‘I’ve got something just about right for you,’ said the woman in the office, smiling at me like I was five years old and this was my first day in school. ‘Filing for a week in an accountancy firm. There’s only three of them there, it’s a quiet little place. Then we’ll see how you feel.’ She didn’t even get me to do a typing test, barely glanced at my over-qualified CV. Joan must have told her the whole stupid saga.
My new place of work was in that part of town with the Georgian streets, the parks with their locked gates and no one inside, the perfect lawns and whooshing trees. I rounded a great, blustery corner on to their street. I pressed the buzzer and waited until the door opened and Denis, a man with huge glasses and no hair at all, stood there. He ushered me in to their office, where my job for the week sprawled higgledy-piggledy in one corner of the room, like a bonfire never lit. Tom and Philomena, still sitting at their desks, looked from me, to the mess, to me again. I figured there must be thousands of sheets of paper in there. There was a bit of an accident, explained Denis. It involved the cat and one of the old cabinets, he continued. From the way the others stayed silent, I guessed it also had something to do with him. All their files from D through to Y lay there (they didn’t have any Zs). It would probably take more than the week to return everything to its proper home, and have each file safe and full in the new cabinet. But they’d see how I got on.
World became surnames, and letters and invoices, pastel yellows and pinks and greens, the new book smell of cardboard folders, and dust mites swimming in late afternoon sun. By the Wednesday afternoon, I was on M. The desire to get to Z by the Friday grew. An innocent one, but I wondered all the same at the adrenalin surge I felt on finishing each letter.
‘Don’t you have one of those white thingamebobs you want to listen to?’ asked Tom on the Thursday, as I was getting towards the end of P. ‘The nephew is about your age – he never takes it off.’
I thought of my iPod in its new home, the storage cupboard, along with spare light bulbs and Christmas decorations, old telephone directories, a bag of his clothes I’d found lying around the house. A T-shirt, two odd socks, a cardigan. I thought of his birthday gift to me of its 3,457 songs. I thought of the last time we listened to it together.
‘I don’t have one,’ I said.
I went to the bathroom, where I slid my back against the door until I was sitting on the tile-cold floor, and pressed the soles of my hands against my shut eyes. I let myself sink into that memory. Our first morning in Honduras, waking on that half-filled air mattress on a wooden room in a tree, only a mosquito net between us and the sky. How I used the iPod to boom Tom Waits at him until he woke. How, when he did, he kissed my forehead and worked his way down, removing everything that interfered with his plan, such as a vest or pair of knickers. How sharp and hard his tongue grew, until I wrapped my hands around his ears and jaw and pulled him back up until we were face to living, breathing, contorting face again. How I then turned my back on him and pressed myself against him until his right hand was clutching my left breast and how then we were bobbing like a raft in a storm. How he pushed until I was face down in the sweat-filmed plastic and he was on top of me and together we reached the exact same place at the exact same time and how we rolled away from each other, laughing and sea-sick drunk. Before I knew what I was doing, my finger slipped beneath the hem of my trousers and underwear and was blurring up and down in there, until I was biting the thumb of my other hand and a moan still almost escaped me.
The next morning I did something I didn’t know I was going to do. On my way to work, I stopped off at the bakery down the street from the office and bought four croissants. We sat around Denis’s desk, where crumbs fell like golden snowflakes.
‘Well, Ruth,’ said Tom, a large piece of pastry clinging to the side of his mouth. ‘We’ve got used to you about the place.’
‘Stellar worker,’ said Denis.
‘A good girl,’ nodded Philomena, in a voice that suggested she knew a bad one when she saw one.
It was almost five o’clock when I placed the final file, a Mr Joseph Williams, into the cabinet, in a pebble blue folder. I let the door slide shut and said, ‘Finished.’ Denis looked up and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He looked at me as though he’d never seen me before. Then he looked at the cabinet.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Would you look at that.’
Tom looked up too, wearing just the same expression.
‘Well I’ll be. Right on the dot.’ Outside it was dark and a mist was falling.
Walking home that evening, the mist gave way to a wind-possessed rain that blasted my face and whipped off my hat once and for all. It seeped through the duffel of my coat, moving on past my cardigan and skirt, my tights and shirt and underwear. The skin on every inch of my body, except for my back, soon burned wet and cold. The rain pushed me against the door as I got the key in the lock and turned it. I half fell into the hallway, to face Frank coming down the stairs, his bag slung over one shoulder and his football boots dangling from his hand by their tied laces. His eyes widened as he took me in. He stopped walking, his open mouth threatening a smile.
‘Hi Frank,’ I said, as I drip-walked past.
‘Well hello there. Wait a minute now, would you? How are you?’
His fingers curled around my elbow. I turned and looked into those water-blue eyes that peered back at me without blinking. I looked down at his fingers and his hand went to the banister, where they wrapped around that instead.
‘It’s just nice to see you out and about for a change,’ he said, his voice higher than usual. ‘You look more yourself than I’ve seen you look in a while.’
By speaking, he was breaking the rule I set the day I came back. When I explained how the only thing stopping me from ending my life was the fact that I could feel safe in my flat. Safe meaning left alone. The fact was, this was a lie. I never came close to wanting everything to end. It struck me for the first time how cruel that was of me. I could see it in his body posture, in the way his eyes flicked from my face to his hand on the banister and back again. In the way he still hadn’t fully closed his mouth.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m not about to jump.’ I glanced over the banister as I spoke. I had to smile just so he’d know it was a bad joke. I knew then, that if I stood there any longer, his arms would be around my back, pressing me to him, and I would be smelling the scent of aftershave and mint and feeling his hot wet tears on my cold wet neck.
‘So long Frank,’ I said, turning and half running up the steps and around to my door.
‘I’m off next week,’ he shouted up at me. I turned, my hand still on the key in the keyhole. From this angle, I could see the top of his hair-stubbled head. I noticed it was cut tighter than usual, and how this suited him.
‘Australia,’ he said. He watched my face, waiting for me to remember.
‘Australia. Of course.’ He was going there for a year. ‘Good luck Frank, if I don’t see you between now and then.’
‘Leaving do is Thursday night.’
‘Have a good one.’
I passed that weekend in pretty much the same way I’d passed every day that autumn prior to my stint with the cabinets. I put on the television and left it on until the agency called Monday morning. Saturday, I spent a couple of hours on the treadmill in the gym across the road. I ate bowls of Cheerios and spaghetti with garlic and chilli fried in olive oil, topped off with grated cheese. I’d learned this recipe from my aunt in Italy and never got sick of it. There were five bottles of wine left in the last crate I’d ordered; I drank three of them. Saturday night’s one I drank on the roof of the extension below my window, necking the bottle. Wrapped in a blanket, I looked at the stars and the small dense clouds moving across them. I stayed there even when a big one came and started spitting on the city. I could see Frank’s window above, glowing a pale yellow, though I didn’t see his shadow move across once. He was probably out. The only Saturday nights he was ever
in were the ones when he threw a party. Starting with his housewarming back in the spring.
He lived in a bedsit, so we were all in the one room. I only knew the couple from downstairs and had just met Frank the day before. Some people were sitting or lying on the bed; the biggest group was standing around in the tiny kitchenette. Glenn was sitting on the arm of the couch, having an earnest-looking conversation with the couple. I had just come from a club and spent most of the night talking to Frank’s college friends, the group in the kitchenette. It was only when daylight began to creep in through the curtains and I was finally feeling as though, if I lay down, sleep would come, that Frank came over with Glenn and introduced us. Told me how they met on a scuba diving course in Spain the year before. Laughter bubbled its way up through me when I took in his grave face and the steady eyes that appraised me; I couldn’t help myself.
‘Nice to meet you,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you enjoying yourself very much?’
As soon as I spoke, I saw how I must have seemed to him: overly confident, too pleased with myself, arriving at a party where I knew no one and acting like its long-overdue life and soul. Then he said, coming closer as he spoke so that he was leaning over me and I could see the small damp curl that clung to his skin below his right ear and the way his eyelashes curled long and dark red and the freckle on his upper lip, ‘I think we’re enjoying ourselves equally.’
And then he grinned. A month later, he was staying in my place at least three nights a week. Three months later, we got on our plane to Honduras.
Monday afternoon the agency called again. Three days, but a bit hectic, I was warned. An estate agent that managed to stay in business by renting cheap accommodation mostly to students. It was on Baggot Street, where all the suit-wearing bagel-buyers throng the street at lunch hour.
‘Thank you,’ I said, surprised at how sincere I sounded.
The man behind the desk stared up at the new girl as the question barked.
‘Who’s got the keys for Harold’s Cross Road?’
I didn’t know. I stared back and said, ‘Hello, I’m – ’
‘Marie, there’s someone here,’ he shouted, while putting on his coat. ‘Where are the bloody keys for – ’
A bunch of keys plunged through the air and through his sentence, past my left ear. They thunked against the wall and hit the ground. He glared at me as he went to pick them up and I took in the muddle of desks and phones and people behind where he sat.
That first day I spoke to no one, except all the people who phoned. I spent my lunch hour sitting on a park bench, where icy sun freckled through leaves, and coffee warmed my hands and sharped down my throat.
‘How long are you here?’ asked a blonde-haired girl at lunch on the second day.
‘Just until tomorrow,’ I told her.
‘Until Denise gets back then?’
I shrugged.
‘Well, if you’re not doing anything, you’re welcome to join myself and the girls for lunch. We’re going to a great crêpe place around the corner.’
She smiled a shy smile. What could I do?
‘OK, thanks,’ I said.
We scraped chairs around the chrome table. I ordered a melted chocolate and banana crêpe with a strawberry milkshake. Outside the tourists and workers and shoppers ant-filed up and down. The girls began to talk and I had no choice but to listen.
‘That’s it girls. It is so over now,’ said the one with the sparkly nails and spaghetti-thin eyebrows. They all looked up and gave a chorus groan.
‘What happened?’ asked shy blonde.
‘I can’t go out with someone who blows his nose every five minutes. That’s what happened.’
‘Come off it, Jenny,’ said shy blonde.
‘I am serious, Laura. Literally, in the cinema, every five minutes. No exaggeration. The guy’s a hypo-chondriac.’
‘So you dumped him?’ asked the one sitting on my left. The one in the purple polo and matching lipstick, red hair scraped into a schoolgirl ponytail that perched on the top of her head like a question mark. Beneath it, an Audrey Hepburn face.
‘I said I didn’t have the time to be seeing anyone.’
‘Sounds easy,’ said Audrey Hepburn.
‘I’m not finished. You know what he did? He started crying.’
The waitress arrived. Chocolate, dark and thick, bubbled over banana slices. Sweet and sweet. I gazed at it and breathed in. I sipped my strawberry milkshake, winking bubblegum pink. I forgot all about tears dripping into drinks. Then sparkly nails resumed.
‘I said, look, Maurice.’
She looked around at us then. I looked up guiltily from my freshly cut slice of chocolate dripping lunch.
‘I said look. There is no point in you acting like this. I mean, it’s not the kind of behaviour a girl is going to find attractive, is it?’
The girl who had not spoken yet gave an appreciative snort. She was a mass of softness and gentle edges in a deep pink sweater, her eyes kohl-smudged.
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ said sparkly nails then. They all looked at me.
‘No,’ I heard my voice say.
‘Join the club,’ said softness. This time, I smiled to their laughter.
On the Thursday, sun got swallowed up by night-dark clouds and November soothe-scared us all afternoon with its drum blanket, on the roof, against the windows. Lonely streetlamps flickered on. Inside, electricity glared and voices flashed naked in the silence. I wanted to go up to the window, look at our sad reflections and at the darkness beyond. I wanted to be out there, walking the ghostly street.
‘Are you doing anything tonight?’ asked shy blonde at five o’clock.
‘No,’ I replied.
‘Come out with us,’ she said. ‘We’re planning on getting drunk.’
Seven Mojitos later, I went up to the guy standing at the stairs, watching the people dancing.
‘That’s a nice shirt,’ I said. I meant it. It was plaid and soft-looking and mostly bright pink.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘Where’d you get it?’ I asked.
‘H&M,’ he said. He was looking at me with a bemused smile. It was a smirk more than a smile and I guessed he couldn’t help it. He looked like the kind of person who was used to drunk girls approaching him. Like he already recognised it as a lucky perk he’d ended up with.
‘You know the laneway between The Stag’s Head and Dame Street?’ I asked. And then I turned and walked out of there. I crossed the Liffey on the people-empty Ha’penny Bridge. I zig-zagged through a screaming hen night and the kebab munchers in Temple Bar. I crossed the long thigh of Dame Street, where the taxis waited and a drunk man muttered his way across in the opposite direction and the remaining leaves on the trees hissed and sighed. It had grown colder; the clouds were gone and the moonless sky stung with white-cold stars. He must have been right behind me all the way, because I was just in the archway, when his hand was on my shoulder.
‘I’m glad your coat is such a bright red,’ he said. ‘I nearly lost you.’
‘You knew where I’d be,’ I said.
‘This is true.’
He pushed his mouth against mine and I pressed the palm of my hand against the back of his head. My other hand opened the buttons of my coat. He tasted of beer and smoke and chewing gum. I didn’t care how I tasted. His tongue pressed hard into my mouth, forcing my tongue down as it searched for something, along my teeth, the roof of my mouth. I pushed mine up until the tip of mine met the tip of his and we both pushed together, as though we wanted to separate, while our hands locked us together. All the time, his right hand moved fast and flat from my hip to my neck.
Behind me, the moss-green wall sloped inwards, offering up a slippery seat. I had glimpsed this in the second before he arrived and now I took a step backwards, pulling him with me. He lifted me onto it, his hands grasping the flesh of my rear, until my feet were hanging in the air, his body holding me there.
His clever hand tripped open the buttons of t
he cardigan, and then the shirt, of my demure office outfit. Then he reached back and undid the clasp of my bra. I wondered how often he had done this before. His hand rubbed hard and fast across my breasts and then his mouth was on one of them, then the other, sucking and biting my nipples ever so gently. Those are seriously soft lips, I remember thinking. More like what you’d expect from a girl. Before I had approached him in the bar, I went to the bathroom in a moment of inebriated focus, and threw my tights into the bin. Now, I pulled my knickers, a boring white cotton affair, off with one hand, lifting each foot lightly, as though I too had done this a hundred times. I stuffed them into my coat pocket. He yanked my skirt up until it was bunched around my waist. Just then, a group of men roared past on Dame Street. None of them, I think, looked in our direction. If they had, they would have seen the side profile of my thigh, and the left one of my respectably ample breasts, all nipple sharpened and standing white against the darkness.
To be honest, I had never had sex standing up before. But then, making a fool of myself had never mattered so little. I reached down and felt the hard bar of his cock and pulled open the buttons on his jeans and broke our kiss to look down. There it was, poking through. Looking up to say hi. I looked at his face and he was grin-smirking again, like it was all one great big joke. Which, of course, it was. I slipped from my perch in the wall and hunched down, put it hard and warm into my mouth, which moved up and down just a couple of times before I was back standing again. Now he wasn’t grinning any more. In the quickest move I have ever seen, he went from not wearing a condom to wearing one. Then his hands grabbed my rear again and I wrapped my legs around his torso, my arms around his neck. And that is how I found myself in the very early hours of a Friday morning, on a dark but not so tucked away part of the city, dancing hard and fast on the erection of a man I never met before. He was stronger than he looked, or at least pulled off an impressive feat for the occasion. I felt the world disappear. I became swallowed up by the growing sensation until it bubbled up and rushed out of my mouth in a groan. This made him move faster, until his rose, came up and out of him, and we were left panting as he pulled himself from me and let my feet rest onto the ground. I could feel the jerky beats of his heart and the shaking of his arms.
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