Once in a Lifetime (35 page)

‘Whaddya mean?’ she blurted out. Stupid, that sounded wrong, like she was worried about it, which was the wrong impression to give. ‘I mean, how does everyone else drink?’

she added, managing to sound a bit blase.

Rhona kept her unwavering gaze upon Dara. Rhona wasn’t one of Dara’s favourite people: she was too sharp, too ready to say what she thought - a very annoying habit. ‘Like we’re going to drink the bar dry.’

‘I don’t do that,’ Dara said and she laughed. Convincing, no?

‘If you say so.’ Rhona shrugged.

When she was gone, Dara thought about the stupidity of the whole conversation. Wasn’t that the point of drinking, to drink the whole bar dry? Dara scanned her mind for that moment in the pub when the alcohol was sinking into her and she was sinking into it, when she’d stare at the jewel coloured bottles racked up behind the bar and want to finish every single one of them. Surely everyone felt the same, didn’t they?

Dara lived in a bedsit near the bank. It was small but reasonably clean and it was her own. That was the best thing about it.

Des Flynn lived near her. Dara liked Des; not that he was her type. He was always in the company of a gang of other lads, equally strapping, all muscled sporty types with big bags that held soccer jerseys and runners, and probably damp towels that housed billions of bacteria and hadn’t been washed since the year dot. Friendly blokes who drank a couple of pints of beer on a night out and danced badly to Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Not the type who knew how to roll a joint or where you could get a bottle of absinthe, therefore not her type.

She’d watched him sometimes as he went out with his pals.

Sitting with the window open all the way down, so her legs

fe.

hung out in the sun, with a glass of wine beside her and her skin tanning, she could see all the way down the street. She could see the little old man who came slowly out of his house every afternoon, shuffling up in the direction of the bookies and perhaps for a pint in Horgan’s once Holy Hour, when all the pubs closed, was over. She could watch the young mother with two small kids come shouting and panting out of her front door, one child holding reluctantly on to her, the other crammed into a pushchair, face screwed up and crying.

The park, Dara decided, they were going to the park, and the mother would stop screaming and they’d all sit on the grass by the swings and the children would smile at the dogs rushing around, sniffing everything, in the sun. She didn’t know if all this really happened, but she liked imagining people’s lives.

And the boys, she watched Des and his mates.

‘How’s it going?’ Des called up to her.

‘Fine,’ Dara said. She wanted to say something else but couldn’t think what to add, so she gave him a little wave.

That looked stupid, she decided.

They were in the pub again after work. It was a Thursday, so nobody wanted to be out late. Well, not that late.

‘Tequila slammer,’ she said.

‘Wayhay!’ yelled Stanno. ‘Atta girl, Dara. Let’s all do tequila.’

‘You’re so boring when you don’t drink,’ agreed Mark, who worked on the counter and charmed all the good-looking mummy types who came in to pay off the husbands’ credit cards.

‘I hate boring people,’ sighed Michaela. ‘The salon was full of them today.’

Everyone smiled indulgently. Michaela owned a nearby hairdresser’s and was often to be found in the pub because she hated the smell of perming lotion and needed little drinkies to cope with having ten staff and annoying clients.

She was older than the rest of them, mid-forties at least, and had curly hair the colour of blackberries. There were three shot glasses lined up in front of her. Peach schnapps. It was her latest favourite, discovered when she drank a Vestal Virgin, of which schnapps was the major ingredient. Nobody was too sure what the others were but it was mind-blowing.

The tequila arrived, dumped on the table by a waitress who was too busy for niceties.

‘Just one lemonade,’ said Dara quickly. No point paying for lots of mixers when they only wanted to spend cash on booze.

The waitress silently took the extra lemonades away and collected an assortment of coins from them.

Dara grabbed the lemonade first, splashed a bit into her tequila, held her hand over the glass to shake it, then slammed the glass on to the table. The drink obediently fizzed up and she knocked it back in one.

The bite of the tequila rasped her tastebuds. It was hideous stuff, but oh, the effect. Her eyes closed, she waited. The warmth spread from the depths of her belly into her limbs and, most importantly, into her head. Lapping at the anxiety and fear like a soft lake gently drowning her. She opened her eyes and smiled at her friends with relief. She felt safe and loved.

‘Haven’t you guys started yet? I’m ready for another.’

James and a few of the other older guys from the bank had been sitting on their own having grown-uppy conversations, but as the evening wore on and the fair-weather drinkers left, they joined Dara, Elaine and the young gang.

James made a bee-line for Dara as usual and, for once, she didn’t mind. He was harmless enough, she decided from the delicious safety of several tequila slammers.

‘Having fun?’ said James, sliding on to a barstool beside her and waving a hand at the barman at the same time.

‘Yes,’ said Dara happily.

‘And on a school night, too,’ James added. ‘You are a wild child.’

Dara grinned at that. Wild child: she liked that. She liked to think of herself as untameable. Nobody tried to capture or hurt wild things. He obviously understood that much about her.

‘Another drink?’

Dara considered another slammer. They hurt her stomach after a while. She’d had a couple of chips when one of the lads got sausages and chips in a basket, but she never ate much when she was drinking. Soaking up the booze was such a waste of good alcohol.

‘Have something else,’ urged James, seeing indecision in her eyes. ‘I’m having brandy.’

That was the smell around him, she realised. A rich, fiery smell. She liked it.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll try one.’

Slammers made her feel high but brandy made her buzz.

Her pulse raced and she felt full of energy, wanting to dance when someone put Salt ‘n’ Pepa on the jukebox, but they weren’t allowed to dance in here and she had to content herself with standing at the bar, moving her hips in time to the music. Dara focused on her reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

She loved how she looked when she was drunk, it was the only time she did. Otherwise, she felt ugly and, no matter how often people like Elaine or Ruth told her otherwise, she felt fat.

‘You’re a size ten,’ Elaine would shriek. ‘If you’re fat, what does that make me, you idiot?’ Elaine was a size fourteen.

‘But you’re taller than me,’ Dara would reply. Elaine was gorgeous, there was no comparison. She could be twenty stone and she’d still be gorgeous. It wasn’t about weight, not for other people. Only her. She was wrong no matter what. Ruth and Elaine never gave up, though. ‘You have to say I’m a beautiful woman and I have a secret,’ said Ruth, who was much taken with a new fad about how to walk into a room and look in control and mysteriously gorgeous at the same time.

Dara had pretended to do it, but she didn’t believe it for a moment. They were just words. She wasn’t beautiful, although she had plenty of secrets.

Right now, she was feeling a little bit not-so-ugly, which was not even in the same time zone as being beautiful. The lighting was dim and in the mirror, Dara saw a small face with big dark eyes and lashes so long they looked false. Her skin was a warm tone and she had a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheeks. Any lipstick had long been smeared off, so she rubbed Body Shop strawberry lip balm on her lips. Sexy, that’s what she looked, with her large dark pupils and the trails of long, thick, espresso-coloured hair curling around her shoulders.

James met her in the hallway as she emerged from the ladies’. ‘I just had a thought,’ he said. ‘This place is boring.

Let’s go somewhere else. Closer to town, more fun.’ Dara wavered. She wanted to stay with Elaine, not go off with James. She didn’t really like him, despite the brandy.

‘I’ve got your stuff,’ he said, holding up her handbag and coat. ‘Come on.’

He gripped her hand and led her outside, whereupon he began to run, pulling her along behind. His car was a red MG. Dara had never been in such a car.

James fired it up, did a U-turn in the middle of the street and began to drive in the opposite direction to the city.

‘This isn’t the right way,’ Dara said.

‘We’re going the back route. Don’t want to get caught by the cops.’

Briefly, Dara wondered if it was a good idea to drive after so many drinks. How many could you have and still drive?

She didn’t know; she didn’t have a car and there was no limit on drinking and taking the bus home.

James put on a cassette and turned the music up to full blast. ‘Pink Floyd,’ he said.

After a few minutes they pulled into a small heavily graffitied car park with lots of cans and broken bottles scattered around and got out. The pub was a solid redbrick square with blocked-up windows that had bars on them.

‘This is a great joint,’ he said.

It didn’t look it, but Dara followed him in. The pub was busy. Every other customer was male. They stared at Dara with her velvet coat and heavily kohled eyes. She shuddered.

This was the sort of place where her father would be right at home, bursting with men full of bitterness and whiskey, angry with life and everyone that looked crossways at them.

James seemed to know the barman and he sat comfortably at the bar and ordered double brandies. ‘Get that down you,’

he said when the drinks arrived. There were no rounded brandy balloons here, just plain glasses that looked dirty. Dara drank but the brandy didn’t make the fear go away.

‘I don’t like this place,’ she whispered to James.

‘Don’t you, honey?’ he asked, putting a proprietorial hand on her leg.

She shifted uncomfortably but James moved his hand higher. ‘Drink up, then, chickie, and we’ll go.’

‘I’d like to go home,’ Dara said when they were in the car.

‘Sure,’ he said vaguely. ‘I’ll go the back way again.’

‘No,’ she said, panic coming from somewhere, ‘drop me at a taxi rank. I’ll get a taxi.’

‘No, no way,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t be safe.’

The brandy and Pink Floyd were giving her a headache, it was like being on a magical mystery ride in the middle of nowhere. James drove down strange streets along the docks, past big empty buildings and boarded-up blocks. Then he turned the car rapidly and drove into a small cul-de-sac in a warren of dockland buildings. James stopped the car and grabbed her, shoving his face into hers.

‘James, no!’ she yelled, pushing furiously.

‘Yes,’ he murmured, forcing his tongue into her mouth at the same time as his hands were wrenching her coat away and pawing over her blouse. ‘God, you’re something else,’ he said, ignoring her struggles.

‘No,’ she shrieked, pushing him as hard as she could.

He was on top of her now, having somehow pushed her seat down and shifted himself over the gearstick to pin her down.

‘You want this,’ he said hoarsely, ‘you know you do.’

‘Not like this,’ she said desperately, hoping to stop him with subterfuge. Maybe she could get him to come to her flat and then she’d scream, then people would hear her.

But it wasn’t working; James was at her breasts now, his breath hot on her bared flesh.

‘I’m the wild child, you can’t do this,’ she begged, trying to shock him out of his frenzy.

‘Wild child, yes,’ he groaned, and then he was holding her down even more forcefully. Dara hadn’t known he was so strong, or that she was so much weaker than she thought.

Her strength was nothing to his, he could break her with one hand.

‘Of course you want this,’ he groaned. ‘Why else did you stand beside me, dancing to that music, waggling your ass in my face, asking for it?’

‘No!’ she roared, but he put a hand over her mouth, pushing so hard she felt she might black out. ‘You want this.’

The weight of his body on top of hers, the force and the fear, brought her back to the bedroom in Snowdrop Park when she was small. Another man, another heavy body on her little one. ‘No,’ she breathed inside her head.

‘No!’ she tried to scream, but James’s hand muffled the noise.

There was only one thing left to do: Dara went inside herself.

Lockdown time. It was about more than closing her eyes. She

closed her heart and her soul; this was a shell of a thing being raped, not her. And the shell could cope with anything.

‘You all right?’ asked Mrs Davis who lived in the bottom flat.

Her front door was in the hall, right beside the phone, and she’d opened her door to take her dog for his morning walk. Dara had her eiderdown pulled around her, and she was as white as snow, except for the raw redness around her eyes from crying all night.

‘Fine,’ muttered Dara, huddling close to the phone. She hadn’t the coins to drop in, so she was tapping out the number on the little receiver buttons at the top of the phone. It didn’t always work, but sometimes it did and you could make a call without paying.

Mrs Davis sniffed and went to the front door with her dog. Dara leaned against the wall, clutching the phone close to her skull.

Elaine answered.

‘Good morning, Harp Bank, Inchicore branch,’ she said cheerily.

Dara didn’t have to fake a hoarse, sick-sounding voice. She could barely speak, whether it was from the trauma of trying to shout or just plain trauma. ‘Elaine,’ she rasped, ‘it’s me, Dara, I’m sick, a bug or something.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Elaine. ‘Brandy, that’s the something. Did you sneak off with James?’

Dara had to hold on to the wall to steady herself. ‘No, I went home, I felt sick then, just had to go.’

‘Oh.’ Elaine sounded a little more convinced.