Offcomer (6 page)

“You haven’t been back to class.” Alan reached out with the bottle, sloshed some more wine into her glass.

“No. I’ve been busy. Essays.” She smiled at him. Her lips felt dry from the wine. Her teeth were probably stained too. She licked her lips. They tasted sour. “How have you been getting on?”

He grinned. “I’m doing grand,” he said. “I think I’m really breaking through, you know.”

“That’s great,” she said.

“It’s very frustrating, though.” He put the bottle down on the coffee table, continued looking at it.

“I know,” she said eagerly, leaning forward. “I can never make anything as good as I want it to be. I’m always trying and trying and doing more and more until I completely bugger it up. Until it’s irreparable. Either that or I just can’t get started.”

“No,” he said, “I don’t mean that.” He glanced away from the bottle, looked up at her quickly, laughed. “No, no problems there. It’s the models I mean. That’s what I find annoying. I just get fed up drawing Mrs. Peters or yer man Steven week after week.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, it’s their bodies. They’re ugly. There’s no satisfaction in drawing well if what you’re drawing is ugly.”

“Do you think?”

He nodded gravely, ponderously, swallowed. “So,” he said. “I was wondering if you’d like to sit for me.”

His eyes, behind their thick lenses, dropped downwards, watching his glass as he raised it uneasily to his lips. And in this momentary awkwardness, in the clumsiness of his request, Claire suddenly realised that he was real; that he was, indisputably, there; and the shock of seeing this was so strong that it almost choked her. She had stopped believing in other people. Somehow, everything had shrunk down to this: one tiny wizened self staring out upon unknowable strangers. And she could not go on like that, she thought. That was no way to be.

His eyes climbed back to meet hers. He looked anxious. She smiled.

“Okay,” she said.

She stood in the unlit bedroom, caught between the closed door and the uncurtained window. A single bed lay beneath the window. The duvet was twisted and tangled like a crisp packet, the bottom sheet creased and loose. Outside, the mist had condensed into fine steady rain, beading the window, refracting stray light from the streetlamps. From up here, she could see into the college. Yellow lights in high up rooms, an edge of the floodlit tower, a corner of the chapel.

She climbed up onto the bed, knelt, pressing her cheek against the cold glass. Looking out across the parkland behind the college, she could see wet dark grass and thick deep trees. Near the boundary fence, in the shadow of a heavy dripping tree, a paler shadow moved. Claire pulled up the sash, leaned out into the wet night.

A deer. Picking its way delicately through long grass and fallen branches, sheltering from the rain. It seemed strange that it should be alone, that it should have drifted off from the rest of the herd. It dipped its head and began to graze. The rain settled on Claire’s hair, spangled her face. She leaned out further, staring into the dark. The deer’s head went up. In one long sinuous movement it turned and fled, skimming the grass like a ghost. She couldn’t see what had startled it. She watched its white, heart-shaped rump as it bounded away.

She sat back on her heels. The bed creaked.

“Ready?” Alan called.

“Not yet.”

Claire reached up and began unbuttoning her blouse.

THREE
 

Claire gently pulled the door to behind her, heard the Yale lock slide into place with a click. She turned, hesitated on the doorstep. She would have to go back to Grainne’s house now. She felt stomach acid rise at the back of her throat, swallowed it down.

Fuck.

She looked up and down the street. Dark windows, neat gardens, cars tucked into the kerb. This could be anywhere in Belfast. This could be any street in any city. Even if she wanted to get to Grainne’s, she had no idea which way to go.

For a moment she saw herself turning back, trying the door. It would open smoothly and she would slip past it, back into the dark hallway. She would silently climb the stairs to the bedroom, step out of her clothes and slide into bed, curling up against Paul’s warm back, pulling the downy duvet
over her and sinking into the soft mattress. Shutting her eyes and drifting away from herself. And, all night, her sleeping body would lie beside his, as if it belonged there.

But the door was locked behind her. She had heard the lock click into place. Going back was not an option.

She paused again at the garden gate, hand already on the latch. The metal was cold and dewy. She glanced up and back at the bedroom window. Unlit. All she could see was the pale lining of his curtains. She slipped out through the gate.

She would go back to Conroys. If she walked back the way they’d come in the cab, she would get there eventually. It would be the last time she could walk into the bar and find everything the same.

Claire turned down the street. She walked quickly, unevenly. The cut on her foot was hurting her. It was weeping again; she felt the lymph sticky against her shoe. She stroked her thumbs absently across her fingertips, became gradually conscious of their texture, aware of the tiny rub of their printpatterns, their tenderness. The tip of her tongue was pressing against the smooth back of her teeth, moulding itself into the sensitive silk of her hard palate. She became aware of her hair brushing against the tips of her ears, of the still-wet softness between her legs.

She was going downhill. Conroys was on the docks, and the docks were by the lough, and that was almost sea, so downhill was the way to go. She passed shut and shuttered shops, bright-lit phone booths, overfull rubbish bins. She smelt the scent of freshly baked bread in the air and water rose in her mouth.

The road was deserted. No passers-by at all. Not a cab, not even the occasional solitary staggering drunk. It was late,
she realised suddenly, uneasily. It was very late. She stopped dead. She cast around her. The sky was deep blue, scattered with orange-reflecting clouds. There was a dark, leafy park on the right. She turned round, glanced back up the hill. A clock hung high up on the building behind her. The hands pointed to half-past two. Conroys would be shut. Tired and sore, she would turn the last corner to find the bar in darkness, the shutters padlocked into place. She would stand there, at the bolted doors, frozen by the knowledge that there was nowhere else to go. By half-past two the place would be empty and Gareth would be at home showering, or asleep, Dermot’s head cradled in the crook of his arm. But perhaps the clock didn’t work. Perhaps that was half-past two on a sunny afternoon in nineteen-fifty-three when the clock had seized up, stopped for good, and no one had glanced up there for years to tell the time. Perhaps it was half-past two on an entirely different night, years ago, in winter, when the frost had bitten into its workings and frozen the hands in place. Claire glanced around her, shivered.

She couldn’t go to Conroys. Not now.

A side street opened off to the left. She turned down it.

The street was darker than the main road. It was lined with thick-trunked lime trees. She got a vague impression of red brick, bay windows, hedges. The street ended, and without much consideration, she turned left.

Side streets opened off the new road. She glanced down them vaguely as she passed. A sense of exhaustion came down over her, overwhelming her. The night’s long work, the din and press of the bar. By now it all seemed like weeks ago, because of afterwards. She paused at a junction. Neat little Victorian terraces snaking downhill. Downhill, towards the
river. They had crossed the river earlier, in the taxi. She had seen the water rippling underneath the bridge, reflecting back the city lights. Stranmillis, and Grainne’s house, were on the far bank. She had her door key in her pocket. If she got back to Grainne’s house, at least she could take off her shoes, bathe her cut, go to bed. Grainne would not be back till Sunday. Breathing space, at least. She could at least lie down and close her eyes. She turned down the narrower street.

It sloped gently downhill. The houses clung to the pavement, no gardens between her and the front walls, the dark windows. She heard her footsteps echoing down the street. She knew the echo was her own, but the possibility of someone following, or waiting up ahead, crept out of a corner of her mind. She pushed it aside.

The close-set terraces ended abruptly. The houses were now concrete and clapboard and cold. They were silent, no windows lit. Above her, the lamp-posts were linked with bunting, their pennants hanging dead and heavy in the still air. And underneath her feet, the kerbstones were painted three different shades of grey. Marking out territory.

She slowed down, stopped. Sodium streetlamps and the moon bleached out all distinction. She could pick out no images, no letters that would force the faded bunting and paint to blossom into colour. And around her, in batteries of little rooms, tracing the length of unknown streets, she knew that people were sleeping. The flickering translucent eyelids of the elderly, children stacked in bunkbeds, discrete dark heads of couples on paired pillows: a community in sleep. And she was there awake in the middle of them all, washed up on their pavement, alone.

Maybe not alone. The echo had stopped with the terraces,
but the idea of being caught there, where she should have known not to be, still lingered. She had to get out onto unpainted, unpennanted streets before she was spotted. She set off again at a shambling, uneven trot, shoulders hunched and arms wrapped around her.

The street ended, butted on three sides by low blocks of flats. A grass forecourt and a stocky flowering cherry tree, a few clusters of blossom hanging half-rotten. Dark alleyways between the buildings. She slowed, stopped. She was lost. She cast around her. She wasn’t sure of the way she had come, couldn’t remember the turns and loops and half-guesses that had ended her up there. The squat blocks loomed up above her. Windowpanes reflected back the night. A clot of cherry blossom broke up into platelets and drifted onto the grass. She breathed in, stepped into the darkness of an alley.

Eyes straining to define the edges and content of the deeper dark: no movement. Above her, the sky a narrow strip, starless. Beneath her feet, flat paving stones. She ran her fingers along the roughcast wall. Vague light-edged forms, as she approached, gradually resolved themselves into council dustbins; large, metal, plastic-lidded, hollow-sounding kettledrums when her fingers knocked them, shifting on their wheels.

As she stepped out from between them, there was grass under her feet. The sky above her was open, orange-stained. There were bushes in front of her. Beyond them she could see a road, a row of streetlamps, trees and then rippling dark water. The far bank climbing steeply up into streets and houses, the sweep of parkland over to the right. She felt an unexpected surge of relief. She suddenly knew exactly where she was, and where to go. Across the river, up the hill, and she was almost
there. Soon, she would be sinking down on cool sheets, pulling a duvet over her. She did not let herself think what would follow when she woke.

She passed through the bushes, began picking her way slowly down the steep grass bank.

The looseweave curtains let in the light. It seeped through her eyelids, stained them scarlet. Her back ached. Through the thin mattress her hip, ribcage and shoulder pressed against the wooden slatted frame.

She was awake.

Tiny, distorted and pale, she saw her reflection in the mirrored bulb of the spotlight on the ceiling.

She heaved herself up, padded barefoot down the stairs.

The kitchen lino was sticky underfoot. She boiled the kettle, burnt her wrist on the steam, and made a pot of tea. She glanced up at the kitchen clock: half-past seven. The whole long day ahead of her, no chance now of further sleep. Her eyes felt gritty. She rinsed out yesterday’s mug, sat down at the dining-room table. Her knee started to bounce up and down underneath the table. She uncrossed her legs. The fingers of her left hand tapped out a rhythm on the tabletop, getting quicker and quicker and quicker. She lifted the hand to her mouth and began to chew on a cuticle. She tugged at the skin. A strip came off between her incisors, and her finger began to bleed. Claire sucked on the finger, tasted the blood, looked around her, at the piles of magazines and the dirty carpet and the clutch of empty bottles in the corner. Grainne would be back at five. Five or six. On Sunday. Land in with a carful of groceries and a heap of exercise books and she would
dump them all down in the hallway and come thumping up the stairs and slump down on Claire’s bed and talk to her. Just wanted to catch up, she would say, before you head off to work. Just wanted to see how you were doing. And Claire would potter around as usual, smiling as necessary, painting on her lipstick, tugging on her shoes. She would have to listen to whatever Grainne had to say, and she would have to smile. And that smile just wouldn’t work. She knew it wouldn’t. It would start badly, become shaky, then grind itself to a premature halt. She scraped back her chair and stood up.