Barefoot Over Stones (2 page)

It was Rose, whose name and life she would later learn, who served her the first of many milky coffees and toasted cheese sandwiches and gave her enough part-time hours so that she could escape the clutches of the unbearably nosy Bea Duggan and her smelly little box room. Within weeks of starting work in the Daisy May she had found a flat to share with another girl on the first floor of a house in Ranelagh. The landlady, who lived on the ground floor, seemed cheerfully oblivious to their existence except for every second Friday when she accepted their rent money.

‘Oh, is today Friday?’ she would enquire with feigned innocence as she grasped the notes out of their hands with poorly concealed glee. The gin bottles that sprawled around the black plastic bin on weekend mornings gave the girls some indication of their key role in Jean McDermott’s household budget. Alison was gone from Mrs Duggan’s two weeks before her father discovered that she had left.

‘What do you mean you have moved?’ Richard Shepherd was prone to sudden flashes of temper that subsided nearly as quickly as they rose. Alison stayed silent, hoping that if she didn’t aggravate him any further, this one conversation might be the end of it. She had told her mother as soon as she had found the flat and needed the deposit of a month’s rent. Cathy Shepherd had been terrified of her only daughter being lonely at Mrs Duggan’s and was in favour of the move if it meant she had company of her own age. She had promised to break the news to Richard the next time Alison came home for the weekend.

Here they were now at the kitchen table after Sunday dinner and he looked as if his switch had tripped and his entire fuse board had blown. ‘But it took us ages to find those digs,’ he spluttered, looking to his wife for solidarity. ‘Talk to her, Cathy, for God’s sake talk to her!’

‘Richard, you know Alison has a good head on her shoulders. I think she deserves our trust, don’t you? She has found a part-time job so it will actually end up costing us less than the digs. Besides, think of the company she will have.’

Cathy’s voice was soft like honey and Richard’s deflation was more or less immediate under its gentle pressure. He muttered something about square meals and all-night parties while he rolled the newspapers furiously into an impossibly tight bundle. Alison pictured the last Spam and canned pineapple concoction that Mrs Duggan had allegedly ‘cooked’ and barely stifled a laugh. Her mother flashed Alison a conspiratorial grin as her father turned and went to the living room to read the paper. As the custard congealed on his untouched bread pudding Alison knew that the matter was over, for the moment at least.

An hour or so later she reheated his dessert for him over a pan of boiling water. In the living room the papers were strewn around him, tossed in untidy heaps. He accepted his daughter’s peace offering with an indulgent smile. ‘You will mind yourself, Alison, won’t you? You are there to study, not to carouse. Remember where you come from. Be careful who you hang around with.’

Alison interrupted him in mid flow before he started reminding her not to take sweets from strangers. ‘Dad, of course I will. I’m older now and I can take care of myself.’

His tears welled up but Richard forced a smile for this ever-so-grown-up girl that his daughter had become while he had been looking elsewhere. Years had passed, becoming a decade, with a second one now close on the heels of the first. It seemed to him like no time at all.

‘There must be loads of fine-looking men in that college of yours,’ Rose chirped on Alison’s second or third week at the Daisy May.

Alison pictured some of the earnest and dreary faces that had turned up to the tutorial on the Crusades that morning. ‘Do you know what, Rose, I think the entire history department is sorely lacking a decent-looking man. I thought secondary school was bad but this is ridiculous.’ She felt very free, being able to indulge in this kind of talk, and relished the anonymity of her existence in
Dublin. Nobody yet knew her past or what she had been like growing up. Rose didn’t know, as they chatted about men, that Alison had been painfully shy at Caharoe secondary school and had never so much as gone out with a boy, let alone discussed them in such a casual fashion with anyone. Up to now her love interests had been a painful mess of crushes and awkwardness.

‘Well, Alison, you will just have to look further afield to find a nice young man with prospects.’

‘I’m only eighteen. I think I would settle for the good looks and hang the prospects for the moment.’

Rose eyed her and was charmed by a familiar innocence. She too had had high hopes once but they had crumbled under the strain of experience. ‘I was married when I was barely older than you are now. I loved my Frank but cursed money was always scarce and there’s feck all romance in scrimping. Remember that.’

Alison thought for a second that Rose was going to cry and she wasn’t sure how she was going to comfort this grown woman whom she barely knew. Sensing the girl’s awkwardness, Rose’s face broke into her familiar grin.

‘Here’s one for you now,’ she said, flashing a smile at a gangly but gorgeous man who had just walked in. Alison was frying bread for a full Irish that had been ordered by a couple of builder’s labourers at a corner table. Typical, she thought. Here she was covered in grease, wearing a hairnet and an oversized cook’s jacket in a shade of tired and insipid grey. ‘The usual is it, Dan?’ she heard Rose say. The fried bread needed to be rescued before it smouldered to the same colour as the pan but Alison was putting off any action that wasn’t strictly necessary. She did not dare attempt to move because she feared nerves rooted her to the spot. Rose moved behind her to butter a mound of toast.

‘It’s a fry they were wanting not a cremation,’ she said in a low-enough whisper, giving Alison an encouraging nudge of her elbow. Rose delivered the toast to the counter in front of Dan with a mug of steaming coffee as Alison finally plucked the bread from the pan. ‘Oh, you haven’t met my new girl, have you, Dan?’ she said, giving Alison an animated wink. Alison turned her flushed face to meet the gleam of piercing green eyes as Rose introduced them. ‘Dan Abernethy, meet Alison. Alison Shepherd.’

Jean McDermott was dragging a dustbin to the front gate when Alison arrived home from the Daisy May. It was a run-of-the-mill household task apart from the clatter of glass bottles betraying the drunken secrets within. ‘Ah, there you are, Mary. Cold, isn’t it?’

It was pointless correcting her. Alison and Ciara had tried, in the first few days, to get her to call them by their real names but were now convinced that Jean had let the flat to them in a drunken stupor and probably thought that she had just one tenant, a nice wee girl called Mary, quite possibly from Dungloe.

In the hallway Alison found Ciara fiddling with the electricity meter. ‘Keep watch there for our esteemed landlady, will you, Alison? This could save us a bloody fortune.’ Alison looked on as Ciara inserted a fifty-pence piece and deftly wound the meter until the coin was just about to drop
and then quickly wound it back again. Each rotation brought the gauge up higher and when the meter was up to the maximum Ciara wound all the way and let the coin click into the box. ‘Electricity for the week for a very reasonable fifty pence!’ Ciara was chuffed with herself.

‘Where did you learn to do that?’ asked a genuinely impressed Alison.

‘Oh, I have my sources and this particular one is a total honey from Waterford.’

Although Ciara had only been in college for a matter of months, she already seemed to know every haunt and was never short of someone with whom to strike up a conversation. They were the same age but Alison couldn’t help feeling that Ciara belonged to the crowd that seemed to have been running around places like Trinity and UCD since they could toddle. By comparison Alison was definitely relegated to the novice hurdles. She felt genuinely lucky to have hooked up with Ciara. She hoped that if she hid how gormless and out of her depth she always felt she could somehow pull off this whole college thing by observing closely the skills that seemed to serve her flatmate so well.

Alison had noticed Ciara in the first week of term. Well, to be more precise, she had noticed her clothes. How could you not? In a bland sea of jeans and sweatshirts she certainly stood out. Sailing up and down the interminable corridors of the history department, she was a spectacular foil to the muted decor. Her unruly auburn hair was the crowning glory for a seemingly endless array of prim Victorian blouses, shawls and floor-skimming skirts. Months later Alison would experience first hand where Ciara found all her clothes when she was taken on a whistle-stop tour of the charity shops around Rathmines and Camden Street. It would never have occurred to Alison that normal people might shop for clothes in charity shops. The Shepherds donated lots of old clothes to the St Vincent de Paul but Alison thought it was strictly for the poor and the very hard-up. She wasn’t so sure about the smell either. Ciara swore to her that every item was laundered before being put on sale but why then did all the shops smell like a packed and sweaty number 13A bus on a wet Monday evening? Whatever her reservations about their source, Alison would never tire of looking at Ciara modelling her latest finds. Ciara’s look was pure theatre and Alison found her sense of glamour utterly captivating. In the early weeks of term they shared some tutorials and when she first heard Ciara speak Alison was genuinely surprised to hear a country accent fairly similar to her own. Kerry, she guessed, or maybe Tipperary. Somehow Ciara looked more exotic than Alison had imagined anyone from the country could manage to be.

Before one tutorial Ciara announced to the assembled group that she was moving out of the place she had rented on Leeson Street. ‘I took on a family of squatting mice and I am ashamed to say they have beaten me. The little shaggers are popping out of everywhere. Anyone know of a room going? Preferably a vermin-free zone!’

‘I need to move out of my place,’ Alison piped up to her own astonishment. ‘Maybe we could find a place for two? My folks fixed me up with a nightmare landlady,’ she said as coolly as she could while her insides churned. Before Alison had time to change her mind, Ciara fell on her offer enthusiastically.

‘Jesus, that would be great, Alison! But I have to warn you I’m on a bit of a tight budget. Forty quid a week max.’

Dr Fitzgerald bustled through the room carrying a pile of paperwork. Alison spent the tutorial somewhat panic-stricken at the thought of telling her parents what she had just agreed. But by the end of an hour on Cromwell and the massacre in Drogheda, of which she had only heard a scant word or two, she had decided that sharing a flat with Ciara was the answer to all her prayers. She would find a way to break the news at home. She told herself firmly that they would understand. Get it first and tell them later. Alison surprised herself with her talent for deceit when she spoke to her parents from Bea Duggan’s front hallway that night. No news. No news at all. Everything fine here.

A few copies of the
Evening Herald
and some visits to truly appalling flats later had brought them to Jean McDermott’s doorstep. And here she was now, waddling back from the gate, a little unsteady on her feet. She eyed Ciara and Alison suspiciously as they stood in the small shared hallway. Her eyes squinted at them as if startled by their presence. After what seemed an eternity she spoke: ‘Make sure to put on the Chubb lock, Mary.’ Then she disappeared, with the swish of rancid plastic raincoat, into the downstairs flat.

‘Mad as a fucking March hare,’ Ciara said rather too loudly as they climbed the staircase. ‘Come on, wee Mary, you have an essay to write on the bleeding Crusades and I have an essay belonging to you to creatively paraphrase.’

Alison smiled. Today was a good day. Not even an essay on the Crusades was going to spoil tonight. His name ran around her head. In her mind she heard Rose say it again. Dan Abernethy. Suddenly the Daisy May, her comfort blanket, had become the most exotic place in Dublin. Two days to her next shift and Alison thought it was quite possible she might burst in anticipation.

Her mood was somewhat punctured by the filthy state of the kitchen and living room. Dirty dishes rose in a tower from the sink and clothes lay strewn everywhere. Alison loved her newfound freedom with Ciara but someone was going to have to take the place in hand. Her mam and dad were bound to come and see the place she had decided was better than their original choice of Bea Duggan’s house. They would have a freak attack if they saw it as it was now.

Even the most rudimentary skills of housekeeping escaped Ciara’s attention. She really did appear oblivious as she swept from room to room. When she had found herself in the flat in Leeson Street at the beginning of term she waited until every item of crockery had been used and had pitched its tent in the kitchen sink. Then she extracted the least soiled items: a water tumbler or a plate that had held yesterday’s toast, which could easily put in a second day’s service without so much as a glance at running water. After one week she had deleted Weetabix from her mental shopping list. Having never soaked a cereal bowl after eating from it she deemed it a food that conspired to glue itself to her bowls and render them out of action. Cornflakes were definitely better, less like wallpaper paste after a day and a half. After two weeks there were fumes coming from the sink, which made Ciara think she might have to clear it soon. But in the name of God how? In her waking hours her mother Aggie maintained her stance at the kitchen sink at home in Leachlara looking out at the cattle grazing in the fields. Neither Ciara nor her brother or sister ever offered to do the washing-up, as her mother seemed to enjoy being lost in contemplation of the world beyond her windows. Ciara’s lack of experience was telling in the smelly realm of her Leeson Street flat.

The water in the tap was never more than lukewarm. She had no sponge: she had flung the one that was in the sink when she arrived into the bin. The smell of it had reminded her of a dead mouse that she had had a whiff of in another flat to let in Rathmines. Washing-up or no washing-up, it had to go. After one enquiring visit too many by her slimy landlord she had decided to tell him to shove the flat up his arse, or words to that effect. She’d taken a sly satisfaction in leaving him a sink full of dirty dishes and maybe inconveniencing his next letting somewhat. She’d sworn that next time she would find a place to live herself and keep her father from hooking her up with another of the Leachlara mafia with their swathes of property in Dublin.