“That’s OK,” he says. “No one’s asked me about it in a really long time.”
“How old was she?” Brigid says.
“Thirty-six.”
“Shit,” says Brigid.
“Yeah.”
Aideen and Brigid exchange a look.
“Was it just you two?” says Brigid.
Now Sean’s eyes close. He nods.
For a girl who secretly believes she’s good with words, Aideen cannot think of a single one to express what she would like to. There isn’t one. Summoning her courage, she reaches across and pats Sean’s shoulder. Awkward, a bit cringey. But then Sean grabs onto her hand. Even though Brigid is sitting with them, beginning to bang on about some debs blowout in town and how someone is supposedly bringing good hash, it’s as if she isn’t there at all.
22
Toweling off, Kevin studies the slick coffin-shaped hotel tub and in his mind puts Rose Byrd in it. There she is, basking amid suds in a bikini, tropically patterned, an island conch coyly covering each breast. Why tropical? He has no clue; it’s always thus, in the same way that Grace’s fantasies, when she used to divulge them to their mutual hilarity, invariably starred a hulking hotel porter with a country accent in a woolen cap.
But back to Rose, who’s untying her scant top, which, despite the ridged shells, does not clack to the floor, but merely floats away. Kevin, too, would like to merely float away. She begins to soap her breasts, simultaneously starting with tantalizing circles around the soft, broad outlines and speeding up as her fingers near each vortex. She’s moaning when his mobile begins to bleat from its spot on the slate tiles (within reach, in case his would-be mistress or, indeed, wife should call). MOTHER flashes up. And again. And again.
Kevin rejects the third call from her today. Maybe now she’ll actually leave a message, though she’s suspicious of voice mail as a rule, the mad old bird. And when she does bother to say anything, it’s enough to give him a sore head. “Kevin, I’ve lost my reading glasses and my mind, oh, and the clicker and where are my car keys? I need to get to the salon and drive everyone there stark ravers.” Or, “Kevin, would you ever pick up a spot of milk for me? And I suspect the gardener’s gone off with another crate of my fruit because the trees are looking rather bare.”
He dresses and then stretches out on the impeccable bed with its grand views, watches as his fellow Dubliners cross the Liffey over the Ha’penny Bridge with an enviable sense of purpose. What, pray tell, is his purpose? To shag his daughter’s school secretary in a hotel frequented by rich foreigners?
Rose is nearly an hour late. He turns on the TV—every channel pure shite—and downs two bottles of minibar beer in rapid succession, checking his phone incessantly. He drafts and deletes and drafts a message to her, which he finally sends: Here. As in, coolly, he hopes, I’m here, will you be too? When no response is forthcoming, he analyzes whether she got held up or if she’s a no-show, considers his next move, rejects a second text message on the grounds that it would appear either self-emasculating (is that a thing?) or stalker-y. Can he not see this for what it is? A chance to opt out, to drag his selfish, potentially family-wrecking arse out of this pompous hotel which, to add more fuel to the fire that is his current reign at the top of the shitlist, is incurring yet more credit card debt, unbeknownst to his family.
And then, a knock.
Kevin notes, with some satisfaction, that the raps gain in volume and number: Rose Byrd wants in. He goes to the door, eyes her through the peephole in distorted close-up. And yet pretty still. My God, he thinks.
Kevin cracks the door a hair. “Can I help you?”
“Hiya, sorry!” Rose giggles and shifts her face to fill the space between them. “Oh no, have you been here long?”
“I was just leaving.”
“Oh no you weren’t.”
She leverages a foot inside the door and pushes past him, spilling into the room, footing wobbly, eyes glazed, laden with a large canvas bag from which looms a bottle of something. Her sense of balance deserts her and she turns and pitches forward again, blasting a wave of hot, beery fumes at his face, and then rights herself.
Kevin barely knows Rose Byrd sober, let alone trolleyed.
“Nice room,” she says. Before he can respond, her mouth is on his. It’s a surprisingly unaggressive kiss, given her boozy entrance, and it’s this sense of her withholding that soothes his bruised feelings, as if she’s trying to show him that she’s got more and better tricks up her sleeve. He relaxes, kisses her back. Kevin is standing in a hotel room getting off with a woman who is not his wife—a moment both natural and totally alien. Soon, he begins to free her blouse from its viselike clutch beneath very tight, very skinny jeans, and his hands are climbing the velvet length of her back.
Moments later, Rose releases him with a gasp. Kevin opens his eyes and she flashes him a sort of smug smile and then burps, not demurely, and squeezes her legs together.
“Dying for a piss.”
She weaves toward the toilet, leaving the bathroom door open so that he’s privy to the sound of a fierce, gushing stream of urine. Sexy.
“Check out this fucking bathtub!” she yells. “Are there jets in here?” He hears water—has she turned on the taps?
Kevin ought to snap up his wallet and walk directly through the door, leave this soused woman-child to pass out alone on the stiffly made bed, go home before irreversible damage occurs, dismiss this all as an embarrassing midlife episode, the turning point when he saved his marriage.
Rose clomps back into the room, fumbling with the midsection buttons on her blouse. Kevin glimpses a tantalizing flash of coral lace. He is so weak.
“Look,” he says. “Are you alright?”
“Bloddy bloddy blah.” She kicks off two tan suede ankle boots adorned with complicated steel hardware; the second one clips Kevin’s shin painfully.
“Oh wait! I brought champagne!” she announces. “Where’d I put my bag?”
“Rose.” He’s speaking in the firm, paternal tone reserved for his children’s bygone meltdowns, when they were near to foaming at the mouth invariably brought on by exhaustion or hunger. “Look, maybe we should do this another time. You’re a bit pissed.”
“No I’m not,” she cries, spraying the air.
“I’d hate for you to wake up tomorrow morning and have no recollection of how ridiculously virile I was.”
“I like virile.”
He’s nearly wincing with the pain of giving this up.
“And despite the fact that I find you…” Kevin pauses, embarrassed. He’s been text messaging this woman saucy one-liners for the past two weeks, but here in the flesh he feels far too chicken to verbalize anything of substance to her. “I find you deeply attractive.” He swallows and thinks: wallet, door, home. “I find myself thinking about you. Frequently.” He stands up. “That said, I think we’d better call it a night.”
“Fuck that.” Rose swoops in on him. His little speech seems to have had the opposite effect: it’s made her keener. Weak and vile man! Despite his inner protestations, he can’t resist what is happening. It all seems already to be in motion. A gorgeous creature is pushing him onto a sleek king-sized bed, very nonmarital, very Hollywood, and she’s quickly astride him. After some doing, she manages to remove her blouse, and then, strip-show style, lassoes it round her pointer finger high in the air, rotating it a good four or five loops before finally launching it across the room where it whacks a standing lampshade. They both crack up.
“Are you sure this is what—”
“Ssssh,” she says, attempting to rest a finger on his lips, but it jabs his left nostril instead. “Too much yackety yack.”
She motions for him to put his head back down on the pillow. Rose Byrd is reaching for Kevin’s belt, Kevin’s belt.
“Chill,” she says, “relax, you.” And so he does. He chills. Now she starts to tug down his trousers but with difficulty, so Kevin helps by wiggling out of them. Pantless and prone, he
experiences the miracle that is Rose lowering his boxers.
She is poised to take him in her hot, clammy, drunken clutches. She bends toward him so that her lovely face hovers just above his crotch, which has Kevin ready to fire away. He tries to calm himself, closes his eyes, empties his mind.
Suddenly, she jolts away with a muffled “Agh,” a genuine yelp of horror, as if she’s just seen a swarm of maggots wiggling through the dregs of a stinking bin of rubbish.
“What?” He lifts his head. “What is it?”
“Oh my God.” She jerks, sitting back on her haunches.
Flooded with a barrage of nasty possibilities, the prime one being, Will this woman vomit on my penis? Kevin sits up.
“Are you going to be sick?”
“Fucking hell!” She peers down into his pelvis and tosses off a reckless laugh. “Oh my God! Did you know you’ve got gray pubes?”
She throws her head back into peals of girlish giggling, every last one a cruel cackle to haunt him all his days. Speechless, he snatches at the bedsheet and prudely covers his apparently decrepit bits.
“No, no, don’t be like that,” she slurs, yanking the sheet from his body. “I’m sorry… No, no, no, lie back, lie back. It’s kind of cute. I don’t mind.” She tries to climb atop him once more.
Kevin, unable to meet her eyes, able only to feel utterly ridiculous, looks away. A digital clock on the bedside reads 9:48. He has time still, plenty of it—two hours before the child-minder will start hounding him. His gaze shifts to the wiry magenta bra which Rose had ripped off, only a few hot moments ago, in lusty haste. Beneath the spotlight of the bedside lamp, a tag reads “Dunnes Stores.”
Where his daughters get these things. And his wife.
Kevin tries to call up the details of Aideen and Grace’s recent Dunnes debacle. Grace had inadvertently embarrassed Aideen in the changing room, something to do with a store assistant. He remembers that Grace had come home upset, that an outing meant for fun had soured.
“Shit,” he says and extricates himself from the warm tangle of Rose Byrd under the bedclothes. “I’ve got to go.”
23
Though rampant, secrets are strongly discouraged by Fair House staff, and so suspicion and a good old-fashioned aversion to privacy filters through every slice of life here. The girls, for example, can’t lock up possessions in their cupboards or drawers despite the fact that some of the sixth-years are eighteen years of age and could (and do) enter a public house and get arseways legally. Should one misplace one’s mobile and need to ring home and complain bitterly about being here again, as Aideen tends to do on a Sunday an hour or so after getting dropped off and forced to say goodbye to her parents and siblings, this weekly mournful orphan ritual, it must be done with clumps of similarly whingy boarders eavesdropping in the queue behind her. Case in point: at this very moment, in the second-floor bathroom of Fair House, Aideen sits, though it’s going on two in the morning, beneath lights that are burning, ostensibly for those in need of a toilet or drink of water, but, really, Aideen knows, to ensure all is illuminated.
But, Janey Mac, the secret half hour she’s just spent! Certainly no one could tell that Big Things have transpired from the look of her. Her body betrays no evidence of her first deep-dive into romantic fumblings other than a flushed, slightly stinging face. But her heart? A different story altogether.
Aideen perches, feet tucked beneath her, on a toilet in the third of five stalls, staring at the cheap translucent paper they’re meant to wipe their bums with. She mentally rehearses her story a final time and pushes down on the flush lever. Almost immediately she hears the expected, Pavlovian footsteps, like a football hooligan instantly parched at the pop and slow fizz of a cracked-open can of Carlsberg. Aideen unlatches the stall door and, sure enough, there’s Bleekland sporting a surprisingly plush aquamarine robe knotted fiercely at the front with a matching belt, a veritable field hockey ref in starting position, legs spread mannishly, feet rooted to the bleached floor tiles, a sour scowl marching across her pinched gray mug.
“Where have you been?”
Even considering the potential trouble she’s in, Aideen finds it difficult to take Bleekland seriously once her eyes fix upon the woman’s yellow flokati duck slippers, furry-billed, with black-and-white plastic eyeballs that stare crossways at the floor. She resists a powerful gurgle of laughter.
“Sorry?” says Aideen, widening her eyes and then scrunching her nose up as if to say, How bewildering!
“We’ve been looking for you,” hisses the old shrew. “Where have you been?”
“I didn’t realize…”
Aideen allows this perplexed fragment to trail away, as if she’s just receiving the intel, as if she hasn’t heard Bleekland dragging her poxy log-leg round the second floor, opening and closing every dorm room door, a soldier rooting out enemy barracks. “I’ve been here sitting on the toilet.” She coughs and then, with a downward gaze, goes in for the kill. “I’ve got my period.”
Bleekland blanches. Like most of the Fair House girls, Aideen knows very well that any vaginal reference, however oblique, is guaranteed to put off the craggy septuagenarian, who possibly has never herself acknowledged being in possession of a sexual organ.
“I checked this room,” says Bleekland, bitter irritation clear in the rise and fall of her words. But Aideen detects relief: Bleekland had actually thought she’d disappeared. Just at this moment, Nurse Flynn scampers in, heading directly toward them opposite the tidy row of identical sinks where six girls at a time brush and scrub and rinse daily. Flynn’s unable to suppress an evil little grin that spills across her wan pancake face. She is the dum to Bleekland’s Tweedledee. On boring prep nights when Aideen’s finished her schoolwork and read through her secret stash of pop music ’zines, Flynn sometimes serves as a handy muse.
There once was a sadist from Bray
Who hounded the Fair girls all day
Phony caring career
Put you out on your ear
Nurse Flynn clearly never got play!
“There you are!” The second-in-command, clad, predictably, in dishwater-hued, gender-neutral pajamas, narrows amphibian eyes at Aideen. “Where have you been? We nearly phoned the guards.”
“I’ve found her, Nurse Flynn. Thank you. You may go back to bed.”
“But where did you—”
“I’m sorry to have woken you,” says Bleekland, unapologetically. “Good night.”
Would they really have called the coppers? Aideen exhales quietly, the heat of accusation momentarily cooled from her, and relives the moment—twenty minutes ago yet already taking on a surreal, legendary status—when Sean had said, “You’re really pretty.” Though she may well get expelled, especially following just after the vodka and beer incident, Aideen’s mouth threatens to turn upward into a massive shit-eating grin.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I felt really sick but I didn’t want to wake you.”
“You should have.”
“I had no tablets so I looked—”
“What kind of tablets?”
“Just Anadin.”
“There are NO tablets allowed of any kind in Fair House!”
“I had a really heavy flow and terrible cramping… So I came back in here—”
“Go to bed at once.” Bleekland barks, eyeballing her skeptically, not nearly as convinced as Aideen would like.
“I’m sorry,” Aideen says again in a meek voice, with an obsequious, hangdog shrug.
“Next time you don’t feel well,” Bleekland says, glaring at her before Aideen shuffles down the hallway, one hand cradling her tummy, milking it, “come to my room. Students do not self-medicate. Students do not ramble through the corridors after lights-out.”
What had woken Bleekland up in the first place? She couldn’t possibly have heard Sean and herself in the supply closet or Aideen’s life would have just become an absolute shitstorm. Must’ve been Bleekland happened to snort awake and did a check and spot
ted Aideen’s empty bed. She curses her own stupidity. In her excitement and haste, she’d forgotten to plant a pillow beneath her duvet.
Aideen slips back into bed, and after sifting through the various probabilities and scenarios, becomes satisfied she’s in the clear. How, she wonders, can a few moments be so life-altering? She’s now a girl who, like only two or three of her dormmates willing to admit it, has been felt up. Is she now a girl with a boyfriend?
Over a series of days-long, flirtatious, momentum-building text messages, Sean and Aideen had hashed out the particulars: time (midnight), what to do if he was caught inside the building with her (say he was her cousin), what to do if he was caught on the green (act deranged and flee). As always, Aideen felt freer, smarter, and funnier in writing than in person. Typing, she could quip cleverly in a way that didn’t come naturally in conversation; with premeditation, she was herself.
They’d planned the visit, dubbed Operation Midnight, down to him chucking pebbles at her window, without considering that it was a pebble-less campus. Sean was forced, in the end, to hurl up his heavy silver key-ring that says “Billabong” on it. Alas, midnight came and went with no ping on glass. Aideen had lain rigid, straining to hear anything, but all was still. Later, after she’d nodded off into a wet puddle of spit on her pillowcase, a clank awoke her, but it sounded more distant than it should have, and Aideen groggily realized Sean was targeting her dormmate Caroline’s window. Caroline was a high-strung girl given to gaspy, asthmatic outbursts and hypochondria, especially on P.E. days, but she was also the soundest sleeper in 2A; Aideen was in the clear.
With thundering heart—a nighttime visit surely raises the bar of Sean’s expectations—Aideen had stood on her bed and looked down. She waved shyly at Sean Gilmore in his shitkickers, shivering in leather, cupping his hands together and blowing into them. She pointed to the double doors. Aideen whisked stealthily through the corridors and down two staircases in her flimsy bedclothes. She’d chosen a plain T-shirt and stripy pajama bottoms and then debated about whether to wear a bra. She didn’t need one, of course, she never really did, but he might think her a slapper without one. Then again, would he deem it strange for a girl to have a bra on at bedtime? And would he even find out? (In the end, she’d opted for one, preferring him to think her quirky over slutty.)
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