—4—
Discreet, gay, professional gentleman seeks civilized companion (m. or f.) to share 3 room k&b flat, Rathgar area.
I toyed with the idea. Could I match his discreet gayness with my well-bred civilizedness?
But no. It was serious. Everything was serious. I had to have a job and a place to live. Both. Mary and I went through all the papers together.
Bedsit, eve. meal incl. £3 pw. Sandymount. I thought of the evening meal sitting hugely in the centre of a brown linoleum room—like a Magritte painting. I crossed that one off the list.
I answered one ad asking for 4th girl to share spacious flat (own rm.) Donnybrook area (the posh ads always said ‘area’).
The three girls, looking for a fourth, said they’d be delighted to show me their flat that evening. I took the bus over. Odd
humiliating things like that nearly kill you; you get used to a car and to money, and each time you go out you’re reminded you’re without them and you hate buses like hell. The car belonged to Colin and I’d left it outside the television station with a note and the keys. Mary said I should have kept it until I found a flat and things but that was worse.
The three girls sat on a divan bed in the living room. They said they were Amanda, Jo (for Josephine), and Anne. They giggled. The living room was used by one of the girls as her bedroom when everyone else had gone to bed. They took turns in the living room, they said. They giggled again. They interrupted each other.
They said, ‘Somebody does the launderette once a week (we all wash our own undies), and somebody does the cooking, and somebody does the washing up, and we have a list, here, see, so nobody has to do all the work, it’s all planned …’
They showed me my separate bedroom. It had a single bed and a wardrobe that went from the floor almost to the ceiling. The linoleum was vomit pattern. The bathroom had three rows of tights and pants and yellowing bras hanging on sodden string lines over the bath. There was a shelf with half-finished bottles of cream on it and scattered powder and a broken lipstick case and a sanitary towel and two boxes of Tampax. (Colin once saw an ad in an American paper that said, ‘Tampax! Almost as good as the Real Thing’.)
The three girls said, ‘Stay for supper.’ That was to suss me out. A boyfriend came. He sat in a chair and the girls all giggled at him and the one who was his girlfriend wouldn’t speak to him but sulked in a chair. Then she went out and had a confab with one of the other girls in the passageway. She came back in and said, ‘Come on’ and she and her spotty boyfriend went into one of the bedrooms. We could hear the bed creaking through the partition walls.
I said I wanted to go to the bathroom. I locked the door and climbed out of the window and ripped my bloody tights. I thanked God it was a ground floor flat and ran down the street, hating those girls and pitying them and thinking of the rooms rotating and launderettes rotating in weekly cycles. Mary thought it was a scream.
Landladies look at you. They say, ‘On your own dear?’ They try to make out if you’re pregnant or if you’re on the run from someone or something or if you’re a prostitute. Landladies hate girls.
Landladies like the boys and the men with their dirty socks and late drunken nights and meals of beans eaten from the tins. They can scold and patronize and go Tsch, tsch, such poor neglected boys. Girls are sneaky; they say that girls put san towels and hair down the lavs and block them, and then the landladies’ husbands have to come and clear them. Girls spill nail varnish on the Good Carpet.
You go through the papers first thing in the morning. You make phone calls. You say, ‘When could I come and see it?’ You ask the rent.
They let you in the door; they show you the room. It’s always worse than you imagined; it’s always mean and yellowed and rubbed against by so many bodies; the curtains are heavy with the sighs and tiny despairs of the bedsitter population that’s lived there. It smells of onions and cabbage and unwashed bodies.
The landladies look at you. They don’t mind if you don’t like the room. They look at you. You say, ‘Umm, does this window open by any chance?’ You make your voice gentle, polite. You try not to grunt as you push at the only window in the kitchenette. The window doesn’t open. None of them ever open.
I thought, Why did I leave Colin? Why did I leave that beautiful flat by the sea? I thought of walking out of that pub and my strength then. I thought, Hate will be my strength—it carried me through packing and going, but then I got tired. The papers made me tired. The landladies with their damned eyes made me tired. I thought I’d scream if another one asked me what sort of job I had, what my father did; probe, probe, probe till I wanted to say, ‘I am a whore to end all whores. My father is a gigolo. Nightly he will bring at least a score of men to my room where they will take their pleasure of my body. We will writhe and scream and spit in the face of God … now, can I see the flat please?’
At first I thought of all the good things with Colin—times when we’d laughed and put on diamond faces for each other and danced for each other. I thought of him saying, ‘Yeah, that looks good on you. Christ you really do look something tonight,’ and feeling his eyes, his pleased eyes, looking at me. That made me beautiful.
I thought of him talking to his friends. His hands patting the words down, excited words. I thought of him working, leaping down from the gantry to the studio floor: ‘No this way’—his looking through the camera lens, a stopwatch swinging from his neck.
I thought of him in bed. His sureness. His hands like china, hands so smooth and sure. His body like wire. His concentration on me. The way he’d say, ‘We’ll make you oblivious,’ and go round and round me till I was all sensation, all feeling, a total nerve ending, and then he’d come into me.
But then there were the bad things I remembered. Watching him flirting with girls. That feeling of his power over me. How he could make me oblivious and how awful it was to see him preparing other people for that. At the time it had been me and him; it was personal between us and I felt annihilated at the thought of him doing it with somebody else.
The days in the flat: waiting my life away from the time when he left till the time he came back. Listening to records. Making clothes, doing something to my body. Making something to eat. The days stretched and contracted around him; long days if he worked, short if he stayed at home.
The ache to be approved of. Anything, I’ll do anything, if only you’ll tell me I’m okay. The wondering: Does he love me? Will he leave me? Aren’t there lots of other girls with sexier bottoms, and bigger bosoms? Even the ugly ones, aren’t they potentially dangerous as well? He might fall for a really ugly one.
Feeling scared. Not something I could even think about very much. I kept it in a box. Locked. But wondering sometimes, What am I doing? I’m doing nothing. I can’t do nothing, I can’t. Somebody is going to come and ask me one day, ‘Why are you doing nothing?’
Colin said, ‘That’s your bloody Catholic conscience again.’ It didn’t stop the scared feeling. What if he leaves? What if I get fat, or spotty, or old? But that’s not the important thing. Who am I without him now? I danced for him till my legs ached; if he goes whom will I dance for? People will laugh at me dancing down the streets like a madwoman, all on my own.
Mary said that being on my own would be the worst thing in the beginning. But it would improve. Would it? The world suddenly seemed such a hollow vault. My footsteps echoing round and round echo in my mind, soft grey marks astronauts might leave on the moon. Everything seemed grey. The colours had been sucked back into somebody’s head.
Why? Why leave?
It was that shout in the pub: ‘You stupid bitch.’ I felt a curtain come down inside my head. I thought, Right, that’s it. You’ll never shout at me like that again. I didn’t think, I’m very clever and therefore you shouldn’t shout, or, I’m very beautiful and you shouldn’t shout. I just thought, I’m a person; you mustn’t ever shout at me li
ke that again. I thought, I’m something. I must find out what. I must go back and then go forward. Reopen some doors.
The doors were stiff. Doors to the past and doors to the future. Thinking about it. Planning it. Wondering, What next? Where do I go from here? Looking for a flat in the summer days.
The flat was finally a room. The room was an attic. The attic was in the roof of a pub looking over the River Liffey.
The man said, ‘Fifty bob a week, shared bathroom and kitchen with meself and the missus, and a drink on the house at Christmas.’ The man was called Mr Maloney. At first he was very reserved. Mary said, ‘It’s your accent.’ He’d stand behind the bar in a filthy apron, his flecked nose matching the marble-top counter. Gradually, though, he became more friendly. Offered me a nightcap, or an evening shot. ‘Oiling the works for the night’s endeavours,’ he’d say. He’d say, ‘A terrible dirty life, surely.’ He said it as if he didn’t mean it; a sort of refrain. His wife was an invalid. She stayed upstairs in a dark bedroom with the curtains closed.
Mary helped me move in. We painted the room white and I polished up a big old brass bed and she gave me a huge rug to put over it.
My first night in Maloney’s I went down to use the loo. It was about ten o’clock. We’d been painting all day and I was exhausted. I could hear the voices downstairs in the bar, like an orchestra tuning up, loud voices and soft voices and a purple sort of rumbling.
The loo was at the end of this long corridor. It had once been a bathroom but Mr Maloney had sold the bath so there was just this very old loo on a sort of dais at the end of a narrow, long room. There was no lock on the door. You couldn’t sit on the lav and keep your foot against the door at the same time; it was too far away. I thought, What the hell, nobody is going to come up here at this hour.
I sat down and was in full flight when the door started opening.
A red blotchy man’s face wobbling on top of a dark suit peered in. The door opened a bit further. The man’s face opened into a wide smile. More faces appeared. More smiles. I just sat on peeing. There was nothing else I could do. I smiled back. The faces gave forth a little grinning cheer. I stood up and they all discreetly left. It was the first time I’d really laughed in weeks. Maloney had forgotten to tell me that sometimes he let one of the rooms upstairs for conferences, meetings.
—5—
The first four days I didn’t leave my room in the pub. I just went out to get milk, bread and cigarettes. I ate the bread dry and drank cup after cup of coffee. I slept and then woke and had coffee and then slept again. I went out with a long coat on over my nightdress to get the milk and the bread. I thought, Ah, if only the girls could see me now. If only Colin could see me now. I imagined being found dead on my polished brass bed. ‘Ex-model found dead on brass bed—ex-boyfriend heartbroken.’
Then a Sunday had come. The bell of the church just down the road was cracked. It made an odd cracking echo, calling the people to Mass. I sat at my attic window and looked down at the women in their nylon scarves and shapeless coats and flat shoes pushing against the wind to get to the church. I saw a drunk from the night before (from forever?) bang-clattering along the pavement. Two seagulls painted white curves of light over the sluggish river.
I thought, One more day in this room and I’ll go daft in the head.
I came to Mary’s. I was rummaging through my bag looking for money and suddenly remembered David’s cheque. It was still there. I’d told Mary about it, about the afternoon in the hotel. She was laughing till tears came down her face. She said, ‘Why don’t you go and cash it?’ We’d had this argument about the cheque. I said I didn’t think it was right to do it, oh, because David was pitiful or something. She was saying, ‘Well if he’s rich why be so worried about it?’
I put the cheque back in the zipper pocket and thought, Well I’ll keep it as insurance; if things get really bad I can cash it.
I realize now why I’d come to Mary—for help. Somebody to say, ‘Look, why don’t you try this, or this, or that?’
We talked for hours—well it was mostly Mary talking. She talked about women, how she really feels for women, how banjaxed they are. She told me about this woman friend of hers who put her head in the gas oven because her husband ran off with a seventeen-year-old girl. The husband came back and found her and dragged her out screaming to the hospital. He used to come and visit her and she’d know this lovely girl would be tapping impatiently outside the door. When she came out of the hospital she packed her things and went to a cottage in the country and didn’t see anyone for six months. She began painting. She painted herself back to sanity.
She talked about me. What would I do? What? I could go back to modelling. She said she thought that would be ridiculous. She said, ‘It’s time you stopped being a bloody clothes-horse; it’s time you stopped worrying what other people think of you and start thinking what you want to be yourself.’
She said the only way to go forward is to go back. She said you must go back to the dead, still centre of yourself, just being calm, if you can, and thinking, and slowly building up on what you have, not what other people give you, or refuse you.
I wanted her to be my friend. I wanted to stay with her, to have her look after me. I wanted her to go on talking to me about women and their problems, and the way she saw things, like
jealousy and bitchiness between women; the way she explained them. The way she said, ‘Look, emotions aren’t the only thing. There’s the whole world in a state of chaos. There’s work to be done.’
What would I work at? What would I do? She said a typing course was the first thing. Being a secretary wasn’t much but at least it was a start. She said that it would bring in the bread and butter and then I could start looking around. We were sitting in the flat smoking and I was thinking of looking, looking around the world I suppose for the first time and thinking, What could I do? And that being quite a good, strong feeling.
Mary knew of this typing school; a friend of hers ran it. They did a crash touch-typing course. You wouldn’t need shorthand. Everyone had Dictaphones now. We rang up the friend and I was to start the next day.
Then there was money. I had thirty pounds when I left Colin. Mary had lent me some more. She rang another friend, a girl who worked in a restaurant. The girl said she’d ask the boss the following night if he’d take on somebody else. She said, ‘I’m sure he will, a girl left only two weeks ago to have a baby and we haven’t replaced her.’
We made lunch: bacon and beans and bread and a bottle of red wine. I was starving; it was the first time in years I’d eaten without thinking, Oh Jesus is this going to make me fat?
You think of the whole world working. Most people working at jobs they despise. Getting up at 7.30; scraping yesterday’s food and cigarette tar off their teeth, last night’s sleep off their faces, depositing yesterday’s waste matter down the toilet, filling their stomach with more; clothing their bodies; catching their train, or their bus, or bicycle, or driving their car; spending the best part of their waking lives, their years, behind a desk, beside a conveyor belt, underneath a machine. It was frightening.
We were sitting at the table in the kitchen with the wine and warmth and food keeping the world out.
‘You won’t be rescued,’ Mary said. She said it in a kind, slow voice. I felt panic rising: stop, stop telling me horrible things—tomorrow, I’ll think about it tomorrow.
She said, ‘Before it was easy for you. Colin did everything. He earned money for both of you, he thought for both of you, he made decisions for both of you—you’ve told me he even bought your clothes.’
I said, ‘No. He helped me choose them.’ ‘Did you ever go on wearing something he didn’t like?’ I said, ‘Yes, of course.’ But I hadn’t. Of course. I didn’t feel the tears coming; I was just suddenly aware of them pouring down my face. They were tears for me, for Colin, for Mary, for the woman who’d put her head
in the gas oven, for the women who didn’t but would have liked to. I supposed mostly they were for me—the jobs, the bedsitters, the life, the flat, flat life stretching ahead of me—nobody going to rescue me . . . nobody. Mary said, ‘Talk about it, talk it out of your system,’ and we started again.
—6—
‘Like to come for a drink, darling, when you’re finished?’ The man patted my behind, pat, pat, like you would a sleek pony’s. ‘I don’t drink actually,’ I said, emphasizing the actually in my frosty waitress voice, hard and thin. You learn the voice quick. It’s the only way to protect yourself and them. Sometimes, though, you feel like dumping a plate of wild duck a l’orange over their damn fat heads.
At least I got the job. Mary’s friend had rung her the next day and told me to come in for an interview. She said, Tell her to put on something sexy; Peter is really a dirty old man, and he likes his girls to look whorey.’
The other girls told me how to survive from the first night I arrived. They said, ‘Be firm, never be snotty, otherwise you won’t get a tip, or they might complain to old head-the-ball (Peter, the owner). Just say, “No thanks dear,” and carry on clearing the plates. Give them a bit of a wink or something. Lead them on; let them feel they’re the sexiest thing since Rock Hudson, and just carry on clearing the plates.’
The restaurant had a rota of eight girls. We worked four a night; the arranging of the schedule was up to us. Peter had a face that perpetually oozed grease. He planned the menus and sometimes did the cooking if it was something experimental. Most of the time he sat around talking to customers who were waiting for a table or watching us. He said, ‘I hire my girls for their looks and keep them on for their endurance.’
We started at 5.30 p.m. Cleaned everything, put fresh flowers on the tables, polished the glasses, cracked white linen tablecloths over the round dinner tables. Each evening I came in, the restaurant seemed to smell of disappointment. We would humour it and dress it and chuck it under the chin and open it up for another night’s experience, but always it would be sad again the following day.
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