Once in a Lifetime (36 page)

‘Tell them I won’t be in,’ Dara said, and hung up.

There was no hot water for a bath this time, although she’d had a scalding hot one last night when James had dropped her home, smiling as if they’d had the date of the century, seemingly oblivious to Dara sitting mutely beside him, her hands shaking as she held her ripped blouse together. She’d

half fallen out of the car and her shoes were in there somewhere, shoved off. She didn’t care; she’d stumbled barefoot up the steps of her building, holding her handbag and herself together until she was safe.

She lay in the cool bath, not wanting to look down at the paleness of her skin in the water. Her legs were bruised, and she had a bite mark on one breast. Her neck hurt from the force of being pushed back and her spine ached where James had shoved her round the car, lying on her, forcing her down on to the gearstick once.

She knew what she had to do next.

The doctor in the women’s clinic was a woman, for which Dara was grateful. She couldn’t have coped with being alone with a man.

Dara sat in the chair and looked at her knees as she asked for the morning-after pill. The nurse had all her details, her blood pressure had been taken, now it was down to the doctor.

‘You may feel nauseous,’ the doctor said matteroffactly when she’d scanned the blood-pressure results and the alleged reason for needing the pills. Getting confused about the safe period. It was the excuse Elaine had used when she’d taken the morning-after pill and it had stuck in Dara’s head, to be remembered today when her head was blank.

Dara nodded. ‘I know.’

‘It’s not a form of contraception to be used every month,’

the doctor went on. ‘It’s for emergencies only, you should remember that.’

Dara still didn’t look up.

The doctor handed over some pink and some white pills.

‘The white ones are for nausea,’ she added.

‘Thank you.’

‘Is there anything else you want to talk about?’ There was a slight softening in the medic’s voice. Maybe she’d seen the scrapes on her knuckles, Dara thought as she reached the door. No, nobody could help her. Not here.

‘No thanks,’ she said and was gone.

The white tablets didn’t kill the nausea caused by the pink ones. Dara knelt on the floor of the bathroom and retched dry heaves. When each session was over, she lay with her cheek on the tiles and she could see all the dust and dirt that had accumulated in the corners. Bits of cotton wool, burnt matches, a glitter of a piece of broken glass from one time she’d been having wine in the bath and dropped the tumbler.

When she’d got out of the bath, she’d cut her foot on a sliver of glass and even then, she’d laughed. Hopping around the flat, leaving bloody drops everywhere, it had been funny because she was drunk. Only the next day, when she was sober, had she realised how sore it was.

Drinking had brought her here. Drinking had led her to James, too much brandy and being raped in his car. Drinking meant she was as culpable as he was. Nobody would let her cry rape when she’d had so much alcohol inside her.

She was pissed, Your Honour, they’d say in court and everyone would look at her with disgust, the drunken floozy who had danced in the pub with the accused, had drunk brandy with him, had gone off happily in his car. Nobody had forced her, nobody had put her in a headlock and said, You must go with this man. You must drink this brandy.

What can this young woman’s word be worth, Your Honour? Nothing at all. She cannot be trusted.

Niall, one of the guys in the house, was having a party on Saturday. Mrs Davis was away and she was the only one who told the landlord about parties. Everyone else in the house would come and have fun.

‘You’ve got to come down, Dara,’ he said, leaning in her door and looking curiously at her, still wrapped in her eiderdown.

Niall

was friendly, and he had the maddest hair: bright red and it stood up like a brush.

She shook her head at him.

‘Ah, go on,’ he said. ‘You’ll be over your bug by tonight, and we need some fun people to liven it up.’

By nine that night, Dara had barely eaten anything and the thirst for something alcoholic was vicious. She had not one single thing to drink in the flat. Nothing.

Pulling on jeans and a big woolly jumper, despite the warmth of the evening, she went downstairs to the party. She needed a drink, just the one. A single drink couldn’t do her any harm, surely? Just enough to damp down the fear and then she’d be fine.

By midnight, the party had spread out into the back garden of the house. Dara was in a happy place now, warmed by vodka punch. She was smoking a cigarette and holding a can of beer as she stood beside the wooden shed that the house owner kept spare furniture in. There was a ladder leaning against the shed. Looking at it made Dara think about flying.

She could fly, she was sure of it. She did it all the time in her dreams: just launched herself and slid her arms and legs out, a bit like swimming.

Sometimes when she woke up, she was so sure she could fly that it was a shock to realise that she couldn’t.

Earthbound was horrible, no freedom to it. But tonight, she could fly for sure. She was invincible. Running her hand along the smooth skin of her arm, she could feel the muscles beneath, sleekly ready to propel her above the ground, and then she’d be able to skim along on hot currents of air, like a bird, free. She could launch herself off the shed.

It was a marvellous plan.

She began to climb the ladder.

‘Whaddya doin’?’ said someone. Niall. He looked funny, Dara thought. His hair was weirder than usual.

‘Hair?’ she said. She’d sort of meant to say Your hair, but the words weren’t coming out right. She tried again but still no joy. Words were bound up in her mouth, clumsy. She hated

feeling clumsy and shook her head to clear it, as though shaking might realign everything, but still the clumsiness remained.

Niall was holding on to her now.

‘Stop,’ she mumbled.

‘Whaddya doin’, Dara?’ he said again. ‘Don’t do anything crazy, or we’ll all be out on the streets.’

At least, she thought that’s what he was saying.

‘Not crazy,’ she replied and got him off her by the simple motion of slapping him on top of the head.

‘Ouch, that hurt!’ he cried.

Dara giggled and kept climbing the ladder. She’d say sorry properly when she was flying.

She felt as if she was dancing now. On top of the shed was a bucket of dirty water. The roof itself was coarse wood. Dara barely noticed. Her skin felt so alive that she didn’t care about earthly things like pain; she was above all that.

From below, she could hear shouting. She smiled indulgently, they didn’t understand. At the edge of the shed roof, she looked down.

‘Dara - Jesus, Dara, what are you doing up there? Get down,’ roared Niall.

‘OhmiGod!’

Dara felt the rasp of the wooden roof as she slid one foot forward. They’d understand when they saw her flying. She leaped, waiting for the whoosh of the currents of air under her body, the glorious lift of becoming airborne.

It never came. There was a sudden screech of fear and a stomach-whooping sensation like being in a rollercoaster, and then nothing but darkness.

‘It’s hard to know what she’s taken …’

The words drifted into Dara’s consciousness.

‘Drinking, all of them ‘

‘Never seen anything like them … police are here. No, she did it herself… told them she could fly. I have no idea how

nothing’s broken. Badly sprained ankle, though. She fell on the bin bags, else she’d be in bits.’

The words receded as pain hit Dara like a hail of bullets.

Sharp, stinging, aching, unbearable. At least it took her mind away from the other pain, the one in her heart. Physical pain was easier to deal with. You knew where you were with it.

The small front room smelled of a wood fire and stale sweat.

When Dara had lived in Snowdrop Park, she’d never realised how dirty and drab the house was, with wallpaper that had been the same all her life. The paper in the front room might once have been small blue flowers on a cream background.

She pictured her mother choosing it and urging Dad to wallpaper the room. Now it was yellow, with the flowers faded into nothingness, more yellow at the top from years of smoke, and with large strips of paper torn off the chimney breast, the result of an argument some night.

‘So you’re back.’ Dara’s father sat in his old chair beside the fire, his cigarette-making paraphernalia beside him on the stained card table, and the ever-present glass in his hand. Clear liquid sat in the glass, therefore Dara knew he’d got poteen from somewhere. The illegal Irish spirit was very strong, beautifully sweet and mellow if made properly. Made incorrectly, it could make a person go blind. But Dad wouldn’t care about that. He was with Machiavelli on that one: the end justified the means. Good or bad, if it made you drunk, it worked.

All the rest was immaterial.

‘I’m back,’ she echoed, although she didn’t want to say anything. It was bad enough to have to move home. She didn’t want to have to talk to her father. She and Greg had discussed it.

‘He’s not so bad these days,’ Greg said. ‘He doesn’t drink at home so much, he goes out a,lot. Makes it easier.’

‘Make it easier if he’d drop dead,’ Dara growled at her brother.

‘It would make it easier if you hadn’t got thrown out of your bedsit,’ Greg said flatly. ‘You going to tell me about that?’

‘No, it was a misunderstanding about rent,’ she lied. How could she tell him the landlord had asked her to leave after the last crazy party? She’d have found another place if only he had given her the deposit back, but of course he hadn’t.

‘You crazy or something?’ he’d shouted at her, gesticulating with his hands. ‘You want your deposit back after all the trouble you’ve caused me? I’ve had the police round and next it’ll be the taxman. Get out of here and don’t come back.’

With no money and nowhere else to go - she’d asked some of the girls if she could bunk with them, but they’d all said no - Dara was left with no option but to go home to Snowdrop Park.

She’d thought she’d never fit all her possessions back into her own bedroom, but strangely she seemed to have less stuff than she’d thought. She’d unpacked one of the bin liners and had begun to put things away into the dusty wardrobe, but she’d felt too dispirited to finish it. Instead, she’d shoved the bin liners into one corner and gone downstairs.

‘Want a drink?’ Her father pointed to a bottle on the floor.

There were no glasses, only a couple of dirty cups on the mantelpiece.

‘Hospitality the Murphy way,’ she said cynically.

He gave her the thousand-yard stare she’d grown up with, the dangerous stare.

At a certain stage of drunkenness, the stare would go from angry to pure rage in a millisecond, and he’d move across the room to slam his hand into her face. Incredible how a man so unfit could move at speed when he really wanted to.

Other times, he’d just glare at her coolly and tell her to fuck off.

Once, Dara had known the precise difference between those two stares. She’d worked it out, as if it were a mathematical

formula studied at CERN: x + y = disaster/mild indifference, with a variant of k.

But she couldn’t be bothered to analyse his mood today.

Let him hit her.

He couldn’t touch her on the inside any more, nobody could. What was another fist in the face from her father? She was used to it. After the first ten years, you became nicely numb. Dara had never hit back before. She didn’t know why.

Your dad was supposed to protect you. Was that it? Was it some race memory of what was expected of a relationship between parent and child that had rendered her too shocked to respond?

Either way, she’d always let him hit her.

But that wouldn’t happen any more. Her old room in the house might be the same, but Dara had changed. She would fight back, and with the animal instinct he’d always had, he knew it.

‘Suits me,’ he said, shrugging. ‘More for me if you don’t drink.’

The mention of the word made her thirsty in a flash. Thirsty for the cosy warmth inside her, the warmth that nobody could take away.

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she snarled.

She grabbed the bottle from the floor, unscrewed the top and drank from it. It was good stuff, all right: soft and sweet, like mellow Japanese rice wine only cold.

‘Jesus, I didn’t say take it all,’ he said, watching the bottle upend further.

The poteen hit the spot, many times. Dara was so tired, she sat on the armchair staring blankly at the television as her father watched a football match, and thought about getting the energy to climb the stairs to bed.

‘I’ll help you,’ he said abruptly when she got up and swayed on her way to the door.

Somehow, they made it up the narrow stairs. In her

bedroom, her father hauled her over to the bed and Dara slumped on to it, toppling black plastic sacks to the floor.

‘I’ll sort you out,’ he was murmuring, putting her feet on the bed and pulling off her boots. He shoved the covers back and nudged her further into the single bed, so there was more room. ‘There’s my girl,’ he said.

Dara’s eyes sprang open. She felt a blast of sobriety come with fear. He was drunker than she was, she could tell. He drank so much that it happened faster now. From nought to sixty in a few glasses. That was what forty years of heavy drinking did to you.

‘That’s my girl’

He had his hand on her neck, curled around it and the fingers sliding down to the curve of her breast in the cheap acrylic polo-neck she wore.

The memories crashed back.

‘Get off me!’ she roared. ‘Get off me!’

‘Jeez, I was only -‘ he muttered.

Dara kicked him as hard as she could and he fell off the bed.

‘Out!!’

He scrambled off the floor and lurched out of the door. The shaking began and Dara slid off the bed, searching frantically in her possessions for the bottle of vodka. She could remember it all and she hated remembering.