‘Kate—’ George pounded the door, ‘can I borrow your Ramones top?’ George was some sort of clothing clairvoyant who somehow knew what Kate wanted to wear before Kate herself knew. And it always looked better on George, her smooth, clear skin and perky no-bra boobs, so that when Kate got back the top, or the dress, or her new leggings, they were somehow less appealing than before.
‘One minute,’ Kate said. ‘I’m coming.’
She left the peas on her locker and got slowly to her feet, hoping she might trick her brain if she was very careful about things. But no, the shooting pain returned the moment her foot touched the ground.
‘Hurry up,’ George called. ‘They’ve a jug of Baby Guinness in the common room.’ She hit the door again. The sound seemed to go right through the bone.
‘Coming,’ she said weakly, limping to the door.
‘How about this?’ George waved a fuchsia miniskirt in front of her face. ‘Got it in Topshop this morning. It would be fab with your velvet coat.’
Kate grabbed the door frame and tried to smile. In fairness, her friend was more than generous with her own stuff.
‘What are you thinking for your hair?’ George said. ‘It suits you blonde.’
‘Tell that to my mother. She saw it at the weekend and said it was like a haystack.’ Kate touched the dry ends of it now, wincing as her weight shifted onto her bad side.
‘Are you OK?’ George did her dimply frown. ‘Are you limping?’
‘Ah, I’m grand. Just did something running.’
‘When did you go running? I thought Tuesday was your full day.’
‘I ran home.’
‘From college? In this weather? You nutjob.’
An image of the slushy footpath by Ho Ho’s in Rathmines, her runners sliding as she tried to bypass a woman with a shopping trolley.
‘I should have gone to the sports hall.’
‘I wish they’d just give us a proper gym,’ said George.
‘Totally.’ Kate thought she might faint.
Jessica from room eleven appeared at the end of the corridor, holding a jug. ‘You’re missing the fun.’
Kate hobbled to her desk to get her keys and a packet of painkillers. She let George take her by the arm and the pair of them made their way slowly to the common room.
It was incredible what five shots of Baby Guinness, four Nurofen Plus and a naggin of vodka could do for your health. Kate felt invincible as she rode the bus into town with her flatmates. The journey was a blur of frowning women and people leaving the top deck, and the bus driver coming upstairs to make them stop singing before eventually kicking them out by the National Concert Hall.
Her hip hadn’t hurt on the walk down, not even when she ran for the lights with the others at the end of Dawson Street. Now, though, they were in an endless queue for the Buttery, huddled together in the sleety weather, coats over their heads, smoking to keep warm. Kate took another of George’s Marlboro Lights, promising she’d buy a box inside, but once they got into the packed cave-like bar, the group splintered off to various arches, and Kate found herself in the back room near the canteen, sitting at a table with Jenny and the girls. They were in a quiet spot near the toilets and were much less drunk than her. She sat at the end of the booth, nodding along to their conversation but unable to follow the thread, the bone ache starting in her hip once more. Only the beer was half price, a watery yellow that was cruelly devoid of anaesthetic. She massaged her hip through the miniskirt and thick black tights, pressing her finger into the joint the way Ray did in physio. Mistake. She yelped and took her hand away.
‘Are you OK?’ Jenny said.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Sorry, Miranda, go on with your thing.’
Miranda did her annoying one eyebrow trick. ‘My thing?’ She narrowed her eyes and then looked at the other two. ‘Here—does anyone want chips? I’m starving.’
‘Oh, yes, please,’ said Jenny.
‘Me too.’ Aoife put on her glasses and dug a fiver out of her purse.
‘I wasn’t offering,’ said Miranda. ‘I’m not your slave. Come with me. Kate, what about you?’
‘I ate already,’ said Kate. ‘In halls.’
‘Oh, really?’ Miranda sounded angry, though Kate couldn’t think why. She’d have to concentrate more on their stories. Miranda hated when people didn’t listen to her.
‘You keep the table, Kate,’ said Jenny, standing up. She hadn’t bothered to change out of her hockey skirt and the group of lads at the pool table turned their heads. Her English legs were a thing of wonder for all the boys used to Irish girls with Irish knees.
Kate took another painkiller as she waited. Miranda and Aoife arrived back first, leaving down two plates of chips, wisps of steam rising off the gravy. Kate moved a chair with her good foot to let them in. It screeched off the cement floor. ‘My teeth,’ said Miranda, ducking her face into her lilac hoodie.
‘Are you sure you don’t want food?’ Aoife hung her tie-dye bag on the chair. ‘Queue’s not so bad.’
‘I’ve eaten,’ said Kate testily. Pain always made her so unreasonable.
‘But of course,’ Miranda smirked. Her jet-black hair was ironed flat to her head in a brutal zigzag parting. The tip of a loose strand caught the gravy as she leaned across the table for the salt. Herself and Aoife started talking about their summer placements in Merrill Lynch in London, how they would live in Camden and go to the markets on the weekend. Kate tried to think of ways into the conversation that kept coming to her seconds too late.
Jenny came back with a tray of golden chips, a glistening chicken breast and a side of mashed turnips that smelt like compost. ‘Gross,’ said Miranda. ‘Like Sunday lunch at the shelter.’ They all laughed, though Kate didn’t think it was funny.
With Jenny’s return, her cheery, inquisitive manner meant an easier flow came to the group, and soon they were bantering about the day’s lectures and the fire in the debating society and the chances of Jenny being able to get into The Kitchen in her hockey gear if they lent her a coat.
All around the room, people were talking in similar animated fashion between bites of food and sloppy pints. At the double doors to the bar, she saw George waving and she eased herself out of the booth and limped over to her friend. There’d been some disagreement with a girl from Galway over a lip gloss in the toilets, and she spent the next while talking George down from a state of hysterical revenge. By the end of it, Kate was horribly sober and in agony with her hip. She had to go home right now. Avoiding the throng at the bar, she went around by the dimly lit outer corridor to collect her bag and say goodbye to the girls. The back room had thinned out and she could hear Miranda’s voice clearly before she turned the corner. Her own name was thrown out like a grenade. Kate the Hummingbird. She stopped short, ducking in behind the doors. She was only a metre or so away from them, had a full view of the table, and yet she was sure they couldn’t see her. It was like she was invisible. The food was gone, replaced by a stack of plastic pint cups. They seemed much drunker than earlier. Miranda had an unlit cigarette in her hand, one of those thin, white French ones, and she was waving it like a baton.
‘And then she picks at her food like a hummingbird, or she just sits there and watches us all and it’s so awkward,’ she said. ‘I feel like we’re the ones being judged for behaving like normal people. It’s creepy, the way she stays so still, like she’s in a trance, like she’s not able to participate in regular conversation. Don’t you think it’s creepy?’
Kate felt her heart flicker on a half-beat. It was like the time she’d sent the text message about Peter to Peter instead of Ray. It was clear that Miranda was mid-rant, that this story, or whatever it was, had started a while ago. ‘Just sits there, barely saying a thing, staring with those blank little eyes of hers.’
Jenny tried to speak but Miranda continued.
‘I mean, she makes me feel like a pig for having a plate of chips. I should be allowed to have a plate of chips if I want them
. I swam fifty lengths this morning. I could have told her that, but why should I have to justify myself to her? If I want a plate of chips—if I want ten plates of chips with curry sauce and gravy—I should be able to have them.’
Jenny uncrossed her legs. ‘I don’t think she’s judging you. Or any of us. It’s in your head.’
‘In my head?’ Miranda scoffed. ‘It’s horrendous, that’s what it is. To see someone do that to themselves. Did you see her limping earlier?’
‘Don’t be mean,’ said Jenny.
‘Well, it’s tragic too, of course.’
‘Tragic,’ said Aoife, trying to grab the cigarette off Miranda. ‘Stop poking that thing in my face.’
‘Maybe we should say something to her,’ said Jenny.
‘I tried to,’ Miranda protested. ‘All last term.’
‘You kept a list of the meals she wasn’t eating and then hounded her about it. That’s not helping.’
Miranda stabbed the cigarette across the table at Jenny. ‘She doesn’t want help. You’ve tried. I know you have.’
Jenny shrugged. ‘I don’t know the right thing to say. Or even how to say it. Sometimes she seems so normal. I don’t want her to think…’
Kate felt like she might be sick. She put her hand against the cool wall.
Aoife said, ‘To think what?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jenny said. ‘For her to think we’re all talking about her. Like, maybe she’s OK. Maybe she’s just a really thin person. She has tiny little bones.’
‘I’m naturally thin,’ said Miranda.
‘And naturally up yourself,’ Aoife said.
‘I don’t mean I’m a model or whatever but I’m thin, I always have been.’
It was true. Kate looked at Miranda’s lithe body, the long limbs and neck, the raptor-like quality to her features. It suited her frame, that’s what they said about girls like Miranda. And what kind of bullshit was that, anyway?
‘We should just make her eat a burger,’ said Miranda. ‘Like every day until the end of term.’
‘It doesn’t work like that,’ Aoife said. ‘You might as well ask her to drink poison. It’s like telling a person with a broken back to get up and walk.’
Kate’s hip started to burn and she knew it would go from under her if she didn’t leave.
‘Oh, you’re an expert now?’ said Miranda.
Aoife twisted the black string of her Celtic necklace.
‘Aoife’s right,’ said Jenny. ‘If she is sick, you can’t order her well again. You can’t force her.’
‘I’m not a bully!’ Miranda sat back, scowling.
None of them said anything for a moment. As she leaned against the door, Kate felt her life narrowing before her.
‘Is it my round?’ Jenny asked.
Using all the energy she had in her body, Kate managed to slip back up the corridor. She waited near the bar queue for Jenny, gave her a quick hug and told her she’d see her tomorrow. When she went to get her bag, the others were talking to the pool guys and barely noticed her leaving.
She’d used the emergency passcard to get a taxi home, stopping for a bottle of Huzzar in the Centra in Rathmines. She was safe now, sitting on her bed in her blue pyjamas and puppy-dog slippers, on her second mug of vodka and stolen orange juice. She’d grabbed the first carton in the fridge, which unfortunately had bits in it, and her stomach turned every time she felt them catch on her lips. She tilted the drink quickly down her mouth to get away from the sensation. Her wet shower towel had fallen while she was out and she watched the damp patch on the carpet for something to do.
No matter how quickly she drank, she kept remembering parts of their conversation. These girls she’d thought were her friends who spoke of her as some sort of invalid, pitiful and grotesque, like a disease they weren’t fully inoculated against themselves. They didn’t want to be around her, not even cheerful, kindhearted Jenny with her drunken wishes to help. Help what? Kate shouted out loud, and then clapped a hand over her big mouth. She didn’t need help. She didn’t need them. She didn’t know what they were talking about, not really. She didn’t see what they saw. Mostly she felt that despite all her effort, she would never be small enough. The others were wrong, or they were jealous, or they just didn’t get it.
Her phone buzzed—Peter again. She’d had to text him for the pin code and now he was hounding her, which wasn’t at all fair. This was her first time in three years at college that she’d had to use the card. Could he not be gracious about it? Her family didn’t know the meaning of the word. She’d sent him two texts saying she was back in halls, that everything was fine now.
The phone rang again and she tossed it up towards the pillow. She drained her mug and filled it halfway with vodka, knocked it straight back this time. It was warm and rancid and kind of wonderful. Feeling brave, she filled it higher the next time and did another straight. Her brain felt like it was lit up from inside. She put her phone in the locker, then turned on her Discman, sang and drank and laughed and drank and felt herself go, until she wasn’t laughing any more. Her tears tasted of salty vodka, like a blunt-edged tequila slammer. She found herself standing in front of the sink in the small space at the end of her bed. Her hands gripped the ceramic basin as she stared at her reflection, which was shadowy in the lamplight and hard to make out. It seemed confused to see her. Neither of them knew what the other needed. She had a memory of Elaine, standing behind her at the oval mirror in the bathroom at Cranavon, pinning Kate’s hair in coloured butterfly clips as she talked about the great freedom they would have in college. But it was not great, this freedom, that was the thing. There was, in fact, surprisingly little freedom in freedom.
Hours went by, people coming and going, slamming doors and giggling and shushing and on and on until there was silence, and the bottle was nearly finished and then completely finished, but it didn’t matter if there was another one and another one after that, she knew now—her hip would still be sore. Finally, at some light-dark hour, she puked into the sink, smashed the orange solids down the plughole with the end of her toothbrush, wiped her face with the mouldy towel and lay down in the bed to rest. Inside her head the screaming was loud and unyielding, the pain, and the panic, and the yearning for time to go backwards. If only she’d seen the ice. If only she hadn’t run home. If only her mother hadn’t visited last weekend. If only Ray and Liz had been around and not off skiing in Austria. But this burrowing backwards through her regret eventually exhausted her. She needed to face it. The bones in some part of her leg, or her hip, or maybe in both, were no longer fused. She burst into tears again. It was the loneliest she’d felt in a very long time. Four and a half years of trying to pretend she was OK. She squeezed her eyes shut as the memories unloaded. The white oak coffin, how her mother had screamed the house down when it arrived with the wrong type of handles. The busyness of Cranavon, so much busier than her father’s funeral, as if there was a rule: the younger the person, the bigger the crowd. Everyone had kept saying that Elaine looked exactly like herself, which wasn’t true at all. There was so little of her sister in the waxy face and pale lips, in the slightness of her shape, the way her body seemed to be eaten up by the folds of white satin. There was no trace of Elaine’s vivacity. If anything, Kate saw herself in the coffin. And she was not the only one to notice this. One night, not long after the funeral, Kate had woken up to find her mother in Elaine’s bed. Barely a metre away, her eyes boring into Kate, pinning her to the mattress. Because it was her fault she was alive. Her mother had never said it, or maybe she had said it once in a fit and then taken it back, but either way, she was right. The wrong twin had died.
* * *
That morning, Peter drove them to the gymkhana in the Jeep, dropped them near the horseboxes and said he’d try and make the finals if the cows went early at the mart.
‘What if I don’t get to the finals?’ Elaine jumped out of the back seat onto the scraped earth path. Kate followed after her. It was the mildest Halloween ev
er, the sky a rippled blue. She was glad she’d worn her denim jacket and not the old fleece.
‘Nonsense,’ said their mother, still in the passenger seat. ‘Of course you’ll make the finals.’ She turned to Peter, instructing him about her list for town. Peter said he wished she’d given the list to Ray, that he’d enough on his plate today with the gymkhana and the mart.
‘Blah, blah, blah,’ said Elaine, scuffing her riding boots in the dirt. ‘I’m going to find Zoe and see where she’s put Slayer.’
Kate laughed out loud.
‘Elaine!’ Her mother turned in the car. ‘Your horse’s name is Prince Francis. After your poor departed father.’
‘Sure—’ Elaine started to walk away, ‘whatever you say. Are you coming, Kate?’
‘Kate stays here,’ her mother said. ‘You need to get ready. No distractions.’
Elaine gave a quick curtsy, ducked under the blue rope by the path and headed diagonally across the field to the trailers, her high Sun-In ponytail swinging like a gold pendulum.
‘I’ll throttle her,’ her mother said to Peter.
‘Now, now,’ he said. ‘Don’t upset her before the competition.’
As she watched her sister go, Kate hugged her denim jacket to her chest. She wished Peter was staying, that she could read in the Jeep while Elaine and her mother got the horse ready. The show-jumping bit wasn’t for hours. They had to get through the prancing one first.
Her mother got out of the passenger seat and waved Peter on, though as he began to reverse down the path, she shouted and rushed after him, gesturing for her list. They began another lengthy discussion. It was lovely to see her back to her old self again, dressing in her good clothes and fizzing with energy. Maybe things had been slowly getting better for a while but it was only since they’d gone into fifth year that you’d notice it. The last few months had been, what was the word she was looking for? They had been normal. It was as if the threat or promise of the Leaving Cert had reminded her mother that the twins were important. In May she’d gone back as the District Commissioner to the Pony Club, and Cranavon was horse mad once again. There seemed to be a competition every weekend—the prancing one, or the cross-country, or the jumps, sometimes all three. It was very familiar to Kate. Except now there was no Daddy to ask about the result.
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