Little Black Everything

by Alex Coleman

  “Who was she? What did she say? How did you react?”

  “Her name was Dolores. She was a barmaid in this horrible pub I used to drink in when I lived in Bray.”

  “Go on.”

  “Yeah, well, I used to chit-chat with her a bit over a pint, you know. Then one night she said that maybe we could go somewhere different some time when she was free, just the two of us.”

  “And you were sure this was an asking-out? It was a date she was talking about?”

  “Oh, yeah. There’s always a tone. At least there is any time I’ve asked someone out. It’s unavoidable. Even if you wanted to hide it, you couldn’t.”

  “So did you go?”

  “Yeah,” Lizzie added. “Did you go?” She was clearly intrigued by this glimpse into her husband’s past.

  Mark shook his head firmly. “I did in me hole. Dolores was the spitting image of Ian Paisley.”

  “Charming,” Holly said. “At least tell me you admired her bravery and the two of you remained good friends?”

  Another head shake. “I thought it was a bit creepy, to tell you the truth. And I never went back there again.”

  Holly looked to Lizzie and mouthed the word “Help”. Lizzie responded with an impotent frown.

  “If nothing else,” Mark said pompously, “I hope this will be educational for you. Asking people out is hard.”

  “Seriously – you have to have something more useful to say than that.”

  “All right, look,” he said. “There’s no secret trick to this. It’s not in the delivery; it doesn’t matter how you say it. Actually, it doesn’t even matter what you say. You can hire a skywriter or you can mumble and stutter your way through it while staring at your feet. At the end of the day –”

  “I hate that phrase,” Holly snapped. It was purely a reflex. “Sorry, sorry. Go on.”

  “At the end of the day, either he wants to go out with you or he doesn’t. It’s not something you can debate. You don’t have to get your arguments and counter-arguments ready. If you ask him and he says no, you won’t be able to convince him. There’ll be no ‘A-ha, but you have failed to consider X, Y and Z.’ There’s no need for any preparation. So stop wondering how you go about it. Just go about it.”

  “Hm. Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. But what should –”

  “And it doesn’t matter what you suggest either. If Scarlett Johanssen walked in here now and asked me to take her ice-skating, do you think I’d say, ‘No thanks, I don’t really like skating?’”

  “Oi,” Lizzie said simply. She sounded like someone giving a command to a dog. Mark responded immediately.

  “Of course, what I would actually say is, ‘You’re very nice and all, Scarlett, but you can’t possibly compete with my beloved wife.’”

  “Aw,” Lizzie said.

  To Holly’s confusion, she seemed to think that he was genuinely being cute, even though she had just ordered him to be.

  “The point still stands,” Mark went on. “Say what you like, how you like. He’ll agree or he won’t. End of.”

  Holly felt better. She took some of her wine and realised that every muscle in her body was tense. With an audible sigh, she relaxed all over. “Yeah. Thanks, Mark.”

  There was a moment of cosy silence. Then Mark said, “Mind you . . . ” Irritatingly, he went no further.

  Holly’s muscles reclenched.

  “What?”

  “I have to be honest . . . ”

  “Go on.”

  “And I’m not trying to take the piss, I’m just trying –”

  “Go on.”

  “Well . . . don’t you think he would have asked you out himself by now if he was interested?”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Lizzie groaned. “She said already, she can’t read the guy. Don’t mind him, Holly.”

  “Maybe she can’t read him,” Mark said. “But she can hear him all right, can’t she? And he hasn’t said anything along the lines of ‘Let’s go out for a drink this weekend’, has he? Newsflash: men don’t sit around waiting for women to do the deed. It’s horrible asking, we know that. It’s horrible and it’s difficult and it can be completely degrading. But we always do it in the end – if we’re interested.”

  “He could be shy,” Lizzie countered. But it was obvious from the lack of passion in her voice that she had found her husband’s argument convincing.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Holly said. “I’m at tether’s end. I want to know where I stand. So I’m asking him. And that’s that.”

  “Well,” Lizzie said as she got up to pour more wine, “all we can do is wish you good luck.”

  “Thanks,” Holly said.

  “Yeah,” Mark said. “Good luck. Now: a toast.”

  The girls raised their glasses.

  “I love toasts,” Lizzie smiled.

  Mark cleared his throat and held his own glass aloft.

  “To desperation,” he said.

  Back in her own house, Holly had trouble settling down. She felt nervous in a way that she hadn’t experienced since her Leaving Certificate days and found herself mooching from the sofa to the kettle and back in a restless, and in its own small way, exhausting loop. The decision she had made was the correct one, she was sure of that. It wasn’t as if she was reconsidering her choice. But there were no two ways about it – this time tomorrow she would know for sure if James was interested. And if he wasn’t, she would not only have the pain of that to contend with but also, as a sort of inverse bonus, the fact that she had found out the hard way. The embarrassing way. The humiliating way. Mark, despite his many insensitivities, had been quite correct – this was educational. All night long she winced as she recalled the various quips and slurs with which she had obliterated potential suitors in the past. From her current vantage point, it seemed obvious that very few of them – and quite possibly none of them – had enjoyed the confidence that they’d been at such pains to project. On the contrary, it was more likely that they had been sick with nerves. Uselessly, she wished that she’d been able to see then that which was so clear now – that to approach another human being with declared romantic intent was to make an open wound of yourself while handing them a packet of salt.

  It was well after midnight when she finally decided to cut her losses and go to bed. She was under no illusions that she’d be able to sleep, but she thought she might as well fret under the duvet as on the sofa. Her footsteps were slow and heavy as she made her way to the kitchen to deposit her mug in the dishwasher. It needed to be emptied, she remembered, and could probably do with a . . . She stopped dead in the kitchen doorway.

  Claude was sitting in the middle of the floor, looking towards the hall as if in expectation of her arrival. To his left, lying curled up with its tail wrapped around its body, was another cat. He or she was barely out of kittenhood and not more than half Claude’s size. Holly didn’t move for a second. How was this possible? Claude’s collar contained a magnet that activated the catflap. It was feasible, she supposed, that any old magnet would open it, but the newcomer wasn’t wearing a collar. After a moment, she stepped forward to get a closer look. Claude raised his head, inviting a comforting tickle, then lowered it again in disgust when it became clear that he was not going to get one. The other cat sprang to its feet – it didn’t seem to have even registered Holly’s arrival up to now – and ran into a corner. It was not, Holly observed, a good-looking animal. Claude’s fur was uniformly smoky grey and shone like something from a shampoo commercial. The new cat was grey in places too, but it was also black and white and, in several vivid patches, bright orange. It looked as if had been put together from the off-cuts of other, more attractive cats. Holly bent her knees in a forlorn effort to make herself less threatening and took another few steps. She had anticipated that the cat would panic and leg it into another corner, but she was wrong. As she edged ever closer, it suddenly trotted forward to meet her. Then, when they were just a couple of feet apart, it lay down again and curled up into the same p
osition it had been in when she arrived. No sooner had it done so than it got up again and walked slowly into a different corner. There it sat perfectly still, looking up at her, eyes wide, mouth half-open. Clearly, this was strange behaviour. If Claude had pulled these sorts of moves, she would have had him at the vet within the hour.

  “Hello, little puss,” she said, extending her hand.

  The cat didn’t respond at first. Then it craned its neck to give her fingertips a tentative sniff. Up close, Holly saw that it was not in good shape. It had a small cut right on top of its head which had caused the surrounding fur to matt together in bloody little Mohawk, and its left eye was weeping for no obvious reason. Most alarming of all, though, was its painful skinniness. “Are you hungry? You sure look it.” She took a pouch of Kitekat from under the sink and deposited the contents in Claude’s bowl. Unsurprisingly, said Claude was on it in a flash. “No, no,” Holly said and scooped him up. “This one’s not for you.” He wriggled in her arms like a landed fish as she used her foot to move the bowl towards the other cat. Its nose started to twitch at once but it seemed to take a few seconds to recognise – or possibly to believe – that this was real food. It gave the jellied meat an experimental sniff, then a series of small licks. Finally, it fell upon it. Holly had seen Claude in ravenous form on plenty of occasions but even at his most desperate, he had never gone at it like this. The Cat of Many Colours didn’t so much eat its meal as invade it. Claude’s struggling became unbearable after a while and Holly dropped him to the floor. He immediately took his place beside the interloper and joined in. Holly sat down at the kitchen table, feeling a small pang of pride in her pet. He still wanted his due, granted, but he seemed perfectly willing to share. There was no growling or hissing, no puffed-up tail or flattened ears. A couple of minutes later, the food was all gone. The Cat of Many Colours spent another couple enthusiastically licking the empty bowl. While it did so, Holly got out of her chair and checked its equipment. It was a girl. Claude had long since had his reproductive capacity curtailed, so they were not – she felt silly for thinking of it in these terms – a couple. What, then? Platonic friends? They certainly didn’t seem to be strangers to each other.

  “Okay,” she said then. “Time to go.” She got up from her seat and opened the back door. Claude didn’t pay the slightest bit of attention. The Cat of Many Colours looked out into the gloom but made no moves away from the bowl. “All right, now, scoot,” Holly said. “Scoot. Scoot! I fed you, didn’t I? Off you go now . . . Go on . . . Go on . . .” No response. Holly went around to the cat’s rear and gave it a gentle prod with her slippered toe. Frankly, she didn’t want to pick it up if at all possible. It looked as if it might be providing bed and board to a great many smaller creatures, some of whom might take the opportunity to relocate. At first, the prod seemed to have an effect. The Cat of Many Colours reluctantly moved towards the doorstep, its ears swivelling, its head low to the ground. But then it stopped.

  “Go on,” Holly said again. “No room at the inn. Sorry. Off you go.”

  She gave it another little prod. It took a few steps and then stopped again. After a moment, it looked over its shoulder and gave a pathetic mewl. It was the first sound it had made. Holly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. On the one hand, it was the sound of an animal in distress and, as such, was heartbreaking. On the other, it sounded so impossibly, cartoonishly cute that it was hard to take seriously. Holly found it difficult to shake the feeling that this was something the cat had practised, possibly with Claude’s help (No, no, no! Softer! More pathetic!). It was almost at the doorstep now. One more push should do it. “Nice try,” she said, applying a third toe-prod. “But not good enough. Bye bye, now. Bye bye.” This time the cat finally crossed the threshold. It turned around as soon as it had done so and repeated its plea for clemency. Holly closed her eyes and wished she could close her ears. Then she shut the door. When she turned around she half-expected to see Claude shaking his head in disappointment. But he had disappeared. She switched off the light and made her way down the hall. When she stuck her head into the front room, she found him on the sofa, already settling in, not a care in the world. So much for platonic friendship, she thought. Five minutes later, she was in bed, staring up at the ceiling, as wide-awake as she had ever been in her entire life.

  It was going to be a long night.

  Chapter 18

  Friday morning was downright weird. Holly had only limited experience with recreational drugs but she supposed that one or more types of high felt something like this. Colours seemed brighter. Sounds seemed louder. Movements seemed exaggerated. Peter Fogarty approached her in the staff room when she arrived and for one terrible moment she thought she was going to scream. He was taller than she was, granted, but those few inches surely couldn’t account for the way he seemed to loom over her like a city-destroying mutant from a Japanese movie (she felt quite convinced that everything had darkened as she fell under his immense shadow). There was no sign of James, which was probably a good thing, she decided. Given her fragile state, who knew what visions she might project onto him?

  Her first classes of the day went by in a flash, largely because she talked non-stop throughout them. She was relieved when the bell rang for the mid-morning break and she got a couple of minutes in which she could try to compose herself. It was just lack of sleep, she told herself. She’d probably had no more than three hours in total and that was bound to have an effect on a person, especially when you added nervous excitement to the mix. She started for outside in the interests of getting some fresh air. Halfway along the corridor, a new fear gripped her: what if James wasn’t in today? There was no way she’d be able to get through the weekend with her sanity intact. She abandoned her fresh-air plan and made her way to the staff room where she threw the door open like a cop raiding a drugs den. James was standing by the sink, sipping on a glass of water. Barry Dwyer and Julie Sullivan were there too, talking across him, both jabbering at once. He looked over to Holly and made the tiniest adjustment to his smile. Holly was sure that it meant Help: rescue me. She stepped across and butted in. Sure enough, Barry and Julie were discussing the history of their relationship; they should have known that such talk was pure poison to a single man. Holly made a few attempts to deflect the conversation in new directions but when the happy couple showed no interest, she was reduced to smiling sympathetically at James, who smiled sympathetically back. Two couples, she thought. Before very long, we could be the school’s two couples. She felt a surge of confidence and all at once, she knew what she was going to do. When time came for them to return to class, she tugged on James’s arm and suggested a lunchtime stroll. He agreed immediately. It was a nice day and he was feeling kind of sluggish. Holly left it at that and strolled off in the direction of her next class. What, she wondered, had all the fuss been about? They would go for a walk and somewhere along the way she would ask him if he wanted to go for a drink at the weekend. And he would say yes. It all seemed so clear now, so simple.

  At lunchtime Holly arrived in the staff room before James. He sat on the other side of the table from her, near the end. There was another seat immediately to his right that he could have taken. Doing so would have meant he was a little closer to being directly opposite her. She started to wonder why he hadn’t sat there but quickly gave herself a mental slap across the face. The time for fretting and obsessing was over. She would have her answer within the hour. As soon as James had finished his lunch, she took her plate and cup to the dishwasher. It was difficult not to look back to see if he had followed her but she managed it. And then, just by her left shoulder, she heard him say her name. Were they going for a walk or what?

  They took the same route that they’d taken the last time. For the first few minutes, they talked about their mornings. Holly, naturally, left out the bits about feeling frantic and drugged-up and restricted herself to pleasant inanities. James reported that he’d had four classes so far and that three of them had featured discu
ssions on the new Bond movie. He was beginning to worry, in fact, about one first-year boy who seemed to be dangerously obsessed with all things 007. He had breathlessly declared his interest right at the outset when he learned his new teacher’s name and James had thought nothing more of it. But there had been several occasions recently when he’d caught the lad staring at him in the manner of a humble peasant who’d been visited by a God. Frankly, he was beginning to wonder if his sense of reality was as finely honed as it could be. Holly did her best to listen and to offer coherent responses, but it wasn’t easy. She was so busy rehearsing her opener – Any exciting plans for the weekend? – that the words seemed to be the only ones that she had access to. She felt incapable of forming a sentence that didn’t use them. When they came to the chemist, Holly pretended to need shampoo and greatly enjoyed James’s reaction when she made a move for the door; it was a special treat when he took her wrist to halt her progress.

  Shortly afterwards, James said that they should probably head back. It had been nice to get a bit of fresh air but he had a couple of phone calls to make before the first class of the afternoon. So they turned around. They had taken no more than a few steps in silence before Holly started to panic that they might walk the whole way back without saying another thing. It was hardly a romantic atmosphere. Her mind spun. There had to be something she could say. Jesus, what did they usually talk about? And then the words just fell out of her mouth.

  “Any exciting plans for the weekend?”

  She almost slapped a hand over her gob. It was too soon! She was supposed to have carefully picked her moment! But it was out there now. There was no time for analysis. The trick was not to panic, to segue easily and naturally into her follow-up – the main event. And then she noticed that James was taking a long time to respond. She moistened her lips with her tongue.

  “James?”

  “Yeah . . . uh . . . actually, I’m going to be seeing Aisling.”