“Where do you keep the tea bags?”
Marian took the baby’s foot out of her mouth and looked around, disoriented. It was as if she had forgotten all about Alice. “Eugene won’t have them in the house,” she said. “Carcinogenic.”
“Tea bags?”
“Yes, even the organic ones. Would you believe it?”
Marian put the baby wriggling on his back in the playpen, then scooped the toddler off the floor and set him down next to the baby. She made a pot of loose-leaf tea and sat down opposite Alice.
“Thanks for the muffins.” It was always “muffins” with Marian these days. Marian never said “queen cakes” anymore, now that she was married to Eugene.
“Daddy’s away this week,” Alice said.
“I heard.”
“I thought I might as well do something.”
Marian picked up a carton of milk, splashed some in her tea. “Like what?”
Alice shrugged. “I don’t know. Meet someone.”
Marian sighed, mopped up cake crumbs with her finger, popped them in her mouth. “You mean a man?”
Alice nodded.
“The trouble with the men around here, Alice, is that they all know you.”
“I thought I might go up to Dublin,” Alice said.
Marian shook her head. “Too dangerous.”
“Speed dating?”
“Too many time wasters.”
Alice felt the morning’s hope begin to curdle in her stomach. She tried again. “I could go to a nightclub.”
“On your own?” Marian was talking with her mouth full. “There’s a lot expected of a girl nowadays.” She gave Alice a meaningful look. “Stuff you’ve never even heard of.”
Marian, Alice thought, was talking as if she were the only one in this town who ever had sex. Talking as if she knew all about Alice. Alice wanted to tell Marian that last night she had made love out in the back of the town hall to a sound engineer from somewhere foreign, tattoos all over his body. She hadn’t, of course. Last night Alice had fallen asleep in an armchair and had woken cold and cramped in the small hours, a mug of stale tea on the table beside her. The truth was that Alice had not slept with a man in four years. And Marian, like everybody else in this town, really did know all about Alice.
Alice had reached the bottom of her teacup. She was afraid to look in case a pattern might form among the leaves. She was afraid she might have the gift. Poor Mammy had the gift and much good it did her. Instead, she looked across the table at Marian, at the dark circles beneath her eyes, the greasy hair, the baby-sick on her cardigan. She saw with sudden clarity the desolate wasteland of her friend’s ruin and, just as clearly, saw it mirror her own. She felt the sun wane, felt the evening and the kitchen closing in.
A whole day had slipped away from her. “Does Eugene have any friends?” Alice felt a fragment of queen cake lodge in her throat at the mention of Eugene, that beige, insipid man. The children were wailing now and Marian was back at the playpen, a grizzling baby over her shoulder. The toddler began to choke, and Marian stooped to take a plastic cow from its mouth. When she straightened up again she said: “There’s a couple of new guys on the soccer team. They’re coming over tomorrow evening for a barbecue. You could drop by, see what happens.”
She sat down opposite Alice again with the baby on her knee. She stood the plastic cow, still glistening with spit, on the table between them. “These are young lads up from Limerick,” she said. Her eyes left the soft fuzz of the baby’s head for a moment and fixed on Alice. “They don’t know anyone around here.” She looked away then, out through the patio doors to the garden where a breeze was buffeting the flowers in the terra-cotta pots. “All I’m saying,” she said, “is play your cards right. There’s no need to go telling them your age. No need to go telling them anything.”
—
NOT COUNTING THE BABIES, there were six people at Marian’s barbecue. Marian and Eugene were on the deck, arguing over raw sausages. One of the lads from the soccer team had brought his girlfriend, a whippet-thin girl of about eighteen with a piercing in her lip. Alice sat at the patio table with a man called Jarlath, watching a wasp drown in a jam jar. Jarlath was in his late twenties, thirty at most. His hair was beginning an early retreat from his temples. He had no baggage, at least none that Alice had been able to establish. It was unlikely, as Poor Mammy might have said, that there had been any great rush on him. He was not the best-looking man in the world, nor the most eloquent. Still, he was broad shouldered and tall and Alice liked the way he blushed when he spoke to her.
“So,” Jarlath said. “Marian told me you used to be an Irish dancing teacher.”
Marian, Alice thought, had no sense. It might seem harmless enough, but Alice knew from experience that it was just a short hop, just a skitter of vowels and consonants, to why she was no longer a dancing teacher. Alice knew there was no bolt to slide across her past. The past was an open door and the best that could be done was to hurry by on the corridor. She sighed and dragged her chair closer to Jarlath’s so that their thighs brushed. “Enough about me,” she said.
Earlier that afternoon, Alice’s father had telephoned from West Cork to remind Alice to put the trash out and to sign for her dole, even though Alice had been unemployed for years now. At the end of the evening, Jarlath didn’t ask for her phone number, but Alice wrote it on a paper napkin and gave it to him anyway.
For the next two days, Alice sat in the kitchen, drank tea, and waited. Corpses of flies multiplied on the flypaper. She got a cloth and dusted her mother’s photograph. Poor Mammy. She had gone downhill very quickly while Alice was away; everyone had said so. Alice had come back to a straw woman. Pneumonia, it had said on the death cert. It might just as well have said “Alice.”
On Thursday afternoon, the phone rang. It was Alice’s father telling her to order a piece of back bacon from the butcher for Sunday, nothing too big and not too much fat. There was still no word from Jarlath. On Thursday evening, Alice put on blusher, lipstick, and her lowest cut sequined top and waited outside the soccer grounds. When Jarlath saw her he froze. For an excruciating moment it looked like he might keep walking, but instead he came over and stood silently in front of her, and Alice did the rest.
—
IN THE SEMIDARKNESS OF Jarlath’s bedroom, Alice lay on her back. She saw a large amoeba-shaped stain on the ceiling, and, on top of the wardrobe, an orange traffic cone. Downstairs, the two young men that Jarlath shared the house with had turned the music up louder. Jarlath lay next to her, his jeans still around his ankles. The music stopped downstairs and for a while there was silence except for the sound of a car going by on the street outside. Alice was overcome by a deadly urge to talk.
“I was away for a while.”
Jarlath’s fingers paused in their downward descent along her body and rose to wait in a holding pattern above her navel. “Holidays?”
Alice rolled onto her side to face him. “Jarlath,” she said, “have you ever done something you’ve really regretted?”
Jarlath shrugged and said nothing.
“Once,” Alice said, “when I was still a dancing teacher, I fell in love with the father of one of my pupils. He lived in one of those big houses across the river. His wife lives there still.”
The muffled sounds of late summer filtered through the curtains: the high-pitched barking of small dogs, the buzz of weed trimmers, the shrill mating calls of teenagers.
“I thought it was love,” Alice said. She laughed, but the laugh bounced off the walls of the bedroom and boomeranged back at her. “He took me to Barcelona once for a weekend.” She raised herself up on one elbow. “Have you ever been to Barcelona?”