Stir-Fry Read online

  EMMA

  DONOGHUE

  STIR-FRY

  Dedication

  This book is for Anne

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  1 PICKING

  2 MIXING

  3 DOUBLING

  4 CUTTING

  5 HEATING

  6 WAITING

  7 STIRRING

  8 SERVING

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  More Praise for STIR-FRY

  PRAISE FOR EMMA DONOGHUE

  ALSO BY EMMA DONOGHUE

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  PICKING

  “2 SEEK FLATMATE.” Two diamonds of masking tape held the card to the notice board. “OWN ROOM. Wow! NO BIGOTS.”

  It was all in red ink except the Wow!, which must have been scrawled on by a passerby. A thumb had smudged the top of the 2, giving it the shape of a swan with its beak held up to the wind. Maria leaned against the wall, getting out of the way of a passing stream of hockey players, and rummaged for a biro.

  She copied the ad onto the first page of her refill pad, which looked, she realised with a surge of irritation, as blank and virginal as the homework notebooks the nuns always sold on the first day back to school. She drew a jagged line below the number. Chances were the room would be filled by now, since the card’s top two corners were dog-eared. Still, it was worth a bash, better than anything else on offer. Maria wasn’t sure how many more weeks she could stand with the aunt and her footstools. Her eyes slid down the notice board. It was leprous with peeling paper, scraps offering everything from “Grinds In Anglo-Saxon By A Fluent Speaker” to “heavyduty bikelock for sale.” All the propositions in the accommodation section sounded equally sinister. “V. low rent” had to mean squalor, and “informal atmos.” hinted at blue mould in the bread bin.

  Returning her biro to her shirt pocket, Maria stood back against a pillar papered with flyers. She clasped her hands loosely over her refill pad, holding it against her belly. The corners of her mouth tilted up just a little, enough to give the impression that she was waiting for someone, she hoped, but not so much as to look inane. She hugged the refill pad tighter against her hips; it felt as comfortable as old armour. Her eyes stayed low, watching the crowd that had overflowed every bench and table in the Students’ Union.

  A knot of black-leather lads were kicking a coffee machine; she looked away at once, in case one of them might accost her with some witticism she would be unable to invent a retort for. Behind the layer of grit on the window, her eye caught a flat diamond of silver. The lake had looked so much bluer in the college prospectus. Her grip on the pad was too tight; she loosened her fingers and thought of being a pike. Steely and plump, nosing round the lake’s cache of oilcans, black branches, the odd dropped sandal mouldering to green. A great patient fish, waiting for summer to dip the first unsuspecting toe within an inch of her bite. Maria swallowed a smile.

  Bending her knees, she let herself down until she was sitting on the top step. Something tickled her on the side of the neck, and she jolted, but it was only a stray corner from one of the orange freshers’-ball posters. She read the details over her shoulder, noting that committee was missing a few consonants. Then she told herself not to be so damn negative on the first day and turned her face forward again. In the far corner, under a brown-spattered mural of Mother Ireland, she spotted a slight acquaintance from home. His corduroy knees were drawn up to his chin, an Ecology Society pamphlet barricading his face. No, she would not go and say hello, she was not that desperate.

  Trigonometry was a stuffy mousetrap on the fourth floor. She counted twenty-four heads and squeezed her leg an inch farther onto the back bench. The girl beside her seemed to be asleep, streaked hair hanging round her face like ivy; her padded hip was warm against Maria’s. When the tutor asked for their names, there was a sort of tremor along the bench, and the girl’s head swung up.

  Maria was reading the ad one more time; she could feel her mouth going limp with indecision. As the registration list was being passed around, she gave a tentative nudge to her neighbor and held up the refill pad at an angle. “Sorry, but would you have any idea what exactly the wee symbol stands for?”

  Salmon-pink fingernails covered a small yawn. “Just means women,” the girl murmured, “but they’d be fairly feministy, you know the sort.”

  Her glance was speculative, but Maria whispered “Many thanks” and bent her head. She was far from sure which sort she was meant to know the sort of. In the library at home she had found The Female Eunuch, a tattered copy with Nelly the Nutter’s observations scrawled in the margins. She had richly enjoyed it—especially the bits Nelly had done zigzags on with her crayon—but could not imagine flatmates who’d go around quoting it all day. Still, Maria reminded herself as the tutorial dragged to a close, it was not familiarity she had come here for. If Dublin was going to feel so odd—so windy, littered with crisp packets, never quiet—then the odder the better, really.

  It was five past twelve before she could slide round the cluster of elbows and out of the office. A knot of lecturers emerged from their tearoom behind her, their Anglophile accents filling the corridor. She hurried down the steps in search of a phone. Catching her reflection in a dusty staircase window, Maria paused to poke at the shoulder pads on her black jacket. Damn the things, they were meant to give an air of assurance, but they made her look humpbacked. She pushed back her fringe and gave her peaky chin an encouraging look.

  “Yoohoo, Maria!”

  She ignored that, because nobody knew her name.

  The shriek went higher. She peered under the handrail to find the streaky blonde from the tutorial waving from a huddle of trench coats. To reach them she had to weave between an abstract bronze and the Archaeology Club’s papier-mâché dolmen.

  “It is Maria, isn’t it?” The girl wore an enamel badge that read MATERIAL GIRL.

  “Yeah, only it’s a hard i,” she explained.

  The voice rolled past her. “Hard? Godawful. I’m dropping out of maths right away, life’s too short. I heard the trig man read out your name, and I thought, well she looks like she knows what he’s burbling on about, which is more than I do.”

  “I sort of like maths,” Maria said reluctantly.

  “Perv.” Her eyes were straying to a mark on the thigh of her pale rose trousers; she picked at it with one nail. “Personally I’m switching to philosophy, they say it’s a guaranteed honour.” She glanced up. “Oh, I’m Yvonne, did I say? Sorry, I should have said.”

  Maria let her face lift in the first grin of the day. Not wanting it to last a second too long, she looked away and mentioned that she needed a pay phone.

  “Over in the far corner, past the chaplaincy. Is it about that flat share?”

  “Well, probably.” Too defensive. “I haven’t really made up my mind.”

  “Personally,” Yvonne confided, “I wouldn’t trust anything advertised in that hole of a Students’ Union. A cousin of mine had a bad experience with a secondhand microwave oven.”

  Maria’s mouth twisted. “What did it do to her, exactly?”

  “I never got the full details,” Yvonne admitted. “Well, listen, if the Libbers don’t suit you, I have an uncle who’s leasing terribly nice flats, apartments really, just outside Dublin—”

  “Actually, I want something fairly low-budget,” Maria told her. “Got to make the money stretch.”

  Yvonne nodded, her hoop earrings bobbing. “God, I know, don’t talk to me, where does it go? I’m already up to my eyes in debt to Mum for my ball gown. How are we going to make it to Christmas, Maria, tell me that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Eh, hello, sorry, is that o
h three six nine four two?”

  “Far as I know.”

  “Oh. Well, it’s just about your ad.”

  “Me wha’?”

  “Wasn’t it you?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Your ad. Your ad on the notice board in the Students’ Union.”

  “I haven’t a notion what you’re talking about.”

  “But, sorry, but I saw it there just this morning.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Well it starts ‘two’ and then a sort of symbol thing—”

  “Hang on. Ruth? Ruth, turn off that bloody hair dryer. Listen, have you taken to advertising our services in the S.U.? What? No, I amn’t being thick. Oh, the flat, all right, well why didn’t you tell me? Yo, are you still there? Nobody tells me anything.”

  “It’s just I was hoping, maybe I could come and have a look, if it’s not too inconvenient? Unless you have someone already?”

  “For all I know she could have sublet the entire building to the Jehovah’s.”

  “Maybe I should ring back later.”

  “Ah, no, it’s grand. Why don’t you come over for eats?”

  “Tonight?”

  “Tomorrow we die.”

  “You what?”

  “Seize the day, for tomorrow we die. Sorry, just being pretentious. Make it eightish.”

  “Are you sure? That’d be wonderful. Bye so.”

  “Hang on, what’s your name? Just so we don’t invite some passing stranger in for dinner.”

  “Sorry It’s Maria.”

  “Well I’m Jael. By the way, was our address on the ad?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “I suppose I’d better give it to you, then, unless you’d prefer to use your imagination?”

  “Do I get the feeling you’re taking the piss out of me?”

  “You bet your bottom I am. OK, seriously, folks, it’s sixty-nine Beldam Square, the top flat. Get the number seven bus from college, and ask the conductor to let you off after the Little Sisters of the Poor. Right?”

  “I think so.”

  “Be hungry.”

  She loved the double-decker buses, every last lumbering dragon. One Christmas her Mam had brought the kids up to Dublin for a skite. Maria was only small, seven or so, but she dropped her mother’s hand halfway up the spiral steps of the bus and ran to the front seat. Sketching a giant wheel between her mittens, she steered round each corner, casting disdainful glances at cyclists who disappeared under the shadow of the bus as if the ground had gulped them down. As she revved up O’Connell Street the afternoon was darkening. When the bus stopped at Henry Street, she had to be prised away; she gave up her hand and followed her mother’s stubby heels into the crowd. Looking back over her shoulder, she saw the Christmas lights coming on all down the street, white bulbs filling each tree in turn and turning the sky navy blue. Maria tried asking her mother why the light made things darker, but by then they were on Moore Street, and her voice was lost in the yelps of wrappinpaypa fifatwenty.

  This was not the same route but a much quieter journey, or perhaps a decade had dulled her perceptions. The bus chugged round Georgian squares, past the absentminded windows of office blocks. Gone half seven, and not a soul abroad; only the occasional newsagent spilled its light at a corner. Maria got off at the right stop but, dreading to be early, walked back to the last shop and loitered among the magazines for twenty minutes. The girl behind the counter had a hollow cough that kept doubling her over on her high stool. As the time ticked away Maria began to feel so uncomfortable that she finally bought Her magazine and a bag of crisps.

  She was licking the salt off her fingers as she rounded the third corner of Beldam Square. Number 69 edged a narrow street; the digits were engraved on the fanlight. Maria knocked twice on the side door’s scuffed paintwork before discovering that it was on the latch. Inside, she fumbled for the switch; a light came on ten feet above her, round and pearly as the one in the dentist’s that she always focussed on during drilling. Halfway up the first flight of carpeted stairs, she remembered the glossy under her arm. She unrolled it and scanned the slippery cover. “Boss Giving You Grief?” That was fine, and not even the most fervid feminist could object to “Living with Breast Cancer.” She had her doubts about “Why Nice Men Aren’t Sexy,” and when her eye caught “Ten Weeks to Trim Those Bulges for Christmas!” she rolled up the magazine and left it at the base of the stairs. She could collect it on her way out. She might not even like them.

  Between two steps Maria found herself in darkness. Damn light must be on a timer. At arm’s length she reached the bannister; it was a cool snake of wood drawing her hand upward. Not a whiff of lentils, she thought, as she was guided round a bend and up another flight of stairs. How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb? One to screw in the bulb, one to stir the lentil casserole, and one to object to the use of the word screw. Her obnoxious little brother it was who’d told her that, when she was complaining about something sexist on the telly one evening. She’d got him for it with a dishcloth later.

  Grey light knifed the top steps. The clean, unvarnished door hung several inches open; Maria watched it shift a little in the draught. She buttoned up her jacket, then undid it again. The savor of garlic was tantalising. Her first tap made almost no sound; she summoned her nerve and thumped on the wood.

  “Hi, hang on, dinner’s burning,” came a yelp. A long pause. “I mean, you can come on in.”

  Maria was standing in the shadowy hall, fingering half a peanut at the bottom of her jeans pocket, when the woman elbowed through a bead curtain. Stuffing wisps of hair into her black cap, she smiled, warm as toast. “I’m Ruth, the other one.” She brushed the beads out of the way and guided Maria in. Clearing a place on the tartan blanket that draped the sofa, she murmured, “Just hang on there while I have a serious conversation with the stir-fry. Oh, goddess, what a mess.”

  Maria cleared her throat. “It’s not that bad,” she commented, fitting herself on the sofa between a dictionary and a small box of blackberries.

  “See, I meant to come home early and tidy up so as I could play the suave hostess, but I was queueing for the library photocopier and my watch stopped, so anyway, I’m just in.” Ruth turned back to the wok and gave it a shake that made the hob clang. “And this cursed onion keeps sticking to my nonstick surface.”

  Maria watched her swerve between the stove and the table, carrying wine glasses and earthenware plates. Ruth’s narrow face, framed in brief dark curls, swung round the kitchen. From the sink she pulled a heap of wet branches, stood them in an empty milk bottle, and placed it grandly in the center of the table. Maria’s eyes waited for a drip from the rusty tip of a leaf to fall onto the wood.

  Ruth subsided onto the sofa. Her eyes rested on her oversized black watch, then lifted; they were wary and chocolate-brown. “Typical, I bust a gut getting everything ready for ten past, and her ladyship isn’t home yet.”

  “I was meaning to ask, is it spelt with a Y?”

  “Is what?”

  “Her name. As in Yale lock.”

  “No no, it’s a J. Jael from the Book of Judges. In the Bible, you know? Sorry, I shouldn’t assume. Anyway, this Jael killed an enemy general by hammering a tent peg into his brain, if I remember rightly.”

  “Oh.” After a pause, Maria tried raising her voice again. “And she’s at college too?”

  Ruth let her breath out in a yawn before answering. “In a long-term sense, yes, but right now she’s probably moseying round town buying purple socks and drinking cappuccinos.” She leaned back into the cushions and rolled her head from side to side.

  “She does that often?”

  “Every few weeks. Only sometimes shoelaces rather than socks. It’s her hormones, you know.”

  They were beginning to giggle when the front door banged open and feet clumped down the passage.

  Ruth’s narrow face opened. “Jaelo,” she sang. “Come here and entertain our gu
est.”

  A pause, and then a pale, freckled face broke through the beads. She was very tall, with very ostentatious ruddy hair. An unsettling laugh as she tossed her plastic bags onto the sofa, just missing the blackberries. “Hello there, new person, I’d forgotten all about you. It’s Maria, right?”

  “Yeah, but with a hard i—Mar-iy-a,” she explained. “But it doesn’t really matter, everyone tends to pronounce it wrong anyway.” God, how seventeen.

  “Did you deliberately pick it to rhyme with pariah?” asked Jael, her chair scraping the bare board floor.

  “Eh, no, actually.” Go on, don’t cop out. “What does it mean?”

  Struggling with a bootlace, Jael paused, one foot in the air. “D’you know, I couldn’t tell you. Some sort of deviant. It’s one of those words you throw around all your life until someone asks you what it means and you realise you’ve been talking through your rectum.”

  Maria cleared her throat.

  “Outcast,” murmured Ruth as she carried the wok to the table, her face averted from the steam. “Pariah is the lowest of the Indian castes.”

  “And knowall is the second lowest.” Jael slid her hand into the crocodile oven glove and lunged at Ruth, who dipped out of the way.

  The nearest seat was taken by a red-socked foot. “Sorry, Maria, my size tens need a throne of their own. Sit up there at the head of the table,” commanded Jael. “Only don’t lean back too far, or the chair might collapse.”

  Maria slid onto the chair and accepted a smoking plateful. She tackled a mushroom.

  “Don’t mind the woman,” said Ruth, unrolling her denim sleeves and passing the basket of garlic bread. “She broke it herself last summer; we had a few people in for dinner, and she got carried away in the middle of an impromptu guitar recital.”

  “All my guitar recitals are impromptu,” said Jael in a depressed tone. She wrenched the corkscrew from the wine bottle gripped between her knees and bent toward Maria.

  Automatically Maria covered the glass. “None for me, thanks.”