Dinner Party

by Sarah Gilmartin

  ‘Jesus, Kate. You have to tell me what’s going on. Now.’

  She looked at his chiselled face, the dark blue eyes full of trouble. Her eldest brother. She was a lost, stupid child—and she’d never be anything else.

  ‘I think I need to go to the hospital,’ she said.

  A strange light broke over his face. ‘Thank God. We’ve been so worried. Myself and Ray. You need help. We’ll get you proper help.’

  Kate frowned. ‘How could you know about my hip?’

  ‘Your hip?’

  ‘I hurt my hip. I slipped on ice.’ She bent her head. ‘I went running yesterday.’

  ‘After the foot? You can’t be—’

  ‘Please, Peter.’

  He relented and sat her back against the wall, asked her to show him. After he’d listened to her story, he tried to move her leg from the knee but she howled. ‘I can’t. It hurts too much.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK.’

  ‘Is it broken, Peter?’ she asked desperately.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Katie.’ He took his weight off the bed and even that hurt her. ‘Do you want help getting dressed?’ He looked at the door. ‘I mean, I can get one of your neighbours. Who’s the one who sounds like Liz?’

  ‘Just wait outside. I’ll only be a few minutes.’

  ‘I’m getting Ray,’ Peter said. ‘We can carry you out.’

  He closed the door gently behind him and his consideration for her sleeping housemates set her crying again. There seemed to be no end to his kindness, to the kindness of both her brothers, and no end to her sadness either, here in this tiny room she’d mistaken for a new home.

  DUBLIN

  May 2018

  It was just gone seven in the morning, and all was right with the world. Life was good, life was great. In the basement room of the laser clinic on Nassau Street, Kate hung her dress on the back of a chair and quickly took off her thong. A fluorescent strip light buzzed above her head. The pale, pitted flesh of her thighs looked alive in the oblong mirror. She got on the bed and covered her nakedness with a hand towel. The machine behind her head purred as it powered up, filling the sterile room with a sort of homeliness. Kate put the special glasses on her face and lay back on the bed.

  The girl knocked, entered the room and went straight to the machine. ‘High or medium?’

  ‘High, please,’ said Kate.

  ‘Good woman,’ said the girl.

  She seemed too young to be in charge of such a complicated-looking contraption but Kate had been to her enough times to know that she was capable, more than capable—a perfectionist in pubic hair removal.

  ‘What happened to low?’ Kate tried to arch a brow. The glasses slipped down her face.

  ‘You’re no wuss.’

  They smiled at each other. The girl’s dark hair was in a sheeny topknot, two strands falling symmetrically at either side of her face.

  As the girl leaned over the bed to examine the regrowth, Kate longed to tug a strand. ‘Go low and go home,’ she said. ‘Fire her up to the max.’ The girl twisted the knob to the right and the bleeping began, growing louder and louder, like a truck reversing beside her head.

  ‘Where do you want me to start?’

  ‘Underarms,’ Kate said. ‘Then bikini and legs.’ The legs were like a little holiday after the others.

  ‘Lift up your arms.’

  As the girl prepared the laser, they chatted about the heatwave and the craic and the state of the canal every morning.

  ‘You must be mad busy this time of year,’ said Kate.

  ‘Everyone coming in with tans and sunburn? We can’t let the lasers near them. You’re like snow though. Do you never go out in it?’

  ‘Rarely.’ Kate shut her eyes. She’d enough of the chats now.

  His beautiful snow queen. The first morning they’d woken up together, that’s what Liam had called her and she hadn’t known how to take it so she’d rolled into his armpit and pretended to fall asleep. She still loved the mossy smell of his fancy deodorant, even after she realized he didn’t buy it himself. He’d told her they were separated, which turned out to be practically separated, which in Ireland meant not very separated at all. His wife Joanna had dalliances too—a quaint word that seemed easier to rationalize. Kate was fine with it, except when she wasn’t. In January they’d spent a fraught night in the family house while Joanna was away skiing with their teenage daughter. When he’d gone to make a phone call after dinner, Kate had put on a childlike amount of lipstick, taken an Avoca alphabet mug from the cupboard—the J mug—and marked the rim with a coral-coloured kiss. She’d wiped it clean seconds later, had washed and dried it, but still, the impulse disgusted her. What kind of person was she at all? Liam had come in just as the press door banged and Kate thought he’d seen, but no, his arms came from behind, arching her back towards him, kissing butterflies on her neck.

  Now it was May, and they hadn’t seen each other in nearly a month. Liam had been in New York since Easter, and aside from his text messages, which were always short and lacking in humour (lacking in him, the real him), all she’d had to sustain her was one lean transatlantic voice call that had taken place when she was half asleep. In the last few weeks, her life seemed to be thinning out. There was no dimension to the days.

  The girl began stinging Kate’s left underarm, no longer attempting conversation. Kate liked that she knew when to leave her be. She found it impossible to talk and take pain at the same time. The best way to deal with it was to lie back and pretend she was somewhere else.

  A clip-on polished silver watch hung upside down on the girl’s uniform, reading lunchtime to Kate, though it was half seven really. How was it only half seven? Adrenalin rushed through her as she thought of where she’d be tonight, eleven hours from now, sitting in the plush chairs of the Garden Room restaurant in the Merrion Hotel. A vodka soda for her, or maybe a martini. She liked the look of the olives on the skewer, the way they nestled into each other. Glenfiddich for Liam, double measure, a jug of water on the side. She imagined the pair of them on the high stools at the mirror bar. All she wanted was for time to hurry up.

  Kate took the ice packs from the girl and placed them under her arms, clamping onto the cool. She wished they’d just invent a booth where you could go in and have five minutes of unadulterated torture and walk out the other side, smooth and virginal. She’d never been lasered before meeting Liam, but now, even when they couldn’t see each other, she felt compelled to keep these appointments. It was a problem she’d never noticed until he’d pointed it out.

  ‘Let your knees flop a bit more.’ The girl drew a white grid over Kate’s pubic hair, the piece of chalk tickling the skin. ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘I’m grand,’ said Kate.

  ‘You’ve goosebumps. Go floppier.’ The girl frowned, as she always did when it came to Kate’s inflexibility.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Kate. ‘That’s as floppy as they go.’

  Kate looked at her thighs. Through the tinted lens of the glasses, they were pale pink, the colour of rashers peeled from the pack. They were flabbier than the last time she’d had this done, or maybe she hadn’t noticed the last time. As the stinging began, Kate took a deep breath—the acrid smell of the singed hair. She lifted slightly off the bed as the laser hit the thin, sinewy bit that joined her thigh to her crotch. It looked so silvery and vulnerable with her knees open. She cast her eyes towards the ceiling, pretending to count the galaxy of tiny holes in the polystyrene squares.

  ‘Stay still.’ The girl stopped the laser. ‘If it’s too much, I can go easy.’

  Kate closed her eyes. She had a longing for a cigarette. She hadn’t had one in four months, not since her last trip home when her mother and Liz had teamed up to list the things missing in Kate’s life: a husband, a family, a career. Kate had tried to play up her role in work in the hope that they’d let the other two go. Career or motherhood, motherhood or career—that was the rule, wasn’t it? The trick was to stop
appearing as if she had neither.

  And they were, finally, starting to take notice of her in the office. All that Keynesian theory learnt by rote might actually come in useful one day. If she got the business development job, she could get away from the reception desk with its plastic plants that looked so real to every single person that ever stopped by. In the beginning Kate had been glad of the conversation starter but three years on, the desk was a glossy, public prison of faux botanical hell. Although her boss Anthony loved to drum the marble counter when he came out to meet clients, to Kate it was just a cold, expensive piece of rock with the ghost of a thousand fingertips. And the stains! The cappuccino froth and ink marks—and once, a baby’s vomit—that tarnished the marble so quickly, so permanently if you didn’t catch them in time, each one noted in the imaginary but extremely real report card that Anthony kept hidden behind his eyes.

  ‘Flip over and I’ll do the backs.’ The girl smiled and handed Kate a tissue smeared with bright green gel. ‘Give yourself a wipe first.’

  Kate rubbed the gel in circular motion over her crotch, like the girl had done in the initial appointments, back when Kate was still mortified by the whole thing. She handed the napkin to the girl, whose foot was already on the pedal, the lid of the bin open.

  There was a rap on the door. Kate clutched the paper sheet beneath her. A girl with tattooed eyebrows stuck her head around the door and said there was an issue in the facial room. Kate heard a woman crying in the distance, someone shouting for ice packs. The girls vanished through the door. Kate hoped it wouldn’t take long, then felt bad for thinking about herself when some other poor woman was dealing with a burnt face.

  She sat up in the bed and looked down. The paper had stuck to the aloe vera and she peeled it off, inspecting the girl’s work. The skin was red and slick with the gel, dotted with the dead follicles that took ages to fall out if the girl didn’t get them. As Kate looked at the angry skin around the lips, she felt impotent. She tried to push the thought away. It was counterproductive to worry about sex. The tightening happened the moment she thought about it. Right now, it was happening right now—there was no way to stop it—the memory of the last few times with Liam flooding her brain, making it tighter still. The pathetic dryness and the burn as he’d tried to find a way in. There was no give to the tissue around the opening any more. It was too thin and parched and wouldn’t yield, not even to a finger unless it was lubricated. And then some unknowable part of her brain did the rest, clamping the pelvic muscles once they felt anything inside her. It was like sandpaper on the thrusts. There was none of the neat, wet communion of the early days, and the more she told herself to relax, the worse it felt. He’d tried to make a joke of it the last time. He’d said maybe the nuns had been round in the night to sew her up. Then he’d gone down on her for ages and she’d made such authentic coming sounds that she’d almost fooled herself. But really, it had gotten so bad that even a hand on her thigh was enough to set the whole thing off—a faulty alarm that didn’t know the difference between a burglar and the wind.

  The girl came back into the room, apologizing.

  ‘No worries,’ said Kate. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Just someone with very sensitive skin.’

  ‘Will she be OK?’

  ‘Oh, she’s not blind or anything!’

  Kate didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Right.’ The girl picked up the lead, hovering the laser. ‘Flip over and I’ll do the backs of the legs.’

  Kate attempted to flip over while keeping her bum covered with the towel. She rested her forehead on her interlaced fingers and shuffled her body on the bed, unable to get comfortable at the incline. The girl usually flattened it for the legs but Kate knew she would have to ask her to do it this time, and it seemed easier to lie in mild discomfort for the next thirty minutes.

  The machine bleeped to life and the stinging began on her left ankle. Her leg lifted for a second, knocking the towel onto the floor. The girl leaned on the bed as she bent to get it, making the incline worse. Kate imagined rolling naked onto the floor, the whole clinic coming out from behind the velvet curtain to gawk. Imagine she broke her pelvis and couldn’t get up. Imagine the ambulance crew arriving in and how awful it would be to have wasted their time with such a brainless, trivial accident brought on by the vanity, by the necessity of hair removal.

  Kate gripped the sides of the bed with her fingers.

  ‘There you go,’ said the girl.

  As the towel’s softness rested on her cheeks, Kate tried to go back into her head, but it was no good. Each sting was sharper than the one before, eroding any thought, any half-thought, so that all she could do was lie there, anticipating the blasts.

  Afterwards Kate walked briskly towards Grand Canal Square. It was a shimmery summer morning, office workers in short sleeves and smiles. In her silk dress and belted jacket, she felt like she fitted in.

  When she hit the quays on the far side of the square, she stopped to take out her headphones, automatically looking up at the third floor of her office building. Conville Media had the whole floor to themselves. They published monthly magazines and online articles in a variety of unrelated sectors. Finance, cars, teeth—Anthony didn’t care, as long as the publications sold ads. They also did one-off magazine specials for organizations on request, which was how Kate had met Liam.

  It was too sunny to see whether the lights were on in Anthony’s corner room but she could make out a suit jacket on the coat stand through the long glass windows. She darted across the road in front of a lorry. Forty-five minutes early, and she was still late, no time to stop at the coffee dock for a croissant.

  In reception, there was a bouquet of white roses on the marble counter. She stopped and took them in, grinning like an idiot. Liam had never sent her flowers before but these were perfect, so neat and exotic. The phone rang on her desk before she could open the card. Leaving down her handbag, she scooted in behind the counter. Someone had messed up her indexed magazines.

  ‘Morning, morning,’ Anthony boomed down the line. ‘Don’t worry about number three. Done. Number bloody two, however.’

  Kate sat down, wiggling her feet into the nude kitten heels she kept under her desk. Beside the keyboard Anthony had left a list of tasks, each with an underline and exclamation mark. She tried to tune into his rant but was distracted by the stain on her dress. When the girl had finished the laser, Kate had found the dress on the floor under the hanger, a tangle of cream silk with the tip of a footprint. As Anthony moved to the next point, she rubbed it with her fingers. She had wanted to look well, to look her best, for this evening. She took her mobile from her handbag, unlocked it in case a message had somehow not registered on the screen. Listening to Antony’s excitable staccato, she knew he’d had his coffee already and that was one less thing she’d have to do. She took up his list again. The final two items had multiple exclamation marks, before and after the words, which meant they were more important than the tasks farther up the list. When Anthony was finished, Kate hung up and read the card on the flowers: a short note congratulating Francesca from sales on a recent deal. She berated herself for feeling disappointed. It would be reckless of Liam to send flowers to the office. She had been let down by her own imagination, nothing more.

  The rest of the office started to arrive. The shaggy-haired production manager, the designer with the nose piercing, the younger sales guys in their crinkled suits, the editor on her hands-free, pointing at the flowers and winking, and gone again before Kate had time to react. She felt ludicrous blushing over someone else’s roses.

  When she came back from Francesca’s desk, Diya was leaning on the marble in a tight-fitting red skirt that Kate hoped wouldn’t mean another caution from HR. Diya, the company events planner, was her best friend in work—though also probably out of work if she was being honest. There was Rory, too, a cheerful accountant from Faranfore who loved to tell people about the airport. The three of them were known as a unit ab
out the office.

  ‘Sup,’ said Diya, groaning. ‘Why did I go out last night?’ She left a greasy deli bag on the counter and coiled her long dark hair into a bun.

  Kate placed a magazine under the bag. ‘Because you can’t resist Thursday pints?’

  ‘I went for one measly drink, and ended up in Coppers.’

  ‘You’re ten years too old for that place,’ said Kate.

  ‘No one’s ever too old for Coppers.’

  ‘You look grand,’ Kate lied.

  ‘For a dead version of myself.’

  Their laughter had an early morning, berserk quality that threatened to turn hysterical as Rachel from HR rounded the corner into the kitchenette.

  The door of Anthony’s office opened suddenly and he appeared beside them.

  ‘Morning, Diya. Good to see such spirits for work.’

  ‘Morning, Mr Fitzgerald.’

  ‘What’s for breakfast?’

  ‘Sausage rolls.’

  He tried to hide a grimace, smoothing his hand through his fringe.

  ‘Need you.’ He curled a finger at Kate before striding to his room.

  She waved Diya off and trucked in after him.

  All summer they’d been taking early lunches outside in the square, leaving the office at noon with Rory’s tartan rug. Diya and Rory would go to the deli and get the lunches while Kate went to claim their spot. It was right beside the water, the salty smell of the Liffey that Kate could never get her head around—river or sea?—but far enough away from the shrieking local boys plunging into the dock in their underwear. She would watch them sometimes from reception if Anthony was out, marvelling at the hours of activity their wiry bodies could take, envying the great sleep it must give them come night-time.