Solace (5 page)

‘Are you coming?’

‘Who, me?’

‘She said there was a barbecue from eight. But if I see another hot dog today I’ll vomit blood. Ten or eleven will be time enough to get out there.’

‘I wasn’t even talking to her,’ Mark said.

‘Well, she said to tell you to come,’ said Mossy, shrugging.

‘She said to say that to me?’

‘I’m texting Lockser,’ Nagle said, reaching for his phone. ‘That blonde bird would be right up his alley. Though he’ll have to go through me first.’

‘Don’t text him then, you bollocks,’ Mossy said, and nodded over to Mark. ‘So we’ll head out there later?’

‘Yeah, sure,’ Mark said, as a fist of anticipation opened, warm and opiate, within his chest. ‘Sure we’re in no rush.’

*

At Booterstown DART station, the sea was hidden behind a high wall, and Nagle complained loudly and fervently about the smell of the marsh. Two long-necked birds were moving
through the rushes, making their way to the glittering pool of water banked, on the other side, by a stretch of mud.

‘It’s a fucking outrage,’ Nagle was saying. ‘You could pay two or three mil, easily, to live out here, and you open your door in the morning to the smell of
shite.’

‘Snipe,’ Mossy said.

Nagle turned his head quickly as though he had been insulted, then seemed to think better of it and continued along the walkway over the marsh.

‘There’s an offy just here at the bottom of the hill,’ Mossy called out to him, and this time Nagle stopped in his tracks and gave Mossy a disbelieving stare.

‘We’re expected to bring our own fucking booze to this gaff?’ he protested. ‘What are we – students?’ He looked to Mark. ‘No offence, Casey.’

Mark shrugged and moved ahead, leaving Mossy to listen to Nagle. He was carrying, now, none of the boozy confidence with which he’d made his way from the pub to the station in Pearse
Street, none of the bluster with which he’d strode around the platform, laughing with Mossy and even with Nagle, as the heat of the day hovered still in the red brick of the old building, as
blue sky glinted through the great cross-hatched barn of a roof. He had felt, then, not just glad about the prospect of the party, but smug, almost; entitled, almost. Not to the girl, but to the
night, to the pleasure of it, to a house where there would be a girl he wanted to get talking to, and where he’d have the whole night to do it. That was what parties were for; that was why
parties, when it came to meeting someone, were the only way to go. In a pub, you’d only ever have started talking to someone like her before the barman was stacking chairs and snatching
glasses and calling time, and in a club it was always too loud, too crammed, too pointless, too dark – and he knew it aged him, seeing it this way, but he didn’t care. He wanted to talk
to her. And only at a party could you get a chance to talk to someone like her properly; at a party, you felt halfway to being comfortable with someone like her, even when you’d only just set
eyes on them, even when you’d only glimpsed the side of their face or the curve of their ass. It was something to do with already being in a house, already surrounded by living-room
furniture, by CDs all over the carpet, by books messed up on the shelves.

But now, crossing the Rock Road to the off-licence, he felt uneasy, felt conscious of all the pints, of how he must look, how he must smell. What if there were only eight or ten people at this
party, all close friends, all solicitors or whatever they were, and he was about to clatter into the middle of them, with Mossy and Nagle, who were surely even more of a mess than he was? He
cringed at the thought of it, and yet he kept going, hearing, as the door of the off-licence opened, the tinkling of some little bell – hearing, behind him, Mossy shouting at Nagle to quit
something, to
fucking quit
! – and going on, and keeping going, because it was better than going back to his unfinished chapter and his hung-over tomorrow and the phone calls that were
sure to come; it was better than all of that, it was different from all of that, and so he went on.

*

The place was a terraced cottage tucked well away from any chance at a sea view, a window on each side of a squat brown door. Nagle snorted at the sight of it.

‘Six fifty, minimum, and it’s a fucking gardener’s hut,’ he said.

‘High standards for someone who just took a piss in full view of the traffic,’ Mossy said. He was looking sloppy, smiling obscurely, his gaze fixing on nothing in particular, his bag
of cans slung low by his side. He leaned a moment too long on the doorbell and frowned in irritation when Mark told him to leave off. Music sounded from the windows, and the busy squall of voices.
They seemed all to be women’s voices.

‘Fuckin’ Beyoncé,’ Nagle said, just as the door was opened by a guy their own age in a tight striped T-shirt and cargo shorts. He greeted them brightly and immediately
disappeared back into a room, leaving them to make their own way.

Inside, the place was bigger than it had seemed, and it was thronged. There were people everywhere: standing in the middle of the floor, sitting on sofas and bean-bags pushed back against the
wall, leaning on low bookcases and coffee-tables and on the high silver speakers from which some female singer – maybe Beyoncé, probably Beyoncé – blared. In clusters,
among the standing groups, some women were dancing. Everyone, dancing or not, seemed to be smiling, and to be confident and happy and well dressed, and to be absorbing and entertaining and
exhilarating each other in conversation. The mood was not just lively, it was positively phosphorescent, delirious, delighted in the extreme: which meant that the explanation had to be somewhere
nearby. And there it was, glimpsed as someone opened a door at the back of the room and quickly closed it again. A girl bent over a dresser. A couple of others waiting their turn. And the guy who
had just come out of the room standing on the threshold of the dance-floor with a beatific smile on his lips, with a quick little tap and tug at his nostrils.

‘Oh, nice one!’ Mark heard Nagle roar.

*

Nobody was dancing in the kitchen, but a DJ was twitching and hovering over a pair of decks. A girl was darting around with a Polaroid camera, detonating the boxy little flash
in people’s faces so that their smiles rippled, for an instant, in recoil. Mark pushed through. On a radiator by the small window, a red-haired guy was slumped, sweat stains darkening his
shirt, his tie wrapped several times around one wrist; he looked defeated and belligerent all at once, and the glare with which he returned Mark’s gaze slipped off his face like oil.

‘You made it!’

Mark turned. It was the blonde. The blonde friend, that was, Mark corrected himself – wanting, even in his internal commentary, to distance himself as far as possible from Nagle. She was
grinning; he didn’t think she was off her head, but he couldn’t be sure. He smiled at her. She clapped a hand on each shoulder and kissed him, hard, on the cheek. Definitely off her
head. She laughed. ‘You bring your friends?’

‘Yeah.’ Mark waved back in the direction of the other room, slapping someone on the side of the head as he did so. He apologized. They seemed not even to have noticed.

The blonde – the blonde friend – looked down to see what he was carrying. ‘Cans?’ She laughed as though he’d turned up with a vault of Buckfast.

‘I was going to bring wine,’ he said, and it was true, he had stood for several minutes in front of the small shelf of wine at the off-licence, but had given up; for as little as he
knew about wine, he had reckoned that a bottle should cost more than a tenner to be any good, and, with the dinner party paranoia still ringing in his head, he had not wanted to show up on the
doorstep offering a bottle of plonk. So Heineken it was. A lot of Heineken, which he was tired of carrying by now.

‘Oh, there’s loads of wine . . .’ the blonde girl was saying. ‘Do you want a glass?’ And she turned and was gone. To the table, or the garden, or the extensive wine
cellar, he didn’t know. He elbowed his way through to the fridge. It was packed; there was certainly no room for six-packs. Bottles, and jars, and packets, and tubs, and as much fruit,
nearly, as you’d see in one of the Moore Street women’s prams, and lumps of cheese and schlongs of salami and the gold-foil knobs that meant champagne. He closed it and shoved the cans,
instead, into one of the kitchen presses, between a food-processor and a little tower of painted clay bowls. Morocco. Or maybe just Spiddal. More money than sense, anyway. He snapped a can off the
six-pack and opened it. When he turned, she was standing in front of him, grinning. Off her head? No time to think about that now. It was her. Joanne.

‘Your stash?’

Blondie must have sent her. She was holding a bottle of wine and an empty glass, which she offered to him now. He took it. This left him with an open Heineken in one hand and a wine glass in the
other.

She laughed. She was even better than he remembered. Green eyes, yes, and you didn’t see those too often, and her fringe dipping low, and her skin freckled, maybe from the sun that day,
and her shoulders were brown and bare. ‘Glad you could make it,’ she said. That gap between her teeth when she smiled.

He put the wine glass on the counter behind him. ‘Just about,’ he said, which made no sense, he knew, as a reply, nor was it true, but it seemed like the right thing to say, seemed
to sound as though there had been other options, as though he had gone to great lengths to get there, so she should be grateful as well as glad, and should show that gratitude by, say, talking to
nobody but him all night, and that just for starters.

She nodded. ‘So, did your friends come, too? Mossy and . . .’

‘Nagle. Eh, Niall. Yeah, Niall’s not really our . . .’ He stopped. There was no point in getting into what Nagle was and was not.

‘Mossy’s a cool guy, though.’

Mark made a noise of agreement, feeling the return of his earlier anxiety. Had he even, really, been invited to this party? Mossy had said so, and he hadn’t said anything to suggest that
he was interested in this girl, but then, he hardly ever did, and even so, that didn’t mean she wasn’t interested in Mossy, that she wasn’t just killing time, now, talking to Mark
so that she’d look busy, or popular, or whatever it was that women wanted to look when the guy they fancied walked into the room. Which Mossy would probably do any minute now. Mark willed him
to stay away. To go into the coke room and snort himself into oblivion. To meet some other girl out there, fall on to a couch with her, take her home to the flat and screw her on their couch, on
Mark’s bed – on Mark’s table of notes and orderly printouts, if necessary.

‘Anyway.’ She leaned towards him, suddenly, and he was startled – and then, all in the space of an instant, delighted, disbelieving, flattered and aroused – but she was
just reaching past him to pick up the wine glass he’d put down. She filled it – really filled it – with red wine. He took a swig from his can. As he did so, she leaned in and
around him again, this time with the wine bottle, and this time she looked right into his eyes, in a way that meant something – he didn’t know what, exactly, but something, and possibly
something good.

‘Anyway,’ she said again. ‘So how do you know Mossy?’

Fuck Mossy, he wanted to say. ‘I live with him,’ he said instead.

‘Loads of free DVDs, so.’

‘Yeah,’ Mark said. ‘Though most of the stuff Mossy brings home isn’t really to my taste.’

‘Really?’ She raised her eyebrows.

‘Animals, you know,’ he said. ‘I mean, it’s cruel. It’s just wrong.’

She squinted at him for a moment, then caught his meaning; she laughed, shaking her head at him, her tongue touching her lips, in a way that made him decide. He was not going to leave this place
without this girl.

‘So you’re . . .’ He wasn’t sure what he was going to say. What did he want to say to her? What did he want to know about her? Anything? Did they really have to go
through the checklist of introductory prattle, talking about their jobs, talking about the neighbourhoods they lived in, talking about the last gig they’d been to – or the last gig
they’d pretend to have been to for the sake of making the right kind of impression? He didn’t want to have to launch into a chin-stroking commentary on whatever band he’d last
seen at Whelan’s, and he definitely didn’t want to find himself trying to explain a PhD on Maria Edgeworth and the Realist Novel. It wasn’t that he just wanted to push her up
against the fridge and kiss her; he did want to talk to her, but not about anything to do with the real world, not about anything that was going to make him have to try too hard, or work too hard,
or think too hard.

‘So this is your friend’s house?’ he said.

‘You don’t recognize me,’ she said, at exactly the same moment.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Do you?’

He wondered how drunk she was, or how much she’d put up her nose.

‘I saw you back in the pub,’ he said uncertainly. ‘I saw you leaving.’

‘Not from the pub.’ She shook her head, ‘Obviously you recognize me from the pub. We’re talking, aren’t we?’

Mark exhaled noisily. ‘I mean, yeah?’ he said, and he cringed at how moronic it sounded. He was now very unclear about what was happening. He wanted to turn around and get himself
another beer, but she was looking at him expectantly.

‘You don’t,’ she said. ‘You haven’t a clue who I am.’

Jesus, was she famous or something? Mark stared. Maybe she did look familiar. What, was she a newsreader, or an actress – was she in
Fair City
or something? He never watched it.
Well, that wasn’t true: it was just on, sometimes, and he found himself following it, but no, she didn’t look familiar, and he told her so. Anyway, it was a bit fucking arrogant of her
to expect to be recognized. He was having second thoughts. Maybe he didn’t want to push her up against the fridge after all. Except maybe to get away from her.

‘But I know you,’ she said, and now he felt panic judder into his perspective. Was she someone he had already slept with? And forgotten? There had been one-offs. He had been
plastered. But he didn’t think she was one of those. He would have remembered her. He looked at her more closely. He shook his head. She wasn’t anyone she knew.