"2 [females] 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. lowrent" 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 oil cans, 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 "Manythanks" 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 Material Girl.
"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 makeit 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 wrappinpaypafifatwenty.
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 highstool. As the time ticked away Maria began to feel so uncomfortable that she finally bought Her magazine and a bag of crisps.
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 curlaway 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?"
Copyright © 1994 by Emma Donoghue