Once, about three years back, Trish had offered Noelle her flat. At that stage, Noelle was in college, not far from the tower blocks with their terrible reputation. Trish had graduated and was temping in an office on the quays. On a January afternoon, Noelle came out with her on the number thirteen bus to the wrong terminus, and looked at the place. It was cramped but comfortable. It had a lot of rooms, more than she’d remembered. A few years earlier, though it felt like a decade now, she’d rolled with the brother on a bed in the room at the back. A glorious summer evening. Noelle had still been in school. It was the first time she’d seen Trish in the brother’s presence and – although the penny had already dropped, at that party where he’d said her name, Beatrice – in her thick mind she’d felt the pieces slot together again, like a puzzle from The Crystal Maze. Trish had come into the room, laughed at their fumblings, then gone out to make tea. Now she was showing Noelle the view, as if Noelle hadn’t seen it before, pointing out the window at the shopping centre. All the amenities, she said. And then she made tea again, which they drank and chatted over, before Noelle had to rush back to her busy world at the other end of the bus route.
They had met by accident some weeks before, at Christmas. The brother had come back for the holidays and a gang of them from the old days had arranged to meet for drinks. The brother seemed different. His green eyes moved slowly in his tanned face, like they had seen things. Otherwise, he’d been in good form. Everyone was remembering, laughing, touching each other’s arms, exchanging fond, meaningful gazes. He leant over and looked at Noelle and said her eyes were like everything. She felt her mousy skin flush under the red of the wine, and had to look down. She turned the talk to wordplay and showed off her newly gobbled education. He rose to it, adding to the banter polysyllables that she didn’t know, that she was surprised he did, and she would remember admiring that, and telling herself, Yes, This is Why.
Trish was in another corner, talking to someone else. Her skin was pitted with the marks of spots Noelle had never noticed in their schooldays. She was wearing a jumper that didn’t quite go with her jeans, and her feet were bare in her slip-on shoes. They all left the pub to go to a cinema and Noelle pulled a green scarf around her sore throat while Trish’s feet stayed bare, white-blue in the plastic shoes.
After the film they went to a club and danced, like they were even younger than they were, and Noelle danced with the brother. All fast movements, hips and feet, hair. A mental beat and a saxophone, somewhere. He asked her to dance slow with him to the record they loved, and they did, and some sadness filled her. Trish was nowhere to be seen.
Noelle turned down Trish’s flat and didn’t see her for a long time. Then a year ago, they bumped into each other in the city centre. Both of them were waiting in the same place, for friends who hadn’t turned up. Trish was wearing a wine duffel coat that was a little too tight. Her bony wrists stuck out from the sleeves. She suggested they go for a cup of coffee. Noelle couldn’t make an excuse and say she was busy; Trish knew she had nothing else to do.
Over coffee they chatted. Noelle blathered what she thought sounded right, and Trish spoke intensely, and so softly Noelle had to lean towards her and cup her hand behind her ear. She wanted to be nice. She felt obliged to do the right thing. So she gave Trish her phone number, and got up.
Trish said, ‘Oh, what way are you going?’ and then, quickly, ‘I’ll come a bit with you.’ At the park, Noelle noticed Trish was veering in the wrong direction, and took advantage.
‘I’d better dash home. It’s been great to see you.’ Then, feeling like she couldn’t push her luck, though later that wouldn’t make any sense, because what she did was pushing it, wasn’t it?: ‘Do give me a ring sometime.’
Logical reasons.
Obligation. A sense of duty. Social conscience, even.
Noelle left her at the gate of the park in her too-tight duffel coat and sallow, marked skin. She walked, fast, a hundred yards or so, and then, once she was sure she was out of sight, relaxed and sauntered home, stopping at a market-stall to buy a bunch of carnations for her flatmate.
Trish started ringing her up, to talk, to arrange to meet. Noelle didn’t know why, she told her flatmate. She couldn’t see what she could offer her. The last time Trish rang they arranged to meet at three. Noelle arrived late. I got held up, she was planning to say.
Trish was sitting at a table, holding a cigarette. Her chin was resting on her hand. Her mouth was lipsticked, frosted pink. Noelle rushed up, as if she’d been running all the way, and said: ‘Oh, you poor thing, I’m so sorry. Can I get you a cup of coffee?’ Trish looked up with her round eyes that were like the brother’s, though not the same colour, and smiled. ‘Yes, thanks. That would be lovely.’
Noelle bought two decaffs, because they’d talked about caffeine the time before, and how important it was to eat healthily. She sat at the table and made more excuses, and Trish told her to calm down. Noelle thought: she’s not resentful or angry or upset, that’s good. She feels we have an equal relationship, even better. Good and better, because they hadn’t, and Noelle knew that, and didn’t want to know.
They talked about the rainforests, and unleaded petrol, and music, and their own plans, and the New Hippies, and the brother, a little, and socialism and hairspray. Then they talked about waste and evil, and love and good, and God and spirits and devils. And Trish lowered her voice and spoke of a presence on her chest one night and the fear she’d had in herself against it.
After the decaffs, they wandered around town, looking in store windows and second-hand clothes shops. Black lace, hats, satin and costume jewellery. In one shop they saw a heap of necklaces in a little glass bowl. The necklaces were all sorts, dull black wooden beads, shiny plastic geometrics, cut stones and glass beads in artists’ colours: aquamarine, sienna, emerald. Noelle played with some turquoises on a gold chain, and Trish picked up a string of purple stones and held them against her duffel. The insides of the stones glowed pale pink against the wine coat. These are my favourite, she said. I love purple. The girl behind the desk made a small sound with her small nose and scratched her neck with her red fingernails. Trish swept a glance at her, and she was sixteen again, disdainful queen of the schoolyard. She dropped the purple chain back on the pile, letting her hand lie there for a moment.
They walked around some more. It was good, window-shopping, looking at things. Beautiful, isn’t it? See that. Attention drifting, saving them from the twin awkwardnesses of silence and conversation.
Noelle left her to go to a party, held by people she didn’t know well. Well enough to get drunk with, though, and argue with, and hug comfortably and mean it when they added to their goodbyes a Hope to see you more often in future. Noelle had hugged Trish too.
When she got home, she lay awake on her bedroom floor, still a bit pissed, for a couple of hours. Alone, thinking of Trish and the brother. Of the wooden hug she’d given Trish when they’d parted and not really wanting her to phone like she’d said she would. Wondering if it was the brother she wanted to come back, or just the her he used to like playing with.
She remembers. She is meeting a friend in town. She hasn’t planned what she will wear. She doesn’t plan anymore. She doesn’t trust her judgement. Someone says: You look good in red, Trish, wear something red, and she wears red for a week. Everything red, down to her pants; all shades of red, abrasive, clashing, clinging red. She lets her mother buy her clothes, but with her own money, which she earns herself, from the temping. And her mother buys for a version of Trish that is too young, the twelve-year old she was before she started putting gloss on her lips and a razor to her legs. That’s where the too-tight wine duffel coat came from.
She stands in front of a speckled mirror and pulls at the strands of nearly dry hair. She drags a nylon knitted jumper over her head. It’s white. Stitched vertical columns line her chest. Her shoulders look bony underneath. White will do that. It’s a bitch for showing up your flaws. Her skin looks yellow. She t
akes out her stretch denims. They fit except for the knees, which sag a little. She takes out a pair of socks. It becomes one sock in her hand. She frowns.
There were two socks. She always rolls her socks into pairs. She loses them otherwise and then her feet get cold. She had another white sock like this one, a little girl Holy Communion knee-sock with fancy stitching like a paper doily in a cake shop. Her mother got it for her. Them. She can’t go out with just one. Must be somewhere. Maybe she’ll find it when she eats her pills.
That night, after the coffees and the party, Noelle lay awake, still drunk, drowsing. And while she drowsed, she heard some voice come at her like a knife sliding through her skin, moving upwards along her legs, through her crotch and up her torso, until it reached her neck. It was as if it was travelling inside her body, but she couldn’t feel it in any particular location. She thought of a devil and her head jerked awake, and all she could hear in the dark was her own breath. The luminous hands on her bedside clock said five.
Trish had told her lots of things between their silences over the black lace shawls, old hats and ornate rosary beads. She had been sick, she’d said. Her confidence was shattered. A man had loved and left her. She found it difficult to get up in the morning. She was taking pills. Her memory was going. Everything was bigger and brighter and vaguer and more and always more than before. When she felt down, she could kill herself, but then she was too down to do even that. She told Noelle those things, mundane horrors that don’t mean anything really, except to the person who’s experiencing them. A guilt in Noelle, a duty, sympathised. She wished it had been more than that. She felt sad for Trish and for what she’d been. So she put her arm around her while Trish told her about the entities coming at her in the night, during the day. Claws tearing at her from inside, baby demons scratching for birth, demanding she be mother. They were bad in daylight, but worse at night, when she was alone. She talked of fear, how afraid she’d been, afraid more than anything else of the fear.
Tingles at the end of a spine. Cold air around a neck. Cold feet, and a cold fear of the empty bed in the next room and the hands of the clock not moving.
It would be easy to be logical, and point to her bare purple foot in its pink shoe. To say, That’s where the cold is coming from. But she’s taken her pills and forgotten her missing sock and her foot could be ice or fire for all she cares. Anyway, the cold comes from some other world and no logic will change that. Always there, even with the duffel wrapped so tight. She turns off the light and walks down the piss-aromatic stairs into the winter.
Somewhere else, a place of perpetual summer, the brother is walking too, along an orange road. A truck with soldiers passes him, raising dust that stings his eyes. They might give him a lift. The sun might set over the mountain. He might be dead. So what. He’s gone. A panorama. A strain of music.
Here, in Noelle’s snug flat, Chubb-locked against the night, it’s cold too. Because, logically, it’s coming up to year’s end. Decade’s end, actually, and Noelle’s got to go out. Places to visit, people to see, appointments to miss. The devil that once-envied Beatrice fears in the night, clawing at her chest covered in skin like the brother’s, is waiting.
Standing at a frosty bus stop beside a vandalised phone box, remembering.
Polyfilla
The party had been thrown by a woman he’d met in college and who now worked in publishing. They’d kept in contact over the years; Seán had done a few jobs for her, she’d regularly plugged his business and, eighteen months ago, she’d drafted him in to oversee the renovations of her new house. She and her telly executive husband were childless and famous for hosting lavish dinner parties. Although Seán had been to a lot of them, he’d never met more than a sprinkling of the same people twice. He wondered if his hosts did this deliberately, blending their guests like paint colours, trying out different combinations until they hit the perfect mix. Maybe the choice was arbitrary, down to who was available and who had the flu. Up to now, it hadn’t bothered him. He’d enjoyed them, the drink and the food and the mingling with whoever he happened to meet.
Tonight, though, was different. He’d felt it in his bones the minute he walked in. For a second he wished Lola had come, to buffer with her chitchat and smiles whatever discomfort was heading his way. Then he remembered, and the wish was gone.
He wasn’t sure when he first noticed the woman in the blue dress. It must have been soon after he arrived. An ice-sweaty glass cooling the raging heart of his right palm. Bubbles of conversation rising around him, made meaningless by the thick membrane of his jangling nerves. His hostess dropping bits of him like breadcrumbs across the room as she ferried him through the crowd. He caught a glimpse of something in a corner – a swirling blue dress, a sparkling butterfly perched on a mane of red hair, a young bell-like laugh – and his hostess, reading the twitch under his skin, steered him in that direction.
‘Seán,’ she said, ‘let me introduce you to Poppet.’
Poppet. Christ, what a stupid name. Though maybe…
Her dress was made of some floaty stuff that seemed to change colour under the lights; one minute the virulent cobalt of grotto Virgins, the next the soft turquoise of the Greek sea. It reminded him of the things Lola used to put on, in the early days when she was shy and sweet, before he’d got his hands on her. This woman was wearing costume jewellery, the sort that would suit a girl: bangles, beads, long silver earrings that brushed the white skin of her shoulders. Then she turned her head and Seán’s maybes soured in a wash of irritation. Crows’ feet. Flabby upper arms. Polyfilla make-up. Late forties, if she was a day.
‘Seán’s our architect, Poppet,’ said his hostess, pressing her fingers into his upper arm. ‘Very artistic. The two of you will get on like a house on fire.’ She winked at Seán, released him and left.
A moment of awkwardness. The woman smiled. Then, at the same time, they both began speaking.
‘Sorry,’ said Seán, waving his glass. ‘Go on.’
She laughed. ‘Oh, nothing, just… You’re an architect?’
Seán swished his whiskey, longing for the satisfying clink of contact: ice on ice. ‘Mmm.’
‘Wow.’ Her lips curled, blow-job soft around an invisible straw. She had drawn a line around the upper one to make it look fuller. ‘I used to be a dancer.’
‘Oh.’ He wondered if he should make his boredom more obvious, let his eyes roam over the room, yawn, pretend to check for texts. Maybe he should go the courteous route; offer to get her a refill and never come back.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me my real name?’
She was gazing at him, intent. Her eyebrows were drawn-on, manufactured like the rest of her face.
‘Most people do,’ she said. ‘They don’t like to think of a grown woman being called Poppet. They think it’s silly.’
‘Oh, I…’
‘Sometimes they even throw names at me. Right in the middle of a conversation. Like a, you know, ambush.’
‘Really?’ His curiosity surprised him. ‘What kind of names?’
She smiled. ‘Why don’t I leave that to your imagination?’
His own mouth, he realised, had begun to curve in a smile; his pirate’s grin, Lola used to call it. He swished his drink again, brought it to his lips.
‘Hey, Josephine—’ he said suddenly.
The moment suspended between them. She laughed. ‘Nice try.’
‘Not Josephine then?’
She shook her head.
‘How about… Phyllis?’
Her clumpy lashes flickered.
‘No. I’ve got it. Bridget. Bridget.’
She laughed again. Her earrings tinkled. The skin of her shoulders was very white. Still laughing, she let her hands flutter up to pat her hair, as if it was a live animal she had enticed onto her head in the belief that it would be safe there.
He grabbed a refill from the tray and swallowed. Poppet had started to chatter away, punctuating her words with sideways glances, mischievous gri
ns, dramatic twists of her fine-boned wrists. Half-listening, he smiled, laughed, making the right murmurings at the right time.
Everything about her was in motion. Her neck was full of little creases that opened and closed as she spoke. Her cleavage quivered, sand-dunes shifting in a sea of blue frills. She kept flicking her hair, touching it. Its bottle-red jarred with the changing colours of her dress, playing tricks on Seán’s eyes, making the space around her shudder. When she lifted her hands, the flesh on her upper arms wobbled. Seán imagined how it would feel, that flesh. Soft and melting as a blancmange. He imagined touching it, gentle at first, then rough, grabbing and pinching and twisting so hard that in the morning she would find bruises. She moved and panic overwhelmed him. Was she leaving? She moved back. He grabbed another drink.
A bell sounded.
Dinner.
They’d been placed several seats from each other; too far away to continue talking. Maybe, thought Seán, his head already mushing from the drink, that wasn’t such a bad thing. Yet every so often he would find himself glancing over at Poppet, or feel the weight of her glance on him and, if their eyes met, would catch himself smiling before looking away, as if he had just caught sight of an old, distant acquaintance on a busy street.
The food was excellent, as it always was, accompanied by a constant flow of talk. Seán listened to himself explaining cantilevers to a budding fashion designer and wondered if anybody had brought cocaine.
Dessert arrived. Chocolate tart and a sweet yellow wine from France. Seán left most of the tart on his plate. He was pouring out his second glass of dessert wine when he became aware of a change in the room’s temperature. The stream of talk had begun to falter, breaking into lesser tributaries around an intense group on the other side of the table. Poppet’s laugh faded. Seán caught sighs, murmurs, a sorrowful shaking of heads. Someone had raised a serious topic.
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