In White Ink

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In White Ink Page 16

by Elske Rahill


  *

  I helped to bring the boxes downstairs and pack them into the car. On reaching the street, Brigitte lifted the scarf up over her head and arranged it deftly, an expression of serene resolve on her face, all her features settled into an effortless symmetry. We loaded the boot in silence. Suzanne stood watching us from the bottom of the polished concrete steps that led up to her flat. I kept thinking she would speak. As Brigitte reached up to pull the boot closed, the words came forward without any search, and so loud that I shocked even myself. ‘La poupée?’ – the doll?

  I didn’t see Suzanne’s face because she was standing behind me, but I was glad that Brigitte stiffened. I had caught her. Her eyes widened and I thought gleefully that her face looked puckered by the black scarf which even covered her neck, squashing in the big sloppy features from all sides. I said it again, ‘La poupée’ – the doll, trembling with a kind of victory now, at having spoken, ‘elle n’est pas interdit?’ – she is not forbidden? I wondered if Suzanne could hear how well I was pronouncing the words.

  Brigitte smiled again, put a painted finger to her closed lips, and winked. Her mother suffered the two farewell kisses with a face hard as bark, wobbling softly at her daughter’s touch like a sapling unbraced against the wind.

  Brigitte nodded at me, Merci Aleezun. She installed herself steadily into her rickety orange car and drove away, head lowered prettily towards the wheel.

  When I looked back at Suzanne, her face shot terror down through my limbs. I wanted to run. She looked like someone else; someone bad and cold.

  ‘Elle a la poupée?’

  I nodded, and smiled; Brigitte had something to hold; Suzanne might be pleased. But all expression had dropped from Suzanne’s flesh, the way a dead person’s does, and it stayed that way, her mouth dripping down off her bones; her eyes flat. She gave a single, curt nod and turned.

  Back upstairs she said something that I was too frightened to understand, so she wrote down a word for me in English: ‘integrity’. Bewildered by the change in her, I didn’t speak.

  ‘She eez empty, my daughter,’ she said, ‘Brigitte. She eez nat true for what she belief. She belief in nothing. Rien. She eez no person.’

  *

  That night on my attic mattress, I wound the jewellery box and watched the ballerina dance by the light of the flea trap. I turned the key again and again until the drowning melody finally died, and she twirled there in silence with her wonky mouth.

  Manners

  THE FIRST TIME Adrian had seen the girls he thought they might be prostitutes. They both had crusty sores on their lips that had been dabbed with flesh-coloured paste, then glossed over many times with candy-pink goo. Their nails were long and flaked with silver polish. One of them had a purple bruise on her neck. They wore thick gold earrings, tight sequinned jeans, and running shoes. They were his daughter’s age, just turned women – buttocks full, hips pressing intently through the chafed denim. They had tight waists, bony wrists, wide, clear eyes and tough little jaws. He had expected them to get off at Stoneybatter, where a businessman could buy a lunchtime blow job for twenty euros. They might have been wearing flimsy nylon tops under their hoodies. They might have had slippery armpits under there, brothy sweat, more bruises, bites. But they had stayed on the bus until Grafton Street. As they disembarked one of them took the other’s hand and whispered into her ear, grinning with the giddiness of a mischievous child. Then they waited quietly on the pavement for an older woman to get off the bus.

  Adrian hadn’t noticed the older woman until then. She was round, zipped into a too-small fleece jacket. She had the same jaw as them, the same dark, itinerant brows, but her skin had the look of granite, dense and pitted, and her coarse black hair was twisted into a plait that tapered all the way down to the cleft of her ass and swung there like a tail.

  The girls weren’t prostitutes. He should have seen that by the way they curved their shoulders – they didn’t know they had two pairs of beautiful breasts in there under those hoodies. His own daughter knew only too well. It made him uncomfortable, the way Carla’s clothes increasingly resembled underwear – bits of designer lace to decorate her cleavage and the tops of her thighs – and the way he paid for the privilege of seeing her walk out like that. He was having a new credit card issued soon. He would keep the numbers from her.

  He had been taking the bus to work for two months now. It had embarrassed his wife at first, and she had insisted on dropping him to the stop lest he be seen walking. Last weekend, though, he had heard her on the phone. ‘Oh yes,’ she had said, ‘well, we’re in the same boat. My Adrian sold the ’07... who would have seen it coming? Grown men like ours, professionals, trudging to the bus stop...’ She still had the four-by-four. One car for a family of three was no great hardship, he told her, but Margaret savoured her horror at the loss of the Merc. He hadn’t got much for it, but keeping it was an expense, he had explained – why pay insurance and petrol and parking fees, when he could as easily take the bus?

  There were a few things that hadn’t worked out. His girls needed to understand that.

  He owned a vacant penthouse apartment in a half-built development surrounded by acres of flattened wasteland, a motorway without a pedestrian crossing, and the promise of a tram stop. Out of laziness or optimism, the large billboard saying HoneyHive Village: Work. Live. Succeed! had never been taken down. There was a crèche on the ground floor called Oxford Junior. It had a heart-shaped crest with a book in one chamber and a teddy bear in another. He had also bought one third of an unused warehouse.

  Recently, in a cafe, he had overheard a conversation between a middle-aged man and his young lunch companion. The man spoke loudly, showing off. He told the girl that the word mortgage came from the French mort – death. It was a debt till death – that was the literal translation. That was why the French rented, the man had said.

  He recognized the regular commuters now. Sometimes he found himself nodding at familiar faces, and they nodded back. It was nice, in a way, to see faces other than that of his secretary, the usual clients, and the man who worked at the coffee dock. There had been no new clients lately, no new stories, just follow-on cases – access reviews, maintenance reviews, fines for broken court orders.

  He saw the girls once or twice a week. They always got on at the same stop – the Spar on the Foxborough road – and he reckoned there must be a council estate around there. There were always skinny men loitering outside the shop. The woman with the plait usually chaperoned the girls. This time she sat beside Adrian at the back of the bus, facing them. She crossed her feet and folded her hands on her lap one over the other, like a lady. She pursed her lips, trying for pride, perhaps, or displeasure. It made him think of Margaret when she was young. When she was nervous she would straighten her back, fold her hands on her lap, survey the room, and swallow.

  It was startling how easily he forgot what his wife had been like then – the way she pinned her shoulders back, the curve of her spine. He’d met her at a dinner party and wanted her immediately. It was the way she allowed her chair to be held for her as she seated herself at the table, the way she held her knees together. He had thought of making love to her, calling her ‘good girl’, the polite little moans she might make. They had driven him wild, those impeccable manners.

  It took him two months. It was much as he had imagined it. She was sweet and mock-demure, hesitating with a grin before parting her legs. When prompted she sat daintily astride him as though riding a horse, brushed the hair from her eyes, left her underwear on with the crotch pulled aside, made small, dignified sounds and smiled triumphantly when he came. What made him start to love her a little, even on that first night, was the way that all of those manners fell away when she slept. She snored like a man, and muttered and scratched and kicked and drooled and fought with the pillow. In marriage he had hoped to access that part of her, to lose the politeness of words and waxed legs. He had looked forward to seeing her face scrubbed bare, to all the g
ore of pregnancy and birth, to sleeping curled together like animals.

  Lately Margaret had taken to wearing an eye-mask to bed. He would come home some nights to find her lying on her back, her hands in cotton gloves to get the most out of her hand cream, and the black mask over her eyes with the word ‘sleep’ embroidered on it in silver thread.

  *

  One of the girls had tried to bleach her hair, but the peroxide had been no match for the thorough blackness of her mane. The hair had come out orange-pink, like a sunset, with two inches of roots. The other girl, slightly taller, with hair greased back in a tight ponytail, was beautiful. Her face was flat like so many of those traveller girls’, with high, dented cheekbones like a form carefully beaten out of bronze. Her thick lips were both stoic and accidentally sensual, raw as a wound. It was the upper lip – the way it swelled a little over the plump lower one – that made her beautiful: the hurt she wore in her mouth, and the resignation, and something else as well – the wince at the edge of her eyes, as though she were tolerating something, resisting an urge to roar. He had noticed the colour before – emerald green shot through with glistening yellow shards like a shattered bottle.

  The girls were each sipping a bottle of Lucozade and the sugar was already doing its job – they were becoming jittery and hyper, giggling and whispering. That must be their breakfast, he thought: a high-calorie drink designed for sportsmen, rich in glucose. He thought of Carla, battling already with her weight. Throughout sixth year she had been eating egg whites for breakfast, an apple for lunch, and turkey breast or white fish for dinner, grilled by Margaret on special fat-absorbing paper. Mother and daughter were both on the Special 8 diet now, which, as far as he could make out, meant that they ate nothing but bowls of cereal with fat-free organic yoghurt. If they could see this – two itinerant girls with perfect figures drinking Lucozade for breakfast...

  Because she wasn’t cooking for herself or Carla, Margaret had taken to filling the freezer with high-quality ready-made meals. She left one to defrost on the kitchen table for Adrian every afternoon. In the evening he was supposed to come home and put it in the microwave, but he was never hungry by then. He ate a lot during the day. Business had been quiet lately. Middle-class separations, with all the mess of joint bank accounts and properties, had kept Adrian in work for two decades, but things were different now. There was less money to fight over than there was to lose on legal costs, and no one could afford to live alone.

  After greeting his secretary in the morning, and opening his post, Adrian had taken to sitting in an Italian cafe for an hour with coffee and a pastry and some folders. Sometimes he sat there until the afternoon. It was easier to deal with paperwork there, amongst walls of wine bottles, than in his brightly lit office. There were PhD students with laptops, women with babies, lovers with problems, ex-politicians. There were low-hanging amber lampshades and cheap paper placemats. There was good coffee. There was never such silence that you could hear the waste of energy hum in the plug sockets. At lunchtime he would order a plate of vinegar-drenched antipasto and eat it slowly.

  He tried to tell Margaret what a waste of money the ready meals were – he ate so often during the day, he said, so many business lunches – but she insisted that since the recession had hit there were great deals on all these things. Marks and Spencer wasn’t even making a profit, she said. They were loss leaders, the three-for-two ready meals that she bought for Adrian. It would be a waste not to buy them, she said. She loved that expression, ‘loss leaders’.

  For the first years after they had married she had cooked him elaborate dinners every evening. She went through phases. First everything was done in the pressure cooker, then the slow cooker. Then she began to grill things. For a time it was their main topic of conversation – her cooking, and his eating. She always asked him what she might improve, and was there enough salt on it, and every Thursday she tried something new from the Living supplement of the Sunday paper. It had gone on like that for – how long? And when had it stopped?

  Margaret took seriously her duties as wife. She had given up her job at the hotel. She had run the house like a good business, constantly striving for improvement. In the eighties they had needed a conservatory and an antique oak floor. In the nineties they had needed the conservatory taken out; in its place they needed decking, and a gazebo. Margaret had designed the gazebo herself, and had it custom made. That was her way of loving him. He knew that. He was no better. He had started buying her chocolates and flowers. On her birthday he had bought a card that said ‘To My Lovely Wife’ on it. On the front was the outline of a woman. There was red silk stuck over it in the shape of a dress, and a string of tiny pearls glued at the neck. There was a time when she would have made a joke of that. Now, she was grateful. She kept the card on the dresser for six weeks. He was not the worst. There was no one who knew quite how to love anyone else. If family law had taught him anything, it was that. How many times, right before a settlement, at the end of a vicious dispute, after the poisonous accusations, the financial ruin, the custody battle, had he watched a client collapse in tears – ‘I tried my best. I tried so hard to love...’

  A few years ago he had paid a girl to piss on him. The girl was thin with brassy yellow hair. He could smell alcohol off her piss, and after it was done he couldn’t remember why he had wanted so badly for Margaret to do it, why the thought had turned him on like that.

  A boy sat himself down behind the girls. He had bum fluff on his chin – a colourless foam, like the mould that sprouts at the bottom of discarded tea cups – that nauseated Adrian. The three teenagers were talking in low, excited mumbles. The woman with the plait was scolding them continuously in that half-English language they spoke. Adrian couldn’t decipher her words.

  His grandmother used to bring dinner and worn blankets to Mrs O’Connor, a traveller woman with nine children who settled in a nearby field every summer. One day she had taken Adrian with her to the caravans. Bits of broken things lay discarded amidst patches of long, parched grass – half a bicycle, a crushed washing line and, in the black aftermath of a bonfire, a cluster of smashed bottles, green and brown and yellow. Adrian had seen a little boy with no trousers or shoes on straddling a shaggy horse, and Mrs O’Connor had shouted something at the boy in that language. Inside, the caravan was very clean and neat. There was a bedspread with large red flowers on it, and a skinny baby sleeping face down on a sheepskin. The sons had grown into thugs, his grandmother had told him, which was a terrible pity, because Mrs O’Connor had been a lady in her own way, and her long, black hair was always clean and glossy.

  The woman was talking to the boy now. Adrian thought he could understand. ‘When you get back don’t go straight to sleep,’ she said. ‘Go for a walk first.’

  Adrian checked his watch. Then he verified the time by checking his phone. It was 9.05. Carla would be picking up her results. How did it work? he wondered. Did the students all queue up, the way they had when he was that age, and file into the principal’s office to hear, after a summer of waiting, how they had done? Or were the results posted on a board, the way they were in universities? Or were they each handed a sealed envelope with their name on it? She wanted to do law like him, poor child. For a year the exams had taken over everything. Carla had tacked a study plan to the back of her bedroom door. Margaret had woken her every morning with a black coffee, and poached the egg whites while Carla did an hour of morning revision.

  Was it he, or Margaret, who had chosen that crèche when Carla was tiny? The only one in Ireland to start Montessori classes at two years instead of three, which had a uniform that made the toddlers look like Victorian dolls, and taught them the violin when they could hardly walk. It had seemed to him, back then, that it would protect Carla to be armed with that education, that class. That’s how it had seemed then.

  Throughout sixth year he and Margaret had been invited to the dinner parties of parents from the school. One night a father had cornered him in the kitchen. />
  ‘I hear Carla’s getting straight A1s in higher maths? Martha says she’s the best in the class. That’s an advantage alright, isn’t it? They get extra points for higher maths.’

  ‘Yeah. I think she is. That’s what she tells us anyway, hah! You never know, though, she says the girl who got the maths prize last year only got a C in the leaving. It all depends on the day, doesn’t it?’

  The man eyed him suspiciously, and moved in closer.

  ‘What grind does she go to? I won’t mention it to anyone else. Please. Martha wants to do science. She needs a B in maths or she won’t get into her course.’

  He had told Carla yesterday, ‘You know it doesn’t matter how you do? Things will work out for the best. Your mother and I know you’ve worked hard. That’s what matters.’

  Things will work out for the best – what did he mean by that? He hoped she wouldn’t get all those points. He hoped her fat-necked boyfriend would dump her. He hoped her life would be thrown off course now before it was too late. He wanted her to enjoy herself in college, to miss class sometimes, and get a job in a bar. He wanted someone to fall in love with her for real, not as an aspiration. He wanted her to sit on grotty couches and argue with other kids as though they all knew everything, and just talk, for God’s sake, and laugh stupidly, and not keep striving into the future, as though there was something there for her.

  Besides, Margaret had promised Carla, without consulting him, that she could have her own brand-new car if she got over 550. He couldn’t afford that.

  His phone was flashing and vibrating. He had forgotten to take it off silent. Six missed calls. Margaret and Carla had both been phoning. He picked up and Carla shrieked into the phone – ‘Five-sixty-five, Dad! Five-sixty-fucking-five!’ In the background her classmates were shrieking too.

 

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