From the very beginning it was never going to be me Cara was infatuated with, not my mouth she watched for minutes on end. I got so much from her, more than enough, plenty. It would have been greedy to want more, that continuous full-face look. What bothered me, I decided as I slid Minnie on to the dual carriageway, was Cara’s declining standards. Not the fact that she fell for other people, always and over and over, but the slippage in what she felt for them – from religious devotion to Mrs. Mew, in our schooldays when I used to help her pace out giant M’s on football pitches, down to this mundane lust.
When I got to the shopping centre, I couldn’t face the midday crowds yet. I allowed myself a choc-ice, sitting on the wall outside the supermarket, blinking in the sun. The taste of white ice-cream dripping down the side of my wrist brought back the day I first told Cara, and she me. This was one I kept to run past my eyes when I needed it, for comfort and absurdity.
We haven’t known each other long; only since October, when I was moved down into her class to repeat every tedious part of the Inter Cert course. On the first day of term I said, ‘How’s your sister doing in Ohio?’ and Cara said, ‘Fine,’ and then we talked about something else.
Nowadays we get each other’s jokes when no one else does. I can’t go another year without putting words to what’s on my mind.
We’ve known each other long enough. If she is my friend then she will not hate me.
‘I want to tell you something,’ I begin, as we stroll the circuit of the athletics field.
Cara stares up from her choc-ice. ‘If it’s about what I said before Maths I’m really sorry, I knew it was a bitchy…’
‘No, that was nothing.’
She licks chocolate off her lips doubtfully. ‘Is it something I won’t like then?’
‘Probably.’
‘Go ahead, so.’
I am disconcerted to meet with so little resistance. I pause to collect the words memorized in the small hours of the night before. ‘I’ve been fretting over whether or not to tell you for ages. I know you’ll try and understand but you won’t be able to, but I don’t mean that as an insult.’
‘Go on.’
‘No, actually I don’t think I can, I think I better just leave it there.’
Her grey eyes are small. ‘Would you rather a kick in the bladder?’
‘I really can’t say it.’
Deep in her throat she squawks and begins to flap her long elbows.
‘It’s all very well for you, you’re not the one who has to.’
Now Cara makes like a chicken on acid, tripping across the hummocky grass.
I cannot break my sulk to laugh. ‘Look, do you want to hear or not?’
‘Not particularly.’
Before I am halfway across the stretch of green she scurries up and falls into line at my heels. I slow down. ‘I’m in love with another woman.’
Cara’s pause is brief. ‘Who was the first?’
‘First to what?’
‘First one you were in love with.’
‘This is the first.’
‘Then why d’you say another woman?’
‘I just, it means a woman, it’s what you say. I’m a woman so she’s another woman.’
‘We’re girls really,’ Cara comments after a minute. ‘Who is she, then?’
‘It’s,’ and my throat closes on the hard K, so I veer into, ‘I can’t tell you the name, I barely know her and it’s all pretty bloody stupid but I can’t help it. But she’s not even around any more, she’s gone away.’ Hot-faced, I look down and see the remains of my ice-cream sliding into the grass. A blob of white dances on the point of a stalk. ‘Look, if you’re scandalized, just say so and be done with it.’
‘Did you expect me to be?’ she asks.
‘Don’t know. Are you?’
‘Don’t know.’
I begin to despair. In TV movies when you tell people hard things they go wide-eyed and say, ‘Oh, honey, it’ll be all right, and I’m so proud of you for telling me.’
‘No, actually’ – Cara’s voice is very soft – ‘I think I’m the same, only different.’
I am licking chocolate off the naked ice-cream stick at this point, and I can taste the wood on my tongue. I give her a suspicious glare but she meets my eyes and suddenly it makes sense, this feeling of correspondence. ‘What, you mean you too?’ Carefully, ‘I don’t think you mean what I mean.’
‘Do so.’
‘Is there someone you actually fancy?’
‘If you’re going to drag it down in the mud,’ she snaps, ‘let’s drop the subject.’
I contract.
‘Fancy sounds like pigeons.’ Cara curls her lower lip. ‘It’s higher than that. You know Mrs. Mew?’
‘The Art teacher? Just to see.’
‘Well, it’s her.’ She stares at her black patent shoes. ‘It’s a sort of obsession.’
‘I know exactly,’ I assure her. ‘It feels sort of platonic, doesn’t it?’
‘Mmm.’
The pause fills up with embarrassment.
‘But it doesn’t make me one of those people,’ Cara adds.
‘Which?’
‘Not gay or bisexual or any of those horrible words.’
‘Do you know any of those people?’
‘No, but I know I’m not one of them.’
‘Me neither,’ I confirm hastily.
‘I just feel ordinary,’ Cara insists, clearing her throat. ‘I think it’s all very silly. They should just let us get on with it.’
‘Mmm,’ I say, then, ‘The bell went ages ago; we’re in for it if it’s Big Dom.’ And we lope across the grass.
Cara begins again as soon as Sister Dominic has given us a section of eighteenth-century history to read through. She points with a surreptitious finger to a neat note on the margin of the book we are sharing. It says, About what we were talking about. Platon. Obsess. etc. Explain more re: you.
My answer is warily pencilled. I put it a bit too strongly. Seem to be getting it under control these days, since she’s gone.
Give hint who?
Nope.
I told you.
Well, I can’t, sorry.
Cara considers, her hand curled round the minuscule writing.
My shoulder leans against hers, the heat leaking through our blouses as my pencil skids along the margin. Listen, I need to know what you honestly think, because I couldn’t bear it if you were just doing the sophisticated liberal act and saying you knew how I felt just to make me feel better…
Cara tugs the pencil from my fingers. I do have some emotions of my own, you know, she scribbles down the side margin, it just happens that we happen to be in more or less the same dilemma.
Glumly, I add a daisy to the last letter. I draw a zigzag line under more or less and add well to be honest for me it’s a bit more rather than less across a faint portrait of Marie-Antoinette.
Her question mark is huge.
Not exactly platonic, I admit in tiny letters across the diamond necklace. And lots of them. What I said about the one whose name I couldn’t tell you, well that’s the most important but I’ve had dreams about others.
With a lunge of the hand Cara moves on to the next page, which has a blank space in the chronology of social reforms. But you can’t be truly in love with lots of women, she scrawls, ignoring my shoe crushing her little toe. Her hand finally freezes under the nun’s stare.
‘Would you two girls care to entertain the class with your correspondence?’ asks the Dominator.
‘No, Sister, I’m sorry,’ the rubber on the end of my pencil already grinding the words away, ‘it was just about homework.’ I will rip out the pages if she comes any closer. I’ll swallow them and die like a double agent.
Cara won’t catch my eye for the rest of the afternoon.
I blinked, focusing on a pyramid of pineapples. It was too hot to shop. We thought we were so important, when we were sixteen. We visualized our lives as a series of significan
t emotional tasks, from Platonic Obsession to Coming to Terms with Death. It didn’t occur to us that most of our existence would be spent in mindless activities like trailing round the supermarket.
It took me ages to find even half the strange foods Kate had admitted to liking. The girl in the dust-striped apron had never heard of fat-free tortilla chips or felafel powder, but I did manage to track down some bio-yoghurt. Beef chunks for Grace – macho enough for his tastes, surely? – and instant coffee for Mr. Wall, as well as a hunk of stilton in case my appetite returned.
By the time I got back to the big house, my shirt was stuck to my shoulder-blades. I had left the pineapple behind, probably under a plastic bag at the till, nor could I be bothered to drive back for it. Cara hated pineapples. She said they lured you in with promises of sweet tender flesh, then stuck spines between your teeth and roughened the roof of your mouth with acid. Maybe her spirit wouldn’t allow a pineapple in the house? I was often haunted by Cara when she was away on trips. The radio tended to play the songs she hummed in the bath, and somehow she always guessed when I had given in to exhaustion and watched something embarrassing like Emmerdale Farm. In the front bedroom – the one I had to remember at all times to call ‘mine’ and never ‘ours’, not as a point of principle but in case Mr. Wall would hear – whenever I was vacuuming I found scrunched-up tissues under the bed on her side.
Having dumped my grocery bags in the larder, I went out and sat on the edge of the hammock. It would leave a wet mark on my trousers, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. Only ten minutes before I’d have to think about lunch. At some point I should probably get around to crying. If it was cold and rainy I could weep, nose against a window-pane like an ingénue in a film. As it was, I bounced on the edge of the hammock, tanning my toes in my slippery sandals, thinking about pineapples. If I did manage to cry it would feel like just another undignified symptom of sun, a sweat of the eyes. Besides, the merry bawl of the birds would drown me out.
I surveyed the overgrown herb bed. Hadn’t weeded it in too long; over the summer my pace always slowed, and since I’d been back at Immac I hadn’t been able to summon the energy. The kids took it out of me, what was left of it after living with Cara. Everyone I ever mentioned my job to said, ‘You must love children.’ But I thought it impossible to love children, in general, any more than you could love the human race. In fact I had gone into primary-school teaching with a vague sense that I was not much good with kids, but at least I could save them from worse, from the kind of teachers who scare you into silence or make you feel guilty for life. My policy with children was what I liked to think of as non-interventionist, which meant leaving them alone as much as was legal. If I saw a girl peacefully lost in her own head, wandering down who knew what paths of fantasy, I let her be, and turned to a more eager volunteer for whatever two-plus-two answer was required. Such inane things I had to teach them, anyway, especially the Irish dialogues, which had not changed much since my day.
‘Cá bhfuil an cat? Come on now, Sharon, you know what that means. Where do you think the cat might be? The word for table is…bord. Tá an cat ar an mbord, say it. That’s right, good girl yourself.’
‘Please, Miss, Miss.’
‘Miss, can I go to you know where?’
‘Miss O’Grady, my mother won’t let the cat on the table she says it’s not hygienic. What’s Irish for hygienic?’
I had no idea. ‘The table is only an example, Aisling. What about the cat is on the floor, who knows how to say that?’
And so on, and on, peacefully enough, the greatest part of my mornings. Could be worse, as I always reminded myself, could be gutting chickens.
What was I doing anyway, daydreaming of work on my precious days off? I should get around to weeding the herbs before cooking lunch. Shame to, in a way; the garden looked so plump and plentiful, I didn’t want to start ripping out handfuls and leaving brown holes. Oh, this ludicrous heat. I kicked at the grass too hard, and the hammock went into a twist.
The familiar sound of a footstep on the grating in the yard: how many afternoons, how many years of homecomings? Not her. The sister. A leggy figure standing at the top of the garden, her suit off-white against the Virginia creeper that was just beginning to darken to red. ‘What in the name of god are you wearing your jacket for?’
‘Puts me in business mode,’ said Kate, her voice carrying as she walked down the garden. ‘How do you feel about anchovies?’
‘Some of my best friends.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Some of my best friends are anchovies. I’m being flippant, sorry.’ This woman must think me so crass, wisecracking on the eve of her sister’s funeral.
Kate’s mouth wavered into a half-smile. ‘Right. Well, they’re on a pizza I picked up at the mall; I couldn’t imagine you wanting to cook.’
‘Shopping centre, shopping centre,’ I tutted, ‘you can’t say “mall” over here. Surely you remember how you used to talk?’
She was folding her jacket over one arm; I was struck by the curve of muscle. ‘Bet you don’t talk like you did at fifteen either,’ she said. ‘Besides, Ireland has nothing but a past tense. Did you know there are more Irish living in America than in Ireland?’
‘Not real ones.’
She smiled guardedly.
‘Come on,’ I told her, hauling myself off the hammock, ‘the pizza will be getting cold. We forgotten primitives don’t know how to insulate a cardboard box. What are you doing buying fast food, anyway? I remember you upstaging us all in cookery class.’
‘Did I?’ Kate said wonderingly. ‘Too busy to eat in nowadays. I do Thanksgiving for my mother, but that’s about it.’
‘That’s a shame. I’ll get plates if you call your father,’ I added, bumping the kitchen door open with my hip.
‘Call him where?’
‘Call him down from his study, you know, shout.’
To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Wall had never tasted a pizza; he would have had no reason to. But he rose to this occasion, and gave his slice the most urbane of glances: ‘Anchovies, how nice,’ he repeated.
When she had finished Kate got up, wiping her fingers, and pulled an electric kettle out of a box. ‘Tah dah,’ she said, as if announcing a mediocre circus act.
Mr. Wall stared at it. ‘There was no need,’ he said. ‘Our old kettle must be in the garage still. I was planning to look it out this evening.’
‘Yeah, but this one shuts itself off automatically by thermostat,’ Kate assured him. ‘It’s foolproof.’
I winced at the word.
‘Very clever,’ said Mr. Wall, and refused a cup of coffee.
Embarrassed by the tension in the air, I said I’d love one, and that it was really thoughtful of her to remember the kettle.
After lunch Mr. Wall set off to the library, his shirt neck open; I could see the edge of the white cotton vest he always wore, even in this weather. I brought my stack of books downstairs and prepared end-of-month tests at the kitchen table. I couldn’t seem to remember what nine-year-olds would be likely to know about the French Revolution, apart from who was said to have said the thing about the cake.
Kate came down halfway through the afternoon in a crisp shirt and long shorts. She watched the kettle as it wheezed towards the boil. ‘Am I in your way?’
‘Not at all, I needed distraction. Rigor mortis was setting in.’ I flinched as soon as I heard myself say it, and didn’t meet her eye. There was a long pause while she filled the cafetière.
‘Is that decaff?’
‘It should be,’ she said wryly.
‘Nice to see Americans aren’t quite perfect yet.’
Kate didn’t rise to it; she was staring at a photograph of her grandparents on the mantelpiece. I went back to the Reign of Terror.
‘I was thinking of taking a walk,’ she mentioned.
‘The woods?’
‘Where else?’
‘Did you used to like them too?’
‘W
ell, there wasn’t really anywhere else to go after a row with my mother,’ said Kate.
‘What did you fight about?’
‘Just stupid things like what time to be in by, or having to give Cara my hand-me-downs.’
I put the cap on my pen. ‘I might join you, if you’re not planning a long hike.’
‘Sure, why not.’
I pulled the kitchen door shut behind us. The sun was hazed over but still bewildering to my eyes.
Kate’s were hidden behind prescription shades. ‘God, it’s hot. We’re not going all the way round by the road, are we? Let’s hop over the wall.’
I looked her up and down. ‘My body doesn’t do that sort of thing.’
‘But there were footholds,’ she protested. ‘Or at least some bricks to stand on.’ I waited in the yard while Kate jogged down to the back wall to investigate. Her steps were slower on the way back. There were drops of sweat on her hairline already. ‘Can’t find the breeze-blocks; my father must have moved them.’
‘Come on, it’s only five minutes by the road.’
But a damp had fallen on our spirits. As we walked up the hill, Kate commented on the lack of children around, our own boom generation having spilled across every avenue and cul-de-sac. ‘When did they shut off that field with bollards?’ she asked, pointing.
‘Dunno. Some time in the eighties.’
‘The itinerants used to camp there,’ she said. ‘Wonder where they are now.’
I confirmed that the Fitzwilliam Inn used to be called Moroneys, that there weren’t any American-style twenty-four-hour garages when we were young, and that the woods had indeed got smaller as the upmarket housing estates squeezed in on two sides. I was beginning to feel like a tour guide. It took all my energy to keep walking into the grey glare; sweat traced the line of my jaw. ‘It said in the paper it would reach thirty degrees today,’ I said.
‘What’s that in Fahrenheit?’
‘No idea, sorry.’
When we reached the wall around the woods, searching for something to say, I pointed to the daub of faded white and said, ‘I’ve always wondered what that means: “the cure” for what?’
Kate’s hand paused in the act of wiping her forehead. ‘Are you serious?’