On her feet are dead men’s boots; in her bag are boxes and boxes of photographic film, a particular type that Evelyn needs, which takes well to the silver-bromide processing, that likes to soak up the white of Evelyn’s blenched backgrounds, likes to take the imprint of every curve, every dip, every contour, every tensed muscle in the expressions of her subjects. It’s only sold in one shop in Brooklyn so every couple of months Aoife is dispatched to stock up. She likes the ride over there, starting in the innards of Manhattan, then rising into the light, which cross-hatches the passengers’ faces with shade.
The sign next to where she stands, leaning on the handrail, would to anyone else say ‘6th Floor’ but Aoife turns her head away, avoiding its eye, as if it is a person who has committed some offence against her. Text to Aoife is slippery, dangerous. It cannot be trusted. One minute the sign might say ‘6th Floor’; the next, the letters will have shifted, with sickening ease, into ‘Gut Flour’ or ‘Girth loot’ or ‘9th Hoor’.
When she first came to New York, she knew no one. She arrived in a rush, like someone who trips as they enter a room. She had dismantled her life in London in a matter of days, giving away what she couldn’t carry, leaving her bicycle on the pavement with a notice: ‘Free to whoever needs it’. She knew someone who knew an American bloke who said his godfather ran a music club in somewhere called the Bowery. He’d give Aoife a job, he was sure of it. It was a tenuous lifeline, but she’d taken it.
When she first came to New York, she found herself always on the look-out for families. In the street, in cafés, in queues at the movies, under the leafy canopies of trees in Central Park. When she saw one, she would study them. She would walk behind them in shops, position herself near them on a bench and lean in to catch their conversations. She wasn’t particular about ages: any family would do. She looked into prams and strollers, and felt a sort of satisfaction when she found an echo in the baby’s face of the mother’s unusually wide eyes or widow’s peak. She watched a father and a teenaged daughter eat bagels together, outside a corner deli, each licking their bottom lip in exactly the same way, apparently unconscious of their mirroring. On her way to the subway every morning, she crossed paths with an elderly mother and daughter who wore the same colour lipstick; they had the same fine, flyaway hair. The mother wore hers swept up into a chignon; the daughter had cut hers – defiantly, Aoife always thought – into a severe bob that didn’t suit her. Aoife often got the urge to whisper, just give in, grow it and put it in a chignon, it will look better.
When she first came to New York, she knew no one, she was on the look-out for families, and felt herself to be as broken as the city. She rented a one-room walk-up in which everything was something else: the tiny bathtub masquerading as a counter in the kitchen, the bed hiding upright in the wardrobe, like an assassin. Cockroaches and something she couldn’t identify skedaddled up the walls and into cracks when she walked in. The man with a music club did give her a job: she had to take a rubber stamp, bang it on a purple-soaked ink pad and press it to the backs of punters’ hands. Each gentle blow inked a bee on their skin, wings outstretched in flight, antennae raised, seeking something. Music-obsessed young New Yorkers would file past her, arms outstretched, waiting for the insignia, the impermanent tattoo that would permit them to exit the real world and enter the world beyond the thick curtain, a world of heavy, smoke-hung dark that reverberated with sound and thin beams of light. If it was a slow night, Aoife inked herself over and over again so that hundreds of bees swarmed over her skin, up her arms and into her sleeves. Later, when the club was full and the doors were closed, she went behind the bar to help serve the drinks and there she would mix cocktails, slip straws into liquid, pack glasses with ice, yell, ‘What’ll it be?’ into people’s ears over the music, her legs moving to the bass, her torso weaving side to side to the guitar riffs, her bee-patterned arms pumping counterwise to the melody. The music filled her skull; she thought nothing the whole time she was in the club. She liked dancing to the bleached-hair woman with large eyes, who sang angrily with an impassive face, and the man who moved as if made of machinery, as if his joints were hinged with oil; she was less enamoured of the ones who spat at the crowds or lashed the walls with their guitars, if only for the leaping, volatile crowd they brought with them.
She knew that none of this – the music, the apartment, the being there – would ever distract her from what had happened between her and Monica. It ran in her mind, on a constant loop. Aoife didn’t think she would ever get over it, that what had occurred between them in the kitchen at Michael Francis’s house would be carried within her for ever, like a splinter she couldn’t remove. She had tried to fix things, she really had. Months after that time in the kitchen, even though she still smarted with the things Monica had said, even though it had shifted something deep within her, when she had heard that Monica had moved house, she had caught a train to Gloucester, then a bus. She’d gone to the place Monica was living, a strange sort of farmhouse, like something a child would draw, like something on a postcard of England, down a long lane with overarching trees. She wanted to say, what’s going on, why did Joe leave, why are we out of touch, what are you doing here? But that Peter bloke came to the door and said that Aoife wasn’t welcome and that he’d thank her not to call again. Aoife had stood on the worn step of her sister’s house and had had to hold on to the doorhandle, just to be sure, just to know that, yes, the door had indeed been shut in her face, that her sister was inside, that she had sent her husband, fiancé, whoever he was – Aoife had only met him once, she doubted Monica had met him many more times herself – to the door to tell her to go, to leave, to not come back. Was Monica watching from inside? Aoife had wondered later. Was she behind one of those net curtains, peeping out as she, Aoife, had stood on the doorstep, tears scoring her face. Aoife scrubbed them off, started back down the path, nearly tripping over a cat, and round the corner, on the lane, she had had to stop, to put her hand on a wall because she was shaking so much she couldn’t walk.
By day, in New York, she straightened tubes of paint in an art-supplies store, sorted brushes by size, polished the glass display cabinets, working until her face appeared and she was always surprised at how serious she looked.
Mainly, she lived. She got on with the small acts of life. She continued to ensure that – in the phrase she always used inside her own head – she got away with it. No one found her out. She got into bed each night and closed her eyes with relief that one more day had gone past in which no one had rumbled her.
She has, over the years, perfected a number of tried-and-tested methods to cover up her problems with the printed word. She says she is short-sighted or has forgotten her glasses or that her eyes are tired. In a restaurant or a diner, she will shut her menu – not too fast, never too fast – turn to whoever is with her and say, with a confidential half-smile, why don’t you order for me? She has an eye for the kind of person who is only too happy for a chance to show off the speed of their reading or the neatness of their handwriting or their flair for composition; she will seek them out to say, off-handedly, could you fill in this form for me, my handwriting is illegible, you know, everyone says so. She has a casual way of passing a page or book to someone next to her and saying, read that for me, would you, and then she listens so carefully, so concentratedly, and opens up that part of her mind that records things, like a stenographer, so that if anyone were to question her about the content of the text she could repeat it back to them flawlessly. On her first night behind the bar at the club, she asked the bartender to tell her which bottle was which and she recited the names to herself, like a novena, first forwards, then backwards, testing herself over and over again until she could find them in the dark: whiskey on the far left, then bourbon, gin next to it, then rum, then vodka. No one would ever know. This is what she aims for, what she strives for, every moment of her days: that no one will catch on. She appears to the world, she knows, as slightly odd but otherwise benign, a little w
atchful, perhaps, a little detached, but no one knows. No one realises that when she tilts her head and says, order for me, would you, or when she turns to the row of inverted spirit bottles, each with its convex Cyclops eye, her jaw is locked with the tension and terror of being found out.
She cannot read. This is her own private truth. Because of it, she must lead a double life: the fact of it saturates every molecule of her being, defines her to herself, always and for ever, but nobody else knows. Not her friends, not her colleagues, not her family – certainly not her family. She has kept it from all of them, felt herself brimming with the secret of it her whole life.
She’d been in New York for six months, perhaps more, perhaps almost a year, she forgets these things, when she was shelving sketchbooks in the art-supplies store, her mind blurred with tiredness as she’d been working at the club until four a.m., and she saw Evelyn Nemetov through the window. She was looking up at the store sign, which, from where Aoife was standing, said: or sometimes KCATTATRA or KCATARACT or RATATATTAT. Aoife recognised her straight away: she’d been to an exhibition of hers, several times, in London. Evelyn Nemetov, on a sidewalk in New York, in a raincoat several sizes too large and a canvas hat pulled down low on her forehead, standing there, hands in her pockets, as if she was just another member of the human race. To Aoife, it was as if a Greek god had materialised right there on 52nd Street, had decided to pay a visit to the mortals of New York, to see how life was, before returning to her insubstantial deified form. Aoife stood in the store, a stack of sketchbooks in her hand, and willed Evelyn Nemetov to come inside, to open the door and walk in. And, after a moment, she did. Not only that, she walked right up to Aoife and said she was looking for some tape, not just any kind of tape, the one that was adhesive on both sides. Did Aoife know what she meant? She couldn’t find it anywhere. Double-sided sticky tape, Aoife said, speaking ordinary words to Evelyn Nemetov, as if she might understand. Yes, Evelyn Nemetov replied, do you have it? Yes, Aoife said. And she went to get it, and when she was ringing up the tape on the till she turned to Evelyn Nemetov and said, do you need an assistant, I could be your assistant, please let me try, just give me a chance.
When she first came to New York, she knew no one, she was obsessed with studying families, she felt herself to be broken, like the city, but then she found the club and then she met Evelyn and everything was different.
Aoife reaches the top floor of the building and fishes in her pocket for the key. She pushes her way through the heavy door, easing the bag in after her.
She always gets the urge to shout at this point. That is what you do, isn’t it, when you arrive in an apartment with someone else there, someone who is expecting you? She has to stop herself every time. Evelyn doesn’t like shouting: it makes her jump and disturbs her concentration. This is not, after all, your average apartment.
Aoife advances over the floor in her too-big boots. She could walk through these rooms at midnight in a power-cut, if she had to. She knows where everything is, where everything goes. If asked, she could find anything at all within two minutes. This is, after all, her job. But it gives her a strange, unfamiliar pleasure because she is not known for organisation, for knowing-where-things-are. If her family were told that she was good at this, that she could do it, they would laugh and gape in disbelief. But they don’t know and no one will ever tell them.
‘Is that you?’ she hears Evelyn murmur, from what sounds like the direction of the darkroom.
‘Yeah,’ Aoife says.
‘My God, I thought you’d been kidnapped. Eaten by wolves. Joined a cult or something.’
‘Nothing so exciting.’
‘You’ve been hours.’
‘Sorry,’ Aoife says, resting her palm on the darkroom door for a moment. ‘The subway, queues, you know. I’ll put the film away.’
Evelyn has lived in the apartment below for most of her life; she keeps this place as her workspace, her studio, her retreat. Aoife goes into the room they use for storage: what would once have been a bedroom is now filled with shelves, cabinets, cupboards. Pigeon-holes stretch from floor to ceiling, along the windows, up and over the lintel. And every single one has a label: film b+w, reads one, film col, reads another; filters, lens caps, spare straps. Aoife doesn’t even glance at these labels, tightly typed by some predecessor or other, because she memorised the contents when she first arrived. She drew a diagram of the pigeon-holes when she got home, standing up beside the covered bathtub, drawing arrows and writing what she remembered in her own sometimes backwards, mostly left-handed scrawl. The result, incomprehensible to anyone else, she’d pinned to the shuddering skin of the refrigerator, until she had it committed to memory.
Along the other wall are cabinets containing Evelyn’s archives – boxes and boxes of negatives and contact sheets, drawers filled with lists of whom she has photographed and where and how much she was paid and by whom. Files and files of contracts, tax returns, letters from fans and non-fans.
This whole side of the room, Aoife stays away from. Which is becoming a problem, with every passing day. She has begun to dream about this side of the room, it has started to invade her nocturnal life. It pops into her head, unbidden, as she stamps bees on the skin of music-lovers, as she clunks whiskey sours down on the bar.
She has got away with things so far. But she knows, this side of the room knows, that it cannot be for long.
Other photographers’ assistants she has talked to have said they never do anything other than filing or dealing with contracts or answering mail or raising invoices: they are, they grumble to Aoife, nothing more than an admin assistant. That Evelyn takes Aoife out on shoots is incredible, they say; Aoife doesn’t know how lucky she is.
Lucky is not how Aoife sees it. She feels herself to be cursed, like those people in folk tales who are singled out for the random cruelty of some higher being, condemned for ever to have a wing instead of an arm or to live underground or to take the form of a reptile. She cannot read. She cannot do that thing that other people find so artlessly easy: to see arrangements of inked shapes on a page and alchemise them into meaning. She can create letters, she can form them with the nib of a pen or the lead of a pencil, but she cannot get them to line up in the right order, in a sequence that anyone else could understand. She can hold words in her head – she hoards them there, she can spin sentences, paragraphs, whole books in her mind; she can stack up words inside herself but she cannot get these words down her arm, through her fingers and out on to a page. She doesn’t know why this is. She suspects that, as a baby, she crossed paths with a sorcerer who was in a bad mood that day and, on seeing her, on passing her pram, decided to suck this magical ability from her, to leave her cast out, washed up on the shores of illiteracy and ignorance, cursed for ever.
On her first day in the studio, Evelyn had handed her a contract and asked her to check it over, then fill it in. Aoife had taken it and laid it on the table and, when Evelyn left the room, Aoife had bent over it, one hand held over her left eye. There was a sudden, crushing weight on her chest and it was difficult to draw breath into her lungs. Please, her mind was saying, she wasn’t sure to whom, please, please. Let me get through this, just this once. I’ll do anything, anything at all. ‘Contract’ she could recognise, right at the top of the page. That was good. Evelyn had said it was a contract. Or did it perhaps say ‘contact’? Was there an r there? Aoife pressed her left eye hard with the heel of her palm and scanned the now undulating string of letters that made up the words. Was there an r and, if so, where ought it to be? Before the t or after the t or next to the c and, if so, which c? Panic cramming her throat, she told herself to leave ‘contract’ or ‘contact’ or whatever the hell it said and look down the page and when she did, she knew she was doomed. For the page on the table was crammed with text, impossibly small text, closely printed, words like lines of black ants crawling over the white. They clustered and rearranged themselves before her eyes, they dissolved themselves from their linear left–ri
ght structure and formed themselves into long, wavering columns, top to bottom; they swayed and flexed, like long grasses in a wind. She saw, for a moment, a v reaching up for an embrace with the empty arms of an h; she noticed an a in proximity to an o, which brought to mind the arrangement of her own name. She caught hold, briefly, of a collocation of letters that said, possibly, ‘fraught’, or maybe ‘taught’, but the next moment it was gone. She was fighting down tears, knowing that it was over, that this job, this chance she’d been given, was scuppered, like so many before it, and she was weighing up the pros and cons of just walking out when she heard Evelyn coming back along the corridor.
Aoife wasn’t aware of the moment in which she made the decision. All she knew was that she was lifting the contract by its corner, up and away, with only the tips of her fingers, as if it radiated some kind of toxic material. She was sliding it into a blue folder and she was putting the blue folder into a box on top of a filing cabinet.
As she came into the room, Evelyn said, ‘All finished with the contract?’
And because Aoife wanted this job, she wanted it so badly, and why shouldn’t she have a good job, an interesting job, like other people did, damn that sorcerer to hell and back, she turned round, she smiled her confidential half-smile, she folded her hands together and said, ‘Yes. All done.’
In Evelyn’s storeroom, she empties the boxes of film on to the table and starts to stack them in their respective places.
Since that day, over the many months she’s worked for Evelyn, the blue folder in the box on top of the filing cabinet has swelled and grown. Every bit of paper she is handed, every letter she opens, every request or application or contract that comes through the door, she puts in there. Anything with numbers and dollar signs – cheques and bills and invoices – she sends straight to the accountant so she knows at least that the money is going into and out of the business. But everything else gets put in the folder. To deal with later. When she can. As soon as she’s worked out how to do it. And she will. It’s just a matter of time. Any day now, she will get down the blue folder, which is bulging, sides straining, and deal with it. Somehow.