Once they had left the square behind, Ruth slowed down, polishing a plucked leaf between her fingers. “Nice day.”
“Mmm.” Maria was watching the chimney tops for birds.
“Sorry Jael was so foul.”
“Not your problem.”
Ruth spiked the glossy leaf on a railing and folded her arms. “Actually I’m glad we’re on our own because there’s—” She stopped and let out a little snort of amusement.
Maria looked at her warily.
“Sorry, it’s just—of all the clichéd phrases—but I can’t think of any other.” Singsong, almost parodie: “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
Not now, thought Maria. Not now that I know the curve of your hip, the sounds you make. I’ve no right to be told anything anymore.
“You may have guessed this already, I mean we really should have got around to saying something before, but I mean, you do know we’re lovers, don’t you? Me and Jael.”
It was a relief to have it spoken. But how unnerving to watch those words being exhumed into the chilly daylight.
“Well, yes. More or less.” Three long seconds. “Fine by me,” she added hurriedly.
“Great.” Ruth’s voice leapt up an octave.
They strolled for a minute or two, both studying the trees through the black rods of the fence. Say something nice, Maria ordered herself, but the silence nibbled away her words.
“Wasn’t sure how you’d take it,” Ruth commented at last. “Most people have been fine, but you never know. A couple of good friends from school—they didn’t exactly spit in my face, but I saw their eyes glaze, and I could never be comfortable with them afterward.”
Maria ran a twig along the railings. “I suppose most students would be fairly liberal, though.”
“Do you think so?” Ruth’s eyebrows were sardonic.
“Well, I don’t know. After they get over the initial shock, maybe. If it is a shock.” Shut up, stop flailing.
The rotting leaves were sticking to Ruth’s low heels; she paused to scrape them off on a kerb. “I find it’s the opposite, actually,” she commented. “Students have this tolerant surface—they cheer Martina’s serves and hum along to k.d. lang—but inside they’re panicking and twisting like hamsters in a cage.”
“You can’t know that,” said Maria desperately, dropping her twig. “And even if some do seem hostile, it’s just ignorance. Like, you’re the first one I’ve met. As far as I know. I mean the first two.”
A quick smile flashed like a dragonfly. “Yes, but some of the warmest reactions I’ve got have been from people who didn’t know the first thing about it but had tolerant instincts. Like that old woman I was telling you about, the one I pickled gherkins with in Germany.”
Maria counted the cracks on the pavement. “Why do you tell people if they’re going to be horrible?” she asked at last. “If I’m scared of something, I just don’t do it.”
“I doubt that,” said Ruth gently. “You must know what it’s like when you’re so scared of something your guts are churning, but you do it anyway, and the adrenaline rushes through you, like a flag going up.”
“Suppose. Not very often, though.”
“Well, I don’t come out to people every day of the week; it would be exhausting. I lie low for a while, then go on a crusade, hit them with it, make all the jaws drop.” Her hand was light on Maria’s elbow, ushering her across the road as the lights changed. “Most of the time I do it just to feel free. I can’t stand those old euphemisms about good friends and flatmates.”
“That’s the way you talked to me.” Maria moved away slightly, unable to keep the hurt out of her voice.
Ruth paused to peer into a cobbled alley and murmured, “The river’s down thisaway.” Then, “I’m a terrible procrastinator, Maria. I was—we were both—afraid you might go.”
“Why would I go?” asked Maria. Her lips were taut with the effort of not saying I nearly did.
“Jael told me that instead of barging in there as usual, I should give you a chance to find out on your own. And once a couple of weeks had gone by, we were too embarrassed to make an official announcement.” Her tone lightening, she went on. “She suggested we stick a little sign on the fridge, saying ‘To whom it may concern: Jael and Ruth indulged in unnatural relations last night.’”
Maria laughed, a little shortly, and commented that unnatural relations sounded like hard-hearted aunts.
Brown office blocks stared at grey ones across the streets that still surprised Maria by their gracious proportions. Out of basements stuck the unlit neon titles of nightclubs and neat plaques offering acupuncture or laser printing. Farther into the old city, buildings sagged, one seeming to lean on a single thirty-foot wooden support. Dandelions tufted from the rubble.
By the time they reached the quays, the conversation had wandered to the ethics of meat. “I remember the first time I ever wanted to be a vegetarian,” Ruth said as they crossed the Ha’penny Bridge. “My mother called me in before mass to show me how to joint a chicken. ‘Listen for the crunch,’ she kept saying.”
Maria nodded vehemently, running her finger along the railings. “What got to me were the names—the breast meat was ‘his chests,’ and that sort of triangle at the bottom, Mam called it ‘the pope’s nose.’”
“My mother would never have been so blasphemous. She probably referred to it as ‘the bird’s posterior.’”
“Does she know about you?” Then Maria wished she hadn’t asked.
“Not yet.” Ruth put her head through the pale blue slats of the footbridge and stared down. “Water’s going at a fair lick, isn’t it?” She grinned up at Maria, her face striped by the bars. “The worst thing about the chicken was its little bag of organs, do you remember? For years I was convinced that all my innards were carried in a slimy pouch too, and if I sneezed, they might shoot out.”
“I worry about you, woman. Come on, let’s go back the long way. I want to show you that peculiar duck I found in the green. And maybe if we give Jael a full hour, she’ll have repented and heated up a frozen pizza.”
“Bet it’ll be a ham one,” said Ruth, leading the way back across the bridge. “I’d have become a vegetarian long ago if it wasn’t for her, you know. Maybe even a vegan.”
Maria had taken to avoiding mirrors. Every time she saw herself she looked younger, as if her handful of years was flaking away. The nose a little flatter, the cheeks paler, the hair more helpless each time she caught her reflection in a polished shopfront. Since she came to Dublin her clothes had been hanging wrong on her shoulders. As for the overall she wore two evenings a week, it made her look like a fifties-era unwed mother, scrubbing floors in a convent. She would have asked Yvonne’s advice, if Maria had not been avoiding her since their last argument about the flatmates. Galway was hardly an expert on clothes, since he wore nothing but skinny jeans. And Damien—glimpsed in lecture theatres, hallucinated on street corners—never noticed her, whatever she wore or however she tied back her drooping hair. So the list of friends ended after two, she noted. Friends her own age, that was, not including Ruth and Jael. It was all too easy to spend a merry evening in the flat and forget that she was playing gooseberry to a couple of lovers.
One evening Maria came in for dinner metamorphosed.
Ruth’s forehead creased. “But it was nice the old way.”
Jael took one look at Maria’s skull-hugging hair and whooped. “What does it think it is, a punk sheep?”
She felt her throat scald. “I just felt like a haircut. I was bored with sweet seventeen.”
Jael produced her vampire smile. “The problem is, my dear, you’re now so cute you put me off my dinner.” She gave the furry scalp a tentative stroke, as if it were a squirrel, and dropped her hand as Ruth walked over to the table with a wok full of steaming vegetables.
“I think it’ll grow on me,” said Ruth. “It’s just the shock of seeing your eyebrows, and—oh, what tiny ears. Lookit, Jael, did
you ever see such defenceless earlobes? They’re going to get so cold!”
Maria squirmed out of their grasp and sat down to eat, claiming the chair with the armrests.
“Oh, by the way,” commented Jael, passing the soy sauce, “I hear you guessed our murky secret, and you’re not intending to call in the vice squad.”
She blinked and picked up her fork. “Not unless you make me do the washing up.”
Ruth, sliding onto her seat, had dark bags under her eyes. “We had assumed our last flatmate knew, you see—”
“A portly bitch in first law called Annabel,” Jael interrupted.
“But when she found out by accident, she made a ridiculous scene, threatened to tell the landlord, and stomped off bag and baggage without paying that month’s rent.”
“Not that heterosexuality ever did much for poor Annabel,” Jael murmured, stealing a mushroom from Ruth’s plate.
After dinner Maria left them bickering pleasantly over coffee and went for a walk in the cool deserted streets. She had brought her sketch pad, but it was too smoggy to make out more than the wooly forms of cars and brick walls. The clammy air stroked her cheeks. A black cat slunk by across the path. She crouched down and whispered to it; it cast her a curious glance before slipping into a tiny basement garden. She would like a cat someday, curled up in a sagbag in a flat of their own. Perhaps her mother was right, and she would never get around to getting married; she could just paint her flat sky-blue, lock the door, and walk round on her deep-pile carpet with nothing on.
As she passed the petrol station her eye was caught by some golden freesia, and she bought a pound’s worth. Ruth and Jael brightened up the flat with their Women’s Music Festival posters and pot plants and television; the least she could do was bring home a few flowers once in a while. They were lovely to her, really; Maria could hardly remember why she had considered leaving. They didn’t quarrel any more than ordinary couples. Most of the time she could just think of them as friends.
But as she headed up the second-last flight of stairs, she was overcome by a wave of exhaustion. Her back was twingeing after having had to scrub that filthy bathroom floor last night, and her shorn head was cold. From the flat above she heard the theme music from “Glenroe” and then a brief scream. For a long moment there was no air to breathe in the dark stairwell. She sank onto a step and listened. On the count of six, she was relieved by a muffled roar: “Jael, get off me this instant, I mean it.”
Maria immersed her nose in the rich stain of the flowers. Taking a sweet breath, she started up the stairs.
She stood at a casual angle to the door, pretending to be absorbed in The Dublin Event Guide but glancing into The Pit every now and then. She had never been near such a place before; her mother always implied your bag would be snatched as you walked in the door. It was almost empty; a couple of punks leaned on the Space Invader games in the far corner, and the bottom table was occupied by three rather intimidating women in suede waistcoats. Two tables up, playing against himself, was Damien.
She hadn’t caught more than a glimpse of his plait for weeks. Today, after a lecture on the salient points of Romanesque versus Gothic cathedrals, she found herself pursuing him from the lecture theatre, past the men’s toilet (she had to loiter outside, reading a poster headed “What Has Jesus Got to Say to You???,” and then down to the university’s subterranean pool hall. Rollie butts sprinkled the floor of The Pit like leaves at the launch of autumn. On the longer wall, titans and demons clashed in a seventies-style mural, all purple and silver. Some graffitist had penned in a lacy garter on one giant’s muscled calf.
Beneath it Damien leaned purposefully over his cue and potted a ball. Maria reminded herself, as she watched his plait loll over one shoulder, that he was utterly unaware of her existence. Odd; here she stood half hidden behind a yellow metal door, watching him chalk his cue, and he didn’t even know her name. She would never have the nerve to accost him in the corridors, and anyway, what had she to say that was any less banal than the usual fresher’s chitchat? Turning aside to watch the game more discreetly over the rim of her magazine, she caught sight of her blurred reflection in a panel of steel. A peaky little face still, even with the trendy haircut. A face to launch a paper boat.
Which was about all this fixation on a stranger amounted to—something to watch, to push, to fill in the spare minutes. Maria waited till Damien had potted two more balls, then walked away.
She blew her nose as she waited for the lift. Were they ever going to turn on the central heating in this damn state-subsidised university? Dawdling past the maths department notice board to see if the results of that painful midterm test were up yet, she came across Galway, leaning out precariously over the bannisters. So much more likeable he was, so manageable a friendship—even if that silly bimbo in the stats tutorial did keep referring to Maria’s “American boyfriend.”
“Yo, stranger, what are you up to?”
Galway straightened up. “Spying on a couple of lovebirds,” he explained in a low voice. He pointed down through the wooden slats to the bench just beside the foot of the stairs. “It’s a cyclical ritual. They exchange tongues for maybe twenty seconds, then spend three minutes scanning the crowd to see who’s noticed them.”
“Pathetic.” Maria peered over the bannisters.
“But fascinating. I never understood the angst of Yeats’s love poems before. Courtship is so tentative and giggly over here; don’t you guys ever just go fornicate with each other?”
“Sex in Ireland is a scary business,” she told him. “We can get pregnant if sperm so much as splashes on our knees. It swims its way up.”
“You trying to fool a gullible Yank?”
Her voice wavered between anger and amusement. “Look, in my school, we were given one hour’s class per year, called Preparation for Life. At fifteen it was on thrush, the next year the nurse talked about praying with your husband, and last year the nuns finally allowed her to mention the rhythm method of contraception. By which time most of my classmates were on the Pill anyway, having told the doctor they needed it as a period regulator.”
“I want to go home to Brooklyn,” he said. “Hot dogs, muggers, sanity.”
“Come for a bracing walk to the cafeteria.”
“So, life is good?” he asked as they tramped down the stairs. “I notice you’ve lost some hair.”
“Apart from cold ears, life is all right. Well,” she added, spurring herself on, “apart from the occasional blip. It turns out that my flatmates, they’re both gay.”
He turned, his eyes narrow. “So why does that cause blips?”
“It’s complicated,” Maria assured him, in what she hoped was a tolerant tone. “Basically they couldn’t agree about whether or not to tell me.”
Galway nodded thoughtfully. “It’s great they did decide to come out to you. They must trust you.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.” She hurried to keep up with him as they crossed the concourse.
“Two of the chambermaids I worked with in Boston were dykes; they were such a laugh,” he said nostalgically.
“Ah, yeah, the flat’s great crack.” It’s true, Maria thought, so why does saying it make it sound like a lie?
The next Sunday she woke late again. She was sleeping a ridiculous amount these days, as if hibernating for the winter. She fumbled with the loose handle of the top drawer, reaching in for her watch. Ten past eleven, too late to have to decide whether to go to mass. Besides, she could hear the rain against the glass. Maria scratched the fuzz at the nape of her neck.
She padded down to the other room; when she knocked she heard nothing but the sound of a hair dryer. Putting her head cautiously round the door, she saw Jael cross-legged on the futon; she had to shout to make herself heard. Jael jumped in shock, then snapped off the hair dryer and swept the red curtain of curls off her face. Static strands clung to her cheeks, and she shoved them away.
“Sneaking up on me, were you?”
r /> “I was just wondering if you were finished with the paper. Where’s your lady friend?”
“Ruth’s gone to Mumsie’s for lunch, so I’ll have to do. Here you go, though there’s nothing worth reading except a nice bitchy review of the Lorca play,” Jael said, handing over the paper. She began yanking a brush through her hair.
Absorbed in the headlines, Maria knelt on the edge of the futon. Something was nagging at her; she glanced up. “Why is it Ruth never mentions her dad? And he wasn’t in any of the photos either.”
“Didn’t you know?” Jael arched her eyebrows. “She’s a secretive little witch. The Johnsons got a legal separation when Ruth was six; the father hasn’t been seen since.”
Maria’s face twisted in sympathy. “That must have upset her.”
“Well, she still has vivid memories of the fights and the financial hassle, so I’d imagine she loathes the absentee.”
Maria sat, lost in thought, on the edge of the rumpled duvet. She was trying to remember whether she had ever heard her father raise his voice to a shout. “Do you think that’s maybe partly why?” she asked, then added hurriedly, “No, forget that.”
“Why what?” Jael kept up her sardonic stare till Maria’s eyes fell. “Oh, I get it—why Ruth was so easily seduced into Sapphic lurve.”
“No, I mean—”
“You mean the trauma of her parents’ breakup turned her off men, so she waited, what, eighteen years, then ran into my arms for consolation.”
Maria rested her chin on her knees. Out of the entangled pattern of the wall hanging, a tiny monkey’s face smirked at her. “I’m sorry, it was a deeply stupid question.”
“That hoary old theory’s no stupider than all the others, tufty.” Dropping her brush, Jael put out one palm and lightly stroked Maria’s hair from the neck up, against the grain. “It tickles,” she observed. Maria wriggled out of reach.
“Listen, most of the queers I know love speculating about causes and influences. My own favourite is the Mummy-didn’t-love-me.”