by Maeve Binchy
The kettle was still hot so Jo found a mug with Visitor on it and put in a tea bag. ‘Nessa’s going to paint my name on a mug,’ she said to the man in the jacket, just for something to say. ‘Oh good,’ he said. He shrugged and asked Pauline, ‘Who’s Nessa?’
‘Lives over there,’ Pauline said, indicating the direction of Nessa’s room.
‘I’m the third girl,’ Jo said desperately. ‘Third in what?’ he said, genuinely bewildered. Pauline had fixed the tray of tea and biscuits and was moving towards the door.
‘’Night,’ she said, companionably enough.
‘Good night, Pauline, goodnight … er …’ Jo said.
She took the cup of tea into her own room. She turned up the television slightly in case she heard the sound of anything next door. She hoped she hadn’t annoyed Pauline. She couldn’t see what she had done that might annoy her, and anyway she had seemed cheerful enough when she was taking this boy off to – well, to her room. Jo sighed and got into bed.
* * *
Next morning she was coming out of the bathroom when she met Nessa.
‘It’s just “J” and “O”, two letters, isn’t it?’ Nessa asked.
‘Oh yes, that’s right, thank you very much, Nessa.’
‘Right. I didn’t want to do it and then find you had an “E” on it.’
‘No, no, it’s short for Josephine.’
‘Right on.’ Nessa was off.
‘What time are you coming home tonight?’ Jo asked.
‘Oh, I don’t think I’ll have them done tonight,’ Nessa said.
‘I didn’t mean that, I just wondered what you were doing for your tea … supper. You know?’
‘No idea,’ said Nessa cheerfully.
‘Oh,’ said Jo. ‘Sorry.’
* * *
Jacinta, who worked beside her, asked her how the flat was.
‘It’s great altogether,’ Jo said.
‘Dead right to get out of that hostel, you’d have no life in a hostel,’ Jacinta said wisely.
‘No, no indeed.’
‘God, I wish I didn’t live at home,’ Jacinta said. ‘It’s not natural for people to live in their own homes, there should be a law about it. They have laws over stupid things like not importing live fowl, as if anyone would want to, but they have no laws about the things that people really need.’
‘Yes,’ said Jo dutifully.
‘Anyway, you’ll have the high life from now on. You country ones have all the luck.’
‘I suppose we do,’ Jo agreed doubtfully.
* * *
If she had stayed in the hostel they might have been playing twenty-five in the lounge now, or someone might have bought a new record. They would look at the evening paper, sigh over the price of flats, wonder whether to go to the pictures and complain about the food. There would be talk and endless tea or bottles of coke from the machine. There would not be four walls as there were now.
She had bought a hamburger on the way home and eaten it. She washed her tights, she put the new sheets on the bed and hung her new towel up in the bathroom on the third hook. The other hooks had ‘N’ and ‘P’ on them. She took out her writing pad but remembered that she had written home on Friday just after she had found the flat. There was nothing new to tell. The evening yawned ahead of her. And then there would be Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday … Tears came into her eyes and fell down on to her lap as she sat on the end of her bed. She must be absolutely awful to have no friends and nowhere to go and nothing to do. Other people of eighteen had great times. She used to have great times when she was seventeen, at school and planning to be eighteen. Look at her now, sitting alone. Even her flat mates didn’t want to have anything to do with her. She cried and cried. Then she got a headache so she took two aspirins and climbed into bed. It’s bloody fantastic being grown up, she thought, as she switched off the light at nine o’clock.
* * *
There was ‘J’ on her towel rack, her name was on the bathroom shelf that belonged to her, and her empty kitchen shelf had a ‘Jo’ on it also. She examined the other two shelves. Nessa had cornflakes and a packet of sugar and a lot of tins of soup on her shelf. Pauline had a biscuit tin and about a dozen tins of grapefruit segments on hers.
The kitchen was nice and tidy. Nessa had said the first day that they never left any washing up to be done and that if you used the frying pan you had to scrub it then, not let it steep until the morning. It had all seemed great fun when she was talking about it then, because Jo had envisaged midnight feasts, and all three of them laughing and having parties. That’s what people did, for heaven’s sake. She must have just got in with two recluses, that was her problem.
Pauline came in to the kitchen yawning, and opened a tin of grapefruit segments. ‘I think I’d never wake up if I didn’t have these,’ she said. ‘I have half a tin and two biscuits for my breakfast every day, and then I’m ready for anything.’
Jo was pleased to be spoken to.
‘Is your friend here?’ she said, trying to be modern and racy.
‘Which friend?’ Pauline yawned and began to spoon the grapefruit out of the tin into a bowl.
‘You know, your friend, the other night?’
‘Nessa?’ Pauline looked at her blankly. ‘Do you mean Nessa?’
‘No, the fellow, the fellow with the jacket with the studs. I met him here in the kitchen.’
‘Oh yes. Shane.’
‘Shane. That was his name.’
‘Yeah, what about him, what were you saying?’
‘I was asking was he here?’
‘Here? Now? Why should he be here?’ Pauline pushed her pink hair out of her eyes and looked at her watch. ‘Jesus Christ, it’s only twenty to eight in the morning, why would he be here?’ She looked wildly around the kitchen as if the man with the studded leather jacket was going to appear from behind the gas cooker. Jo felt the conversation was going wrong.
‘I just asked sociably if he was still here, that was all.’
‘But why on earth would he be still here? I went out with him on Sunday night. Sunday. It’s Tuesday morning now, isn’t it? Why would he be here?’ Pauline looked confused and worried, and Jo wished she had never spoken.
‘I just thought he was your boyfriend …’
‘No, he’s not, but if he was I tell you I wouldn’t have him here at twenty to eight in the morning talking! I don’t know how anyone can talk in the mornings. It beats me.’
Jo drank her tea silently.
‘See you,’ said Pauline eventually when she had finished her biscuits and grapefruit, and crashed into the bathroom.
Jo thanked Nessa for putting up the names. Nessa was pleased. ‘I like doing that, it gives me a sense of order in the world. It defines things, that makes me feel better.’
‘Sure,’ said Jo. She was just about to ask Nessa what she was doing that evening when she remembered yesterday’s rebuff. She decided to phrase it differently this time.
‘Are you off out with your friends this evening?’ she said timidly.
‘I might be, I might not, it’s always hard to know in the morning, isn’t it?’
‘Yes it is,’ said Jo untruthfully. It was becoming increasingly easy to know in the morning, she thought. The answer was coming up loud and clear when she asked herself what she was going to do in the evening. The answer was Nothing.
‘Well I’m off now. Goodbye,’ she said to Nessa.
Nessa looked up and smiled. ‘Bye bye,’ she said vaguely, as if Jo had been the postman or the man delivering milk on the street.
* * *
On Thursday night Jo went downstairs to answer the phone. It was for one of the nurses on the ground floor as it always was. Hesitantly she knocked on their door. The big blonde nurse thanked her, and as Jo was going up the stairs again she heard the girl say, ‘No, it was one of the people in the flats upstairs. There’s three flats upstairs and we all share the same phone.’
That was it! That was what she hadn�
�t realised. She wasn’t in a flat with two other girls, she was in a flat by herself. Why hadn’t that dawned on her? She was in a proper bedsitter all of her own, she just shared kitchen and bathroom facilities, as they would put it in an ad. That’s what had been wrong. She had thought that she was meant to be part of a jolly all-girls-together. That’s why she had been so depressed. She went over the whole conversation with Nessa the first day; she remembered what they had said about doing it up as bedsitters but not telling the landlord anything, it never did to tell landlords anything, just keep paying the rent and keep out of his way.
There was quite a bounce in her step now. I’m on my own in Dublin, she thought, I have my own place, I’m going out to find a life for myself now. She didn’t have to worry about Pauline’s morals any more now. If Pauline wanted to bring home a rough-looking person with studs on his jacket that was Pauline’s business. She just lived in the flat next door. That’s what Pauline had meant when she had said Nessa lived next door. And that’s why Nessa went in for all this labelling and naming things. No wonder they had been slightly surprised when she kept asking them what they were doing in the evening; they must have thought she was mad.
Happy for the first time since Sunday, Jo did herself up. She put on eyeshadow and mascara, she put some colour in her cheeks and wore her big earrings. She didn’t know where she was going, but she decided that she would go out cheerfully now. She looked around her room and liked it much better. She would get some posters for the walls, she would even ask her mother if she could take some of the ornaments from home. The kitchen shelves at home were chock-a-block with ornaments; her mother would be glad to give some of them a new home. Humming happily, she set off.
She felt terrific as she swung along with her shoulderbag. She pitied her sisters who were only finishing the late shift now at the hotel. She pitied the girls who still had to stay in a hostel, who hadn’t been able to go out and find a place of their own. She felt sorry for Jacinta who had to stay at home and whose mother and father interrogated her about where she went and what she did. She pitied people who had to share television sets. What if you wanted to look at one thing and they wanted to look at something else? How did you decide? She was so full of good spirits that she nearly walked past the pub where the notice said: ‘Tonight – the Great Gaels.’
Imagine, the Great Gaels were there in person. In a pub. Cover charge £1. If she paid a pound she would see them close up. Up to now she had only seen them on television.
They had been at the Fleadh in Ennis once about four years ago, before they were famous. She had seen an advertisement, all right, saying that they would be in this pub, and now here she was outside it. Jo’s heart beat fast. Was it a thing you could do on your own, go into a concert in a pub? Probably it was a thing people went to in groups; she might look odd. Maybe there’d be no place for just one person to sit. Maybe it would only be tables for groups.
But a great surge of courage came flooding over her. She was a young woman who lived in a flat on her own in Dublin, she had her own place and by the Lord, if she could do that, she could certainly go into a pub and hear the Great Gaels on her own. She pushed the door.
A man sat at the desk inside and gave her a cloakroom ticket and took her pound.
‘Where do I go?’ she almost whispered.
‘For what?’ he asked.
‘You know, where exactly do I go?’ she asked. It seemed like an ordinary pub to her, no stage, maybe the Great Gaels were upstairs.
The man assumed she was looking for the Ladies. ‘I think it’s over there near the other door, yes, there it is beside the Gents.’ He pointed across the room.
Flushing a dark red she thanked him. In case he was still looking at her she thought she had better go to the Ladies. In the cloakroom she looked at her face. It had looked fine at home, back in her flat. In here it looked a bit dull, no character, no colour. She put on much more makeup in the dim light and came out to find out where the concert would be held.
She saw two women sitting together. They looked safe enough to ask. They told her with an air of surprise that it would be in the pub, but not for about an hour.
‘What do we do until then?’ she asked.
They laughed. ‘I suppose you could consider having a drink, it is a pub after all,’ said one of them. They went back to their conversation. She felt very silly. She didn’t want to leave and come back in case there was no re-admittance. She wished she had brought a paper or a book. Everyone else seemed to be talking.
She sat for what seemed like a very long time. Twice the waiter asked her would she be having another drink as he cleaned around her glass of orange, which she was ekeing out. She didn’t want to waste too much money; a pound already coming in was enough to spend.
Then people arrived and started to fix up microphones, and the crowd was bigger suddenly and she was squeezed towards the end of the seat, and she saw the Great Gaels having pints up at the bar just as if they were ordinary customers. Wasn’t Dublin fantastic? You could go into a pub and sit and have a drink in the same place as the Great Gaels. They’d never believe her at home.
The lead singer of the Great Gaels was tapping the microphone and testing it by saying, ‘a haon, a dhó, a thrí …’ Everyone laughed and settled down with full drinks.
‘Come on now, attention please, we don’t want anyone with an empty glass now getting up and disturbing us,’ he said.
‘Divil a fear of that,’ someone shouted.
‘All right, look around you. If you see anyone who might be fidgety, fill up their glass for them.’
Two men beside Jo looked at her glass disapprovingly. ‘What have you in there, Miss?’ one said.
‘Orange, but it’s fine, I won’t get up and disturb them,’ she said, hating to be the centre of attention.
‘Large gin and orange for the lady,’ one man said.
‘Oh no,’ called Jo. ‘It’s not gin …’
‘Sorry. Large vodka and orange for the lady,’ he corrected.
‘Right,’ said the waiter, eyeing her disapprovingly, Jo felt.
When it came she had her purse out.
‘Nonsense, I bought you a drink,’ said the man.
‘Oh, but you can’t do that,’ she said.
He paid what seemed like a fortune for it; Jo looked into the glass nervously.
‘It was very expensive, wasn’t it?’ she said.
‘Well, that’s the luck of the draw, you might have been a beer drinker,’ he smiled at her. He was very old, over thirty, and his friend was about the same.
Jo wished they hadn’t bought the drink. She wasn’t used to accepting drinks. Should she offer to buy the next round? Would they accept, or would they worse still buy her another? Perhaps she should just accept this one and move a bit away from them. But wasn’t that awfully rude? Anyway, now with the Great Gaels about to begin, she wouldn’t have to talk to them.
‘Thank you very much indeed,’ she said putting the orange into the large vodka. ‘That’s very nice of you, and most generous.’
‘Not at all,’ said the man with the open-neck shirt.
‘It’sh a pleashure,’ said the other man.
Then she realised that they were both very drunk.
The Great Gaels had started, but Jo couldn’t enjoy them. She felt this should have been a great night, only twenty feet away from Ireland’s most popular singers, in a nice, warm pub, and a free drink in her hand, what more could a girl want? But to her great embarrassment the man with the open-neck shirt had settled himself so that his arm was along the back of the seat behind her, and from time to time it would drop round her shoulder. His friend was beating his feet to the music with such energy that a lot of his pint had already spilled on the floor.
Jo hoped fervently that they wouldn’t make a scene, and that if they did nobody would think that they were with her. She had a horror of drunks ever since the time that her Uncle Jim had taken up the leg of lamb and thrown it into the fir
e because somebody crossed him when they had all been invited to a meal. The evening had broken up in a shambles and as they went home her father had spoken about drink being a good servant but a cruel master. Her father had said that Uncle Jim was two people, one drunk and one sober, and they were as unlike as you could find. Her father said that it was a mercy that Uncle Jim’s weakness hadn’t been noticeable in any of the rest of the family, and her mother had been very upset and said they had all thought Jim was cured.
Sometimes her sisters told her terrible things people had done in the hotel when they were drunk. Drunkenness was something frightening and unknown. And now she had managed to land herself in a corner with a drunk’s arm around her.
The Great Gaels played encore after encore, and they only stopped at closing time. Jo had now received another large vodka and orange from the friend of the open-shirted man, and when she had tried to refuse, he had said, ‘You took one from Gerry – what’s wrong with my drink?’
She had been so alarmed by his attitude she had rushed to drink it.
The Great Gaels were selling copies of their latest record, and autographing it as well. She would have loved to have bought it in some ways, to remind herself that she had been right beside them, but then it would have reminded her of Gerry and Christy, and the huge vodkas which were making her legs feel funny, and the awful fact that the evening was not over yet.
‘I tried to buy you a drink to say thank you for all you bought me, but the bar man told me it’s after closing time,’ she said nervously.
‘It is now?’ said Gerry. ‘Isn’t that a bit of bad news.’
‘Imagine, the girl didn’t get a chance to buy us a drink,’ said Christy.
‘That’s unfortunate,’ said Gerry.
‘Most unfortunate,’ said Christy.
‘Maybe I could meet you another night and buy you one?’ She looked anxiously from one to another. ‘Would that be all right?’
‘That would be quite all right, it would be excellent,’ said Gerry.
