To compound my annoyance, no one noticed that I had stopped eating. I had expected concern, ‘Rachel, why aren’t you eating?’ But no one said anything. Least of all that stupid old slurpy bastard John Joe.
I couldn’t understand why I was so angry. I’d been feeling red-hot rage on and off all day. As well as wanting to burst into tears. Neither of which were like me. I was a happy-go-lucky person most of the time. I should have been happy because I’d wanted to come to the Cloisters. And I was glad I was there. But maybe I’d be more glad when I’d clapped eyes on a couple of celebrities and perhaps had a little chat with them.
After the chips etc, there was cake. John Joe enjoyed it. They probably heard him in Peru.
But then, while I sat hunched into a ball of tense anger, imagining John Joe being tortured, the brown jumper who had been sitting on my other side got up and Christy appeared in his place. While I went all of a dither he called to Brown Jumper, ‘Brown Jumper’ (or whatever his name was) ‘are you finished? Is it OK if I sit here for a while? I haven’t had a chance to speak to Rachel yet.’ And he sat down as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I immediately wiped John Joe and his chomping from my mind and forced myself to smile brightly.
‘Hello, I’m Chris,’ he said.
His chlorine-bright eyes were so blue they looked as if the light must hurt them.
‘I thought your name was Christy.’ I smiled, in what I hoped was a cheeky, intimate way at him. (Like me, like me!)
‘No, that’s Oliver’s fault.’ (Stalin, I presumed.) ‘He can’t call anyone a name without putting an “ey” on the end.’
Mesmerized, I watched his quirky, beautiful mouth as he asked all the usual questions. Where was I from, what age was I, etc., etc. But I answered with a great deal more enthusiasm than I had in any of the identical conversations I’d had earlier. (‘Yes, haha, it’s a beautiful city. No, you can get most things that you can get here. Except for Kerrygold, hahaha.’)
He smiled at me at lot. It was gorgeous, wryness going on right, left and centre. He’s so cool, I thought in admiration, much cooler than Luke. Luke just thought he was cool and dangerous and living on the edge. But he had nothing on Chris. I mean, Chris was a drug addict. Beat that, Luke Costello!
And while I was all for men being cool, and being drug addicts if needs be, I was middle-class enough to be relieved that Chris was well-spoken and articulate. It turned out he lived about ten minutes from where I’d been brought up.
‘I believe New York is a great place,’ he said. ‘So much to do. Great theatre, great fringe productions.’
I couldn’t have agreed less, but I was happy to overlook it to make him like me.
‘Great!’ I said with pretend enthusiasm. I was in luck because, a couple of months before, I’d gone with Luke and Brigit to this awful ‘interactive installation’. A kind of a play thing that was on in a disused garage in TriBeCa. It had bodypainting and nipple piercing actually live on stage. Although when I say stage, I really mean the piece of greasy floor that the audience weren’t allowed to stand on.
The only reason we’d gone was because Brigit was having dealings with a boy called José. (Pronounced Hose-ay, except Luke and I called him Josie to annoy Brigit.) Josie’s sister was in the play thing so Brigit wanted to curry favour with him by going to see it. She begged Luke and me to come and provide immoral support, she even offered to pay for us. But the thing was so awful we left after half an hour, even Brigit. And went to the nearest bar, got jarred and made up pretend reviews. (‘A pile o’shite,’ ‘Loan the usherette your clothes.’)
I closed my mind to the feelings of loss as I remembered that evening. Instead I dredged up a flattering description of the play for Chris and threw in words like ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘astonishing’ (it was that, all right).
While I was still expounding he stood up and said, ‘I suppose I’d better get on with the tidying. I can’t let the lads down.’
Slightly dazed, I looked around. The inmates were scraping plates and loading them onto a trolley. One of them was tickling the lino with a sweeping brush. Why are they doing it? I wondered in confusion. How come the Cloisters haven’t got a team of lackeys to clean up? And set up, for that matter? Are the inmates really doing it just because they’re nice people?
Well, why not? I demanded of myself. People can be nice, you know. And I shook my head at my lack of faith in human nature. I must have lived in New York too long.
‘Can I do anything to help?’ I asked politely. Although I didn’t mean a word of it. If they had said yes, I would have been highly annoyed, but I knew they wouldn’t. And they didn’t. There was a chorus of ‘no’s and ‘not at all’s. And I was pleased because they obviously sensed that I wasn’t really one of them.
But then, as I ran up to my room to quickly re-do my make-up in honour of whatever happened after tea, I passed the kitchen. Where to my great surprise Misty O’Malley was washing a huge pot. She had to stand on a chair to do it. Although I was sure that she didn’t really have to stand on a chair, she only did it to look cute and dainty.
I was instantly sorry that I hadn’t insisted on helping with the tidying. I never felt that anything I did was right. If I had helped and Misty O’Malley hadn’t, I would have felt like a right sucker. But the other way round, with Misty helping and me skiving, I felt lazy and worthless.
So when I got back I tried wandering aimlessly around with a butter dish until one of the jumpers stopped me.
‘There’s no need for you to do that.’ He gently removed the dish from my happy-to-yield hand.
I was delighted. Beat that, Misty O’Malley!
‘We’ve put you on Don’s team,’ he continued.
I wondered what that meant. Don’s team? I supposed it must be something like Josephine’s group.
‘You’re on breakfasts tomorrow, so I hope you’re good at getting up, it’s a seven o’clock start.’
He was obviously having me on.
‘Ha ha.’ I winked at him gamely. ‘Nice one.’
13
I loitered in the dining-room as the remains of the tea disappeared. Whenever I wasn’t actively involved in doing something, thoughts of Luke overwhelmed me. The pain of his rejection increased from a background hum to acute misery. I needed a distraction and fast. It must be time for the massage and the gym and all that, it really must. I could no longer sit quietly, drinking tea, tormented by the realization that Luke had ditched me, I just couldn’t!
Hysteria rose from the pit of my stomach to contract my throat. Sweat prickled my scalp and I was suddenly propelled into positive action. I found myself on my feet, looking for Mike. Forgetting my earlier reluctance to seem too pally with him, I marched up to him and demanded, in a belligerent fashion, ‘NOW WHAT?’
I managed to stop myself from grabbing the front of his jumper and, in an wild-eyed, out-of-control screech, adding ‘And just in case you were thinking of suggesting it, I’m not drinking any more fucking tea!’
He looked taken aback at my aggressive stance, but just for a moment. Then he smiled easily and said ‘Whatever we want. On Friday nights we’ve no lectures or meetings, so we can do whatever we want.’
‘Like what?’ I asked. Strangely, I found that the great rage had left me breathless.
‘Come on and I’ll take you on a little tour,’ he offered.
I was torn between curiosity and reluctance to spend time with him. But he was already racing out of the room, so, still gasping for breath, I followed him.
First stop was the sitting-room. Like the rest of the place, it was in the middle of being redecorated. But they’d really ripped this room asunder. All the furniture had been moved out except for a couple of threadbare couches and there were lumps of plaster on the carpet which must have fallen down from the ceiling. The windows were being replaced, but in the meantime a bitter wind raided through the room. There was only one person there. I was surprised there was anyone at all, considering the Siberi
an temperatures. When we got closer I saw that it was Davy, the lone gambler. I hadn’t recognized him because he was wearing his coat and a hat with earflaps. He was on the edge of the couch intently watching You Bet Your Life. ‘All of it,’ he muttered at the screen, ‘go on, chance the lot.’
‘What’s on, Davy?’ asked Mike, in an odd singsongy voice.
Davy jumped, he literally jumped, and hurriedly hopped up and turned off the television.
‘Don’t tell anyone, will you?’ he beseeched.
‘I won’t this time,’ said Mike. ‘But for Christ’s sake, be careful, you big eejit.’
I had not the slightest idea what either of them were talking about.
Next stop the Reading Room.
It too was being decorated. Despite that, there was a good number of the inmates there. Even though it was called the Reading Room, they were all writing. What were they writing? I wondered. Letters? But why would writing a letter make them slap the table with despair and shout ‘I can’t do this’? Because that was what they were all doing. I was only there for about three seconds and in that time at least five of them slapped the table. A few more crumpled pieces of paper into balls and flung them at the wall. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke and desperation. I was relieved to leave.
‘And now,’ said Mike, ‘for the best bit.’
My heart leapt, chasing away the last few wisps of anger. What was he about to show me? The gym? The celebrity wing? The swimming pool?
His bedroom actually.
He dragged me up the stairs and threw open a door and said ‘The piece de resistance.’ He didn’t even attempt a French accent. He just wasn’t that kind of man.
Now that my anger had receded I was left with feelings of shame and a desire to be very nice. That was the usual sequence of events. So, while I might have drawn the line at giving him a blow job if that was why he’d taken me up there – I didn’t feel that guilty – I was more than prepared to stick my head round the door and compliment his room to the hilt.
And I could hardly believe what I saw! It looked as if there had been a competition to see how many single beds you could fit into one room. It was crammed with beds. Packed. Each bed was in contact with at least one other.
‘Nice and intimate, isn’t it?’ Mike asked drily.
I laughed. I thought he was funny. Although I would still have laughed even if I didn’t think he was.
‘Come on, let’s go back downstairs,’ said Mike after I had used every compliment I knew to describe his room.
‘No, show me the rest of the place,’ I protested.
‘Ah no,’ he said, ‘it’s dark and cold outside now. I’ll show you tomorrow’
The gym and pool and sauna must be in a separate building, I realized. So back down we traipsed. Back to the dining-room, where about ten of them were still sitting. Still drinking tea, still heaping spoonfuls of sugar into their mugs, still lighting cigarette after cigarette.
They loved the dining-room, it seemed to be some sort of spiritual home. With a sinking heart, I finally admitted to myself that these men probably never went to the gym. They probably never even left the dining-room. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that they slept there. None of them gave a damn about their bodies or the way they looked, that was glaringly obvious.
Except for Chris. He had disappeared, and I was willing to bet I knew where he was.
While I sat there I began to feel – there was no getting away from it – depressed. The yellow walls were getting to me, the tea-drinking was wearing me down, even though it wasn’t me that was doing it. And thoughts of Luke were back in my head. The glamour that I was depending on to take my mind off him remained tantalizingly out of sight.
I tried to cheer myself up by asking Oliver, the man with the Stalin moustache, where he was from. Only because I wanted him to say that he was a ‘Born and bread and butthered Dublin man’. And, when he replied ‘Dublin, I’m a Dublin man. Born and bread and butthered’, it lifted my spirits, but only for a moment.
This wasn’t the way I’d expected it to be, I thought with acute sadness.
Just as it occurred to me, accompanied by a violent lurch of my stomach, that there might be two Cloisters, and that I was in the wrong one, Clarence came in. His face was bright red, his sparse hair was wet and he was grinning fit to burst.
‘Where were you?’ Peter asked, with a forced bark of laughter that made me itch to pour a cup of boiling tea all over him.
‘Beyond in the sauna,’ said Clarence.
With those words my heart leapt with joy. And, I had to admit, relief. Now that I had proof, my fears seemed silly. Laughable even.
‘How did you get on?’ Mike asked.
‘Great!’ said Clarence. ‘Just great.’
‘Wasn’t it your first time?’ someone asked.
‘Yes,’ he said. And it went grand, so it did. I feel really good after it.’
‘And well you might,’ said someone else. ‘Fair play to you.’
‘It feels lovely to get rid of those impurities, doesn’t it?’ I asked, eager to be a part of this.
‘Don’t talk to me about impurities,’ laughed Clarence. ‘Sure, I hadn’t a clean pair of jocks to my name.’
Ah, Jesus! I recoiled in disgust. Ugh! I was revolted. What did he have to mention his jocks for. I’d gone right off him. Which was a pity, seeing as I had just started to like him.
Clarence sat down and the conversation returned to whatever it had been before he arrived. I suddenly felt very, very sleepy and unable to concentrate on what the men were saying. All I could hear was the murmur of their voices, rising and falling, as conversation waxed and waned. It reminded me of when I was a little girl and used to stay in Granny Walsh’s cottage in Clare. In the stillness of the evenings there were constant visitors, who quietly came and went, sat around the turf fire, drank tea and chatted into the small hours. Our bedroom was just off the main room and my sisters and I would fall asleep to the murmuring voices of the local men who came to visit Granny. (No, she wasn’t a prostitute.)
Now, as the waves of mostly rural, mostly men’s voices washed over me, I began to feel drowsy in the same way as I did back then.
I wanted to go to bed but I was paralysed by the fear that I would draw attention to myself if I stood up and said goodnight. I had made a big mistake by ever sitting down.
I’d always hated being tall. So much so that when I was twelve, and my sister Claire told me in tones of delighted horror, ‘Mum’s going to talk to you about The Curse,’ I thought she meant that Mum wanted to talk to me about my height.
Although strangely enough, only about two months after she gave me my ‘Introduction to Periods’ talk (which included the sub-speech ‘Tampons are the work of Satan’), Mum took me aside for another mother-daughter chat. This time it really was about my height and the fact that I hunched over so badly I was almost folded in two.
‘Stand up, come on now, don’t be like a tree over a blessed well,’ she said briskly. ‘Shoulders back, head up. God made you tall, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.’
Of course she didn’t believe a word of it. Even though she herself was tall, she thought that being twelve years old and five foot seven was freakish enough to deserve my own page in The Guinness Book of Records. But I mumbled ‘OK’ and promised that I’d try.
‘No walking along inspecting the footpath,’ she warned. ‘Walk tall!’ That sent her into a bout of what sounded like hysterical giggles. ‘Sure, what other way could you walk?’ she snorted and bolted from the room while I stared after her in bewilderment. She couldn’t have been laughing at me, could she? I mean, my own mother…?
As soon as she had gone, Claire burst into the room and grabbed me. ‘Come here,’ she said urgently. ‘Don’t listen to a word she says.’
I hero-worshipped Claire who, at sixteen, seemed outrageously glamorous. Naturally, I believed everything she told me.
‘Don’t walk tall,’ she urged, ‘don’
t hold your head up.’
‘Not,’ she added ominously, ‘if you ever want a boy friend.’
Well, of course I wanted a boyfriend, I wanted that more than anything in the whole world, even more than a rara skirt or a pair of tukka boots, so I listened to what she had to tell me.
‘They won’t go near you if you’re taller than them,’ she advised. I nodded solemnly. She was so wise! ‘In fact, unless you’re a lot shorter than them, they don’t like it. It makes them feel threatened,’ she finished darkly.
‘Short and stupid,’ she summed-up. ‘They like that. That’s their favourite.’
So I had taken Claire’s advice to heart. And I found it to be true. In fact Claire would have been well-advised to heed her own words. I was convinced that Claire’s marriage had broken up simply because when she wore high heels, she was the same height as James. His ego just wasn’t able for it.
14
And so to bed. Cue: yawns, outstretched arms, rubbing of knuckles into eyes, smacking lips and muttering ‘Myum, myum, myum’, putting on a fleece-lined, Care Bears nightshirt and snuggling under the weight of a protective duvet to gratefully receive twelve hours of restoring, healing, happy sleep.
Fat chance!
Or if you prefer, Me arse!
There was a shock in store for me when I slumped into my room, all set to fling myself on the bed and not take off my make-up. (A special treat, the not-taking-off-my-make-up one, reserved for evenings of particular exhaustion. Or inebriation, of course.) To my dismay, I found Chaquie already in the bedroom. Dammit, I’d forgotten about her.
She was sitting on her bed, elegant ankles crossed, as she gave herself what appeared to my untutored eye to be a manicure. I had never needed a manicure to tidy up my nails. My life-long habit of biting them to the quick did just as well.
‘Oh, hello,’ I said nervously. Would I have to talk to her…?
‘Hello, Rachel.’
Apparently I would.
‘Come in and sit down.’ She patted her bed invitingly. ‘My heart went out to you at dinner, sitting next to that disgusting animal, John Joe. The noises that come out of that man. He must eat with the pigs at home.’