What Are You Like Page 11

  ‘You know, May-Ann nearly had an affair once,’ he said. ‘She could have slept with him and told me. But she didn’t sleep with him, and she told me that instead. I’d rather she slept with him and said nothing.’

  He waved his glass. ‘Women just love the truth, don’t they? They think it’s simple.’

  So he was drunk, after all.

  ‘For a woman, a lie is the same as an infidelity; an infidelity is as bad as a murder. I mean, come on.’

  ‘And what is it for you?’

  They had ended up on a sofa in the living room. It was the first time Maria had had sex with someone she did not like, and she found she quite enjoyed it.

  ‘Listen. Every morning I woke up with my wife, I thought I was beside the wrong person. I go to a shrink, the shrink says, “Maybe you’re the wrong person. Maybe the wrong person is you.”

  ‘And was it?’

  ‘“Defensive doubling,” he says, “castration anxiety, that’ll be fifty bucks.” Don’t ever go to a shrink.’

  She picked up her clothes from the floor.

  ‘Not much use if you don’t have a dick.’

  He snorted into his drink. He was a man not used to laughing at other people’s jokes. Maria could hear him repeating the remark to someone in a tasting, droll way, just because she had caught him off-guard.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she said.

  She said she had another guy at home, and truth didn’t come into it.

  ‘The week before Christmas,’ said May-Ann. ‘Oh my.’

  Eighty-seventh Street was misting up behind her, all the way to the park. It was snowing in New York, the slowest snow in the world – every flake seen and known, long before it hit the ground.

  Maria did the bedroom and wiped down the kitchen. She took a scrubbing brush to the grouting in the shower. She switched on the tap to rinse it down and looked at the water pulsing in from every side.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll tell Mr Bell you said goodbye.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The windows were fully steamed up now. The ghosts of old words were emerging on the glass. The last time the windows were wet, it seemed, someone had scribbled on them with their finger. Maria realised that the room had been invisibly written, all that autumn and the summer before. She looked at the scrawls and drawings – which were not exactly nice. Though some of them, it had to be said, were quite funny.

  She looked at May-Ann, who looked back at her, with an amiable dislike.

  ‘The heating needs doing,’ she said. ‘Oh my. How many times?’

  Maria walked out into New York. In front of her was the line of Fifth Avenue, cutting into the city. In the dizzy silence of the snow, she could hear the whole goddamn symphony. Back in Dublin the class was stuck into Hydraulics & Metal Fatigue – but she was inside it. Maria was inside everything she could ever know. And she decided to lose herself here, disappear into the music, bone by bone.

  Hands

  London, 1980

  ROSE HAD COME too late to the violin. She could read anything and play it on the piano, but she could not improvise and her tone was too polite and dry. People envied her precision but it was not what she wanted, not, not, not. She ended up bashing the keys; she damaged her hands while chopping carrots or moving a bookcase against a wall. Because when she was playing, she could never stumble. Even when she was exhausted, she would pause rather than fall. And she always felt that she was falling.

  Her father said that it was just her age – later, the emotion would start to tell. Rose was fifteen and she felt as old as the hills. Besides, it was not emotion she wanted. It was the feeling you got when something complicated was suddenly clear. It was,

  ‘Bliss,’ she said.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Like Notre Dame.’

  Her father pushed his glasses up and leant his forehead on the heel of his hand. She saw that he was smiling down at the wood of the table, or wincing, and Rose was suddenly mortified. She turned out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

  They had stood there together in the centre aisle, the two of them, almost father and daughter. She had looked at the astonishing space, and seen them both in it; a girl in a summer dress with her mosquito bites fading, and an old man by her side. She saw him clearly, his long belly hanging from under his ribs, the tremor of his hand that dabbed back, as though in irritation, from his side. While above them both, the cathedral gave its huge, silent roar.

  Rose listened to it – a thrilling, high chord that she could not name. She looked at the stained glass, the columns and grace notes of stone and for a moment she knew what it all meant. Bliss. Something so big, you got it and forgot it at the same time.

  Then her mother was back beside them, telling her to light a candle under the statue of Joan of Arc.

  ‘Oh, Mother,’ said Rose. ‘Would you please grow up.’

  Rose wanted to play the violin because it was the hardest thing she could think of: it sounded so awful when you played it wrong. And she loved the flexible, singing sound of it, the way it soaked out into the room until that moment of solid release, like the top of a yawn. She liked, she said, its acoustic shape.

  Her father paused over his dinner. She had spent the afternoon battering through Bach and had decided on an adult approach.

  ‘Is that so?’ he said, tilting his head. He was listening for the echo of her music teacher in what she said. Rose was in love with her music teacher, but that was not the point.

  ‘Because I’m not sentimental,’ she said. ‘And it is.’

  ‘And why aren’t you sentimental?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.

  ‘Show me your hands.’ She held out her hands.

  ‘How much did you say it would cost?’

  ‘Please, Daddy.’

  ‘When I was her age, it was horses,’ said her mother.

  ‘Your mother’s right,’ he said. ‘You should get out more.’

  So she got the violin and she put in the hours and was good enough. But it was all too late. When she got to college Rose was surrounded by girls with hands as tough and flexible as steel cable. Not one of them could play, she thought, but they still played better than she did. Besides, she was worried about her chin, which was doubling as she looked at it, no matter how far she stretched her neck each time she settled the damned thing in. Her room at college was a brick box that bent every note into a right angle and fired it back at her. Sometimes she liked to close her eyes as she played and let herself cry; the tears mixing with the rosin and sliding on to the wood.

  Rose checked the lines on her palm under the anglepoise light at her desk: lifeline, heartline, fate. She pinched the muscles at the base of her fingers and examined the white splits when she stretched them apart. She hated her hands: their Victorian tapered look, the quiet crook of the smallest finger, the cushioned, upholstered backs. She wanted hands that flew and tore; not these soft cats hanging off the end of her wrists, with a dodgy octave, and a secret tension between thumb and index finger that she had to shake out every half an hour.

  After practice, she swung out of the lintel to stretch her tendons and went shop-lifting. It was the only thing she could think of that was exciting and funny at the same time. Sex didn’t seem funny, and music was only funny when you played it in your sleep. One day Rose went into Tesco’s and was so disgusted by an old woman’s warty hands feeling up the fruit that she turned and walked out of the shop with a vacuum pack of salami still tucked under her arm. She looked at it in the street outside, six fluorescent rounds of meat, lurid with fat. Then she tucked the lot, hands and meat, into her pockets and walked away. It was only when she turned the corner that her heart started to go.

  She told nobody, not even William, who was her boyfriend – who really was her boyfriend, now they had started sleeping together at the weekend. Though they did not have sex, because they weren’t ready yet. Sometimes Rose wondered if she just liked his flat, it wa
s so much better than her own brick room, with a decent double bed, lots of space, and three framed pictures of men unloading fish at a dock.

  ‘Lithographs.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Not “pictures”,’ said William. ‘They’re lithographs,’ and Rose asked herself if her virginity wasn’t worth more than a man who was prissy about bad art. Or was it worth anything at all? Every man you met said something stupid, sometime. She lay beside him in her T-shirt and knickers and they talked in the dark, not knowing how to stop and fall asleep. She thought she loved him when the light was off but she did not tell him about the salami, how good the stuff had tasted when she got it home. And she hated wearing knickers all night, it made her feel dirty when she woke, made her want to swim with William, or shower with him – get it over with, somehow, before the whole thing went sour.

  ‘Tell me if I snore,’ she said and unclenched her hands and slept.

  She saw him first playing viola, in the quartet that he organised. He had the brilliant Andrew Mew for first violin, but the bass was a dork and the cellist was a boring bitch, with a nervy, sentimental rubato. She should have fallen for Andrew Mew, but Rose fell for William instead. She liked the way he nodded as if the music was something he allowed. She liked the control in his face, while Haydn surrounded him with such helpless sweetness. She kissed him, drunk, and for the next few weeks mulled him over, falling in love with him piece by piece.

  His legs were too short and his face too heavy for nineteen. He sort of sniggered suddenly, when people gave their opinion, and he hated to dance. But, somehow, Rose was jealous of all these things. William had what she always wanted – he had never been a child. Her day turned into a conversation with him, as he judged the clothes she wore and the people she passed in the street. He commented on the food she ate and tut tutted her out of bed in the morning, even when he wasn’t there.

  When she saw him in the flesh again, she was always a little disappointed. William’s face looked like it had been stuck together by someone else, like he was waiting to grow into it. It was this bruised, blocky feeling that she sensed beside her all day, drawing attention to the lecturer’s pop-socks or the wonderful brickwork on that Victorian façade.

  They talked about sex a lot. It seemed to be something you talked about, like Scarlatti, or working with period instruments. Apparently William had already done it with the boring bitch cellist (as if Rose didn’t know), but she had run off with Andrew Mew. He pushed himself against her and,

  ‘Not yet, William,’ she said. But she could not shake him out of her mind.

  After the episode of the pink salami and the old woman’s warts, Rose realised something strange. From the fruit and veg, all the way into the street, she had been completely alone. William was gone. It was only when she looked at the vacuum pack in her hands that he returned to her side and said . . . Well, he said nothing, actually, for quite a while.

  Now when Rose walked up the aisle and lifted the odd half-pound of sausages William would turn away and burst like a bubble, leaving an irritated ‘ping’ behind. The more she took, the longer it was before he came back – until he was so far away that she thought she might sleep with him now, quite easily.

  And there was no doubt about it, her playing improved. She walked past the old dears using their trolleys for zimmer frames, a tin of Bird’s custard stranded on the wire, and her heart sang. There was no other word for it. The singing got her through the map of the shop, made her timing easy when the moment came, to stoop, reach, put it away. She did it allegro. She did it easy easy. She sang her way past the tills and out into the street and then down the street and around the corner, until she reached her brick room and the silent round of applause.

  Sometimes she went back twice in the same day. Plink, pingeddy pong – addicted to the muzak and the aisle full of breakfast cereal, something really big and light. Everyone was watching her, and no one actually saw. It was like escaping and being locked up, both at the same time.

  She imagined what it would be like to be caught: the humiliation of the security guard’s hand on her shoulder, something sexual about the way he would not let her go, made her feel like trash. ‘I am a music student,’ she would say. ‘My hands, mind my hands.’ Her nifty little, nimble little hands, which floated over corn on the cob and packets of frozen spinach and forgot themselves entirely. Her criminal little hands, who knew just what they were. She saw them before her on the dock, and liked them: liked the edgy, raped feeling when she lifted her head and looked the judge in the eye.

  At least, if they caught her, she would have something to talk to her mother about. Finally. Lots of earnest discussions about the pain Rose felt about being adopted, the unfairness of it all. For the first time she understood all those boys who casually stole from and betrayed her parents – not because they wanted to, but just because they could.

  By February she was getting B plus for expression and William was even more cautious. When they slept together at the weekend, he swallowed over and over in the dark and left her plenty of room.

  Rose knew he was right. He would have to catch her now, or lose her, once and for all. She walked out of Safeway’s with a full trolley of groceries. She started stealing clothes: stockings, tights, a dreadful pair of jeans. For a while she went around in her mismatched, snatched, anything-she-could-put-her-hands-on, until she got sense and stuck to tops that were a reasonable and roomy size twelve. She wore them like an open secret, the lumpy bras, the culottes that looked too butch and fake, and the skirts that trailed the ground.

  One morning in spring when she was cycling to her harmony class, her legs started to itch and burn. She hopped from foot to foot as she locked her bike and walked like a cowpoke through the door of the hall.

  Rose sat there watching the lecturer’s hands swirling through some nonsense about the tritone of C# – G, while the rash spread from her thighs down the back of her calves. For the first time, she knew what her skin actually was, so she picked it up and walked it out of the hall, leaning slightly backwards, looking straight ahead. Her skin was fighting against her. It was trying to jump off her. Rose looked out through the holes of her eyes as she walked down the street, and hoped the rash wouldn’t travel to anywhere strange.

  By the time she reached Boots, she was quite frantic. She passed the shelves without lifting so much as a packet of aspirin, went to the prescriptions counter and placed her white hands on the wood; a patch of red already creeping out from under her cuff. The pharmacist took one, unhurried look and gave her some antihistamine tablets with a glass of water, and some cream for later. The cycling might have something to do with it – the sweat and friction.

  ‘Change your washing powder,’ she said.

  Rose sat naked in her room and tried to study. She stood naked at the music stand playing Poulenc and feeling foolish. Someone came to the door, who might have been William, but she ignored his knock. After a while, she put on a pair of rubber gloves, and an old dressing gown, ventured down to the bathroom and started to rinse out her clothes.

  The next weekend they were sitting over William’s special omelette, made with fried potato and chopped tomatoes that shed their skins into the yellow of the egg. She was gathering the skins into a pile on the side of the plate when William stopped eating and pushed his food away.

  She was talking about the boring bitch cellist, the way she quite liked playing with her legs open, the way she swayed so her chair creaked, in a way that was always, somehow, out of tune.

  ‘That’s enough,’ he said.

  ‘Is it? Sorry.’

  Rose wondered if there was something wrong with him in the trouser department. There was a thing her father used to say about boys pulling their foreskin back or it wouldn’t work properly when the time came.

  ‘Enough,’ he said again and she thought about the rash subsiding from her thighs.

  ‘Maybe we should get drunk,’ she said. ‘People get drunk.’

  He cam
e around to her side of the table, and placed his head on the shoulder of the white cotton shirt she had lifted from Marks and Sparks men’s department. After a while, he creaked down on to his hunkers and pressed his cheek against the space above her breast. This was it, then.

  They started to kiss, the dinner getting cold on the table. Rose felt the muzak start in her heart – plink, pingeddy pong. She felt like giving poor, perfect William the fright of his life. She felt like stealing the breath out of his mouth. But the fright, when it came, was hers.

  They spent the rest of the year, Rose’s second in college and William’s last, practising sex. Practising and practising, and still not getting used to it. Her music may have improved ‘emotionally’, but her technique went to pot, so it was hard to tell. She did not stop stealing, although the things she took got odder: shoe polish, when she never polished her shoes. Toilet brushes. She had a light bulb phase. She started to bring home clothes just to try them on, taking them back again when they did not fit. Once, she got a refund.

  At Easter, William suggested that she come to his parents’ for the long weekend, and Rose packed carefully, taking only the things that she had bought herself.

  When they got there, Rose couldn’t believe the house. She had the strangest sensation that there were more rooms in it somewhere, which she just couldn’t find. It was terribly clean, and the doors had silly pebbled glass in them instead of wood.

  William’s mother was in the kitchen when they arrived. They sat at the table and had their cups of tea in china that matched, while his mother chopped vegetables on a counter that had nothing on it but the vegetable to be chopped.

  ‘Good journey?’ she said.

  Rose tried to be relaxed, but William’s mother did not seem to want relaxed. She went very quiet when Rose described the other passengers on the train, the man with the corset, and the deaf couple who made the filthiest signs.

  When she tried to wash up, his mother intercepted her at the sink and Rose nearly dropped the cup out of her hand. There was William’s mouth, sitting on a woman’s face. It was older and plumper, pleated with wrinkles and slightly wet. It was revolting.