Shift

by Mia Gallagher

  I never thought of her then, in that way, from the inside. None of us did.

  Now I can’t stop.

  How did her days pass for her? Was she busy? Housework, friends, shopping? Dropping into the post-office or credit union? What was her time like? Did it flow, or drag? What occupied her, in those shortening afternoons before the night’s work started? Was she happy?

  Ridiculous question.

  Her snake coils in its cage. I see its eyes, yellow glints in the darkness.

  I can’t remember who started the fabrications. Matt, maybe. ‘A hooker? No! How do ye know, lads?’ A question, triggering responses, leading to a riff, exploding out into an epic. There was a guy who came to the door in the daytime, during her non-working hours. Her boyfriend, I suggested. The others scoffed. ‘You dick,’ said Matt. ‘No self-respecting lad would have a hoor as his bird.’

  ‘Actually, Matthew,’ said Dave, doing one of his about-takes. ‘You’re the dick. All that expertise. Who wouldn’t want a sample of that, especially if it’s going for free?’

  There was another day-time guy, thin and sleazy, blouson jacket, Brazilian strip of a moustache. Dave reckoned he was her pimp. And then there was the kid, but only on the weekends. Sweet-looking. Glasses. I thought he was around eight. Dave said older. ‘Undernourished. Because he’s a knacker.’ A sly sidelong at Matt, who came from a working-class family. But Matt just took a long toke and spoke through the spliff-smoke, exaggerating his Limerick whine.

  ‘Technically, David, you’re not insulting me there. Knacker’s only for Dublin scumbags.’

  Two weeks in and we’d already assumed the positions. Wind-up merchant, dude, fall guy.

  It was Dave who came up with the first name, the son’s. Dylan. Matt named the ex. Pat. Pah, he said, dropping the t the way they do in Dublin. The pimp was my contribution.

  Steo.

  Dave started laughing.

  ‘Oh, that’s good. That’s dirty.’

  ‘Steeeeo,’ I said, emboldened, making my mouth mean and long, and Matt joined in the laughing then.

  ‘Who do ye think he lives with?’ I said later. ‘Dylan. The kid?’

  But they were already on about the match that afternoon, losing interest.

  Her flat was immaculate. We’d get a glimpse of it sometimes on our way up the stairs, or if we were passing to go out to the overgrown back garden. I imagine her, scouring the bachelor fittings in the lean-to kitchen, rubbing Jif along the ancient draining board until her hands stung. Spraying Pledge on the shelves, plumping up her cushions from All Homes. Polishing his cage, rubbing the bars till they shone.

  His name I knew, though I never told the lads. She’d shared it with me the week after we’d moved in. I’d been heading in with a take-away, saw her open door. In the gap, her; standing near the window looking out, the python wound around her body like a belt of ammunition.

  ‘Oh.’ She turned, catching me. Her face was soft and pale. Brown eyes, longish lashes. No make-up. Her mouth small, delicate, the colour of a winter rose, fading.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. A blurt. My hand stuck itself out, like I was playing bank manager.

  She looked down at it, my silly hand. Looked up. Her gaze seemed bored, unreadable. ‘You’re one of the students.’ The snake shifted, raised its head. Its tongue appeared.

  ‘This is Kaa,’ she said, stroking his scales.

  I must have blinked, surprised she had the same references I did.

  Her head tilted. ‘Oh, yeah,’ she said, like it was a question, or challenge. ‘He’s the real king of the jungle.’

  Trust in me. Just in me.

  Ugly wallpaper. A green floral motif; hard and embossed, like a skin disease. A dull no-colour carpet, the type country landlords used back then because it didn’t show the dirt. She’d added touches. Three Anne Geddes posters; dimpled four-year old Californians sucking on lollipops, hugging teddies. They bother me now, those posters. Did she choose them to throw the landlord off the scent, make the place not look like what it was? Or for her own sake, to help her feel innocent again? Did she get them for her son, or because they reminded her of him? Or were they part of her shtick, a deliberate choice, along with the prim secretary get-up and the pale, featureless face; a sop to the men who fucked her there, that really, what they were doing to her, what she was letting them do, was okay?

  Maybe she got the posters to make the men feel bad, like when they were fucking her, they were fucking innocence too.

  Maybe she wanted herself to feel bad.

  ‘Nice,’ I said, nodding over at their dimpled faces, the evening she introduced me to Kaa.

  All the time backing out, arse first, like a toady at a Renaissance court.

  Her window was long and dusty. Floor-length velvet curtains. Dark red, starkly vaginal. Knocking Shop 101. Those were the words I used when I described them to Dave. He didn’t react. He seemed preoccupied. I felt myself panic.

  ‘Do you think she bought them?’ I said. ‘You know, like a thing? Like the snake? Or the posters?’

  ‘What posters?’ said Dave.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You know…’

  Dave shrugged. ‘No idea. Ask Matt.’

  But Matt wasn’t there. He was staying out again, with the girl he was shifting from the College of Commerce, the one who had the bedsit off Camden Street.

  ‘Or maybe.’ Dave had about-faced again. Was looking at me, suddenly alert. ‘Maybe they were Steo’s idea.’

  ‘The posters?’

  ‘What posters? The curtains.’

  My mouth opened itself. ‘Yeaaaahhh.’ There I was, doing Steo’s voice again. ‘Steo, branding mastermind. Knockin Shop Won Oh Won.’

  Dave laughed then, like he hadn’t the first time I’d said it, and I did it again, and did some more, and we riffed then, about asking the powers-that-be at UCD to bring Steo in as a guest tutor to lecture us on the marvels of the marketing mix.

  ‘I bet you he’s given her a name,’ said Dave. That slightly hyper look in his eyes. ‘Suzanna. Her real name is—’

  ‘Susan.’

  ‘Yeah. But—’

  ‘Clients don’t want a Suuusan.’ I was doing Steo again. ‘Suuusan’s their mot’s name. They want something exotic—’

  ‘Something with a Z,’ said Dave, in a Steo’s voice that, under the Belfast, was way more dangerous than mine. We stopped and looked at each other, and because there was nothing else to do, we laughed, though it had an odd, uneasy sound to it as it came out of our mouths.

  Was she ever renamed, the real Susie? Suzanna for work, Suzanna with a Z, Suzanna the one who was spied on by the elders? Would she have liked that name, or been upset by it? Felt like it took something from her, scraped away at a piece of her soul, made whatever she had left less hers, more theirs, the men’s, his, the pimp’s, the one we called Steo? I find myself asking her these questions. I find myself imagining a friend for her, like an Imelda, from Cork, who will answer them. I picture them together outside working hours, two young women sitting on a park bench on a Saturday afternoon sharing a fag. They are discussing the Z. Imelda tells Susie not to argue with Steo about it. Yerra, girl, he’ll only do something on ya.

  i.e., Glass or cut her.

  Maybe Susie was okay with it. Felt the Z gave her something. Protection. Yeah, Steo. I like it. Thanks.

  Or maybe the Z was hers all along.

  Here listen up, Steo, you little worm. I’ve an idea. I want a Z in me name… and I realise I’m doing Susie’s voice this time, but out loud, and nobody is listening.

  I’ve begun to take the Luas to Ranelagh. Two, maybe three evenings a week, after work. It’s the wrong Luas line, adds an hour or more onto the commute, but I find I can’t not do it. A compulsion. The tram bells trill and a voice tells me we’re there, and I get off. I walk past the house and look beyond the tidied-up lawn at the ground-floor window, the one at the front that wasn’t Susie’s. I can’t get past its black glass. I want this woman’s history to surface
for me, a wooden saint emerging from the painted doors of our shared astronomical clock. But all that surfaces is me.

  I think of the black eyes we saw her sport; twice, each time the same eye. Was it Steo who gave it to her, like Dave said? Or the ex, Pah? Was it a punter? How did she get away with it for so long, working there? I see our dusty old Mayo landlord, poised on the landing, fist raised to knock for the rent. I feel her furniture crash to the floor. I hear her shouting, swearing, ripping the world open with the edge of her voice.

  It’s easy to make up lives for other people.

  Dave created the therapy group. He hated that stuff, thought it was soft and meaningless, useless in the face of real problems happening to real people, like wars. But he made up a group for Susie, and gave her a facilitator too. A book. Heal Your Life. He had me say the title, in the well-meaning Dublin accent of our dinner ladies at the college canteen. Together we tried to cobble up a Bad Thing that had happened to Susie to justify the therapy. ‘Maybe she killed someone,’ said Dave. ‘One of her men.’ Maybe she tried to kill Dylan, I thought, but didn’t say. Thinking of my mother, the unspoken-of darkness that fell on her after my sister was born.

  Dave invented Susie’s family too, a big horde of Cabra Dubliners on her mother’s side. I gave her a Belfast father.

  ‘Cliché,’ said Dave. ‘She doesn’t sound remotely Northern.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Think about it. His name’s Jack. A violent bastard. Used to beat her mother. That’s what put her on the game.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ said Dave. ‘What do you know about any of that? Here’s what it is. She loved Jack and Jack loved her mother and her mother loved her and none of them—’

  ‘None of them,’ I said, getting it.

  Loved the one who loved them.

  But who, who, I think? Who, apart from her child, was her family? Where did they live? Did she have parents who were still alive? Siblings? Aunties, uncles, grandparents? What did they know of what she did, those shapeless relatives? What could they know? If someone from the fringes of my family had been a working girl at that time, would I have known?

  I picture her not by the canal, but across the city, on the other strip: the Golden Mile near Heuston train station. Sun slants over the low roofs, striping the Liffey gold. A man pulls up in his Punto, winds down his window. Another girl is nearer but the man beckons to Susie, smiling his slow, investigative punter’s smile. Susie leans over. A waft of fag smoke, sweat and Magic Tree.

  ‘Christ!’ says the man.

  Susie retracts. The man grabs her wrist. ‘Susie.’ She falters. He takes off his shades.

  Recognition.

  Things like that can happen.

  She kept her earnings in the flat. A biscuit-tin.

  1991. I’m guessing this: handjob fifteen quid, blowie thirty, full basic package somewhere between fifty and a ton. Extras extra. Six a night, average five nights a week, and Steo took his cut of (I’m guessing again) sixty percent. If my sums are right, and they’re probably not, on good weeks she would have made almost a grand. Maybe I’m overestimating her earnings. The thought makes me sick.

  One night, towards the end of November, she came up. The others were out, Matt at his girlfriend’s, Dave on the tear. It was very late. Two or three. I couldn’t sleep, was sitting in the kitchen, reading a horror story about a pack of boys and a body. A knock.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know if…’ She was in a dressing-gown and slippers. Shivering. The kohl around her eyes was smeared. She looked worried. ‘I heard a noise at the back. I think there’s…’

  Someone in the garden, I thought. It was an old house, spooky. It backed onto a lane; easy enough for someone to climb over the wall and in.

  ‘Would you come down?’ she said. ‘Just to keep me company?’

  I remembered my mother, not letting go my hand. Not letting go my hand and all me wanting was to get away.

  The stairs swallowed us.

  ‘What age are you?’ she said.

  I didn’t want to answer. My mouth moved. ‘Twenty.’

  ‘Ah. Where are you from? Wexford?’

  Not a bad guess. That surprised me. But then, I thought: all those men.

  ‘Waterford.’

  ‘Nice there?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘The good-looking lad that lives with you.’ She was peering down at the steps, carefully, as if she’d never walked them before. ‘The fella from the North.’ I felt my skin itch. ‘Is he a friend?’

  The stairs swallow us.

  ‘Eh,’ I said, stopping on the landing. ‘I don’t think there’s anything there.’

  ‘Please.’ She held out her hand, drew me down.

  The biscuit-tin was on the top of the Super Ser. The Super Ser wasn’t switched on. Its back door was an inch open. She asked me to stay, till her mind was settled, like, and would I want a cup of tea. I can’t remember if I nodded but she made me one anyway.

  ‘Can I have a biscuit?’ I said.

  She looked at me and I thought I saw pity in her eyes and there I was, the fat boy again.

  ‘I don’t have any.’

  I must have glanced at the tin and she must have looked and blinked or something because then I knew.

  Steo, financial wizard. Here, Susan, don’t give your money to the fuckin bank. Keep it somewhere safe.

  I made my face into nothing. I do remember that moment, the mask coming over me. Its tightness on my skin, warm as scales.

  She must really have been frightened, I think now, to leave the tin out like that, not take a moment to hide it after emptying out the money and stuffing it down her pants or bra or wherever she stuffed it.

  ‘They eat people,’ she said, nodding at Kaa. ‘I heard about a fella who had one. He forgot to feed it. Left it for a week and one night it swallowed him.’

  Is he part of your act, I wanted to ask. Is he your surrogate baby? How old is he? Is he ancient, older than you and me combined? How old is Dylan? Your son, I mean. What is his name? Do you love him?

  Something rattled at the window. She jumped.

  ‘That’s just a tree,’ I said. I was feeling angry and I didn’t know why.

  ‘I don’t have biscuits,’ she said. ‘But I can make you toast.’

  A smell was on her, rich and loamy as leafmould.

  I didn’t want her toast. I didn’t want her kitchen, or anything. ‘Okay,’ I said.

  This is what I would like:

  She keeps him hungry for a week, then another, and another again. It hurts her to do it. She still risks the occasional caress, but she no longer takes him out of the cage to wind around her body, or brings him to bed with her, balancing him against her palms while she lies back and tries to sleep and maybe dreams.

  One night, servicing a client, she hears him, rustling in the cage behind his curtain. Trying to move the hunger out of him. The client hears too. Complains. She says Kaa’s part of her act, but he’s sick that night. Another night, another rustle, another complaint. Word reaches Steo. Here, Susan, what’s the story? Susie tells him she’s planning to get rid of Kaa. Having a snake, she says, wasn’t as good for business as she’d hoped.

  While he starves, she plays knife-games on her kitchen table, spreading out the fingers of her left hand and stabbing the wooden spaces in between. She’s good at that game; I’ve given her my own skill with it, though I’ve kept the beginners’ scars on my fingers for myself.

  The stabs make a rhythm, like drums. She thinks of Dylan.

  She thinks of Pah, and Steo, and her clients. Each time the knife makes contact, she pictures it jabbing a face. She sees the featureless man I imagined for her at Heuston Station. The father I invented, Jack, from Belfast. She sees Matt. She sees Dave. She sees me.

  Yerra, girl, you’re terrible quiet these days, says Imelda, the fabricated friend from Cork. Are you eating enough?

  Kaa’s skin is dull, his eyes are baleful. The uneaten mice in the cage grow fat and complacent. The ro
om fills with the stab of the drum.

  Tak-tak-tak-tak-tak.

  She stops playing the keyboard. It hurts Kaa’s ears and makes his mouth open.

  She misses the keys like she misses his scales. They both give under her fingertips.

  I began to go back home at the weekends. The bus was cheap but the smell of other people made me feel sick, so after the first weekend, I hitched. My da was worried, but he didn’t know what to ask. My sister was cramming. For the Inter. What a profound waste of time, I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t have those words. I walked the People’s Park and up the hill, to the bad stretch of Barrack Street where the winos and the tough boys laughed and called each other names. I didn’t want to drink. I didn’t want to do anything. ‘Have you lost weight?’ my sister said, and it was an accusation.

  One Sunday evening nearing Christmas, I came back to Dublin and the house in Ranelagh had changed. It looked brighter somehow, as if someone had turned on all the lights, though they hadn’t. Susie’s door was closed. Sounds were coming from behind it, but they weren’t sex. I passed it quickly. Dave was on our landing, just out of the bath. Hair wet. A towel around his neck.

  ‘Och, there he is. Returned traveller!’

  He gave me a rough hug and I smelt sweat, warm, on the damp towel.

  ‘She’s leaving,’ he said, pottering around, opening beers.

  ‘Who?’

  He stopped. ‘Who d’you think? Her downstairs. She was robbed. Friday. Came back late, found her room in pieces. Furniture smashed. He’d taken her money.’

  How do you know, I wanted to say. ‘Is the snake alright?’

  ‘You know who it was? The fucking landlord. He knew where her money was. She kept it there. In a tin. How stupid is that?’ He shook his head, frowning. ‘Trying to get rid of her, he was. Wanted a different type of tenant.’

  I see her room again, the Super Ser on its side, the biscuit-tin open. My trouser pocket stuffed. My trouser pocket stuffed.

  I laughed.

  Dave looked over.

  ‘Jesus, Dave,’ I said, ‘you’re some can of wee-wee. That’s a fucking good one. Best so far. You had me convinced there, nearly.’