What Are You Like Read online

  Berts found his eyes watering. He was drunk after all. But he wasn’t trying to cry for Dempsey, who was so ‘good’ to him he had to hate him a little, had to gain some satisfaction from the knacker-woman shouting about the bag. He was trying to cry for the feeling he had had in his lips, the shaming weakness of his mouth when he had kissed the first strange mouth in twenty years. Even the word ‘kissed’ was an embarrassment to him. He went indoors.

  During the months of January and February Berts kept himself to himself. He ate his sandwiches in the office and did not stray into the pub for lunch. Then Maria came home and put the whole house into a spin. Berts had to drive Evelyn out to the hospital night after night. After two weeks of it, he parked the car under a street lamp and took out the Irish Times.

  The young woman in question did not intrude. She passed him in the corridor and smiled, tightly, as she always had. She put her head around the door and fed him some detail that might be useful for the matter in hand. The thought occurred to him that she might not even remember what had passed between them, but he could not believe that this was true. There was a resentment there. There were sudden changes of mood. One day she looked in for no other reason, it seemed, than to tell him a joke.

  ‘What do you call a sheep with no legs?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘A cloud.’ She pulled the door after her with a satisfied click and Berts sat there like an eejit, his heart pounding, wondering what the hell she meant.

  Everyone knew, of course. It would be foolish to let it bother him, but he wished they would stop letting it slip every time they opened their gobs. The stupid bitch had fallen through a doorway, and he had fallen after her, that was all.

  She was twenty-nine. She thought she was going places. And he had to admire her – the way she glossed things over, the way she segued on, as though she didn’t know she was riding for a fall. Berts watched her, in the normal way of these things, but he could not enjoy it. He did not enjoy watching her lips move. He looked at her in meetings, talking on, and thought, deliberately, about that mouth around his private parts. But the flood of revenge he got was turned to weakness by a peculiar want. He wanted, for example, to tell her that she had biro marks on her blouse.

  One day he saw her in the corridor, with a piece of tissue stuck to her shoe. He ducked in behind her, and stamped it to the floor. Then he walked on, leaving her standing there, with one arm as long as the other.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  That evening at home, Berts found himself in a mood of great hilarity. He rustled the paper from page to page, while Laura sat watching the television and picking her split ends. At least she had stopped eating it. She had always hated her lovely red hair.

  ‘What do you call a sheep with no legs?’ he said.

  ‘Da-ad.’

  ‘What? It’s a joke.’

  ‘I know it’s a joke. I know that joke.’

  ‘Well, so,’ he said.

  ‘An elephant’s tampon.’ After a moment she said, ‘Well, don’t blame me,’ as he stood up and walked out of the room.

  He could distinguish, or thought he could distinguish, her step; the click of her shoes on the corridor, the high hiss of nylon rubbing against nylon, between her legs.

  She was all husband-no-children, she was three-bedroom-semi-detatched. Berts paused to think what it was that she might want and the thought that she might want him spread in a heat, from the back of his neck to his lips.

  She had pulled him by the tie, she had wrapped the tie around her fist with a twirl of her hand and she had said,

  ‘You know what your problem is?’

  She was drunk. He had leaned his arm against the wall above her head and said,

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You know what your problem is?’ she said again, as he shifted his weight on to the other foot, and she slid towards the door.

  ‘What?’ he said, after she had nearly hit the floor, after he had grabbed her under the armpits and was propping her up against the stairs.

  ‘I forget,’ she said.

  It was then that he had felt the word at the root of his tongue, and all the rest of it happened, piece by piece.

  March was a terror. The rain whipped through everything and the wind never let up. The garden was all light green buds in the occasional sunshine, and the branches wet and black. Laura was getting worse. She was coming home later and later. One morning Berts found the dried traces of his daughter’s vomit when he lifted the lid on the toilet bowl.

  The month rolled over into spring, and everyone felt the change in the air. That afternoon he walked, for the first time, into the small room she called her office. He did not knock. The room was empty and Berts looked around, amazed by her absence.

  The place used to be a cloakroom, full of coats and hats, over-shoes and umbrellas. He looked at the row of hooks along a green plank on the wall and remembered the comfort of the place, the smell of wet wool, like school.

  When she came in, Berts did not know where to look. As far as he could recall, her hair was brown, with a bit of a wave in it. As far as he could recall, she had a girl’s hair. But the woman who came in the door had a cropped blond helmet on her head. She looked like a light bulb. Her eyes glittered at him from underneath it, as though he was supposed to notice, or pass some remark. He curled a finger around one of the hooks on the wall, and tucked the other hand into his pocket. He was not in the business of noticing people’s hair.

  She was putting a database together, which was all very modern and commendable. But it was messing with interdepartmental links; she was getting up everyone’s nose, skipping protocol. He decided he would tell her as much.

  ‘You might be hurt, that’s all.’

  ‘Hurt.’ She seemed pleased by the word, she smiled around it.

  ‘I mean,’ and Berts lifted both hands as if to show that they were empty, ‘it might be taken away from you. That’s all.’

  ‘They can’t do that,’ she said. ‘It’s my baby.’

  Berts examined the hook. It was an old, graceful thing, curled like old handwriting, a scribble on the wall. What was there to say? That he loved her. That he wanted to stop her from making mistakes.

  ‘These things are not as simple as they seem,’ he said.

  ‘They’re not as difficult either.’

  She was looking at him like he was the enemy.

  ‘Well, I just thought I’d warn you,’ he said, and turned to go. The door shut behind him and Berts found his handkerchief. He pushed it against his face, then he pinched the bridge of his nose.

  ‘I have a daughter gone into hospital,’ he said to her in his head, as he walked away from her room. ‘Nerves,’ he said.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, smiling. ‘Oh dear.’ As she brushed her lips across his forehead. ‘Never mind. It’s not your fault.’

  ‘No, it’s not my fault.’

  So they gave the database thing to Carney, who would bury it decently and take his time. She arrived up to Berts, all agitated, and he tried to settle her down – these things were hard, after all. They talked for a while, but she did not move from the place she had chosen in the middle of the room. Berts spoke across to her, but she looked very small, and mistaken, and hard to reach.

  At the door she stopped and faced him again, all drama.

  ‘Don’t let this happen.’

  ‘And how,’ said Berts. ‘Could I stop it?’

  ‘Of course you could.’

  The door shut behind her. Perhaps it was true. The thought had not occurred to him. If it came to a question of him or Carney, he knew he could carry the day. Berts moved seldom, but he moved well.

  ‘Of course you could.’

  He threw it as a ball from hand to hand. He felt the texture of it, a dark sponge ball, such as dogs run after, full of their spit. He could take her side.

  The next morning, her door was open, and she looked up at him as he passed. She was wearing a jacket with pads in th
e shoulders, and the pads were bigger than her breasts. Her small breasts. Her my-husband sort of breasts.

  ‘My husband,’ he heard her say once. ‘My husband,’ as though they were supposed to think the man marvellous just because she had married him. As though they had actually met the man and been fairly swamped by admiration.

  Tell your husband I know you.

  Still, by mid-afternoon, Berts had almost resolved to move. He went up to the top corridor and walked to the very end, passing the powers-that-be, door by door. He knew them intimately. He knew what they loved, by way of literature, or flattery, or policy. He knew them like he knew the inside of his own head. If he wanted to, he could move. He felt he might.

  There was a window at the end of the corridor. Berts looked out over the dome of the Four Courts. He thought about the way she stood as if attached to a spot in the floor – if you pushed her over she would flip back up again, like a ballerina in a child’s box. She was cheap music. She went on and on.

  ‘Of course you could.’

  She was full of ‘could’. You could go to Spain on your holidays, or go to France, you ‘could’ go to bloody Malaysia. You could dye your hair so you looked like a light bulb, you could pull a man by the tie, for no reason at all.

  The whole thing was a joke from start to finish. He paused for a leak on the way back to his own room. He glanced at his member, as he had done every day, several times a day, for the last fifty-eight years. He washed his hands, as he always washed his hands, and looked at his face in the mirror above the washbasin. And the whole thing of it, the whole miserable kit and caboodle, made him wince.

  And when he went home that evening, he pointed his knife across the table and said to Laura that he would sit up, that night and every night, for as many nights as it took, and if he smelt drink off her, when she came in, he would pull her by that red mop of hers up to the Garda station where they would force out the name of the publican who was serving underage. He would pull her through the courts if necessary. He would pull her from here to Kingdom Come. He had the patience for it and he had the strength, she need not think otherwise, because he would not stand idly by while his own daughter fell into the gutter.

  The Changing Room

  Autumn, 1986

  THE MAN WHO loved his wife stood outside Maria’s changing room and cleared his throat. Maria knew that he loved her because she was sentimental that day, but perhaps she wasn’t wrong either. Today she fancied married men, with children on their shoulders and kind intelligent faces. This one did not have a child on his shoulders, but his wife was pregnant and that was just as good. Maria checked his shoes under the curtain as he waited on the other side. They were slip-ons, which was a mistake, but you couldn’t be a snob in this job. People would wear anything. You’d go mad looking. Maria had been mad already and she wasn’t going back now.

  She arranged her numbers from one to four, and pushed the rejected clothes along their rail. She picked up her can of air freshener and put it down again, wanting things to be right for this pregnant woman; wondering what smell she might like, what smell she might leave.

  Maria scanned the room from corner to corner, looking for who to protect and who to despise. It wasn’t the baby, or even the woman whose husband loved her. It wasn’t anyone, yet. Maria waited, though she did not know what she was waiting for. She knew this feeling and was not afraid of it. She was afraid of very little, here in her changing room, where people decided things if they could. She picked up her can of Autumn Essence and sprayed it into the air.

  The new blouse was all wrong; big red poppies that would not match as the woman fastened them together from the neck down. The whole thing gaped to show her protruding belly button, like the nipple on a giant breast. Maria thought about the baby curled inside, charged and mute; the smell of Autumn Essence already translated in its tiny pink blood.

  Maria started to cry. The woman in charge of the fitting room started to cry and wiped her eyes any-old-how on a pair of black trousers that someone might want to buy some day. She turned to her curtain to hide her tears, while the wrong blouse came off the pregnant woman. She was the one who should be crying, you might think, but the woman in charge of the fitting room did it for her, as she pulled the elastic of her trousers across her navel and then pushed it down again, because everything today was too tight.

  Under the curtain, the man’s feet flexed in his slip-on shoes. A gap opened between the leather and his sock, wide enough to slip a finger down. The pregnant woman put on her jacket and walked over to Maria.

  ‘Any luck?’

  ‘Not at all,’ and the man could not take the thinness of the curtain a moment longer. He put his head into Maria’s changing room.

  ‘Do you mind?’ said Maria. ‘Do you mind?’ as his eyes scanned the room.

  ‘It’s a bit sploshy,’ said the pregnant woman, holding the blouse up for her husband to see.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Maria, moving in front of his face.

  ‘Sorry?’ he said, as if she hadn’t seen the way his eyes travelled all over the room; over women half-in and half-out of their clothes, women turning to the mirror, asking questions of their thighs. He took it all in with a jitter and sweep of his eyes, settled on the blouse, then switched to Maria, like she was in on the joke.

  ‘Come on, you,’ the pregnant woman said. His face disappeared from the curtain as she swivelled him back towards the shop. She handed back the blouse to Maria, gave her a filthy look, and followed him through.

  Maria adjusted the curtain after they were gone.

  Ordinary, ordinary, said Maria. You have to get used to the ordinary. This is what she had looked for; she had looked for what she could not bear. A man who cannot resist. A woman who will not let her legs show. And two women with a handicapped child who looks at herself in the mirror and laughs at her new clothes.

  ‘I think she likes it,’ says one.

  ‘Oh Like,’ says the mother.

  And the child says, ‘Like! Like!’

  Some of the women took their skirts off first, and some their tops. Others stripped to their underwear and started over new. A few changed under their coats, just opened them like a flasher when they were done.

  Nothing fitted. At least for a while. It always took a bit of smoothing or twirling before a new thing settled down. Maria ignored the clothes and looked for stories instead, a bad husband, a failed kidney – tremendous operations forcing the flesh into a badly stitched seam. She saw lots of appendix and, once, a catastrophic heart, a shiny zip turning the woman’s torso into its own jacket. Mostly it was children: they came in sometimes, the little Caesars, all new beside the bellies that they had sloughed off. Might as well work in a morgue, she thought sometimes, wondering what the difference was in being alive. But,

  ‘Suits you,’ she said. ‘No, really.’ Making the leap for them, as they turned from side to side. And it was a gift: to be able to tell the difference like that, to turn the nearly right into the just perfect: to see the future and believe in it.

  ‘That’s a lovely colour on you,’ she said. ‘That’s a lovely blue.’

  The Interview Room

  Autumn, 1986

  ROSE MADE HER way up a set of concrete steps. Either the dogs were very big around here, or someone had been shitting on the stairs.

  Rose hated the flats. She hated the smell of them. The balconies were stained with rain, and the central courtyard was deserted. A small boy, perhaps four years old, stood on the third-floor walkway, with his feet solidly apart. He lifted his face to her, full of things to say.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You looking for Benny?’

  Rose looked at him. Was Benny the drug, or was he the dealer?

  ‘No,’ she said. Then she said, ‘No, sweetheart,’ and the little boy ran away.

  She found the right door, hefted her bag on her shoulder and slouched down. This was what the people in the office looked like when they went on a call. They looked sloppy, but
their eyes were neat. Rose was jealous of them. They had a way of being angry, of dumping their big bags on their desks, of sprawling in their chairs and stubbing out their cigarettes with a twist. But their eyes were neat. Their eyes were able to judge and assess. She tried to imagine being one of them, every time.

  The woman came to the door in her dressing gown, but it was only eleven o’clock, so that was fine. Rose walked through the rooms and judged as she went on the adequacy of things, looking for the signs of strain. In the kitchen she saw a snowdrop in a little liqueur glass by the sink. It excused everything, the stickiness of the carpet underfoot, the smell, the fact that the woman could not explain where her partner might be, or produce one of the kids. There was a snowdrop by the sink in a little liqueur glass, and, roughly translated, it said everything in this flat was just fine.

  When she got the call the next day Rose decided, yet again, that she was in the wrong job. The missing child was in Casualty with four fingers that were not so much broken as dislocated. Of course the boyfriend was not to blame, the boyfriend was nowhere near him – but if this was true then why ring his probation officer? Unless it was to say, ‘Take him away from me, now.’

  Rose put down the phone and felt a rise of vomit in the back of her throat.

  Because a small bit of her was pleased. A small bit of her – if she prodded it – was inflamed with a dislike of these people. Their endless mistakes, their fucking snowdrops.