Stir-Fry Page 7

  He looked young in the morning light. “Our tour guide couldn’t have been described as a New Man. Did you catch his little jest about the hygiene habits of Viking women?”

  “What got to me was the way he kept calling ‘Step this way—but mind the step, ladies!’”

  Maria found a tiny café, the only door open on the street. “Hey, I didn’t tell you,” she said over the menu, “I’ve got a job at last. Office cleaning, at night.”

  “Go for it,” said Galway. “I was a chambermaid in Boston the summer before last. It gives you lots of dream time.”

  “I’m glad you approve. Everyone else says why don’t I do waitressing instead.”

  “I’d rather sell sweat than smiles,” he told her.

  “Me too.” Maria was always convinced by epigrams. “It’s not the sweat I mind, though, it’s the stink of window-cleaning fluid.”

  “Soon get used to it. Who are you working with?”

  “A woman called Maggie. She has a lavender overall and flat grey curls and never speaks.”

  “You’ll get some peace and quiet, then.”

  “Oh, stop it. You could get a Ph.D. in looking on the bright side.”

  The grey steps of the administration building were littered with several dozen bodies and three banners. “Rubbers for Revolution,” she read, and one long sagging one that included the letters “HIV” and something that looked like “Cabbage” but couldn’t be. Maria dawdled at the edge of the gravel till she spotted Galway’s arm waving in a leisurely fashion. She waved back but walked on; it was too bright a day to sit on concrete in the shade. Of course the college should install a condom machine, but somehow she couldn’t work up the energy to demonstrate for a product she had never even seen out of its packet. As she strolled toward the main gate, she heard rising from the crowd a slow clap and several chants, including an irreverent “Johnny, I hardly knew you.”

  Maria got off the bus a stop early, to soak up the yellow sunlight. She considered her new boots with satisfaction: slightly imperfect matte-brown Doc Martens, £15.99 from the stall that shifty-looking guy ran in the arcade she discovered last Saturday. Now she could pass for a real student. Their broad toes scuffled through gutterfuls of sharp leaves.

  The door at the top of the stairs was swaying open, so she strolled in and glanced through the bead curtain.

  It wasn’t her fault; she was in no sense spying. She couldn’t help but see the shape they made. Her eyes tried to untangle its elements. Ruth, cross-legged on the table, her back curved like a comma, and Jael, leaning into it, kissing her. There was no wild passion; that might have shaken her less. Just the slow bartering of lips on the rickety table where Ruth chopped garlic every night.

  Maria clamped her eyes shut, as if they had not already soaked in the scene as blotting paper swallowed ink. When she raised the lids, the women had not moved. The kiss, their joint body, the table, all seemed to belong to a parallel world. She had the impression that no noise from behind this shifting skin of beads could reach them.

  She doubled back to the door, making her brash boots land as softly as slippers. A count of ten, she gave them, as she leaned against the door frame. How long could a kiss last? Five more seconds. It occurred to her that they had no reason to stop. Nineteen hippopotamus, twenty hippopotamus … Perhaps they would go on all afternoon. The windows would darken around them, their faces would become silhouettes, the dinner would stay on the chopping board, and all this time Maria would be standing in the front doorway.

  “I’m home, folks,” she yelled, loud and cheery as Doris Day. They behaved perfectly too, strolling out of the kitchen with armfuls of library books as if they had been rehearsing this little scene all their lives. Which, now she came to think of it, they probably had.

  Five hours later was the earliest she could go to bed without having them worry that she was ill. She kept yawning heartily and explaining how her new job really took it out of her, what with the industrial vacuum cleaners and all.

  At last she was under the covers, soft candlewick bunched in her fist. She concentrated on blacking out the tableau that was still flickering on the screen of her mind. What bothered her was that there was no distance. The topic had come up before, of course. Girls joked about it all the time in convent school; there’d even been rumours about the gym teacher. At parties they swapped Freudian theories, and Nuala had once claimed to have seen a French film with two women in bed in it. But it was never real. Now suddenly here were two friends of hers kissing on the table she ate at every night. Rapt faces and library books and garlic, how bizarre.

  Almost a month, Maria thought. Four entire weeks, and she hadn’t copped on, not even after overhearing that first conversation. Nearly thirty days of conversations, blown kisses, suppers, private jokes. The quilt was heavy on her eyelids, blotting out the light. What ludicrous naivete, even for seventeen. How could she not have known? And then, embarrassment swinging to anger, the question reversed: How the hell was she meant to know?

  3

  DOUBLING

  Waking, Maria felt weighed down, as if something was crouching on her rib cage. She lay still for a few seconds until it rushed back into her head: the table, the kiss, the lot. She stretched up to tug the curtain a few inches open, letting an arm of light slide across the bedspread. Daylight made things more manageable.

  Certain phrases soothed her, she found, as she lay there trying to formulate a policy. Consenting adults, that was a steadying one, along with nobody’s business but their own. Different strokes, she thought, then rejected it as too vivid an image. What was the phrase the Northerner came up with at the women’s group? Mutual acceptance, that was it. She would accept them and they would accept her and not flaunt it in her face or push it down her throat.

  Maria halted the words flooding through her head. That wasn’t what she meant. All she wanted was not to be afraid and embarrassed in her own flat. Flaunting, pushing, that made it sound like a stick. But she didn’t know how else to visualise it. An open-winged hawk, a double cherry, a two-way mirror? A kiss on a kitchen table, that was all she had to go on. Somewhere between private and public, terrible and tender. Maria sat up and pulled the curtain fully open. She leaned back, letting the cold wallpaper startle her skin awake.

  By the time she emerged, Ruth and Jael had almost finished breakfast. Under her plate she found a saccharine letter from her school about the graduation ball. Automatically she slid it over to Ruth and poured the last drips of milk over her granola. She couldn’t be the first to speak; her voice might shake.

  Jael was reading over Ruth’s shoulder; “If I were you,” she commented, “I’d find myself a man pronto. Take one spotty Homo sapiens, insert him in a wing collar, proceed to your grad, and get yourself laid.”

  Maria’s tongue prised a bit of hazelnut out of a back tooth. She was inclined to make a feminist virtue of financial necessity and just not go. As for stage two of the operation, the laying, that struck her as even less attractive, though probably cheaper. “I’m not sure how much I want to spend a night doing The Birdy Song’ with a hundred schoolmates in pink taffeta,” she said. “I know a girl who worked in a bingo hall all summer to pay for her dress, but I couldn’t be fashed. Did you go to yours?” she asked Jael.

  The eyes crinkled with nostalgia. “Peering back through the mists of time—when was it, late seventies?—I seem to recall that I brought the first friend’s brother who was willing to pay his half of the ticket, and the creep got inflamed by vodka and tried to rape me in the lobby of the Shelbourne Hotel.” She dropped yet another sugar into her coffee, then added, “I must admit I was tempted. There was damn all else going on. It was really his getup that turned me off; I can say to my credit I’ve never laid a guy in a bow tie.”

  Maria’s mind lurched. She bent her head and focussed on her tumbler of apple juice. “What about you?” she asked Ruth after a minute, in case they noticed her silence.

  “Didn’t go, didn’t see the point
.”

  Jael beamed. “Now that is the essential difference between us. Ruth Johnson is a hundred percent Ideologically Sound.”

  Ruth turned from a sink full of mugs to throw a hazelnut at her. Her—what was the right word—friend, girlfriend, lover? She missed.

  I’M FELICITY, TRY ME was hung alongside SEAN L. FOR CLASS REP, HE’S FULL OF PEP, and below them sagged MARYLOU TENNANT, THE CLASS REP WHO’LL GIVE YOU WHAT YOU WANT. Maria scanned the ten-foot banners of computer paper taped to the steep brick walls of the lecture theatre. She decided against voting for any of the candidates. Only eleven o’clock, and already the day felt old. Keeping the mind on small things, that was the knack. Not to fret, not to make any sudden decisions, not to think too much. She distracted herself by scanning the packed lecture theatre, row by row, for Damien’s silhouette. In the far corner her eye found him, under the grimiest patch of wall. He had his head back like a dead bull; perhaps he was asleep. Much the best thing to do. Face on her arms, Maria slumped across the desk.

  The professor’s drone hovered above the hum of the crowd. “I hope I made it sufficiently clear in my last lecture that the really essential point you must grasp is the significance of the rediscovery of oil paint and the resultant potential in terms of color intensity—”

  A nudge jolted her awake. “What?” she spat.

  “And a good morning to you, sunshine.”

  “Sorry.” Maria hoisted herself onto her elbows. Yvonne had either been crying or was wearing startlingly pink eye shadow.

  “What’s up?”

  No, Maria assured her, she was not hung over, nor having her period, nor in love. Her finger traced the generations of graffiti carved on the desk. Famous names of rock, sharp-petaled flowers, the odd swastika drawn the wrong way round. Then the words slipped out past her tongue. “I got a bit of a surprise.”

  “A nice surprise or a nasty surprise?” asked Yvonne, in what she clearly thought of as her tactful tone.

  “Oh, for god’s sake, you sound like an Enid Blyton book. Just a surprise, all right?”

  “About what?” She was beyond tact now, her eyes bright with curiosity.

  Damn it, why had she said a word? Just below her pad was a deeply scored heart, bigger and sharper on the left side; she traced it with her pencil. Taking a heavy breath, she decided to get the whole thing over with. “About my flatmates going out together.”

  A brief pause. Then a tentative “Going out where?”

  Maria kept her face blank.

  “Oh, good jesus.” Yvonne’s voice went spiralling up to the top of the lecture theatre, and several bored faces turned to stare. “You’re telling me they’re lesbians? Both of them?”

  “Will you shut the fuck up?” snarled Maria under her breath. “No need to tell the whole of first arts.”

  The professor peered up in their direction, then resumed his monologue. Yvonne leaned over toward Maria’s ear. “You poor creature,” she whispered, “you must have been so embarrassed when they told you. How did they bring it up—which of them actually said it?”

  Engrossed by the carvings on the desk, she stumbled over the syllables. “They didn’t have to tell me in so many words, you know, it just sort of became clear.”

  Yvonne nodded. “Of course, you’re pretty perceptive, you’d be quick to pick up the clues. Body language. Had you noticed anything, like, revealing before?”

  “They’re perfectly normal people otherwise.” Maria looked up suspiciously. “And you’re not to spread it round campus.”

  “I wouldn’t.” Yvonne’s voice was hurt. “I can just imagine how I’d feel if a rumor went round college about me—I’d be sure everyone was staring. I won’t even tell Pete, I promise.”

  “Thanks.”

  Yvonne sat back, dazed. Maria began to hear what the professor was saying. She supposed she should be taking notes. A quick glance across the theatre showed her that Damien had gone, sloped off during Yvonne’s little fit, no doubt.

  “I just hope no one jumps to the wrong conclusions about you, Maria.”

  “Sorry?”

  Yvonne had got her breath back. “Just because you live with them, I mean. Not that anyone would be likely to, since you’ve got hair down to your shoulders and you often wear skirts. Well, fairly often.”

  Maria rested her forehead on the heel of her hand. “Look, they’re both very nice. And they wear skirts sometimes too.”

  “Oh, I know,” said Yvonne wisely, “but they’d have to, wouldn’t they, as cover?”

  Trailing out of the library with the last studious finalists that evening, Maria found herself unwilling to go home. She wandered round the arts block, looking at dog-eared posters for hot-whisky evenings and medieval farces she had missed. The sculptures in the courtyard were so different by night; they lost all their comic twists and darkened to look like standing stones. She stood with her fingers and nose against the icy glass.

  Maybe Yvonne was right; it was hardly what you’d call normal to be sharing a flat with—how would the nuns have put it, if they ever had to?—two active homosexuals. One of them being either bisexual, having implied at breakfast that she liked to lay guys without bow ties, or a convincing liar. The other being the kind of woman Maria would have liked to bring home to her mother. Both being mortal sinners, according to one rule book, and pitiable case histories, according to another. She turned from the window, rubbing the cold pads of her fingers against her jeans.

  Could it all have been a hallucination? Or a joke—could they have heard her coming up the stairs and started kissing just to shock her? No, she thought, summoning up the image. And no chance of it being the first time, either; those lips were used to each other. So she could stop codding herself and get on with prising open her mind to fit this knowledge.

  Maria scanned a notice on the Hockey Club bulletin board, but the words slid by without meaning. She had nothing against her flatmates, she thought; they lit up the rooms and made them ring with laughter. But the fact remained that she didn’t know what to do or be with them. Anger bubbled up in her stomach. It was a bit much that they hadn’t warned her before she moved in. Unless—of course, that wretched ad, it must have been some sort of code. Well, how was she supposed to know? It didn’t seem too naive to assume that a women’s symbol meant women, and no bigots meant generally liberal people.

  The phrase turned her mouth cold, as she leaned against a notice board. It meant her. Well, if she was a bigot, she couldn’t help it. She didn’t understand, she didn’t know what to think or why she thought it, she didn’t even know the right terminology for it. Oh, damn and blast it, why couldn’t they teach this sort of thing at school?

  A few limp couples were curled up in corners, deaf to everything but their own whispers. When the ten-thirty siren blared, they straggled out of the building two by two. The night was so mild that Maria decided to risk a stroll around the lake. If she met a rapist, she would gouge his eye out, she reminded herself, and splayed her keys between her fingers as Ruth had taught her. Though of course, now that she came to think of it, Ruth was a bit paranoid about men. The moon looked almost full, just a lick taken out of its side. Avoiding the dark bushes, Maria threaded her way through the trees and reached the rim of the lake.

  She found a space relatively clear of white gulls’ droppings and crouched down on the paved edge. The nuns never liked you to sit on cold surfaces; they said you’d regret it in later life. Only years afterward did she discover that all they were warning against was piles. Where had all the ducks gone? Probably nesting on the artificial islet. The water looked so silky, though she knew it was full of oil drums and scummy crisp bags. She resisted the impulse to pull off her runners and socks and dip her feet in; no point getting pneumonia for a bit of moonlight. Staring across the stretch of water, she watched the library lights go out one by one.

  A plumber gave them a quizzical glance as he passed down the underground corridor.

  “So then she said to me, the cards
show that you are having problems in a relationship with a dark-haired man, he is not yet ready for commitment. Wasn’t that weird? I had barely mentioned Pete, and certainly not the color of his hair. And then there were quarrels, and after that a love choice, but a definite reconciliation by Christmas. Maria, are you listening?”

  “Mmm. Don’t move your jaw too much, I’m trying to catch the angle. What else did Madame Zelda predict?”

  “No, her name was Doris. Just some stuff about buying a house; I think she overestimated my age. But the emotional stuff was really accurate, wasn’t it? She offered to read my palm for another fiver, but I was nearly broke, and anyway Pete knows this guy from Luxembourg, we met him in a wine bar on Saturday, and he’s going to read mine for free.”

  “Sounds good.” She held the pencil out at arm’s length, narrowing her eyes.

  “You think it’s all mumbo jumbo, don’t you?”

  “Stop putting words into my mouth.”

  Yvonne arched her back against the rusty blue locker, then stretched one foot out with a slight moan. “You needn’t bother drawing me, I’ll have turned to a statue if you keep me sitting on this concrete floor much longer.”

  “Are you cold?” Maria looked up in concern. “I’m sorry, it’s the only place I could think of to get any peace. You could sit on my jacket.”

  “Never mind, I’ll survive.” She leaned over for a peek at the page, but Maria jerked it out of sight. “So what’s up with you today?”

  “Nothing’s up.”

  “Well, you’ve been fiddling over that sketch for twenty minutes now without saying a word, and my beauty isn’t all that engrossing, so you must have something on your mind.” She flicked a cigarette butt off the side of her shoe. “Is it them?”

  “Who?”

  “You know right well who I mean. Have you decided whether you’ll be moving out?”

  Crosshatching a shadow, Maria said nothing. After a few seconds, “I just like to concentrate when I’m doing a picture. You said you wanted it for your wall.”