Evening Class (46 page)

Fiona thought about it all for hours afterwards. Grania was only a year older than her. How had she been able to face up to her parents like that? Compared to the dramas in Grania’s life, Fiona’s were very small. What she must do now was something to get her locked into Barry and his life again.

She would think when she got into work next morning.

If you worked in the hospital you could often get flowers cheap at the end of the day from the florist, blooms that had passed their best. She got a small bunch of freesias and wrote ‘Get well soon, Nessa Healy’ on it. When nobody was looking she left them at the Nurse’s Station in the ward. Then she hurried back to her coffee shop.

She didn’t see Barry for two days, but he looked cheerful when he came in. ‘She’s much better, she’ll be coming home at the end of the week,’ he said.

‘Oh, I am glad… has she got over it, whatever it was?’

‘Well, it’s my father, you see. She thinks… well, she thought… anyway, he wouldn’t come and see her. He said he wasn’t going to be blackmailed by these suicide attempts. And she was very depressed at first.’

‘But now?’

‘Now it seems that he gave in. He sent her flowers. A bunch of freesias. So she knows he cares and she’s going home.’

Fiona felt herself go cold. ‘And he didn’t come in himself… with the flowers?’

‘No just left them in the ward and went away. Still, it did the trick.’

‘And what does he say about it all, your Dad?’ Fiona’s voice was faint.

‘Oh, he keeps saying he never sent her flowers, but that’s part of the way they go on.’ He looked a bit worried about it.

‘Everyone’s parents are very odd, my friend was just saying that to me the other day. You couldn’t understand what goes on in their minds at all.’ She looked eager and concerned.

‘When she’s settled in back at home will we go out again?’ he asked.

‘I’d love that,’ said Fiona. Please, please God, may no one ever find out about the flowers, may they decide to take the easy way out and go along with the notion that he had sent them.

Barry took her to a football match. Before they went he told her which was the good team and which was the bad one. He explained the offside rule and said that the referee had been blind on some previous matches and it was hoped that his sight might have returned to him by now.

At the match Barry met a dark, thickset man. ‘Howaya, Luigi, I didn’t know you followed this team.’

Luigi couldn’t have been more pleased to meet him. ‘Bartolomeo, me old skin, I’ve been with these lads since time began.’

Then they both broke into Italian,
mipiace giocare a calcio
. They laughed immoderately at this, and Fiona laughed too.

‘That means I like to play football,’ Luigi explained.

Fiona thought it must, but she sounded as if it was news to her. ‘You’re all getting on great at the Italian, then?’

‘Oh sorry, Luigi, this is my friend Fiona,’ Barry said.

‘Aren’t you lucky your girlfriend will go to a match. Suzi says she’d prefer to stand and watch paint dry.’

Fiona wondered should she explain to this odd man with the Dublin accent and the Italian name that she wasn’t
really
Barry’s girlfriend. But she decided to let it pass. And why was he calling Barry this strange name?

‘If you’re meeting Suzi later, maybe we’d all have a drink?’ Barry suggested, and Luigi thought that was the greatest idea he’d ever heard and they named a pub.

All through the match Fiona struggled hard to understand it, and to cheer and be excited at the right time. In her heart she thought that this was great, it was what other girls did, went to matches with fellows and met other fellows and joined up with them and their girlfriends later.

She felt terrific.

She must just remember now the different circumstances which led to a goal kick or a corner, and which to a throw-in. And even more important she must remember not to ask Barry about his mother and his father and the mysterious bunch of freesias.

Suzi was gorgeous, she had red hair and she was a waitress in one of those posh places in Temple Bar.

Fiona told her about serving coffee in the hospital. ‘It’s not in the same league,’ she said apologetically.

‘It’s more important,’ said Suzi firmly. ‘You’re serving people who need it, I’m just putting it in front of people who are there to be seen.’

The men were happy to see the girls talking so they left them to it and analysed the match down to the bone. Then they started talking about the great trip to Italy.

‘Does Bartolomeo talk night and day about this
viaggio
?’ Suzi wanted to know.

‘Why do you call him that?’ Fiona whispered.

‘It’s his name, isn’t it?’ Suzi seemed genuinely surprised.

‘Well, it’s Barry actually.’

‘Oh. Well, it’s this Signora, she’s marvellous altogether. She lives as a lodger in my mother’s house. She runs it all and she calls Lou Luigi. It’s an improvement as it happens, I sometimes call him that myself. But are you going?’

‘Going where?’

‘To Roma?’ Suzi said, rolling her eyes and the letter R.

‘I’m not sure. I don’t really know Barry all that well yet. But if things go on well between us, I might be able to go. You never know.’

‘Start saving, it’ll be great fun. Lou wants us to get married out there or at least have it as a honeymoon.’ Suzi waved her finger with a beautiful engagement ring on it.

‘That’s gorgeous,’ Fiona said.

‘Yeah, it’s not real but a friend of Lou’s got some great deal on it.’

‘Imagine a honeymoon in Rome.’ Fiona was wistful.

‘The only snag is that I’ll be sharing a honeymoon with fifty or sixty people,’ said Suzi.

‘Then you’ll only have to entertain him at night, not in the day as well,’ said Fiona.

‘Entertain
him’
? What about me? I was expecting him to entertain me.‘

Fiona wished she hadn’t spoken, as she so often wished. Of course someone like Suzi would think that way. She’d expect this Luigi to dance attendance on her. She wouldn’t try to please him and fear she was annoying him all the time like Fiona would. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be as confident as that. But then, if you looked like Suzi with all that gorgeous red hair, and if you worked in such a smart place, and probably had a history of fellows like Luigi giving you great rocks of rings… Fiona sighed deeply.

Suzi looked at her sympathetically. ‘Was the match very boring?’ she enquired.

‘No, it wasn’t bad. I’d never been to one before. I’m not sure if I understand offside though, do you?’

‘Jesus no. And I haven’t a notion of understanding it. You’d find yourself stuck out in the freezing cold with people bursting your eardrums if you could understand that. Meet them afterwards, that’s my motto.’ Suzi knew everything.

Fiona looked at her with undisguised admiration and envy. ‘How did you get to be… you know, the way you are, sure of things? Was it just because you were good looking?’

Suzi looked at her. This girl with the eager face and the huge glasses wasn’t having her on. She was quite sincere. ‘I have no idea what I look like,’ Suzi said truthfully. ‘My father told me I looked like a slut and a whore, my mother said I looked a bit fast, places I tried to get jobs in said I wore too much make-up, fellows who wanted to go to bed with me said I looked great. How would you know what you looked like?’

‘Oh I know, I know,’ Fiona agreed. Her mother said she looked silly in the tee-shirts, people in the hospital loved them. Some people said her glasses were an asset—they magnified her eyes; other people asked could she not afford contact lenses. And sometimes she thought her long hair was nice and sometimes she thought it was like an overgrown schoolgirl.

‘So I suppose in the end I realised that I was a grown up and that I was never going to please everyone,’ Suzi explained. ‘And I decided to please myself, and I have good legs so I wear short skirts, but not stupid ones, and I did tone down the make-up a bit. And now that I’ve stopped worrying about it nobody seems to be giving out to me at all.’

‘Do you think I should get my hair cut?’ Fiona whispered to her trustingly.

‘No I don’t, and I don’t think you should leave it long. It’s your hair and your face and you should do what
you
think about it, don’t take my advice or Bartolomeo’s advice or your mother’s advice, otherwise you’ll always be a child. That’s my view anyway.’

Oh it was so easy for the beautiful Suzi to talk like that. Fiona felt like a mouse in spectacles. A long-haired mouse. But if she got rid of the glasses and the long hair, she would just be a blinking short-haired mouse. What would make her grown up, and able to make decisions like ordinary people? Maybe something would happen, something that would make her strong.

Barry had enjoyed the evening. He drove Fiona home on his motorbike and as she clung to his jacket she wondered what she would say if he asked her to another match. Should she be courageous and, like Suzi, say she’d prefer to meet him afterwards? Or should she work out the offside rule with someone at work and go with him? Which was the better thing to do? If only she could choose which she wanted to do herself. But she hadn’t grown up yet like Suzi, she was someone who had no opinions.

‘It was nice to meet your friends,’ she said, when she got off the bike at the end of her street.

‘Next time we’ll do something that you choose,’ he said. ‘I’ll drop in and see you tomorrow. That’s the day I’m taking my mother home.’

‘Oh, I thought she’d be home by now.’ Barry had said he would ask her out when his mother had settled in at home, obviously she had thought Mrs Healy had been discharged. Fiona had not dared to go near the ward in case of being identified as the woman who had left the freesias.

‘No. We thought she’d be well enough but she had a set-back.’

‘Oh I’m sorry to hear that,’ Fiona said.

‘She got it into her head that my dad had sent her flowers. And of course he hadn’t, and when she realised that she had a relapse.’

Fiona felt hot and cold at the same time. ‘How awful,’ she said. And then in a small voice: ‘Why did she think he had?’

Barry’s face was sad. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Who knows. There
was
a bunch of flowers with her name printed on it. But the doctors think she got them for herself.’

‘Why do they think that?’

‘Because nobody else knew she was in there,’ Barry said simply.

Another night without sleeping for Fiona. Too much had happened. The match, the rules, the meeting with Luigi and Suzi, the possibility of a trip to Italy, people thinking she was Barry’s girlfriend. The whole idea that once you grow up you know what to do and think and decide for yourself. And then the horrible, awful realisation that she had set Barry’s mother back by her gift of the flowers. She had thought it would be something nice for the woman to wake up to. Instead it had made everything a thousand times worse.

Fiona was very pale and tired-looking when she went into work. She had taken the wrong day from her pile of tee-shirts. She created great confusion. People kept saying that they thought it was Friday and other people told her that she must have got dressed in the dark. One woman who saw Monday on Fiona’s chest left before her appointment because she thought she had got the wrong day. Fiona went to the cloakroom and turned her shirt back to front. She just made sure that nobody saw her from the back.

Barry came in around lunchtime. ‘Miss Clarke the supervisor let me have a couple of hours off, she’s really nice. She’s in the Italian class too, I call her Francesca there and Miss Clarke at work, it’s a scream,’ he said.

Fiona was beginning to think that half of Dublin was in this class masquerading under false names. But she had more on her mind than to feel envious of all these people who were playing childish games up in that tough school in Mountainview. She must find out about his mother without appearing to ask.

‘Everything all right?’

‘No, it’s not, as it happens. My mother doesn’t want to come home and she’s not bad enough for them to keep here, so they’ll have to get her referred to a mental home.’ He looked very bleak and sad.

‘That’s bad, Barry,’ she said, her face tired with lack of sleep and anxiety.

‘Yes well, I’ll have to cope somehow. I just wanted to say, that you know I said we’d have another outing and you could choose what we did…?’

Fiona began to panic, she hadn’t dared to choose yet. God, he wasn’t going to ask her now on top of everything else.

‘I haven’t exactly made up my mind what…’

‘No I mean, we may have to put it off a bit, but it’s not that I’m going out with anyone else, or don’t want to or anything…’he was stammering his eagerness.

Fiona realised that he
did
like her. About three-quarters of the weight on her heart lifted. ‘Oh
no
, for heaven’s sake, I understand, whenever things have sorted themselves out, well I’ll hear from you then.’ Her smile was enormous, the people waiting for their tea and coffee were ignored.

Barry smiled just as broadly and left.

Fiona learned the rules for offside in soccer but she couldn’t understand how you could make sure there were always two people between you and the goal. No one gave her a satisfactory answer.

She rang her friend Brigid Dunne.

Brigid’s father answered the phone. ‘Oh yes. I’m glad to have an opportunity of talking to you, Fiona. I’m afraid I was rather discourteous to you when you were in our house last. Please forgive me.’

‘That’s fine, Mr Dunne. You were upset.’

‘Yes, I was very upset and still am. But it’s no excuse for behaving badly to a guest. Please accept my apologies.’

‘No, maybe I shouldn’t have been there.’

‘I’ll get Brigid for you,’ he said.

Brigid was in great form. She had lost a kilo in weight, she had found a fantastic jacket that made you look positively angular, and she was going on a free trip to Prague. No awful nude beaches there showing people up for what they were.

‘And how’s Grania getting on?’

‘I haven’t an idea.’

‘You mean you haven’t been to see her?’ Fiona was shocked.