Joanne was laughing again; the sound brought him back to the room. She was standing closer to him, and he could smell her perfume, and he thought, for some reason, of leaves.
‘I don’t know you,’ he said. ‘Why don’t I know you?’
‘I’m a couple of years younger than you. Maybe that’s why. And I didn’t go to school in the town.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘I was a boarder in Ferbane.’
The boarders in Ferbane were rich girls. Bare brown legs and white knee socks. They used to come back into Longford on the bus on Friday evenings, spilling into the car park opposite the cathedral, kilts hitched up and blouses hanging out, and you didn’t know whether you wanted them to tuck the blouses back in so that their tits would be more obvious or leave them untucked so that they looked half undressed already. Both, preferably. An assortment.
‘Ferbane,’ Mark said, and shook his head.
‘I lived up the road from you,’ she said, and she shrugged. He had to work out who she was. If he didn’t do it soon, she would get insulted and walk away. If she wasn’t insulted already.
‘Your name is Joanne,’ he said.
‘Mossy probably told you that,’ she said, and she drank her wine.
‘You’re from Edgeworthstown?’
‘I’m from Caldragh,’ she said.
And then it was as though he was in a field, and he had lost his footing, and he had grabbed an electric fence for support. It went through him the same way. A jolt, a quick searing of everything’s edges. Caldragh was a townland ten minutes up the road from Dorvaragh, and Mark had scarcely ever had reason to be there; he was on no more than nodding terms with anyone from there. But there was one name from Caldragh that he knew. And as he looked now at the girl in front of him, and around him at the scene in which she seemed so at ease, the circle to which she seemed to belong, that name was coming in on him like a current.
‘I think I have you,’ he said.
‘You know me?’ she said, smiling widely.
‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Joanne Lynch, am I right?’
She gave a cheer, as though he had pulled her name from a hat. ‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d remember me. I knew you’d get me eventually.’
‘Well,’ Mark said, and then he couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he smiled at her, and he took a long slug from his beer.
*
When she woke the next afternoon, sprawled on top of her bedclothes, with the sunlight pressing sharp against the closed curtains and the sound of children playing in the street below, Joanne was still dressed. And she felt like she was shaking. She was not trembling — she was doing something other than trembling; she was, it seemed, jumping, jittering, without even moving from where she lay. Her head was pounding with what felt like noise, but when she groaned and the groan came out as noise, she knew that what was in her head was pain, and her mind; her mind she could not stop from slamming, catapulting, through one vivid, disconnected image after another. All she got, and she could not slow it down, was a carousel of people’s faces, saying things to her that she could not hear, because although their lips moved, their voices made no sound; Mark Casey’s was one of them, and she tried to slow it down there, she wanted to slow it down, because although he kept flashing through her mind now, she could not remember what Mark Casey looked like. She could not remember what he tasted like; her mouth felt suctioned of everything but its own skin. She could remember only fragments of what they had said to each other, what they had done to each other, and the fragments were all out of order, were scattered impossibly across different parts of what did not even seem like the same night. She couldn’t remember how she had got home. She could remember talking to him, and flirting with him, and kissing him, and going into a bedroom with him, and doing a line, and doing another, and doing another, and at some stage going into another bedroom and finding someone already fucking someone else in there, and then what? What had they done instead? She could remember talking, a lot of talking, and sitting on his lap and holding his face and telling him things it suddenly felt like a very big relief to tell, and she cringed at that now, because she could not remember what those things were, but if it had felt like a relief to tell them, it meant that, really, they were not meant to be told at all. And she could remember his friend with the fat face coming up to them and roaring, with absolute joy, ‘Blondie’s snogging another chick!’ and that was Sarah, her housemate, getting together with that girl she had been trying to score for ages, which was why Sarah would not be here now, to do what they always did for each other when they were destroyed the morning after: to answer the weak knock on the bedroom wall and bring in painkillers, bring in a washcloth soaked in cold water, bring in a fucking sleeping tablet so that you could pass out and be unconscious for whatever else it took to get to the end of this nightmare.
She was already dreading the next morning. She had brought home so much work to do this weekend, and she hadn’t even looked at it. There was no way she was going to get it done today. If she went near it, she would probably make such a mess of it that she would be fired more quickly than if she never did it at all. It was horrible work, case notes and court transcripts, and the client, who was at the moment taking up most of the time and energy of Brennan and Mullooly, the firm with which she was doing her traineeship, was a sleazy, pompous boor. But it was a traineeship. They were hard to get. They were worth it for what, hopefully, they led to: a real job doing the kind of work you wanted to do. What Joanne wanted to get into was family law, of which Brennan and Mullooly did very little, and the partners’ ideas about training seemed to revolve mainly around how much photocopying needed to be done. What legal work she was allowed to do was dull — conveyancing and probate, both of which left her buried for hours in convoluted leases and deeds — and there had been no chance, so far, to go to the courts; that privilege was reserved for the other trainee, Mona, because Mona had been there almost a year longer. Mona got all the court work, and all the coffee breaks and walks in the fresh air and conversations with other people that went with it, while Joanne stayed in the small, dusty office and photocopied so many documents that in the evenings she saw the glint of the Liffey through phantom flashes of yellow.