In all of this, Mark’s mother was sympathetic. She told him to do what he had to do, to concentrate on his own work, to take with a pinch of salt his father’s air of being winded by his leaving, confused by his inability to stay. And yet, after a couple of weeks had passed, she would be on the phone again, wondering when he would be coming down. In the spaces between her words he felt he could almost hear his father’s breath.
‘Monday,’ his mother had said on the phone that morning, when he had explained to her about the deadline. ‘Monday, you’ll be finished? Monday we’ll see you, so?’
He had said yes. Or he had made some noise that sounded like it. Then he had said goodbye and, looking to the clock radio beside his bed, he had discovered that there were technically three more hours left in the morning, despite the sharpness of the sunlight splaying itself through the blinds. He had slipped back into a heavy, dream-crazed sleep, and when he had gone down to the kitchen more than three hours later, Mossy had cooked breakfast and had planned for them both what he called a knockout of a day.
And this was the knockout. A back yard in the Liberties, barely bigger than the sitting room of their flat, heaving with the sun-blistered bodies of strangers and skangers and shits like Nagle, and a bar that looked populated entirely by jailbirds and jailbait, with a few pissed grandmothers and breastfeeding infants thrown into the mix. He knew he was kidding himself to think he’d get anything done now if he went back to the flat, back to his bedroom, where he’d set up an old kitchen table as his desk, across which his notes and books and printouts lay in the kind of neat and careful order that, in truth, only meant that he wasn’t working, that he hadn’t been working for some time. Because there was on that desk no sign of the scuffling and flittering and leafing and scrambling it took to really get through a piece of academic work, with its footnotes and its quotations and its weavings in and out of elements from every scrap of paper touched and filed and vanished over the course of long months and years. It would be useless, Mark thought, but he would be better off there, so he drained his pint and went to say goodbye to Mossy, pushing his way through the crowd, elbows and tummies and tits and arses and pint glasses raised and pint glasses slopping.
And talking to Mossy was a girl who made Mark decide, the instant he saw her, that he was staying where he was.
Chapter Two
She was dark-haired. No: brown-haired, Mark saw, as she turned in the low slant of sun. Brown hair that looked heavy, the way it fell in its thick, loose curls. As she listened to whatever Mossy was saying now, she put a hand to her fringe, pushed it aside; she smiled, and Mark saw the gap in her smile, the sliver of nothing between her front teeth, and he swallowed.
She was tall. Almost Mossy’s height, and taller than either of the girls who were with her as she talked to him, standing beside her doing things with their handbags and their sunglasses and their phones, like people who were getting themselves organized to go somewhere. Like people who were leaving.
And she was leaving. That was what she was saying to Mossy now, Mark could hear, as he came close; that she was heading, that she would see Mossy later, that he was to text her if he couldn’t find the house. And then she was coming towards Mark, and when she saw him, as she passed him, she was smiling.
‘Hiya,’ she said, and he saw that her eyes were green. And she was gone. He nodded a response, but too late for her to see; one of her friends saw instead, and gave him a strange look. They must have been the girls Nagle had turned to when he and Mossy went into the bar, Mark realized. They must have been the ones at the next table. He tried to remember. Had he noticed her? He would have noticed her. He would have stared. Staring would have been a better use of his afternoon. Talking to her would have been better still. What had he been doing? Talking shite to Mossy, taking shite from Nagle? He raised his eyebrows as he handed Mossy his pint.
‘What?’ Mossy said, innocently.
‘What yourself?’ Mark said. ‘What was that about?’
‘That girl?’
‘Yeah, that girl. Who is she?’
‘Joanne. Comes into Laser a lot. Gets the new releases. Nice girl. Training to be a solicitor. Joanne.’
‘I heard you the first time.’
‘Yeah, well,’ said Mossy, and he stretched. He looked lazy, unbothered, almost post-coital; either he’d slept with her already, or he was utterly confident of sleeping with her soon. Mossy scored whenever he wanted to score. Mark did not do too badly — at least, he liked to think of it that way — but Mossy was always miles ahead. It was the accent, or it was the wild head of hair, or it was the fact that he could speak Irish, or something. Mark didn’t know what it was. But it worked. There were weeks when he bumped into two or three different women in the morning. Not on the same morning. But even that he wouldn’t put past Mossy. Even in their first year in college, when everyone was talking about it and nobody was getting it, Mossy had been getting it. And he didn’t brag about it. He barely ever talked about it. But he got it. And now it looked like he was on track with this girl. He yawned. Mark wanted to give him a dig in the stomach.
‘So you’re meeting up with her later?’
Mossy took a drag from his cigarette. ‘We’re going to a party,’ he said. ‘Some of her solicitor friends just bought a house out in Booterstown. Mustn’t mind the place getting trashed already, I don’t know. Or maybe they’re just desperate for a lawsuit.’ He laughed, and Nagle brayingly joined in.
‘Christ, outstanding rack on that blonde friend of hers,’ Nagle said, inclining his head to where her friends had been sitting. ‘She gonna be at this party?’
Mark stared at him. The thought of being left in the pub with Nagle while Mossy fucked off to meet the girl was bad enough, but if Nagle was invited to the party too, Mark was going to do damage with one of those Miller bottles. This was what he got, he thought. This was what came of sitting by himself at the bar inside, moping over his thesis — moping over his parents, for Christ’s sake — while out here Mossy and Nagle were doing what anyone with any cop-on would be doing in a beer garden on a sweltering Saturday afternoon: talking to chicks and laying the groundwork for Saturday night.