by Lucy Carey
Two Alone in Dublin
A Lesbian Love Story
Lucy Carey
Copyright © 2014 by Lucy Carey
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Second Edition, 2015
Lucy Carey Romance
Kilkenny
Ireland
www.lcareyromance.blogspot.ie
Chapter One
It had been a couple of weeks since Susie Green had had a full night’s sleep. Sure, she’d snatched a few hours here or there in the early hours of the morning but it was fitful and uneasy, her mind overly alert to the call of her alarm clock. The noise started early in the evening, the rattle of music and chatter emanating from the other rooms in the house and intruding through her bedroom walls. She’d tried to drown the din out with headphones. That didn’t work. She’d taken to sleeping with a pillow over her face to muffle the sounds but that had only worked slightly on the quieter nights.
All she wanted—in fact, prayed desperately for—was a bit of uninterrupted sleep. Failing that, though, she’d settle for a bit of sympathy, which was in short supply lately. It felt like she had been whining to her family and friends about her housemates for a long time. Where once they had placated her, now, whenever she complained of the tiredness to her parents or older sister, she got that familiar nod or raise of the eyebrow. “Students, eh?”
“I can’t stand it, Dad,” she’d told her father on her last trip home. “All they do is have parties and ride loudly and drink whatever’s cheap from the off-licence.”
Her father had laughed (a little patronisingly, she thought). “You’re only young once, Susan. You should try living a little.”
Lying staring at the ceiling of her tiny bedroom now, with her eyes trained on a tiny black spider weaving a web, she wished she could somehow teleport her family here. She had mentally perfected that revenge over the past few nights. In her fantasy, her family would call up to the house and think, as she once had, that her housemates were kind of funny. They’d fall for their charming patter, their easygoing humour. They’d think, as Susie had when she moved in, that they were just having a bit of a laugh. And then they’d try to go asleep.
“You were right,” they’d tell her. “We believe you now.”
And she would smile and nod and say, “Students, eh.” Despite their pleas, she’d refuse to grant them ear plugs to deal with whatever shitty club music was banging through the walls at that moment in time, no matter how much they begged. She’d make them listen to the highly emotional crisis some random girl was having this evening (there always seemed to be a wailing drunk girl at their get-togethers), discussing it at volume outside her room after too much vodka. She’d make them suffer through all the drunken crying of whatever waif or stray had ended up at the house, sobbing into her cider.
“Just listen to it,” she’d yell. “Who the hell wants to live like this?”
Without the aid of a teleportation device she contented herself with standing up and pounding on the wall.
“Can you keep it down please? I’ve a lecture at nine in the morning.”
“Sorry,” someone shouted back and the music was turned down.
She crawled back into bed, pulled the covers over her face and tried to get some sleep. Sometime soon, the volume would turn back up and she’d be awake again. The volume was always turned back up.
* * *
On the corner of a cobblestone side street on the way to Trinity College stood The Coffee Bean.
The café, though lovingly tended to, had seen busier days. In the late nineties when it first opened, it was a trendy hangout, popular with the skaters and scholars and stoners who flooded the area. Later, in the boom times, it retained its popularity, especially with anyone looking for an antidote to the chain coffee shops beginning to spring up across the city. These days, though, with most of the country up to their eyes in debt, coffee was one of those splurges that people had cut out.
Since then, The Coffee Bean had been relying on its most loyal remaining regulars to keep itself afloat. Its longest-serving waitress, Mariana Abreu Santos, knew all of the regulars by name—and most of them by personal history too. It wasn’t the most mentally stimulating job, but Mariana was comfortable in her role. Some of her regulars came to see her specifically, just to chat. She took pride in the care she offered them; felt validated by their appreciation of her. Still, as she turned the key in the lock to set up for the Monday morning “rush”—the volume of customers wasn’t a patch on what the café had experienced in the good times—the nagging sense that something was missing chewed at her again. She’d left Brazil with expectations of something better—something more exciting than Anápolis had to offer.
She’d arrived to the west of Ireland, to Galway, to follow some family friends who had emigrated a few years prior. It was a beautiful place, full of friendly people, they had told her, and they were right. Steeped in history and surrounded by greenery, it was welcoming and quiet.
Nonetheless, it wasn’t long before the pace of life began to wear on her. Every day started the same and ended the same with little to distinguish one day from the next. She spoke to the same people every day at her job in a small office; socialised with the same people every weekend. She ate and drank in the same pubs, visited the same shops and went to bed at the same time every weeknight.
So she’d moved to the east of Ireland to the country’s capital for some excitement. She laughed wryly to herself as she considered the irony. She’d moved one-hundred-and-forty miles to meet some new people and here she was speaking to the same people day after day.
The bell attached to the door of the café tinkled as Mariana was lifting the upturned chairs resting on the table tops.
“Olá, belíssima.”
Marianna turned to greet her boss, David, who stood grinning at her expectantly.
“Olá, meu amor,” she said, completing the well-worn exchange. David returned the compliment with a gentile bow.
“Olá, belíssima” and “Olá, meu amor” were the only phrases David knew in Portuguese, no matter how many more words Mariana tried (and failed) to teach him. Still, the gesture meant a lot to her and warmed up her mood without fail every time they ran through it.
“How are you this morning, Mariana? Did you get up to anything interesting at the weekend?”
Mariana considered lying, or at least dressing up her boring weekend, but David knew her well enough to know when she was being untruthful.
“Devil’s the bit,” she said with a sigh, as she plonked herself onto an overturned chair. David smiled at her but there was something in his smile that she couldn’t quite place. She looked at him quizzically. Was it sympathy? No, that wasn’t it. It was almost paternal and...pitying!
“What?” she asked. “Why do you look at me like that?”
“‘Divil’,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow at him. He chuckled.
“‘Divil’s the bit’ is the expression.”
Mariana stood up and walked over to the serving counter, keeping her back to David. She picked up a cloth to polish an invisible stain on the serving counter, hoping to hide the flush that she could feel beginning to burn on her cheeks. Almost four years she had been living in Ireland and still parts of the language escaped her. She had a handle on most of it but every so often a phrase, usually a curious mix of the Irish language and the English language the country had been forced to learn, tripped
her up.
David had meant nothing by the correction but it was in moments like these that she felt so like an outsider in a country that didn’t quite feel like home.
“You’ll wear a hole in the counter if you keep that up,” David said, not unkindly, and she realised she had been scrubbing more vigorously than she had meant to.
She eased her grip on the cloth and tossed it in the sink before flicking the switches on the coffee machines behind her. David leaned on the counter in front of her and reached for her hand.
“What’s wrong, my Brazilian beauty?”
She sighed again, more deeply this time, and let his hand rest on hers.
“I don’t know, David,” she said. “I think, sometimes, that I should go home. My mother, she says to me when I am speaking to her that it might be time. I am twenty-five now and I have no plans, no place in the world.”
David squeezed her hand.
“That’s just the Monday blues, pet. You’ll see. You’ve just had a shit weekend and it’s rainy and grey outside. We’re due for a little sun.”
Mariana looked outside to the rain battering against the windows.
“I hope so, David. I really do.”
Chapter Two
The insistent beeping of her bedside alarm clock snapped Susie out of a heavy, dreamless sleep. She prised her eyes open, fighting against the urge to go back to sleep, and squinted at the clock. It took her a few fuzzy moments to realise that her alarm must have been sounding for quite some time. With a start, she realised that it was forty minutes later than she had intended to get up, and now she was running late for college.
“Crap,” she muttered and then louder again. “Crap!”
She swung her legs out of bed, her hurry shaking off her sleepiness. She had a lecture at nine that she couldn’t afford to miss. There was a project due in a couple of weeks that counted for fifty per cent of her final grade and she needed the notes from this class to finish it.
She pulled on some underwear and a bra, her fingers slipping and sliding on the clasp in her rush. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she repeated as she willed herself to calm a second to complete the task. She finally clipped the clasp, and allowed herself a tiny moment of triumph before grabbing a pair of jeans and a clean-looking t-shirt from the back of her chair. A couple of yanks of a hairbrush through her unruly and unyielding curly hair convinced her that a beanie hat was in order.
She slung her bag over her shoulder and stomped down the stairs. With a V-sign flicked to her slumbering housemates, she slammed the front door behind her.
Five minutes later, past the initial adrenaline of getting herself out the door on time, Susie’s energy levels were beginning to wane. Besides that, her stomach was growling treacherously. She willed it to shut up on the crowded bus. She checked her watch. Despite her late start, she was still on time for college, with a cool fifteen minutes to spare.
She did a quick mental calculation. Her first class was at nine but straight after that she had to start an assignment. If she ate something small now, she could maybe get away with skipping lunch and getting home for an hour’s sleep before the animals that lived with her started up again.
The bus’s stopping bell dinged. Where was she? She buffed the foggy window roughly with her coat sleeve and peered out through the cleared section. She recognised the narrow streets and looming buildings around her; she was a stone’s throw away from Dublin Castle in one of Dublin’s busiest thoroughfares. She craned her head up the road searching—she seemed to recall there was a small café down a lane near this stop.
I’ll chance it, she thought. A coffee will wake me up.
She scooped up her bag from the floor and sidled past the standing passengers, onto the street outside.
She calculated again. How much could she spend on a coffee and a pastry? She had sixty euro to see her through till the end of the week. If she didn’t need to go anywhere, that should easily do her until she got paid again. With her father out of work and with a government grant only just covering her fees and some living expenses, she had to be careful with money. She worked in a pub on the weekend (her lack of sleep during the week worked surprisingly to her advantage on the long, late shifts). Every extra euro she earned, she had been putting away religiously, saving so that she could afford to move out of her current home. She could ill afford a treat, she thought, but she reasoned that the four or five euro she paid now was an investment in getting her through the day.
She pushed open the door of The Coffee Bean and stepped inside. The place was surprisingly quiet for the time of day, the queue much shorter than she had been anticipating. Half of the colourfully tiled tables were empty and a large leather sofa in the corner lay vacant. It wouldn’t hurt to sit down for a few minutes, she reasoned.
A voice intruded on her thoughts. “What can I get you?” a greying man in his forties asked and she realised that she had reached the top of the queue.
She thumbed the change in her pocket as she added up the cost of her options.
“A cappuccino with two shots of espresso,” she said. A tray of muffins behind a glass case called out to her softly growling stomach so she ordered a muffin, too.
“Can I have a takeaway cup for the coffee, please?” she asked. “But if you don’t mind, I’m going to sit down with it for a few minutes.”
He smiled in response. “I’ll bring it down to you.”
The big leather armchair was as comfortable as it had looked, Susie noted, as she allowed the soft padding to mould to her weary frame. The café was warm too, a balm to the heavy rain beginning to dash against the windows. The torrent of the raindrops, together with the hissing of coffee machines and the rumble of a dishwasher beat a rhythm in Susie’s ears. She leaned on the arm of the chair to better tune into the sounds and as she did, she heard quietly in the background someone humming. She strained to place the tune but it was not one she recognised. The humming was soft and sweet but Susie thought she caught a sadness in it, a faint but distinct longing. She scanned the room to find the source and her gaze settled on a short woman wiping down tables.
Susie moved the hand she was leaning on to hide her eyes, splaying her fingers to peek out and watch unobserved. The woman was foreign, Susie thought. Latina maybe. Her skin was dark and smooth—not freshly tanned, but a world away from Susie’s own pale skin. As the woman moved to another table, the curve of her hips moved too under a pencil skirt, her ample breasts heaving slightly as she swiped the cloth from edge to edge of the table.
From behind the counter the grey-haired man called to the waitress and as she turned to answer him, her long, chocolate-brown hair, tied in a tight ponytail, swung with her.
Susie cursed him silently for bringing the humming to an end. She would have liked to hear its smooth and comforting sound for just a little longer before she roused herself to run through the teeming rain to college.
The waitress chatted to the man for a few moments and then went back to wiping down tables. And then, a few moments later, the beautiful sound started again, the same sad melody that she had heard before. Susie closed her eyes to listen to it a little while until her coffee came...
“Miss? Miss?”
The feeling of a hand gently shaking her shoulder broke through the fog of Susie’s mind and she forced her eyes open.
The waitress was leaning into her, peering at her in concern from beneath the long lashes of her dark brown eyes. Susie stared up into her face, taking in the sharp line of her nose, the thickness of her red-painted lips.
The lips parted and, dreamily, Susie observed the pink of the waitress’s tongue behind her teeth. An exquisite moment of desire muddled up Susie’s mind and drowned out her other senses as the woman’s lips, tongue and teeth moved, until, with a start, Susie realised that the woman was talking to her.
“Are you okay, miss?”
Susie straightened up in the chair as reality began to cut through the treacle of her drowsy thoughts. A cardboard cup of coffee
sat on the table in front of her alongside the muffin she had ordered. She must have fallen asleep. What time was it? How long had she been asleep?
She shook her head to clear the last of her befuddlement.
“I’m fine.”
The woman smiled slightly, concern deepening in her eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” Susie said as the sequence of events became clearer to her, that unfolding realisation cascading into a burning embarrassment. Was her cheek damp? Had she been drooling in her sleep? Oh God, had she snored? “Really, I’m fine.”
Susie yanked her bag up from the floor and grabbed the coffee and the muffin from the table. “I’m fine, I... I’m very sorry. Really, I...” She pulled herself up quickly from the chair and ducked her head to her chest. “Thank you. I’d best be going.”
She made a beeline to the door, never looking back, even after she reached the gates to her college.
