When Kate stood to clear the plates, Liz offered to help, but it was Ray who did the scraping while his wife slumped in her chair and started to play the damn game again. Kate stacked the cutlery to the sound of her own name popping across the table like a ping-pong ball. She drifted into her imagination, and when that failed her, she tuned into the lyrics of the song playing too faintly from the speakers. The day weighed down on her, exhausting, and she wished she could kick them all out now, even Ray.
‘Kind.’
‘Controlled.’
‘Skinny,’ Peter said.
Kate could feel Liz’s eyes darting over her body. Head, chest, legs, head again, like an elastic snapping each time it landed. She’d been doing it all evening, a kind of slanty, sideways watching, but now it was shameless. Now she had permission.
‘Yes, skinny,’ Peter said. ‘I’m afraid that’s the word for it.’
Kate bashed her knee on the table corner. A side plate nearly toppled from the stack.
‘You’ve gone backwards, Kate, have you?’ Peter touched her arm as she reached for the last plate, and she froze beside him until he let go.
They all knew—even Liz—that backwards meant third year in Trinity, where the second term had ended with a fractured pelvis and hip, and a bone chip in her sacrum. She’d been hospitalized for three months. They’d said confinement meant her bones would fuse together more quickly, but really it was so that people could monitor her eating. Although she’d agreed to the treatment, deep down she’d known she hadn’t been sick enough for such a fuss. (And her mother had agreed. Silly goose to go running in icy weather.)
‘Kate,’ said Ray. ‘Is everything OK?’
When she refocused, they were all staring at her. A heat crept up her neck and the plates suddenly felt too heavy. Oh, those mean pinhole eyes, what did they want from her? There was nothing—nothing!—to say. She wished suddenly that her mother was here, for a bit of her liveliness and drama, the wonder of her distraction. Her mother would help her, in that moment she was sure of it.
‘Kate?’ said Peter.
Afraid she would drop the plates if she didn’t go now, she started for the kitchen.
‘Can I—’
‘You’re grand, Ray. I’ve to do the dessert.’
Liz said, ‘Text the Netflixer, Raymond, if you want to be useful.’
Kate reached the sink just in time, leaving the plates down and rubbing her wrist. All around her, the mess she had made. Dirty trays, pink stains on the granite counter, pans steeped in rusty water, a trail of juniper berries across the floor. As Liz’s voice came warbling from the living room, Kate stared at the freezer. Her mother’s housewarming gift hung from the handle, a tea towel with a frowning woman, the speech bubble protruding from her face like some word-filled growth: I gave him the skinniest years of my life! Kate picked up the towel, fingering the sheer material that was so unsuited to drying. She laid it gently on the counter before opening the freezer and taking out the dessert. She stood back to get a better look. Some of the spikes had broken off. She reached out and snapped one of the good ones, then another and another, and two more after that, before lifting the plate again and upending the whole thing into the bin.
When the lid came to a standstill, she realized that the playlist inside had finished, leaving a grim, after-hours echo in the living room. She washed her hands, smoothed her hair and rubbed Vaseline on her lips. She tried to sneak back into the room but the three of them looked at her expectantly.
‘Right,’ said Liz. ‘Where’s this masterpiece?’
‘Liz.’ Ray shook his head.
‘What? You know your one will only stay till eleven.’
‘It’s still rude.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve bad news,’ Kate said. ‘The freezer door was left open. The Alaska’s ruined. I had to dump it.’
‘Please don’t say that I—’
‘Of course not, Liz.’ Kate grimaced. ‘I checked it before the main and must have forgotten the door.’
Ray sat back in his chair. ‘All your hard work, Katie, melted to nothing.’
‘That’s about the size of it,’ Peter confirmed.
‘Will anyone have coffee? Tea?’ Kate lifted an invisible cup from an invisible saucer, in case they had never heard of the concept. ‘More drinks?’ Suddenly she wanted them all to stay. The long blue night was waiting for her. Delay, she thought, delay!
But Liz already had her phone out and Kate knew that they would all go soon. She excused herself for a moment, could hear a chair being pushed out as she left. Moments later, Ray hovered behind her at the counter, his hand resting on her shoulder.
‘Don’t worry about dessert, Katie. We were stuffed. All of us.’
She couldn’t turn around.
‘What’s wrong?’
She couldn’t bear the closeness, now.
‘Is it Elaine?’
She shook her head, unfair to blame the dead.
‘Maybe I can help,’ Ray said.
‘There’s no problem,’ she snapped.
‘Grand so.’
She gave her brother a hug and walked him to the hallway where Liz was on her phone, talking to the babysitter. Peter already had his cap on.
When they’d left, Kate locked the front door and came back into the kitchen. She worked quickly, rinsing the plates and filling the dishwasher. The room was cool again, the suds soft, soft on her fingers. She hadn’t lied to Ray, not really. She could never pin down the problem; it was a shifty kind of thing, something to do with routine. Shopping in the same supermarket, buying the same foods, wearing the same outfit in different colours, or even with things she enjoyed like music or exercise, running the same stretch of beach, having to reach the railing she’d reached the day before—all these arbitrary markers of success or failure that seemed to somehow captivate and imprison her. Diya said it was just the break-up blues making her feel inadequate, but the truth was, it had been going on for years, long before Liam, this impulse to do things to exhaustion. It was extreme living. Or it was living for two. Wringing the sponge, Kate felt the energy leave her body. She sat on a stool and began to count.
Three.
Then five—no four—it was only four.
And a sprout.
Less than ten bites in total, a miracle with all the food. The evening’s conversation swirled through her mind, her own words lodging like grit. I used too much butter. I forgot to chill the next one. Undiagnosed. Somewhere in the distance was the pop and sputter of fireworks but only the same black sky outside her window. Well, it had been a fine evening, really, but she would not do it again.
In the bathroom, midway through the second cleanse, Kate thought she heard a knock on the door. She washed the froth off her face. Another knock, clearer now, a single, solid thump that sounded like Peter. She went quickly through the living room, scanning for foreign items. Nothing. On the console table in the hallway, the tea lights were out and the pumpkin looked deranged. Oh, what would she do if Peter was back for the chats, with more lessons in drainage, perhaps, or some detail he’d omitted about the characteristics of the soil, or worse again—
But it was Ray’s muffled voice that came from the corridor.
‘Kate. Katie, it’s me.’
‘Ray,’ she said, forgetting the chain.
Ray smiled sheepishly at her through the gap.
She closed the door and opened it properly. ‘What did you forget? Come in.’
‘I can’t stay. Liz was raging when we doubled back.’
‘Right,’ said Kate, more confused than ever.
‘I brought something for you. For all of us.’ His face was a bit pink. He had similar skin to herself, the kind that flashed up feelings to the world.
‘Here.’ He held out a brown paper bag.
‘Ah, Ray,’ she said, clueless. ‘You shouldn’t have?’
‘It’s not what you think.’
She could see a dark, ridged square through the shiny paper. A cake o
f some sort, or a slice of a cake.
‘Is it dessert?’ Her voice seemed loud inside her head. ‘Come in, won’t you. Do you want to send Liz on?’
‘I’d love to.’ Ray looked longingly down the corridor. ‘There’d be war. But, here—’ He pushed the bag into her hands. ‘Deco gave it to me this morning after our run, he’d made a batch of them. And I don’t know, I thought—’
‘A batch of what?’
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I thought it might be fun.’
They stared at each other for a moment, Ray’s eyes doleful, a serious green. She looked beyond him to the peeling paint in the corridor. What was he even doing here, tormenting her?
‘It’s a bit late for dessert.’ She crumpled the bag with her fingers. ‘And a bit stingy, no offence.’
Ray laughed.
‘It’s a brownie,’ he said.
‘For me?’
‘Not a regular one, like.’
Did he mean sugar free? She considered the bag again. A supersized one?
‘Do you remember that time you visited me in college?’
Kate shook her head.
‘In the house in Castletroy with no cooker.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Right.’
The house with no cooker, and a hot-press full of weed and mushrooms. Ray had been proud of her for taking the spliff in front of his flatmates and acting as if it was just another cigarette. The next day she’d had sore stomach muscles from laughing. She opened the bag now and sniffed. Not grassy like she expected; sharp, a hint of disinfectant.
‘A special brownie,’ she said. ‘A magic brownie?’
‘Exactly.’ Ray leaned against the door jamb. ‘I thought it could be a laugh after dinner. All of us, like.’
Kate squealed laughing. ‘With Liz? With Peter?’
‘I know, I know. Stupid. I knew it the minute I saw him in his big farmer’s coat. Liz might have gone for it.’
‘Really?’
Ray shrugged. ‘Not with the girls, I suppose. Not now. But you can do it, there’s nothing stopping you.’
‘On my own?’ Kate said. ‘Where’s the fun in that?’
Ray’s phone vibrated in his pocket. It rang off and then began to bleat.
‘She’ll have the taxi drive off,’ he said.
‘You could stay. We could?’
‘I’d love to.’ He seemed to mean it too, but then he answered his phone. ‘I’m coming,’ he said. ‘I’m at the lift.’
When the phone was back in his pocket, he came at Kate, his arms wrapping around her. She rested her chin on his shoulder and squeezed back.
‘I’d love to,’ he said. ‘Just things are a bit—’ He wiggled his hand. ‘With Liz and me.’
‘Oh?’
‘Ah, it’s nothing. Just work stuff.’ He turned to leave. ‘Only eat a quarter. Deco said it was laced.’
‘Hash?’
Ray shook his head.
‘Weed?’
‘A concoction.’ He wagged a finger. ‘Only a quarter.’
‘All four quarters are going in the bin, Raymond.’ Kate waved him down the corridor, watching him break into his familiar strut run.
‘Live a little!’ The words echoed back and then he was gone.
In the living room, Kate switched on the mood lamp in the corner and sat on the couch with a bottle of beer. There was a dent in the upholstery where Peter had been earlier and she settled into it, capping the beer with the teeth of a novelty shark opener that Liam had brought her back from Sydney. The apartment was full of these token gifts that she couldn’t bring herself to part with. Taking a sip of beer, she searched her phone for an album she liked in college, a pre-Liam album. Though they’d only been together two years—only!—she’d struggled since the break-up to remember her life before him. Her interests, her weekends, her friends. Her exes? Yes, there had been others before him. She wasn’t some yearling broken in by Liam Carroll. She’d had a past—a life. In college, she’d seen a quick-witted arts student from Armagh, then a lanky jock who’d cheated on her, and after him, the one that hurt, an almost thing with a friend from home, the lovely Conor Doyle who was now married with children, a seemingly benign phrase that her mother managed to wield like a knife. In her twenties, Kate had gone out with a banker for a while, and the banker’s cousin for a while after that, and she’d had a good time with a Maths teacher, too, until he’d moved to Dubai. But when she looked back on it, these men, these boys, were not really exes, rather brief periods of weakness or respite that all finished in the same way: too much, too much they wanted from her, and then nothing.
Sipping her beer, Kate looked at the greasy paper bag on the coffee table. If only Elaine was alive—the thought landed, as it so often did, and she tried to banish it. Elaine was dead, to begin with. Wallowing only made her sad. Not sad—tiny, vague word that didn’t cover any of it—especially not now, years later. But if only her sister hadn’t died, maybe they’d both be here, slicing into the brownie, having the time of their lives. What’s it like to lose a twin? So many people—so many more than you would think—had asked her over the years. She usually said that it was tough. Once, she had said it was like a losing a limb and the person had clutched their arm and said, how unbearable.
Kneeling on the rug by the coffee table, Kate took the brownie from the bag. It was a slab of a thing, rectangular in shape, thick as two regular brownies. It was more food than she’d had all evening. There were probably enough calories to keep her going for a week. And what if the drugs made her loopy? Imagine she overdosed on a brownie and her mother found out. Kate had never done anything laced in her life. It sounded filthy and so unlike her. She prodded the top of the cake, the crumbling exterior. Six hundred calories, maybe seven with the depth of it, but she would only eat a quarter, and drugs, anyway, didn’t count the same, did they, and—enough! Before she could think again, she scooped a clump into her hand and swallowed, took another clump just to be sure. It was far too sweet, a mousse-like consistency that coated her throat. She felt proud of herself, then immediately anxious. She flicked through old photos on her phone until her mind grew critical. Switching to an electro playlist, she lay back on the couch and closed her eyes.
After half an hour or so, her legs began to tremble. The tingling continued past her thighs into her crotch, and up into her stomach, flitting around her middle. She spread her arms over the top of the couch and leaned her head back. When she opened her eyes, the ceiling was a darker shade of grey—a large bulge in the paintwork above her. She was buzzing all over her body now, hot and cold at the same time. At some point she realized the music had stopped, but she couldn’t find her phone. Anything that wasn’t attached to her seemed lost and unimportant. Her own hand felt like the hand of a stranger. She pressed it down on her thigh. Then: an image of Liam’s face between her legs, his smart, sardonic eyes looking up at her, checking.
Kate jolted forward on the couch. Everything was liquid, fluctuating. She pulled at the criss-cross of her dress, bunching it down as far as her bra. There was wet in the space between her breasts, lodging in the fine hairs that had grown one after the other in secret before recently announcing themselves as a sizeable patch of fur. She had found other patches too, over her hip bones, on the sides of her neck, a downy strip across the small of her back. Kate put a hand up her dress and sought out the patch. Twisting, twisting the strands between her fingers, tighter and tighter. She’d been pretending for months that it was her hormones and she wondered if she could even admit it to herself, now, really admit what was going on. The brownie was giving her the sense that anything was possible. She said the words out loud to no one.
You. Are. No.
She hated the word, the dramatic X, the skeletal shape of it. Yes, she’d had a problem with food in college and she’d gotten help. She’d spent a little time in hospital. A time of blinding whiteness was how she remembered it now, a rare snowy winter, the grounds so clean and beautiful, the white lamp of the nurse’s ni
ght station, the white whizz of the doctors doing their rounds, their white smiles and gleaming orders. Back then, things had been a little worse than normal, but normal was such an impossible word when it came to food. Normal was bingeing and dieting and cleansing and counting and over and under—and half the world was at it. Really, she had not been sick enough to be hospitalized. To be put in an actual hospital with people who had brain surgery and heart attacks. Though there were days when it felt like she belonged there. Days when she needed to be minded or monitored, when the thought of glistening cheese on a pizza could reduce her to tears, or the idea of sitting still for a whole afternoon brought on a crawly, unclean feeling that made every freckle and bump on her body seem wrong and unsightly. On days like that, she would vow to change her life, to make sure she ate elaborate, healthy meals on a regular basis. But then something would happen to make her see the flaw in the plan, or in herself—or it was all too complicated to think about. And she had not been sick enough, anyway, not one of those lollipop heads her mother liked to talk about, the girls who were a danger to themselves. A disgrace. Even when Kate had been in treatment and done everything they’d asked of her, to the point where they’d discharged her, pleased with her efforts, she knew that she didn’t deserve the praise, because she hadn’t ever really been sick enough in the first place.
But now, there were signs it was coming back, for months, maybe longer.
Yes?
No. It was not the same thing for an adult in control of her life.
Sedulous. She remembered the word now, hours after she’d needed it for the damn game. Liam’s word for her. Liam with his postdoc from Oxford that was so inconsequential she’d only learnt about it from Anthony.
In other news, the ceiling was sliding closer to the couch. She took a long breath, tried to count to five on the exhale. From somewhere, the whistle of a kettle, the skin on her mother’s milky tea. Nausea went through her like a wave, a huge, rising wave that appeared in front of her like some sheer metallic cliff, taking her tumbling into the grey hardness of the water, slapping and being slapped, the stinging on her face, her legs gone from under her, then out, out onto the cold, mean carpet.
Dinner Party Page 3