“That’s disgusting.” He took a sulky draw on his cigarette.
He sounded so mean she didn’t know what to say. She looked away down the snowy garden. It was like this between them more and more now. They were all right with other people there. Then they’d hold hands and feel close and wish they were alone, but as soon as they were, they’d bicker.
“It was an interesting night.” She leaned out beyond the shelter, into the slowing blizzard. “I wasn’t supposed to go, but I asked and they said it was all right.”
“You’re so ambitious,” Sean said reprovingly.
“No I’m not,” Paddy snapped back.
“Yes you are.”
“I’m not that ambitious.”
He took a last drag on his cigarette before throwing it away. “You’re the most ambitious person I know. You’d cut me in half for a leg up.”
“Piss off.”
He twitched a bitter little smile. “You know it’s true.”
“I might be ambitious, but I’m not ruthless. That’s a different thing.”
“Oh, now you are ambitious?”
“I’m not ruthless.” Paddy petulantly kicked snow off the step. “I’ve never done anything for you to say that about me.”
They stood on the step looking out, each silently continuing the argument.
“Why can’t you be content to rub along like the rest of us?” He sounded so reasonable.
“I’m just interested in my job. Is that wrong?”
She understood why it made him angry: Sean wanted them to stay in the same place near the same people for the rest of their lives, and her ambitions threatened that. Sometimes she wondered if he was going out with her, a dumpy girl half as attractive as himself, because he could count on her to be grateful and stay.
“And you’re competitive,” he said, as if confessing his own flaws reluctantly.
“I am not.”
“Ye are, everyone knows you are. You’re competitive, and to be honest,” he added, dropping his voice to a confidential mutter, “it frightens me.”
“For Godsake, Sean-”
“If it was a choice between me and your job, which would you choose?”
“Bloody hell, will ye drop it?”
He threw his cigarette into the garden, to the spot where he always threw his cigarettes. Underneath the snow Paddy knew there were roll-up dog ends from last year’s long hot summer, when they had both just left school and clung to each other. She’d just started at the Daily News and didn’t know if she would be able to hack it. Over that was another layer of ash and filters from the rainy autumn, when Sean had started work and had a bit of money for real fags. And over them were the Christmas cigarette ends, when they sat on the step in the dark with a blanket over their knees and cuddled together; where Sean proposed after lunch on Boxing Day. All that closeness had evaporated since they’d got engaged, and Paddy couldn’t understand where it had gone.
Sean kept his eyes on the lonely thin tree at the end of the garden. “I worry that you’re gonnae leave me.”
“Oh, I’m not gonnae leave ye, Sean.” Paddy fumbled for his hand, callused and swollen from hard work, and lifted it to her mouth. She kissed the well of his palm as hard as she could. “Seanie, you’re my sweetheart.”
He cupped his free hand around her cheek and they looked at each other sadly.
“You are,” she said adamantly, not sure whom she was trying to convince. “You’re my dear, dear Sean and I’ll never leave you.” But even as she said it, she was wishing it were true. Her throat was aching. “Come upstairs with me and we’ll have a winch, eh?”
He looked at his feet. She kissed his hand again.
“Sean, I shouldn’t have said that about the boy. I don’t know what I saw. Come up with me.”
She tugged his sleeve encouragingly, opening the back door, afraid to let go of Sean in case he disappeared off into the snow forever. She held on tight and pulled him through the door, leading him into the warm.
III
The bedroom door was blocked by a large wardrobe, so that the room had to be entered sideways. Beyond it were two single beds with a narrow aisle in between. At the foot of each bed sat a set of drawers where the girls displayed their most prized possessions. Paddy had a jar of clear green Country Born hair gel for spiking her hair next to all the crap Sean had bought her: a bottle of Yardley perfume; a ridiculous neck ruffle to attach to her clothes for an instant New Romantic look; a little model of two teddy bears wrestling each other, wearing capes cut out of J-cloths and silver electrical wire belts Sean had made during an idle morning at work. Mary Ann kept her eye shadows on top of her chest of drawers, set out in little troops of blues and greens and pinks. She had a lone black one that Paddy bought her for her birthday, and she sat it at the front, next to the chewy blue eyeliner pencil she always used.
Paddy had a poster of the Undertones above her bed. It was the first picture she had ever seen that mirrored her own life: a lot of cheaply dressed, ill-nourished people squashed into a small living room with a picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall. Mary Ann preferred pictures of dewy-eyed heartthrobs: Terry Hall and sad-eyed Patrick Duffy looked down on her side of the room.
With six adults smashing around the place, there was very little privacy in the Meehan household. To make it worse, Paddy and Mary Ann’s bedroom door was first at the top of the stairs, so anyone coming up could hear what was going on. Invariably, when Paddy and Sean got into heavy winching, someone would come up and interrupt them, but tonight everyone was out and Trisha and Con were downstairs watching a never-to-be-repeated program about the miraculous visions of Saint Bernadette. They were as close to alone as they had ever been.
“I’m the Man” dropped down the record player spindle as Paddy sat down next to Sean on the bed. She didn’t want to lose him. She wanted to make a great, reckless, beautiful gesture to bind them together so that he couldn’t slip out of her life while her attention was elsewhere.
They sat on her bed and kissed softly. She put her hand on his chest, pressing lightly, urging him to lie back.
“No, Paddy,” he murmured. “Your folks might come in.”
She smiled as she kissed him and pressed again, catching him off balance, toppling him back a little.
“No,” he said sharply, slapping her hand away, bouncing back to vertical.
He started kissing her again, not expecting her to mind being so bluntly corrected. But she did mind. Hiding her annoyance, Paddy let her hand rest on his thigh until he was comfortable with it, kissing him gently, rubbing her nose on his cheek and very slowly stroking up his thigh. He flinched, so she slowly moved her hand back to his knee, keeping it there until he was comfortable before moving it again. She reached the seam of his crotch.
“Don’t,” he said, letting her continue. “Don’t.”
He was very hard, she could feel it through his trousers, and she liked that she could do that to him. Groaning, Sean yanked her hand away and crab-walked his legs around the edge of the bed away from her. He was panting. She reached out for his arm but he slapped her away.
“No.”
He was bent over and she didn’t really know why. She didn’t understand the geography of men’s genitals. She’d seen a cross section in a biology textbook. The teacher refused to teach the module on religious grounds because it contained information about contraception. She told them which page of the textbook it was on, as if they needed to be told, and gave them an hour to read through it in silence. Paddy knew that everything was arranged differently when men weren’t naked, cut in half and perfectly side-on.