by Kevin Barry
‘You know it hurts,’ said her best friend.
She shrugged.
‘It will,’ said her friend.
‘You know it can fit a baby’s head.’
‘And you can know that all you like but it still hurts. Trust me.’ And she mirrored the shrug and pushed her tongue under her bottom lip and into a pout and then she said, ‘Do you trust him not to blab afterwards?’
‘Yeah.’ She was the only person he ever blabbed to anyway. He’d told her everything she’d ever asked for and more besides, his eyes wide as if to warn his flapping mouth that he needed to stop giving away so much of himself because there’d be nothing left to hold court over soon. He told her about the battles his father dragged him into, and the hours of the clock he most missed his mam, and why he didn’t care what teachers said, what guards said, what social workers said, what anybody said except her. Her mouth and, deeper and more truthfully, her body.
‘They always blab,’ her friend said.
‘He won’t.’
They drifted away from Summer Wear and further into the store, following a course marked out by pastels and Special Offers. The intercom crackled. A woman droned an order for someone to pick up a phone call.
‘Will you be his first?’ said her best friend.
‘I don’t know.’
This was something she didn’t want to think about. She had made her decision and she didn’t need it marred by the thoughts of his body being charted territory. Of course it was, though. There was a girl right before her; she was sixteen and a friend of his cousin’s and the whole school – what had sounded like the whole school to her burning ears – had talked about it. That a sixteen-year-old girl in Transition Year would have any interest in a then fourteen-year-old young fella was something worthy of long, whispered debate and, depending on the gender of your selected protagonist, awe or ridicule. So there must have been sex. Sixteen was a milestone.
The sixteen-year-old had been shelved with staggering speed, but that, she knew, was down to her making her own intentions known to him, not because of sex too freely given and poisoning his interest. She wasn’t sure exactly what it was he loved about her that he didn’t love about the sixteen-year-old, but it was gratifying. Not just gratifying. Wonderful. Amazing. Head-swellingly magnificent. He loved her. He’d loved her for months. All she’d had to do was shrug and smile and he was hers entirely. She trusted him for that. Did it matter if it was to be her first time and not his?
Yes.
But there was nothing she could do about it.
‘You’re as well off, like,’ said her friend. ‘He’ll know what he’s supposed to do.’
‘Like he wouldn’t know anyway.’
Boys always knew. It wasn’t something they were told in science but you didn’t need to teach the absolute truth. Boys just knew these things. They were much closer to instinct than to cop-on so they were ready for it at their very first quickening. Boys never said, Hold on. Boys just flaked into it like hormonal juggernauts. Boys were lorries.
There was a part of her glad of this and a part of her that still wanted him to be unsure and clumsy.
Her best friend said, ‘You’re going to have to tell him to be ready and stuff. He’ll have to get Things.’
‘Don’t be stupid. If I tell him, he’ll know.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said her friend. There’d be no room for error or mind-changing or delaying the scheme of things if having sex was something he expected. It had to be a surprise, a feeling that the opportunity was just a gate she’d shyly left ajar.
‘Then you’ll have to get some,’ her friend said.
‘Oh, I will, yeah! He’d think I was a slut.’
‘Well what then?’
‘Maybe he’ll have some.’ She’d have to trust that he’d know, on some level, what she wanted from him. There was so much she could already tell him with a look, or a stroke of his hand. Or his back. Or that vertical line she liked to draw just above his belly button. Just below.
They were closing in on the lingerie section. ‘I should buy something,’ she said. ‘Like, something cute. Not sexy.’ Not blatant.
‘Something just for him?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What if you wear them and nothing happens?’
‘It’ll happen.’
She chose a matching set: a bra with light-blue pinstripes and a white, lacy trim, briefs to match. There was a thong too. She had no problem with thongs; you couldn’t wear anything else under a tracksuit bottoms, otherwise there’d be a map drawn on your bum for anyone’s mind to wander. But for this occasion it seemed wrong. Too obvious. And having sex with him was something she’d decided to do but she wanted it to be something he did to her. A thong just wouldn’t work in that scenario. A thong would tell him she’d thought about it.
Her father was still freaked about the advent of thongs on his washing line. She was the middle of three teenage daughters, and she knew her dad was worrying himself grey about what they got up to when he wasn’t there to shepherd them. He didn’t know she had a boyfriend at all, and she needed to keep it that way for as long as she could.
She carried the underwear to the checkout. As they were queuing, she considered picking up a few of the last-minute extras the clever people at the shop lined the path with – fake tan, lip balm, false eyelashes – but she didn’t have the coins to throw away on a mask, not if she wanted McDonald’s and ice cream after, like every other day marked Saturday, Boring. The girl at the till shouted, ‘Next please!’ and raised neither smirk nor eyebrow when she placed the set on the counter but it might have been as obvious as a flashing siren strapped to her head; she wasn’t sure and she didn’t know if she was being stupid and insane and pinning meaning to things that didn’t need meaning.
She picked up the bag from the counter and her friend said, ‘Like, this isn’t the first thing you’ve done with him, though.’
She didn’t reply until she was safely away from the shop assistant. ‘You think you’d keep it down?’ she said.
‘Like she’s your mam.’
‘Still!’
‘She might tell your mam. She might announce it over the intercom. Hello, is there a mammy here who owns a blonde wearing Cons and skinnies and a purple Adidas top? She’s buying nice knickers. She’s up to something.’
‘You’re very smart,’ she said.
She might tell her mam herself, the way she inadvertently told her every wilful snippet by letting it run rampant across her treacherous face. What are you up to? her mother would say. What are you at? Like a toddler taking revenge by scribbling on her parents’ bedroom wall, she thought that she might even want her mother to twig it.
Not so with her dad.
He would be in the sitting room when she got home. He was a logistics manager down in Ringaskiddy and he usually did Saturday mornings and then came home and sprawled for the afternoon, in so far as a wiry bag of nerves could sprawl. Only the minimum required area of his arse would be on the couch, the rest of him poised like a jack-in-the-box over the balls of his dainty feet. Her dad had been designed for maximum efficiency. She got her small frame and short temper from him.
‘You shopping again?’ her dad would say, and she’d swing the bag loosely, so that it didn’t show the form of the illicit gifts inside.
Her dad was funny, gobby and confrontational. He didn’t like change and so he dealt with everything new in the wrong way – he flung threats about until the walls he’d kept around his girls were slimed with the trails of sinister promises that slid into filmy pools on the floor. He would never be able to tell what she was up to. And this made her kind of, a little bit, inappropriately for this Saturday, Boring . . . sad. Not crying, keening, snorting sad, of course, but enough to prick the corners of her eyes. She didn’t want her dad to know what she was thinking; she wasn’t sad because he couldn’t read her mind. She was sad for him.
Her dad had been a boy once and boys lived their whole lives having th
eir decisions made for them by girls, whether they knew it or not, whether they wanted it or not. Her dad would vow that mountains be moved before he’d allow a rival male get any sort of foothold in the conquest of his daughters – especially the middle one, the glinting little blonde who was most like him – but it would be to no avail. He could do nothing about this. He could swear and dance his tantrums but he couldn’t stop progress, and this was how she was progressing, this was where she was going – straight to another dominion, and it was nowhere her dad could follow.
Her friend asked again. ‘Have you done anything with him yet?’
More than once, she and her friends had pored over the glossy magazines with their tales of biological audacity and invading alien life forms. ‘How to Blow His Mind in Ten Minutes.’ ‘Sex in Enclosed Spaces.’ ‘What Your Favourite Cocktail Can Tell You About His Cock.’ There was so much to learn and so much expected of her. Waxing. Buffing. Bleaching. She had cautiously concluded that the hints and tricks and stern provisos were all nonsense. She couldn’t be certain. She was afraid to wax and unsure where to buff and the idea of bleaching anything made her want to run to her mam and bury her head in her shoulder. It had occurred to her that the women in the glossy magazines were maybe being devious in their reverse psychology. That the entire genre was written and run by smirking nuns. None of it corresponded with the feeling deep in her belly and the impatience that caught in her throat when she was pressed against his chest with her hands in his back pockets.
She didn’t really want to have to tell anyone what had happened between their first kiss and this afternoon’s realisation. She wanted to have sex with him and she didn’t want there to be a set process. Things just happened when they were together and every small gesture was theirs alone and may as well never have been attempted by anyone before. Just like his words, his actions were newborn and yet as ancient and innate as breathing.
One nana, her dad’s mother, used to say of wily children that they had been ‘out before’. Maybe that’s how it was, between them. Old and new at the same time. When she was with him she didn’t think of the sixteen-year-old who’d treaded the same ground only a couple of weeks before. She didn’t think of the boys she’d been tangled up in, the ones who had botched their invasions in the dark corners of Youth Club discos. The ones with whom she’d had biting kisses. Languid, slimy tongues. One awkward hand job, where any enthusiasm she might have had was scuppered by the fact that his jeans zip was all the way up and there was no room in there for her hand to move at all.
‘Well?’ said her friend. ‘I promise I won’t tell anyone.’
They’d had two hours together last night. The Junior Cert was coming and her mam and dad were see-sawing between hardassery and judicial lenience, and on this occasion the lever had come down in her favour. She’d texted him and galloped out to meet him at the corner of the big green outside his estate. It was relatively private. There was no clear view from any of the houses around the green, and a wall and a parked car made the borders for their world. Because it was dark they hadn’t said all that much. Talking was for daytime and night-time was for clawing advantage from.
‘Hand job?’ said her friend. ‘Blow job? Cos you have to start somewhere or it’ll be like a total shock to dive in totally.’
‘We’ve started somewhere,’ she said.
‘Yeah, but where?’
‘Doesn’t matter where,’ she said.
‘Why won’t you tell me?’ said her friend. ‘If you’re ashamed of it already you can hardly keep going.’
‘I’m not ashamed of it,’ she said. She just didn’t want to share. And that was a strange realisation, too. She actually didn’t care whether or not her best friend thought it was fine. She’d just wanted to say it. I want to have sex. I want to go there. I want it to be him. To make it real and solid and to have the whole world slow down its revolution so as to make space for her.
‘Be that way so,’ said her friend.
‘It’s just between me and him, is all.’
‘That means you’ve done nothing.’
Her friend waited for a reaction to her thrown gauntlet, the accusation of frigidity she’d cast between them. She’d be waiting a while.
‘Are we going to McDonald’s so?’ said her friend, after the clock struck.
‘D’you know what? I think I’ll leave it. I’ll go study a while.’
‘Study?’
‘Junior Cert’s coming, isn’t it?’
‘That’s what it is, yeah,’ said her friend, bitterly.
It felt like something had snapped and broken. Some parameter she only noticed in its absence.
She wondered if he felt the same way. If he noticed the horizon shifting. If he sat at home now wondering why the sky was that bit bigger. If he was playing with his phone in his hands, waiting for her text explaining where this new space was opening from, telling him that she was ready to go with his instinct if he’d just learn a little from her cop-on.
Her friend said, ‘When are you going to do it?’
‘Maybe later. Maybe in a few days. You can’t put a definite on something like this.’
‘Tell me after, though.’
‘Duh.’ She wasn’t promising anything. ‘I’ll see you Monday anyway,’ she said.
For a second her friend looked like she was going to cry. Like she was seeing her off to war. She shifted her weight and her shoulders jerked and she said, again, ‘Tell me after,’ like a goodbye, because they both knew there’d be no full story after, that at most there’d be a quick concession to the act that had passed and the loss of that last burden of eleventh-hour childhood. They were still friends but what was friendship now?
The realisation spread across her shoulders and anchored her to the ground. Her friend turned to leave and as she watched her trudge away she pressed her palms flat against her belly and she was Home, and happy for it, and suddenly old as the sea.
Tiger
Michael Harding
I was glad to be back in Castlebar, behind my own door, talking to the cat. I’d spent the day in Sligo trying to tell Maureen that I had prostate cancer. It was Philip’s eighteenth birthday, and I was amazed that she actually put on lunch and invited me, and I suppose it wasn’t the time to be talking about my health; but I knew I had to tell her sometime.
I said to Philip, ‘You’re a grown man now,’ as we munched on T-bone steaks that Maureen had cooked on the barbecue machine outside, before it started raining, at which point we abandoned the patio and came back into the sun room and finished our meal there. ‘T-bone for the young man,’ she said, gushing at Philip, who is seven foot tall and flaunts dreadlocks that go all the way down to his backside and he walks like he’s trying to balance something on his head.
‘I’m proud of you,’ I said to Philip. There was no reply to that. His face said, so what. Nor could I get a moment with Maureen on her own, so in the end the prostate never got mentioned either.
I stopped the jeep three times on my way back to Castlebar to piss in the bushes on the side of the motorway and when I got inside the apartment in Angle Court, I undressed and then sat on the toilet, trying to piss, as the bath was running. The cat was in the doorway. I sometimes wonder does she notice when I’m naked, or does it disturb her.
There’s a downside to everything, including living alone in an apartment; for one thing, cats, or any pets, are not allowed, and I’m obliged to hide Tiger 2’s existence. But a definite plus is that the water tank is insulated in a hard green shell, so that the water stays hot all day.
I thought Maureen didn’t like cats, until I was leaving and she insisted on keeping the one we had at the time. It was a long-haired white queen with some black marks. We called her Tiger, because we thought she resembled a Siberian Tiger, and she still looks down her nose at the world from a sofa in the sunroom above Lough Gill, even three years after I was banished. So once I had moved into the apartment I went out to Animal Rescue and found an uninspiring t
abby in a cage and paid €10 to cover injections and took her home in a cardboard box and called her Tiger 2.
I didn’t buy the apartment in Castlebar. I’m renting it. But it’s my space. Completely my space, and I can lie soaking in the bath as long as I like.
In the distance I can hear Lana, the Polish girl, playing with her little dog, out in the courtyard. I can hear the occasional slamming of a door upstairs, where an American woman with a cute little button nose lives, with her Irish boyfriend, a big red-haired boy, and who as far as I can make out sells drugs. They drive a black Hilux, and one night there was a squad car in the courtyard with blue lights flashing and two female guards knocking on their door for half an hour. I knew they were inside but they didn’t budge till the guard was gone. Like Lana, they too have a dog; a little brown mutt that shits through the grill of the balcony directly above me.
Pets are not allowed, but Lana, who is about seven, and has brown eyes the size of chestnuts, is always careful when she lets her puppy out for a run. I think he does his toilet in the underground car park, which nobody uses except a few boys who sometimes climb over the gates from the street and drink alcohol down there.
At the table in Sligo my son Philip said, ‘You’re very quiet today, Dad.’
I said, ‘I have nothing to say.’
‘You should try to talk about something,’ he said. ‘The silence is deafening.’
He’s got very snotty in the past three years since I’ve left. It’s because she spoils him.
‘What’s up with him?’ I asked her when he was in the bathroom.
‘Maybe he’s angry because he lost his father,’ she said.
‘He didn’t lose his father,’ I said, ‘his father was put out.’
‘I didn’t put you out.’
‘I say you did.’
And the boy returned and said, ‘Jesus Christ will the pair of you shut up. For fuck sake. Some birthday.’ The room was very silent for a long time after that so I tried to broaden the discussion and be fatherly at the same time.
