What Are You Like Page 13

  ‘What do you expect?’ she did not say. ‘Ten years of the fucking viola.’

  No. William was happy, finally, exposing the lie. Pulling apart phrases by Stock Aiken and Waterman to see if he could squeeze a couple of K out of them over an ascending series of dominant sevenths. Everyone was copying someone else. If Puccini were alive, he was fond of saying, he could get some shitload out of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

  ‘But that’s what music is,’ Rose did not say back. ‘It’s a game. Like throwing the ball.’

  Tonight, he talked about money. All he needed was fifty K for a computer that would take a melody and transcribe it for any number of instruments you chose. Think of it. Think of the fees, not just the Royal Philharmonic, though it could be the Royal Philharmonic, but the Ta-Rar-A-Boom-Dee-Yay for the panto in the Leeds Playhouse, or more likely, all the gloopy strings when Cliff Richard decides to do a cover of the ‘Londonderry Air’.

  ‘The bank’, he said, ‘is keen.’

  ‘Terrific,’ she said.

  William had discovered money, like the discovery virgins make that everyone fucks, that they fuck all the time.

  Is money dirty? Only if you are earning it right.

  Rose was back at college for her last year. After that, she did not know what to do. Down in the career guidance office she looked up short courses in psychology, ethnomusicology. Late at night, she read research on whale song. But what was the use? Everything she tried to listen to just got in the way of the noise in her head.

  William caught someone’s eye and made a little signature in the air. She wasn’t even finished dessert – he just could not wait. It gave him such pleasure to lay his credit card on the little tray and ignore the waitress who came to take it away. Rose remembered the first time they had dinner, on her nineteenth birthday, when he stared at his plate and said,

  ‘They’re raw.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The oysters. They’re raw.’

  Never trust a man who won’t eat seafood. They never went down. This she got from her Thursday man who married a psychotherapist, and told jokes, and went down all the time.

  Her brain was out of control.

  The waitress came back with the credit card receipt and William signed it, pretending not to look at the price. He clicked his nice pen and put it back in his jacket pocket.

  Everywhere you went these days they were playing The Four Seasons, or that thing by Albinoni. Rose pushed the tiramisu around her plate and did not say that the whole country was going to pot.

  ‘The whole country is going to pot,’ she did not say.

  Well, that was something at least. She was a person who hated nice pens, and stripey blue shirts and Margaret Thatcher. That was who she was. She would work with handicapped children. She would do music therapy and ease them into swimming pools. She had an image of a small girl buzzing with her lips against the taut skin of a balloon.

  Kissing language.

  Out in the street, Rose looked at William and took his complicated arm. Ten years of the fucking viola. She wondered would it be better, after all, not to resent the thing. To let it go, if you were losing it, but all at once.

  His new flat was half-finished. The living room still had its old wallpaper and there was a big black hippo of a leather sofa squatting among the violets. William wanted to christen it, so they creaked around for a while. Then he panicked about the stain and went to find a J-cloth. Rose peeled her bare bottom off the leather and knew that she had to get out of this relationship, very soon.

  But she looked at him as he slept and thought, ‘He is so very sweet.’ He was not an immoral man. The problem was her. Everywhere she looked, she knew what it meant.

  But she still didn’t know what it meant to be ‘Irish’.

  Her mother saying, ‘But that’s why we went to Mass, all those years.’

  They must have told her. She must have forgotten. Or did they forget? How could you forget a thing like that?

  ‘Did you tell me?’ she said. ‘Did you?’

  Maybe. It was back somewhere with polio jabs, and the facts of life.

  ‘We must have,’ said her mother.

  And perhaps they had.

  Now Rose lay beside William and made a list of the things she was – things she could not forget, even if she tried.

  She was twenty-one years old. (Probably)

  She was studying music. (More or less)

  She was a woman. (?)

  She was in bed with William/Will/Bill.

  She was too full of things.

  She was born with a hole in her head, a hole in her life.

  Everything fell into it.

  She started again.

  She was Irish.

  Her favourite colour was blue.

  Her favourite colour was actually a deep yellow, but she couldn’t live with it.

  She was English.

  She was tidy. She was polite. She hated Margaret Thatcher.

  She was a mess.

  She was someone who gave things up.

  She was someone who tried to give things up and failed all the time.

  It was all lies. Rose had a hole in her head and anything at all could come out of it. She could be anything, do anything. She could be a murderer. She could go deaf. She could study whales. She could place the balloon against the child’s lips, gently, gently, and teach it not to bite.

  Eggs

  New York, 1985

  AFTER ANTON LEFT, Maria found herself walking the streets every day after work. He was somewhere in Manhattan, lying or telling the truth, and she looked into the faces of the people she passed, checking for clues.

  Hello.

  Hello.

  Hi.

  Some afternoons she developed a system – every second turn a left turn, or every third turn a left, or always on the sunny side of the street. But mostly she just put one foot in front of the other, until she was sucked down some subway steps and a train ride home.

  One evening she found herself in Battery Park, at the end of the road. She sat down on the grass, with her back to the cliff of money that was downtown, and she looked over at the Statue of Liberty, a postcard hallucination in the sea haze.

  The first month she was in New York, they came here all the way from the Bowery, just because they couldn’t believe it was real. They sprawled on the grass and dropped acid and followed the slow arc of the moon.

  Maria still remembered the feel of that moon in her stomach, a hard-edged plate of pure light. There was a guy called August lying beside her, so black he looked green in the dark. You could sink into him like moss. Maria took his hand but was frightened by how dry it was.

  ‘The moon,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right.’ Stoned or straight, August said everything like it was a funny little thing that just slipped out of your mouth.

  Maria’s tongue was a muscle. She knew that much. But she wasn’t sure if she knew how to speak. A guy started shivering out on the edge of things. No one knew who he was.

  In those days, everyone had a fantasy on their skin, a way of showing what they knew. Eoin, who was her contact for the flat, had a crown of thorns tattooed around his right nipple. August had a dog lead hanging from his belt with no dog at the end. And Leenane, who just watched, had a baby, a beautiful bump she wore over her skinny little legs.

  During the day it was one betrayal after another. There was a girl from California who had all these parents and didn’t give a shit. She slept with Leenane, and messed up her head. August just disappeared. He owed Maria money but she didn’t care about that. She cared about his skin; about the fact that he belonged everywhere; that he never once thought of her as being real.

  Maria had to get it together and earn some money. When she decided to leave for Cassie and a cold-water walk-up in the North Village, Eoin spent all night sitting on her bed telling her how much he hated her.

  Now, when she thought of all the drugs, she felt a twitter of horror, as though she had r
un across the street in front of a car, and nearly not made it to the other side. Whoosh.

  But she missed the moon. She missed having it inside her. And she could not read the streets any more, where the good things were, where Anton might be. She used to be untouchable. Now she was a drab little Dublin girl, out to get herself raped. She was a cleaner who might take a job in a bank if the visa came through. She was a woman who mistook sex for everything else. She did not have a talent for life.

  This is what he had done to her.

  The more she walked the less she wanted to meet him. His tatty little-boy eyes. His thumped face. His stupid lies. He was on the run from some fuck-up – money, or everything, or maybe a girl like Leenane whose beauty was hard to get away from.

  Maria crossed intersections and turned right or left. She felt ordinary, ordinary. She had never been in love, never lost herself in that place where your own face was a mystery to you. She wondered what the girl in the photo looked like now – like someone else again, probably. Still, she wanted to see herself, her old self, or a different self, passing her by and escaping down the street.

  At dusk she came across a diner; a metal trailer outlined in neon and tacked on to the side of a fifties highrise. She did not think it could be real, but when she walked in, her stomach clenched at the smell of hash browns and bacon. Over easy, she said to herself. Sunny side up.

  ‘How would you like that cooked?’ said the waitress, and Maria tried to remember. She recalled an egg, crisped and frilly at the edges. She recalled an egg she had once with a runny yolk.

  ‘Whatever.’ The waitress looked at her with something like disgust and turned away. Maria watched the other customers, chewing solidly.

  An egg wasn’t just an egg, it was a state of mind.

  Everyone in this city knew what they wanted. She turned to the window and looked at the three hundred perfect eggs that passed, runny and hard, and just soft enough. And Maria wondered why she had never seen them before like this, happy in a sort of senseless difference. She looked at the particular cut of their collars, the different colours of their shirts, the way they styled their hair.

  The waitress was coming to her table. She had wig-blond hair and was wearing a dolly apron. Maria dreaded what she might find on the plate. She stood up and walked out the door.

  ‘Hey!’

  Maria ran and stopped and lifted up her face. She opened her mouth and tried to howl it up into the canyons of New York. But no noise came. She kept going. Her body bulged as she walked and the pavement hit her step after step. A tramp passed and she smelt his coat in the very middle of her head.

  Panic was in front of her, but she could not turn back. It was in the breaths she took and the smells that happened in her brain. She tried to run but there was a wall of it, and she could not get through.

  She walked and shuffled into a run and paused and walked some more. Somewhere in TriBeCa she started to recognise the streets again, realised she was nearly home, and that she could not move.

  After a while, the air opened up around her. She felt calm. She sat on the ground. She was on an empty lot in TriBeCa, sitting on the ground like the queen of smashed glass. She knew that it was wrong to put her life to the test like this, that it was very wrong. She looked at the weeds and the trash. She looked up at the moon in New York.

  People passed. A man said to another man, ‘I thought I was going to shit in his hand.’ A pair of dealers, dipping at the knee. Six young guys, who stopped talking Spanish as their fanned-out shadows flicked over her. A couple hurrying through, the woman speaking low and hard.

  It was a warm, fighting night.

  Maria pushed herself up off the sidewalk and went on. She passed a sad-looking woman who ignored her, and recognised, too late, her own reflection. Even she did not know what she looked like any more.

  Finally.

  She had wiped herself off the map.

  Roughly Translated

  London, 1985

  ROSE BLAMED THE man on Oxford Street.

  One dismal winter afternoon, a man leaned towards her on Oxford Street, rubbed the tips of his fingers together and said, ‘Puss! Puss!’

  Rose walked on, checking her clothes. She was wearing a brown suede jacket, a pair of washed-out Levis and a black turtle-neck jumper. She was wearing white underwear, black socks and black flat shoes. She felt her face flush. Everything was her own. She had lost the habit of stealing. There was no reason for men to hiss at her, as she was walking down the street.

  She wondered what he knew, what flaw he sensed in her. Think you’re good-lookin’? Rose did not know if she was good-looking, though there were days, like today, when she was pleased enough. Recently she had applied for a passport and surprised herself by not knowing what to write on the form. Her hair was an ordinary brown, but how to describe the mucky nothing of her eyes. Blueish-grey with gold flecks? A few green bits?

  ‘What colour’, she said to William, ‘are my eyes?’

  At Oxford Circus, Rose walked into Hennes, of all places, and lifted, in quick succession, a chocolate-coloured cardigan and a slim red skirt. She took them into the fitting room, and opened her bag and just did it.

  But she had grown up. She had lost her nerve. She was trying to get past the stone balustrade at Oxford Circus tube when she felt a hand running down her forearm and on to the top of her bag. Rose turned.

  The woman had grey hair, dyed blond, and lidless eyes set flat into her face. She looked bothered, as though she had rushed out without her coat, left something behind her on the stove. Rose’s heart leapt. She opened her mouth to say something, but there was a man on the other side of her now, with a grip that bunched the muscles against the bone of her arm.

  They brought her to a room at the back of the shop. A few orange and grey plastic chairs, coffee mugs on a drainer beside the sink. You never thought about shops having rooms like these, the door hidden by a mirror where people looked at themselves and despaired of their old clothes. Ordinary rooms, with the shop assistants’ old jackets on a coatstand by the door.

  The woman, for some reason, wiped the table with a cloth, then turned to rinse it at the sink.

  ‘I have a sixth sense,’ she said. She stood with her back to Rose and dried her hands. ‘I’m never wrong.’

  ‘It was a mistake,’ said Rose.

  The woman turned.

  ‘Of course.’

  She sat in a chair on the other side of the table and joined her hands together as though praying. Then she pushed them forward across the damp table, and glared.

  ‘I know you,’ she said. ‘As soon as you walk into my shop, I know what you want. I know what you’re going to do, even before you know it yourself.’

  Rose started to laugh. Then stopped herself. The woman leaned back.

  ‘Don’t come back, all right? When you pass me, you pass sixteen security personnel talking to me in their walkie talkies, up and down this street. You don’t come into my shop. You don’t go into their shops. All right?’

  They sat in silence then. An assistant came in with a plastic bag, the top stapled with a receipt.

  ‘Here’s your change.’

  Rose made her way out into the street. She hung on to the balustrade and laughed. She looked at the stream of people pouring down the steps to the tube; the tops of their heads made vulnerable by partings, and thinnings, and dark roots on show. She turned around and looked into the shop.

  The bitch refused to catch her eye, but Rose hung on. She hung on, literally, for half an hour, furious, wanting. Because when she turned and saw this woman for the first time, her heart jumped in her chest.

  Rose thought this woman was the answer. And as she glared through the shop doorway, she translated the question for the first time – the question she asked of faces on the street, the question she had been asking all her life, was the simplest one of all.

  ‘Are you my mother?’

  The crowd bumped past. She felt its slow patience as it tried t
o tear her away from the barrier, as it clotted at the traffic lights, and broke free again. Rose held her ground, and tried to catch the women’s glances as they hurried by. A start of recognition, that is what she wanted. She checked their eyes for the puzzled look, the mucky everything of her own. Is it you? Are you sad? Is your life better now, without me?

  So many people looked as though they had lost something, or put something away.

  Two weeks later she went to see Judi Dench in Antony and Cleopatra. She felt like running on to the stage and unmasking the woman on the spot. She felt like shouting it out to the crowd.

  When she was small she had cut pictures of actresses and models out of magazines. She remembered feeling sorry for them. This was what you had to do to look beautiful, she must have thought, this is what you had to do to make everyone love you. You had to have a secret sorrow. You had to give up a child.

  But the secret sorrow grows up. The secret sorrow becomes so famous she plays the Albert Hall and her mother hears her own voice in the music. The dressing room is full of flowers. The mother stands at the door and watches, unsure, as the whole world takes and loves the thing she gave away.

  Rose sat in her room night after night. An anglepoise lamp. A desk and chair. A music stand. The black mirror of the window. A wardrobe overflowing with clothes, many of which were not her own. A bed.

  She stayed up late and walked in the dawn light, trying to catch them off-guard. She hated the way they hid themselves – under make-up, under sunglasses, or layers of fat. The streets were full of women who dyed their hair. Sad women, and glamorous women: women who gave her away and never got over it, or women who were thriving, because giving her away was the simplest, the most sensible thing to do.

  Her mother was on the tube, overdressed and sleek. Her mother was in the supermarket aisle, ducking away from her, and she was there behind the cash register when Rose went to leave. Her mother was standing outside a hi-fi shop looking at twelve television sets, she was writing a letter in a café window, she was pausing at a street corner and checking her left-hand coat pocket.