She paused and refreshed her lips with chapstick. I reached down and put my hand on Kim Sutton’s thigh. Isadora noticed and her eyes opened wide.
On she went about mashed potatoes and music from the 1940s, confusing Glenn Miller with Glen Campbell, and thereby providing me with an interesting image of the Rhinestone Cowboy drowning in the English Channel. All the time she spoke, her eyes were fixed on my hand. I squeezed and massaged. Kim Sutton twisted, but she couldn’t get away. The restaurant turned into a giant magnifying glass, with a hand and a thigh at the centre of focus.
Isadora’s speed of delivery slowed. My hand moved up another inch, above the agreed line of human decency. The words continued to flow, but the point and direction became even more uncertain. It was like watching a ship in full sail being confronted by a pirate with one deadly remaining cannonball.
“Your boyfriend is right,” I said. “You do talk too much.” Boom! Right below the waterline. The ship stopped on a dime. Isadora looked at Kim Sutton in panic. It was obvious that her “best friend” had let her down. What other little secrets had she shared with me between the pillow and the pulled-up blanket?
Isadora looked at her watch and said, “I really have to go.” She waved away Kim Sutton’s protests. “No, no. I have to go. I have to now. Please.” She knocked over a chair in her haste to escape. She ran past the restaurant window, down Suffolk Street, towards the bus stop outside Trinity College.
It was a while before Kim Sutton spoke. “Why did you do that?” she asked.
“Why?” It was hard to believe that she didn’t get it. Why didn’t matter. Why never matters. Questions that start with “why” don’t deserve an answer. I finally let go of her thigh. Why?
“I won,” I said. “Didn’t I?”
9
CONVENT
I got all my girlfriends, including Kim Sutton, from the same source: Saint Bridget’s Convent on the Dublin Road. Their school uniform was a myrtle green jacket and skirt, white shirt, knee socks and black patent leather shoes. There was another girls’ school in town, The Presentation Academy for Young Ladies. I didn’t care much for their navy pinafore and gingham accoutrements; it looked like the sort of costume an escaped mad woman would steal from a clothes-line.
My earliest girlfriends were mostly pale creatures, their faces easily lost in a crowd. But there was one exception, a girl with a name so preposterously Irish, she could only have been American. Colleen McIlvaney of Brooklyn, New York. She was a gum-chewer and a nose-talker, but there was something sexy about her crooked smile and her habit of pushing boys around with her breasts. Colleen’s father had sent her to St. Bridget’s as a full-time boarder. He wanted her to experience a complete Catholic education at the hands of women who knelt to pray, sat to teach and stood to pee. She hated every minute of it.
I met her at a “social” organised by the nuns and the Christian Brothers. Boys and girls were brought together for polite conversation broken by musical interludes. Sometimes a boy would play a tin whistle and a girl would dance in the old style. With arms limp by her side and legs as straight as stair rods, she would murder passion with every jump and jiggedy-boo. It was like watching a reanimated corpse battling rigor mortis.
During our social chat, nuns and Brothers sat around the outer perimeter of the assembly hall, sipping tea and watching. I told Colleen that I was studying higher level geography, history, biology and English. I told her that I played basketball and that I had been on the school debating team two years in a row. I told her that I was a decent swimmer and enjoyed listening to LPs on my record player. When it was her turn to talk, she leaned in close and said, “I want you to pinch my nipples.”
My eyes widened.
“You heard me,” she said. “I want you to twist ’em like you’re tuning a radio with one hand and opening a safe with the other.”
I laughed. The nuns and the Brothers bristled. Antennae and periscopes rose from their ranks.
Colleen whispered, “I wanna meet you on Friday night, beside the tennis courts.”
“What time?”
“Nine o’clock.”
I met her twice a week for the next seven weeks. She crept down the fire-escape and I climbed the convent wall. We took walks around the hockey field, stepping into the bushes every few yards, kissing and fumbling. She lifted her skirt and took my hand. The nuns in their nearby beds felt the electricity generated by our actions. Their thighs tingled and they bit their sleeping tongues when Colleen McIlvaney came.
It took me a while to realise that Colleen was actually trying to get kicked out of school and bounced all the way back home to Brooklyn. She started asking questions like, “Did anybody see you getting over the wall?” and when I said no, she was clearly disappointed. What she really needed was a one-man band tossing flashbangs and singing “Wake Up Little Sister” as he marched across the tennis court in jackboots. I was too discreet.
My final failure as a boyfriend came just before Christmas. Colleen gave me a fancy cigarette lighter, a Ronson Varaflame, with my name engraved on top. I gave her a bottle of perfume (“Kinda new. Kinda wow – Charlie!”). It cost two quid. She called me cheap, which in Ireland is considered a compliment. In fact I was thoughtless and inconsiderate. If she had stuck around a bit longer, she might have discovered the difference.
After four months in the psychogeriatric ward, Kim Sutton had reached the end of the line. “Another old man died today,” she said.
“Jesus,” I said. “You stop hearts the way some nurses stop erections.”
She wasn’t amused. She told me she was moving to the city to look for work. That knocked me back. I told her that the city was a hostile place, full of drippy-nosed hooligans in anoraks, purse-snatchers and Peeping Toms. “And you don’t have anywhere to stay,” I said.
Knowing full well that she was aiming a spear straight at my heart, Kim replied, “I’ll be staying with Colleen McIlvaney.”
“You mean Colleen tennis court, Ronson Varaflame, orgasm in the bushes McIlvaney?”
“Yes, that one.”
I was beyond stunned. Girlfriends don’t move in with ex-girlfriends, except in blue movies. For a moment I pictured them showering together. “You gotta sponge me good,” said Colleen, in my fevered dream.
Kim Sutton judged my expression and asked, “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”
“Does it involve soap?” I asked. “If so, yes.”
I told her it was a bad idea. How well did they know each other?
“We sat in the same classroom for five years,” she said.
Right. I’d forgotten about that.
Colleen had found an apartment on Rathgar Avenue, in a building with a buzzer on the front door and ficus and philodendron trees in the lobby. The way Kim Sutton described it, it was urban, sophisticated and smug, like something out of the Mary Tyler Moore show.
With Kim Sutton gone, it rained more than ever in the Rainy Town. I walked down by the river and shouted abuse at the swans. I got stoned every night with people I hated. I looked for hell and I found it.
She came back home at the weekends and told me Capital City stories about fifty-pound scarves in the window of Brown Thomas. She told me about the Dandelion Market and the gigs in the National Stadium.
“Colleen says hello,” she said.
“Tell Colleen hello back,” I said, in a voice that was airy and mean.
Colleen worked in the new burger joint on Grafton Street. They hired her because she “sounded New York.” She wore a rust-coloured uniform with a big yellow logo. She gave away free burgers to everyone she knew, and if you handed her a five-pound note, she gave you ten back in change.
My hopes of Kim Sutton returning home in failure were dashed when she found a job in a French restaurant on Wicklow Street. Le Petit Chou. It was owned by a pair of brothers, Iggy and Sam, and the kitchen was run by a French chef called Maximilian. Their names alone were enough to guarantee my undying hatred. I pictured the
m posing with skillets and strings of garlic around their necks, a suckling pig turning on a spit in the background. I had never been in a fancy restaurant, so my imaginings tended towards the medieval.
“What sort of people eat there?” I asked.
“Politicians from Leinster House,” she said. “German tourists. We get a lot of food critics.”
That was so fucking Irish, a restaurant kept afloat by the people sent to sink it. I went back to the river and ordered the swans out of town. “If you’re not gone by Tuesday,” I roared, “I’ll be back with a shotgun and a hungry Cocker Spaniel!”
Weeks passed and the friendship between Colleen and Kim Sutton deepened. They confided in one another. They shared dreams and expectations.
“Does Colleen ever mention me?” I asked.
“No.”
“Never?”
“She just laughs whenever I say your name.”
So I was a source of amusement. A romantic novelty. An amorous automaton. A wind-up cock. I put on my poker face and pretended it didn’t matter. But young men were creeping into their lives. They were referred to as “friends” who came around to “move furniture” and “paint spare rooms,” but male “friends” only do that stuff if they’re looking for sex. A man would carry a grand piano up four flights of stairs if he thought there was a handjob at the end of it.
Kim Sutton told me she spoke French at work. Everybody did. Le Petit Chou was a Parisian oasis. “It’s fully immersive,” she said. “We feel completely French.”
“Really?” I said. “Do you ever feel like surrendering to the German tourists?”
She was slipping into a new world, a world in which my central position was no longer guaranteed. A world full of unpainted rooms and moveable furniture, French conversation and shop windows filled with delights.
There is only one thing Earth can do if the moon starts to drift beyond its field of gravity. Earth has no choice. Earth must move to Dublin.
I found a bedsit in Ballsbridge. Never mind swinging a cat, it wasn’t big enough for a cat to swing a mouse. The bed was no wider than a stretcher and the “kitchenette” was a wonky hot-plate in a closet. My housemates were mostly Spanish and Italian students who spent all their time in the shared bathroom.
I found a job as a kitchen porter in Dublin’s finest hotel, hauling buckets of soup from the stockpots, scrubbing salamanders and mopping floors with buckets of steaming water and sugar soap. I had two work companions, a pair of skinny Dubliners called Bob and Shay. They stole Pernod and brandy from the sauces corner. They stole meat from the fridges. They walked about with roast chickens hidden beneath their greasy shop coats. They were magicians. Everything around them disappeared.
I lasted three weeks in Dublin’s finest hotel, but they fired me when they discovered I had no soul. I got a new job as a stagehand in Dublin’s grandest theatre, pulling levers and throwing switches for a fucking tedious Mime & Mask troupe from Switzerland. They moved on the darkened stage in black velvet body-suits. They reminded me of cats; I wanted to put them all in plastic bags and toss them into the Grand Canal. “Mime your way out of that,” I would say.
The Swiss cast was troubled by my murderous stares and sneering demeanour. Plus I was stoned all the time. At the end of week one, the curtain came down on my theatrical career.
I moved back to the Rainy Town. The swans were gone and there was no one left to shout at. I never told Kim Sutton about my Dublin sojourn. I had moved around that city like one of the Swiss mimes, creating no impact and leaving no impression. On a Friday evening I would catch the early train down the country, and she would arrive back an hour later. I’d wait in the station to meet her. “How was your week?” she would ask.
“Same as yours,” I’d reply, and it was almost the literal truth.
There were nights in Dublin when I lurked in the shadows and followed her home at a distance. She hopped on a bus and I took a taxi. She stopped at the late night shop in Rathmines to buy an orange and a women’s magazine; I stood in a doorway and smoked a joint. She walked across Leicester Avenue and Kenilworth Square with the sort of confidence a young girl doesn’t usually have after dark; I crept behind her like an alien creature dodging the peasants with pitchforks. One night I watched the lights go on and off in her apartment as she moved from room to room. Another night, I climbed into the box hedge at the front of the building. I saw Colleen McIlvaney arrive home, ironically striding up the street like the model in the Charlie perfume ad. She looked prettier than I remembered, but she was less desirable now that she was free and at large in the world. I had wanted her most when she was locked away in a convent, in the chamber of sanctified virginity.
“Hello?” said Colleen, scanning the box hedge. “Anybody there?”
She couldn’t have seen me, but somehow her senses prickled. It was just like old times at the edge of the tennis court, except this time I wouldn’t step out and reveal my wicked intentions.
Back in the Rainy Town, I waited for news from the front. Eventually it came, and it was good. Colleen had been fired from her job in the burger joint. A drunk had tumbled up to the counter one night. “Why don’t you let me grab those tits?” he’d asked.
“Why don’t you let me stick this cheeseburger up yer fuckin’ ass?” she’d replied.
The management had not been happy. A man in a white shirt had shaken his head and pointed at the door. Colleen, it appeared, was too New York for Grafton Street. A week later she was back in Brooklyn and Kim Sutton was distraught. Colleen’s father had been paying for the apartment. Reality was scratching at the door. “What will I do?” Kim Sutton asked. “I love living in the city.”
Fortunately I had a plan. I had managed to save three hundred pounds and I had asked my friend Kevin if we could come and stay with him in London.
“London,” said Kim Sutton. “I don’t know.”
I told her London would be just like Dublin, only bigger and brighter and packed with more possibilities. “It’s London or the Rainy Town,” I said.
A cloud passed over her face, but I knew it would clear and sense would prevail. Dublin had never connected with me. It had belonged to Kim Sutton. But London would be mine, all mine, and if she was lucky, I might just share it with her.
10
BOY
“A mother who loses her child can no longer believe in God.”
Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
SUNDAY, MAY 6, 1979
The boy had a mouth like a twisted rag. He stood in the doorway of the house at Tottenham Green and looked us up and down. We needed engine parts for a Honda 175.
“It’s out back,” he said. “I’m breaking it for scrap.”
The boy led us through the house. His mother walked past carrying a ball of laundry. Her eyes were aimless. All she knew was that the world dumped pain and washing at her feet every day, and it didn’t matter that her son was leading strangers through the messed-up living room.
The back yard was full of junk. Sheets of de-laminated plywood covered some of the wreckage, but most of it was out in the open: a blue bathroom suite; a wardrobe with a cracked mirror; a plastic fertiliser sack stuffed with shoes; a guitar with a missing neck; and two solid bags of old cement.
“Cool stuff,” said Kevin.
The boy didn’t get it. He puffed himself up with the pride of ownership. He pulled back a tattered Union Jack and revealed a smashed-up piano.
“Someday I’ll restore that, and I’ll play it.”
Kevin gave him a look that said, No, you won’t. You will never fix anything because you belong to a breed that breaks, wrecks, smashes and ruins, and then you collect the debris. Your father, your grandfather and your great-grandfather were damagers and destroyers and they passed down their toxic DNA in a series of short bedroom grunts – to you. You, my child, are about as useful as a fucking pogo stick in a minefield.
The boy grinned as he tinkled on a fractured key. There was a scampering animal sound insid
e the piano. The boy stepped back quickly and slammed down the lid.
“The Honda 175,” said Kevin. “We need the piston rings.”
The boy pulled aside the drum of an old tumble dryer and the wing of a car to reveal the barest skeleton of a motorcycle. The back wheel was missing, the petrol tank was missing, the indicator stems dangled from electrical threads, the handlebars were gone, and the speedometer glass was cracked. The engine was still in place only because the demon of carnage had run out of destructive energy.
“You’ll need a 10-, a 12- and an 18-millimetre socket,” said Kevin.
“I know what I need, mate,” the boy sniffed. “I’ll go get my tools.”
“You do that, mate,” said Kevin.
The boy went into the house and Kevin rolled a joint. “What do you think of Quasimodo?” he said. I was baffled. Kevin laughed. “You didn’t notice the hunchback?”
I said no, I hadn’t.
The door opened and the boy’s mother came out with another giant ball of laundry. Kevin nodded at the rusty drum that lay in the middle of the yard. “Will we pop it in the tumble dryer?” he asked, holding out the joint in her direction. She was a drab, thirty-something woman in apron and slippers with a life that had stopped moving sometime in the 1960s. She took the joint and stuck it in the side of her mouth. The big ball of laundry dripped on her hip as she took two deep drags. She blew a lungful of smoke into the space between us, and then chased it with a cough. She handed back the joint and went about her business.
A Ton of Malice Page 6
