Stir-Fry (12 page)

“Read it,” said Jael brightly. “She’s on Mykonos.”

Ruth handed it back. “No thanks, it’s yours.” She turned away to finish the washing up.

Jael brushed past Maria at the door of the bathroom and
muttered sharply, “What do you bet she read the whole postcard coming up the stairs?”

The safest answer was a shrug.

At dinner that night they drank toasts to the pope and the plight of the aged—Jael having difficulty in blowing out her thirty candles. To the strains of flamenco music on Ruth’s dragging tape recorder, they ducked for apples in a wok full of water, which Maria managed to overturn on the carpet. Tonight she would not watch them, would not worry and analyse and hold back. Tonight was for having a good time, all girls together. Jael and Ruth overdosed on chocolate nuts and whisky while Maria nursed a glass of wine. At two in the morning she left them tangoing on the sofa, roses (improvised from red paper napkins) stuck between their teeth. Her bed wrapped her in a cool embrace, and she slept almost at once.

It began as her usual bird dream, with her rising above the bed, melting through the window, gliding over the roof and away. But this time she found herself hurtling through a canyon, her wings flaring out behind her. Gradually she realised that the cliffs at the end—or were they skyscrapers?—were too close together. She hunched her feathered shoulders and tried to slow down, but as the gap came nearer and nearer, the wind forced her eyes shut. She knew that the gap had narrowed to nothing.

There was no crash, just a quietness; like in a cartoon when the cat skids out over a precipice and sits for a few long seconds, rigid and bemused, on thin air. Gradually a set of pale lines formed themselves into striped curtains, barred with street light. Maria knew where she was, but she was still waiting for the fall. She wanted to crane back over her shoulder to see where solid land ran out; her stomach was clenched against the drop.

A glass of ice water, that would bring her back to reality. Pulling her dressing gown on over her thin pyjamas, Maria crept down the corridor. Before her hand touched the beads, a faint sound stopped her. Shadows were twisting on the rug in front of the dull embers.

She held her breath until her pulse thumped in her throat. As her eyes got used to the dark, she could see firelight edging over a tangle of limbs. It wavered on Jael’s long brown back arched over Ruth, their arms like the dark interlacing bars of a hedge. Ruth lay askew, her lean body stirring under the weight of her lover. Maria had to strain to hear the rough breathing, the indistinguishable words. She had no idea how long she had been standing there, all her senses riveted to the scene, when a frantic whisper began to spiral from the bodies. She couldn’t tell which of them was making the sound. It was like nothing she had ever heard. As it clawed its way upward she wrenched herself away and ran back to her room.

Furled up in the foetal position, the quilt over her head, Maria waited for calm. She thought perhaps she was going to throw up, but it was too far to the bathroom, so she swallowed it down. I’m a voyeur, she told herself, mouthing the words into the pillow to make them real. I’m worse than them. To do it is one thing, that’s their business, but to watch it, to spy on friends at their most exposed … how can I look them in the eye tomorrow morning?

Outside, the rain had begun, rumbling and spitting at her window. She found her cheeks latticed with tears for the first time since she came to Dublin. So that’s what it’s like, she thought, bewildered.

L
ooking at a flattened curl on the back of Ruth’s head, Maria wondered whether she had been hallucinating. This frail, cuddly woman could have nothing to do with the shapes by the fire last night. Leaning against the sink, Ruth washed two aspirins down with orange juice. She was colourless as paper; tiny wrinkles showed round her eyes.

Jael lay diagonally across her futon with a sockful of ice on her forehead, rejecting Maria’s offers of hangover remedies and breakfast. “I’m thirty fucking years old,” she commented, eyes shut, “so what good will a poached egg do me?”

When Maria came back into the kitchen, Ruth was picking up sticky wine glasses and tattered napkins. They washed up wordlessly, their hands dipping in tandem. Half an hour later they were curled into the sofa, swapping family photos.

“Is that your little brother in the suit?”

“It was far too big for him, but Mum insisted,” answered Ruth. “He’s doing law; she’d love him to become a diplomat.”

Maria contemplated three photos of the same triangle: a
woman sitting in an armchair with a boy at one shoulder and a young, slightly sullen Ruth at the other. “Is that what she wanted you to be?”

“Oh, no, the Civil Service was much more suitable for a girl, no need to live in foreign parts. It broke her heart when I ditched it. Maybe if I go on and get a master’s, it’ll make it up to her.”

The next sheaf of photos showed Ruth and her mother walking on hard shingle. “What would you research?”

“Medieval nuns. My professor tells me it’s a soft subject, but I think they led such fascinating lives.” Ruth looked up and smoothed the lines out of her forehead. “What about you, Maria, what are your plans?”

“Plans, woman?” She shrank back into the folds of the tartan blanket. “I’m not old enough to vote yet.”

“I keep forgetting.”

Maria tapped the photos into a neat pile. “You know how, when you’re small, adults can never think of anything to ask you but what are you going to be when you grow up? Well, I used to say a bus driver just to shock them. And because I liked buses.”

Ruth grinned reminiscently. “I always said air hostess, just like every other little girl in my class. Jael said terrorist once and got slapped for it. At least that’s her story.”

“Should we try the malingerer again?”

“Why not.”

Finding the bedroom door open, Maria picked her way through strewn jumpers and coffee bowls to the window and pushed it a few inches open.

Eyes shut, Jael ordered, “Shut that damn window.”

“We were going to go for a walk as far as the river,” said Maria, nudging it farther open.

The reply was prompt: “You can go for a fuck in the park for all I care, ducky.”

“Oh, come on,” Ruth called from the corridor, “let her fester.”

The sunlight was turning to violet in the oil-streaked puddles. How familiar the streets were to Maria now, as if she had spent years in Dublin rather than weeks. The grimy corners, bus stops askew, green street-name plaques so high on the red brick walls that tourists had to crane up as if looking for Superman. The city was always quiet after a holiday, especially the debauch of Hallowe’en. Orange streamers were coiled in gutters, and some joker had left her witch’s hat on the skull of a bronze patriot.

Once they had left the square behind, Ruth slowed down, polishing a plucked leaf between her fingers. “Nice day.”

“Mmm.” Maria was watching the chimney tops for birds.

“Sorry Jael was so foul.”

“Not your problem.”

Ruth spiked the glossy leaf on a railing and folded her arms. “Actually I’m glad we’re on our own because there’s—” She stopped and let out a little snort of amusement.

Maria looked at her warily.

“Sorry, it’s just—of all the clichéd phrases—but I can’t think of any other.” Singsong, almost parodie: “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

Not now, thought Maria. Not now that I know the curve of your hip, the sounds you make. I’ve no right to be told anything anymore.

“You may have guessed this already, I mean we really should have got around to saying something before, but I mean, you do know we’re lovers, don’t you? Me and Jael.”

It was a relief to have it spoken. But how unnerving to watch those words being exhumed into the chilly daylight.

“Well, yes. More or less.” Three long seconds. “Fine by me,” she added hurriedly.

“Great.” Ruth’s voice leapt up an octave.

They strolled for a minute or two, both studying the trees through the black rods of the fence. Say something nice, Maria ordered herself, but the silence nibbled away her words.

“Wasn’t sure how you’d take it,” Ruth commented at last. “Most people have been fine, but you never know. A couple of good friends from school—they didn’t exactly spit in my face, but I saw their eyes glaze, and I could never be comfortable with them afterward.”

Maria ran a twig along the railings. “I suppose most students would be fairly liberal, though.”

“Do you think so?” Ruth’s eyebrows were sardonic.

“Well, I don’t know. After they get over the initial shock, maybe. If it is a shock.” Shut up, stop flailing.

The rotting leaves were sticking to Ruth’s low heels; she paused to scrape them off on a kerb. “I find it’s the opposite, actually,” she commented. “Students have this tolerant surface—they cheer Martina’s serves and hum along to k.d. lang—but inside they’re panicking and twisting like hamsters in a cage.”

“You can’t know that,” said Maria desperately, dropping her twig. “And even if some do seem hostile, it’s just ignorance. Like, you’re the first one I’ve met. As far as I know. I mean the first two.”

A quick smile flashed like a dragonfly. “Yes, but some of the warmest reactions I’ve got have been from people who didn’t know the first thing about it but had tolerant instincts. Like that old woman I was telling you about, the one I pickled gherkins with in Germany.”

Maria counted the cracks on the pavement. “Why do you tell people if they’re going to be horrible?” she asked at last. “If I’m scared of something, I just don’t do it.”

“I doubt that,” said Ruth gently. “You must know what it’s like when you’re so scared of something your guts are churning,
but you do it anyway, and the adrenaline rushes through you, like a flag going up.”

“Suppose. Not very often, though.”

“Well, I don’t come out to people every day of the week; it would be exhausting. I lie low for a while, then go on a crusade, hit them with it, make all the jaws drop.” Her hand was light on Maria’s elbow, ushering her across the road as the lights changed. “Most of the time I do it just to feel free. I can’t stand those old euphemisms about good friends and flatmates.”

“That’s the way you talked to me.” Maria moved away slightly, unable to keep the hurt out of her voice.

Ruth paused to peer into a cobbled alley and murmured, “The river’s down thisaway.” Then, “I’m a terrible procrastinator, Maria. I was—we were both—afraid you might go.”

“Why would I go?” asked Maria. Her lips were taut with the effort of not saying
I nearly did
.

“Jael told me that instead of barging in there as usual, I should give you a chance to find out on your own. And once a couple of weeks had gone by, we were too embarrassed to make an official announcement.” Her tone lightening, she went on. “She suggested we stick a little sign on the fridge, saying ‘To whom it may concern: Jael and Ruth indulged in unnatural relations last night.’”

Maria laughed, a little shortly, and commented that unnatural relations sounded like hard-hearted aunts.

Brown office blocks stared at grey ones across the streets that still surprised Maria by their gracious proportions. Out of basements stuck the unlit neon titles of nightclubs and neat plaques offering acupuncture or laser printing. Farther into the old city, buildings sagged, one seeming to lean on a single thirty-foot wooden support. Dandelions tufted from the rubble.

By the time they reached the quays, the conversation had
wandered to the ethics of meat. “I remember the first time I ever wanted to be a vegetarian,” Ruth said as they crossed the Ha’penny Bridge. “My mother called me in before mass to show me how to joint a chicken. ‘Listen for the crunch,’ she kept saying.”

Maria nodded vehemently, running her finger along the railings. “What got to me were the names—the breast meat was ‘his chests,’ and that sort of triangle at the bottom, Mam called it ‘the pope’s nose.’”

“My mother would never have been so blasphemous. She probably referred to it as ‘the bird’s posterior.’”

“Does she know about you?” Then Maria wished she hadn’t asked.

“Not yet.” Ruth put her head through the pale blue slats of the footbridge and stared down. “Water’s going at a fair lick, isn’t it?” She grinned up at Maria, her face striped by the bars. “The worst thing about the chicken was its little bag of organs, do you remember? For years I was convinced that all my innards were carried in a slimy pouch too, and if I sneezed, they might shoot out.”

“I worry about you, woman. Come on, let’s go back the long way. I want to show you that peculiar duck I found in the green. And maybe if we give Jael a full hour, she’ll have repented and heated up a frozen pizza.”

“Bet it’ll be a ham one,” said Ruth, leading the way back across the bridge. “I’d have become a vegetarian long ago if it wasn’t for her, you know. Maybe even a vegan.”

Maria had taken to avoiding mirrors. Every time she saw herself she looked younger, as if her handful of years was flaking away. The nose a little flatter, the cheeks paler, the hair more helpless each time she caught her reflection in a polished shopfront. Since she came to Dublin her clothes had been hanging wrong on her shoulders. As for the overall she
wore two evenings a week, it made her look like a fifties-era unwed mother, scrubbing floors in a convent. She would have asked Yvonne’s advice, if Maria had not been avoiding her since their last argument about the flatmates. Galway was hardly an expert on clothes, since he wore nothing but skinny jeans. And Damien—glimpsed in lecture theatres, hallucinated on street corners—never noticed her, whatever she wore or however she tied back her drooping hair. So the list of friends ended after two, she noted. Friends her own age, that was, not including Ruth and Jael. It was all too easy to spend a merry evening in the flat and forget that she was playing gooseberry to a couple of lovers.

One evening Maria came in for dinner metamorphosed.

Ruth’s forehead creased. “But it was nice the old way.”

Jael took one look at Maria’s skull-hugging hair and whooped. “What does it think it is, a punk sheep?”