Hood Page 9

  Cara wails.

  ‘Come on, lovey.’

  ‘Can’t, it’s so, I didn’t know how, wish I, you wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘You could get the bus over if you’d find it easier to talk here.’

  Her breath shudders like an old engine. ‘Can’t. Leave the house.’

  ‘Have you tried?’

  ‘Far as the gate.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s the matter.’

  ‘Lost…’

  ‘What have you lost? I’m sure we’ll find it. What’s really the matter?’

  ‘Virginity.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve lost it.’

  The words slap me in the face, welding my bones together. Put an ad in the evening paper, I want to spit, but do not, but hold it in, but hold my breath until I have control. Until I am kind enough to say, ‘I’m sorry. If you are. I mean if you didn’t want to lose it.’

  ‘I wanted to but now I’ – Cara’s voice rising to a keen again – ‘wish I hadn’t.’

  I summon all that remains of my liking for this girl. I am too tired; the words drip out as if from a rusty pipe. ‘Did it hurt?’

  Between gulps, she tells me. ‘Yes, but that’s not why. I just didn’t realize it would be such a big deal until it suddenly was. You wouldn’t understand unless you’d done it. We, Roderick and me, the minute we did it we both knew it felt wrong and something irreplaceable was gone…’

  I wish I could laugh, it would relieve the feeling that my head is made of tight rubber. ‘Jesus, Cara,’ I say – too loud, is my mother awake? – ‘it’s only a wee flap of skin.’

  ‘It’s not the skin, it’s the symbolism.’

  ‘Bollocks to that, if it’s the symbolism you lost it two years ago on the convent roof.’

  Silence from her end. A snuffle.

  Fury is hitting the arches of my skull from the inside with ungloved fists. ‘But of course, I was forgetting, as a born-again het you wouldn’t count fingers.’

  ‘It’s not the same thing.’

  ‘Thank god for that,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t be horrible.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Then I hear myself, and the words are false. ‘Actually, no, I’m not sorry at all.’ A weight lifts off; I don’t care if my mother can hear me. ‘You are the most insensitive little gobshite I’ve ever met.’

  A hoarse giggle down the line.

  ‘I don’t believe this. You’re ringing me, me of all people, for congratulations on your defloration, and sniggering –’

  ‘It’s not like that,’ says Cara. ‘I’m still upset. I just, you always did know how to make me laugh.’

  ‘Stop flirting. This is not how ex-lovers are meant to behave.’

  A pause. ‘Well, we weren’t exactly lovers were we, strictly speaking?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I read on some problem page that lots of girls, you know, do things with each other when they’re teenagers. It’s not unusual.’

  Which would give her less satisfaction, for me to slam down the phone or not to?

  Another peal from the phone in the big house hoisted my head off the pillow; this time I leaped down two stairs at a time and got to it first. A wrong number, wouldn’t you know.

  Kate’s mood was no better than mine, I could tell at a glance as I walked into the kitchen. Her linen suit was one of those colours with a pretentious name, ash or bone or something. She held the coffee cup an inch below her lip. ‘I suppose you’ll have made arrangements with my father about the move, Pen?’

  I tightened the threadbare belt of my dressing-gown. ‘I didn’t know he was moving.’

  One thick eyebrow lifted, a trick I had always wanted to learn. ‘Well, he can hardly rattle round here all on his own.’

  I shut my mouth without letting more than a breath escape.

  Kate set down her cup with a clink and stared at the walnut cabinet. ‘He’ll have no space for a great monster like that.’

  And all of a sudden I was furious on behalf of the cabinet, its burnished grin. ‘I’m sure he would have told me if he was planning to move. He’s very fond of all this.’

  ‘I remember. He bought it all with my mother’s salary, you know; more fool her for having a joint account.’ She licked the cool coffee out of the bowl of her spoon. ‘Probably in shock,’ she added.

  ‘Who, Mr. Wall?’

  Kate’s lip curled up at the corner. ‘That’s a rather formal title, isn’t it, if you’ve been part of the furniture for years?’

  I ignored my flush. ‘He hasn’t asked me to call him Ian.’

  ‘I’d nearly forgotten that was his name. How grey can you get.’

  A wheeze from the handle, and the door jumped open. ‘Good morning, girls,’ said Mr. Wall, halfway to the sink.

  I didn’t meet Kate’s eye. ‘Morning. Are you not at the library today?’

  ‘Slight little bit of a headache,’ he admitted, rinsing his cup. ‘I should go in this afternoon.’

  ‘How’s that coffee I brought?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Fine, just fine. Though I may in fact’ – picking up the jar and rubbing at the label with his thumb – ‘it might be the case that I used the instant. Had it to hand.’ Mr. Wall gave an apologetic glance over his reading glasses.

  ‘I like instant better sometimes,’ I assured him idiotically.

  ‘Indeed. Requires less appreciation when one’s in the middle of something.’ He looked down and removed a yellow sticky label from the edge of his cardigan. ‘Though I will,’ he added, giving us each a brief smile, ‘I will definitely try the gourmet brew after lunch.’

  ‘Do that.’ For a moment I wanted to cry, but it passed.

  Kate asked for another coffee if he was making it. He wasn’t but it would be a pleasure. His pace quickened; he seemed glad to know what his daughter wanted and have it in his hand, smoking and jittering in the saucer.

  ‘So, Dad,’ she began; it had the ring of a line in a play read through by an understudy. ‘I was just asking Pen what your plans were. Vis-à-vis the house.’

  His eyes did a cautious circuit. ‘Is anything the matter with it?’

  ‘It’s much too big,’ she said, as if to a small boy. ‘Now, what might suit you is one of those new flats down by the river, there was an article on them in yesterday’s paper. They’ve got a security porter and a laundry service.’

  ‘And an automated bath-chair, no doubt, in the fullness of time.’

  I snorted before I could stop myself. Mr. Wall looked down for the duration of his smile. ‘Excuse my flippancy, Cáit. I do appreciate your concern. I shall give the matter thought.’

  ‘And don’t worry about all this clutter,’ Kate drove on. ‘We can put it in storage or something.’

  I expected his head to snap up, but he continued drying the handle of his coffee cup. ‘I shall give it thought,’ he repeated, shutting the door behind him.

  ‘He and Mom weren’t even Irish-speakers, you know,’ murmured Kate. ‘Totally false nostalgia, this Celtic Revival shit. Cara, Cáit, Cáity, coochy-coo; it’s always bugged me.’

  ‘He knows,’ I said.

  She gave me a wary glance. ‘Will we make a move?’

  ‘Sure.’ I was picking up her nasty Bostonian accent already. ‘Just let me get some clothes on.’

  I took a good fifteen minutes, just to make her wait. I could tell it was going to be another scorcher, so I lingered in the shower, turning down the hot tap until the water was cool enough to raise goose-pimples along my upper arms. I shut my eyes, letting the stream cover my face. The delicate brown pores around my nipples reminded me of a rubber plant after the rain.

  Last year my soaping fingers found a pea-shaped lump. I told myself it was hormonal, but walked around for days with the whiff of death in my nostrils. My conversation turned enigmatic and sentimental by turns; I stroked Grace a lot and left sentences unfinished. Then I went to the doctor and came home crowing, ‘It’s a cyst, I’ve g
ot a cyst, that’s all.’ Cara was furious with me for not having told her before, but I couldn’t see the point of having both of us fretting over something that might not be anything. She said I was a stupid woman, and I was to promise to tell her anything like that in future. I stuck out my tongue and she closed her teeth over it.

  When I emerged at last, Kate showed no signs of impatience. She sat into Minnie as if she was used to being chauffeured, tucking her leather portfolio between her ankles. So that we wouldn’t have to make conversation, I turned on the radio, and the earnest discords of a debate on emigration kept us going all the way into town. It was another ridiculously sunny day; what was the Irish climate playing at? Just when I could have done with a bit of pathetic fallacy, a sober rain or cruel wind, the sun was insisting on dazzling Dublin.

  After dropping Kate off at the print bureau, I picked up the paper and read it over a polystyrene cup of coffee in the car. The rush of caffeine made my palms damp. I bit into the snow-topped Danish and read the ads for end-of-summer sales; it felt like a holiday. On the fifth page of the paper was a small headline: ‘Road Accidents Claim Six Over Weekend’. Claim, what an odd verb, as if the roads had a certain toll they were entitled to collect in pounds of flesh.

  Listed in the second paragraph was ‘Ciara Wall’. All I could feel was irritation that the journalist hadn’t bothered to check the spelling. The report added that the driver of the car that had hit the taxi had died in intensive care on Sunday evening. On balance, I was glad. This way, I wouldn’t have to track him down and kill him. Really, it would have been worse of me to wish him to live with that on his conscience. For a moment I wondered whether the driver was counted in the weekend’s six as claimant or claimed, dragon or virgin. None of this was real, not a bit of it. These names, even this doppelgänger ‘Ciara Wall’, were strangers to me. I could feel the appropriate things but only at a distance, as if reading a book which, however moving and engrossing, would be put aside as soon as there was a knock at the door.

  Driving home through spacious streets of terracotta brick I passed the Alternative Bookshop. I paused on the kerb outside to blow my nose, looking up at the hand-painted sign on the third-floor window. It had only been an alternative for a couple of years. I had tried it out not long after it opened; I remembered it as a spring day, or maybe it just felt that way.

  The air smells green that afternoon. Unwilling to spend another lunchtime in the staff-room listening to the stress symptoms of women with lines around their mouths, I have gone walking halfway into town. I decide to try this new lefty bookshop on the corner by the synagogue; three flights up and very poky, but nearly empty at this time of day.

  I am browsing through a history of quilting when I stagger over this girl who is crouched at the bottom of Women’s Studies. But she turns round before I have a chance to be mortified; swivels on her heels, like a squirrel, and gives me a devastating grin.

  ‘Really sorry,’ I add for what sounds like the tenth time, and edge my swollen feet away.

  The bookshop has its own miniature café. I have squeezed in behind the corner table and almost finished a slice of mushroom quiche before the woman comes over to the next table, which is only a foot away. Out the corner of my eye I have spotted her badge and am going light pink. It’s not even one of those joined women symbols or a discreet labrys. It’s a yellow badge with ‘BY THE WAY, I’M A DYKE’ emblazoned across it.

  In order to dissociate myself from this lunatic I take a vast mouthful of pastry crust.

  She leans over and says, ‘That’s quite a waistcoat.’

  I open my lips to answer, then remember the quiche. My eyes bulge slightly as I begin to cough. I hack and choke and generally behave like one of the Junior Infants down the hall at Immac. More than half the laughter is coming from this stranger; she passes me her glass of water.

  When I have recovered, we discuss the waistcoat. How I made it from an old curtain of my mother’s one night when I couldn’t get to sleep after watching that film about the woman with multiple personalities; how I like to make my own clothes when I can find the time, because the shops have always mysteriously run out of anything in my size; how the quiche is not bad at all, considering. She seems quite ordinary, apart from the badge which I hope the waitress can’t see from over there. She’s got a North of England accent. But how did she spot me? It’s a very flowery waistcoat I’m wearing, nothing Radclyffe Hall about it.

  ‘Would you make me one?’ she asks, leaning back till her wooden chair rests against the wall.

  I smile wanly.

  ‘A green one. It wouldn’t take much, a couple of scraps; I’m only small. I’d pay, of course.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not that, it’s just a question of…’

  And she is leaning over, plucking a biro out of her jacket pocket. No paper, no napkin. I must look a right egg, sitting here letting a strange woman write on the back of my hand. I just hope I won’t get the tickles as her ballpoint moves towards the wrist.

  ‘Well, it depends on whether I have any green,’ I tell her hoarsely, and add, ‘You didn’t give me your name.’

  She pulls open her denim collar, and angles towards the light, showing the curve where her neck becomes her shoulder. ‘Day,’ it says, the olive letters deformed into the silhouette of a leaf. ‘That’s me. Short for Dymphna, wouldn’t you know.’ And picks up her wallet and goes, grinning over her shoulder.

  When the door has clattered shut I realize that she doesn’t know my name, but I can hardly chase her down the stairs bawling it out. Besides, it’s ten minutes to the bell; if I’m late back those hyperactive bowsies in Fourth Class will be throwing milk cartons at each other again.

  In a whirl of occupation the afternoon goes by. I don’t let myself think of Day again until I’m washing chalk off my hands in the staff toilet at ten past three. Suddenly I am bone-tired, longing for the big house and its sofa, kettle, crocuses. I could ring Day’s number tonight, I suppose, if there’s any of that pea-green velvet left in the back of my sewing drawer. I could ring just to say ‘Hey’. Cara’s taken her roll-up banner to a Right to Choose march in Leeds, and anyway, after that last workshop on Polyfidelity she dragged me along to, didn’t I decide to consider myself a free agent? So I can ring who I like, cut my life to my own fit, kiss whose shoulders I please.

  I stare at myself in the mirror. Rather pale, my hair closing to a Cleopatra silhouette round my face. I could be just about anything, and the nuns and brats wouldn’t notice. Spanish Armada somewhere in my ancestry, Cara remarked when she hung the gold boat on the chain around my neck on our first anniversary. Under my collar against the metal my skin is slippery and sweet.

  I glance down at the bits of me I have always liked – my long, plump hands, drying themselves automatically on the towel. And too late, about a minute and a half too late, I see the tail of a green digit across a vein. No, two digits: a six, then a scrubbed pink patch of skin, then what could be a seven or a two. I lean my forehead on the icy mirror. How many six-digit numbers are there that start with six and end with seven (or, of course, two)? It doesn’t bear thinking of. It must be a sign, a judgment on me for trying to be something I’m not. Go on, get your folder and car keys, move.

  A shrill voice lifts my face off the sweaty glass. I follow it to the door where a girl from Junior Infants is standing with her legs entwined like snakes. ‘Please, Miss, can’t do my zip.’

  I have her tiny dungarees undone and around her ankles just in time; she shuffles across the corridor to the kids’ toilet. How I love being necessary.

  Pulling my mind back from that peculiar afternoon when I had seriously considered seizing for myself the freedom Cara held always in her hand, I looked out my window and up at the sign. ‘Radical Books for All the Families,’ it said in bubble letters. ‘The Only Alternative.’

  The door at the bottom swung open: of all the people in the world I did not want to see, Sherry. With a freshly shaved head and a small boy for accessories.
I started up the engine and was edging off the kerb by the time she patted the window. I rolled it down halfway.

  ‘Pen, what are you doing here? I’m so sorry, I was up all night crying, Jo told us after dinner, I just can’t believe it yet.’ Sherry shoved up the sleeves of her ragged crochet shirt and leaned her elbows on the window edge. Freckles stood out across her creamy cheek-bones. ‘How are you coping, I mean how’s it all going? I’m just unbelievably shook up. Came back from Greece on such a high but this has brought us all way down, it’s like death is just around the corner for any of us, you know? Cara was just so…’

  I couldn’t stand much more. ‘Who’s the wee sprog?’

  ‘Oh, he’s my ex-before-last’s nephew.’ She hauled him up between her delicate wrists. ‘Say hi, Jonathan. His parents are bringing him up without, like, any gender stereotypes.’

  The boy gave me a dubious glance and kicked the door. I started up the engine again.

  Sherry put her bud of a mouth against his sticky cheek, then let him down on the kerb. ‘Well, listen, Pen, I suppose we’ll see you at the cemetery tomorrow. But also, we were thinking we might do some kind of wake thing at the Attic this weekend. A barbecue in the garden, if the weather holds, with maybe a circle dance and stuff. So if you can think of any poems Cara was into – it’d have to be women’s stuff, obviously – or any special songs we could learn…’

  ‘I’ll keep it in mind,’ I told her, barely civil. ‘Now I really have to hurry, there’s so much to do.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ And Sherry leaned her fuzzy copper head in the window to give me the compulsory kiss on the hairline. She smelt of milk and incense. ‘You take it easy, now. Go with the flow. Jonathan, you want to say bye-bye?’

  But Minnie was rumbling off along the main road. My girlfriend, I decided, as I sped through an amber light, had no taste. What she had seen in that bald hippy I would never know. Cara was skinny enough herself; they must have struck sparks when their hips touched. If they touched. When. If. Don’t dwell on it, Pen, watch the traffic. I had nothing but a hunch that it was Sherry, I reminded myself; it could have been anyone or no one. Besides, hadn’t I sorted out my attitude to all that years back?