‘I would,’ said John Joe. He seemed to find it hard to talk. By the look of things there hadn’t been much call for it in his life until now.
‘I can’t hear you, John Joe,’ said Josephine. ‘Louder. Tell me who had a drink.’
‘I had.’
‘Louder.’
‘I had.’
‘Louder.’
‘I HAD.’
John Joe was distressed and was shaking at the exertion of having used his vocal chords so much.
‘Own your actions, John Joe,’ barked Josephine. ‘You did them, so say you did them.’
Watch how she tries to break them down, I thought with interest. How cruel. I had to admit that I’d underestimated Josephine. She was not so much Micky Rooney as Dennis Hopper.
Although you wouldn’t catch her getting the better of me. I wouldn’t react to whatever she said to me, I’d just stay calm. Anyway she had nothing on me. I didn’t drink two bottles of brandy a day and I never sold cattle without telling my brother.
Josephine pressed John Joe hard, firing questions at him about his childhood, about his relationship with his mother, all the usual stuff, I would imagine. But trying to get information out of him was like trying to get blood out of a turnip. He was all shrugs and ‘Yerra’s and not too many hard facts.
‘Why didn’t you ever get married, John Joe?’ she demanded.
More shrugs, more gentle smiles.
‘I s’pose I just never got round to it,’ he said.
‘Did you ever have a girlfriend, John Joe?’
‘Yerra, I might have had one or two,’ he admitted.
‘Was it ever serious?’
‘Sure, it was and it wasn’t.’ John Joe shrugged. (Again!)
He was starting to irritate me now. Couldn’t he just tell Josephine why he hadn’t got married. There was bound to be a good Irish economic explanation. Perhaps the farm wouldn’t have been viable if it was divided between him and his brother, or he had to wait until his mother died before he could marry his sweetheart because he couldn’t have two red-headed women under the one (thatched) roof. (This one seemed to be a common problem in rural Ireland, cropping up again and again in agrarian folklore. I had spent a summer in Galway once, I knew about these things.)
On and on whittled Josephine, asking questions that were ever more brazen. ‘Were you ever in love?’
And finally she asked ‘Did you ever lose your virginity?’
There was a collective intake of breath. How could she ask such a thing?
And was there really a chance that he hadn’t?
A man of his age?
But John Joe wasn’t telling. He gazed steadfastly at his boots.
‘Let me put it another way,’ Josephine pressed on. ‘Did you ever lose your virginity to a woman?’
What was she implying? That John Joe had lost his virginity to a sheep?
John Joe sat as if made of stone.
The rest of us were much the same. I held my breath.
The voyeuristic thrill was nearly cancelled out by the feeling that I was trespassing. The silence stretched on for ever. Until eventually Josephine said ‘Right, time’s up.’
The disappointment was huge. How awful to be kept hanging on a thread. It was like a soap opera only worse, because it was real.
As we all filed out my head was racing. I caught up with Mike.
‘What was that all about?’
‘God knows.’
‘When will we find out?’
‘We’ve got group again on Monday.’
‘Oh no! I can’t wait’
‘Look.’ He sounded annoyed. ‘It mightn’t mean anything. It’s just a ploy. Josephine asks all kinds of questions in the hope that one of them touches a nerve. She casts her nets widely.’
But I wasn’t buying it. I was used to the dénouement of soap operas.
‘Oh come on…’ I said scornfully, but I was talking to the air. I was annoyed to find that Mike had gone over to John Joe who looked shocked and shaken.
11
Now what happens? I wondered eagerly. Now do we go for the massages? I watched the others intently, anticipation zinging my nerve endings, to see where they were going. Down the corridor, round the corner and… oh no!… back to the dining-room. Everyone from Josephine’s group and the other groups poured in and commenced to drink tea, talk loudly and smoke cigarettes with gusto. Maybe they were just having a quick cup before rushing to their session in the sauna? Maybe.
I sat down, perched on the edge of my chair, and refused a cup of tea. I didn’t want to be dying to go to the loo during my aromatherapy session. My eyes darted anxiously from one cup of tea to another. Come on, I urged silently, drink them quickly! Otherwise, it’ll be dinner time and we won’t have long enough for a massage worth talking about. But the tea was consumed with excruciating slowness. I felt like frantically grabbing the cups and drinking it for them.
Then, as they drained the dregs in unbearably relaxed fashion, I was aghast to see them languidly pick up a teapot and pour a second cup which they sipped with lazy enjoyment.
OK, I reasoned nervously, maybe after the second cup?
But as the minutes ticked by and the second cups were sipped and cigarettes were lit and then, the dreaded third cups were poured, I reluctantly admitted that they all looked as if they’d settled in for a long stay. Maybe after tea was when it all happened?
Of course, I could just ask someone and find out for sure.
But somehow I wasn’t able to.
Perhaps I was afraid that the ordinary clients like Mike and John Joe would think I was shallow if I seemed too concerned with the luxury treatments or where the celebrities were housed? In fact, I realized, they were probably expecting me to ask about them. They were probably sick of people arriving and saying dismissively ‘Get out of my way, I’m off to sit in the seaweed bath with the likes of Hurricane Higgins.’
Well, I’d pretend that I was perfectly happy to sit and drink tea with them for all eternity. That way they were bound to like me. I’d be here for two months, I calmed myself, plenty of time.
I looked around the table. They were still at it, heaping spoonfuls of sugar into cups and knocking back tea and remarking on how nice it was. How sad for them.
‘Don’t you smoke?’ asked a man’s voice. I was alarmed to discover that it belonged to Vincent, Mr Angry.
‘No,’ I said nervously. At least, not cigarettes.
‘Given up, have you?’ He moved closer to me.
‘Never started.’ I shrank back. Oh, how I wished he would go away! I didn’t want to be friends with him. He scared me, with his black beard and his big teeth. Lupine, that was the word to describe him, if lupine meant wolf like.
‘You’ll be on sixty a day by the time you leave here,’ he promised me with a nasty grin and a whiff of BO. (‘Oh Vincent, what a big smell you’ve got.’)
I looked around for Mike to protect me but there was no sign of him.
I turned my back on Vincent as much as I could without seeming rude and found myself face to face with strange Clarence. Out of the frying pan into the fire. Although I was afraid there would be a repeat of the hair-stroking incident, I reluctantly spoke to him.
I suddenly realized that I’d been there a whole afternoon and the thought of a drug hadn’t even crossed my mind. Hadn’t even occurred to me! Which gave me a warm, self-satisfied glow which lasted while I had a succession of identical conversations with nearly every man in the place. They all wanted to corner me and find out everything about me. All except the good-looking one I’d seen at the lunch table. Because I would have actually liked to talk to him, he totally ignored me.
Well, to be fair, he wasn’t even in the room.
I related my background countless times in the space of a couple of hours. I said over and over again, ‘My name is Rachel. I’m twenty-seven. I’m not an anorexic, but thank you for asking, naturally I’m flattered. No, I haven’t always been this tall, I was slightl
y shorter the day I was born. I’ve lived in New York for the past two and a half years. I was in Prague before that…’
‘Where’s Prague?’ John Joe asked. ‘Is it in Tipperary?’
‘Jeee-zus.’ Clarence sucked his teeth and shook his head in disgust. ‘Did you hear him? “Is it in Tipperary?” You big thick.
‘Doesn’t everyone know,’ he added, ‘that it’s in Sligo.’
I was sorry I’d let slip that I’d once lived in Prague because at the mention of it everyone always became excited and it was no different in the Cloisters. Say to anyone, anywhere, ‘I’ve lived in Prague,’ and brace yourself to be asked questions. Three questions. The. Same. Three. Questions. Always, It was unbearable. Whenever I came home from Prague on my holidays, I was a woman on the edge, tensed against hearing The Three Questions one more time. In the end what I wanted to do was, anytime Prague was mentioned, to circulate a photocopied sheet of paper, that said ‘One: yes, you’re right, Prague is beautiful. Two: no, actually, the shops are much better now, you can get most things that you can get over here. Although not Kerrygold, of course, ha ha ha.’ (The Kerrygold question was the one that really, really annoyed me. And if it wasn’t Kerrygold it was Barrys tea.) ‘Three: yes, you really should get there before the Yanks have the place taken over.’
Talking about Prague always reminded me of what a philistine I was. I was ashamed that, even though Prague was beautiful and atmospheric, I hadn’t been comfortable there. Too wholesome, outdoorsy and undebauched for me. If there had been slightly less of the weekend skiing and hill walking and a bit more of the staying out till dawn in a succession of clubs, I might have liked it more.
As I was being quizzed by Eddie, the man with the bright red face, about the price of everything in Prague, the good-looking man came into the dining-room.
‘Here’s Christy,’ shouted a man with a luxuriant head of black hair and a huge Stalin moustache that strangely enough was grey. He pronounced it ‘Chreeeeeeeeesty’ thus letting me know that he was a salt-of-the-earth, dyed-in-the-wool, born-and-bread-and-butthered (as he would have said) Dublin man. Christy sat down a couple of places away from me. This threw me into such excited confusion that I lost my conversational thread and told Eddie that beer was much dearer in Prague than in Ireland. Which, of course, it wasn’t. He looked very surprised, and stepped up his interrogation.
‘Vodka?’ he demanded.
‘What about it?’
‘Dearer or cheaper?’
‘Cheaper.’
‘Whiskey?’
‘Dearer.’
‘Bacardi?’
‘Ah… cheaper, I think.’
‘But why would Bacardi be cheaper and whiskey be dearer?’ he demanded.
I just ummed and ahhed vaguely. I was too busy giving Christy a thorough, if sidelong examination. I had been right. He was good-looking. Even outside the Cloisters he would be. He had blue eyes that burned with brightness and pale colour, as if he’d been swimming in over-chlorinated water.
A little voice protested that it still preferred Luke, but I immediately silenced it. I intended to fancy this Christy whether I liked it or not. I was desperate to wipe out the hurt that Luke had caused and what better way than to become fixated on someone else? It was just random good fortune that Christy was so attractive I couldn’t take my eye off him. (I could only spare one because Eddie was such a demanding conversationalist.)
I stared sidelong at Christy as he talked energetically to the Stalin-moustache man. Christy had my favourite type of mouth, a Dave Allen one.
(Dave Allen was a dissipated raconteur whom I used to watch in the late seventies. My father regularly entertains people, i.e. bores them comatose, by telling them about how I used to scream my head off to be allowed to stay up to watch Dave Allen on telly.)
(I was twenty-five.)
(I was only joking about that last bit.)
Anyway, a Dave Allen mouth is a great thing on a man. It’s an unusual mouth, because it looks as if it’s slightly too big for the face that it belongs to. But in a highly appealing way. A quirky mouth, whose corners turn up or down as if they have a life of their own. People blessed with Dave Allen mouths always look slightly wry.
I continued giving Chris the discreet once over. Even his hair was nice. Wheat-coloured, and cut well.
Despite his mobile, quirky mouth, he looked like a man, one you could depend on. Not one that you could depend on to not ring you, the other kind of dependable, the ‘I’ll get you out of a burning building’ kind.
I thought he was gorgeous, except, of course, for his height. When he stood up to reach the teapot from further along the table, I saw that he wasn’t much taller than me. Which was a disappointment, but one I was familiar with.
But despite that, there was some very pleasing body action going on. He was thin. Not in a pale, concave, weedy, toast-rack-for-ribs, baguettes-for-thighs kind of way. Lean would be a better word to describe him. His sleeves were shoved up and he had strong-looking forearms that I wanted to touch. And he had great legs. They were a tiny bit shorter than would be considered ideal. Which was fine by me. If I thought a man was good-looking, the addition of shortish legs pushed him into the realm of very sexy. I wasn’t sure why. It might have had something to do with an indication of sturdiness.
Or the suggestion of a thick willy. Even though I knew I was supposed to love them, I wasn’t wild about men with very long legs. They were the caviar of the leg world. In other words, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Men with lanky legs often put me in mind of giraffes and ballerinas and general effeminatry.
Christy was in no way effeminate.
I suddenly understood why they’d always made such a song and dance about Corpus Christy at Mass. Now that I’d experienced it first-hand, I certainly wouldn’t ever again have any objections getting on my knees for it… but that was enough of that kind of talk. With a pang of loneliness, I realized that I missed Brigit, I missed Luke, I missed having someone to talk dirty with.
I wrenched my mind away from Luke and back to Christy and his body.
Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, my mind wandering, if something happened with me and Christy. If we fell in love. And if he came back to New York with me and we met Luke. And if Luke was gutted, and found out that he really loved me and begged me to leave Christy. And I’d get to say something horrible to Luke like ‘I’m sorry, Luke, but I’ve found out how shallow you are. What Christy and I have is real…’
I’d just got to the bit where Luke tried to hit Christy and Christy caught Luke’s arm and said with great pity ‘Come on, man, she doesn’t want you, right?’ when suddenly a couple of people threw handfuls of knives and forks onto the table with a great clatter. Christy was one of them, which surprised me because in my head he was still humiliating Luke.
‘Teatime,’ fatso Eamonn shouted joyfully.
What the…? What on earth…? What the hell were they doing? To my amazement, the inmates were setting the table! I had thought they were rattling the cutlery to let the kitchen staff know they were ready for their tea. But, no. The rattling had merely been a prelude to the table being set. They ferried jugs of milk, sliced bread and distributed dishes of butter and jars of jam the length of the table. (‘Here, pass that down to the end and don’t let Eamonn eat it.’)
‘Why are you setting the table?’ I asked Mike nervously. Because they needn’t think I’d help. I wouldn’t set a table ordinarily and I certainly wouldn’t do it while I was on holiday.
‘Because we’re nice people,’ he smiled. ‘We want to save the Cloisters money because we don’t pay them much.’
Fair enough, I thought, so long as they don’t have to do it. Although, for some reason, I wasn’t convinced. It might have had something to do with the burst of raucous laughter that followed what Mike had said.
12
The dinner was lovely in a totally disgusting way. We got chips, fishfingers, onion rings, beans and peas. Unlimited quantities
, according to Clarence.
‘You can have as much as you want,’ he advised, in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Just go down to the kitchen and ask Sadie the sadist. Now that she knows you’re an addict you can have as much as you like to eat.’
I winced at the ‘you’re an addict’ bit, but then my great love for chips took over and I started to devour them.
‘I’ve put on a stone since I came here,’ he added.
I felt a cold hand clutch my heart and my loaded fork came screeching to a halt just before I stuffed it into my mouth. I didn’t want to put on a stone. I didn’t want to put on any weight, I was bad enough as it was.
While I tried to convince myself that one fat-laden meal wouldn’t do any real harm and that I’d start eating properly tomorrow, I became aware of an unpleasant noise to my left. It was the sound of John Joe eating!
It was really loud. In fact, it was becoming louder. How come no one else seemed to notice? I tried not to hear him but I couldn’t help it. My ears had suddenly become like those powerful microphones used on the television programmes to hear ants breathing.
I concentrated on eating my chips but all I could hear was John Joe slurping and chomping and puffing like a rhino. My shoulders got tenser and tenser until they were nearly up around my ears. The smacking and chewing became louder and louder until it was all I could hear. It was revolting. I felt acute rage, boiling, killing anger.
‘Say it to him,’ I urged myself. ‘Just ask him to keep the racket down a bit.’ But I couldn’t. Instead I fantasized about turning to him and belting him really hard, swinging my arm across his chest and thumping the chomping noises out of him.
No wonder no one would marry him, I thought, in a fury. Serves him right for never losing his virginity. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Who’d sleep with a man who made that kind of lip-smacking, disgusting racket three times a day?
The noise of a particularly enthusiastic mouthful reached me. This was unbearable! I threw my knife and fork down on my plate with a loud clatter. I would not eat another mouthful under these conditions.