As she turned onto Beldam Square, running her fingers along the scaly railings, someone came hurtling down the footpath. She stepped out of the way, then recognised the bounce of Jael’s coppery hair. Whipping the lollipop from her cheek, Maria dropped it into a clump of dandelions.
“Whoah,” she called as the red face panted up to her. “What’s the race?”
Jael grabbed her by the sleeve of her anorak and dragged her along. “Offy,” she gasped, “nearly six.” Her voice was harsh as a gull’s.
Maria, tripping over her skirt, had no breath to answer. They made it to the door of the off-licence just as the manager was about to lock it, and though he seemed unconvinced by Jael’s saga of an aunt who’d had a car crash, he did reopen the till to sell them a bottle of whisky.
They ambled back, swapping giggled details of Aunt Bridie and her late lamented Citröen Diane. Jael pulled up the collar of her battered leather jacket, wrenching loose hair out of the way. She looked wan behind her freckles.
“But I knocked at your door, I could have bought it for you.”
“Did you really?” said Jael. “We must have had our headphones on. Oh, well, my back was aching, I needed the exercise.”
Maria staggered up the stairs after her.
A bus ticket, curled on the kitchen table, read “Off with women’s group to deface offensive billboard, see yez later, Ruth. P.S. plenty chili left in pot.”
Jael scanned it with a groan. “She’s going to get herself arrested again.”
“She what?”
“The only reason the beer manufacturers didn’t press charges last time was because the police rounded the lassies up before they’d finished painting the first syllable of Objectification.”
“What are they like, this women’s group?” asked Maria, rereading the note. “Ruth invited me to go along, but I forgot.”
“A clatter of middle-class neurotics whining on about how oppressed they are.”
Maria gave her a thoughtful glance and went to heat up the chili.
Hot tea and hot whisky, and the fire scalding their foreheads. Maria wriggled back in the rocking chair, tucking her moccasins under her skirt. She would just finish her crossword before tackling the worksheet of stats problems. Crosswords counted as mental exercise. She struggled with an anagram, half-aware of the faint twangs of Jael tuning her guitar on the hearth rug. The night was wrapping round them; an occasional blast of wind shook the navy-blue windowpanes. Once Maria glanced down at the bent head and realised that this was the first time they had ever been in the same room without talking. Twelve across, a Tibetan snow monster.
“My god.” Jael tossed back her fringe. “I’ve just realised I don’t know your surname.”
“Almighty.” Maria sucked the top of her pen.
“I beg your pardon?”
She sighed, doodling a ship in the frayed margin of the newspaper. “Your god’s surname.”
After a moment, Jael strummed a major chord. “Aha, I get it. A rare but tasty witticism from the Virgin Maria.”
Maria stuck her tongue out without raising her eyes. “I should never have told you I was a virgin. Next time we play Truth or Dare I’m going to lie.”
“You’re learning.”
Five notes, rising in jerks like washing on a stormy line. Maria reached down for her tea.
“What was I asking you?”
Maria filled in a clue.
“Classy pen you’ve got there.”
“From my parents, for getting honours in the leaving cert.” She looked at the words engraved on the silver side. How many teabags, carrots, six A.M. starts had paid for that? For this?
“They must like you.”
“Expect so.” Something in the tone made her look down at Jael. “Don’t parents usually?”
“Not mine.”
Maria waited, stretching one leg and folding it under her again. “Why not?”
“Oh, lots of reasons. No reason, really.” A minor chord, a major, a deeper minor. “But what was it I was on about before?”
“Surnames,” murmured Maria, engrossed in thirteen down.
“Yes, how come I don’t know yours?”
“Murphy.”
“I don’t want to know it, I want to know why I didn’t know it already. Murphy, really? How disappointing.”
“Mmm.”
Jael laid the guitar in her lap and leaned across it menacingly. “Maria bloody Murphy, either you pay me some attention or you’ll get a plectrum somewhere painful.”
She stared over the rim of the paper. “It just never came up in conversation, all right? It’s not that unique as names go; you could have guessed it.”
“The point is, you never tell me anything.”
Maria was trying to be reasonable. She still felt like a visitor here. “What do you want to know?”
Jael leaned back against the sofa and snarled softly. “What do you tell Ruth? I bet she knew your surname weeks ago.”
“Nothing. Just things,” said Maria. Her finger picked at a rough bit of wicker on the chair arm.
“When I came in from the pub the other night, you were gossiping about nuns who used to teach you macramé.”
“That was one sentence. Mostly we hadn’t been talking about anything. It’s nice to just sit, sometimes,” she finished pointedly.
The plectrum Jael was aiming at the handle of the fireguard fell in the coal scuttle. “I promise to sit quietly like a good girl if you’ll talk a bit first.”
Maria’s eyes had strayed to twenty-seven across; the fountain pen bobbed in her hand. “Does separate have an a or an e in the middle?”
“If I tell you, will you tell me something really intimate?”
“Oh, don’t be silly.” Their eyes locked bullishly. “Like what?”
Jael smiled greedily and folded her arms. “Like … your worst nightmare.”
“I don’t really have nightmares,” protested Maria, snapping open the newspaper. Then she laid it across her knees. “Every now and then, though, I dream I’ve chopped my mother’s hands off with an axe.”
“Glory be.” Jael cleared her throat.
“But I’m so used to it, I wouldn’t consider it a nightmare,” added Maria, lifting her pen again. “I think it comes from the time she was chopping tomatoes, and I jumped out from behind the fridge door to say Boo!, and she cut the top off her finger.”
“Well, don’t tell Ruth about it.”
“Why, is she squeamish?”
Jael started picking out the notes of “Jingle Bells.” “No. I just like to know some things she doesn’t.”
“You’re pathetic.”
“That’s me.” The tune sped up, Jael stumbling over the high notes.
“Anyway, is it an e or an a in separate?”
“Haven’t a clue.”
Somehow it was the middle of October. Two weeks too late to start introducing herself to all her fellow students in the canteen. Yvonne talked to her sometimes, and so did Galway, and that was it. There was a lively threesome in her sculpture tutorial that she wouldn’t have minded talking to, but every time she saw them she buried her head in her notebook, having forgotten the names they told her last time and the time before. Besides, what had she to offer them, or them her? It was the same as every guide camp, Gaeltacht, or class party: Maria found herself sitting in the corner, with folded arms and a slightly amused expression, trying to remember if she had chosen to be there. Despite all her resolutions to try a little bit harder this time, hang round the bar more, not let the smile slide off her face, she had ended up more isolated than ever.
Head cushioned on her arms at a library desk, Maria considered the possibility that she was just not a friendly person. No matter how warm she felt on the inside, her skin stayed cool.
No getting maudlin before noon. She stared over the edge of the beige partition. Was that Ruth over in the history shelves, crouched under a leaning tower of hardbacks?
“You can’t be going to read a
ll these by lunchtime,” protested Maria as she relieved her of the top half of the pile.
Ruth scratched her scalp through her black velvet cap. “I’ll just fret over their indexes and take down a few conflicting hypotheses about the causes of the Great Famine. I never seem to actually read books anymore, I just consult them.”
“And carry them,” Maria reminded her, thumping down her load and resting against the sharp edge of the desk. “Better than weight training.”
Ruth put one small desert boot up on the chair to strike a pose, showing off an invisible biceps. “With a body like mine,” she asked in a husky bass, “who needs a history degree?”
“Do you mind?” A pair of steel glasses loomed over the partition. “Some of us are trying to work.”
Ruth’s face shut down. “Sorry,” she said, and the head disappeared.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” whispered Maria, “why didn’t you come to college till now?”
“Don’t spread it round,” said Ruth, sheepish, “but I was a civil servant.”
“Not one of those drones who spells surnames wrong on envelopes?”
“I was that drone.” She began scribbling to get her pen to work. “Three years of earnest dedication to the Irish state.”
Maria sat on the edge of the desk and put her shoe tips up on Ruth’s plastic chair. “Had you, like, a pension and all?”
Ruth leaned back and laughed softly. “God, they breed them right where you come from. The pension was the whole point. My mother nearly had a canary when I told her I was packing in the job. I kept insisting it was a dead end, and all she’d say was, ‘But your pension!’”
“So then you came here.”
“To wake myself up. It was a sort of … quest, you know?” The pen was still dry; she put it down.
“Never been on one myself. And did it work?”
Ruth wrinkled her forehead. “Only sort of. Not the way I had expected, but other ways. All I found out was some people stuff; nothing I could get a grip on.”
“Well, so long as you’re awake, does it matter how you were woken?”
The dark eyes lifted and crinkled at the corners. “I suppose not.” But the books drew her lashes down again. “I’d rather it was a way that would win me a first this June, that’s all.”
“Is that a hint? Should I leave you in peace?”
Ruth leaned her head on her hand briefly; when she looked up, the lines were smoothed away. “Please don’t. In fact, while the sun’s out, why don’t we stack these tomes of wisdom up here—no one’s likely to steal them—and go soak up some vitamin D by the lake.”
Their voices lifted as they moved away from the desks. “I didn’t expect you to be so easily corruptible,” Maria reproached her, holding open the swinging door. “You’re meant to be a scholarly role model for me, as well as mother figure and general mentor.”
Ruth made a loud retching noise, startling a librarian just below them on the escalator. “Why me? Jael’s older, she can be your mother figure.”
“Nah, she can’t cook.”
A heavy sigh from Ruth, as they crossed through the grimy glass tunnel into the arts block. “Everyone could cook if they wanted to, only they pretend it’s a special gift so a few poor suckers have to do it all the time.”
“I honestly can’t. Food doesn’t like me.”
Ruth’s eyes lit up. “Wouldn’t it be gas if you went home for Christmas and dazzled your entire family with pineapple curry and crème caramel!”
But Maria had dropped back to peer at a typewritten notice on the wall. “Hey, do you think I have the makings of a part-time library administrative assistant? Sorry, I missed that last bit.”
“I was saying I bet I could teach you to cook.”
“I swear, my mother’s been trying for years, and I’m a culinary cretin. All I ever liked doing were cake mixes, because you can blame them if anything goes wrong.”
“What could go wrong?” Ruth held the heavy door open for Maria to walk into the sun. It dazzled them, held them on the spot a moment. Then the students following behind jostled them; they shaded their eyes and moved across the courtyard.
“Well, once I did a sponge cake,” continued Maria, “only I forgot the egg, so it came out all pale. I was too mortified to admit my mistake, so my father thought it was the fault of the manufacturers and got Mam to write them an outraged letter.”
“Did you get your money back?”
“Worse,” said Maria. “They sent us twelve packets of the cursed stuff by return post.”
The lake glittered sharply in the afternoon light; they headed for the wooded east side, away from the sprawled couples on the southern bank.
For five or ten minutes they soaked in the white sunshine, without a word. Maria kept waiting for it to feel awkward, but it never did. She sat cross-legged on the concrete edge of the lake and watched an ant haul a piece of crisp into a crack. Red leaves were scattered all along the concrete footpath; as they dried, their sides arched backward, making them sharp as arrows.
“Hey, I’ve thought of another reason why Jael couldn’t be my mentor,” Maria said at last. “She intimidates me.” She threw a handful of the leaves at a nearby duck; they fell short and basked on the surface of the water.
Ruth was leaning against a tree trunk. She nodded, without opening her eyes. “She used to intimidate me too, until I learned how to get under her skin.”
“How’s it done? Will you teach me that instead of cookery?”
“Sure you’d really want to?” asked Ruth lightly. “Under Jael’s skin is not the most comfortable place to be.”
“I thought age was meant to calm people down, but she’s so over the top,” said Maria, crushing a rusty leaf to fragments in her palm. “I mean the other day, right, I found myself snared in some kind of intense ambiguity when as far as I knew we’d been discussing the price of teabags.”
Ruth’s mouth twisted up at one corner. Her eyes were closed against the sunshine.
“You won’t tell her I said any of this, will you?” asked Maria, brushing her hands clean. “She probably thinks I’m a moron anyway.”
White lines made a delicate tracery around Ruth’s eyes. “Don’t mind her slagging,” she murmured. “She only mocks people she thinks highly of.”
“Really?”
“Like I only give cookery lessons to people I think highly of.”
Maria sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. If there was one thing she could not bear, it was the suspicion that someone might think she had been fishing for compliments. There is nothing more juvenile, she told herself. And few things more pathetic than sucking up to a flatmate because you can’t make friends your own age.
“Has Jael been giving you a hard time?” Ruth was watching; her voice was suddenly concerned.
“No, no. I’m sure she just takes a while to get used to.”
“Listen, if she’s ever really—if she makes you feel uncomfortable, tell me.”
“And what’ll you do?” asked Maria cheekily.
“Oh, probably beat her to death with the shower attachment.”
Maria’s hands, suddenly warm, scooped a pile of leaves together on the concrete. “I’m sure I’ll grow out of being scared of her. Suppose you’ve known each other for decades?”
“We only met the spring before last, and we’ve had the flat just over a year.”
“But I presumed you were at school together.”
“No way,” said Ruth in amusement. “Madam went to a posh boarding school. And I haven’t kept any of my pals from the convent. The good girls were boring, and the baddies got pregnant and left early.”
Maria nodded eagerly. “But the baddies were more fun, weren’t they? In primary school I was a good girl. We swapped Chalet School books and went ahead with our mitten patterns during lunch break.”
“Don’t remind me!”
“But then these twins—I can’t remember their names,” Maria began, her forehead crease
d with effort. “Never mind what they were called, all that matters is that they were cool. They stayed back to repeat sixth class, and claimed me for their gang. They wore their socks down around their ankles, and they could roll their tongues into the shape of brandy snaps.”
Ruth sat up, coughing. “You have a lurid imagination, Maria.”
“But it’s true.”
“A lurid memory, then. But why did they want you, what strange anatomical feat could you perform?”
“I think it was because I pretended to know all about what we called the Facts.”
“Mmm, I remember them. Should have been called the Wild Guesses.”
“The Stabs in the Dark,” Maria contributed, then winced and said, “that’s literally what we thought it was. Anyway, these twins dared me to chalk ‘Father Malone has a ginor-mous willy’ on the back wall of the bike shed, and I did.”
“And had he?”
“It was a rough estimate, based on the size of his ego.”
“Well, good for you anyway, you wee vandal.” Ruth smoothed her black wool tights and picked a tiny twig off one knee. “So you became a bad girl?”
“Not for long. Sister Miriam—the head nun—she tried to break us up. She called me over one lunch break and said she didn’t think my mammy would like me to be friends with those twins, they weren’t my sort, and why didn’t I have a chat with Baby Jesus about it and tell him what she said?”
Ruth slapped the concrete. “That’s exactly what our nuns used to say. They must teach it in the novitiate.”
“Thing was, she needn’t have bothered. The gang dumped me after Christmas when they discovered I didn’t know what an erection was.”
“So you palled up with the knitters again?”
“Yeah, except from then on I wore my socks down around my ankles.”
“Speaking of ankles,” murmured Ruth, leaning over, “is that a shaved leg I see before me?”