Orchid & the Wasp

by Caoilinn Hughes

  Gael had jumped to attention, then felt somewhat abased at having done so. Such obeisance. She bent down, not in genuflection but to rummage through her bag for her pocket mirror. Handing it to Guthrie, she said, ‘We’re playing Who Am I.’ Jarleth gave her a Playing, is it? look. His straight eyelashes pointed at her, then moved to the beverages that had been served to them. A can of Sprite for Guthrie. Sparkling water for Gael, who had asked for coffee, but the receptionist had tucked her chin into her chest and had declared Ms Foess ‘very sophisticated altogether takes after her father doesn’t she but I don’t think your mammy’d be happy if we sent you home all jittery now would she missus?’ Gael had given her best tsk in reply: the sound of a control-alt-delete command. ‘If you’re going to use third person, commit to it,’ Gael had said. ‘I’ll have sparkling water. Pellegrino, please.’

  Guthrie hadn’t dared to open the compact mirror to guess who he was supposed to be, but at least the disguise had worked. Horseplay trumped waterworks in their father’s eyes.

  ‘It’s ten past three,’ Jarleth said. ‘Since you two have run out of homework, I’ll have to call Carla.’

  ‘Oh Dad,’ Gael said. ‘Don’t call Carla.’ To Gael, Carla was the most depressing kind of adult – the kind that sees children as a separate species, blind to the puerility of her own life. Girls’ nights out on indisposable income. Deliberately limited vocabulary. Lip-gloss mania. Guthrie didn’t like Carla because of her general negligence and bad cooking. Their mother liked her threatlessness.

  Indifferent, Jarleth took his mobile phone from the breast pocket of his suit jacket and spun it the right way up like a cut-throat razor. The suit was that classic navy-grey colour that exists only on the suit spectrum. It had a muted pinstripe and was paired with a crisp white shirt with sloping collar corners, silver button cuff links (that had been no one’s gift to him) and a silver and blue tie patterned with a tight grid. His white-gold Claddagh ring looked attractive against his spring tan. He’d gone out cycling for hours on Sunday after mass and the sun shone down on him, he declared upon return, sanctimonious on his carbon cloud. (He never wore cycling gloves or shaved his legs: the two most effeminate aspects of cycling culture. The spandex was just practical.) In the office, he was a bit like a bride in her gown alongside all the bridesmaids, in that none of his colleagues – even fellow executives – dared to wear the same shade of dominion. It was true, he wore it well. When he stood in the daylight, the high thread-count made the suit appear pale blue, though this room had no windows. Today was one of those rare days when Jarleth hadn’t matched anything with his eyes, which he liked to think of as green, though they were brown as hundred-euro banknotes dropped in a puddle.

  ‘You dropped something,’ Gael said, to divert his attention from finding Carla’s number. She threw her only banknote onto the carpet as she stretched. There goes Susan’s hymen pill deposit.

  Jarleth looked at the folded fiver. ‘Buy yourself a coffee.’ He glanced at his watch.

  ‘Tell you what,’ Gael said. Her father preferred propositions to questions. She was well trained to please him. The technique had the opposite effect on her teachers, but parents pay cash and report cards are easily forged. ‘We’ll go to Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre till you’re done.’ She tilted her head towards Guthrie. ‘I’ll hold his hand.’

  Jarleth studied her with some seriousness. ‘You have time to kill because your teachers were too provincial to appreciate your business idea – clever, if low-margin and most certainly age-inappropriate – and now you’d like to fritter away that hard-won time in a shopping centre?’

  ‘I’ve karate at half shix,’ Guthrie said, or at least that was what it sounded like through the Sellotape matrix. ‘Buth I can not go if itch ease–easiel … Thath?’

  ‘Market research?’ Gael lifted her shoulders to her ears in a cutesy shrug.

  ‘Walter Lippmann had a great name for the masses that congregate in shopping malls instead of libraries,’ Jarleth said. ‘ “The bewildered herd.” They trample each other down for discount espresso machines. You’ve seen it.’

  ‘We already have an espresso machine,’ Gael said.

  ‘There’ll be something else you want.’

  ‘I might need something.’

  ‘What do you need? Tell me what you need. What your brother needs.’ Jarleth strode over to the tabletop phone to dial 1. ‘If I’d only known my children were deprived. Anything, Gael. I’ll have Margaret put in an order, whatever it is. Same-day delivery.’

  ‘I get the point,’ Gael said, glancing at Guthrie repentantly, then refocusing.

  ‘What point?’ Jarleth thrust one hand into his trouser pocket and pushed his stomach out so that his tie slipped to the side and Gael could see the dark coiled hairs of his lower belly through the slits in his strained shirt. He used his body like this on purpose: the body language of an older, uglier, sloppier man; his form unambiguated by an undershirt. This seemed to make him all the more attractive to women of her mother’s age, and younger, Gael had observed of late.

  ‘What’s my point, Gael?’ He always managed to keep his full lips – the same ballet shoe colour as the rest of his face – relaxed, even when the words coming out of them weren’t.

  Gael put on her straitlaced voice. ‘My time’s more valuable than the time it would take to walk to Stephen’s Green to go shopping.’

  ‘Good.’

  Thankfully, he never said ‘good girl’ like relatives and teachers and strangers. Gael hated the phrase in the way she hated people who mixed chocolate with fruit. A denigrating thing to say. It even had the sound of a gag. G-g. A cooing baby sound. Worst of all was good girl, Gael. Miss McFadden had paid sorely for that in fourth class.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Huh?’ Gael skimmed her mind for What Else.

  The landline phone on the table rang shrilly. Jarleth picked up and listened. ‘Tell him I’m on a conference call with London. I’ll be there when he sees me.’ He spanked the phone to its cradle, gave a sharp sigh and frowned at Guthrie, then at Gael. ‘Who is he, then? Picasso’s Weeping Woman?’

  A grin ripped through her concentration. Gael tapped Guthrie on the knee, where the mirror sat in his palm. He opened it and held it at arm’s length to try to take himself in. For a moment, nothing registered. They waited. Then, it came as the kind of wave you see at the last minute and you have no choice but to duck under. His face bulged through the tape and the composition slipped apart, taking all the fine down of his cheeks away with it. The laughter was so against his will that his eyes were going again. Straining to make out what he was saying, soon Gael was at it too and it didn’t occur to her to stand outside herself to check for giggling; to alter herself towards the caustic, brusque laughter of men. At last, Guthrie steadied himself and sputtered it out. ‘Deirdre Concannon,’ he said.

  ‘Arsehole in one!’ Gael clapped her hands once. She turned for her father’s reaction or reprimand, but he was no longer there and the door was shut.

  A taxi arrived soon after to take them home. Jarleth said he’d be late and to use the money on the hall table for takeaway. Not to wait up.

  Guthrie had no lift to karate. Just bail, Gael told him. But no, Dad would be cross if he didn’t go because they’d had a talk and they’d made a pact and it was true that his physical strength was that of a wicker basket. Gael said she’d phone Dad to ask if they should order a taxi, but she didn’t make the call, predicting how their neediness would irk him.

  No, she didn’t feel like being that child. That wasn’t what she felt like any longer – there was a mismatch between what she felt and how she looked. She considered her uniform with umbrage. Her red tie lay on the living room floor as a discarded snakeskin, blood side up. Slowly, while thinking, she lifted her navy pinafore by its pleated skirt over her head so that she was standing in her white shirt and ankle socks, absorbing the glut of underfloor heating. There was that feeling again, trilling through her. Along the backs of
her knees to the base of her buttocks. Across her scalp. The one that felt a bit like fear, but not. A bit like nausea, but not in her stomach. It felt like the inside. As if a dangerous magnet had made its way through her system – harmless so long as it was unpaired. Was it her womb? Her bladder? Like having had way too much to drink but feeling parched. Being giddy on sugar but wanting to get it by the bagful and bury her tongue into its rough dissolvable crystals. She considered herself in the window, where the reflection was clear because it was dark out and all the lights were on inside. She wore a bra because the mandatory crested school shirts were cheap and the absence of bra straps would be conspicuous. Now and then, she filled the sagging cups with things like chestnuts or Barry’s tea bags or bits of sponge or textbook pages folded into squares for when there were tests. Mostly, she left them empty, with just air against her nettle-stung nipples. Boys were impressed by mere semblances. She went upstairs dreamily and put on jeans and a black shirt her mother had bought her for a clarinet exam. (Play the part of a musician and they might forgive that awful upper octave, her mother had said, knowing early where Gael’s talent did and did not lie.) It would be cold and she’d need a jumper but nothing warm from her closet looked right when she imagined a police car riding by. The shirt would do.

  By playing the video clip at double speed, she was able to watch ‘How to drive an automatic car’ four times before they had to go. If this circumstance was a test, part of the test might have been to devise one’s own questions. ‘I’ll drive it up and down the road,’ she called up the stairs, ‘to get used to it. Get your stuff ready. You’re late.’

  Guthrie had been watching her attempts to start their mother’s car from his bedroom window, and the sound of wipers scraping against a dry windscreen, the lack of indicators when pulling out, the fog lights glaring and the way the car juddered like it was having a conniption of its own were enough to convince him. He ran downstairs and waited until she had stopped safely by the kerb, give or take a few metres. Just about to test out reverse, she screamed at the appearance of Guthrie’s white face in the dark driver’s window, looking up to her. ‘Everything’s different from here!’ she said, but he couldn’t make sense of it. She found the electric window switch. ‘Where’s your dressing gown?’

  ‘It’s not a dressing gown.’

  ‘The robe thing.’

  ‘It’s a karategi.’

  ‘If it’s in the wash, use my gown.’

  Guthrie’s face was all stretched in laughter one muscle from surfacing. ‘There’s no way I’m getting in that car with you!’

  ‘Why not?’ Gael struck her palm on the steering wheel and it beeped. ‘You have to.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m a natural.’

  ‘Way.’

  ‘Just get in. I’ll go slow.’

  ‘Then we’d die slowly.’

  ‘Come on, Guthrie. Please. I’m sick of relying on parents.’

  Confronted by her brother’s certitude, Gael saw a lost cause. She groaned and went to switch off the lights but, instead, turned on the screen sprinkler. The neighbour’s porch lights came on. Gael fiddled with sticks and buttons and keys until everything was dark and still. That must mean off. Only when stopping had been decided for her did the relief come with a collapsing sensation. So that’s what adrenaline feels like. Stealing had nothing on driving. ‘Gimme a minute,’ she said, recovering. Taking in this new perspective. The trimmed gardens of closed-curtain suburbia. The raked lawns stacked with lifestyle. Lives by rote, the driveway pillars tidy and in place like cairns – Connemara granite by way of China grit – never allowing any poor sod the excuse of having lost his way.

  Guthrie opened the door for her and she tried to get out, but the seat belt was still on. So she plonked back into the seat and went mock-slack. Guthrie climbed over her to reach the release and helped her arm through the belt.

  He stayed close by her elbow. ‘You’re sweaty.’

  ‘That was intense.’ She pushed the door shut and clicked a button on the key to lock it, but the boot popped open. They both stared at it as at an ice cream on a pavement.

  ‘Let’s watch Karate Kid,’ Guthrie said.

  Gael looked back down their street where a car was rolling forward. Was it Dad? She went to wave. No, it sped up and U-turned. Guthrie shut the boot. Slipped the keys from her hand. Pressed the right button to lock up.

  ‘Can we?’

  She heard him only vaguely. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Watch Karate Kid.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah.’

  It was ten forty and Guthrie had fallen asleep on the beanbag. Gael brushed poppadum crumbs from his jersey and gently steered him to bed. In his fuddled, interrupted-dream voice, he asked, Is Dad back yet? Shh. Stay asleep. Brush. I need my teeth. What time’s it? Shh, Gael said. Half ten. Watch your step. Where’s Dad? On his way, she lied. He wants you out for the count, so go straight back to your dream while it’s warm. Take off your socks. She tucked the duvet around his small frame and pushed his feather fringe back to blow cool air onto his forehead, the way Mum seldom remembered to do. He let her do it. Age wasn’t darkening him. It wasn’t rendering embarrassing such gestures. Rather, the opposite. All at once, he sucked in as if on a harmonica and his eyes opened wide. Gael was still there, heavy almost as a woman on his bed. What’s wrong? She rubbed the duvet across his chest. What is it? Did you forget your meds? I’ll get water. But she didn’t budge because, beneath the duvet, she could feel his right hand free itself from the mummying and trace a path from his throat to his navel, left shoulder to right. Sign of the cross. He looked to the window, where a moon offered its ear, in competition. Can you go please? he said.

  Gael was lying in the dark on the front-room divan when Jarleth got home. She knew it was well after midnight because she’d heard the twelve muffled dongs from the radio, which Sive had left on low in the kitchen six days ago and no one had bothered to turn off. Gael had been thinking about control and how one gains more of it. Her heart, for example, didn’t feel under her command. Though it was muscular, she couldn’t clench it. She couldn’t suspend it pro tem. She couldn’t borrow her mother’s vocabulary of the heart; write ritardando above the ribs’ staff. The heart keeps changing tempo. 4/4. 2/4. 9/8. How could it be refuted? When Jarleth passed by the open door without looking in and headed straight for the stairs, it cut time. And she had to stay there, unmoving, for several minutes before it was even again. Spianato.

  She got up and climbed the stairs, slowly. The costly kind of oak that doesn’t creak. A floral scent lingered along the corridor and in the upstairs landing. Sive rarely kept flowers in the house because of too many things to tend to and because it made Guthrie morose to witness the bloom-wilt biorhythm and because Gael would pick at them until they were not flowers but flowers’ infrastructure. These flowers smelt as though they’d gone bad. Like if you pulled them from the vase, wherever it was, the stems would be gooey brown. There might well be things like this around the house that they’d neglected while Sive was away. Things that might have consequences. Like a tap left on.

  Not a tap though. A shower. Her father was taking a shower without using the extractor fan. After looking in on Guthrie, whose mouth was agape, famished for sleep, she shut his door firmly. Then she pushed open her parents’ bedroom door, slipped in and pulled it quietly closed behind her. Steam burgeoned from the open en suite and the mirror above the sink was fogged. There were sounds of skin slapping and soap alather. The carpet felt deep and plush as she padded across it in her socks, taking the path between the bed and the ottoman rather than roly-polying across the bed, like she used to. The curtains were open and the bedside lamp was on, but there were no neighbours in view. Her strides were deliberate as though readying for a long jump. There was a grunt as if she had taken the leap, but it wasn’t her grunt. There was a throaty moan like when you stretch in the morning, after a too-long sleep, but it wouldn’t put her off. Long, silent strides. Sive was tall. That boded wel
l for her children. Face-to-face, Sive and Jarleth were even.

  Jarleth was someone who faced things. Just now, he faced the shower faucet. The arm closest Gael was stretched above his head, leaning against the tiled wall. He was letting the water hit the back of his head and umbrella around him. His right hand was cleaning his groin.

  Gael took a seat on the closed toilet. The rotten-iris scent was now overpowered by mint from her father’s shampoo, which was a hair growth stimulant. He must let the suds run down his spine, she thought, because there was a line of hair all the way down that pooled in his lower back like lichens on a rock. His thighs and buttocks, though, weren’t hairy. They were pale. Paler than she’d imagined. Pale like her. There were distinct tan lines from his cycling gear. The lower half of his legs and arms and the back of his neck were brown. The white, palm-sized hollow of his buttock shallowed when he moved. He did a small squat and reached between his legs to his scrotum, which she couldn’t see. Then he took his left arm from the wall and made the motion of washing his hands, though surely they were clean by now. He pushed the knob with his fist to turn the water off, then swiped the excess water from his hair and arms and chest. He turned and stepped out onto the mat in the same motion, and froze.

  ‘I don’t like the smell of her.’

  Gael said this. Her eyes met with his, but she couldn’t help them darting down to his engorged penis. It listed from one side to the other and the eye at the end lowered slowly to the floor like a remorseful child. He had just jerked off. It doesn’t go limp right away, she would later learn. Her heart was more tremolo than spiccato and she had that strange not-quite-sickening feeling but she didn’t want to make it seem as if she couldn’t bear to look, so she let her gaze stay there a moment longer. At his hairy hanging sac like a wasp nest and the heavy penis that seemed alive, then dead as gristle. Her cheeks must be even pinker. Setting her expression like a glass on an uneven surface, she tried to look proud. Disaffected. Jarleth didn’t leap for a towel. Whatever way he moved would lose him power. The towel hung halfway between them on the wall. He would have to take a long step forward to reach it. She imagined passing it to him, but this way was better.