He wanted to die of shame, seeing the crack of her backside disappearing into her jeans, the set of her small shoulders against him as she struggled into her top, anger or shame making her fingers clumsy. He hadn’t even bothered to take off her bra. The image was fuck-all use to him when he half-heartedly had a go at himself in the shower; his langer practically crawled back up inside him with humiliation.
‘Bet you’re sorry you were in such a rush to get to school today,’ Lucy said.
Damn right.
* * *
Lucy wished Paul would wake up again. Although, asleep, his breathing deepened to almost normal. She could count his breaths now that the machinery noises above her had stopped.
‘I just had to keep talking,’ she told her imaginary interviewer. ‘It sounds silly, I know, but when Paul was asleep, even the sound of my own voice was comforting.’ She could add a brave smile here as well.
As a child, when her mother went out at night, she used to sing to herself. When she ran out of songs or tired of those she knew, she moved on to reciting the alphabet or counting up as high as she could go. The beauty of numbers was that they kept on going. Even a little kid could add one. She was exhausted in school the following day, going around with the hollow eyes of the food-bank kids. It gave her an air of mystery. That and never inviting anyone home.
Then her mother bought her the clock radio and it was a whole new world.
To the sound of the late-night oldies, she watched the digital display for her numbers, the magic ones – 22.22 first, then 23.32 and 23.45. At first, they were signs that her mother would be home soon on the last bus. Then they were proof that she was getting bigger, she was able to stay awake longer. Then they took on another kind of power: if she saw them all, without missing a single one, then the following day would bring good news. She had to catch the numbers unawares though. Watching the clock was against the rules, it cancelled out the spell.
Her love of numbers didn’t fade. Looking out bus windows on normal journeys, it was the numbers going past that she watched, enjoying their certainty. The opposite was also true, travelling backwards through the numbers on a street made her anxious, especially when she was between boyfriends. She worried that the street would run out of numbers, that they would reach Number 1 with still more buildings ahead of them. The idea of those poor people living their lives in the negative made her want to weep.
‘There was a kid in my class once,’ she told Paul in the darkness, ‘from South Africa. He seemed so exotic to us. We had no idea how he came to be in a little country school.’
She used to imagine he had been on his way somewhere else and instead became trapped in Ireland, his feet freezing to the Irish surface water like the poor cursed swan-children in the Children of Lir story. His exoticism, though, bleached a little further with every shower of rain, and then a little further still.
‘He told us one day in religion class that a tribe in his country believed that every person got seven lives to live, each one better than the last because each time you got to repair the mistakes you had made the last time…’
She remembered it clearly, his use of that un-childlike word, ‘repair’. As if children had any business taking apart and mending their own lives.
‘Anyway, you kept going until your seventh life when you had fixed all your mistakes and then you lived forever in the perfect life that you created for yourself.’
A comforting idea, those seven lives. Sealing the application for her second postgrad, she had wondered if that was what she was trying to do, relive her college experience over and again. Her psychology degree, so glamorous and uplifting for the first two years, revealed itself in her final year to be a thing of nothing, its uselessness not improved by its kind intentions. ‘The preying fingers of hope hooking into the malformed of spirit,’ her then-boyfriend – himself an art-college dropout – told her, shaking his head at her naïveté. ‘Codology, the lot of it.’ His advice sent her to the departmental office with tears and an incomplete thesis and the prospect of repeating the year. He cost her a year of her life, to say nothing of the price of the particular shame he made her feel. The things he suggested she do to atone for the sheer bourgeois of her thinking.
If the seven-lives theory was true, no doubt she would be the one who left the biggest mistake until her last life and then had to live with it for always. She shook her head, jarring her ankle. Her mother had no time for self-pity. Even the merest hint of it met her sharp words. ‘To the homeless, Lucy, every meal is a picnic.’
The chance to live life over might be wonderful, yet how tiring the prospect of her mother in every lifetime.
* * *
Thirty-seven of the ninety-nine bottles were left on Lucy’s wall when Paul next woke. His voice seemed stronger, she told herself, although every sentence was followed by a raspy cough that Lucy found hard to listen to. She worked a summer in an old folks’ home, where there had been much talk of the final rattle. This wasn’t that. It couldn’t be.
It was the creepiest thing in the world to be caught in the dark by something she couldn’t see. Every now and then she tried to move her leg, but the fierce barks of pain given out by her ankle convinced her to abandon her efforts. She could move it, that was good. And the pain meant she wasn’t paralysed. Also good.
Her back ached and she shifted slightly against the seat.
‘Looks like we’re sitting tight another while, Paul,’ she said, but he was gone again. Kieran used to do that, doze off in the middle of a conversation or while they were watching TV. She didn’t mind, it was better than having him stare at her while she tried to concentrate on the storyline.
‘I prefer to watch your face,’ he said, when she asked crossly how he could follow anything at all. God help her, she found it attractive at the start. Beginnings were always the same, she walked in the rain with a smile, danced in queues.
‘You’re a pure fool,’ her mother told her more than once. ‘Any man could take you and you’d let him.’
She didn’t lick that off the stones, Mam, now did she?
She would do that newspaper interview, a whole series of them, perhaps. That would show her mother. It would show them all. Her so-called girlfriends, sitting in their couple-y judgement, telling her she needed direction in her life. The old classmates who never managed to make it out of the hole of Kilbrone but instead slung out interchangeable babies and sat at home in their tracksuits, night after night, with a baby on one nipple and a thickening ex-rugby-player husband demanding the other. With her face on the covers of magazines, who would be laughing then?
She reached out and stroked Paul’s hair. It was wet and matted, so she shifted to the dry side.
‘I always wanted a younger brother,’ she imagined saying. ‘My mother told me that she risked her figure once having me and who would be daft enough to chance it a second time.’ In the darkness, she tried on several smiles, eventually settling for wry. Or what felt like wry. It was hard to tell without a mirror.
James had a son doing his Leaving Cert next year. He didn’t talk about him much. A guilt gag, she had seen it before. Once he started paying the rent on her little flat, he could choose the conversations he didn’t want to have.
‘My family is none of your business,’ he told her.
It was hardly a crime to ask how his son was doing. It wasn’t like she ever mentioned his wife, although sometimes, when he came home with a little gift for her, she wondered if there was an identical package tucked away in the boot of his car. In a different colour maybe. James was blessed with neither conscience nor imagination.
It was hypocritical to snigger at those particular shortcomings when so many of her own decisions were driven by the desire to make herself into the very opposite of his wife.
‘She spends four hours in the hairdresser’s every two weeks and goes on about it like it’s a job,’ James told her the night they met. In Lucy’s experience, once the gloves came off, the clothes were no
t long behind them.
‘How boring!’ Lucy laughed, almost innocent. ‘I cut my own hair.’
‘It’s so sexy that you don’t care what you look like,’ he said, in the cubicle of the ladies’ toilets, pulling the neckline of her T-shirt roughly enough to ruin it. She pretended insouciance, turning the T-shirt back to front and leaving him panting after her.
She got her hair cut every six weeks, making sure he noticed when it got a little bit shaggy. Tina in the hairdresser’s was a friend and gave her the bag of hair clippings without asking any questions. That Tuesday evening she would wait in the bathroom for his key in the door, the hair carefully scattered into the sink and around the tops of her shoulders. Bare skin peeping out the top of her towel, the scissors in her hand.
‘I needed a trim,’ she would say, arching her neck this way and that as if making sure the sides were even. Men only ever saw what was directly in front of them.
Two weeks ago, in a burst of resolve, she gave up the lease on her flat and moved back to her mother’s house. Her independence only lasted as far as packing boxes, not heaving them down four flights of stairs. She phoned Kieran to help her to move and, sure enough, he was there nearly as soon as she hung up the phone. Since then it had been two weeks of casual coffees and other pretend-friend behaviour without any sign of interest from him. He had hardly moved on and, besides, there was no mention of anyone else. Incredible as it seemed, he was exercising restraint. Fucking typical of him to do the exact opposite of what she needed. Last night, she gave in and sought him out. He was unrecognisable from the back, his long hair all shorn away, and she had a moment’s hesitation.
‘You look like an egg with ears,’ she told him, with three-vodka cruelty, but she slept with him anyway, rubbing her hands over the fascination of his skull. She fell asleep afterwards, a dull and heavy sleep, before waking in the hot smother of his arms and creeping out to catch the early bus home.
A small cough broke her train of thought. ‘Paul?’ Her voice cracked. ‘Paul? Can you hear me?’
‘I don’t think he can hear you,’ a voice said from behind her.
Lucy screamed and nearly jumped herself free, cursing as her ankle roared stars across her eyes.
‘Sorry,’ she said when the pain subsided. ‘You gave me a fright. I didn’t know anyone else was… awake.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, it’s okay. It’s great. Are you all right? Can you move?’
‘My seat belt is stuck.’
Jesus, wonderful. Only about ten people in the whole country ever used the damn things on public buses and this girl had to be one of them.
She craned around to look over her shoulder. The girl was on the opposite side, at a lopsided angle, like a home-made Christmas decoration. Around her, metal twisted into long-armed shapes that might, in a different setting, be called modern art. Lucy opened her mouth to share her observation but closed it again. The artistic elements of their situation wouldn’t be something most people would appreciate.
‘I’m Lucy,’ she said, instead.
‘My name is Orla.’
Lucy had to concentrate to understand the girl, her voice was low and hoarse with a slight lisp, her s’s bouncing off the side of her tongue and sliding out the sides of her mouth, saliva pooling.
‘Where were you going on the bus?’ Lucy asked. The sound of voices – even those engaged in inane small talk – was better than nothing.
‘I’m going to meet Janet, my job coach.’
Not any more she wasn’t. ‘Your what?’
‘My job coach, she helps people to find jobs when they might have a hard time finding them themselves. She’ll talk to me about the kinds of things I like doing and see if there’s a job somewhere that has those things in it and then she’ll ask them if it would be okay for me to work there.’
‘Cool. Where did you work before?’
Anyone would think they were just two random people, sitting next to each other at the hairdresser’s or queueing for a flight.
‘I did some practising in Janet’s office in Lota,’ Orla said. ‘It was fun.’
‘Cool,’ Lucy said again. She couldn’t imagine there was much to enjoy about spending day after day in a special school. As a child, her mother threatened her with the place if she misbehaved or broke something or ran downstairs too loudly. ‘I’ll give you to Lota if you don’t behave yourself and you’ll have to spend your days there with the feeble-minded.’ Once, she drove her as far as the gate of the place and stopped the car. She got out and opened Lucy’s door. ‘In you go, if they’ll have you.’ Lucy had cried herself sick, vomiting her breakfast onto the grass verge at the side of the road.
‘I like organising things,’ Orla was still talking. ‘I’m good at it. Any office would be lucky to have me, Janet says.’
‘I’m sure they would.’
‘My sister said any office would be lucky to have me because they won’t have to pay me, but I think she was just joking. She says things sometimes that might sound mean but really they’re just jokes. My parents used to tell her not to, but then they decided it was okay for her to tease me as long as I know she doesn’t really mean it. She winks at me and that’s how I know she doesn’t think it really.’
‘Do you ever get to tease her back?’
‘Her hair stands up on her head when she wakes up,’ Orla’s voice was full of giggles. ‘She has to have a shower every morning before anyone sees her and finds out she’s a hedgehog.’
Lucy forced a laugh.
Had anyone’s life ever been as bizarre as hers? Surely this situation was well beyond the usual kind of strange, the my-first-cousin-took-your-sister-to-the-debs-how-mad-is-that benchmark of Irish stories. This right here was the kind of weird that won prizes.
‘I have to be careful who I tease her to. Mam says it’s not nice to tease someone in front of anybody who isn’t in our family. They might think we meant it. You don’t think I meant it, do you?’
Lucy shook her head. ‘You were very clear that you were only joking.’
In the silence, she heard the sound of dripping water. Was it getting faster or was that just her imagination? She searched around for words to soak up the fear.
‘What do you mean they won’t have to pay you? Surely if you’re working there they have to pay you?’
‘No. The government will pay me.’
Lucy caught the pride in Orla’s voice. ‘Goodness me! You will be important to them if the government are paying you!’ she said, but overdid the cheer and it fell flat and fake.
Orla said nothing. Had she noticed and decided to let it go? Imagine her pitying Lucy! Christ.
‘It’s great that you can take the bus by yourself,’ Lucy tried again.
‘I did my transport training three years ago,’ Orla said. ‘My parents told me that it was safer to sit on the side opposite the driver,’ she added.
Lucy laughed, stopping when it became clear that Orla didn’t intend it to be ironic.
‘Where are you going?’ Orla asked.
‘Nowhere.’
‘Oh.’ Orla’s voice was small. ‘You can say it’s private, if you want to.’
‘It’s private, then.’
Her mean streak had been having a field day lately. To her mother, she had to pretend a casualness she didn’t feel, claiming she enjoyed the impermanence of her work, that she could move on if she chose. It took a toll, all that fakery. She couldn’t understand how her mother didn’t see through it. As if anyone could legitimately believe there was anything to enjoy in running the same mind-numbing short-term memory experiments for students that she herself had done in her own undergrad. She left it too late, spent too long gathering qualifications, only to be overtaken by the recession. The best she could look forward to was being whored out to other departments whose own postgrads or postdocs had bigger plans than the daily grunt work of academia.
‘I’m sorry, Orla,’ she said. ‘I meant I wasn’t going anywhere in
particular, just back to my mother’s house.’
‘I want my mam and dad.’ Orla’s voice started to wobble.
‘Me too,’ Lucy said, surprising herself.
Her mother looked out for her, there was no denying it. All the sacrifices she made over the years, working two jobs, giving her daughter everything in the expectation that it might lead to a more comfortable life for the two of them. A cleaner in once a week, a fortnight in the sun every summer, it wasn’t much to ask.
‘Your hair is very short,’ Orla said, à propos of nothing. ‘I thought you might be a boy until you told me your name was Lucy.’
‘I don’t like it,’ Lucy told her, surprising herself again. ‘It used to be very long. I think I’d like it to be very long again.’ She would grow it right back down to her backside, she decided.
‘Why did you cut it all off?’
Because Kieran’s had been long too, almost the same shade as hers, she used to plait their hair together while they were sitting on her couch. That was before things turned creepy. Before he started walking her to work. Before he arrived at her desk every day with lunch, waiting outside the door to walk her home again. Before he started hiding her phone and house keys.
The day she left him, she cut her hair to the scalp, sending him her long plait in the post in a mad fit.
‘Take that for closure!’ she slurred in the pub, bashing her vodka glass against Caroline’s. She wasn’t Lucy’s first choice of drinking buddy, but she was the only person in between jobs and up for blowing off the day. She regretted sending it, of course, waking the following day to a mental picture of him sitting on the couch in the evenings, stroking her plait with one hand and himself with the other. How had she forgotten that closure was often only spite?
‘I suppose I just wanted a change,’ she said.
Orla touched the twisted stem of the bar in front of her, ‘It’s kind of pretty, don’t you think? Like in an art show.’
That was it, Lucy was going straight to hell. With only her prejudices for company. And her mother. She looked back at Orla. ‘We should rest for a while. Save our strength,’ she said.
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