She slides box after box of film into the pigeon-holes. ‘How’s it looking?’ she calls.
Evelyn appears in the doorway. A tall woman, she towers over the diminutive Aoife by at least a foot. Her mink-grey hair is pulled back from her face and held in what looks to Aoife like a bulldog clip; her shirt, which must be an old one of her husband’s, has several clothes pegs hanging off its front. She has her long, sinewy arms crossed over herself. ‘I don’t know,’ she mutters, in her sixty-a-day husk. ‘It’s kind of grainy.’
Aoife eyes her. ‘Grainy can be . . . good, though . . . can’t it?’ she says, with care. It is never entirely clear when Evelyn needs verbal reassurance or just mute understanding.
‘Not grainy.’ Evelyn runs a hand along the shelf. She stops by a box of light bulbs and frowns at it. ‘Murky.’
‘Murky?’
‘Murky-grainy.’
Aoife picks up the last box of film.
‘Did you send off that magazine contract?’ Evelyn says suddenly.
The sides of the box are slippery, textureless; it falls from Aoife’s fingers as if drawn to the floor by a magnet. ‘I . . . um . . .’ she gets out, as she fumbles on the tiles for the film. ‘I’m sure I . . .’
‘Odd,’ murmurs Evelyn, at the window now. ‘They called to say they hadn’t had it but—’
‘You need to get ready,’ Aoife interrupts.
Evelyn turns. ‘I do?’
‘Yeah. You have to be downtown in twenty minutes.’
‘Oh. I’m having lunch with . . . thingy, aren’t I?’
‘Thingy?’ Aoife raises an eyebrow at her. Evelyn’s terrible memory for names is a long-running joke between them.
‘Dan? Bob? No . . . Paul,’ Evelyn says, fishing a half-smoked cigarette from the shirt pocket. ‘Paul . . . something. Ah!’ she says, with a triumphant wave of her crumbling cigarette. ‘Allanson. Paul Allanson.’
‘Close,’ Aoife says, gesturing at the pegs on Evelyn’s shirt. ‘Allan Paulson. Curator at MoMA.’ Evelyn comes forward and holds her arms up in the air, allowing Aoife to remove each peg with a snap. ‘Make sure he takes you somewhere nice.’
‘I’ll bring you a doggie bag. I can never eat at these things.’
‘Thank you.’ Aoife extracts the bulldog clip from Evelyn’s hair. ‘You want me to come in the cab with you?’
Evelyn shakes her head. ‘No. I’m not totally useless. You carry on with . . .’ She nods towards the darkroom. ‘Don’t forget to . . .’ she waves her hand in a vague arch ‘. . . well, you know what to do. Maybe you should go to the store and pick up some things for the refrigerator. It looks horribly empty. Take some money.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Aoife follows Evelyn to the door, where she hands her a jacket and then a satchel.
At the top of the stairs, Evelyn stops, puts her hand to her head. ‘Oh, my, I almost forgot. There are messages on the machine. That guy called again. Whatshisname. Kitchen man. He said something about being back in town. You know what? You should just go. Go home. Go and meet him. Everything here can wait until tomorrow.’ She sets off down the stairs, muttering to herself. ‘Can’t believe I almost forgot to tell her, what kind of a person am I, forgetting that, almost forgetting, Jesus, am I getting so old I can’t even remember basic . . .’
Aoife goes back into the apartment and stands on the landing of the studio, clasping and unclasping her hands, knuckles whitening through skin. She shuts her eyes for a moment or two, enough for the chambers of her heart to contract once and expand again, taking in the returning blood. A reprieve. For now. Got away with it one more time – and a phrase of her sister’s pops up in her head: by the skin of her teeth.
Then the moment is broken. Aoife opens her eyes. She releases her hands and moves off, pulling open the darkroom door and letting it shut behind her. She disappears, like an actor into the wings, swallowed up by the gloom.
The answering machine glows with four messages. The first one is from a magazine editor, the next from the assistant of an actress Evelyn is due to shoot next month, and there’s a long one from Evelyn’s husband about the new coffee-machine. Then another voice comes on the line: ‘Hey, Aoife, it’s Gabe. I’m back in town, not sure for how long but I was wondering if you were free this afternoon. I know it’s short notice but . . . anyway . . . I hope you can get away. You can call me on . . . Actually, that won’t work. I’ll call again in an hour or so. ‘Bye.’
Aoife raises the receiver, listens to the purr of the dial tone and replaces it, trying to ignore the pulse that is suddenly clicking, clicking in her neck. She flicks on the red bulb and goes over to the strips of film, hanging by their ends to a washing-line. They jostle and shift, like animals sensing the approach of a predator. She picks up one by its edges and, finding it dry, holds it up to the light: tiny ghosts flare up within the frame, white mouths agape, pale hair on end, the skies behind them dark as Doomsday.
Taking the scissors from a hook on the wall – also installed by her, amazingly, since hammers and nails are not her natural tools – she begins to slice the developed films into strips of ten, counting as she goes.
It always reminds her, this counting, of helping her mother in the chapel before one of the big days, Easter or Christmas or Harvest Festival. Her mother at the altar, slotting lilies and roses into vases, tugging straight the cloths she had laundered and ironed, staying up the previous night, sweating and swearing over the starch and heat and tension of it all. It was Aoife’s job to put a hymn book on each seat, straightening any skewed hassocks as she went. And she liked to count as she did this. ‘Thirty-three, thirty-four,’ she whispered, under her breath, ‘thirty-five, thirty-six. I got to thirty-six, Mammy!’ Her mother would reply, without turning round, ‘You’re going great guns there, Aoife, aren’t you? You keep it up now.’
Aoife keeps it up with the film, just as she did with the Easter hymn books, methodically slicing through every tenth frame, stacking the shiny strips in slippery piles.
All this – this work, this apartment, this city, what she’s wearing, what she does, who she is – is so removed from what she was brought up for, from what she was taught, from what she learnt, that it makes her smile sometimes. The thought of Evelyn in her parents’ house, at her convent school, is as incongruous as a flamingo in a field of cows.
Aoife left school without a single qualification. The nuns described her as ‘quite literally unteachable’. She failed every exam she sat (apart from art, in which she scraped a pass). She hadn’t written a word on any of the papers. In some, she didn’t even bother to turn over the exam sheet, just filled the margins of her paper with doodles.
The local priest, having had his ear bent by Gretta, who was given to regular laments about poor Aoife and what was she to do with a girl like that, what would become of her, suggested that Aoife help out with the Sunday-school classes. They always needed people to read Bible stories to the children and help them draw pictures afterwards. Maybe in time, the priest suggested, Aoife could use this experience to become a teacher.
When Gretta had returned with this news, Aoife had sat in her room, in the dark, looking out of the window. The list of things she couldn’t do seemed to her endless. She couldn’t hit a ball or catch one, she couldn’t spell, she couldn’t play an instrument, she couldn’t hold a tune, she didn’t have the ability to blend in with other people, she always stuck out, was always mystifyingly noticeable, odd, different. She couldn’t even read aloud a Bible story to children and never would be able to.
Gretta was over the moon about the Sunday-school classes. Aoife overheard her telling someone on the phone that they had of course feared that Aoife would never amount to much but after this she might be able to hold down a respectable job.
Imagine, then, the uproar when Aoife announced one night over dinner – Monica and Joe were there but Michael Francis was not – that she wasn’t going to help at Sunday-school classes, that she had been to see the priest that very day to say she wouldn’
t be doing it. She didn’t want to be a teacher, she wasn’t good with children; she could think of nothing worse.
It was one of the Riordan family’s louder uproars. Gretta hurled a plate of spinach to the floor. She would later deny this and say it had slipped from her hand. Either way, spinach ended up on the carpet and there would be a green stain there for years, always referred to within the family as ‘the Sunday-school stain’. Gretta said she would die of shame, that Aoife would be the death of her, that she didn’t know what to do with her.
Not long after this, Aoife left. She simply walked out. It was so straightforward she didn’t, afterwards, know why she hadn’t done it before. ‘See yous,’ she said, giving a wave from the door, then stepping out into the light. And that was that, as far as Aoife and Gillerton Road went. They heard later she was living in a squat in Kentish Town. Michael Francis was dispatched to visit her and found her in the back room of a terraced house, cross-legged on a mattress, a half-strung necklace in her hands, a girl with a guitar next to her. The squat had mould on the walls, violent orange wallpaper, a bearded man digging up the back garden and a parrot sitting on top of the cooker. Aoife, he revealed, under close questioning from Gretta, was fine. Fine, Gretta shrieked, fine? What was she eating? Who was she living with? Did she look ill, unhappy? Did she have a job? Did he talk to her about doing the Sunday school classes? Was she decently dressed? Was she sharing the house with men? Men, Michael Francis shrugged, and women. Lots of them. Gretta couldn’t bring herself to ask what she really wanted to know, which was, was Aoife sharing her bed with any of them? What else, she said, tell me more. Michael Francis said, after a pause; that he thought her hair was different. Different, Gretta demanded, different how? Longer, he gestured around his own head, with beads in.
The hair beads were the last straw. It was agreed after this, among the Riordans, that Aoife had Gone Off The Rails. Rumours passed from Gretta to Monica and back again about Aoife and drugs; Aoife and men; Aoife and the dole office. There was the time Monica claimed that a friend of a friend had seen Aoife on the canal bank in Camden, selling patchwork bags from a blanket. This was never confirmed or denied by Aoife herself. Someone told Michael Francis he’d seen her on top of a bus in the King’s Road area with a man in purple flares. This piece of information he kept to himself. Aoife still turned up, from time to time, for Sunday lunch in Gillerton Road but she smiled enigmatically at Gretta’s questions about jobs, lifestyle, clothing, and helped herself to more potatoes.
The truth was that she had given herself a time span of five years. She didn’t know what she wanted so she set about sampling all the things she thought she might like. She began an evening class in pottery but left after a term. She helped a friend who ran a gardening firm (the bearded man Michael Francis had spied from the squat’s back windows). She worked at the tearooms in the British Museum. She slept with some men, then some more, then with a couple of women. She tried grass, then acid, then LSD, but decided, like sleeping with women, that while pleasant it wasn’t for her. She knew what she was searching for: something to set a flame under her life, to heat it into activity, into transformation, into a momentum all of its own. But nothing had, so far. She had liked the pottery; she liked the mornings in the museum tearooms, before they got too busy, when it was just the academics, thinking their abstruse thoughts while chewing yesterday’s scones; she hadn’t liked the gardening – just outdoor housework, she thought – or the acid or the mouldy walls of the squat. She found work as a set designer at the BBC and for a while she thought this might be what she’d been looking for. She could do it, she was good at it; she had the right kind of photographic memory, the right kind of devotion to detail. She could construct a set in her mind, then go out and reproduce it in a studio. But after she was briefed to create a Regency drawing room for the fifth time, she felt her attention begin to loosen and wander.
During her sixth Regency drawing room there had come the split – for this is how Aoife thinks of it, of the two of them cleaved apart, like a tree hit by lightning – with Monica, starting with the hospital, then Joe leaving like that and then Peter closing the door on her, so fast she’d had to shuffle backwards. The humiliation, the shock of it. The man almost a stranger, after all. Her sister somewhere in the house behind him; the knowing Monica was there. Going down the path, Aoife had been seized by an urge to throw back her head like a wolf and call her name – Monica, Monica – the way she used to when she was little and Monica was minding her, their mother out somewhere, and she couldn’t find her, had lost her in the house. Aoife would stand in the hall and shout her name, terror building in her chest. Shapes were passing and passing outside the sunburst-patterned glass in the front door: what if one of them were to turn, come up the path and loom large and faceless through the striated pane? The space under the sofa was beginning to bother her, the way the stuffing hung down limp in places like the bodies of rodents. And the hole in the skirting where the old boiler used to be – a horrible mouth into the dark, cluttered intestines of the house. She made it into the hall and no further because she couldn’t climb the stairs and run the risk that there would be no one upstairs and she’d be alone up there, the light switches too far up the wall to reach, the curtains not yet closed over the dark, and she shouted her sister’s name, over and over. Monica would always come. Always. And she’d always be running. Running down the stairs to her. Running to catch her up in her arms, to hold her face against the soft wool of what she called her sweater set. I wasn’t far away, she’d say, not far at all. And she’d make Aoife cinnamon toast to help her feel better.
On the path outside the farmhouse, Aoife had nearly tripped over a cat with a tufty black coat and she had wanted to call her sister like that, wanted her to come running and to say, not far at all. But instead she sidestepped the cat, even though it was coming at her with its tail held vertical and questioning, and made it away down the leaf-crammed lane.
In Evelyn’s darkroom, Aoife flicks the switch on the developer and, in its cone of white light, arranges the films in strips of ten, lining up the frames the way Evelyn likes: each one trapping a moment in life, a glass placed over a bee.
She is just lining up the last one when the phone startles into life. She leaps across the room and lifts it to her ear. ‘Nemetov studio, Aoife speaking.’
‘Hey.’
She drops to the floor, almost with relief, pulling the phone into her lap. ‘You’re back,’ she says.
‘I am. I got in this morning. I took a train. Several trains, in fact. You wouldn’t believe how long I’ve been travelling.’
‘You can tell me later.’
‘I can?’ She hears the smile in his voice. ‘You can get away?’
‘Sure. Evelyn’s gone off for a lunch and I’ve been officially set free for the day.’
‘Your place? In half an hour? Forty minutes?’
‘I’ll see you then.’
She shuffles the contact sheets into a rough heap, empties the developing trays and rinses them under the tap. When she emerges from the darkroom, she is surprised by the blaze of afternoon sun, taken aback not to find an answering dark in the apartment, as if she’s lost track of the day, the season. Aoife darts about the apartment, in search of her scattered jacket, sunglasses, keys, bag. She makes her way downstairs, out of the building and down the steps into the subway.
The platform is crowded, the heat overwhelming, but the passing and passing of trains brings a sudden, relieving movement of air. Aoife takes her place among all the other people waiting. To her left two men are arguing in Italian, one smacking his forehead for emphasis; to her right is an elderly woman in a fox fur and lace gloves. For some reason, Aoife’s mother surfaces in her mind. Gretta had told her once that her aunt had a fox fur and that she’d loved the way its mouth had a spring that would clip over its tail.
Aoife stands on the platform, subway-breeze stirring the hem of her dress, thinking of her mother as a child, the head of a fox in her h
ands. Then her train arrives and she moves forward. In the crush to get through the doors, she allows the tendrils of the fox to brush against her arm.
When she emerges at Delancey Street, Aoife knows she ought to go to the store. She needs milk, she needs cereal, a loaf of bread: basic food items that most people have in their apartments. She hovers outside a store, she contemplates a display of oranges, she picks up a peach and stands there with it in her hand, feeling its solidity, its mouse-like skin. A woman with a child balanced on her hip reaches across her for a bunch of bananas and says, as if to Aoife herself, you’ll get what’s coming to you. In the doorway an old man is laboriously counting coins from one hand to the other. Impatience seems to envelop Aoife like a cloak; she finds she cannot face going in, cannot face waiting in line to pay. She puts down the peach, carefully, so that it nestles among others of its kind. As she walks away, the child is refusing the proffered banana with a high-pitched wail.
She lets herself into her apartment with a feeling of such relief it’s as if she hasn’t seen it for weeks. She leans against the door to close it, lets her bag fall to the ground; she chucks her keys on to the board that covers the tub, straightens the sheets and starts to kick things under the bed – loose clothes, used mugs, odd shoes. She is just pushing a bundle of scattered clothes into the bottom of the closet, when there is a knock at the door, and suddenly Gabe is there, and he is lifting her off her feet and his hair is shorter and his jacket is wet and he is saying something about what a shithole of a neighbourhood this is and how can anyone in their right mind live here?
Aoife met Gabe on a shoot, three months previously. Evelyn was doing portraits of people in their workplaces. She’d done a tattooist, brandishing a needle in his parlour, a dog-groomer beside her array of brushes, a costumier in a back room at the Met, her mouth bristling with pins. The last in the series was to be a chef famous for his temper, his exacting secrecy over recipes and the snaking queues of Manhattanites eager to get a table at his restaurant.