Authors: Emma Donoghue
Stir-Fry
DONOGHUE
STIR-FRY
This book is for Anne
1
PICKING
“2
SEEK FLATMATE.” Two diamonds of masking tape held the card to the notice board. “OWN ROOM. Wow! NO BIGOTS.”
It was all in red ink except the Wow!, which must have been scrawled on by a passerby. A thumb had smudged the top of the 2, giving it the shape of a swan with its beak held up to the wind. Maria leaned against the wall, getting out of the way of a passing stream of hockey players, and rummaged for a biro.
She copied the ad onto the first page of her refill pad, which looked, she realised with a surge of irritation, as blank and virginal as the homework notebooks the nuns always sold on the first day back to school. She drew a jagged line below the number. Chances were the room would be filled by now, since the card’s top two corners were dog-eared. Still, it was worth a bash, better than anything else on offer. Maria wasn’t sure how many more weeks she could stand with the aunt and her footstools. Her eyes slid down the notice board. It was leprous with peeling paper, scraps offering everything from “Grinds In Anglo-Saxon By A Fluent Speaker” to
“heavyduty bikelock for sale.” All the propositions in the accommodation section sounded equally sinister. “V. low rent” had to mean squalor, and “informal atmos.” hinted at blue mould in the bread bin.
Returning her biro to her shirt pocket, Maria stood back against a pillar papered with flyers. She clasped her hands loosely over her refill pad, holding it against her belly. The corners of her mouth tilted up just a little, enough to give the impression that she was waiting for someone, she hoped, but not so much as to look inane. She hugged the refill pad tighter against her hips; it felt as comfortable as old armour. Her eyes stayed low, watching the crowd that had overflowed every bench and table in the Students’ Union.
A knot of black-leather lads were kicking a coffee machine; she looked away at once, in case one of them might accost her with some witticism she would be unable to invent a retort for. Behind the layer of grit on the window, her eye caught a flat diamond of silver. The lake had looked so much bluer in the college prospectus. Her grip on the pad was too tight; she loosened her fingers and thought of being a pike. Steely and plump, nosing round the lake’s cache of oilcans, black branches, the odd dropped sandal mouldering to green. A great patient fish, waiting for summer to dip the first unsuspecting toe within an inch of her bite. Maria swallowed a smile.
Bending her knees, she let herself down until she was sitting on the top step. Something tickled her on the side of the neck, and she jolted, but it was only a stray corner from one of the orange freshers’-ball posters. She read the details over her shoulder, noting that
committee
was missing a few consonants. Then she told herself not to be so damn negative on the first day and turned her face forward again. In the far corner, under a brown-spattered mural of Mother Ireland, she spotted a slight acquaintance from home. His corduroy
knees were drawn up to his chin, an Ecology Society pamphlet barricading his face. No, she would not go and say hello, she was not that desperate.
Trigonometry was a stuffy mousetrap on the fourth floor. She counted twenty-four heads and squeezed her leg an inch farther onto the back bench. The girl beside her seemed to be asleep, streaked hair hanging round her face like ivy; her padded hip was warm against Maria’s. When the tutor asked for their names, there was a sort of tremor along the bench, and the girl’s head swung up.
Maria was reading the ad one more time; she could feel her mouth going limp with indecision. As the registration list was being passed around, she gave a tentative nudge to her neighbor and held up the refill pad at an angle. “Sorry, but would you have any idea what exactly the wee symbol stands for?”
Salmon-pink fingernails covered a small yawn. “Just means women,” the girl murmured, “but they’d be fairly feministy, you know the sort.”
Her glance was speculative, but Maria whispered “Many thanks” and bent her head. She was far from sure which sort she was meant to know the sort of. In the library at home she had found
The Female Eunuch
, a tattered copy with Nelly the Nutter’s observations scrawled in the margins. She had richly enjoyed it—especially the bits Nelly had done zigzags on with her crayon—but could not imagine flatmates who’d go around quoting it all day. Still, Maria reminded herself as the tutorial dragged to a close, it was not familiarity she had come here for. If Dublin was going to feel so odd—so windy, littered with crisp packets, never quiet—then the odder the better, really.
It was five past twelve before she could slide round the cluster of elbows and out of the office. A knot of lecturers
emerged from their tearoom behind her, their Anglophile accents filling the corridor. She hurried down the steps in search of a phone. Catching her reflection in a dusty staircase window, Maria paused to poke at the shoulder pads on her black jacket. Damn the things, they were meant to give an air of assurance, but they made her look humpbacked. She pushed back her fringe and gave her peaky chin an encouraging look.
“Yoohoo, Maria!”
She ignored that, because nobody knew her name.
The shriek went higher. She peered under the handrail to find the streaky blonde from the tutorial waving from a huddle of trench coats. To reach them she had to weave between an abstract bronze and the Archaeology Club’s papier-mâché dolmen.
“It is Maria, isn’t it?” The girl wore an enamel badge that read M
ATERIAL
G
IRL
.
“Yeah, only it’s a hard
i
,” she explained.
The voice rolled past her. “Hard? Godawful. I’m dropping out of maths right away, life’s too short. I heard the trig man read out your name, and I thought, well she looks like she knows what he’s burbling on about, which is more than I do.”
“I sort of like maths,” Maria said reluctantly.
“Perv.” Her eyes were straying to a mark on the thigh of her pale rose trousers; she picked at it with one nail. “Personally I’m switching to philosophy, they say it’s a guaranteed honour.” She glanced up. “Oh, I’m Yvonne, did I say? Sorry, I should have said.”
Maria let her face lift in the first grin of the day. Not wanting it to last a second too long, she looked away and mentioned that she needed a pay phone.
“Over in the far corner, past the chaplaincy. Is it about that flat share?”
“Well, probably.” Too defensive. “I haven’t really made up my mind.”
“Personally,” Yvonne confided, “I wouldn’t trust anything advertised in that hole of a Students’ Union. A cousin of mine had a bad experience with a secondhand microwave oven.”
Maria’s mouth twisted. “What did it do to her, exactly?”
“I never got the full details,” Yvonne admitted. “Well, listen, if the Libbers don’t suit you, I have an uncle who’s leasing terribly nice flats, apartments really, just outside Dublin—”
“Actually, I want something fairly low-budget,” Maria told her. “Got to make the money stretch.”
Yvonne nodded, her hoop earrings bobbing. “God, I know, don’t talk to me, where does it go? I’m already up to my eyes in debt to Mum for my ball gown. How are we going to make it to Christmas, Maria, tell me that?”
“Yeah.”
“Eh, hello, sorry, is that oh three six nine four two?”
“Far as I know.”
“Oh. Well, it’s just about your ad.”
“Me wha’?”
“Wasn’t it you?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Your ad. Your ad on the notice board in the Students’ Union.”
“I haven’t a notion what you’re talking about.”
“But, sorry, but I saw it there just this morning.”
“What did it say?”
“Well it starts ‘two’ and then a sort of symbol thing—”
“Hang on. Ruth? Ruth, turn off that bloody hair dryer. Listen, have you taken to advertising our services in the S.U.? What? No, I amn’t being thick. Oh, the flat, all right, well why didn’t you tell me? Yo, are you still there? Nobody tells me anything.”
“It’s just I was hoping, maybe I could come and have a look, if it’s not too inconvenient? Unless you have someone already?”
“For all I know she could have sublet the entire building to the Jehovah’s.”
“Maybe I should ring back later.”
“Ah, no, it’s grand. Why don’t you come over for eats?”
“Tonight?”
“Tomorrow we die.”
“You what?”
“Seize the day, for tomorrow we die. Sorry, just being pretentious. Make it eightish.”
“Are you sure? That’d be wonderful. Bye so.”
“Hang on, what’s your name? Just so we don’t invite some passing stranger in for dinner.”
“Sorry It’s Maria.”
“Well I’m Jael. By the way, was our address on the ad?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“I suppose I’d better give it to you, then, unless you’d prefer to use your imagination?”
“Do I get the feeling you’re taking the piss out of me?”
“You bet your bottom I am. OK, seriously, folks, it’s sixty-nine Beldam Square, the top flat. Get the number seven bus from college, and ask the conductor to let you off after the Little Sisters of the Poor. Right?”
“I think so.”
“Be hungry.”
She loved the double-decker buses, every last lumbering dragon. One Christmas her Mam had brought the kids up to Dublin for a skite. Maria was only small, seven or so, but she dropped her mother’s hand halfway up the spiral steps of the bus and ran to the front seat. Sketching a giant wheel between her mittens, she steered round each corner, casting disdainful glances at cyclists who disappeared under the
shadow of the bus as if the ground had gulped them down. As she revved up O’Connell Street the afternoon was darkening. When the bus stopped at Henry Street, she had to be prised away; she gave up her hand and followed her mother’s stubby heels into the crowd. Looking back over her shoulder, she saw the Christmas lights coming on all down the street, white bulbs filling each tree in turn and turning the sky navy blue. Maria tried asking her mother why the light made things darker, but by then they were on Moore Street, and her voice was lost in the yelps of
wrappinpaypa fifatwenty
.
This was not the same route but a much quieter journey, or perhaps a decade had dulled her perceptions. The bus chugged round Georgian squares, past the absentminded windows of office blocks. Gone half seven, and not a soul abroad; only the occasional newsagent spilled its light at a corner. Maria got off at the right stop but, dreading to be early, walked back to the last shop and loitered among the magazines for twenty minutes. The girl behind the counter had a hollow cough that kept doubling her over on her high stool. As the time ticked away Maria began to feel so uncomfortable that she finally bought
Her
magazine and a bag of crisps.