What Are You Like Page 10

  ‘He started it,’ she said, but the lifeguard had already flipped him on to his front and was pressing the water out of him. He shook his head like a dog, crawled over to the edge and vomited into the pool.

  ‘You could have done it on the tiles,’ she said.

  They laughed all the way home.

  That night she threw a marmalade kitten into the tree outside her bedroom and called him in. When he went out to get it, she shut the window. She got his book on the seven wonders of the ancient world, tied a scarf under her chin like his mother, and made boo-hoo faces at him, until he lobbed the kitten at the glass.

  After he left, her father came into her bedroom with a chainsaw. It was so unfair. The tree was hers. Ever since she was little she had watched it grow up towards her, as she leant out the window; then meet her and pass her out.

  ‘No!’ she said, but her father just smiled at her over the noise of the saw, like it was all a big adventure.

  Rose could not believe the branches fell so hard. She leaned out the window and watched them crash down between the trunk and the wall of the house.

  That evening, she stayed in her room and arranged her things one more time; the tree lopped outside in the dark. Stones on the windowsill, gonks on the dresser, dolls on the bed. She took down Adam and Eve, stuck up a picture of David Essex, and tried to believe in it.

  ‘I didn’t know you missed Africa,’ she said to her father, after dinner.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘But then we got you.’

  ‘Why didn’t you pick up a little nigger instead?’ she said. ‘A little black one?’

  Her mother went silent at the sink and her father looked at the table. He lifted his head.

  ‘Where is your liver?’ he said. It was their old game. ‘Where are your kidneys?’

  ‘Oh, shut it.’

  ‘Where’s Africa?’ He reached out to her, and tickled her under the arm. ‘Is it here?’ He tickled her stomach. ‘Is it here?’

  ‘Daddy.’

  Her mother smiled at the sink. ‘Leave her hormones alone.’

  ‘Is it?’ he said, lifting her arm into the air. He peeked under it.

  ‘Oh look,’ he said. ‘It’s the Queen of Sheba.’

  But she was too old for all that. Anyway, the next boy they got was just a kid.

  Music

  New York, 1984

  MARIA WENT UP to the fourteenth floor where the woman sat, terrified of her own body. She was always in the same place, sitting with her back to the window so the light would wash past the creases on her face. Sometimes Maria saw her move, a tiny pleasure in the turn of her wrist, a sweetness as she straightened and stretched her neck, and then it was gone. May-Ann Bell was frightened of her legs, and no wonder – she had the sharpest knees you could ever want to see. Bagged in skin and sheathed again in the most expensive stockings that Maria had ever seen. Sheer, sheer, the legs of a sick old girl, as she crossed and uncrossed them for a thousand men and never left her room. Her ribs hung with little pouches for breasts, her thin arms just something to hang a muscle off, meat swagged over a curtain rail.

  Maria had no idea how much of her was real. Though,

  ‘I’m all me,’ she said. Everything she had was old, so maybe her prosthetics were too. She was from the South, of course, though she never spoke about her father, or hummed to herself a winsome tune. Still, Maria had seen her before; and heard before the childlike lift in her voice as she asked for the weakest tea.

  ‘Just show it the bag.’

  Maria was afraid that May-Ann would shatter as she cleaned around her. She surrounded her with flesh, rolls and heaps of it. She gave her bursting thighs, a triple layer of bosoms unrolling down to her waist, a belly that forced her legs apart and sat for her on the seat of the chair. When she vacuumed around May-Ann, she gave her plenty of room.

  This woman’s meat was amazing. She was not a doll. May-Ann Bell – a woman Maria had known about long before she came to America, a woman she had heard about in so many different ways – was real. Maria swept her nail clippings off the bathroom floor, shook her skin from out of her panty hose. This woman, who sat alone in a Manhattan apartment and said,

  ‘Oh good, you’re Irish. I had a Polish girl last time and she couldn’t figure out the juicer,’ was real. Maria was in America. She was really there.

  ‘And where are you from?’ said May-Ann, as though her own history were well known.

  Maria thought about a line of three-bedroom semi-detached houses in the suburbs of Dublin – that would really cheer her up. She invented a farm, added in some rain that slanted across brown – no, lilac-coloured mountains.

  ‘Lilac?’ said May-Ann, like why was she confusing a hair-rinse with a lump of rock.

  ‘Heathery,’ she said.

  ‘Ah,’ said May-Ann, who could relate to tweed. ‘And how many children in your family?’

  ‘Three,’ she said.

  ‘Three?’

  ‘That’s all,’ said Maria. ‘God was not good to us.’

  Most of the apartments were empty when she came, and that was the way she liked it. There was something embarrassing about meeting people when you were so intimate with their things. Though, it had to be said, they didn’t seem to mind. They stood and explained themselves to her. They took time for it. Maria couldn’t believe it, this level nonsense they came out with, like life was a corporation they were trying to run. All their names sounded invented and lost.

  Wendy Shower, a writer with five white rooms on the Upper East Side, was suing the hospital where she was born because they had induced her mother early and so messed up her horoscope. She was delivered during an opposition of Saturn and the full moon in Virgo. If the consultant hadn’t had a golf date, she said, the moon would have made its transition into Libra.

  ‘And you know how beautiful a Libra moon can be.’

  ‘Really?’

  Wendy swept her arm around the four white walls and said, ‘Don’t you see?’

  ‘What?’ said Maria.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. Her walls were practically bare. She was drawn to the wrong men, she ate Japanese, she could never splash out. They had played with her luck and turned her into someone else – someone she was not, had never wanted to be.

  ‘So how is it going?’

  Her lawyer thought she had a case, once they had cleared the Time of Conception argument. She had been conceived in a boathouse in Maine, under a Cancer moon.

  ‘Cancer nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m not fat.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Maria. ‘I mean, where you were conceived.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  Maria slopped the Ajax around the sink, thought about the bed that Berts and Evelyn now shared.

  ‘I don’t really want to.’

  ‘OK,’ said Wendy, slowly. ‘But. Well, my parents were very much in love.’

  No one in this town lived straight. Outside were the streets of Manhattan, numbered and cut, but everyone was still looking for the map. Even her boss Cassie, who was from Galway, was getting involved in cosmic convergence and the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

  ‘But that’s because I’m Irish.’

  And Maria could never figure out what people actually did. One client said he was an inventor.

  ‘My job’, he said, ‘is to sit in this apartment, for as long as it takes. My job is to live, that’s all. The remote control was invented on a settee.’

  But she did not believe him. Besides, there was something uncomfortable about the way he sat there, as though there was a something in his trousers that he had invented just for her. She mentioned it to Cassie, who dropped him from the list pronto, then told her about a Latvian girl she had once, who didn’t get out of a client’s bathroom for three days.

  Maria loved New York. She slept with a couple of guys, just because they were in this town together and both at the same time. Saturday nights they ended up in tiny apartments in TriBeCa and Cassie explained who was into what, and where th
ey were moving on to from here. But the only thing that Maria understood was gay or straight – and that not fully either. Sex seemed to be the easiest solution, when you were the new girl in town.

  She didn’t tell them she wasn’t used to it. Maria thought that maybe she was no good in bed. The bit she liked best was getting up as the city relaxed into dawn and mooching her way out into the street to get a cab. She liked catching sight of herself in someone else’s mirror, surrounded by their things. On the other hand, she could have a good snoop on the job and didn’t have to sit around afterwards, waiting for them to call.

  Maria wandered the empty rooms of the rich with her dustpan and brush, and had their lives, down to the shower gel. There was nothing surprising about them after all, these people with blood-smeared diaries and clean smiles. The pornographic magazines were only remarkable once, though seven pairs of jeans, the same make and size, gave her a fright every time. She tried all the cosmetics in the bathroom cabinet. She cocked the guns and smoothed the sheets with a feeling hand.

  The only thing she stole was the music, and even then she left no trace. Each disc she slid out of its sleeve was a different room to clean; the melody curving into the corners, making a joke of the gaps. She hummed as she went, imagining herself into a cleaning woman with a taste for Bach. Imagining herself into a woman who had, somehow, grown into a complete box set of Wagner’s Ring cycle and a scratched half-hour of Al Stewart’s The Year of the Cat.

  Meanwhile her visa was running out. May-Ann Bell switched to autumn wear; trim suits in air hostess colours, ancient bouclé with big sophisticated buttons; a ring of metal around a bobbled woollen heart.

  ‘What do you mean you’re going home?’ she said, looking betrayed.

  ‘Well, actually, I’m in the middle of an engineering degree,’ said Maria and immediately felt that this wasn’t true; that someone else might be in the middle of an engineering degree, but she was here in Manhattan with her foot on a pedal bin and a limp lettuce in her hand, which she was trying not to throw at Ms May-Ann Bell.

  ‘Oh my,’ said May-Ann.

  Nights, as she tried to sleep, Maria wove her way over and back across the bridges of New York, from Brooklyn Bridge to the Triborough Toll. The idea was to end up back on Manhattan itself, but she always lost her way up by Harlem, until she had to put on the light and find the map. She shuttled across the nameless bridges of the north all the way round to the wide Hudson and the George Washington Toll. Then she started over again, including the tunnels. Then she started over again and took the ferry rides. The week before her first lecture was due to start, she took the phone off the hook. She said to Cassie, over a couple of joints, that she wasn’t sure who she was yet, or who she might turn out to be. Cassie agreed, up to a point, and passed the cherry ice cream. She asked was there a guy involved in all of this and Maria said – well, yes – and the two of them laughed like horses.

  But the fact was that Maria just liked being nothing. As though there was something coming out in her now that previously she had not allowed. Because she was a treasure. They left notes on the refrigerator to tell her so. She set flowers in their vases and ornaments according to height. She never cleaned the same way twice. The music changed the order of the rooms, made her shift a book from one shelf to another, arrange the chairs parallel or diagonal to the wall.

  The guy she was seeing was Irish. He had ended up on her floor one night after a Pogues gig. Maria looked at him in the morning, chewing bread, and she realised that he was mad. He even smelt mad – a girlish, soft smell, to go with his messy eyes. There was no telling what was in his head. When she took her clothes off, she might as well have been a swarm of bees, the way he looked at her. It all depended on the light. It actually all depended (and she could barely admit this to herself) on how she was feeling at the time. Maria walked towards him and saw things flitter across his irises and she knew what they were. This was the exact extent of her own madness, at the time, a kind of understanding. Which isn’t so mad, she thought, which isn’t so mad. As she shape-shifted in and out of his arms.

  It was only when he spent the night looking at his hand in the dark and they woke up the next morning and it was still in the air that things began to get a little strained. Maybe it was just the whole question of anyone staying the night, not just Jack. A good name for a madman, she thought, ‘Jack’.

  ‘Do you want some breakfast, Jack?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Stone mad.

  The airplane took off without her on a still night of thunder. The sky over Battery Park lit up like a low, flat movie screen. Maria looked up in New York, wondering which passing plane held the life that she had let go. She went into a phone booth and punched a random number. A man’s voice said ‘Hello? Hello?’ while the city spread about her, crackling with connections she could not hear.

  May-Ann threw her a set of keys that she had stored in her dreadful lap, bandaged today in turquoise Chanel.

  ‘My husband. Or should I say ex.’

  Maria looked at the keys.

  ‘I don’t know why I do it for him,’ said May-Ann.

  His apartment was in the same building. It was a mirror image of May-Ann’s, the same chrome in the kitchen, the same rack of appliances. He came in as she was clearing out his fridge, Thelonius Monk hesitating and hustling on the hi-fi.

  ‘Ah. The help,’ he looked too packed, too fleshy and healthy – though now that Maria thought about it, MayAnn could be any age at all.

  ‘Tell my wife I’m doing just fine.’ He wandered off. After a while Maria followed him, opening door after door. She found him sitting at a desk in the den, with his back to her.

  ‘So do you want a cleaner, then?’

  He smiled at her over his shoulder.

  ‘I’ll leave your money on the little walnut table. In the hall.’

  ‘That man,’ said May-Ann. ‘I don’t know why we bother. I told him you were coming. I said to him expressly.’ She sat there, vividly ignoring the new intimacy between them. Maria could feel her hunger, but there was little enough to tell – no fluffy slippers under the bed, no rubber gear in the wardrobe, no big secret. A photograph of a woman in a plain silver frame. A moisturiser in the bathroom, which was the same brand as May-Ann’s. That was all.

  For the next few weeks she had a free play of his record collection, and wondered at the exact difference between a man’s dirt and a woman’s. There was more hair, which was grey, and the feeling that things gathered in crusts. The hair could have come from any part of his body. Otherwise, he was neat enough, almost shy, and stripped the sheets before she arrived.

  One room fed into the next, a series of double doors that could be flung open, until blocked by a final wall. May–Ann had hung a painting there – the most beautiful heap of rust you ever saw. He marked the end of the line with a black baby grand.

  When she dusted along the keys, Maria wanted to bottle the notes, she wanted to take them home and drink them down. The slow stroking scale brought him out of his den, and he watched as she put down the lid and picked up the picture in the silver frame.

  ‘She looks sort of mean, don’t you think?’

  As far as Maria was concerned the woman didn’t look anything, except maybe a bit sad. She ran her cloth across it.

  ‘What age is she?’

  He listened to his own silence for a moment, then laughed at it.

  ‘You know, for a moment there, I thought you were insulting my wife.’

  He left a message, ‘Please come up to iron Thursday, if you can, 7 p.m.,’ and when she came for the extra hours’ work he was, as she expected, waiting for her there. He leant against the kitchen table drinking Scotch and water, teasing the corner of his lip with a blunt finger as she shook out a linen sheet and ironed it on the double, wishing she knew more about starch.

  He watched her for a while, then ducked into the living room. The apartment filled with the high-wire wobble of Callas singing Tosca. She could hear it fi
ll the distant rooms.

  ‘I have a faggot’s taste in music,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘I couldn’t really say,’ said Maria, knowing she had been discovered; grateful for the ironing board between them and for the iron that was now just a prop – though the shirt she was running it over, the armpit she nosed it into, were altogether real.

  ‘Well, enjoy,’ he said with a tight smile, and went back to his den.

  The music ended and the smell of hot cotton drifted down the hall. She picked up his boxer shorts and rubbed the thick cream silk between finger and thumb, feeling slightly hilarious. Then she heard his door open, and reached for another sheet.

  ‘What a nice smell.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maria, and noticed the slight hissing you got from good linen, the slippery feel and the shine.

  He leaned against a counter, crossed one leg over the other, and watched her. He wasn’t embarrassed. He wasn’t even drunk. Maria wanted to laugh, but she realised that there was nothing in this man’s pants that liked jokes. He stood there until she imagined it too, the simple feeling of his cock sliding in, just twice. Then he smiled, drained his glass and went down the hall.

  He brought back a dress in a dark lime chiffon that Maria had not seen before.

  ‘Could you do this before you finish?’ and laid it across the board.

  ‘It’s very fine.’

  She turned the iron right down, realising that every rich man in New York had laundry that just arrived, that she was here for no reason, except for this moment, when he would stand behind her as she ran the iron over lime-green chiffon and caught the rising smell, first the perfume and then the sweat, of an unnamed woman, who had not worn this dress in a long time.