Time was against us. They would be clearing the bar in the Irish Centre. But we stayed perfectly still, like children bewitched in a fairytale. There were raised voices below, but the street seemed distant. I heard the condom slip to the floor. Some men often made a joke while others were quiet and tender. Luke did nothing until I felt his cold hands toying with my shoulders.
‘Tell me about wall tiles,’ I said.
‘They’re smooth.’ His hands moved to my neck. ‘You take your time and lay them right until even the joins are smooth. That is unless you make a mistake and they crack.’
There was no force in his hands and nothing in his voice to suggest menace, but I was suddenly scared and he knew it. The room was cheap and my unease made me feel cheap too. Luke must have been crazy to take this risk. How crazy was he and what danger had I placed myself in? I sensed him staring at my neck.
‘Shouldn’t you head back to your flabby wife?’ I wanted to break the spell and control my fear with the insult, but Luke’s voice maintained its methodical calm.
‘It so happens I love her.’
‘Is that meant to be a joke?’
‘No. But it doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy fucking other girls either.’ A hint of apology entered his tone. ‘You’re not just some girl. I don’t do this often. Seven times in twenty two years. That’s faithful enough as marriages go.’
‘That’s my age,’ I said. ‘Twenty two. You must like us young.’
‘I’ve only had one girl younger than you.’
‘Flirting with innocence, were you?’
‘She was the most deadly of the lot.’
I didn’t want a litany. I felt cold and started shivering. Tomorrow I’d wake hungover, trying to convince myself this had never happened. But I’d know that physically it had felt truly good.
‘It didn’t work, you know,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Facing away from me. For all your attempts to hide it, I could still tell both times you came.’
I felt vulnerable and wanted to be out of that room. His fingers retreated from my neck to glide slowly along my backbone. When he lifted them away my inability to track their movements made them more menacing. Luke wasn’t the first Irishman to touch me. I had fooled myself into thinking I could banish such memories.
‘I suppose you’re going to say you love me next,’ I said.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I haven’t room to love anyone else. But I loved fucking you.’ Somehow the inflection he invested in the word stripped it of vulgarity. ‘Next Sunday night I can make sure we get this same room. You enjoyed it here, don’t say you didn’t. Think about it, eh?’
‘So much for champagne and flowers,’ I mocked.
‘I haven’t time for that stuff any more and, be honest, you don’t want it either. There’s a fight brewing out there. I’ve got to get down. Next Sunday night, around half past nine.’
‘Bring a copy of Penthouse and a hanky,’ I said. ‘I’d hate to have you going home frustrated.’
‘Half nine,’ Luke repeated. ‘Ten at the latest. I warn you, I won’t wait all night.’
I stood up. My knickers lay a few feet away. I didn’t want to put them on with him watching. But when I bent to pick them up he covered them with his foot.
‘Pirate’s loot,’ he said. ‘Be a good girl and you’ll get them back next week.’
I didn’t argue or tell him what to do with those panties alone by himself here next Sunday and every Sunday until he went blind. I held my tongue, sobering up rapidly. I had broken every rule I ever taught myself for protection against this self-destructive urge. I simply wanted to get safely out that door. Only when I had it open did I glance back. Luke was slumped on that chair with his trousers still bunched around his ankles. Something about him, in the light from the hallway, suggested the sight which must greet night porters who enter hotel rooms to find that a murder has occurred. Then he turned his head.
‘I couldn’t stop looking at you,’ he said, as if amazed to find himself there. ‘You don’t know how desperately I want you to come.’
I ran downstairs, past reception and only stopped when I found myself among the crowds from the Irish Centre. Luke was right, an argument was developing among his family. If his wife saw me leave the hotel she gave no sign, but one or two heads turned when I passed. There was no sign of Garth. The black haired girl stared at me coldly and almost defiantly now. I felt naked as if she had understood Luke’s game all along. She could even be his daughter. I pushed my way through the crowd, sensing her eyes still watching me. I felt a chill beneath my skirt as I ran, watching for danger from the shadows. I didn’t care now what cranks might be on the train. I was just thankful to have got safely away and to know that I would never see Luke again.
IT IS JUST BEFORE my sixth birthday. I remember this because my thoughts are about presents as I rush from school among a flock of children. Now, walking with my mother, I’m anxious to get home to where Gran will have lunch ready and ensure that I finish two glasses of milk before being allowed to watch the children’s programmes.
But my mother takes a meandering route as if prolonging our journey. She says nothing to draw me into her brooding world, even when I ask for a story. We reach a footbridge across railway tracks and climb up to look across at wintry back gardens where fluorescent lights shine in kitchens. I tug at her hand, but she waits there. Then the train comes, all noise and slipstream and unwashed roofs of carriages. I’m frightened. I know the train cannot hurt us, thundering beneath our feet. It’s my mother I am scared of or scared for. It’s the way she watches the train. She wants to leave. That much I understand. She wants to leave Harrow and Gran and Grandad Pete and maybe she wants to leave me.
Or worse, perhaps she wants to bring me with her on those speeding carriages, away from my dolls and Grandad Pete’s piggyback to bed, from my shelf of stories and the cherry-blossom petals against my window in springtime. There would only be my mother and I travelling alone, past towns without names, skirting forbidding forests where bears roam. I start crying and finally she looks down. She isn’t like mothers in stories or those my classmates have. It’s Gran I run to when I hurt my knee. Yet even Gran tells me to call her mother. ‘I want to go home,’ I say, ‘I want my Gran.’ I pull at her hand, knowing that if I wait for another train I’ll never see her again.
I woke sweating from that dream, the morning after meeting Luke. After sixteen years, my stomach was queasy and I instinctively checked my knickers, remembering how Gran would change the wet sheets while my mother comforted me and I pretended not to remember what my dream was about. How long was it since I had last dreamt of that? Certainly not since my mother’s death, even among the myriad dreams I’d had about her after moving into the flat. Dreams where her face hovered among the blouses in my wardrobe, or she stared up from the water in the sink when I bent to wash my hair. In each dream her eyes were the same as during the bedside vigils before she died, disappointed