Instructions for a Heatwave (11 page)

On her first day in the studio, Evelyn had handed her a contract and asked her to check it over, then fill it in. Aoife had taken it and laid it on the table and, when Evelyn left the room, Aoife had bent over it, one hand held over her left eye. There was a sudden, crushing weight on her chest and it was difficult to draw breath into her lungs.
Please
, her mind was saying, she wasn’t sure to whom,
please, please
. Let me get through this, just this once. I’ll do anything, anything at all.
Contract
she could recognize, right at the top of the page. That was good. Evelyn had said it was a contract. Or did it perhaps say
contact
? Was there an
r
there? Aoife pressed her left eye hard with the heel of her palm and scanned the now undulating string of letters that made up the words. Was there an
r
and, if so, where ought it to be? Before the
t
or after the
t
or next to the
c
and, if so, which
c
? Panic cramming her throat, she told herself to leave
contract
or
contact
or whatever the hell it said and look down the page, and when she did, she knew she was doomed. For the page on the table was crammed with text, impossibly small text, closely printed, words like lines of black ants crawling over the white. They clustered and rearranged themselves before her eyes, they dissolved themselves from their linear left-right structure and formed themselves into long, wavering columns, top to bottom; they swayed and flexed, like long grasses in a wind. She saw, for a moment, a
v
reaching up for an embrace with the empty arms of an
h
; she noticed an
a
in proximity to an
o
, which brought to mind the arrangement of her own name. She caught hold, briefly, of a collocation of letters that said, possibly,
fraught
, or maybe
taught
, but the next moment it was gone. She was fighting down tears, knowing that it was over, that this job, this chance she’d been given, was scuppered, like so many before it, and she was weighing up the pros and cons of just walking out when she heard Evelyn coming back along the corridor.

Aoife wasn’t aware of the moment in which she made the decision. All she knew was that she was lifting the contract by its corner, up and away, with only the tips of her fingers, as if it radiated some kind of toxic material. She was sliding it into a blue folder and she was putting the blue folder into a box on top of a filing cabinet.

As she came into the room, Evelyn said, “All finished with the contract?”

And because Aoife wanted this job, she wanted it so badly, and why shouldn’t she have a good job, an interesting job, like other people did, damn that sorcerer to hell and back, she turned around, she smiled her confidential half-smile, she folded her hands together and said, “Yes. All done.”

In Evelyn’s storeroom, she empties the boxes of film onto the table and starts to stack them in their respective places.

Since that day, over the many months she’s worked for Evelyn, the blue folder in the box on top of the filing cabinet has swelled and grown. Every bit of paper she is handed, every letter she opens, every request or application or contract that comes through the door, she puts in there. Anything with numbers and dollar signs—checks and bills and invoices—she sends straight to the accountant so she knows at least that the money is going into and out of the business. But everything else gets put in the folder. To deal with later. When she can. As soon as she’s worked out how to do it. And she will. It’s just a matter of time. Any day now, she will get down the blue folder, which is bulging, sides straining, and deal with it. Somehow.

She slides box after box of film into the pigeonholes. “How’s it looking?” she calls.

Evelyn appears in the doorway. A tall woman, she towers over the diminutive Aoife by at least a foot. Her mink-gray hair is pulled back from her face and held in what looks to Aoife like a bulldog clip; her shirt, which must be an old one of her husband’s, has several clothes pegs hanging off its front. She has her
long, sinewy arms crossed over herself. “I don’t know,” she mutters, in her sixty-a-day husk. “It’s kind of grainy.”

Aoife eyes her. “Grainy can be … good, though … can’t it?” she says, with care. It is never entirely clear when Evelyn needs verbal reassurance or just mute understanding.

“Not grainy.” Evelyn runs a hand along the shelf. She stops by a box of lightbulbs and frowns at it. “Murky.”

“Murky?”

“Murky-grainy.”

Aoife picks up the last box of film.

“Did you send off that magazine contract?” Evelyn says suddenly.

The sides of the box are slippery, textureless; it falls from Aoife’s fingers as if drawn to the floor by a magnet. “I … um …” she gets out, as she fumbles on the tiles for the film. “I’m sure I …”

“Odd,” murmurs Evelyn, at the window now. “They called to say they hadn’t had it but—”

“You need to get ready,” Aoife interrupts.

Evelyn turns. “I do?”

“Yeah. You have to be downtown in twenty minutes.”

“Oh. I’m having lunch with … thingy, aren’t I?”

“Thingy?” Aoife raises an eyebrow at her. Evelyn’s terrible memory for names is a long-running joke between them.

“Dan? Bob? No … Paul,” Evelyn says, fishing a half-smoked cigarette from the shirt pocket. “Paul … something. Ah!” she says, with a triumphant wave of her crumbling cigarette. “Allanson. Paul Allanson.”

“Close,” Aoife says, gesturing at the pegs on Evelyn’s shirt. “Allan Paulson. Curator at MoMA.” Evelyn comes forward and holds her arms up in the air, allowing Aoife to remove each peg with a snap. “Make sure he takes you somewhere nice.”

“I’ll bring you a doggie bag. I can never eat at these things.”

“Thank you.” Aoife extracts the bulldog clip from Evelyn’s hair. “You want me to come in the cab with you?”

Evelyn shakes her head. “No. I’m not totally useless. You carry on with …” She nods towards the darkroom. “Don’t forget to”—she waves her hand in a vague arch—“well, you know what to do. Maybe you should go to the store and pick up some things for the refrigerator. It looks horribly empty. Take some money.”

“Don’t worry.” Aoife follows Evelyn to the door, where she hands her a jacket and then a satchel.

At the top of the stairs, Evelyn stops, puts her hand to her head. “Oh, my, I almost forgot. There are messages on the machine. That guy called again. Whatshisname. Kitchen man. He said something about being back in town. You know what? You should just go. Go home. Go and meet him. Everything here can wait until tomorrow.” She sets off down the stairs, muttering to herself. “Can’t believe I almost forgot to tell her, what kind of a person am I, forgetting that, almost forgetting, Jesus, am I getting so old I can’t even remember basic …”

Aoife goes back into the apartment and stands on the landing of the studio, clasping and unclasping her hands, knuckles whitening through skin. She shuts her eyes for a moment or two, enough for the chambers of her heart to contract once and expand again, taking in the returning blood. A reprieve. For now. Got away with it one more time—and a phrase of her sister’s pops up in her head: by the skin of her teeth.

Then the moment is broken. Aoife opens her eyes. She releases her hands and moves off, pulling open the darkroom door and letting it shut behind her. She disappears, like an actor into the wings, swallowed up by the gloom.

The answering machine glows with four messages. The first one is from a magazine editor, the next from the assistant of an actress Evelyn is due to shoot next month, and there’s a long one from Evelyn’s husband about the new coffee machine. Then
another voice comes on the line: “Hey, Aoife, it’s Gabe. I’m back in town, not sure for how long but I was wondering if you were free this afternoon. I know it’s short notice but … anyway … I hope you can get away. You can call me on … Actually, that won’t work. I’ll call again in an hour or so. Bye.”

Aoife raises the receiver, listens to the purr of the dial tone and replaces it, trying to ignore the pulse that is suddenly clicking, clicking in her neck. She flicks on the red bulb and goes over to the strips of film, hanging by their ends to a washing line. They jostle and shift, like animals sensing the approach of a predator. She picks up one by its edges and, finding it dry, holds it up to the light: tiny ghosts flare up within the frame, white mouths agape, pale hair on end, the skies behind them dark as Doomsday.

Taking the scissors from a hook on the wall—also installed by her, amazingly, since hammers and nails are not her natural tools—she begins to slice the developed films into strips of ten, counting as she goes.

It always reminds her, this counting, of helping her mother in the chapel before one of the big days, Easter or Christmas or Harvest Festival. Her mother at the altar, slotting lilies and roses into vases, tugging straight the cloths she had laundered and ironed, staying up the previous night, sweating and swearing over the starch and heat and tension of it all. It was Aoife’s job to put a hymnbook on each seat, straightening any skewed hassocks as she went. And she liked to count as she did this. “Thirty-three, thirty-four,” she whispered, under her breath, “thirty-five, thirty-six. I got to thirty-six, Mammy!” Her mother would reply, without turning around, “You’re going great guns there, Aoife, aren’t you? You keep it up now.”

Aoife keeps it up with the film, just as she did with the Easter hymnbooks, methodically slicing through every tenth frame, stacking the shiny strips in slippery piles.

All this—this work, this apartment, this city, what she’s wearing, what she does, who she is—is so removed from what she was brought up for, from what she was taught, from what she learned, that it makes her smile sometimes. The thought of Evelyn in her parents’ house, at her convent school, is as incongruous as a flamingo in a field of cows.

Aoife left school without a single qualification. The nuns described her as “quite literally unteachable.” She failed every exam she sat (apart from art, in which she scraped a pass). She hadn’t written a word on any of the papers. In some, she didn’t even bother to turn over the exam sheet, just filled the margins of her paper with doodles.

The local priest, having had his ear bent by Gretta, who was given to regular laments about poor Aoife and what was she to do with a girl like that, what would become of her, suggested that Aoife help out with the Sunday-school classes. They always needed people to read Bible stories to the children and help them draw pictures afterwards. Maybe in time, the priest suggested, Aoife could use this experience to become a teacher.

When Gretta had returned with this news, Aoife had sat in her room, in the dark, looking out of the window. The list of things she couldn’t do seemed to her endless. She couldn’t hit a ball or catch one, she couldn’t spell, she couldn’t play an instrument, she couldn’t hold a tune, she didn’t have the ability to blend in with other people, she always stuck out, was always mystifyingly noticeable, odd, different. She couldn’t even read aloud a Bible story to children, and never would be able to.

Gretta was over the moon about the Sunday-school classes. Aoife overheard her telling someone on the phone that they had of course feared that Aoife would never amount to much but after this she might be able to hold down a respectable job.

Imagine, then, the uproar when Aoife announced one night over dinner—Monica and Joe were there but Michael Francis was
not—that she wasn’t going to help at Sunday-school classes, that she had been to see the priest that very day to say she wouldn’t be doing it. She didn’t want to be a teacher, she wasn’t good with children; she could think of nothing worse.

It was one of the Riordan family’s louder uproars. Gretta hurled a plate of spinach to the floor. She would later deny this and say it had slipped from her hand. Either way, spinach ended up on the carpet and there would be a green stain there for years, always referred to within the family as “the Sunday-school stain.” Gretta said she would die of shame, that Aoife would be the death of her, that she didn’t know what to do with her.

Not long after this, Aoife left. She simply walked out. It was so straightforward she didn’t, afterwards, know why she hadn’t done it before. “See yous,” she said, giving a wave from the door, then stepping out into the light. And that was that, as far as Aoife and Gillerton Road went. They heard later she was living in a squat in Kentish Town. Michael Francis was dispatched to visit her and found her in the back room of a terraced house, cross-legged on a mattress, a half-strung necklace in her hands, a girl with a guitar next to her. The squat had mold on the walls, violent orange wallpaper, a bearded man digging up the back garden and a parrot sitting on top of the cooker. Aoife, Michael Francis revealed, under close questioning from Gretta, was fine. Fine, Gretta shrieked, fine? What was she eating? Who was she living with? Did she look ill, unhappy? Did she have a job? Did he talk to her about doing the Sunday-school classes? Was she decently dressed? Was she sharing the house with men? Men, Michael Francis shrugged, and women. Lots of them. Gretta couldn’t bring herself to ask what she really wanted to know, which was, was Aoife sharing her bed with any of them? What else, she said, tell me more. Michael Francis said, after a pause, that he thought her hair was different. Different, Gretta demanded, different how? Longer—he gestured around his own head—with beads in.

The hair beads were the last straw. It was agreed after this, among the Riordans, that Aoife had Gone Off the Rails. Rumors passed from Gretta to Monica and back again about Aoife and drugs; Aoife and men; Aoife and the dole office. There was the time Monica claimed that a friend of a friend had seen Aoife on the canal bank in Camden, selling patchwork bags from a blanket. This was never confirmed or denied by Aoife herself. Someone told Michael Francis he’d seen her on top of a bus in the King’s Road area with a man in purple flares. This piece of information he kept to himself. Aoife still turned up, from time to time, for Sunday lunch in Gillerton Road but she smiled enigmatically at Gretta’s questions about jobs, lifestyle, clothing, and helped herself to more potatoes.