Three Wise Men, page 22
‘I’ve just remembered something else about Mrs Gilmartin,’ says Kate. ‘At the end of your visit she tells you to concentrate on whatever you want most in the world, hold the thought and then she lets you know if it will happen for you.’
‘We might as well toddle back to the Killiney angel,’ says Eimear. ‘I’d rather wish on him than on Mrs Gilmartin with her hens in the back yard in Ashbourne.’
‘He wasn’t bad, our winged totem, he made my wish come true.’
‘What was it?’ Eimear is curious, it’s not like Kate to be so forthcoming.
‘The three of us friends again, no more cheating and evasion.’ Her voice has an uncharacteristic catch. ‘How about your wish?’
‘I’ve forgotten what I asked for,’ lies Eimear. ‘I’m going to watch television now, there’s a film on RTE I want to see.’
‘Chick flick? I’ll tune in myself if it is.’
‘Splendor in the Grass.’
‘Oh boy,’ Kate exclaims, ‘the chick flick par excellence, Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood, consumed with unconsummated lust at high school in Kansas. Which channel did you say it was on? Here come the titles, catch up with you later, Mulligan.’
Eimear switches on the television set but keeps the sound to mute. Warren is necking energetically with Natalie in an open-topped car, while a waterfall pounds in the background. Very subtle, Mr Director. Warren climbs on top of Natalie, she pushes him off, he thumps the door in frustration, she’s apologetic.
Women are far too conciliatory, thinks Eimear, as she pulls the notepad towards her, not to write poetry but to compile a list.
She writes PRIORITIES IN MY NEW HOME, underlines it and starts with
Period Features
She crosses that out and replaces it with
Spare Room To Write Poetry In
With built-in shelves for all her awards, she giggles. And a side entrance for all her lovers. Why not aim high?
CHAPTER 27
It’s Eighties Night in the Den of Iniquity (chance would be a fine thing) but the DJ has jumbled up his decades and is urging the punters to get dancing in the street. Kate, Eimear and Gloria are tempted to take him at his word and jiggle amid the traffic outside because the dance floor is jammed to capacity. A heaving mass of bodies are writhing – like one of those scary dark canvasses by artists in the pay of the Vatican showing the contortions of the damned. It’s a vista that calls for alcohol. Fast. Kate hacks her way to the bar and orders a bottle of wine, just the house white but she’s dazzled by the price.
‘Unless it’s the strobe lighting kicking in,’ she tells Eimear.
All Kate and Eimear can say for the wine is that it’s wet. Presumably it’s alcoholic too because halfway down the second glass apiece they decide to Walk Like an Egyptian – there’s a very insistent voice over the speakers recommending it. They toy with the idea of undulating with feet and hands at right angles around the table but discard it on the grounds they can shimmy at their own kitchen tables any day of the week. They’re on a Girls’ Night Out and they intend to have fun.
So off they bolt for the dance floor, desperate to do their Bangles impersonations before the song is over; naturally it ends just as they find a space to cavort seductively – and another space for their handbags but, hey, Gloria assures them, it’s cool to bop around your Jane Shilton these days.
A slow set starts up so they file back towards the Argentinian vino.
‘Isn’t it amazing how even a few seconds of dancing leave you gasping for expensive cheap wine,’ remarks Kate.
Eimear is tapped up, as they used to say at school discos – literally tapped on the shoulder by a lad of seventeen or so, who jerks his head towards the dance floor and reaches for her hand.
‘Go for it, Mulligan,’ Gloria and Kate yell encouragingly, as she suffers herself to be led, pantomiming extreme reluctance. This is too entertaining to miss, at the risk of looking like wallflowers they elbow a space at the side of the dance floor to watch. Eimear is back beside them halfway through the song, however, when they’ve only had a chance to run hands up and down their bodies suggestively a few times.
‘Ah Lord, could you not have given the poor lad till the end of the dance at least,’ protests Gloria. ‘Such an innocent, and he wearing the shirt that his mother ironed for him only a few hours earlier.’
Eimear arches an eyebrow. ‘I need a drink. That innocent has just told me he was voted best at head in his class and that only regular practice can keep him, um, ahead.’
They troop back to their table, sorrowing at the forward behaviour of the younger generation. Someone has emptied the bottle in their absence and stubbed a cigarette out in Gloria’s glass of Ballygowan. She’s had a positive pregnancy test so she’s with the girls in spirit but sticking to water.
Gloria volunteers to trek barwards for another bottle – ‘Is it Chateau Vinegar Hill I have to ask for?’ – and Eimear and Kate contemplate the dribble in their glasses in her absence.
Kate leans across to gossip about Gloria’s annunciation but it’s impossible to make Eimear understand.
‘What? You’re what? You’ll have to speak up, Kate, it’s like living inside a tom-tom drum here. Without wanting to sound like my mother, we’re probably doing irreversible damage to our eardrums just sitting here.’
Kate gives up and sways along to the Floaters instead. ‘Float, float on,’ she mouths, the words gobbled by the sound system.
‘I’m sure that was a hit in the seventies; this DJ doesn’t know his stuff,’ Kate complains, but Eimear doesn’t see her lips move, she’s watching the action on the dance floor.
‘Cancerous, and my name is Barry,’ Kate’s singing, still with the Floaters, as Gloria returns from the bar with their nectar of the gods – they’re easily pleased by this stage.
‘The next time we want a bop, we should do it around the bottle as well as our handbags,’ Kate shrills in a gap between songs. ‘No point in being taken for saps twice.’
‘Sound idea,’ agrees Eimear.
Gloria cradles her bottle of Ballygowan possessively.
‘We’ll dress up in ra-ra skirts and frilly shirts and comb sugar through our hair to achieve the Steve Strange electrocution look if we come here again,’ says Eimear.
‘Quick, look,’ says Gloria, ‘there’s a fellow out there who’s the spit of Mr Collins, our first-year geography teacher.’
They peer through the weaving dancers, past a Boy George lookalike, and catch a glimpse of an Adam Ant pirate who does indeed bear a fleeting resemblance to the idolised Mr Collins. He only lasted one year at the convent but he metamorphosed during those three terms from someone in a collar and tie to a man who wore polo necks and let his hair grow and then, in the penultimate week, to a free spirit in denim flares with bumble bees and butterflies rioting up the sides. Kate smiles. How the nuns must have fretted when he pitched up for class looking like someone who stepped out of a commune, but he was working out his notice by then and they were powerless.
‘He was a complete child of the sixties in his cheesecloth shirts and flares,’ recalls Gloria wistfully.
‘Except we were more than halfway through the seventies by then,’ Eimear points out.
‘True, but Omagh always was a decade behind,’ interjects Kate.
They sigh in unison, thinking of their deprived youth in a backward country town. Kate was amazed, the last time she went home, how much it had come on. Or maybe she’s getting old. ‘Desist, you evil thoughts, I’m here to drink myself comatose and prowl for Beautiful Boys,’ she rallies herself.
‘Whatever happened to Mr Collins?’ asks Eimear.
‘He travelled around Europe for a year or two, then went back to teaching in the end. Married a teacher he trained with, who wore little round granny specs, and they’re living in Dundalk now,’ Kate tells her.
‘I heard they called their first baby Free but it turned out to be Fee, short for Fiona,’ adds Gloria.
They digest this depressing information, until Gloria snaps them from their reveries.
‘I know they’re a bit passé but how about we give a Seventies Nights a go, get into all that Bee Gees disco beat, it’d be a hoot.’
‘We laughed at it first time round,’ protests Kate. ‘Can’t we laugh at something different now?’
‘We fancied John Travolta though,’ admits Eimear.
‘True but we were ashamed of it,’ the others remind her.
They’re distracted by a slender drunk wearing a pair of dungarees – ‘Dexy’s Midnight Runners fan or a farm boy too rushed to change?’ speculates Kate – who walks a wavy line towards their table and enunciates slowly and distinctly, ‘You ladies are each so gorgeous you take my breath away. Would one of you do me the honour of a dance?’
‘Feck off,’ says Kate.
‘For God’s sake, Kate, we came here to boogie,’ hisses Gloria. ‘I’ll dance with you, sonny,’ she adds, rising to her feet.
‘I was really hoping for the good-looking one,’ he complains as he lurches after her.
‘He meant you,’ Kate tells Eimear, who shrugs and takes a drink.
‘Don’t you know he did,’ Kate insists.
Eimear scrutinises her coolly. ‘My pretty face didn’t keep my husband interested.’
Spandau Ballet are singing an interminable song about cutting a long story short, but failing to deliver on their promise. Kate doesn’t know how to answer Eimear.
Finally she responds: ‘Neither did my plain one.’
They look steadily at each other. ‘Bastard,’ they spit in unison, and then dissolve in giggles.
‘I don’t know what they’ve put in this wine but it works for me,’ chokes Eimear.
‘Alcohol,’ Kate tells her. ‘They’ve put alcohol in the wine, it’s never known to fail.’
Gloria returns, minus her pixilated infant, and demands to know what the joke is.
‘Is it your man? I know he was making a show of me on the dance floor but what could I do,’ she complains.
‘Regard it as your good deed for the day, he looked about the right age to be a boy scout,’ says Kate, and seconds later they’re gasping and waving their legs in the air.
‘Come on, now, seriously, I thought we were on the pull,’ says Eimear, after they’ve wiped away the tears, thumped Gloria on the back for her hiccups and had a calming drink of wine. ‘We mustn’t keep turning down fellows who ask us for a dance, we might regret it, there could be a shortage of them.’
‘Who was it said, “How extravagant you are, throwing away men like that. Someday they may be scarce”?’ asks Kate.
‘It was the chief of police in Casablanca,’ says Eimear. ‘And he said women, not men.’
‘Same idea,’ she shrugs. ‘Maybe we are being profligate. We don’t seem to be meeting many Beautiful Boys.’
‘That’s because there aren’t any here,’ Kate points out. ‘Obviously the Den of Iniquity isn’t their happening habitat any more.’
‘Never mind,’ says Gloria, ‘let’s have another dance.’
Eimear and Kate ignore her as they mournfully survey the lack of talent.
‘The options are limited,’ admits Kate, after a profitless scan. ‘There’s maudlins and toddlers, the choice is yours, Mulligan.’
‘You mean the lack of choice.’
‘If you were so keen on being picked up, why didn’t you skip off with the lad you danced with?’
‘Do me a favour,’ protests Eimear. ‘He was both drunk and under-age – I have my standards, it’s either or.’
‘Fair enough,’ Kate concedes. ‘But why should we sit around waiting for one of them to approach us? We’re modern, vibrant, unattached women (apart from Gloria, who doesn’t count) in the prime of life, let’s each select a man and put the moves on him ourselves.’
They stare at her, aghast.
‘There’s being independent and there’s being independent. Surely you’re not suggesting we ask fellows to dance,’ exclaims Gloria.
‘They’ll think we’re sluts,’ Eimear backs her up.
‘Times have changed and Irishmen with them,’ Kate reassures them. ‘It’s cool to ask a man to dance, he won’t think any the worse of the woman that does.’
They regard her doubtfully, then Eimear empties her glass and stands up purposefully.
‘You’re right, Kate. I’ll show them mine if they’ll show me theirs. Here goes.’
She walks across to a tall, dark-haired man leaning against the bar. How did they miss this one, he looks both soberish and thirtyish. The catch with no apparent catches (yet) bends his head to listen to Eimear and they speak for a moment. Then she turns and walks back to her seat.
‘Did he say no – what happened?’ They’re agog.
Eimear serenely refills her wine glass, gulps from it and replies: ‘I bottled it.’
‘You mean you didn’t ask him for a dance?’
‘No, I asked him if he knew what time last orders were.’
They carry on drinking until the bottle is empty and Gloria suggests they may as well dance with each other since no one else seems inclined to manhandle them. She also insists on taking the empty bottle with her to boogie around, an astonishingly drunken suggestion from someone awash with water.
When they return to their table, the tall, dark-haired stranger is waiting with a bottle of wine – not the house gut-rot they’ve been knocking back – and four glasses.
‘I hope you don’t think I’m being too forward but I’m bored senseless over there on my own and wondered if you ladies would mind having a drink with me. I’ll go quietly as soon as you tire of me. You’ve only to ask.’ He flashes a smile at each of them in turn. A disarming smile.
His name is Christy Troy and they agree later that he looks a bit like Pierce Brosnan, only real. He’s been on the fizzy water all night because he’s chauffeuring his sister and a group of friends who’re helping to celebrate her twenty-first birthday.
‘I’ll just have the one glass of wine, then it’s back on the wagon for me – the guards will be out in force on a Saturday night,’ he explains, as he offers up a toast.
He has pale grey eyes fringed by the blackest lashes, Kate notices; she’s a pushover for long lashes. Someone told her once premature babies often have long lashes but she doesn’t think there’s anything premature about their new acquaintance – he’s arrived at exactly the right time. Lucky for him he’s not wearing a flying jacket or she’d ravish him here and now.
‘To beginnings,’ announces Christy, and they chorus ‘beginnings’, exchanging covert glances.
This man is too good to be true. An Irishman who doesn’t drink and drive and who gives up a Saturday night to look after his little sister – it has to be a front. He must be a drug baron or a student priest or a nutter. Still, if he’s a looper he’s easy on the eye.
‘Which is your sister?’ asks Gloria.
He gestures towards a manic throng of girls in the centre of the dance floor.
‘That young one over there with the suede pixie boots and the pedal pushers,’ he points.
Kate peers but can’t detect anyone with a family resemblance at this distance. Specs are needed but not just yet – she’s the St Augustine of the optically challenged.
‘Could they not take a taxi home?’ she asks, more to encourage him to look at her than because she cares about the answer.
‘Sure who’s able to find a taxi on the streets of Dublin these days?’ shrugs Christy. ‘It’s not every day your baby sister turns twenty-one, I can manage one night among the tots in the Den of Iniquity. I’m not sure how many more fizzy waters I can stomach though, they have my insides churning – do you know they cost the same as a beer, it’s criminal.’
They chat for a while, roar actually, the DJ seems to be increasing the volume as the night wears on. It turns out Christy’s a press photographer and renovating a Victorian railwayman’s cottage a couple of miles from his parents’ home – what a relief, thinks Kate, she thought they might have bagged one of those lads who stay at home till they’re thirty-seven and then decide to get married because the Mammy’s not able to wait on them hand and foot any more.
He has to be over thirty because he lets slip that he finds eighties nostalgia nights depressing – it seemed like only ten minutes ago he was driving around Dublin with his ‘Who Shot JR?’ bumper sticker listening to a tape by a hot new band called U2.
It’s difficult to say which of the three Christy Troy is interested in. He takes them out one after another for a slow dance, starting with Gloria.
‘But that could be because he’s sitting next to her,’ Kate and Eimear hearten each other while they’re watching them shuffle.
He moves on to Kate, who has Christy in stitches when she tells him the proper manner of inviting a woman to dance in her part of the country is to ask, ‘Would you face me?’
‘They don’t really say that in Tyrone, do they?’ he demands.
‘No,’ she admits regretfully. ‘Probably not. Except maybe in VERY remote areas.’
Christy finishes the set with Eimear, to Kate’s disappointment. She was hoping to hang on to him for a couple of dances once they were out there on a dance floor bearing an increasing resemblance to Sodom and Gomorrah before the plug was pulled on the party. Kate looks at him smiling down into Eimear’s face and sighs. He saved the best till last, like Angel Clare carrying Tess across a water-logged road in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
Christy sticks to his word and returns to the Ballygowan after his single glass of wine.
‘Did he do anything he shouldn’t have when he was dancing with you?’ Kate asks Eimear.
‘Sadly no,’ she responds.
‘Me neither.’
Gloria looks horrified when the same question is put to her. ‘I’m not on the market, Mick and I are simply taking a break from each other,’ she says. Then she smirks. ‘Mind you, a few more smoochy sessions with that fella and Mick could be consigned to history.’
Eimear grabs her by the arm. ‘Are you saying he smooched you on the dance floor?’ she demands.
