by Lucy Carey
She flicked the switch on the kettle.
“Now, to reverse things: would you like a tea or a coffee?”
Mariana sipped on a sweetened black coffee, struggling to keep her face pleasant. She didn’t normally take sugar in her coffee but the instant, granulated tar in her cup had prompted her to load the sweetener in.
She didn’t mention her dislike of the coffee to Susie though. When her host had opened the cupboard with her name stickered on it, Mariana had noticed that all the products were non-branded or supermarket-branded products. Though ordinarily, she would sip only slightly from a mug of such bad coffee, she resolved to finish the whole cup of something she guessed Susie could ill-afford to buy.
“I was thinking we could start by reading through those articles and we could discuss any words or phrases that you didn’t understand. How does that sound?”
Mariana put her cup down.
“That sounds like a good way to do things.”
She took the articles, printed out from the internet, from her bag and began to underline.
* * *
Susie hovered over the article, her head so close it was almost touching Mariana’s at the forehead. She allowed herself to breathe in again that melody of lemon and coffee and cinnamon.
“Okay, so this phrase, ‘putting her best foot forward’, means that she was trying her best, or that she was putting the best version of herself forward. So, for example...”
The end of her sentence was cut off by the swinging open of the kitchen door, as two of her three housemates wandered in, chatting.
Mark, the louder of the two, gave her a wink. “Howya, Susie?” He closed the door behind him. “And who is your lovely friend?”
Susie smiled tersely.
“This is Mariana. I’m giving her lessons at the moment, so...” She left the implication, her irritation at his interruption, hanging in the air.
He nodded slowly, apathetically, then sat in the vacant chair at the foot of the table beside Mariana. He put his hand out.
“Hello, Mariana. I’m Mark.”
Mariana took his hand limply, barely politely, and let it drop as soon as it was socially acceptable to do so.
“Hi,” she said without smiling.
Smart girl, Susie thought.
“Mariana, would you like a drink? We’re going to have a beer, but you can have a vodka, if you prefer, or a rum?” her other housemate, Shane, called out with his head inside the fridge. His stupid, fat arse pointing out from the refrigerator was just begging to be kicked, Susie thought.
He brought his head out from the fridge to look at Mariana expectantly. Susie willed her not to accept, not to fall for the “cheeky chappy” crap that had worked on too many of her female friends in the past. So many women she had brought to the house in the past had been taken in by her housemates’ sleazy charm that she had stopped bringing any close friends home for fearing of losing all respect for them.
Mariana cocked an eyebrow at him and shot him a withering look.
“I am having a lesson. No, I do not want any alcohol, thank you.”
She turned her glare to Mark who was reading one of her print-outs. She snatched the paper from his hand.
“I need this for my lesson.”
She turned to read the print-out, intently focusing on the page, then began to read the words with increasing volume until Mark stood up.
“Suit yourself,” he said in a clipped tone. “Come on, Shane, and we’ll leave them to it.”
Susie fought the urge to squeal in victory as the two men left the room.
Just seconds later, though, the dishes in the sink began to vibrate with the throb of music.
“For fuck’s sake,” Susie said more loudly than she intended. She got out of her seat and walked to the foot of the stairs.
“Lads, can you turn it down for just a little while? We’re trying to work.”
She waited a few seconds for a response. When none came, she thudded up the stairs and rapped on Mark’s bedroom door.
Mark opened the door to her, an innocent expression on his face. A cloud of smoke billowed out the door from behind him.
“Are you all right, Susie?” he asked, leaning against the door-frame.
“Would ye mind turning it down for a bit? I’m trying to finish the lesson with Mariana.”
He leaned into the bedroom.
“Shane, will you turn that down a bit? Susie’s trying to work.”
The volume dimmed.
“Thanks,” Susie said, without waiting for any more conversation, and headed back down to the kitchen.
“I’m sorry about that,” she told the waiting Mariana. “They can be a bit inconsiderate sometimes.”
“Yes, it seems that way,” Mariana said. “They are very loud.”
“They are,” Susie agreed. “They should hopefully be quiet until we finish up.”
It was wishful thinking, Susie admitted to herself, and futile at that. They weren’t ten more minutes into the lesson when she heard Mark shout out to Shane, “Aw, man, I love this tune.” The volume increased again and the dishes resumed their shaking.
Susie rolled her eyes and admitted defeat.
“I’m really sorry, Mariana. I don’t think we’ll get the rest of the lesson finished. We can reschedule for a day next week when I’m finished early from classes and you’re not in work, maybe. How does that sound?”
Mariana’s eyes softened in sympathy and she patted Susie’s hand.
“That sounds good.”
Susie leapt up, afraid Mariana would catch the look of glee her touch had evoked, and went to fetch her guest’s coat.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll walk you home.”
* * *
“So those boys, are they always like this?” Mariana asked as she and Susie left the house.
Susie sighed.
“Pretty much.”
“They are so annoying. They are definitely boys. Men do not act like that. How long have you lived there?”
“Six months now,” Susie said. “Until I can save enough money for a deposit on a new place. It’s hard though with fees and things. And because my mother earns slightly too much, even though my dad doesn’t work, I don’t qualify for an education grant. I’m just... stuck.”
Susie looked so lost, Mariana felt her temperature rise, an irritated prickle running up her spine.
“Why does your landlord not kick them out? You have told him, haven’t you?”
“Yep, I tried that. He said with so many houses going unrented, as long as they pay the rent, he doesn’t give a shit what they do.”
Mariana shook her head in disbelief.
“And your neighbours? Do they not complain too?”
“Nope. The ones to the left of us come in for the parties. They’re a student house too. There’s no one to the right of us to complain about them.”
“That is ridiculous,” Mariana said to herself as much as to Susie. “Just ridiculous.”
“I wouldn’t mind so much if it wasn’t every day. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in I don’t know how long. I just feel ready to snap all the time.”
Mariana scrutinised Susie’s face. In the first flush of her attraction to Susie, she had noticed only the perfections of Susie’s face—the brown flecks in her almond hazel eyes framed with those long, fair lashes, the slight freckling of her skin across her nose and cheeks.
Now that she looked at her—really looked—she came to see the dark, blue circles under her pretty eyes and the sickly pallor of her already fair skin.
She watched her new teacher bite her soft pink lips in private thought. She looked so sad.
Susie turned to her.
“It just gets a bit lonely at times, you know? I feel like an intruder in my own house, like I have nowhere to call my own.”
Mariana stopped as they reached the steps to her apartment.
“This is my place,” she said.
Susie looked up startled.
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“Oh, right.”
She reached over to clasp Susie’s arm, desperate to break through the loneliness that she could see on Susie’s face.
“I get lonely too. So much. In Brazil I had people, I had friends. I had women close to me. Here I sometimes feel like I have no one. No female company anyway.”
Susie looked long and hard at her and Mariana’s breath caught in her throat. For a moment she felt a friction pass between them, a frisson of electric tension. She longed to pull Susie to her chest, to stroke her hair and to kiss her face, over and over again.
And then she remembered the man outside the college and the spell was broken.
“I should be going,” she said. She let go of Susie’s arm and Susie stepped backwards.
“Oh, of course,” Susie said. “I’m sorry to be keeping you from your evening.”
The urge to protest, to beg Susie not to go, tugged at Mariana, but she had played this game before. She wasn’t making that same mistake again, of pouring her love and attention onto a straight girl only to have it spurned.
* * *
What the fuck was that? Susie thought as she made the walk home. What had just happened?
Had she totally misread Mariana? In that frozen moment on Mariana’s step, Susie thought—no she felt—that Mariana shared her interest. She had been sure Mariana was going to kiss her then or maybe just invite her in out of the cold.
Was it possible that she had the wrong idea altogether? That she had sized Mariana up wrong?
Her footsteps felt heavier the further she walked away from where Mariana was, the leaden pounding of her feet struggling to keep up with the rapid beat of her heart.
The walk home had never felt so long before.
Chapter Six
The café was far too quiet, Mariana thought as she swept under the same table she had swept under ten minutes before. Though in recent times, things had been slow, today even the regular customers were nowhere to be seen. After the lunch rush, the flow of customers had thinned to a trickle.
With no customers to serve and nothing else to distract her, Mariana’s mind was free to wander dangerously to thoughts of Susie. Even when she wasn’t thinking of her, the memory of Susie’s face kept barging into her thoughts unbidden. The image of Susie, her big hazel eyes peeking out from the mess of red curls that framed her face, bit at Mariana.
She could try to be her friend, Mariana reasoned. And really, she would love to be her friend, to fix every hurt Susie felt or hold her tightly when she cried or to make her face light up in laughter. But she knew deep down that it would never be enough. One day Susie might smile at her in a certain way or she’d look as lost and fragile as she had the other night and Mariana wouldn’t be able to resist pressing her lips on Susie’s, running her hand through the bounce of her curls, and engulfing her in a deep and probing kiss.
No, Mariana thought. Best to get out gracefully now with her dignity intact.
The bell tinkled behind her as the door to the café pushed open whipping a wind through the coffee shop.
“Olá, belíssima.”
David, returned from an errand, walked to the corner to hang his coat on the rack.
“Olá, meu amor,” Mariana said softly. She was at once gladdened and irritated by being torn away from thoughts of Susie.
David stared around the café.
“Bloody empty today,” he mused, the observation digging a furrow in his brow. Mariana said nothing and David stood silently for a few moments longer. He rallied himself.
“We might as well make use of it. Cup of tea, Mariana?”
Mariana nodded and David began scalding the cups and teapot. She returned the sweeping brush to its hook behind the counter.
David carried the tea to a table by a couch and slumped into the leather cushions.
Mariana sat on a wooden chair in front of the table and then slid another one out to rest her feet on. David poured a weaker cup of tea for her, then swished the pot for a few moments more to strengthen the tea for himself. (His tea was so strong, a spoon could stand up straight in it, Mariana liked to joke.)The heavy clatter of his cup on his saucer snapped Mariana’s attention to him.
She looked at him for a few moments. Though his hair was no longer jet black and though his skin was lined, a boyish exuberance that manifested as a twinkle in his eye meant David had never really looked his age. Now, pale and drawn, he looked every day of his nearly fifty years and, Mariana had to admit, a good few more.
He sighed.
“What am I going to do with this place, Mariana? It’s starting to look more and more like a graveyard in here with each week that goes by.”
Mariana smiled in sympathy. There was nothing she could think to say to him that would ease his worry. He was right—business was bad and it showed no sign of picking up again. When she had started working there, she had prayed for every moment she could to get off her feet, so busy were they with queues of customers. Most of those customers had proven to be fickle, jumping ship when new chain coffee stores had sprung up in close proximity.
“Is it very bad?” she asked finally and David winced.
“It’s pretty bad. Most weeks, we’re not even breaking even. I’ve cut everything I can cut. We’re down to a skeleton crew—I’m sure you’ve noticed—and I’m refinanced every way I can be. I don’t know what else there is to do.”
He pressed his head back against the couch and closed his eyes.
“We’ll figure something out, meu amor. I will help you to think of ways to fix this, to get people back into the Coffee Bean again.”
David looked doubtful.
“We will do it, David,” Mariana told him. “We just have to think of how.”
They sipped silently for a little while, each lost in their own thoughts. David broke the silence.
“So what’s wrong with you then?”
“Me? Nothing.”
David snorted and crossed his arms.
“There fecking is. You keep saying you’re fine but you’re walking around with a face like a smacked arse all day.”
Mariana leaned forward and propped her chin on her hand, blowing an errant strand of hair from her eye-line. She decided to come clean.
“I am very fucking lonely, David.” She said it without bitterness or sorrow, more stating a fact than inviting sympathy. Still, he frowned and uncrossed his arms.
“Are you really? For friends or family or...”
She knew exactly what question he had left hanging in the air. He had asked before about her suitors (or lack thereof) in casual conversation and had helped to dissect the corpses of the one or two brief relationships Mariana had since living in Dublin.
She exhaled heavily.
“I want a girlfriend, David. I am sick and tired of being on my own and of having no one to talk to in the evening.”
She lowered her voice to a hiss.
“And I have not had a fuck in too long.”
David burst out laughing.
“No wonder you look so bloody morose! That may be a little easier to fix than my problems, my dear. Did I ever tell you about my friend, Tara?”
He pulled out his phone and began scrolling through the numbers.
Chapter Seven
Saturday nights in O’Rourke’s pub are always busy—which, given the décor, was always surprising to Susie. The velvet-covered booths and bar stools were at least twenty years old, their original colouring—as well as the paisley-patterned carpet—dull and rank with age, smoke, stains, and (she shuddered to think) various bodily fluids. Originally, the walls had been white, she guessed, but these days they were more of a yellow colour: a throwback to the days before the smoking ban of 2004.
Still, for some reason, people seemed to regard the pub as “traditional” and “unpretentious,” rather than “stinky” and “depressing” as Susie did. It drew masses of people year-round. Besides catering to the tourist and student crowds, the pub heaved with locals. Funny, Susie th
ought midway through her shift, how people always managed to find money for drink when so many of them couldn’t even afford their car or house payments.
Right now, they were elbow-to-elbow at the bar. “Who’s next there?” she yelled at the throng in front of her. A middle-aged man in a loud pink shirt clicked his fingers and waved a €50 note at her.