I kissed him on the cheek as he helped me close my buttons and fasten my bra. I left my knickers in my pocket as I walked away, still breathless and without anything to say anyway.
Walking after orgasm was a novelty. I took a long route home, one that took me on down Dame Street until I reached Christchurch. Then I went down Patrick Street, where the traffic never stops zipping or crawling, depending on time of day. I took a left at the church until I reached St Stephen’s Green, where the trees swayed understandingly and not without a sense of humour. By then my breath had returned to normal. And all that was left was the coldness of my legs and the damp, bunched-up knickers in my pocket and the sensation fading back into where it came from.
I walked along the tramline, one foot right behind the other, like it was a tightrope. I met no one. See? I said to myself. Glenn is gone for ever. It didn’t matter if I fucked strangers in the night-time. It didn’t matter if I fucked Glenn’s Dad. I took out my phone, read again the text message sent by my brother James the week before I started temping. As I read, the desire to hit him, and hear the bone break, came back just as strong.
Mum’s out of her mind worrying about u. I know ur sad, but u need to snap out of it. U only knew him 3 mnths. U know that’s not even 1% of ur life so far?
But this time I deleted the message. And this time, I did not wish something worse than breaking bone: that it was James who had lain there in the morgue in Honduras, and not Glenn. Glenn, with his strand of his long red hair hanging loose, so that when they brought me in to identify the body, I knew it was him before they removed the sheet. And then they pulled it back anyway and there he was, only fatter. His nose, only purple and crooked. The man in the crumpled blue shirt and sad moustache told me it was broken, along with his lungs.
‘Like that,’ he said, clicking his fingers and shaking his head, the sad moustache turned downward in distaste rather than sympathy or sorrow. But Glenn had been a careful diver, I wanted to tell him. He had done all the courses and passed them with flying colours. Not like some of the backpackers who dive here because it’s cheap, without learning how to do it properly, and risk their lives but manage not to die. Glenn only came here to see the fish that glow in the night time. He said it was like flying amongst the stars.
When I opened the red door that night, after walking the long way home from fucking the stranger, a couple was coming down the stairs.
‘Is Frank in?’ I asked them.
‘Conked on his bed,’ said the man.
‘Anyone else in there?’ I asked.
‘Nope. You’re a bit late.’
I got Frank’s spare key from my flat and went across and into his. There he was, lying back-down on his double bed in the corner of the room, hidden torso down beneath the quilt and snoring. All of his things were gone, except for a bulging rucksack by the door, a pile of clothes on the armchair and party debris: wine-stained glasses, bottles of beer and cigarette stubs squished in saucers. I took off my coat and lay down beside him. I let my arm lie across his waist. When my phone rang, I woke dry and fuzzy in my mouth but with no headache at all. It was the agency. I glanced at the silver watch on Frank’s wrist. 8.30.
‘Sorry for the early call,’ said the agency woman. ‘But we need you in an advertising company off George’s Street, by ten if you can make it. Basic data inputting this time. It’s just for the day.’
Frank stirred but did not waken. I took a peek under the quilt and then threw it off. I slid down the bed along his Viking frame, using my elbows to lever me, and then put his morning-sharp cock in my mouth. I resisted the urge to look up when I heard the gasp, the ‘Jesus’, followed by the dry mouth whisper, ‘Ruth’. I wrapped my lips hard around it and moved up and down, all the while my left hand wrapped around his upper arm. Then I straddled him. He closed his bug-big eyes and let it happen. I loved him briefly for that. Afterwards, I kissed his dazed face, his lips first and then his forehead.
‘A goodbye gift. Thanks for everything. I promise you I’ll be OK.’
An hour later, I walked past the tree skeletons, past corner shops and cafés, through doors and along the marble-floored reception area as though I’d worked there all my life.
‘Marsh Advertising?’ repeated the woman behind the desk. ‘That’s on the seventh floor. Through the atrium to the lift. All the way to the top.’
I swung open a second set of doors and walked warm and tiny through the glass-roofed green. The lift carried me upwards, out-climbing the sun-craving palm trees and vines. At the top, a smile flashed at me behind a vast ash desk, across a sea of leather sofas and glass table tops.
‘Ruth, is it? From the agency? I’ll just tell Margaret you’re here.’
I walked to the wall window. Below me and the empty blue deep, the city spread out startling vast. I pressed my forehead against the cool glass and stared into its jumble of houses and cars and streets as it filled to the horizon, all silver gleaming and morning new. I spoke his name – Glenn – to the morning, and told him, for the last time, I was sorry for carrying on.
Last week, I went to the graveyard for the first time since the funeral. There was no one else in sight. I placed a bunch of eight sunflowers on the earth’s new icing of snow, one for each one he bought me. I had to scrape the snow off the temporary gravestone of a little wooden cross in order to see his name. Glenn Garvey. ‘Ruth Garvey,’ I said, and let myself cry, just a little. Snow glittered and above, the sky echoed it with blue. There was a blackbird singing in a tree behind me. And I could hear the wind, and in the distance, the traffic of the city sang to me until I turned and walked down the cemetery path, back towards the street.
About the Story
Ten years ago, Imoved to Dublin city. At the end of the first year, a plan was formed among my flatmates to move to a bigger, better house in the ’burbs. I backed out at the very last minute. Instead, I got myself a bedsit in a Georgian house, walking distance from the city centre. Everyone, myself included, thought I was behaving rather foolishly. My new home, after all, was a dump. And I had no real excuse for this behaviour, other than the fact that I wasn’t too keen on getting the bus.
Time passed and things changed, as they tend to do. I got a proper job and a proper place to live, one that had a television and a separate room for the bed and even other people living in it. In recent years, so many things have changed; I have found myself reliant on the bus for the first time since I moved here. Then, a girl called Ruth turns up in morning scribblings. She lives, of all places, in that old bedsit, a place I haven’t thought of in years. She walks to her stress-free work.
Thinking about this now, it seems clear that the story came partly at least from a nostalgia for that part of town, and that stage of my life. But it’s also about Dublin being the kind of place that comes right up and touches you, in the physical sense of the word. When things force Ruth to return to the world, almost everything she encounters rubs up against her in some way or another: the weather, cardboard files, men. It’s what helps her to move on. Maybe moving into that bedsit wasn’t so foolish after all. Sexy and ugly at the same time, Dublin is the kind of place to walk around in, as you let the weather beat you up a little and every now and then get thrown a shot like the docks at dusk or seagulls screaming over a beer-can-strewn canal.
Of Cockles and Mussels
by Stella Duffy
IF THERE’S ONE THING I know to be true about Molly Malone, it’s that she was not sweet. Not sweet at all. She was wild and funny and exhausting to be with, she could be cruel too, had a mean temper and a hard jealous streak. But God she was good, to watch, to drink alongside, to play, to laugh, to fuck. And definitely more salt than sweet. Alive, alive oh.
I was sixteen when we met, she was already a grown woman of twenty-eight. Other women her age, the girls she’d been at school with – just for the few years before she started the business, set up her stall – the girls from her catechism class, dull, virginal girls all, she said, were long-married an
d on to their fourth or fifth babies by now. They spent their mornings shopping and cooking, their afternoons washing and cleaning, and their evenings moaning about mewling brats and stupid or nasty or lazy or boring husbands and interfering mothers-in-law; blaming the woes of their lives, not on the evil English as their husbands did, or on the lazy Irish as their landlords did, but on the priest that wouldn’t let up when they dared brave the confessional. Not Molly. She had no quarrel with the Church, it didn’t touch her and she didn’t touch it, not since she was fourteen years old and Father Paul, on the other side of the confessional grille, had asked her to recount, blow by literal blow, the exact details of her afternoon down by the river with Patrick Michael Fisher. By the time I met her, Molly Malone went to church only on her favourite saints’ days and no Sundays, and she had no intention of tying herself to a man, to a ring, to a child. No intention of tying herself to a woman either. More’s the pity.
There’s something about a woman whose hands are always a little wet, red from the cold and the wind and her own hard work. Her skin flushed with standing outside in all weathers, from morning after morning waiting for the fishing boats to come in, her hair pulled right back, scraped away from her neck, from her face, tied tight, held in, held away. Molly’s hands smelled of the sea, of broken shells, what else could they do? But her hair, fat handfuls of thick, rich, dark brown hair, smelled of Molly alone. Of nutmeg grated on to warm milk, of the whisky added for a top-up, of the fresh pillow case – old linen, always ironed, no matter how hard her week – and of the warmth of her bed. Our bed. Her bed.
There was a song before there was Molly, my Molly. But after my Molly, that song only ever meant her.
Molly Malone told me she’d fucked James Joyce and he named Molly Bloom after her. Told me it was the bloom of her skin of her rose of her rising and falling and falling for him, in him, under him (through him in him with him) that is was and ever shall be. She took his hand and showed him where to go, how to go, how high to go, young artist falling from the sky on melting wings, into the melting Molly, wide bloom of melting Molly Malone.
She said she’d fucked Tristan Tzara too, when he was over for a visit, before he and Joyce went off to Zurich together. Said his line about Clytemnestra on the quays of decorated bells was about her, Dublin quays, fishing boat bells. Molly was happy to fuck them, but had no time for their work – said it was easier when their hands were too full for a pen, their mouths too full for words. In her opinion there were too many Dadaist fellows anyway, not enough women, lads sitting in over-heated rooms and getting all excited about words when they should have had women to work for, women to please, no wonder their women turned to fucking each other. She was quite fond of Joyce, but thought the others were just odd, over-excited about all the wrong things. They could keep their poems and plays and prose, she was happier with a sentence that made sense, not the cut and paste variety Tzara preferred. Molly said scissors were for cutting hair, cutting bacon fat, shucking an oyster if there was no knife to hand.
I handed her a knife. She put it aside. Shucked me. Shucked off the plain and the hidden and the scared and the young and I grew under her tutelage, under her.
When we met. I’d gone down to her stall, I’d been there before, of course, many times. Middle child of five and all those boys, you know my mother didn’t have anyone else to help her keep them clothed, fed, washed, clean. I hated doing the laundry, all that endless scrubbing of filthy boys’ shirts and underpants. My brothers are not the only reason I started with women, but knowing a little too much about the ways of men certainly did make women a more interesting possibility when I was just sixteen.
So. I had been to her stall before, but I’d never met her, never actually talked to her. Molly Malone always had a crowd around her, a dozen housewives and as many stevedores, fishermen, passing clergy on occasion, they liked to buy from her because she always had the freshest and the best – my mother said she worked the fishermen for that privilege and I didn’t doubt it – but also because she was so damn happy. It wasn’t easy, back then, back there. None of us had anything to spare, none of us had time to give away either, not those who had their stalls in the fishmarket, or those who went to buy from them. I’m not talking the kind of Oirish poverty your American films like to revel in, all Fatima and famine, but the constant uncertainty, the grinding regularity of not quite having enough. Of never quite having enough. It’s exhausting, and boring. It doesn’t make for many cheery smiles or faux-folk songs breaking free from a mouth full of regular white teeth at the drop of a hat. For most of us, it was ordinary. And that’s why people used to stop by Molly’s cart.
I know she worked it, we all did, none of us thought her smile and her laughter and her smart, dirty mouth were all part of her nature, we all knew it was part of her work, and she worked it well. It drew her a crowd, kept them there while she told the story of the Kilbarrack fisherman she’d bought this cod from, the Howth girl she’d wheedled this tub of winkles from, the hard bitch at the end of the old harbour wall who hoarded the best oysters, brought in just once a week by her eldest son, and wouldn’t let Molly buy any for her cart until she told her, word for word, about the last bloke she’d had. The oyster woman hadn’t had sex for fifty years or more, but Molly could get a bucket of oysters from her with a twisted tale, whispered sweet.
Anyway, this day, a Wednesday, I arrived late. The baby brother was sick and our mother had had to sit with him while I did most of the day’s work alone, which meant it was just tired bread and a thin soup for their dinner, and none of them happy about that, so our mother sent me out that afternoon to see if there were any leavings from the market, I’d sit with the boy and she would make up a stew of whatever I brought back. Now, I hate vegetable stew, it does nothing for my insides, and, even when I was a child, didn’t agree with me too well, and scrag end of mutton can only go so far with a bunch of boys and my father, hungry from his wanting dinner. So I went to the market, to Molly Malone’s cart. I knew she had to get rid of everything at the end of the day, and there were always plenty standing around to put up their hands when she offered this chunk of tired skate for half the price it had been in the morning, that bucket of fish heads and innards the nicer ladies asked her to remove, gutting her speciality and their relief.
This day though, I was too late. Molly Malone had given away the last chunks of tails and heads, all that was left on her stall were the blood and scales of the day and she was readying to pick up the cart and sluice it off, leaving it clean for the morning, gone six already, bells ringing for evening novenas, Molly was heading home to clean herself and sleep before she had to rise at four and grab the prime spot to meet the boats. (I assumed Molly was heading home to sleep. I know better now. I knew better not very long after.)
Molly Malone said later she could see it on my face, the anger, the frustration, the need, the hunger, the desire. I still believe she was making that up. What she could see on my face in that moment was simple damn fury that my stupid brother was sick and my stupid mother had sent me out to buy the worst food with the least money and my stupid life in which these kind of events were going to become more not less as I grew older, were going to become more difficult as I grew older and tried to have a family of my own, a life of my own. These problems were going to be my whole damn life. That’s what I thought at sixteen, that’s what scared me then. And yes, I did also think that Molly Malone looked good. And maybe I didn’t even know I was thinking that. All I knew was she smiled at me and even though I was angry and tired and cold, I smiled back.
(I’d smiled at boys until then, and they’d smiled back at me. Tried more than just smiling often enough. Now I noticed that a girl could smile the same. Different. Better. The same.)
Molly Malone knew I needed what she had to give. She reached under the cart and pulled out a box. Inside were six of the shiniest, happiest looking mackerel I’ve ever seen. I shook my head, ‘I can’t afford that.’
‘Yes, you
can.’
‘No, really,’ she was smiling at me and it made me smile at her, smile even though I was confused and chilly and annoyed. ‘I can’t.’ I reached into my pocket and pulled out the few coins. ‘This is all I have, and I know my mother would want me to bring back some change.’
‘You came out to buy fish heads and innards and wanted change from that?’
I shrugged, ‘You can’t blame me for trying.’
‘No,’ she agreed, ‘So try this. You can take the fish, and keep your coins. I have a different price in mind.’
She nodded me closer to her and I took those steps willingly. I could smell the river now, and now the sea, the rocks and the waves and now the wide ocean bed. I could smell it all on her. And more. Could smell me on her.
I stood before her, she on one side of the cart and myself on the other. I was dizzy and interested and frightened and excited. I was sixteen.
She was speaking very quietly, and I had to lean in to hear her better, so many people around, other stall-holders, late like Molly, clearing up after their long day, shouting to each other, shouting to us too, laughing at us I thought perhaps, a few people pointing, one or two shaking their heads, a man called out ‘there she goes, Molly Malone at it again’ and another spat, calling after his friend, ‘Damn me, how she does it, when I can’t even get a bite.’ I heard them, but I didn’t hear them, because what Molly was saying was so strange and so unexpected and yet also so right, that I couldn’t seem to take in what they were saying while I took in what she was saying. Asking. She was asking.
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