Stir-Fry (2 page)

She was licking the salt off her fingers as she rounded the third corner of Beldam Square. Number 69 edged a narrow street; the digits were engraved on the fanlight. Maria knocked twice on the side door’s scuffed paintwork before discovering that it was on the latch. Inside, she fumbled for the switch; a light came on ten feet above her, round and pearly as the one in the dentist’s that she always focussed on during drilling. Halfway up the first flight of carpeted stairs, she remembered the glossy under her arm. She unrolled it and scanned the slippery cover. “Boss Giving You Grief?” That was fine, and not even the most fervid feminist could
object to “Living with Breast Cancer.” She had her doubts about “Why Nice Men Aren’t Sexy,” and when her eye caught “Ten Weeks to Trim Those Bulges for Christmas!” she rolled up the magazine and left it at the base of the stairs. She could collect it on her way out. She might not even like them.

Between two steps Maria found herself in darkness. Damn light must be on a timer. At arm’s length she reached the bannister; it was a cool snake of wood drawing her hand upward. Not a whiff of lentils, she thought, as she was guided round a bend and up another flight of stairs. How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb? One to screw in the bulb, one to stir the lentil casserole, and one to object to the use of the word
screw
. Her obnoxious little brother it was who’d told her that, when she was complaining about something sexist on the telly one evening. She’d got him for it with a dishcloth later.

Grey light knifed the top steps. The clean, unvarnished door hung several inches open; Maria watched it shift a little in the draught. She buttoned up her jacket, then undid it again. The savor of garlic was tantalising. Her first tap made almost no sound; she summoned her nerve and thumped on the wood.

“Hi, hang on, dinner’s burning,” came a yelp. A long pause. “I mean, you can come on in.”

Maria was standing in the shadowy hall, fingering half a peanut at the bottom of her jeans pocket, when the woman elbowed through a bead curtain. Stuffing wisps of hair into her black cap, she smiled, warm as toast. “I’m Ruth, the other one.” She brushed the beads out of the way and guided Maria in. Clearing a place on the tartan blanket that draped the sofa, she murmured, “Just hang on there while I have a serious conversation with the stir-fry. Oh, goddess, what a mess.”

Maria cleared her throat. “It’s not that bad,” she commented,
fitting herself on the sofa between a dictionary and a small box of blackberries.

“See, I meant to come home early and tidy up so as I could play the suave hostess, but I was queueing for the library photocopier and my watch stopped, so anyway, I’m just in.” Ruth turned back to the wok and gave it a shake that made the hob clang. “And this cursed onion keeps sticking to my nonstick surface.”

Maria watched her swerve between the stove and the table, carrying wine glasses and earthenware plates. Ruth’s narrow face, framed in brief dark curls, swung round the kitchen. From the sink she pulled a heap of wet branches, stood them in an empty milk bottle, and placed it grandly in the center of the table. Maria’s eyes waited for a drip from the rusty tip of a leaf to fall onto the wood.

Ruth subsided onto the sofa. Her eyes rested on her oversized black watch, then lifted; they were wary and chocolate-brown. “Typical, I bust a gut getting everything ready for ten past, and her ladyship isn’t home yet.”

“I was meaning to ask, is it spelt with a
Y
?”

“Is what?”

“Her name. As in
Yale lock
.”

“No no, it’s a
J
. Jael from the Book of Judges. In the Bible, you know? Sorry, I shouldn’t assume. Anyway, this Jael killed an enemy general by hammering a tent peg into his brain, if I remember rightly.”

“Oh.” After a pause, Maria tried raising her voice again. “And she’s at college too?”

Ruth let her breath out in a yawn before answering. “In a long-term sense, yes, but right now she’s probably moseying round town buying purple socks and drinking cappuccinos.” She leaned back into the cushions and rolled her head from side to side.

“She does that often?”

“Every few weeks. Only sometimes shoelaces rather than socks. It’s her hormones, you know.”

They were beginning to giggle when the front door banged open and feet clumped down the passage.

Ruth’s narrow face opened. “Jaelo,” she sang. “Come here and entertain our guest.”

A pause, and then a pale, freckled face broke through the beads. She was very tall, with very ostentatious ruddy hair. An unsettling laugh as she tossed her plastic bags onto the sofa, just missing the blackberries. “Hello there, new person, I’d forgotten all about you. It’s Maria, right?”

“Yeah, but with a hard
i
—Mar-iy-a,” she explained. “But it doesn’t really matter, everyone tends to pronounce it wrong anyway.” God, how seventeen.

“Did you deliberately pick it to rhyme with
pariah
?” asked Jael, her chair scraping the bare board floor.

“Eh, no, actually.” Go on, don’t cop out. “What does it mean?”

Struggling with a bootlace, Jael paused, one foot in the air. “D’you know, I couldn’t tell you. Some sort of deviant. It’s one of those words you throw around all your life until someone asks you what it means and you realise you’ve been talking through your rectum.”

Maria cleared her throat.

“Outcast,” murmured Ruth as she carried the wok to the table, her face averted from the steam. “Pariah is the lowest of the Indian castes.”

“And knowall is the second lowest.” Jael slid her hand into the crocodile oven glove and lunged at Ruth, who dipped out of the way.

The nearest seat was taken by a red-socked foot. “Sorry, Maria, my size tens need a throne of their own. Sit up there at the head of the table,” commanded Jael. “Only don’t lean back too far, or the chair might collapse.”

Maria slid onto the chair and accepted a smoking plateful. She tackled a mushroom.

“Don’t mind the woman,” said Ruth, unrolling her denim sleeves and passing the basket of garlic bread. “She broke it herself last summer; we had a few people in for dinner, and she got carried away in the middle of an impromptu guitar recital.”

“All my guitar recitals are impromptu,” said Jael in a depressed tone. She wrenched the corkscrew from the wine bottle gripped between her knees and bent toward Maria.

Automatically Maria covered the glass. “None for me, thanks.”

Jael trickled the wine through Maria’s fingers. Maria snatched her hand away. Red drips scattered on the table; one ran along a crack in the wood. “I said I—”

“I heard what you said.” The round-bellied glass was two thirds full. “But you can’t insult Ruth’s cooking by drinking water, especially not plague-ridden Dublin tap water.”

Maria sucked her fingers dry one by one as the conversation slid away from her. The wine tasted as rich as the overpriced bottles her Da kept in the back of the shop for the occasional blow-ins from Dublin on their way to a holiday cottage. They often chose her town square to stop in, to stretch their legs and fill up the boot of the car with ginger cake and firelighters. How many years before she would become a foreigner like them? She reached for her glass and took a noiseless sip. Three years of the uni, that’s if she had the luck to pass everything first time. Then some kind of a job for which her statistics classes would in no way have qualified her. Or maybe she could cling on and do an M.A. in art history. Go on the dole and help kids paint murals on crumbling city walls. On what day in what month of this queue of years would she find that she had become a rootless stranger, a speck in the urban sprawl? The accent was wavering
already; her “good night” to the bus driver this evening featured vowels she never knew she had.

There was something glinting on the window behind Ruth’s bobbing head; a hawk shape, a giant butterfly? Maria didn’t want to interrupt their argument, which seemed to be about the future (or lack of it) of the Irish language. She could look more closely at the window in daylight. If she was ever here in daylight. If she didn’t catch the train home tonight and start sorting potatoes in the shop on Monday morning. At least in a small town people knew how to pronounce your name.

By the time Maria had forked down her cooling dinner, Jael was boasting of her twenty years’ experience of fine wine.

“They put it in your baby bottle?” suggested Maria.

She turned, big-eyed. “You mean you didn’t warn her?”

Ruth was staring at the fridge with an air of abstraction. “I knew I’d forget to add the bean sprouts. Sorry, warn what?”

“That we’re old fogeys. That dreaded breed who lurk under the euphemism of Mature Students.” Jael lifted a curl away to point out invisible crows’ feet round her eyes. “Your charming hostess is twenty-four, and I, loath though I am to admit it, am twenty-nine.”

“You’re not.” Maria’s eyes shifted from one to the other. She took another sip of wine. “Neither of you look it. I don’t mean you look young, exactly, but not nearly thirty.”

Jael cackled, balancing her last mushroom on a forkful of broccoli. “I retain my youthful appearance by sucking the blood of virginal freshers by night.”

“You look much more aged than me,” Ruth reflected. “Doesn’t she, Maria?”

“I’m not taking sides, I’m just a visitor.”

Ruth reached past Jael for the wine. “If her hair wasn’t red, the grey would be much more obvious. And you should see the cellulite on her hips.”

Jael made a face of outrage and flicked a pea at Ruth; Ruth retreated to the sink to fill the kettle.

“So what about you?” Jael asked.

Maria jumped; she had been engrossed in making a swirl of wine with her fork on the table. “What about me?”

“Oh, the usual things,” said Jael, tugging her frayed, multicolored jumper over her head and tossing it just short of the sofa. “Place of origin, college subjects, vital statistics, bad habits, thoughts on the meaning of life.”

Maria considered, the fork tasting metallic in her mouth. “I don’t like listing myself,” she said, smiling slightly to cushion the words.

Was that respect in Jael’s salty blue eyes, or amusement?

Maria edged her glazed mug over to be filled from the cafetière.

“But then,” Jael went on, “how are we meant to know whether you have all the necessary attributes of a good flatmate?”

“Guess.”

Her mother would slap her hand for being rude, but then, her mother was more than a hundred miles away. And they never had cream in coffee at home. She took the jug from the outstretched hand of Ruth, whose eyes rested on her. “Tell us this much—how did you come to answer our ad? I’d have thought you’d have friends from home coming up to college with you.”

“Oh, I have. Well, school friends, not real friends. They’re mostly doing commerce or agriculture. They’re nice, there’s nothing wrong with them,” she added uncomfortably. “It’s just that I’ve had enough of pretending to be equally nice.”

Ruth nodded. “I used to have some friends I could only describe as nice. Life is too short.”

“Besides,” Maria went on, taking a scalding mouthful of coffee, “I can just imagine what sharing a flat with school
friends would be like. Borrowing stamps and comparing bra sizes, you know the way.”

Jael coughed so hard she had to put her cup down. “There was none of that in my day. Support girdles we wore, back then.”

“Oh and also,” said Maria, turning back to Ruth’s gaze, “why I noticed your ad was the bit about no bigots.”

Hunched over her mug, Jael sniggered, for no reason that Maria could see.

“That was my idea,” Ruth murmured. “It simplifies things.”

“It was eye-catching,” Maria assured her.

Another snort.

Had she said something stupid? Was she showing her youth again? She leapt into speech. “I was once stuck in a Gaeltacht in Mayo learning to speak Irish for three entire weeks with a pair of bitches who supported apartheid. I don’t think I could stick a flat unless everyone in it was basically liberal.”

“We Dubliners are very liberal altogether, you’ll find,” Jael commented, shovelling the coarse curls back from her forehead. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Guinness.”

“I’m the only Dub here,” commented Ruth.

“Ah, Kildare’s only a county away. Besides, I’ve been soaking up the metropolitan atmosphere for a fair while now; I’m as much a true Dub as a snobby Southsider like you anyway.” Jael ducked to avoid the tea towel. “Listen, why don’t we start showing this bogtrotter round our bijou residence?”

In the half-light of the corridor Maria glimpsed black-and-white posters of a cityscape. Something brushed her ear; she put up one hand and found an asparagus fern hanging overhead, its points sharp against her palm. They had no plants at home; her dad claimed they gave him hay fever.

“This room’s a bit bare, I’m afraid.” Ruth’s voice reverberated in a narrow doorway. As the light snapped on, Maria narrowed her eyes, taking in pale orange walls and flame-striped curtains. “If you really loathe the colour … I mean, we keep meaning to get around to repainting it.”

“It’s distinctive,” said Maria warily.

“Ruthie babe,” came a bellow. “I’m off to the off-license. Don’t suppose you’d have a tenner on you?”

She was gone, fumbling in her jeans pocket. Maria’s palms bounced on the bed tentatively. The nut-brown chest of drawers looked antique; when she tugged at the top drawer, the wrought iron handle came off in her hand, so she stuck it back in hastily and sat on the edge of the bed.

Their voices trickled down the passage. It occurred to her to cover her ears, but that seemed juvenile. She concentrated on the old calendar hanging from a nail beside her.
Ireland’s Underwater Kingdom
, it read; the picture for October was a crab that seemed to be signalling frantically at her with a strip of seaweed.

“So she’s gone at last.” That was Jael, husky.

Maria held her breath.

“Really?”

“Her flight was at eleven this morning. Unless she missed it, which is unlikely.”

“Well.” Ruth again, distant. “Hope she finds a job all right. There’s not much for her in Dublin.”