Stir-Fry

  Jael trickled the wine through Maria’s fingers. Maria snatched her hand away. Red drips scattered on the table; one ran along a crack in the wood. “I said I—”

  “I heard what you said.” The round-bellied glass was two thirds full. “But you can’t insult Ruth’s cooking by drinking water, especially not plague-ridden Dublin tap water.”

  Maria sucked her fingers dry one by one as the conversation slid away from her. The wine tasted as rich as the overpriced bottles her Da kept in the back of the shop for the occasional blow-ins from Dublin on their way to a holiday cottage. They often chose her town square to stop in, to stretch their legs and fill up the boot of the car with ginger cake and firelighters. How many years before she would become a foreigner like them? She reached for her glass and took a noiseless sip. Three years of the uni, that’s if she had the luck to pass everything first time. Then some kind of a job for which her statistics classes would in no way have qualified her. Or maybe she could cling on and do an M.A. in art history. Go on the dole and help kids paint murals on crumbling city walls. On what day in what month of this queue of years would she find that she had become a rootless stranger, a speck in the urban sprawl? The accent was wavering already; her “good night” to the bus driver this evening featured vowels she never knew she had.

  There was something glinting on the window behind Ruth’s bobbing head; a hawk shape, a giant butterfly? Maria didn’t want to interrupt their argument, which seemed to be about the future (or lack of it) of the Irish language. She could look more closely at the window in daylight. If she was ever here in daylight. If she didn’t catch the train home tonight and start sorting potatoes in the shop on Monday morning. At least in a small town people knew how to pronounce your name.

  By the time Maria had forked down her cooling dinner, Jael was boasting of her twenty years’ experience of fine wine.

  “They put it in your baby bottle?” suggested Maria.

  She turned, big-eyed. “You mean you didn’t warn her?”

  Ruth was staring at the fridge with an air of abstraction. “I knew I’d forget to add the bean sprouts. Sorry, warn what?”

  “That we’re old fogeys. That dreaded breed who lurk under the euphemism of Mature Students.” Jael lifted a curl away to point out invisible crows’ feet round her eyes. “Your charming hostess is twenty-four, and I, loath though I am to admit it, am twenty-nine.”

  “You’re not.” Maria’s eyes shifted from one to the other. She took another sip of wine. “Neither of you look it. I don’t mean you look young, exactly, but not nearly thirty.”

  Jael cackled, balancing her last mushroom on a forkful of broccoli. “I retain my youthful appearance by sucking the blood of virginal freshers by night.”

  “You look much more aged than me,” Ruth reflected. “Doesn’t she, Maria?”

  “I’m not taking sides, I’m just a visitor.”

  Ruth reached past Jael for the wine. “If her hair wasn’t red, the grey would be much more obvious. And you should see the cellulite on her hips.”

  Jael made a face of outrage and flicked a pea at Ruth; Ruth retreated to the sink to fill the kettle.

  “So what about you?” Jael asked.

  Maria jumped; she had been engrossed in making a swirl of wine with her fork on the table. “What about me?”

  “Oh, the usual things,” said Jael, tugging her frayed, multicolored jumper over her head and tossing it just short of the sofa. “Place of origin, college subjects, vital statistics, bad habits, thoughts on the meaning of life.”

  Maria considered, the fork tasting metallic in her mouth. “I don’t like listing myself,” she said, smiling slightly to cushion the words.

  Was that respect in Jael’s salty blue eyes, or amusement?

  Maria edged her glazed mug over to be filled from the cafetière.

  “But then,” Jael went on, “how are we meant to know whether you have all the necessary attributes of a good flatmate?”

  “Guess.”

  Her mother would slap her hand for being rude, but then, her mother was more than a hundred miles away. And they never had cream in coffee at home. She took the jug from the outstretched hand of Ruth, whose eyes rested on her. “Tell us this much—how did you come to answer our ad? I’d have thought you’d have friends from home coming up to college with you.”

  “Oh, I have. Well, school friends, not real friends. They’re mostly doing commerce or agriculture. They’re nice, there’s nothing wrong with them,” she added uncomfortably. “It’s just that I’ve had enough of pretending to be equally nice.”

  Ruth nodded. “I used to have some friends I could only describe as nice. Life is too short.”

  “Besides,” Maria went on, taking a scalding mouthful of coffee, “I can just imagine what sharing a flat with school friends would be like. Borrowing stamps and comparing bra sizes, you know the way.”

  Jael coughed so hard she had to put her cup down. “There was none of that in my day. Support girdles we wore, back then.”

  “Oh and also,” said Maria, turning back to Ruth’s gaze, “why I noticed your ad was the bit about no bigots.”

  Hunched over her mug, Jael sniggered, for no reason that Maria could see.

  “That was my idea,” Ruth murmured. “It simplifies things.”

  “It was eye-catching,” Maria assured her.

  Another snort.

  Had she said something stupid? Was she showing her youth again? She leapt into speech. “I was once stuck in a Gaeltacht in Mayo learning to speak Irish for three entire weeks with a pair of bitches who supported apartheid. I don’t think I could stick a flat unless everyone in it was basically liberal.”

  “We Dubliners are very liberal altogether, you’ll find,” Jael commented, shovelling the coarse curls back from her forehead. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Guinness.”

  “I’m the only Dub here,” commented Ruth.

  “Ah, Kildare’s only a county away. Besides, I’ve been soaking up the metropolitan atmosphere for a fair while now; I’m as much a true Dub as a snobby Southsider like you anyway.” Jael ducked to avoid the tea towel. “Listen, why don’t we start showing this bogtrotter round our bijou residence?”

  In the half-light of the corridor Maria glimpsed black-and-white posters of a cityscape. Something brushed her ear; she put up one hand and found an asparagus fern hanging overhead, its points sharp against her palm. They had no plants at home; her dad claimed they gave him hay fever.

  “This room’s a bit bare, I’m afraid.” Ruth’s voice reverberated in a narrow doorway. As the light snapped on, Maria narrowed her eyes, taking in pale orange walls and flame-striped curtains. “If you really loathe the colour … I mean, we keep meaning to get around to repainting it.”

  “It’s distinctive,” said Maria warily.

  “Ruthie babe,” came a bellow. “I’m off to the off-license. Don’t suppose you’d have a tenner on you?”

  She was gone, fumbling in her jeans pocket. Maria’s palms bounced on the bed tentatively. The nut-brown chest of drawers looked antique; when she tugged at the top drawer, the wrought iron handle came off in her hand, so she stuck it back in hastily and sat on the edge of the bed.

  Their voices trickled down the passage. It occurred to her to cover her ears, but that seemed juvenile. She concentrated on the old calendar hanging from a nail beside her. Ireland’s Underwater Kingdom, it read; the picture for October was a crab that seemed to be signalling frantically at her with a strip of seaweed.

  “So she’s gone at last.” That was Jael, husky.

  Maria held her breath.

  “Really?”

  “Her flight was at eleven this morning. Unless she missed it, which is unlikely.”

  “Well.” Ruth again, distant. “Hope she finds a job all right. There’s not much for her in Dublin.”

  Jael’s voice lifted to a call as she clattered down the stairs. “See you later, ladies. Be good.”

  Cold air was coming o
ff the bare window. Maria pulled the sleeves of her jumper down to cover her fingers and leaned on the sill. Her breath made a circle of glittering condensation; she touched her little finger to its chill, and made a small m in the center. When she heard steps in the passage, her hand poised to rub out the mark, but instead she reached for the curtains and drew them across. The room was safer now, but smaller. “Couldn’t see anything but roofs,” she told Ruth.

  “Yes, but this room faces west; it’s glorious in the late afternoons. Come and see the rest?”

  It would be strange to live up so many steps, without a garden to wander into. The elegant and the shabby met in every corner of this flat. She craned her neck to examine the moulding around a bare light bulb.

  “Georgian,” Ruth explained. “Gorgeous fanlight over the front door, did you notice? Three floors of the building got converted into offices in the fifties, but the penthouse was too oddly shaped for anything but a flat. A bugger to heat in the winter, but I love these high ceilings. They elevate the mind, don’t they?”

  Maria nodded, rapt. The highest ceiling she had ever slept under, she remembered now, was in Uncle Malachy’s smelly barn one night when she’d gotten locked out by mistake; she hadn’t wanted to throw a stone and wake Mam, who was still weak after the operation. “So who’s down below?”

  “You’re unlikely to meet them; they use the front staircase. There’s a firm of chartered surveyors, an optician, and the Girl Guides HQ. In the basement there’s what purports to be a baldness clinic, but we suspect it’s a brothel for businessmen. Is there a brothel in your town, Maria?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she answered, after a puzzled moment. “I’ve lived there all my life, but I’ve no idea. There’ve been rumours about the flashy cars outside Mrs. Keogh’s, but I’ll bet that’s because she’s a redhead.”

  Ruth chuckled under her breath. “Must tell Jael about that.”

  The bathroom was lined with white tiles, clean but cracked in places. Opening the hot press, Ruth prodded a folded towel into line. When she turned, her face looked tired in the hard fluorescent light. “I’d better be honest with you, Maria, you might find it a bit isolated here.”

  “Isolated from what?”

  A disconcerted pause. “Depends what you’re looking for.” Ruth bent to fish an empty shampoo bottle out of the bathtub. “I’m not wildly sociable, myself; I do things at college, debating and stuff, but when the day’s over I like to curl up with tea and a book.”

  “Me too.”

  “Really?” Ruth’s mouth softened. “You could get somewhere nearer the university with a younger crowd, for the same money. But on the other hand, this place can be a sort of home. On good days.”

  “It seems very nice,” said Maria.

  “Do you think so? It all depends on … what do you do, Maria?”

  “Maths and art.”

  Her hand flapped that away. “No, I mean what do you really like to do?”

  She sat on the rim of the tub and let the question hang in the air. Her eyes paused on a ceramic mermaid, old toothbrushes poking up from her breasts.

  “I know, isn’t it the pits?” said Ruth. “I’ve tried all sorts of arguments, but Jael is such a stubborn Scorpio. Apparently it’s got sentimental value because she got it from an old friend in Denmark. I think she keeps it to annoy me.”

  Maria traced the yellow hair with one finger. “Why haven’t you accidentally knocked it off the windowsill?”

  “Do you know, I’ve never thought of that.” Ruth’s expression was oddly respectful. “Not sure I could go through with it; what if it decapitated a passerby? Maybe if you came to live here, you could do the deed.”

  Maria was reminded that she still had to prove herself. “About what you were asking—I can’t really say what I like to do.”

  “Ah, forget it, you don’t like questions.”

  “No, it’s not that.” Her fingers rested on the cold ceramic. “It’s just that I’ve never lived away before, so I don’t know what I’ll be like. At home I draw and watch wildlife documentaries and stuff. I sit round nattering to Mam while she cooks, and keep my brothers away from breakable objects.”

  “Every house needs someone like that.” Ruth’s smile vanished as she turned off the light. “And this is our room,” she said as she opened the door to a larger, darker bedroom, with a purplish hanging on the wall. “It’s north-facing, so we don’t sit around in it much.”

  “But you don’t even have proper beds,” protested Maria. “Could you not ask the landlord—”

  “We like the futon, really. It’s great for Jael’s bad back, and there’s plenty of space.”

  “Just seems a bit unfair that whoever moves in gets a room of her own.”

  “Ah, don’t worry about it,” said Ruth, bending to straighten a corner of the duvet. “We’re used to each other by now. I’ve trained Jael not to snore.”

  Halfway through a tour of the cupboards, Maria’s eye was caught by a moth flapping against the ceiling; she looked up and noticed a skylight. “Can you get out onto the roof? The view over Dublin must be amazing.”

  “To tell you the truth, I’ve never got around to it.”

  “Suppose not,” said Maria, regretting her enthusiasm.

  “But I must ask the landlord,” Ruth added as she pushed an obstinate door shut on a stack of blankets. “Though the mean bastard would probably put another fiver on the rent ‘for use of rooftop recreational space.’” Her fingers slid to the switch, and they were standing in darkness.

  Maria stood still. Small ads, that was always how psycho killers lured victims to their flats.

  “Look,” said Ruth.

  “What?”

  “Up. Have your eyes adjusted?’’ Directly below the skylight, Ruth’s finger was raised. “That must be the Seven Sisters.”

  “I didn’t think Dublin had stars. I mean, with the smog and all.” She peered up, open-mouthed.

  The front door lurched open.

  “What are you two playing at in the dark?” Jael asked, as they came up the corridor to help her with her splitting bags. “Hey,” she went on, “some good fairy left me this month’s Her on the stairs, and it’s got twenty gorgeous pages of lingerie. I have my suspicions,” she went on, putting the tip of the wine bottle to Ruth’s temple.

  “It’s mine.” Maria’s cheeks were scorching. “I must have dropped it and not noticed.”

  “Ah, too bad.”

  “No, no, take it. I’ve read it already. On the bus,” she insisted. “Speaking of which, I’d better be getting back before my Aunt Thelma rings the police.”

  They turned on the light in the stairwell for her as she said her goodbyes. They would ring. She would take care. As she reached the first landing, she heard one of them begin to hum, one of those slow fifties croonings you could never get out of your head.

  Maria pretended not to see the youth in a bicycle helmet who was shifting round the phone box, rubbing his hands and peering at his watch in the streetlight.

  “Yeah, they’ll let me know by the end of the week. I hope so, Mam. I think being a nonsmoker was a plus.

  “The rent’s not too scarifying. If I got a job on top of my grant, it should be grand. Central heating, and an open fire as well. I didn’t check the fridge. Should I have? Ah, Mam, it’s very civilised, not like a squalid bedsit at all. You can stop fretting. OK, I didn’t mean fretting—being concerned.

  “Yes, I’m eating very well, Thelma cooks everything in a cream sauce. Mam, she specifically asked me to call her that, it makes her feel younger. Yeah, she’s still at the upholstery. All right. Night-night now. Ta for letting me ring reverse-charges. Say hi to Dad and the lads, will you? God bless.”

  She swung the glass door wide and darted out, with a quick “Sorry for keeping you.” Halfway down the street, hands bunched in her duffel-coat pockets for warmth, she remembered her fountain pen sitting on the directory and loped back.

  His helmet bent over the receiver
, he was agitated in conversation. Maria knocked timidly on the glass and got a glare in return. “Sorry,” she mouthed. “Pen.” Her hand made a writing motion, then pointed at the ledge. Dark eyes stared through the glass. “Forget it,” she mouthed, her hands flapping; she turned her hot face away and headed down the narrow street.

  The door of the phone box crashed open. “What? What is it?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she called, her voice unsteady.

  “Hey, come back here, I’m through with my call.” He lowered his voice as she neared him. “I guess I was rude. I was in a hurry.”

  “It was just my fountain pen,” Maria said, clearing her throat. “I think I left it on the shelf.” She took it from his hand. Up close, he was skinny and no older than she was.

  “I’m sorry I wouldn’t open the door, but you know, you could have had a knife or something.”

  She stared.

  “So you’re not the most likely of muggers,” he admitted, tugging off his helmet and running a bony hand through tufts of hair. “But in Brooklyn we take no chances.”

  “You’re from New York, really?” Then she heard her own voice talking to a male stranger on an empty street. “Sorry to have bothered you. Good night.” And she strode off, not giving him a chance to do more than nod.

  Safe on the top deck of the meandering bus to Dun Laoghaire, she let her shoulders uncurl, shedding the weight of a long day. Twenty minutes of dreamtime now, as floodlit city corners flared into black suburban avenues. The knob-bled branches of overhanging horse chestnut trees cracked against the windows, on and off, pulling her back to consciousness. Glinting on the glass she could see the first spatter of rain.

  Her aunt’s house was the last in a cul-de-sac of opulent hedges. Maria let herself in noiselessly and was halfway up the stairs when she remembered the no-shoes rule. Damn it to hell, who ever heard of having a magnolia carpet? She was wrenching off her second sneaker when the kitchen door opened.

  “Welcome back. You’ll join me for cocoa?”

  “Surely,” said Maria, stuffing her sneakers into her coat pockets. She padded down the stairs and into the gleaming kitchen. “Could I have a glass of water as well?”