What Are You Like Page 6

  Outside, the street began to fill with water.

  ‘Everything floods in this town,’ said a man at the table behind her. ‘Everything floods.’

  The cake was warm and savoury, melted through with ricotta cheese. It was the best thing she ever ate.

  She watched the rain slice down in mirrored sheets. It was so heavy the drops shattered, as they bounced back up, into a knee-high haze. Maria walked out into it, feeling the weight of the water on her shoulders, and the lightness of the drops that trickled into the hollow of her back. The cut above her ankle started to sting, and the blood ran again, under the arch of her foot.

  By the time the rain had stopped Maria was somewhere else. She was walking on new streets, full of different people. The sidewalk began to steam. She had to pause, to remember what she was doing here, and which was the way home.

  She began to spot the other people, stalled or stopped, who stood there and wanted the crowd to wash past them. A man endlessly studying doorbells under the swelling stone breast of a sphinx. A regulation drunk, sitting on the sidewalk, his face working in slow motion, as though every emotion was a puzzle to him, and the solution always a surprise.

  Maria was in the country of the lost. They were everywhere – a small man with a chair strapped to his back walking down Varick Street, a woman in the middle of Broadway, going through the contents of her handbag as the cars swerved past. It was a parallel world. It was just over the other side. Maria had always known it was there, but, now she was in it, she did not know how to get back out again.

  The city was full of doors that led to God knows where. She opened one of them, and was back in her own room.

  Anton was walking towards the door as she opened it. He stopped when he saw her face.

  Maria sat in the chair and Anton looked out the window. Anton sat on the end of the bed while she stood by the counter, gathering crumbs with the side of her hand. Anton went into the bathroom and came back out again, too soon. The row was like a marriage after the affair – so clichéd it couldn’t be real. Except, somehow, it was the wrong way around.

  ‘Who is she, Anton?’

  ‘What are you doing, going through my things? What are you doing?’

  ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘Give me that, that’s mine.’

  He had packed his bag.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘What do you mean? She’s a girl.’

  ‘No she’s not. She’s not just a girl.’

  ‘Jesus. Give that to me, will you?’

  ‘She’s me.’

  She swept the crumbs off the counter, slowly. He looked at the floor. He said, ‘Any chance of a cup of coffee? Do you want coffee?’

  After a while he raised his head and looked at her. His eyes stayed the same but his gaze seemed to widen.

  ‘Hang on.’

  ‘She’s me.’

  He came back into the room. ‘She’s a girl I knew. For about two seconds in, Jesus, in 1977.’

  ‘Why did you keep it, then?’

  ‘She was a girl.’

  ‘Did you fuck her?’

  He started to laugh. Other things happened. He picked up his bag.

  ‘You don’t believe me,’ she said.

  ‘Believe what? There’s nothing to believe.’

  He walked over to her with his hand outstretched and gestured for the photo.

  ‘Why did you fuck me in the first place?’ she said. ‘Why did you fuck me at all?’

  Later he said, ‘Will I ring Cassie?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m going out. Do you want me to ring someone? I’m going out for a while.’

  She said, ‘You haven’t listened to me. You haven’t listened to anything.’

  He touched her shoulder. She flinched away. She threw the coffee pot at him, she picked up the knife. He was stained with coffee. She threw a newspaper at him and the sheets separated as they flew through the air. He caught her arms and her wrists were bruised. She turned to the wall and hunched over. She faced him and smiled. She pulled her shirt open and leant towards him, jeering. He walked towards her and she whimpered.

  He put his hand on the latch. He let his hand drop. He sat down on the chair and looked at her. He said,

  ‘Jesus. This town.’

  Then he left.

  3

  Dublin

  21 April 1987

  Electricity

  THE ONLY WAY Evelyn could meet Maria, when she came back from New York, was by going into a shop in the centre of town, taking some clothes off a rail and going into the fitting room where she worked. Maria spent her day handing out plastic numbers to women who came through the curtain, saying ‘That’s really nice’ every once in a while, ‘That really suits you’. It wasn’t much of a life, unless the child was a lesbian, but she was glad to have her back in the country. God knows why. Just in case there was a funeral to attend. It would save the cost of a flight.

  Maria said she wasn’t actually home. She wanted to work in an airport, she said, and this was the next best thing. She was waiting for something and Evelyn did not know what it was. Every couple of weeks she came in to see if she had found it yet and each time she came into the shop she hoped to find her gone.

  Evelyn hated the centre of town. There were security guards to pass and the girls behind the cash registers picking at bits of themselves. One day she would steal something by mistake. In the meantime she took real clothes into Maria’s fitting room, in her own size. She even tried them on. Once, she bought a dress.

  It was one of those communal changing rooms, a smelly, underwater sort of place with mirrors the length and breadth of opposite walls. There were three cubicles at the far end, with scraps of doors – you might as well be in the middle of Grafton Street for all they hid. You had to come out anyway, to see what you were trying on. Evelyn tried to take decent things in with her, so she wouldn’t look like a fool as she stood there, exchanging a few words. It wasn’t easy.

  ‘Any news?’ she said, in a red, raggedy, tart’s dress, with handkerchief ends.

  ‘Anything strange or startling?’ in a houndstooth hacking jacket, very Protestant, her big backside sticking out the vent.

  ‘Are you all right for money?’ in the palest blue. The things she had to do to see a girl who was not even her daughter, who was barely polite.

  ‘Cormac’s moving up again. He’s decided to specialise.’ This in a gathered floral thing that made her look like an alcoholic. ‘I am a barrister’s mother,’ she thought. Even if he was still a student, she should try to look the part.

  ‘So how are you?’ she said, in a fluffy cardigan, in a pair of Capri pants (quite nice), in a Nehru jacket with a peacock sheen.

  ‘How are you?’ she said in a skirt with her top off, in a blouse with her legs on display. While Maria stood there, in a plain white shirt and black skirt – the only one who never had to change.

  ‘Suits you,’ she would say. ‘No, really.’ The little bitch. She wouldn’t get rid of her that easy.

  When they first met, the child had tried to strangle her with her own jewellery and Berts had kissed her neck. And so it went. Evelyn knew, for the first time, what it was to be wanted, and that it had nothing to do with her. Another woman would have done just as well, a woman in a houndstooth hacking jacket, a woman in the palest blue. Never mind. Evelyn made her own clothes and she was good at it.

  She made wedding dresses for the neighbours’ daughters for pin money, working in cotton gloves so her sweat would not stain the silk, tacking and stitching their agitated flesh into the rolling sea-calm of the dress. They all wanted ruffles. No innocence without frills, no love without a fuss. Someday she would dress Laura, her youngest, plain as an arctic fox with her red hair; in the meantime she fussed them up good and proper, all shriek and suspenders.

  ‘So, how’s the love life?’

  ‘Sorry?’ She would not be making one for Maria, not at this rate.

  ‘Is there anything you n
eed?’

  ‘Like what?’

  And Evelyn would change back into her own clothes with a grim smile. Because this is what they shared – they owed nothing to anybody, not even to each other. And this is what brought Evelyn back through the streets full of young people with their longer legs and better skin and loud deflowered voices, to see a woman who wasn’t even her daughter, but who had the same embarrassing laugh – they were free. Life had put them in the same room, they might as well take a look at each other now and then. Though you got the feeling from Maria that she did not even look at herself, with that acre of mirror in front of her. And although freedom made Evelyn kind (because you might as well) it made this woman who wasn’t her daughter unimportant and small. Evelyn was not important, but she knew how to pour someone a cup of tea like it was an important thing to do. How did other people grow, when Maria just shrank?

  ‘She’s got a job.’

  ‘Has she?’ said Berts. And there was no use getting annoyed with him. She was in charge of things like that, family, the telephone, Christmas. While Berts – well, Berts was just in charge. Evelyn felt the unfairness of it. Because Maria had always been hard. The child did everything on time, from sitting on the potty to going on the pill, like she had read the book on how to grow up. But she never had the gift of liking things. She would love you if she had to, but liking was another matter.

  ‘As a shop assistant.’

  Berts took a piece of gristle out of his mouth and laid it on the side of the plate.

  ‘So what do you want me to do about it?’ he said, and his silence spread and became unpleasant. Evelyn decided not to embarrass him with her trips to town, but she still went back, for the barest of reasons. At least she was able to hold her head up in front of the neighbours and say, when asked, that Maria was between things. That is what you said about children these days, that they were between things – you did not say that this was the place they had ended up.

  Evelyn checked the knobs of the gas and the lock on the back door. She went from room to room closing what had been left open, unplugging things. The harsh spring sun cut through the windows and bleached her furniture. Everything in this house was clean, and nothing was new. Tomorrow was her fifty-third birthday. If only she liked shopping, she thought, they would have led a different life.

  A woman on the radio was talking about electricity. She could not suffer it in the house, she said, she was allergic to the static. She sat ten feet away from the television, and kept a cat on her lap to absorb the rays. And what was the reason for all this?

  ‘My father worked in a power station. He was an older man, Marion,’ she said. ‘He was fifty when I was born. You know, he’d come home in the evening and I was his little girl. I’d sit in his lap, and really, he’d be just crackling with the stuff.’

  Evelyn sighed. The country was falling apart. She stood in front of the hall mirror to do her lipstick. If Evelyn was allergic to anything these days, it was probably the radio. Hundreds of people talking over the airwaves about being ignored, or hit, or loved, or raped. Evelyn had never met a woman who was raped but they were queuing up on Radio Eireann. Raped at seventy, raped at seven. Ireland was packed with men with the strangest lumps in their trousers and still Evelyn couldn’t go out the door without a bit of lipstick on.

  The house was humming around her, the sockets leaking into the rooms. She left the radio playing, to keep the burglars company, and went out to catch the bus.

  The clothes in Maria’s shop were for girls who were two sizes smaller and twice as young again. Evelyn settled for a loose batik dress with a bit of shape to the waist and pulled back the curtain to the changing room.

  ‘How’ya,’ said Maria.

  Evelyn checked the room for other customers. There were six of them, half in and half out of their clothes. They looked stuck.

  ‘One? Is it?’ Maria handed Evelyn a blue plastic tag and the women started moving again.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Evelyn, holding up the dress.

  ‘Lovely.’

  ‘So how are you?’ she said, hanging up her coat and draping her scarf around the hook.

  ‘Fine,’ said Maria.

  ‘How’s the flat?’ as if she had been over there, twice at least, to help run up some curtains or just take a cup of tea.

  ‘It’s a bit musty. There was a flood next door,’ and they talked about that while Evelyn dived through the hoop of the dress and let the fabric fall to her waist. Maria smiled.

  She looked in the mirror.

  ‘What am I like?’ she said, looking at the pattern that flowered and cut against her skin.

  ‘No, it’s lovely,’ said Maria.

  ‘Right,’ said Evelyn, letting her tweed skirt drop, but keeping within the rumpled circle it made on the floor.

  A woman burst a cheap zip in the corner, with a soft, plastic sigh. She looked at the gape like it had happened in her own stomach and Maria watched as she worked herself out of the trousers, her shoulders and breasts rolling loose. She did not look away. As a child, thought Evelyn, she rarely cried.

  ‘So when are you coming out to see us?’

  ‘That really suits you,’ said Maria and she started to unzip.

  ‘Your father says hello.’

  ‘How is he?’ said Maria.

  ‘How do you think he is?’ Evelyn turned to face Maria. ‘I don’t think he’s well.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s himself.’

  ‘Really,’ said Maria. ‘How can you tell?’ And Evelyn was suddenly fierce. She didn’t know everything, this child. What it was like to sleep beside a man all your life and count the breaths he took in the dark. She pulled the dress off her any old how, showing the long sad line of her cleavage, the armpits she had never shaved now sparse and grey. Maria looked away and Evelyn felt that she had won something small, at least. A sense of shame.

  ‘He misses you.’

  As soon as she said it, she realised that it was true. When Berts went for walks, Evelyn checked whether she should go with him, or let him go alone. When he came back, she made tea. Later she would ask how it had gone and he would say, ‘All right,’ as if it was her fault.

  ‘Does he now,’ said Maria. Sometimes she thought the child was unnatural. Sometimes just the sight of her, half in the country and half out of it, put Evelyn in a rage.

  ‘Throw it away,’ said Evelyn. ‘Why don’t you?’ her voice suddenly too loud.

  ‘Throw what away?’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ she was actually shouting. ‘I don’t know why you came back. I don’t know why you bothered. All the things you put us through, and look at you.’ They were all watching her now, a copse of women, a mirror full.

  Maria made a small gesture, as if for her tag, and the whole place went quiet as Evelyn tried to get the right buttons in the right buttonholes. She pulled the scarf down from its hook and threw her coat across her arm, then she walked along the line of the mirror towards Maria.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Well?’ And she handed the tag back and pushed her way through the curtain into the shop. She walked past the rails of clothes, shrugging herself into her coat, hitting a skirt by accident and knocking it to the floor. She did not pause to pick it up and when she was out the door and into the street, she heard the sound of the alarm go off behind her. This was it, then. Evelyn checked her bag for the dress that she didn’t even like, but must have stolen anyway. It was not there. Maria was behind her, swinging her around.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. She had a bundle of trousers in her arms, the hangers danghng and rattling. It was raining, hard.

  ‘You’re sorry? What age do you think I am?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘You’ll come out?’

  ‘No, I won’t come out,’ she said, the rain hitting her face. Evelyn sensed the pain of the child and her vanity.

  ‘Why not?’ said Evelyn. ‘What are you waiting
for?’

  ‘Just.’

  They stood in the street, looking at each other like a pair of tinkers. Evelyn wanted to slap her in broad daylight, but she did not. She turned on her heel and walked away. Someone switched off the alarm.

  The One-eyed Man is King

  BERTS CRUMPLED UP the wax paper around his sandwiches and threw it in the bin. ‘Brennan’s Bread’, said the wrapper.

  ‘Sufficient unto the day,’ said Berts. ‘Sufficient unto the day.’

  He lit up a cigarette and waited for his insides to ease. After a while he got up and walked across to the window. He had to go out, and the thought did not appeal to him. There were some dirty-looking clouds hanging over the centre of town, and they weren’t shifting.

  The door opened behind him and Carney’s narrow little face slid through the gap.

  ‘Seventy-four grand?’ he said. Berts opened his mouth to reply but Carney was gone. Carney was a waster. Lash it out, said Carney, like he was scattering Smarties. The world is a droll place.

  Seventy-four grand was nothing; the irony, as always, was in the details. When it came to the details, Carney was a connoisseur.

  James Anthony Murphy, welder, of 174 Shandowen Park, had tripped and fallen on a piece of pavement laid and maintained by Dublin Corporation at the comer of Parnell and Cumberland Streets. He had sustained, he said, a bang to the head. In evidence, Mr Doney Sheridan, medical consultant, had stood up on his hind legs and discussed the non-linear transmission of information in the brain: he talked of parallel connections, of recursive connections, of feedforward and feedback. Mr Murphy, in short, had a leaky head. He suffered a range of symptoms: a speech defect that affected the ‘K’ sound, a problem with the meaning of colours (which had ended his welding career) and a strange helplessness when it came to the sense of smell. His patient, said Sheridan, was continually swamped by fragmented scenes from his childhood, which had not been happy. Freshly laid tar was a torment to him. Toast made him cry. Grass cuttings rooted him to the spot. It was not known when or if the symptoms would abate – until they did, his patient lived in an emotional state so heightened as to be disabling. Even in these modem days, the brain was a mysterious and, perhaps fortunately, a private place. Thank you, Mr Sheridan.