Brass

by Helen Walsh

  ‘How d’you mean, kidder? Boss-looking girl, she is! Age ain’t got nothing to do with it.’

  ‘For sure, for sure – but when a woman hits forty she kind of tastes different down there, don’t you think? Must be something to do with hormones, change of life and all that. You know, marriage counsellors put so much emphasis on the psychology of relationships when accounting for infidelity, but I reckon, that that is the prime causal factor for affairs.’

  ‘Fuck you on about, girl?’

  ‘Cunnilingus. It can break even the most steadfast of marriages.’

  ‘Just run that by us again!’

  ‘Think about it. Divorce affects most couples between the ages of thirty-five and fifty yeah?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, man goes down on young bride. Young bride is happy. Young bride hits forty. Cunt starts to fester. Husband goes on cunni strike. Sex is reduced to basic and functional intercourse. Wife feels fusty and unsexy, denies husband of intercourse. Husband gets frustrated. Husband has affair.’

  ‘’kinell Millie, la! You’re not a full shilling, you!’

  ‘So everyone keeps telling me.’

  He tops up the bubbles, pulls up a leather beanbag and settles opposite me. I decide I’ll flatter him a bit.

  ‘So? What did all this cost, then? Or did some hopeful little hireling acquire it for you?’

  A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth and opens it wide.

  ‘There’s nothing new in here, girl. Just altered the lighting and shifted the furniture around and that.’

  ‘Well that certainly wasn’t here last time I came.’

  I nod towards an ugly ebony sculpture of a genderless child.

  ‘Oh, that little fella. Got that from an artist mate of mine down in London. What d’you think?’

  ‘Nasty. Cheap. Vulgar.’

  ‘You’ll get on like a house on fire then.’

  I stick my tongue out.

  ‘What you doing knocking around with sculptors anyway, Sean Flynn?

  ‘My mate and that, isn’t he? Met him at that Home. Good lad, he is.’

  ‘He sounds it.’

  ‘Pierrot and that, the sculptist lad…’

  ‘Pierrot?’

  ‘He told us it’s got hidden meanings and what have you.’

  ‘Really?’ I say, fighting back a grin.

  ‘Oh yeah – like, he’s left its bits out and that so’s we can make our own minds up.’

  He slumps back defiantly, waiting to be challenged.

  ‘Sorry – about what?’

  ‘You know,’ he blushes. ‘He left it without no thingio so’s we can half sort of put our own meaning into it and that, depending how we’re feeling. Like somedays I calls him Jimmy and somedays I calls him Shelley.’

  ‘Right,’ I say with big mock eyes. ‘That’s so clever! Very postmodern.’

  He’s delighted. Mad to think of thuggish Sean getting mugged by a sculptor’s bullshit, but God moves in mysterious ways.

  ‘Is though, innit?’

  ‘I mean not just because it gives the viewer a heightened sense of autonomy, but because the artefact itself transcends gender altogether. It resists categorisation, bypasses the modernist mode of thinking wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Oh yeah. Is right. Deffo and that.’

  He eyes his androgynous friend with animosity. We sit there in silence for a few seconds, then I relieve him from the ordeal by changing the subject. Pierrot, by the way!

  ‘How’s business?’

  ‘Chocka,’ he says, reverting to his usual overweening self. ‘Barely enough hours in the day, truth be known. What with the new Sushi bar and that – fucken done in, I am. Did I tell you I’ve opened another salon up on Smithdown?

  ‘Anne Marie’s gaff?’

  The words have slipped out before I even think. The smile drains from his face and for a fleeting moment, I feel the same crippling fear of an animal ensnared by it’s predator – but then the grin returns, bigger, bolder and he starts talking to me so casually.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Dunno’, I bluster. ‘Just heard she was going to be looking after the new place for you.’

  ‘Looking after it?’

  ‘Managing it. I heard she was going to be the manager, like.’

  ‘Anne Marie?’

  He grins his big bold grin again and shakes his head in mock disbelief. He gets up and disappears into the kitchen and I down the bubbly in one, in an attempt to numb myself to the surge of uneasiness I’ve poured into the room.

  It was Billy who told me. I met him after lectures – we went for Dim Sum. He’d been malingering around town all day, drinking like a paraffin. He finds it painful at the best of times to keep a secret Billy, and with two vats of lager gushing through his veins, it was a handicap he couldn’t manage a minute longer. He had to unload. When I walked into the Mandarin that night he was like a kid who’s dying for the toilet. He could hardly wait for me to sit down and order a Tsing Tao.

  ‘Get a load of this’, he said, jabbing his fork at me. ‘You’ll never guess what I just found out…’

  And with a swift glance either side, he informed me in a conspirational whisper that his future sister in law not only has a demon beak habit herself, but has been enlisted by the Flynns to help run their empire. Billy’s not arsed about her – said that in a weird way he’s got a sneaking respect for her, for being so fucking stony cold ambitious. But he doesn’t want anyone making a cunt out of Jamie, least of all his future wife and he’s certain Jamie knows nothing of all this and he’s ready to go round there and tell him everything. I surprised myself by talking him out of it – not out of any regard for Anne Marie, but because I know how stories get around in this city. An ice cream man can become a drug baron in the space of an afternoon and I told Billy that if he’s going to tear the arse out of his brother’s world he’d better make double sure of his facts first.

  Sean returns, composed and moody, now. He cuts out a couple of ample lines. I wait, fearful he’ll press me further about Anne Marie. He doesn’t. He gestures to the beak and my heart leaps – Bonnie Night has started! I take a note from my bag, roll it into a perfect cylinder and swoop. My nose is stuffy and it takes two or three attempts to clean the table, but I feel the buzz immediately.

  ‘Wow. Nice gear.’

  ‘Clean, innit?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, topping up our champagne. ‘No edge at all.’

  We clank glasses. He stands, and pads over to an expensive looking sound system. I watch him all the way, watch his lithe, prowling movements – graceful, yet fearsome.

  He feeds Norah Jones in and skips straight to ‘Feelin’ the Same Way’. I peel my fake fur off, sag down in my seat and let the music wash over me. I allow my eyelids to sink down for a while and when I open them again I catch him roaming my body. My cunt tingles and I feel my cheeks flush over.

  Okay, Thing One – no way in the world am I attracted to Sean Flynn, right? But Thing Two – there’s no denying he has one of the most beguiling faces I’ve ever seen. And that’s not just the beak talking. His face is bewitching. I could stare at it for hours. It’s his eyes – big brooding pools of mystery that can flame with such yearning, such intensity, yet with the blink of an eyelid abate into vacant recesses of tissue and matter. There’s hatred in those eyes too, and when he’s been drinking, his pupils contract into demented, dangerous pinpricks. But to be sat within such proximity of such impossible physical architecture floods my cunt with a woozy warmth – like pissing in the cold sea.

  ‘Just out of interest,’ he says, over-concentrating on the small mountain of powder before us. He sifts and chops and sifts again, then looks up at me. He smiles. ‘Who spieled you all that shite about Anne Marie?’

  ‘Fuck – can’t remember!’ I try to disguise my anxiety behind a ditzy smile. ‘Is it important?’

  He makes a big thing of smiling kindly, this time letting himself twinkle in unison.

 
‘Not in the slightest,’ he says, raising both palms to let me know the subject’s closed. Slightly too eager, I reach for the bottle and pour the remains of the champagne. To compensate for my haste and my awkwardness, I raise my glass.

  ‘To the lovely Anne Marie.’

  ‘To the lovely Anne Marie,’ he says. He swooshes the bubbles through his teeth and just sits there, watching me.

  Our eyes linger in each other’s and a sexual friction cracks wide open. I don’t see Sean. Just a pair of savage eyes and perfect features. My head battles, a moral, deep-rooted instinct to walk away, flailing in the face of raw sexual desire. I take a deep gulp of air and feel his eyes pulling me towards him. He gets up, comes and sits next to me.

  I flicker my eyes over his face, pausing at his lips. Moist and full and throbbing with desire. His lips. This is so wrong. I can’t stop myself. I edge closer and surrender my mouth in utter despair.

  CHAPTER 6

  Jamie

  Weird one, la. It’s like we’d just walked right it on something. Now Sean is the last lad on earth that our Millie’d go for, but I know I’m not imagining it. The pair of em are acting double shady. I’ll leave it for a while mind you – wait til she’s had a gargle and that later on. I’ll glean it out of her and I tell you now, I don’t care who the fuck his brothers are, if he’s laid a finger on that girl, he’s dead.

  I rally the troops and gets em moving.

  Millie

  Seffie park is pulsing with studes. A blur of bobble hats, southern accents and fluorescent sparklers. In spite of the fact that Billy has coloured his hair a garish blonde and Sean’s two sidekicks Kev and Mally look like Big Issue vendors, I feel dead proud to be out with my pals. That incident with Sean, whatever it was, has faded along with the beak high. Every now and then, a furtive glance from him will drag it from my subconscious and I’ll shudder. There is and never will be an Us.

  We find Liam and his wife up near the hotdog stand. Their son, Tony, is staring in mute amazement at the spectral showers above. Liam greets Jamie and Billy with bear hugs and Sean with a cursory slap on the back. Kev and Mally linger back, stiff and nervy – he always has that effect on blokes, Liam.

  ‘You know Jackie don’t you?’ Liam goes, slipping an arm around me and ushering me towards her.

  We exchange self-conscious smiles and I feel a lump of guilt lodge in my throat. Since the night I saw Liam in the Living Room, I’ve thought about him quite a lot. Stupid, harmless fantasies that aren’t really to do with sex. Just me and him walking along the Dock front. Talking. Flirting. Getting to know each other.

  ‘Hi, how’s it all going?’

  ‘Ah not bad love,’ she says, ‘And you? Have you finished with that Uni yet?’

  ‘No,’ I say, plaintively, ‘final year.’

  When you see Jackie you think of sucking babies, pendulous breasts and home-cooked dinners. She has warm, genteel features and a manner that is as effortlessly compassionate as it is asexual. Kissable not fuckable. She hasn’t let motherhood pull her down though. She’s looked after her figure through brutal aerobic workouts and pilates and her Clinique complexion is devoid of a blemish or wrinkle. She knows how to get the best out of that amiable reprobate of a husband of hers too. Ah, she’d probably be quite tickled if she knew I’d been thinking about him.

  The night vault rests for a while and Tony springs to life, shifting his weight to the balls of his feet, and hurling a fusillade of punches which fall inches from my tummy.

  ‘Ey, ey stop that will you,’ Liam says, pulling him away from me, ‘Remember what we said about all that? A time and a place ey son?’

  I smile. Tony juts his chin out and folds his arms. I ruffle his hair.

  ‘Neat little left upper you’ve got there Tony,’ I say and slide my eyes up to meet Liam’s. He holds my gaze for a moment and I wonder if I fancy him or if I’m just drunk enough to feel big feelings. The spell is broken by the lunge of Tony’s fists as he shuffles around me, ducking and dodging like a stalked fly. Liam shakes his head despairingly.

  ‘O’Malley’s over there with that new lad,’ he goes, ‘Thingio. What’s his name. Hornby. Must’ve seen him in the Echo last week?’

  My heart sinks a little. The whole boxing thing has just gone stale on me. I loved it to begin with when O’Malley had the place on Granby Street. There was only a dozen of us back then, mainly friends of Jamie and Sean. Then he moved to a bigger venue in town and installed mirrors, running machines and a sauna and it quickly became a melting pot for doormen, mock gangsters and brassy women with He-man physiques. At Granby, I was the only girl, which meant I got to train and spar with the boys. I was loved and utterly indulged. Women though, they’re vicious and ruthless – no attention to defence or footwork. All they’re bothered about when they step into a ring is how quickly they can smear their opponent’s nose across their face.

  * * *

  A belligerent succession of snaps and bangs signals the start of the main display of the evening. All heads lurch skyward and the night throbs in a thousand different colours. A gusto of applaud and drunken revelry follows. Students whoop and cheer loudly, hugging each other and grinning like phoneys. I detach myself, tilting my neck as far back as possible to catch the last dregs of my can. I let it fall discreetly to the floor and fire up another cigarette. Jamie quickly materialises with another cold can.

  ‘Twice in one day, hey?’ he goes, snapping the ring pull off for me.

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘Just seen your aul’ fella there, queuing for a bevvy. With some girl. Here y’are, there he is!’

  He points to a throng of people on the other side of the fire. A splinter of fear worries its way under my skin. Dad. I know it – I just know this is going to crush me. My eyes flit from face to face and lock right into him. He jerks away quickly, as though he hasn’t seen me and tips his head towards a burst of colour in the sky that belongs to some other distant display. But his face is a dead give-away. He’s been sussed. Before I can stop him, Jamie is trotting over. They embrace blokishly and laugh about something. Jamie swings round and points over to me. Dad crouches down and lifts his hand to his eyes as if trying to seek me out. He throws me a wave. I know what’s going to happen before it even happens. A smiling radiant blonde skips up to Dad and hands him a hotdog. She kisses him affectionately on the nose. She’s younger than me. Dad scratches the back of his head nervously and casts a quick glance in my direction. The girl is one of his first years – tall, blonde and pathetically pleased to be here, with him. She’s making a big thing of being childishly, girlishly thrilled by a firework display. She’s hunching her shoulders and simpering at Jamie. I want to launch a rampant rocket through her face. There’s nothing weird about lecturers hanging out with their students. John Fenney takes his Gender in Literature mob on mad benders to Amsterdam, but it’s something Dad has always snubbed.

  ‘It’s just not professional,’ he’d say. ‘How can you make an objective decision on a paper if you know the student intimately? Your students may like you more if they see you drunk, but they will respect you less.’

  Dad shifts about awkwardly. Jamie tries to beckon them both over but Dad shakes his head and taps his watch. He throws me another wave and then disappears into the crowd. The girl gives me this look, and follows him like a puppy. I want to bite her face off.

  Jamie jogs back, grinning apologetically.

  ‘I did invite them over you know, but he said he was running late for something and that. I think he was a tad embarrassed.’

  ‘He’s well trained, my Dad. He knows better than to thrust students in my direction.’

  ‘Yeah, but you’d make an exception for his bird wouldn’t you?’

  Not even by then am I prepared for the sting of hurt and bitter envy these words cause me. His bird. My Dad.

  Back at Sean’s, there’s a mad scramble to use the bathroom. Jamie and Sean insist on performing their ablutions for the third time today and Mally and Kev remonstrate l
oudly against Sean’s bedroom on the grounds that the mirrors are deceptively unflattering. Billy’s decided he doesn’t like his shoes and he’s legged it back home for his Patrick Cox faves. I change in the kitchen. I’ve never felt comfortable in dresses – they render me feminine and vulnerable. I regret my choice of outfit but I’m too inebriated to throw a tantrum. I use the kitchen window as a mirror and dress as though a hidden camera is filming me, peeling off my clothes in a seductive manner, and lingering naked for a while before I pour myself into the dress. I smear on layer upon layer of black eyeliner and charcoal eyeshadow and smother my lips in two coats of red red lipstick. I step into my heels, run a hand through my hair and prance around the kitchen, pouting my lips, jutting out my hips and tossing back my hair. I open up the fridge which is one of those big swanky Smeg contraptions and pull out more champagne. I guzzle wholeheartedly, produce a very expensive belch then give my hidden camera the finger. I cork the bottle with a piece of scrumpled up kitchen roll and return it upright to the fridge. When I walk into the lounge, they’ve all changed and Kev is chopping out rows of white substance with a frantic earnestness. Different patches of aftershave conflict in the air. Jamie and Mally wolf-whistle in unison. Kev pauses and looks up. His eyes flicker seductively over my body and then he’s back to the beak. I flash them a quick, coy smile and sit down beside Jamie who is wearing a grey shimmery turtle neck shirt. He looks clean and handsome. Kev and Mally look hideous. Kev is wearing a black Lacoste jumper four sizes too big for him, so that the neckline drags across the goosey white scrawn of his neck. Mally, although his outfit is sleek and composed, looks as though he is slowly decomposing. His face is streaked with a yellow nervous sweat. Almost as though his liver is mouldering, poisoning his whole body from inside to out. The pair of them are more mates of Sean’s than Jamie’s. Historical circumstances should have naturally thrust them apart but Sean just can’t resist the symbiotic relationship they share. He provides them with beak and gratis entry into clubs and they afford him demigod status through cringing feats of sycophancy. It works.