At least I know them, which is more than you do. And they never wear boiler suits or”—she scanned her memory frantically—“studs in their noses or get their hair shaved off or any other clichés you might care to dredge up.” She ground to a halt. “And neither of them has even a shadow of a moustache, so there.”
“Aren’t you going to finish my picture?”
“Go back the way you were, then. Hands in your lap.” Maria sketched in silence. After a few minutes, she had almost lost herself in the faint rasp of the pencil.
When Yvonne, scratching her wrist, whispered, “I never mentioned moustaches,” Maria pretended she hadn’t heard.
“Did I not remind you to peel them?”
“There isn’t anything to peel, Ruth, carrots don’t have a skin.”
“Well, they’ve got a surface, and it’s leathery. Here, use the potato knife.”
A gull screamed above the open window; Maria glanced up from her knife to catch a flash of white against the smoky sky. In ten minutes it would be dark. From the street below came the rumble and screech of office workers leaving ten minutes early to beat the traffic.
Hard to stave off melancholy these late October afternoons, when the clouds massed so quickly after five o’clock and blocked off the mild light. She had always disliked the moment when her mother would send her to turn on the overhead kitchen lamp and snuff out the day. Especially on lethargic afternoons when somehow she had not got around to doing anything but arranging her paintbrushes in order of size and feeding her brothers’ neglected hamster; those times, it choked her to snap the light switch down and admit that the day was over, with no possibilities left but Irish grammar by the fire and cereal with hot milk for supper. Maria used to suspect she would never grow up while she clung to these domestic comforts. To be a teenager you had to brave the twilight and stay out long past teatime, walking along the wall of the graveyard and hanging round the chip shop swapping insults with the rough lads from the travellers’ caravan camp. She used to fear she would always be four foot four as long as she stayed under the thrall of the kitchen light bulb, eating the spirals of sharp peel her mother tossed aside as she made apple pie.
“Oh, slice them longways.”
“Sorry?”
“Instead of circles, could you slice the carrots into little sticks? Eighths, maybe,” suggested Ruth.
“Sure. Sorry, I was dreaming.” Maria shifted her weight to the other leg and set to work again on the mouse-shaped chopping board. Her thighs were stiff as girders after scrubbing toilets three evenings in a row. Tonight was hers, she promised herself: a two-hour bath with last Sunday’s papers, random television, and a bar of Belgian truffle. The knife skidded through the carrot. “Bloody hell, I fear for my fingers. This is the last time I volunteer to cut up your crudités.”
Ruth turned, her face softening. “Ah, pet, I’m really grateful. I’d never have had time to do three dips otherwise. Do you think they’ll like the fennel-and-chives one?”
“They’re students; they’ll probably chomp through the lot without noticing any difference.”
“No doubt.” Coming back from the sink with a colander of wet herbs, Ruth paused by the window and peered down. “I wonder what time Jael will be back. Bet she’s on a bender with the Spanish crowd.”
“She’s a big girl, don’t worry about her.”
Ruth pulled with both hands on the wooden frame, until the window gathered momentum and rattled shut. She snapped the light on, and the table was suddenly bright with orange and green.
“So how come you’re the one who gets landed with bringing food to the History Society do?” asked Maria, sliding the carrot sticks into a tub.
“Suppose because I’m the social secretary, and they know I like to cook.”
“Sounds a thankless job.”
“I’m their token woman. When I lost the auditor election to Graham, I thought I’d take the next most responsible position.” Ruth tasted a fingertip of dip abstractedly. “I used to be more like you when I was younger,” she remarked.
Maria took a cautious bite of cucumber. “Like me how?”
“Oh, you know.” Ruth pressed a lid on a tub with the heel of her hand. “Good at saying no to things.”
“Am I?” She was not sure whether to take it as a compliment. “It’s mostly just cowardice.”
“No, I’ve been watching.” Ruth straightened her back and gave her a thoughtful look. “You say no to most things, to make room for the things you really want.”
Maria felt pink.
“I used to be able to do that. When I was in the Civil Service, if anyone had asked me to make crudités for a party, I’d have told them where they could stuff them.”
She held a slice of cucumber up to the light bulb; it glowed white, like a cell under a microscope. She fed it to Ruth. “So what happened?”
“Came to college, got happy. Figured I was getting what I wanted, so it would be mean not to give other people what they wanted. Oh, I don’t know,” the voice straining to lighten, “I suppose I’m just overworked and overcommitted.” She bent to Maria’s hand, taking another sliver of cucumber into her mouth. “Sometimes,” she said through the crunch, “I’d like to be seventeen again.”
“Yuck.”
“I could start from scratch. No ties or duties or fixed ideas.”
“You poor, world-weary crone.”
“Amn’t I just. Do you think I should cut the courgette on the diagonal?”
“Don’t ask me, ma’am, I’m just the skivvy.”
The window was a square of licorice now, and the
noise from the street had lulled. This table was floating in a pool of yellow light on top of the city. Maria would never get used to living as high as the gulls. Some nights, as she hauled her knees up the last flight of stairs, she felt like an old usherette, lost in the innards of a Victorian theatre. Coming through the light-dripping curtain of beads into the living room was like wandering onto a stage in the middle of the last act. Even when it was empty, it carried the echo of shouts, whistled tunes, thrown cushions. On her own, Maria sometimes felt so exposed, on this bright platform perched on a block of deserted offices, that she stayed away from the windows. She had to remind herself that there was no one high enough to look in.
Her knife was lolling; she reached for a handful of radishes. “Hey, did I ever tell you about my one and only cordon bleu production?”
“What did you cook?” asked Ruth.
“Don’t remember; suffice to say it was the hautest of cuisines. The point is, it was meant to be a romantic dinner for my parents’ silver wedding anniversary the year before last. I locked the lads into their bedroom with a packet of chocolate biscuits, ushered the happy couple into the candlelit kitchen, opened the half bottle of champagne, and glided out, shutting the door softly behind me.”
“Of course.”
“You know what the clodhoppers did? They turned the lights back on at nine to watch Dynasty.” Maria slashed a radish in half.
Ruth laughed, laying her dripping whisk on the bare wood. “With my mother it was the other way round; it was me who was always disappointing her.” She reached past Maria for the garlic crusher. “Like, when I was about five, she went into labour with my brother, and I had to call the ambulance for her. I remember running into the kitchen to show her a daisy chain or something, and she was sitting on the floor and making a sort of grunting noise.”
“You creature! What did you do?”
“She told me to get the phone, but the cord wouldn’t reach. So then she said, ‘Do three nines, love, and tell them your mummy’s having a baby.’ She was having a what? Where? That was the first I’d heard of it. So I took about five goes at dialling—with my left thumb, I remember—and told them our address, and they came for her twenty minutes later.”
“Hang on. Surely your mother was proud of you then, not disappointed?”
Ruth shook garlic off her fingertips and scratched her eyebrow with one wrist. “All I remember is her look of exasperation while I was struggling with the phone.”
“If you had labour pains, you’d look more than exasperated.”
“I suppose so.” Ruth was staring into space. “It’s coming back to me now. She used to tell this story at parties, how she asked me would I like her to bring me a little brother home one day, and I said no, I’d rather a box of chocolates. How honest we are until we reach the age of reason.”
She could never remember which plants needed watering on which nights. That yucca seemed to be keeling over; it was probably too late for a reviving squirt of plant food. Maria considered the matter as she started up the droning vacuum cleaner. Just when her back was beginning to twinge, in the fourth corner of the manager’s office, the bag exploded.
Maggie was surprisingly nice about it. She said everyone did it once and few did it twice. After finishing all the rooms on her side of the corridor, she came back to help Maria mop the dust off the manager’s keyboard, family photos, and cafetière. Working only inches apart, the women felt their shyness evaporate. Maggie described her grandniece’s mysterious rash; Maria gave a brief summary of the difficulties of higher maths. And yes, wasn’t the backache an awful curse.
At the end of the evening, wheeling the overladen trolley into the fifth-floor elevator, Maria found herself on the point of blurting out something about the flat. A thoroughly stupid idea. What form would the revelation take: “I think I may be living with a couple of lesbians, Mags, what would you advise?” It wouldn’t be fair to embarrass a fifty-five-year-old like that. Besides, she thought, as she watched the light drip down the panel from five to one, she had to make up her own damn mind. How was she ever going to grow up if every time something scared her, she ran, lips quivering, to the nearest mother figure?
“Night, so.”
“Night night.”
On O’Connell Street Maria paused to change out of her hated pink overall. She sat on a ledge by the left knee of Anna Livia, a reclining giantess in bronze. She put on one thick jumper, then another, but she still shivered in the night air; the wool weighed her down. There were two stains on the front of her overall, but it would do until the laundry on Saturday. She folded it and squeezed it into her denim bag, over the bag of red grapes she hadn’t been able to resist on Moore Street that afternoon. She dug in and plucked four of them off the stem; they should give her enough energy to make it to the bus stop.
Behind her, eager fountains were hiding the green nakedness of the statue. A monster, really, all out of proportion, her bony thighs a good seven feet long. But the calm face always comforted Maria as she dragged her sore feet by after work. It was good to see a woman, even a mythical one, sprawling so disdainfully in a giant bath, oblivious to trucks and taxis.
Just get to the bus stop, Maria told herself as she strapped her bag and straightened up. A bus would be sure to come in ten or fifteen minutes, then a ten-minute ride, and no more than four minutes walking, including the stairs. She promised herself a scalding bath within the half hour, lavender oil slippy between her knees, steam lifting all her aches away. These nights she longed for the flat as if it were home. She kept forgetting there was anything to worry about.
With a forkful of apple crumble halfway to her mouth, Ruth was staring at her watch. “It’s stuck at half five.”
“Ten to seven now,” said Maria.
“Why didn’t somebody tell me?” she wailed.
Her mouth bulging with crumble, Jael pointed at her bare wrist.
“I was meant to be working out a strategy with the team, and now we’ll all be contradicting each other.”
Jael cackled, sliding the wine bottle toward Maria. “Who’s going to notice the difference? After a sherry reception all arguments about European unity sound the same.”
Ruth was rummaging in the pockets of her suede jacket. “Speech, lozenges, tissues, lip balm.”
“Ignore her, you’ll be grand,” said Maria. “Your black cap’s on the telly. Listen, are you sure you don’t want us to come?”
Jael rapped her fork on the table. “Oy, speak for yourself. No offence, but I’d be bored rigid.”
Ruth gave Maria a twist of the mouth. “I’m better on my own. See yez later.” The door slammed behind her, and a faint call came up the stairwell.
“What did she say?”
“Keep me some apple crumble, I think,” said Jael, and topped up Maria’s glass. “Or it could have been, Teach me how to rhumba, but that’s less likely.”
Maria licked the last trace of sweetness off her fork. “How come you don’t have a watch, anyway? Surely the stud farm could finance one.”
“Just don’t like them, they’re like handcuffs. Besides, if I want to know the time, there’s usually somebody to ask. No better way to chat up a stranger on a train.”
“You’re so bloody suggestive about all those years of travelling,” commented Maria from the window. She scanned the pavement but couldn’t see Ruth yet. “I bet you were a dishwasher in a series of little German teashops.”
Jael swirled the dregs in her balloon glass. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Couldn’t care less, to be honest,” said Maria. She stared over the rooftops. “But if I’d spent ten years on the move, I’d never shut up about it. All those trilingual puns and stories you must have.”
Jael was pressing the last crumbs of pastry onto the back of her fork. “I do use them at parties, or sometimes I make them up, because the best stories are lies. Like that time I was climbing in the Tyrol and slipped down a glacier—”
Maria turned, belliger
ent. “I believed that one.”
A whoop of laughter. “It must have been a good one, so. But mostly I find the present more interesting.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.” Then, casting her a concerned glance, Jael asked, “Why, is your present life so dull?”
“No, no.” She fumbled for the words. “It’s different for me, because things are so, well, different nowadays. I mean Dublin and all. Whereas you’ve got a past worth talking about.”
Jael tipped the wine bottle up to get the last mouthful. “Live long enough, pariah, and you too will be a Woman with a Past.”
“Maybe.” Maria turned her gaze back to the window. There was Ruth at last, a dark figure bobbing in and out of the crowd of shoppers. Maria waved her fingers.
“Anyway, why isn’t your own past worth talking about?”
She turned. “Ah, because. It’s only home, and it’s still there, I haven’t got right away from it yet.”
“I don’t think we ever get right away,” said Jael softly. “Tell me something about it.”
“Like what?”
“Something small.”
Maria turned into the room, frowning in concentration. “Can’t think. Well, the TV screen always has a sort of figure-of-eight smear on it from Mam, from my mother, she wipes it with a wet rag every Saturday morning. And we once had a budgie, but it flew out the window in a storm and didn’t come back. There’s a little statue of Our Lady with the hands chipped off, and a field out the back full of cowshit.”
“Look, don’t satirise it for my benefit,” Jael broke in. “I’m not a journalist.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just, if you liked it, don’t try and be sophisticated by slagging it.”
“I am not trying to sound sophisticated,” said Maria in fury.
Jael leaned her forehead on her fist. “That came out wrong. All I mean is, I come from the country too, I remember the smallness of it all.”
“Thought you were a filthy rich Prod from a stud farm.” Maria’s voice came out even more hostile than she intended.
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