We turned to each other with disgusted expressions. ‘The cheek of him,’ we nodded vigorously. ‘The cheek of him.’
I looked at Shake and he looked at me and we both said, ‘The cheek of him!’
Brigit turned to Joey and Joey turned to Brigit and they both exclaimed ‘The cheek of him!’
Luke and Johnno looked aghast and said in unison ‘The cheek of him!’
Melinda looked at Tamara and Tamara raised her eyebrows at Melinda and Melinda said ‘We must remember to buy some milk on the way home.’
‘Gaz, man,’ said Luke, when the hue and cry had died down slightly. ‘I keep telling you, man, you can’t go round saying things like that about the ladies, it’s not what a gendeman does.’
Gaz was puzzled and annoyed. ‘What have I done?’ he demanded.
‘You’re insulting her by talking that way about her,’ explained Luke gently.
‘I’m not insulting her,’ said Gaz hotly. ‘She was a great ride.’
‘Are you anything like your big sister?’ he asked, moving perceptibly closer to me.
6
I enjoyed talking to the Real Men. In New York I found it so hard to get men to show any interest in me that it was balm to the ego to be the centre of some male attention. Even if you wouldn’t touch said males with a ten-foot pole. In fact, Brigit and I were so popular that Melinda marched off in a huff, wriggling her six-year-old-child’s bum. The lucky bitch! Then Tamara flounced off a second later, looking as though her legs might break.
‘The blonde leading the blonde,’ I remarked. Which had everyone in stitches. Like I said, I hadn’t thought any of them were Einstein.
‘Poor Tamara,’ I continued. ‘She must have a terrible sex life.’
They all demanded ‘Why?’ Fair enough, as at least three of the lads present were responsible for Tamara’s horizontal fun.
‘Because,’ I explained, ‘Tamara never comes.’
Luke, Shake, Joey and Johnno nearly had to be hospitalized. Gaz looked bewildered and bleated plaintively ‘What does she mean?’ until Luke, doubled over with laughter, took him aside and explained it to him.
Eventually, the time came to say goodbye to the boys. It had been a pleasant interlude, but Brigit and I were on a mission. There were too many chiselled hunks in that room for us to be wasting time talking to this crowd of hairy eejits, nice and all as they were.
But just as I was about to slip my moorings, Luke remarked to me, ‘When I was nine, I wouldn’t have dared dress up as Johnny Rotten. I was more likely to have gone as Mother Teresa.’
‘Why’s that?’ I asked politely
‘I was an altar-boy then and I wanted to be a priest.’
With his words, a youthful memory ignited in my head.
‘That’s funny, when I was nine I wanted to be a nun,’ I burst out, before I could stop myself.
Straightaway, I was sorry I’d said anything. After all, this wasn’t something I was proud of. On the contrary, it was something I had kept well hidden and that I wished had never happened.
‘Is that right?’ Luke gave a big, amused smile. ‘Isn’t that a blast, altogether? I thought I was the only one.’
His relaxed attitude, as if it wasn’t something to be ashamed of, mollified me.
‘So did I,’ I admitted.
He smiled again, drawing me into an intimate little circle of identification. I felt a flower of interest begin to unfurl within me, and I decided not to leave just yet.
‘How bad did it get for you?’ he urged. ‘Because I don’t think you could have got any worse than me. Would you believe I was actually sorry that Catholicism wasn’t still banned because I would have loved to have been martyred? I used to fantasize about being boiled in oil.’
‘I used to draw pictures of myself covered in arrows,’ I admitted, on the one hand amazed at how bizarre my behaviour had been and on the other remembering how real and important it had seemed at the time.
‘Not only that,’ Luke said, his eyes twinkling at the memory, ‘but I was into mortification of the flesh, tying stuff too tightly on me, and all that. Sort of like, Junior S and M, you know?’ He cocked a questioning eyebrow at me, and I smiled encouragingly.
‘Only I couldn’t find any ropes in the garage, so I had to steal the cord of my mother’s dressing-gown and knot it round my waist. I had a couple of days of good, purifying agony until my brother found out and accused me of being a transvestite.’
I found myself drawing nearer to Luke, as I wondered how other people dealt with scornful older siblings.
‘Did he really?’ I asked, intrigued. ‘And then what happened?’
‘I suppose I should have done the decent thing,’ he said thoughtfully.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘Pray for him?’
‘No! Head-butt the fucker.’
I burst out laughing in surprise.
‘But instead I made a great show of turning the other cheek, then I said I’d do a novena with his name on it. The joys of a Catholic childhood.’
I laughed and laughed.
‘I was an awful eejit, wasn’t I, Rachel?’ He invited me, with a charming, disarming smile.
I liked the way he said my name. And I decided to wait a while longer before cruising the room. I discreedy shifted so that I was in a corner, with Luke facing me. That way, no one who mattered could see me.
‘Why do you think?’ I asked awkwardly. ‘Why did we want something so peculiar? Could it have been incipient puberty? Hormones gone haywire?’
‘Could have been,’ he agreed, as I searched his face for answers. ‘Although maybe we were a bit young. I think with me it had something to do with having just moved house and having no friends.’
‘Me too.’
‘You’d just moved house?’
‘No.’
We looked at each other for a few bemused seconds. He didn’t know whether to feel sorry for me, or to laugh or to offer advice. Then, luckily, we both laughed, holding each other’s eyes, united by the laughter, encircled by it.
And for the next couple of hours Luke had me in hysterics. He told me about an Indian restaurant on Canal Street where he said he had a curry so hot he swore he went blind in one eye for three days. Talk of food led to the revelation that, like me, Luke was a vegetarian. That opened up an entire new pasture of shared experience, and we talked at length about how vegetarians were discriminated against and not taken seriously. And we enthusiastically told great stories of Times I Was Nearly Forced To Eat Meat.
Luke took the biscuit with a tale of a guest-house in County Kerry where he asked for a vegetarian breakfast and the plate arrived with the best part of a cooked pig draped seductively across it, almost grinning up at him.
‘So what happened?’ I asked gleefully.
‘I said to Mrs O’Loughlin “Woman of the house, didn’t I say I’m a vegetarian?”’
‘And what did she say?’ I asked, thoroughly enjoying myself.
‘She said “You did, alanna, you did. And what’s up?”’
‘So what did you say?’ I joyously fed Luke his lines.
‘I said “Rashers, missus, is what’s up.”’
‘And what did she say?’
‘She nearly burst into tears and said, “But it’s not right, and you a growing lad, to be only ating a few oul’ musharoons and four or five oul’ eggs. What harm can a rasher or two do?”’
We energetically threw our eyes heavenward and tisked and pshawed and felt great.
We complained for a bit about how people overcon-sumed protein anyway, and how alfalfa sprouts were a much-maligned foodstuff and were actually a wonderful source of everything.
‘What more do we need?’ I demanded rhetorically. ‘Only alfalfa sprouts?’
‘Exactly,’ Luke agreed. ‘An adult male can survive on a handful of alfalfa sprouts every couple of months.’
‘Cars can run on them,’ I pointed out.
‘Not only that,’ I went a step further. ‘But alfalfa sprou
ts give you X-ray vision, superhuman strength and… and… let’s see…’
‘A glossy coat and tail,’ Luke offered.
‘That’s right.’
‘And the secret of the universe.’
‘Exactly,’ I smiled. I thought he was great, I was great, alfalfa sprouts were great.
‘It’s a shame they taste so horrible,’ I added.
‘Isn’t it?’ he nodded.
I tripped over myself to match Luke hilarious anecdote for hilarious anecdote. He had a marvellous turn of phrase and did a great line in accents so that one minute he was a Mexican bandit, the next a Russian president, the next an overweight Kerry policeman making an arrest.
He seemed to exist in vivid colour in a world of black and white.
And I, too, was at my entertaining best because I was totally relaxed. Not just because massive amounts of alcohol had been ingested, but because I didn’t fancy Luke.
In the same way that I never felt nervous with a gay man, no matter how extravagantly good-looking he was, I just couldn’t take Luke or his pals seriously as potential boyfriend material. Try as I might, I simply could not make myself blush or become a brain-dead mute or pull my wallet out of my bag only to find it was a folded sanitary towel or run my fingers through my hair leaving a false nail trapped in it or try to pay for a round of drinks with a phonecard or any of the other things I did as a matter of course when I fancied a fella.
It’s tremendously liberating when you don’t fancy someone because you don’t have to try and make them fancy you.
With Luke, I was able to be myself.
Whatever that was.
Not that he was bad – looking. He had nice dark hair, well, it would have been nice if he’d had it cut properly. And he had twinkly eyes and a very animated, mobile face.
I told him all about my family because, for some reason, people found that amusing. I told him about my poor father, the only man among six women. How he’d wanted to move to a hotel when my mother’s menopause arrived on the same day as Claire’s puberty.
How he’d bought a cat to try and even the sexes up, only to discover that the cat wasn’t a male. And how he’d sat at the bottom of the stairs and wept ‘Even the shagging cat is a girl.’
Luke laughed so much I thought he deserved to be told about the school trip to Paris I’d gone on when I was fifteen. How the tour bus got caught in a traffic jam in the Pigalle and the nuns who were guarding us nearly had apoplexy at their proximity to neon signs advertising totally nude bars.
‘You know the sort of thing,’ I told Luke. ‘ “Girls, girls, girls, in their pelt!” ’
‘I’ve heard such things exist, all right,’ he said, his eyes wide with contrived innocence. ‘Although of course, I’ve never actually seen them.’
‘Of course.’
‘So what did the good sisters do?’
‘First they went round and closed the curtains on the bus.’
‘You’re joking!’ Luke looked stunned.
‘And then…’ I said slowly, ‘You’re not going to believe what happened next.’
‘What happened next?’
‘Sister Canice stood in the aisle and, all business, announced “Right girls, the Sorrowful Mysteries; first, The Agony in The Garden. Our father who art in heav – Rachel Walsh, come away from that window! – who art in heaven…” ’
Luke choked, in hysterics. ‘They made you say the rosary!’
‘You can see it, can’t you,’ I said, making him laugh even more. ‘Forty fifteen-year-old girls and five nuns, on a bus in a traffic jam in the red-light district of Paris, with the curtains closed, intoning the fifteen decades of the rosary.
‘That,’ I said solemnly to his red, shiny-with-laughter face, ‘is a true story’
Like a magnet, Luke drew lots of me to the surface, so that I told him things I’d never tell a man that I fancied.
Somehow, I even let slip that I kept The Collected Works of Patrick Kavanagh by my bed. As soon as I’d said it, I wished I hadn’t. I knew what was cool to read and what wasn’t.
‘Not because I’m a clever clogs,’ I hastened to tell him. ‘But I like to read something and my attention span is only long enough to concentrate on something short like a poem.’
‘I know what you mean,’ he said, giving me a wary look. ‘There’s no problem trying to remember plot developments or different characters with a poem.’
‘I think you’re humouring me.’ I smiled.
‘There’s nothing wrong with reading poetry,’ he insisted.
‘You wouldn’t say that if you had my sisters,’ I said ruefully, then I made a scrunched-up face so that he’d laugh.
Now and then, the others interrupted and tried to join in with funny stories of their own, but it was no contest, really. No one was as funny as Luke or I. At least that was what Luke and I thought and we gave each other knowing looks as Gaz laboured to tell us about the time his brother nearly choked on a Rice Krispie. Or was it a Frostie? No wait, it might have been a Weetabix. Not a whole Weetabix, couldn’t have been a whole Weetabix, although maybe again it was…
All the others, including Brigit, did at least one trip to the bar to get drinks for everyone, but Luke and I didn’t. We ignored Gaz as he called, time after time, ‘Your shout, you stingy bollix.’ (Eventually Joey managed to make him understand that the drinks were free and he shut up.)
Meanwhile, Luke and I were so busy out-hilariousing each other that, when our drinks were pressed into our gesticulating hands, we barely noticed. We hardly even heard the several mutters of ‘You could at least have said thanks.’
I just kept thinking to myself, he’s so nice. He’s so funny.
He launched into another story ‘So, Rachel, there I was, wearing one of my mother’s flowery skirts…’ (He had broken his leg.) ‘And who do I meet, only my ex-girlfriend…’
‘Not the one who caught you and Shake tying each other up?’ I exclaimed. (They had been practising knots, not indulging in bondage.)
‘The very same,’ said Luke. ‘And she looked at me and shook her head and said “Now it’s women’s clothes. You’re one sick bastard, Luke Costello.” ’
‘And what did you say?’ I gasped.
‘I decided to go for broke, so I said to her “I suppose a ride is out of the question?” ’
‘Any luck?’
‘She threatened to break my other leg.’
That had me in hysterics. All in all, I was delighted with my new friend.
Of course, I realized, I’d have to do something about the way he looked. What would people think of me if I was seen with the likes of him? I wondered. Wasn’t it a pity? Because if he didn’t dress like such a fool he could nearly be attractive.
I found myself discreedy checking out his body, flicking my eyes away from his face and back again, really fast, so that he wouldn’t notice what I was doing. And I had to say that, while leather trousers are rather unsubtle, there was no denying that he had tall, strong legs and… I waited for him to turn slightly to accept another drink from Joey, so that I could get a good look… a very cute bum. I found myself thinking that if, just say, I was a Rock Chick and if, let’s pretend, I was looking for a mate, then he’d be a good one to pick.
After ages of non-stop mirth, there was a small let-up in the talk. The hum of the outside world broke through the magic circle that Luke and I had drawn round ourselves.
Out of the corner of my ear I heard Johnno calling to Brigit, ‘Hey, The Brigit of Madison County, get cigarettes as well.’
‘Isn’t it funny,’ Luke remarked, ‘how this is the first time we’ve ever spoken to each other?’
‘I suppose.’ I smiled.
‘Because I’ve been watching you for a long time, you know,’ he said, holding my eyes for far longer than was necessary.
‘Have you?’ I simpered, as my brain screamed, He fancies me, one of the Real Men fancies me, what a blast! I wondered how soon I could tell Brigit so that we could la
ugh our heads off about it.
‘So tell me,’ he said confidentially, ‘what it is you and Brigit find so funny about me and my friends?’
I could have died. That lovely, warm feeling ebbed away at high speed. He didn’t fancy me at all, how could I have thought he did? Even though my emotions were well upholstered by the twenty Seabreezes I’d had, I stammered and blushed.
‘Because I’ve seen you, you know,’ he said. He didn’t sound half as friendly, all of a sudden. He didn’t look it either.
He was like a different person, grim and annoyed. One worthy of respect.
I dropped my eyes and found that I was looking at his midriff. His white T-shirt had worked its way free of his waistband and I could see his flat, tanned stomach and the line of black hair that led down to his…
Quickly, my heart beating fast, I looked up again and met his eyes. He glanced down, at where I’d just been looking, then held my gaze again. We stared at each other in silence. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. Then suddenly lust just exploded within me.
In an instant, Luke ceased to be a figure of fun. I didn’t give a damn about his unfashionable haircut or his stupid clothes. Everything about him, including his tight trousers and, more importantly, their contents, had become inexplicably and unbearably sexy. I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted to drag him away from the Rickshaw Rooms. I wanted him to throw me in a taxi and tear my clothes off. I wanted him to fling me on a bed and fuck me.
He must have felt the same because, although I don’t know who made the first move, one moment we were staring angrily at each other and the next his mouth was on mine. For a second cool and gentle, then hot and sweet and hard.
My head swam with shock and pleasure. Christ, was I glad I had come tonight! His arms were around me and underneath the hair at the back of my neck, his fingers on the sensitive skin sent desire racing through me. I slid my arms around his waist and pulled his body close to me. With a shock I realized that the hard thing against my stomach was his erection. I soared as I realized that I wasn’t imagining this. He fancied me as much as I fancied him. This was real.
He pulled my hair and tilted my head back. It hurt and I loved it. He scraped his stubble along my face and bit the side of my mouth. I nearly fainted.