Apartment 3B

by Patricia Scanlan

  But tonight the sea was flat calm and she climbed the steps of the pier to walk along the top. She thought she heard a noise. It must have been the gulls, but no, they were long gone. Maybe a seal then. Sometimes they fed on the small fish thrown overboard from the fishing boats. It came again, a faint cry, and peering out into the gloaming she saw someone struggling in the water.

  ‘Jesus help me, someone’s drowning!’ she cried aloud, her hand going to her mouth. ‘Oh God . . . ’ She looked around frantically for a lifebelt but saw that it had been stolen off its hook and she cursed the gurriers who had stolen it. On their heads be the person’s death if he or she drowned. Quickly, unthinkingly, she flung off her sandals, and without hesitation dived off the wall into the sea. She gasped as the icy water hit her, but she came out of her dive in a graceful curve and struck out to where the flailing swimmer was. Lainey was a strong swimmer, and had dived from the pier many times with the boys from the village, the only girl to dare to do it. Now she thanked the Lord that she had accepted their challenge because, had she not done it already, she doubted that she would have had the nerve to do it in the almost-dark. She could see the swimmer’s struggles getting weaker and more desperate as she fought to get near. She realized that it was a man and that he was fast reaching the end of his tether.

  The current was strong but just as he was finally sinking under water she caught him. He had not the strength even to panic any more and for that she was grateful, because she knew he could have drowned her. Catching him under the chin, she raised his head and began to make for the pier. Her arms seemed to be getting heavier and heavier but she bit her lip and forced herself to swim. It wasn’t too far away but to her, the looming wall seemed unreachable. ‘Please, God!’ she pleaded in desperation as she fought the current that swirled and eddied around the curve of the pier. If the weather had been stormy she knew they could have been battered against the rocks, but, as if in answer to her prayer, a wave lifted them along and deposited them within arm’s reach of the big boulders that protected the pier. Treading water, she managed to grab one. Where she got the strength from she would never know, but she pushed and shoved until the youth was lying motionless across it. Hauling herself up alongside him, she knelt astride and began to squeeze the water out of his lungs. He seemed to have swallowed half of the Irish Sea and she was beginning to think she would have to give him the kiss of life when he gasped, spluttered and gagged. ‘Thank God! Thank God! Thank God!’ she muttered over and over again as shock hit her and she started to shake.

  ‘Ye bloody idiot, going swimming on your own at this hour of the night,’ she spluttered angrily.

  Then, peering in the dark at the person she had rescued, she recognized with a shock that it was Tony Mangan. ‘What the hell are you swimming in the sea for? Haven’t you got a swimming pool at home?’ Then, looking down at the prone youth beside her, she said a little more calmly, ‘Do you think you could walk? We’ll have to try and get up the steps over there to get you home.’

  ‘I don’t want to go home! Just go away and leave me alone,’ Tony muttered, burying his head in his hands.

  ‘You don’t want to go home? Don’t be daft! Why not? Nobody will say anything to you about ruining your clo—’ A thought struck her. He was fully dressed. Why would anybody go swimming while fully dressed? Sacred Heart! He’d been trying to commit suicide!

  ‘You tried to do yourself in, didn’t you?’ she demanded, totally baffled. ‘Why? Is it because of the Leaving Cert?’ Lainey knew that Tony was taking the exams as well.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand so why don’t you just fuck off and leave me alone!’

  ‘Listen, Buster!’ Lainey spat, outraged, ‘I just saved your goddamn life. Don’t be so bloody rude!’ They glared at each other and then Tony started to laugh a little hysterically.

  ‘This is pure crazy, you know.’

  ‘You can say that again!’ Lainey replied indignantly. ‘Come on, let’s get the hell out of here, I don’t know about you but I’m freezing.’ She had started to shiver.

  ‘Oh! . . . Oh! . . . I’m sorry,’ he said, and her heart melted as she saw him staring at her, water dribbling down his face from his soaking hair.

  ‘I’m sorry I called you a bloody idiot,’ she apologized. ‘I just got such a fright.’

  ‘I’m sorry too. Come on, let’s get out of here or you’ll catch pneumonia and won’t be able to finish the Leaving Cert,’ he muttered. They helped each other up and somehow managed to climb the steps of the storm-wall. They made a sorry-looking pair squelching wetly along, but fortunately no one saw them and as they came to the fork in the road where their ways parted, Lainey asked anxiously, ‘Do you want me to go home with you?’

  ‘Naw,’ he said gruffly.

  ‘But will you be all right? I mean you won’t do . . . you won’t try to . . . ’

  ‘Look, I feel a bit of a prat standing here in wet clothes. I won’t try to commit suicide again . . . well, not tonight anyway,’ he amended morosely. ‘Goodnight . . . and . . . er . . . thanks.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ she responded, troubled.

  Lainey did not sleep well that night. She was worried about Tony Mangan. The next day, after her exam, Lainey dawdled past the boys’ school until, to her immense relief, she saw Tony appear.

  ‘Hi,’ she said cheerfully.

  ‘Hello,’ he responded sheepishly.

  ‘How did you get on?’

  ‘OK. How about you?’

  Lainey grimaced. ‘Just about passed, I’d say.’ They walked towards the bus stop in silence, but when the bus arrived, Tony sat beside her.

  They bumped into each other several times during the exams, and his pale drawn face worried her. He looked as if he was under severe strain.

  ‘Why did you try to commit suicide?’ she asked him bluntly one day, as they were walking the last bit home. He had once again sat mute beside her on the bus for the entire journey.

  ‘If I tell you you’ll probably never speak to me again,’ he answered brusquely.

  ‘Don’t be a moron!’ Lainey retorted. ‘Why did you do it? What could be so awful that you’d prefer to die than live?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘How do you know until you’ve told me?’

  ‘I . . . I’m . . . I’m a homosexual!’ he blurted out, his face flushed, his hands clenched. ‘Do you know what that means? I’m gay . . . I’m a fruit. Imagine trying to tell that to my parents and all those silly schoolgirls who are always simpering around me trying to get me to invite them out so they can come up and swim in the pool and use the tennis courts. Imagine if the rest of the blokes found out, I’d . . . they’d batter the crap out of me.’ He was nearly crying now.

  Lainey didn’t know what to say. Of course she had heard about homosexuals and it all sounded vaguely disgusting, but this was the first time that she had ever spoken to one of them, and Tony wasn’t the least bit disgusting. In fact she rather liked him in a maternal sort of way, feeling responsible for him because she had saved his life.

  ‘Does anyone else know?’ she asked hesitantly.

  ‘Just . . . just PJ . . . he’s my . . . my friend,’ Tony explained, amazed that she hadn’t gone running off.

  ‘Well I don’t see what’s so awful about it that you have to try and kill yourself!’

  ‘Don’t you?’ His tone was incredulous.

  ‘No! Sure when you start college, you’ll be living up in Dublin, won’t you,’ Lainey said logically, ‘and nobody will know anything about you. You can do what you like.’

  ‘That’s another thing. My dad wants me to be a doctor and I don’t want to. I want to be an accountant. He just puts so much pressure on me to live up to his expectations, I can’t cope.’

  ‘Just put your foot down and say that blood makes you faint or something,’ she urged.

  ‘You make it sound so easy,’ he muttered.

  ‘It is!’ she said crisply. ‘Just try it once.’

&nb
sp; Two days later, she met him again. ‘I’m going to do Commerce,’ he said, grinning from ear to ear. ‘I just told dad straight out that I didn’t want to be a doctor, and that I’d probably end up killing people instead of curing them. I think the thought of the scandal was enough to change his mind.’ He paused and seemed rather agitated. ‘Lainey, I . . . was just wondering . . . ’ he stammered, red-faced. ‘I was just wondering if you would come up to the house now and again. I could kinda pretend that you were my . . . my girlfriend,’ he said, all of a rush.

  ‘Of course I would,’ she agreed kindly. ‘Only I’ve asked John Keegan to my debs. You won’t mind if I’m two-timing you?’ she teased.

  ‘Not in the slightest!’ Tony laughed, delighted with himself.

  That was how she found herself one evening sitting at a dinner-party in the Mangans’ house, a bewildering array of cutlery and glasses on the table in front of her. When the soup was served she took her roll and began to butter it, only to hear with mortification the scornful reedy voice of Sheila, Tony’s thirteen-year-old sister.

  ‘Mummy, Lainey doesn’t know what plate to use! She took the wrong roll.’

  Nettle-stings of mortification wounded Lainey’s heart and she wished the floor would open up and swallow her.

  ‘Be quiet!’ hissed Tony as Mrs Mangan silently swapped Lainey’s plate with her daughter’s. It had been a nightmare of a meal but Lainey held her head up and got through it by watching Tony carefully. All the well-dressed women there in their posh frocks had made her feel so gauche and out of it. And she swore that one day she would show them. That’s why she was sitting on a train reading a book on etiquette. As she read ‘start from the outside in’, the rhythmic clickety-clack-clickity-clack of the swaying train made her eyelids droop and before she knew it, she was asleep. Then a hand was shaking her gently.

  ‘Elaine . . . Elaine!’ A deep voice she did not know was calling her by her full name. Sleepily she opened her eyes. It was a man she didn’t recognize at first, and then, with a sense of shock, she realized he was Steve McGrath from Moncas Bay. He was shaking her shoulder and smiling at her. ‘We’re just arriving in Arklow,’ he laughed. ‘It’s just as well I was on the train or you’d probably have slept all the way to Rosslare.’

  ‘Crikey!’ she gasped, flustered. She could feel the train slowing down as they pulled into the picturesque station.

  Steve reached up and pulled down her bag. ‘I wasn’t sure if it was you or not,’ he grinned. ‘You sure have grown up, Elaine Conroy.’

  So have you, Steve McGrath, Lainey thought in appreciation. She hadn’t seen him for about four years. He had been studying in Dublin at the College of Catering, and then he had gone to Switzerland to work and study the hotel trade. He’d left Moncas Bay a skinny, lanky youth but the man striding up the train ahead of her was tall, dark and very very handsome. Thank God for her French plait and colour co-ordination. At least she didn’t look like a hick little schoolgirl, which was, no doubt, how he remembered her. He had looked at her quite admiringly, his eyes moving up and down her lavender-and-white-clothed figure. A little glow of pleasure ignited in Lainey, as Steve McGrath turned to help her off the train.

  Friday 6 August 1976

  Not even the chaos of a bank holiday Friday’s traffic could put Lainey in a bad humour as she sat in her blue Toyota, fingers tapping against the steering-wheel, at the bridge in Ringsend. She had been stationary for the previous ten minutes.

  A long weekend in Moncas Bay. Oh bliss! It had been a scorcher of a summer and there were no signs of the heat abating. In fact people were seriously worried about drought. She was going to go for a swim as soon as she got home, if she ever got home. The traffic inched forward and she got as far as Ringsend Library. She looked across at the squat little building sitting by itself in the middle of the road. She had worked there on relief a few times. It was one of her favourite libraries. Well, if things went to plan, she’d be handing in her notice to Dublin Public Libraries in the very near future. Lainey gave a broad grin. After two years, she was moving on to a new career. A career where she would be her own boss, more or less, and where all her hard work would be rewarded. She couldn’t wait.

  Two months ago when she had been transferred yet again, she couldn’t believe it. There had been talk of a changes list for ages and out it finally came, but she hadn’t expected to be moved. After all she had been on the Christmas transfer list, when she had gone in to Central, on relief. In one way she had been glad to be moved to a branch library again. Relief was a bit of a pain; you never knew from day to day what library you were going to. And it was impossible to make plans. She had gone to her new library on the day required and had had her interview with her new librarian.

  ‘I don’t like lates, I don’t like laziness and I don’t like cheekiness and if you remember that you’ll do fine,’ Lainey had been informed by the stern-faced woman sitting behind her desk. She felt like a ten-year-old in front of the headmistress and it rankled. For crying out loud, she was an adult young woman supporting herself! Where did they come from? Her nights had been changed yet again and she had been forced to abandon a French language course she had been taking. It had thoroughly pissed Lainey off. She had been reading the newspaper during her lunch hour when she saw the advertisement for a sales rep with a publishing company, car-owner essential. She had her own car, her blue Toyota, Bluebell by name. It was Lainey’s pride and joy. Hard saving had got her that car but it had been worth every penny for the freedom it gave her. No more standing waiting for hours for buses. No more waiting for taxis after a night out. No more depending on people for lifts. Buying the car had given Lainey a great sense of achievement and getting her driving test first go had made her feel a million dollars. Now here was a job jumping out at her from the paper, a job that required a car owner with full licence and experience of the book trade. To hell with it! She’d give it a bash.

  That night she did out a glowing CV and sent it off. The next day, at work, she got back-issues of The Bookseller and Books Ireland and read them from cover to cover to make herself conversant with the publishing world. Three weeks later she was summoned for interview. It sounded a most attractive job, going around the bookshops keeping them supplied with books and taking orders for new titles. She’d be meeting wholesalers and retailers, she’d be travelling around the south of the country and she’d have to attend the Frankfurt and London book fairs. Lainey knew she’d love it. Mind, the salary was slightly lower than what she was currently earning. But a drop in salary would be worth the increased job satisfaction. At least she’d be treated as a person and not as a cog in a machine.

  Lainey did an excellent interview. Her research had paid off and her library experience was of tremendous help. At least she was au fait with the current bestsellers and the like. Articulate, well groomed, she knew she had made a good impression. She had worn her Fiorucci pure new wool suit and she had looked so elegant. That suit had been a great buy. It had cost her an arm and a leg, even though she had got it in the sale in Brown Thomas, but it had been worth it.

  Since she had started working, Lainey had begun to accumulate an elegant and well-thought-out wardrobe. She didn’t buy many clothes but what she bought she spent time looking for and spent money on. She would put aside so much every week for her clothes and then, twice a year in the January and July sales, she did her serious shopping. She bought two or three good items that she could match and mix to create different outfits. It paid off. Lainey always looked as though she had stepped from the pages of Vogue. She had an innate sense of style and elegance that was the envy of her flatmates and workmates and often they would come to her for advice when buying clothes or dressing to go out on a special date.

  From the time that she had come to Dublin to work, Lainey had set out to improve herself. She took extra-mural classes, she learned how to ride, took tennis lessons and it was all paying off. Now she could mix with the Moncas Bay crowd and not be worried about making social
gaffes. This poise and sophistication had certainly impressed her interviewers and although there had been hundreds of applicants for the job, just that very morning she had got the letter to say she had been selected to attend for a second interview. They had narrowed the numbers down to ten. She was one of them!

  Lainey had hugged the letter to herself that morning before she set out for work. Just wait until Steve heard the news. He’d be delighted for her. She could feel in her bones that the job was hers.

  Lainey smiled to herself as she drove in a bumper-to-bumper line of traffic towards the Merrion Gates. As she reached them, the lights flashed and the barrier went down. A train flashed by. Probably the Rosslare train, she mused, and a little glow enveloped her as she remembered that first lovely meeting with Steve. It must have been fate, she decided. She had been dating him ever since. Two years and two months practically to the day. She had never felt happier.

  The barriers lifted and she continued her journey towards Blackrock. Tonight she would feel Steve’s arms around her. They might even go for a midnight swim and make love in a secluded spot in the soft ferns that overlooked the beach. And afterwards, Steve would light a cigarette for each of them and with her head resting against his tanned muscular chest he would tell her how things had been going since she had seen him last. Lainey loved those special confiding times. Then he let down his guard and told her his fears and worries about the hotel. Not that he needed to worry much, she thought, as she nipped neatly into the inside lane and passed a lorry that was holding up traffic at a right turn.