Thirst Trap, page 14
‘I…yeah, maybe?’
‘Think about it. Let me know.’ Ann speeds up on their way into the office. Maggie pulls her sleeve down quickly to cover her scrawled printer login.
* * *
—
She has not been running since before Christmas, and hasn’t heard from Cate. Against her better judgement, Maggie downloaded a dating app at the weekend, shuffling through a deck of profiles that included four of her ex-girlfriends, two dozen obvious catfishes, and a girl who used to bully her at school who is now seeking someone to join her and her boyfriend in a threesome. Every other bio lists piña coladas and getting caught in the rain as their main interests. Maggie receives several enthusiastic opening greetings of Hey gorgeous!! and a shock of heart-eye emojis, usually from twenty-six-year-old women who, when she replies with an inoffensive hello-well-what’s-the-craic, offer no further response. She speculates cynically that these are baby bicuriouses simply sweeping the apps for a fleeting fix of attention. She chats briefly with a few women who mainly have questions about where to procure the Kate Bush T-shirt she wears in her profile photo. (She is reminded that she has not seen this T-shirt in some time, and makes a note to ask Harley if she’s borrowed it.) She has one short-lived conversation with a burgeoning local influencer who seems to be trying to recruit her to a pyramid scheme. The only sustained exchange has been with someone called Tess, a hairdresser from Cork who drinks pale rosé and owns a cat, and who suggests meeting for a drink on Friday night. Maggie tentatively agrees, although she keeps surreptitiously checking her phone throughout the week, half nervous Cate will message to ask if she’s up for running on Saturday morning. By Thursday Maggie has worked herself into a twist of indignation and begun hoping that Cate will message, so that she can respond with an airy dismissal (sorry pal, got a date on Friday so will have to give running a miss!) and feel temporarily powerful. On Friday she decides that if Cate gets in touch she will simply not respond, and will later post a photo of drinks to her Instagram story as a (not so) subtly intended out-of-office.
Maggie meets Tess at the Sunflower at seven o’clock. Tess has what Maggie’s Aunt Aoibhlinn would call ‘a face for period dramas’, the sort of big dark eyes and wild brown hair that look as though she’s been recently roaming a moor in long skirts. A tote bag rests at Tess’s feet, the fabric slouching so that Maggie can see it contains a notebook with an iridescent cover and a bottle of whiskey. Tess explains that these are a late birthday present from a friend. Her birthday, she says, is two days after Christmas. ‘That’s the worst time to have a birthday,’ Maggie comments.
‘It’s the best time to have a birthday,’ Tess counters. ‘Everyone thinks “poor you, only getting one set of presents”, so they overcompensate. People always factor my birthday present into their Christmas shopping. If I’d been born in April, no one would give a thundering fuck. All I’d get from friends is a text promising me a round of drinks next time we were out together, and you’d just know by the time that came round they’d have forgotten about it.’
‘I’ll take the hint and get a round in then, will I?’
Maggie is quietly relieved that Tess’s birthday has been and gone recently. She had an unfortunate spell in her mid-twenties of going on two to four dates with women whose birthdays were in the offing; by the second or third encounter, Maggie had generally decided that she wasn’t feeling the romance, whereas her dates were beginning to imply that they would like her to attend their birthday celebrations and be introduced to their friends. Maggie has a blanket veto on meeting the friends of a potential love interest until after they are securely in a relationship; she has identified a personal tendency to become swept up in the intimacy of girl-groups and believe herself briefly in love as a result. When she was twenty-five she dated a woman for six months before realizing that she most enjoyed herself when they were on group nights out and enacting the performance of a relationship to the glee of this woman’s closest friends, feeling the most warmth and affirmation when a member of the group seized her hand, sloppy-drunk in the toilets, and said, ‘You two are so lovely together – you’re so good for her!’ This has, of course, never been an issue with Cate. The few times they have merged groups on nights out, Maggie has craved the feeling of one of Cate’s friends approaching her and saying, ‘You two always look so good together,’ on the dancefloor. It is a ludicrous thought, she knows. She and Cate have never been on a date, have never met in a pub one to one and done the awkward hug and cheek-kiss, perfunctory admin about who orders the first round, small talk about bus delays and weather and what they’ve done that day. Maggie has always thought herself fortunate that their meetings are so organic and without ceremony, and yet she wishes Cate wanted even just occasionally to meet her at an agreed time and place with the unspoken expectation of date formalities.
‘What are you going to use your notebook for?’ Maggie asks when they are settled, pints in hand, at the table.
‘I’m a writer,’ says Tess. ‘So, probably nothing good.’
‘Gas. What do you write?’
‘Historical fiction, mostly.’
‘That’s a very broad category.’
‘I’m a very broad church.’
Tess speaks eagerly but not self-importantly about her writing. She tells Maggie she’s had a story accepted by The Stinging Fly and that she dreams of writing a novel set in the 1870s, a long, dark, sprawling Dickensian work distended with detail. She says it would probably never see the light of day because hardly anyone has the attention span for that kind of thing; she includes herself in this, she says, admitting she largely avoids books with cramped font and more than two hundred pages and words like ‘epic’ and ‘richly detailed’ in the blurb. They talk about the books they had to read at university, the tragedy of buying all the module texts full price at Blackwell’s because their classmates had beaten them to the charity shops, the fact that they have both hung on to their doorstop copies of The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare because they were so expensive and so little used and you never knew if they might come in handy someday.
After two drinks, the expectation that they’re going to fuck arrives between them like a silent, voyeuristic third member of their conversation. They are teasing each other as though they are old friends, and Tess’s eyes are deep and alluring and locked on Maggie’s as if she means to swallow her.
At half past nine when Tess goes to the bar to buy another round, Maggie looks at her phone and wishes she hadn’t. Mags!!! You out?? Xx Cate texted an hour ago. Fifteen minutes ago, she followed this up: Five Points, mon down!! Xx This summons reminds Maggie of a time she went out with an English girl who interpreted mon down! as a misspelled man down! and asked concernedly whether everything was all right. Maggie explained it was a contraction of come on down, and the woman said it didn’t really work as a contraction if she had to explain it, and Maggie wrote stop trying to colonize me as a joke, and did not get a response.
Maggie tenses, waits for Tess to come back to the table, then excuses herself to use the bathroom. She sits on the chilly toilet seat and takes several deep breaths as she runs through her options. The sense of power she expected to wield at Cate getting in touch has not quite kicked in. The feeling is instead not dissimilar to resale tickets popping up for a sold-out festival with her favourite band headlining, with a very small window to make a decision that will empty her bank balance but potentially lead to a life-defining experience.
‘You all right?’ Tess asks as Maggie returns to the table.
‘I feel a bit tipsy actually,’ says Maggie, pinching the bridge of her nose. ‘I think – I’m really sorry, but I think I should maybe head on after this one.’
‘Okay, sound,’ Tess says, nodding understandingly.
‘I’m not normally a lightweight, honestly. I just feel a bit drunk and I’m meant to be going running in the morning, I don’t want to overdo it.’
‘Oh, nice! I do the Waterworks parkrun most Saturdays. Yeah, you definitely don’t want to be running hungover – I tried once and nearly boked on a swan.’
Maggie laughs, aching at how nice Tess is being. She almost wishes Tess would say something intensely strange or problematic, to relieve her guilt about leaving.
‘We should do this again, though?’ Tess continues. ‘I promise not to suggest we go running together. That’s only a date on Made in Chelsea.’
‘Yeah, we should do this again!’ agrees Maggie, and is surprised to find she means it.
* * *
—
Maggie touches up her makeup on the walk through town and manages to poke herself in the eye with a mascara wand. Her eye is still watering when she gets to the Five Points and she wonders whether this is why she can’t see Cate anywhere in the bar area. She texts, At the Points, where you at? while she queues for the bar.
Nearly twenty minutes later, Maggie has necked two nervous gin and tonics and is ordering her third. She has run out of cash and the pub does not have a card machine. There is a cashpoint across the road, the barman says. He has already poured her drink and gestures to indicate he will save it for her. Maggie shouts over the trad band to ask him to move it further back from the bar. ‘I DON’T WANT TO GET SPIKED!’ she explains helplessly. He looks nonplussed, but obliges. When she returns, three men out with an office party try to pressgang her into dancing when the band starts up ‘Wagon Wheel’, and Maggie wonders if Rohypnol in her gin mightn’t have been preferable after all. She flees to the bathrooms, where her phone finally lights up with Cate’s name. Top floor of Lavery’s!
Maggie takes more deep, calming breaths. Cate probably had no signal. She was busy helping a friend who’s steaming and throwing up. She was taken briefly hostage by a mafia of urban badgers. There is no point, she tells herself, in wasting time sulking about it; she is already out now.
She relocates, glancing behind her every few seconds, nervous that she will run into Tess and be caught out. She shrinks behind people until she has reached the front of the Lavery’s queue and paid to get inside. The top floor is packed, and Maggie shoulders through the crowd on the dancefloor as well as she can. A man a foot taller than her thinks it’s funny to rest his plastic pint glass on her head. Can’t find you, she finally texts Cate. Her message is read, then Cate is typing. So sorry Mags, just got a taxi back! Shattered. Next time! xx
* * *
—
In the toilets at Filthy’s half an hour later, Maggie admits hollowly to Harley and Róise, ‘I think I need to stop seeing her.’ The statement feels devoid of any particular gravitas. It’s like shouting a theatrical ‘... and STAY out!’ after someone who left weeks ago.
Róise’s eyebrow lifts slightly. ‘What did she do?’
‘Do we need to hunt her down?’ asks Harley.
‘Don’t worry. She’s not done anything worse than waste my time.’
‘That’s a good enough excuse. Bin her.’
‘I think I have to.’
‘Clean break,’ Róise advises curtly. ‘None of this “let’s stay friends” bullshit.’
She thinks about all the times Cate introduced her as my friend Maggie to make sure she knew her place. She makes a scoffing noise in her throat and says, ‘We were never really friends.’
Filthy’s closes promptly at one o’clock. They join the queue for the Gypsy Lounge upstairs with the rest of the people who aren’t ready to accept the night is over and want sanctuary for a further hour or two. The club is crammed full, its low ceiling making the room feel even more tightly packed. The airless atmosphere drenches Maggie in minutes, perspiration prickling in her control pants and a gloss forming on her face. When they are on the dancefloor, Harley clamps her in a clammy hug. ‘SERIOUSLY, THOUGH,’ she says, detaching from her and holding up a hand in case Maggie plans to interrupt what is clearly about to be a statement of considerable wisdom and importance. ‘FUCK THAT HOOR,’ she pronounces. ‘YOU ARE MAGNIFICENT. FUCK THAT HOOR. IS SOMEONE PLAYING THE FUCKING TRUMPET?’
The last query is bellowed into the air as Harley squints around for the source of the music. Some nameless house beat has been thumping since they arrived, but now it is overlaid with a piercing brass solo; there’s a musician next to the DJ booth playing over the track. A lacy black bra is looped over the bell of the instrument, hanging by its strap. It is unclear whether this is the addition of the trumpet-player or an ad hoc adornment by a fan in the crowd. Maggie does not know whether it’s the gin or the feeling of slow asphyxiation in the stifling club, but her head is light with a sensation of not-quite-thereness. She dances with her friends alongside the shriek of the trumpet, feeling the gentle press of the small hours and elbowing them aside.
broken irish
In the last week of January, with a grand total of three pounds and eighty-nine pence left in her overdraft, Harley sets about going through her small stack of Christmas cards from family members and counting out the money inside them. There isn’t as much as she’d like; it is a great injustice, she thinks, that her young cousins making their First Communion were gifted an amount that looked like the proceeds from a large-scale bank heist, while Harley, who has actual bills to pay, gets the same ten-pound Lush gift card from her Aunt Beccy every year. She makes a grand total of twenty pounds in cash and thirty in vouchers, which means she will have to postpone paying her already overdue lesson fees to her piano teacher for one more week, unless Mrs Erskine is willing to accept alternative currencies (namely a voucher for scented candles with season’s greetings from Harley’s grandmother). She also doesn’t have enough money for drugs until payday, although Harley considers that the embarrassment of Frankie’s sexual rejection may well be enough to jolt her into teetotalism.
Sometimes she thinks about their last encounter and burns with mortification, seeing him rigid and horrified at her advances, backing away as one might from a feral dog. Late at night, however, she remembers the subtle murmur of his tongue against hers, slow, unspoken syllables that she was sure meant he wanted her. She thinks of this in the small hours and grinds a vibrator furiously against herself as if sheer force can authenticate the memory. After a few days, she unscrews the cap to replace the battery, and the device comes apart in her hands, a tiny detached spring shooting across the room and burying itself where she cannot find it.
Lydia swore by rechargeable batteries, and Harley finds herself wondering, without really meaning to, whether there might be a functioning toy somewhere in Lydia’s old bedroom. Her parents came and cleared a lot of her things around a year ago, claiming some items for sentimental value and bagging up most of her clothes for the charity shop. (Maggie, a dedicated patron of Oxfam, is now prone to drunk existential pondering about how many dead women’s jackets she owns.) At the time, Lydia’s mother stood in the hall and said to them, ‘It doesn’t feel right, us going through her things. You girls do what you like with what’s left. It’s mostly, you know, hairdryers and lamps and things.’ She said it as though the room had been left in junk-shop condition, lampshades stacked high and an artillery drawer of ancient hairdryers. When Harley peered inside, however, it looked broadly unchanged: the wardrobes were empty and a mosaic of square patches haunted the walls where photos had once been, but apart from that it was still Lydia’s bedroom. It occurred to Harley some time later that in going through her clothes, Lydia’s parents had probably happened upon her substantial collection of lingerie, and she wondered if this had been the point at which they’d decided to abandon their review of her possessions. Harley imagined Lydia’s father glimpsing her favourite item of latex and at first mistaking it for a swimming cap, then, realization dawning, a scarlet flush creeping up the neck he barely had.
The house is empty and Harley tells herself she will simply have a look in the nightstand drawers, then leave. The bedroom door is always closed, and she has half convinced herself over the last year that Lydia is still in there, simply taking a quiet nap. Harley notices when she steps into the room that someone has put a dehumidifier on the windowsill, and plugged in a floral air freshener near the door; she assumes this is part of Maggie’s new crusade against the damp. Harley tries not to pay any heed to the pile of dog-eared books on the floor, novels by glamorous twentieth-century women who drifted bored around Paris drinking wine in the afternoon and hoping to feel things. There are half-empty perfume bottles shrouded in dust on the dressing table, hairpins and lipsticks and odd earrings sorted into Mason jars of different sizes. There is a pot full of buttons in baggies, because Lydia always kept the spare buttons that came stapled to new coats and skirts. Next to the bedside table is a basket full of barely used hairstyling products – hammerhead nozzles and travel-size curling tongs and a crimping device that was obtained for a Mary-Kate and Ashley–themed party and proved almost completely ineffective.
Harley finds a sleek-looking massager in the bottom drawer of the nightstand, along with some silver Kegel balls, a honeysuckle reed diffuser still in its packaging, and about half a gram of coke. Harley is shaking the powder to the bottom of the bag to inspect it when Róise says, ‘Harley?’ from the bedroom door.
Harley starts and stands up straight, silicon wand still in her other hand. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she exhales. ‘I thought everyone was out.’
Róise comes properly into the room. ‘Did you come in here looking for gear?’
‘No! I came in here looking for sex toys.’ Harley pauses. ‘Arguably worse.’
‘I’ve been wondering where that went,’ Róise says, and Harley follows the line of her gaze to the Cluedo board-game box visible under the wardrobe. Róise looks up and around the room as though admiring the fixtures of a gothic cathedral, and sits on the edge of the bed. ‘Explain this, then,’ she says, cocking her head towards the vibrator.
