Be Careful What You Wish For, page 12
Helen hitched down her suede skirt, even as Molly deliberately inched her pinstriped skirt up her knees. She should have known better than to expect to introduce a subject as explosive as incest in La Cave on a Friday night when Molly was wired for frolics. But there was no appropriate time or place.
Incest. There, she’d said it. Rattled, Helen drained her glass and turned towards the man beside her, who immediately refilled it. She needed amnesia – concentrate on him and perhaps his voice would sound in her ears instead of Patrick’s. Maybe she could dip a toe in brown eyes instead of drowning in grey-green. Helen’s mouth pursed. Incest. The word reverberated through her skull with the persistence of a pneumatic drill. And it was equally impossible to ignore. She was drenched in self-repulsion. She drank again and felt herself grow light-headed.
‘You find the wine good?’ asked the Italian, bottle at the ready.
‘I find it effective,’ she replied, ‘or at least I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt.’ The corner of the bar counter bit into her back as she leaned away from him but she continued to smile. Distract me, she pleaded mentally. Incest was such a putrescent word.
At some stage of the evening – they’d lost track of time – the girls, along with the other late drinkers, were ejected from La Cave and made their way to Lillie’s Bordello where further drinking was assured in the nightclub’s private members’ bar; its attraction was that it scarcely felt as though you were in a nightclub at all. Around 2 a.m. Helen pulled off her usual trick of seizing Molly by the elbow and dragging her into the ladies, where she insisted they slope off and leave the Italians to their own devices.
‘I know we’re reputed to be a friendly race but we’re not obliged by the laws of hospitality to sleep with tourists into the bargain,’ she complained, rimming her lids with a wobbly line of black eye-pencil.
‘I suppose not,’ said Molly regretfully, nose a-glow from the killer combination of drinking and dancing.
‘So what do you say we slip off for a coffee, just the two of us?’ wheedled Helen. ‘We could have some food – we forgot to eat in La Cave.’
She was tempted to evacuate on her own but conscience prevented her from leaving Molly to parry the Taormina Twins on her own. And an additional burst of puritanism hindered her from allowing Molly the freedom to decide against fending off one or other of the pair.
‘We’re out of here,’ grinned Molly, with more alacrity than Helen had bargained for. Maybe her friend was learning restraint. Or perhaps the promise of food was the bait, as Molly added: ‘I’m starving; I could eat the hand of God. You nip downstairs for the coats and I’ll stand guard.’ She paused and added, ‘We’re making a habit of this, sloping into the ladies as a prelude to abandoning men. If word leaks out we’ll be banned from using toilets.’
Outdoors, giggling and insulated from the wind by the amount of alcohol pumping through their veins, they headed for an all-night café near Smithfield Market. By this stage Helen had lost interest in discussing her predicament with Patrick. All she wanted was something to eat – a cross between breakfast and supper. Perhaps poached eggs.
‘So what was your Italian like?’ asked Molly between bites of sausage as she devoured a cooked breakfast.
‘He wasn’t the worst. His name was Angelo and he was some sort of engineer. How about yours?’
‘Paolo, also an engineer; they work together. This is their first time in Ireland. They usually go to France but they saw a behind-the-scenes TV programme about the Rose of Tralee competition and decided to establish whether the blooms compensated for the thorns.’
Helen lifted a triangle of buttered toast to her mouth. ‘They talked excessively about food, that’s what made me hungry. They think the food is abysmal but the craic compensates.’
‘What’s wrong with our food?’ Molly was indignant.
‘Pizza bases are too thick, pasta sauces aren’t homemade.’
‘You mean they’re not even sampling Irish food, they’re eating Italian nosh on their holliers?’ Molly savaged a slice of fried tomato which splattered seeds on the plastic tablecloth. ‘Of course it won’t be as good as Mamma makes, stands to reason.’
‘It’s tricky for tourists to test-drive Irish food. There isn’t any unless you count soda bread,’ Helen pointed out.
‘Can’t they eat chips like the rest of us? They’re made with Irish potatoes.’
‘Most of the chippers are Italian.’
‘So they are. Mine said,’ Molly adopted an approximation of Robert De Niro’s voice, ‘“You Irish girls are a handful, you like to laugh – I bet you like to love too.”’
They convulsed in stereo.
‘Of course,’ amended Molly, ‘he said it in an Italian accent rather than a Bronx one. But you get the picture.’
‘Remember the time,’ reminisced Helen, ‘we picked up the Germans at La Cave and made them drink Blue Nun all night to punish them for exporting it to us?’
‘Tourists,’ sighed Molly. ‘What would we do with all that chunky crystal and those even chunkier sweaters if they didn’t come here and buy them?’
‘Here’s to tourists.’ Helen raised her orange juice and Molly clanked her tumbler against it.
Helen caught a glimpse of a man’s back at the counter and stiffened for the space of two heartbeats as the set of his head led her to imagine it was Patrick, although the chances of him wandering around Smithfield at three o’clock on a Saturday morning seemed improbable. The expression that flitted across her face – a piquant combination of eager and wary – triggered in Molly the recollection that Helen seemed determined to talk to her earlier in the evening.
‘So what’s on your mind, Helen? Spill your guts to me, I’m a trained listener. Tape recorder’s ready and running. I’m presuming you don’t mind your secrets being splashed across the front page.’
But Helen, having longed to probe the intricacies of her situation – in a circumspect way, with someone whose judgement she trusted despite her wayward tendencies – was now defensively protective of her conundrum.
‘Nothing that can’t wait, Molly. We’ll do the girlie chat another time.’
Molly studied her: purple blots were brushed beneath Helen’s lashes; she was someone whose sleeping pattern had been disrupted. Molly was too weary and inebriated to tackle her now but instinct told her, at long last, that she should bend an ear to whatever was troubling Helen.
‘We’ll have to leave it until Sunday because I have a hot date tomorrow,’ Molly mused aloud.
‘Are your dates ever anything else?’
Molly cast her mind back over her last few encounters. ‘They always start hot and grow progressively more lukewarm. But hope springs eternal. Give me a ring on the mobile about ten p.m. to be on the safe side. I can either claim you’re a sick relative or tell you to push off, depending on the temperature.’
‘Fair enough, but you have to promise to tell me all about it on Sunday. Especially if it’s one of those dates where the poor fellow thinks you’re saddled with a weak bladder because you keep bolting for the ladies to let your giggles erupt.’
‘It’s not my mission in life to accept gruesome dates to provide entertainment for my friends.’ Molly pantomimed huffiness.
‘No, but it’s a useful bonus from my point of view,’ said Helen. ‘Do you want that phone call at ten o’clock or not?’
‘Done deal, angel face,’ agreed Molly. ‘Why aren’t you out on the pull tomorrow anyway? I presume you have something more pressing on the agenda, like rearranging the furniture.’
‘Having an early night with my Filipino houseboy, if you must know. But I’ll take a break and send him off for fresh supplies of baby oil around ten as a concession to friendship.’
Molly laughed and lightly punched her shoulder. ‘Let’s ring for a cab. And while we’re waiting I’ll remind you of some of the highlights of my dates from hell. You’ve no idea how I’ve suffered, Helen. And what’s worse, I never learn because I plan to continue suffering.’
She contemplated admitting she was seeing Fionn the following night but decided on discretion – not a virtue Molly was acquainted with but you were never too old to learn. Helen might try to talk her out of meeting Fionn. Her disapproval of his Stateside vanishing act had been comforting then but might incline towards the censorious now. Time enough to unveil Fionn to Helen if she chose to let him unveil himself to her first.
‘Do I know who you’re seeing tonight – it’s not one of those seedy hacks you hang around with, is it?’ asked Helen.
‘I have my standards.’ Molly looked virtuous. ‘Low ones admittedly, but standards none the less. Hacks are out of the frame. It’s a friend. I don’t expect it will amount to anything; I’m really only taking pity on a sorrowful specimen tomorrow night, or rather tonight. He’s been unlucky in love and is throwing shapes. Wounded warrior ones. I’m currently trying to decide whether to play doctors and nurses with him.’
‘And there I was imagining it was true love with the Geek,’ said Helen.
‘Greek. And rule nothing out. Hercules is still up there among celestial clouds on Olympus but any time he fancies plunging earthwards, I’m his woman. In the meantime I need some distraction while waiting for him wake up to the fact I’m an über-babe. Which he will.’ Molly clanged her knife and fork onto the plate and wiped her mouth with a paper serviette. ‘The man hasn’t a chance.’
‘Fighting talk, Molly Molloy. Go get him.’
‘On one condition.’
‘Name it.’
‘Never call me Molly Molloy in public again.’
CHAPTER 10
Helen was clamped in a vice. She wanted that night with Patrick, a night to store in her memory banks and carry with her as a bulwark against the bleakness threatening to engulf her. Yet she knew it could unravel a craving she might be impotent to curb. She’d just about managed to clamber out of the gully levered open three years ago. Survival had been achieved only by severance. She’d been steely for both of them. They had to be parallel lines from then on, she’d told him, all intimacy guillotined. That was when Patrick had moved to London. Unrelenting in extremis, she’d given him an ultimatum, virtually packed his bags and impelled him to the plane. If he didn’t emigrate she would. It had been the correct action to take, they were unsafe together and Patrick had prospered in London while she had … coped.
Helen had never allowed herself to recreate that night three years ago, to sift through the sensations. Other vignettes, more innocent ones from their teenage years, often overwhelmed her, but this one had been painstakingly interred. Her sanity decreed it. But these recent meetings with Patrick had loosened the amnesiac straps she’d coiled around the memory and for the first time recollections of their encounter three years ago were unleashed. She parried the pictures swarming through her consciousness. Lava-like, they scorched her. And then she submitted to the imagery, wearied by the years of willing it into denial.
Her body is stirred as much by his sweet expression as by his sure touch caressing her. She is aroused beyond caring about the consequences. Tangled in each other’s limbs on the cracked leather sofa of her flat in Kimmage, they’re panting and semi-undressed – clothes scrabbled open in the compulsion for skin to connect with skin. His urgency is matched by hers. It’s life-enhancing, a liberation, and she glories in it. Unexpectedly, at the moment of penetration, his frenzy abates; she hesitates momentarily until her body takes its cue from his. He smiles, she relaxes and a waft of honeyed leisure subsumes them at their joining together. ‘We were born for this,’ he whispers, hands alongside her head to steady her, shafting euphoria into her body. Closing her circle.
Afterwards he cradles her, lapping at her tears and promising the guilt will subside. She doesn’t tell him she’s not weeping from a sense of transgression but from the conviction they belong together. Later the guilt does float to the surface. But it does not drown out the desire.
‘Dear Jesus, but I want him still,’ she croaked.
Acknowledgement panicked her: three years of self-control were draining away; she was losing her grip inexorably. And that way lunacy beckoned. She shouldn’t even be toying with the notion of agreeing to something so unnatural as a night in the arms of her brother. Or was it truly obscene? It felt completely natural to love him, that was the crux of her problem.
Helen’s head was reeling. She slumped at her computer screen with a blank expression and an even blanker productivity level, battling against the realisation she’d manage no work that day. She was supposed to be writing a new banking programme in C – a language which Molly joked could stand for cryptic as readily as code. But nothing was forthcoming. Perhaps if she allowed herself fifteen minutes to mull over Patrick’s suggestion with a coffee for company it might eliminate the dilemma and concentration would be restored. What would Molly say? Helen half-smiled. She’d sing out: ‘Duck, low-flying pigs overhead.’ Nevertheless Helen groped by the side of her desk for her satchel and headed for the canteen, reconsidered when she saw how crammed it was, and stepped outside to José’s sandwich bar opposite the sub-post office.
José, who preferred to be called Joe, personally delivered her latte to the corner table with its view of the street – a service reserved for regulars and women he fancied. He also brought a caramel slice which she hadn’t ordered.
‘On the house – you look like someone in need of cheering up.’ He patted her seat back – Helen had an untouchable aura. ‘My wife baked it only an hour ago.’
Although Joe gave a convincing impersonation of being a hulking thug he was a kind man, and while he liked to admire the pretty office workers who frequented his sandwich bar he never overstepped the mark.
Helen was grateful for the gesture and so, while she hadn’t a sweet tooth, she perfunctorily forked some of the toffee-swathed biscuit base into her mouth. As she chewed she considered her life. Some would say she was blessed. She had her own home with a manageable mortgage; a two-year-old car with 14,000 miles on the clock; a job with excellent prospects which she enjoyed; a best friend who entertained her and could be relied on in an emergency; she was reasonably attractive and could still fit into the clothes she’d worn at eighteen, if she chose (which she didn’t tend to because she’d outgrown unrelieved black as a lifestyle statement), she had no debts apart from her mortgage and seven more interest-free-credit instalments on a flat-screen television set described as sexy three times by the sales assistant in the space of a minute. Um, had she mentioned the career? That appeared to be it. Not such a disgraceful tally. There was no love interest but did she require a man in her life for fulfilment? Society seemed to believe so but she wasn’t obliged to conform to its diktat.
The planned circumlocutory chat with Molly still hadn’t happened because Molly had cried off on Sunday, laid low by a tummy bug after an Indian meal the previous night – although Helen reasoned that the culprit was the combination of a barrel-load of red wine in La Cave followed by her fry-up in Smithfield. Whatever the cause, the hot date morphed into a date from hell without passing through the lukewarm stage.
Instead of meeting Molly on Sunday afternoon Helen mooched around Blackrock market on her own. She inspected novelty clocks and stained-glass mirrors with even-handed indifference, almost bought a pair of candlesticks but reconsidered when she detected a flaw in one, and had a coffee and some quiche by way of lunch and dinner combined in a café. She phoned the invalid on Sunday night to check on her state of health and concluded she’d live, although she must truly be unwell because even a reference to what Molly should wear for her tryst with Hercules in the lecture theatre on Thursday night failed to spark interest.
Helen wished she could tread a path as uncomplicated as Molly’s, for all her unrequited passions and recent fixation on a white wedding. But that would mean writing Patrick out of her life and, despite the turmoil, she wasn’t ready to excise him just yet. She realised she had cut her caramel slice into eight tiny squares, the biscuit base crumbling around the plate, and scooped some up with a fork. A glance at her watch told her the fifteen minutes allotted by that mandatory timekeeper in her conscience had already elapsed and she was no nearer elucidation. There was a hole in her life, she admitted, but it wasn’t a man-shaped void. It was a Patrick-shaped one. She didn’t need him to transform her life but she knew he could enhance its monochrome, just as she could add colour to his. Helen pined to love and be loved in return … wasn’t that what it was all about? Otherwise there was a pointlessness to this whole business of breathing and eating and going to work and dragging home.
Patrick had phoned twice yesterday while she’d wandered aimlessly around Blackrock market but she hadn’t returned his calls. She had no answer to give him. Yes was impossible and no was equally unfeasible.
Helen sighed and made for the street, nodding at Joe on her way past.
He watched the pale woman with the fleeting smile that transformed her features walk, head bowed, in front of the plate-glass window and wondered how she could look so care-ridden. As far as Joe was concerned, beautiful girls had no serious problems.
If only, thought Helen, back at her desk again, she could sleep round the clock she’d have the energy to devote to this. She was so tired, energy sapped from insectile beating against the window of her brain. She’d make an appointment with her doctor, concoct an excuse for why she needed a prescription for sleeping pills. Telling him she was exhausted from pondering the implications of sleeping with her brother wouldn’t pass muster – he’d be quicker to refer her to a shrink than dole out some little white tablets. She’d fabricate something – say, stress from overwork. Helen caught her boss, Tony’s, eye resting on her and hastily clicked her mouse onto an icon.
The doctor, tweed-suited among ferns and spider plants on his desk and on the window ledges like some Victorian botanist, gave her a lecture about Mogadon – it had a half-life the following day, which meant she wouldn’t be firing on all cylinders – and then prescribed some. The packet specified one to two and Helen dithered on quantity before deciding to try two with a milky drink later. But she couldn’t settle – even ironing failed to soothe her as it usually did with its mechanical precision – so she conceded defeat and unplugged the phone at eight o’clock, then squeezed a couple of pills from their foil container onto the palm of her hand. She swallowed them with a glass of pear-flavoured water.
