Thirteen Stops

by Sandra Harris

  Jack smiled, anyway, at her remark, and said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s gorgeous. Can you let it down?”

  “Like Rapunzel,” giggled Fauve, on whom the cocktails were already working their sultry magic.

  “Like Rapunzel,” Jack agreed solemnly.

  He’d watched while she unpinned her hair, which fell in a lustrous coil to halfway down her back. She shook it out self-consciously and then chanced a look at him from beneath the fake eyelashes she’d glued on after work.

  “It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.”

  “Ah, g’wan out of that!” Fauve slurred in mock-modesty. “Would you ever feck off!”

  “No, you are, and, what’s more, you know you are.”

  “Well, maybe,” slinked back Fauve, who knew no such thing, but who was she to argue with this drop-dead sexy Adonis who was easily the best-looking guy she’d pulled in, like, a bazillion years?

  “Another cocktail? These are going down like water, aren’t they? I’m done with mine already.”

  Fauve nodded in what she hoped was a coquettish manner but which she feared merely said about her: “Yes, Attractive Stranger, you’re quite right! I’m an old soak who’ll put out for booze, so can you liquor me up on the double, please, you delicious sex-bomb, you?”

  They drank more cocktails. She’d told Jack quite a lot about herself by this stage, not just the usual stuff about what she did for a living and where she lived and about her housemates, but silly stuff from her past too, like how she’d had braces on her teeth until she was nearly twenty-one because her father was a dentist and had a big hard-on for straight teeth. She told him about how she’d once had a dog called Nellie, named after Nellie Oleson from Little House on the Prairie. Nellie, a feisty Jack Russell, bit the neighbours, the postman and anyone who came within an ass’s roar of the house. In the end, it became so bad that Fauve’s dad had to take Nellie to live on a farm somewhere ‘down the country’. When Fauve grew up and discovered what the words ‘a farm down the country’ really meant, she’d been traumatised beyond words. It still made her cry buckets to think about it. Poor, poor Nellie.

  She’d even told him something she didn’t usually talk about to other people: the fact that her parents were disappointed with her for only working as a doctor’s receptionist instead of going to medical school, or to dental college as they’d wanted her to. Or even law school, like her solicitor mother. That was the trouble with having professional people for parents. They always bloody well wanted you to follow in their boring bloody footsteps.

  “But I didn’t want to spend another six or seven years of my life in fucking college,” she’d slurred at Jack, who’d nodded gravely. “I bloody hated school and I couldn’t bear the thought of a load more years spent swotting my arse off over a bunch of dry old textbooks that I couldn’t make head-or-tail of, d’you know what I mean? I couldn’t stand all that stuff in school, so why would I want to sign up for years and years more of the same?”

  Jack had nodded in sympathy again while signalling to the overworked barman to bring two more drinks over to their seats. He let Fauve talk and talk and talk, all the while stroking her hair or putting his hands lightly but proprietorially on her arm or on her knee or even on her bare thigh in the short skirt she was wearing. Fauve adored that he seemed to be listening so attentively to her bemoaning her situation. She was tickled pink by his close attention. As for any sleuthing on Fauve’s end, all she had managed to get out of Jack was that he was twenty-eight, that he lived in Dublin and worked in marketing. He didn’t specify what aspect of marketing, he didn’t say where in Dublin he lived or even if he was single, but he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring or sporting the tell-tale tan lines that indicated that he’d taken one off and slipped it into his pocket for the night – the mark of a true sleazebag, as Fauve and her friends well knew. Still, it was the least amount of information that she’d ever managed to wheedle out of a guy she was thinking of going to bed with. He was definitely very close-mouthed on the subject of himself. If she’d been sober, she might have done a bit better but, as it was, the cocktails had done their work magnificently and she was utterly plastered when she staggered out of the club on Jack’s arm, waving royally to her friend Molly as she passed. Molly had pulled a portly, pinstriped wanker-banker, not unlike Orla’s Nathan, and was as pleased as Punch with herself.

  They’d got a taxi to Fauve’s place in Kilmacud.

  The sex with Jack had been fan-fucking-tastic. He had been much more in control of his drinking than Fauve – thank Christ! – and he’d managed perfectly serviceable intercourse twice (condomless – the subject of protection never even came up, much to Fauve’s later shame) before they both fell asleep in Fauve’s bed. Fauve had thoroughly enjoyed gazing up uninterrupted at Jack’s handsome face during the sex, the face that looked as if it should be gracing a billboard ad for designer aftershave or some celebrity’s brand of underwear. He was gorgeous in a totally swoonsome way. Even while blind drunk (enough to completely forget to take her pill, anyway), Fauve could appreciate this fact. How easily she could fall in love with a guy like this!

  The following morning she’d been gutted when he’d said he had to go to work. But it was, after all, a workday – Wednesday, or ‘Hump Day’, after which you’d be freewheeling down to the weekend again. But he’d left her his mobile number, at her request admittedly, on a piece of paper she’d hurriedly torn from a notebook. She’d snuggled back under the covers with his phone number under her pillow after he’d left, too hungover to go to work and wanting nothing more than just to lie there in her warm toasty bed, congratulating herself on her good fortune in meeting someone as attractive and special as Handsome Jack.

  After begging Doireann to phone in sick for her – not for the first time – she’d slept like a log until nearly the close of business for the day. She’d hauled herself out of bed then, showered and made herself a light meal of an omelette with some salady remains from the fridge which were rapidly nearing their sell-by date. There was no name pasted onto the salad bowl, which meant that anyone who wanted could fill their boots. A name pasted onto the bowl meant Piss Off And Get Your Own Food, You Scabby Git. Over her meal, she’d sent a text to Jack on the number he’d left her that morning. After agonising over the wording for a full quarter of an hour, she’d finally settled on: Hey you, how was your day? Loved last night, must do it again soon. Rapunzel here, aka Fauve. Absolutely no kisses yet – it was much too soon. She wasn’t a fool. She knew how easy it was to scare blokes off with all that soppy stuff. She thought her text was bright and breezy enough to more than pass the acceptability test.

  To Fauve’s distress, Jack didn’t reply to the text, even though she’d received a delivery report for the message and so she knew it was a real number and that she hadn’t been fake-numbered, something that had happened to her in the past. That had really pissed her off. How could a man be so immature and childish as to give a woman a fake number? She couldn’t understand the mentality of someone like that. What was the big deal about giving a woman your real phone number? Why were guys so precious about their bloody phone numbers, anyway? Afraid of their lives that some woman might get a hold, however tenuous, on them? Meh. Screw that, seriously.

  She’d spent a miserable evening moping about the house, jumping every time her phone beeped with a text. As was always the way when she was waiting – hoping – for a text from a special someone, Fate mocked her with a succession of texts from the wrong people. (Clearly not the same sympathetic Fate that had brought them together in the first place, harrumph harrumph! An underling, maybe, filling in for the real Fate, an underling who hadn’t read any of the notes on Fauve and Jack left out for him or her to peruse. You just couldn’t get the staff these days. Again, harrumph.)

  First her mother Elaine, saying she hoped Fauve was planning on wearing something nice when she came over to the house for Sunday Lunch-With-A-Capital-L, as Granny Helene and Granddad Joseph, both professional people
(though not still practising) and from whom Fauve’s mother had inherited her terrifying ambition, would be there. Oh, joy unconfined, Fauve wanted to text back but of course she didn’t dare, just told her mother what she wanted to hear. Next came a text from her hairdresser’s. They wanted her to know that they were having a twenty-per-cent-off sale on all their bottled shampoos and conditioners. Fauve was fine for hair products at the moment and she deleted the text with a huge sigh. By the time she’d had the text from Orla, asking her to put on the immersion heater so she could jump in the bath the minute she came home because she was going out with Nathan later on, and the text from the local takeaway place, urging her to buy a poxy chicken snackbox on a Wednesday in order to avail of one free poxy mini-snackbox and a free can of orange soda on the same day, Fauve was ready to throw the phone at the wall the way she’d seen people in films do it. She’d seen a guy in a film chuck his phone in the ocean once. She didn’t throw it, though, because what they never show you in these films is the bit where the hasty phone-thrower has to slink sheepishly over to where they’ve flung their phone to gather up the pieces and try to glue them back together. Because everyone needs a bloody phone, right? Worst-case scenario, they have to eventually present themselves shamefaced at the New Phone Emporium to buy a new phone because the old one was, basically, fucked from being flung at walls. People in films were so stupid sometimes.

  Fauve kept the phone beside her when she slept, though, and left it on ‘loud’ and on ‘vibrate’ so that she could hear it if – when – it beeped in the night. When she woke the next morning, the first thing she did was check her phone. Only one text, from her bloody service provider. It was time to top up by twenty quid again if she wanted to keep availing herself of free text messages for the month ahead. For fuck’s sake. She was gutted, but she’d still had to drag herself out of bed and practically force herself to go to work and be nice and smiley to the clients who came in for their biopsy or ultrasound results, because none of this was their fault.

  There began then a long, bleak horrible period of Waiting-For-Jack-To-Call-Or-Text, but he never did, no matter how many texts or voice messages Fauve sent him, and she sent him a lot of messages. It wasn’t very satisfactory leaving him voice messages, because it meant listening to that annoying automated bloody woman’s voice starting in with her “You have reached the voice mailbox of 087-blah blah blah, please leave your blah after the blah.” Blaaaaaaaaah! It wasn’t even Jack’s own voice on the message. She could imagine him casually saying: “Hi, you’ve reached Jack, leave me a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can, especially if you’re Fauve, the beautiful girl I met a few nights ago in Copper’s and who I’ve been thinking about every minute of every day since. Please call, Fauve, I desperately want you. I’m nothing without you. I need you to make me whole again.”

  She confided in Doireann about the whole sorry affair, on the morning her housemate had come downstairs to find her bawling her eyes out and holding her phone like it was a photo of someone dear to her who’d gone off to fight in World War II or something. Doireann made large amounts of coffee and agreed with Fauve that Handsome Jack was clearly the kind of shit who slept with women he didn’t know and then buggered off without any intention of seeing them again. Doireann was kind and tactful enough not to say stuff like, ‘Well, what did you expect, Fauve? You slept with a total stranger who got you blind drunk at Copper’s?’ Fauve was immensely grateful for her tact. She didn’t need judging – she had already judged herself plenty. She knew that it was a bit sluttish (well, a lot sluttish really) to have irresponsible one-night-stands with blokes you met in pubs and clubs, but what guys didn’t understand was that the women who did that weren’t really looking for sex at all – they were really just looking for love, like most women were, and they shouldn’t be dismissed as slags because of the way they went about it. Like, where the hell else were they meant to meet fellas? Fauve wasn’t about to sign up for a night class in basic motorbike mechanics. She had a life, thanks very much. Anyway, everyone knew that those classes were mainly attended by grim-faced single women looking for a man in the Last Chance Saloon, so there. You had about as much chance of meeting a man there as you did of ever convincing your mother that you were a worthwhile human being deserving of her respect.

  But Jack obviously viewed Fauve as just another notch on his bedpost, a structure that was probably so riddled with notches by now that it likely couldn’t even take its owner’s weight any longer. Fauve thought it was terribly unfair that she was the one who’d be classed as the slut, while Jack was just doing what came naturally to guys and no blame would attach to him whatsoever. No consequences either. But there would be consequences for Fauve, might already be consequences. At the very least, and she’d be lucky if she got off so lightly, there was the whole thing of feeling shame and remorse for her impulsive behaviour, and mainly there was the fact that she felt like a giant twat for letting some smooth-talking Casanova chat her into bed for just the price of a few blue cocktails. Why had she priced herself so low? And had she always done that? She was deeply ashamed of her own answer.

  “Will we have a biscuit?” Doireann said now, breaking into Fauve’s reverie. “I’m feeling reckless. I’ve stuck to my diet all week and I deserve a break. Chocolate or plain?”

  “What does it matter?” said Fauve glumly, wrapping her hands around her coffee cup and taking a grim pleasure from the fact that it was burning her hands. “I’ll be the size of an elephant soon enough anyway, so who cares what I eat?”

  “Now stop it. You don’t know that,” Doireann said firmly, sitting down across the kitchen table from Fauve and putting the biscuit tin between them. “Think of all the times in your life you’ve done a pregnancy test and they’ve all been negative. Every single one of them. Think of all the times I’ve done tests, and Sasha and Orla too. We’re . . .” she thought for a minute, “we’re the Uncatchables!” she finished with a flourish.

  There was even that one legendary time that all four of them had been convinced at the same time that they’d been caught and were pregnant, even though all four of them were on the pill and (mostly) carried condoms around with them on a night out. (The ‘mostly’ nights were the nights you had to worry about, especially if you forgot to take your pill on the same night, or accidentally puked up your pill when you had a stomach bug. These things had all happened to girls they knew at one time or another.) It was about a year earlier, not long after they’d all started living together. They’d stocked up on booze, bought four pregnancy tests and had a ‘test’ party at the house. They had done their tests one after the other while nearly blotto on the gin and vodka they’d bought, and every one of them had had their tests come back negative, much to their collective relief and surprise. They’d celebrated by grabbing a taxi into town and getting even more shit-faced at Copper’s. Every one of them, bar Orla, who was already seeing the awful Nathan by that time, had got the ride that night, and the following day saw a mad scramble to find places that dispensed the beautiful, ever-blessed morning-after pill. Life goes on. Sasha, in particular, had been certain once more that she’d been knocked up and there was no consoling her until enough time had elapsed for her to do another test, which had come back negative. She had been so relieved she’d sworn blind to never, ever have unsafe sex again but of course she’d broken her promise the next time she went out. They’d all broken their promises to behave more cautiously and sensibly a dozen or more times. It was hard to be good all the time, goddamit, reflected Fauve as she disconsolately dipped a chocolate digestive into her coffee, not even caring when half of it broke off and fell in her cup. Fauve sighed heavily. It was no more than she deserved, after what she’d done. A soggy biscuit was surely the least of what she deserved, for her rank stupidity in getting ‘caught’, and by such an obvious player too!

  It was inevitable that one of the four women would get caught one day. You can’t continuously play with fire and not get burnt. So now, Fau
ve thought, she’d be pregnant and her parents (and grandparents) would be even more disappointed in her than they already were, and her sister Brianne, the perfect sister, would shake her head in disbelief and say, “C’mon, Fauve, honestly, a baby?” in that snooty fucking voice of hers, as if getting pregnant was the worst sin you could commit. Well, it probably was, thought Fauve sadly, but she still wasn’t relishing the thought of Brianne gloating at her misfortune which, let’s face it, was what she’d do. Of course, Little Miss Perfect Sister Brianne had a degree in Economics and an important position in a fancy company perched at the very cutting edge of mobile-phone technology, and she was engaged to the equally perfect but dull-as-dishwater Eamonn who worked in the same company. Their wedding next summer would be the Wedding of the Year and it would make Posh and Becks’ nuptials look like a cup of char and a fag in a greasy spoon somewhere, that was how big a deal it was.

  Whereas she, Fauve, was only a receptionist. It didn’t matter that her boss was one of the most eminent and highly esteemed cancer specialists in the country – the way her parents treated Fauve’s job, you’d swear she was only the fucking cleaner in the place and now, probably, a knocked-up receptionist/cleaner to boot. She’d have to quit her job and go and live in a council flat somewhere with her snotty brat who’d cry all day and all night until Fauve went insane and flung herself, or the brat, out the window of their high-rise tower block. Okay, so there weren’t any high-rise tower blocks any more to which single mothers could be exiled as punishment for their crime of committing the ultimate sin against decent society, but the whole situation was still a steaming, stinking pile of horse doo-doo. Guys would never look twice at her again. Everyone knew that no fella in his right mind wanted to be saddled with a single mother and her offspring. They came with too much baggage for the average guy to cope with. She’d have to give up fags and booze and lovely smoky nights out and all the things that made life worth living. And for what? So that she could get fatter and fatter until one day she found it was just easier to wear horrible elasticated sweatpants than attempt to fit into something that gave her a waist. She’d even have to give up dyeing her hair for now because she’d read somewhere that hair-dye was bad for the baby. Nearly everything she liked to do would be Bad For The Baby. Probably even having sex was bad for the baby, not that she was currently having any. And who’d ever want to have sex with her again, after she’d lost her figure and her boobs drooped down to her knees because of all the breastfeeding the booby-feeding Nazis would shame her into doing? She’d have to devote the rest of her miserable, sexless saggy-boobed life to a baby she didn’t want, a baby whose father wouldn’t even know of his or her existence.