Fathers Come First Read online

  We were supposed to meet for coffees the day after and scheme and chatter and talk about who wore what, and who was sleeping with whom, and go and have our hair done together. We were The Girls. The boyfriends would say to us, all indulgence and fat grins, ‘And where have you girls been?’, like you would ask children. We didn’t trust each other for one minute; all the time we were looking and watching with big smiles stuck over our faces.

  It was a spring and summer of a new life. It was modelling bras and a new soap powder and clothes at the boutique. Suzanna said I didn’t work hard enough at it. She meant I didn’t sleep with all the right people and go to all the right places. She said, ‘You’ll never get to the top unless you give your whole self to it.’

  The world opened up a bit and there were lots more people suddenly and things to be done and places to go to, this place or that, wherever the fancy took you. You were buying clothes and painting the flat and going to dinner parties and discotheques.

  The world opened up a bit but closed a bit as well. I saw this scientific picture. It was about white mice. Scientists were studying the white mice to see if it could tell them something about human beings. The mice lived in connecting cages. If a male mouse, say, saw some female mouse that he really fancied he could go running through this little connecting door and find her in the next one. The horrible part about it was he couldn’t get out again. He could never get back to his original cage—only on to another one, and another one. I hated that feeling—forfeiting one experience for another. So. The world opened a bit and closed a bit.

  At night when it was dark and you were the only one awake you’d think about your life, your young life, and about your looks. Mostly about your looks.

  We were the little dancers on the stage; puppets dressed in the shortest skirts and the deepest décolletés and the tightest jeans. We danced and danced to please and flatter and titivate and charm. The hand that pushed and pulled us might jerk us right off the stage or drop us, so we had to keep going. We danced till our limbs ached and our faces felt stiff and all the time we were wondering, Am I okay? Does he really fancy me? Is my bosom sexier than hers? Is my bottom too flat? Are my eyes nice? Have I passed the test again? Am I okay, okay, okay?

  Modelling had helped you in that way. The other girls would say, ‘Oh for God’s sake, no need to get so upset,’ and you learnt from them how to be a bit blasé and walk with your bosom stuck out and your hips moving. You knew you, for the moment, were part of the crowd. You knew you were good looking by their standards at least. You could walk into restaurants and bars and parties and keep your face blank and your head blank and know men were looking at you, and you thought, Fine, just fine.

  You didn’t know what you were yourself. You’d stopped thinking, worrying about that.

  —8—

  Colin rang the agency and left a message for me: ‘Old friend coming to see you. Tuesday at seven.’ I thought, I knew he’d come, but I hadn’t known at all. I went out and bought these very tight black trousers that I’d seen in Valerie’s place.

  The first thing he said when he came into the flat was, ‘So, the Professor’s daughter grows up, tunes in, and turns on.’ He was laughing, his eyes taking in the flat, the furniture, me. You could see he was thinking, Well she’s doing okay for herself anyway.

  I poured us a drink—a large whiskey for him, an orange juice for me. I put on a record; my hand was wobbling. Bach’s concerto fluted out into the room. Colin was sitting on an old chesterfield sofa that David and I had bought down at the quays. Chesterfield sofas were all the rage.

  We both said, ‘Well’ together and then laughed, little pools of silence eddying and sucking between floating conversation. I thought, Don’t panic, relax. I thought, You’re a woman in her flat, surrounded by her possessions. I thought, There’s you and there’s Colin and you’re having a conversation. That is all.

  Valerie used to tell us at school that when somebody really intimidates you, you should think of them sitting on the lav; she said once you think of somebody on the lav they won’t scare you any more. We used to work it on the nuns.

  Colin was saying, ‘Well I suppose you’re making pots of money now—since you’ve taken up the modelling business.’ I told him I didn’t do all modelling. I’d kept the job in the library part time (security?); I said, ‘The photographer I work with is a queer; well not really a queer but completely asexual.’ I hadn’t even thought of it before. Why did I say it? Colin said something about girls liking queers because they don’t feel threatened by them. Wrong again, this one would burn the eyes out of you with jealousy, envy.

  I asked him how the Fir Bolgs were. He said fine. His programmes were due to start in the autumn schedule. He’d had some trouble with the Civil War sections. Too many people still alive from that period, all with different points of view. I thought of a big garbage can with everyone picking and picking.

  He said, ‘You weren’t very nice to that girl the other night.’

  ‘Me? Not nice? Oh, how?’ (How can a Nice Girl not be nice?)

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  I said, ‘Well of course it does.’ We smiled. Almost conspirators.

  He said we should go on a pub crawl round the docks area. Where the workers drink. ‘I think you should see how the other half lives,’ he said, ‘for a wee change.’ That night I was not noticing sarcasm.

  The phone rang. It was David, wanting to come round. ‘I’m tired, going to have an early night,’ I said. ‘No, I’m going to bed almost immediately. No please don’t come David, I’d honestly prefer to be on my own—yes, honestly. Yes. I’ll give you a tinkle tomorrow at the office. Bye now, byeee.’

  Colin was laughing, his hand over his mouth. ‘So that’s how it’s done!—the Brush Off?’

  ‘I am tired,’ I said. Pompous. Damn David. Damn him blind.

  We walked down along the canal. Colin left his car parked outside the flat. It was cold. In winter you could feel the air cracking and stiffening with the cold. This summer air was calm, but still cold. The sky was very high and suspended, as if it might blow off.

  Colin said, ‘Your nose is pink,’ and then said, ‘Don’t worry, it makes you look less like you’ve just walked out of a magazine.’

  That was always the pattern with him from then on. Making remarks about your nose being red, or that colour looking poxy on you, and then he’d laugh and link your arm and say, ‘C’mon then Lizzie, I was only joking.’ You’d say, ‘Mmm’, and give a little laugh, but stay wondering inside.

  We went to this pub on the quays where a sailor had been knifed the night before. One of the Dockers told Colin. It was called ‘The Twilight’. It was bright like a dentist’s room. The walls were yellow with cardboard pictures hung around of ships balanced on huge seas. Bottles were piled like Skittles behind the barman’s head.

  They were all men except for two women with dyed hair in the snug. The women were drinking half pints and smoking cigarettes. One had her slippers on. The men wore donkey jackets. They put their hands right round their pints of Guinness and looked down into their glasses when they drank.

  Colin was greeted by the barman with a wink: ‘A pint I suppose, is it, Mr Dempsey.’ The barman knew him. ‘An’ what will it be for the lady?’ he said. Colin said ‘A half pint’ before I’d time to say anything. I said, ‘I don’t drink Guinness, actually.’ A few of the men near us turned round. They looked at me, then Colin. ‘Bejay, Colin, and how’s the head, uh?’ They were slapping hands and saying, ‘Jaysus, now, and how’s things?’ Colin said, ‘Grand.’ Then he put his arm around me and said, ‘And this is Elizabeth O’Sullivan.’ He paused. ‘A model,’ he said.

  One of the men said, ‘A what?’ and there was a big shout of laughter. They all nodded their heads and some of them shook hands with me. Colin said, ‘I thought I’d bring her down to see how the other half lives.’ The men laughed again. �
�Pearl amongst swine,’ said one of them, and grinned at me.

  We went to three more pubs. I was drinking Bacardi and Coke. Colin said, ‘Oh the real Dublin bourgey drink.’

  I said, ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘The drink for all the clean-living ladies out to live it up and find men for themselves.’

  In each pub Colin knew people. He was talking and laughing and buying drinks and introducing me, then linking arms, we’d be away to the next one. He said that in the first pub I looked as if I thought the men were going to bite me.

  In the third pub I asked where the ladies’ was. The barman said, ‘The wha’?’ ‘The Ladies’,’ I said, ‘you know—the loo.’

  This woman who was sitting in a corner in a crumpled tweed coat was called over. The barman had a whispered conversation with her. She said, ‘Come with me, love.’ We went up the back stairs of the pub and along a thin draughty corridor. She opened the fourth door on the left. ‘In there love,’ she said, ‘I’ll wait for ya.’

  At first I couldn’t see anything, just this empty room with a bed, bare boards, and the moonlight falling coldly in. Then the moonlight showed up this china chamber pot, right in the middle of the floor. I squatted over it. The pee wouldn’t come for ages. It was like school—having to pee for the infirmary nun into a jar and the pee not coming for ages. You’d been bursting to go a minute before.

  Colin said he was hungry. It was eleven o’clock. I was feeling this light, tight sensation all over. I started singing as we were walking back—a song from school—‘Shine out great sun and brin-i-i-ing the day-a-a-a-ay.’ It was a song for four parts and swept up and down like a swollen river, rising and falling. Colin was laughing and saying, ‘More, more’ and clapping his hands in the middle of the street. People looked at us and we chanted on.

  We came to this café. Colin said, ‘And now for some déjeuner.’ He ordered bacon and eggs, twice, bread and tea, twice. I thought ‘I’ll diet tomorrow.’ He said, ‘Now stop worrying about your figure. You’re beautiful.’ He kissed the back of my hand and then turned it over and looked at the palm and started reading it. ‘A long life … ever so long Missus … a fine, tall handsome stranger … but oh what’s this? Oh my, my.’ I said, ‘Stop. Please, stop.’

  The café was full of people. There was a jukebox and these two scrubbers were standing in front of it. ‘Scrubbers’ is slang for factory girls. They were chewing gum and wiggling, and slapping their mouths open and shut with the gum in time to the music.

  The floor of the café was covered in red tiles, all broken. Black and slimy where the cement floor showed through. There were cigarette burns on the plastic tops of the tables and all over the floor, like a disease.

  On the counter there was a Perspex display box. Inside were slices of apple tart and cream crackers and angel cakes laid out on white paper doilies as if they’d been quietly left to expire. On the wall there was a big blackboard. It said: liver sausages, beans and chips 4/6d, tonight’s speciality. Bread and tea were a shilling extra. Colin said he hadn’t seen the board changed in a year.

  You could eat either sitting up at the counter or down at a table. Men sat up at the counter and ogled the three women who ran the place. The biggest one was called Dolly. She had bright yellow hair, and the hairs stuck one by one out of this pink scalp, like a doll’s. Colin said, ‘She used to be a tart, but got a bit old for it.’ Dolly would just say, Oh neow when the men passed remarks at her. Colin said she was as strong as a horse. One night she’d chucked a man out into the street because he’d got a bit uppity.

  Then an oldish man came in, reeling, his clothes torn, a greasy hat on his head. He sat down near the two scrubbers and was dribbling and watching them. Suddenly two men came over, took him by one arm each and ran him out through the door. They came in again a few seconds later, fags in the corners of their mouths still, slapping their sleeves.

  I was getting up, saying, ‘Colin, we must help that poor old man, what are they doing to him?’ Colin pulled me down. ‘He was jacking himself off in front of the girls, you dope.’

  Outside the café Colin tossed a coin. ‘Heads my place, tails it’s yours.’ It was tails. I panicked. I thought of somebody in a play who said, ‘The first step to wisdom is to stop. Whatever it is, stop it. Then maybe you’ll find out.’

  I said, ‘Hang on a minute.’ I thought, This isn’t what I’d planned at all. I hadn’t planned anything.

  We walked back to my flat. Quieter. Colin lit a small fire when we got in. He poured us each a whiskey. He said, ‘Drink up.’ I went and quickly had a glass of milk in the kitchen. In the bathroom I sprayed on some deodorant, under the arms, between the legs. A drop of Gold Spot on the tongue. A touch of powder on the slightly shiny nose and chin—‘danger areas, girls,’ Miss Gilligan had said.

  On your body there were erogenous zones and danger areas and areas of temptation and your private parts, like a survey map. They were all mixed up together and their values kept changing as you grew up. Your private parts were your personal bank account. You kept them for bartering with husbands or lovers —depending on whether you were a Catholic or not.

  The nuns had said, ‘Oh, the body is the source of many temptations,’ but then when you grew up a bit people would say, ‘Oh, the body is the source of all pleasure.’ It was confusing. The pleasure and the temptations were tangled together.

  I thought, I don’t look too bad, considering.’

  The fire came up slowly. Colin had put in three fire lighters and then stacked the sticks like a wigwam round them and then briquettes round the sticks. I put on a record. I thought, Everything is just right: music, a fire, a little drink, Colin. I thought, Let it stay. Stay for ever.

  ‘You’ve grown up so much since I last met you,’ Colin said. ‘You look harder.’ I thought, He doesn’t like me. I knew it all along. Thinks I’m hard—am I hard? I don’t feel hard inside.

  He said, ‘I’ve been thinking about you quite a bit you know. Since we last met.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ring me up and find out if I was thinking of you?’ I said, brazen.

  ‘I thought you were still living at home.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I didn’t want to get involved and end up chastely kissing you goodnight on your father’s doorstep every evening, terrified you were half an hour late.’

  ‘How did that stop you seeing me?’

  ‘Well you were hot for it, too, weren’t you?’ He gestured. ‘Going out to cinemas and theatres every night isn’t my idea of a relationship.’

  You were hot for it, too. That had stopped me dead. You weren’t supposed to say things like that—hot for it, like a bitch on heat. You certainly weren’t supposed to say it like that. Spoiled, all spoiled.

  Colin was talking again. Gently now, calming. ‘Don’t be hurt, we can be really good together Liz, you know that.’ He was stroking my arm and his hand was touching my ear under my hair. ‘I’d like to make love to you, right here in front of the fire.’

  I got up. I thought, Oh, a little faint, Oh, inside myself. I said, ‘That’s a bit sudden, isn’t it?’ I thought, For God’s sake your voice is going to break any minute.

  Colin was patting the carpet beside him, tap, tap, and smiling. I was thinking, Fool, fool, you must make him work harder, you can’t just throw yourself at him, remember the rules, relax, smile, pretend it’s all in a day’s work, you’re only doing it for kicks—right?

  ‘That’s my girl,’ Colin was saying, ‘That’s my girl,’ and putting his drink down and pulling me down beside him and pushing me back and his mouth coming down and his eyes, covering, covering …

  Then you were on the floor and it was like coming out from under an anaesthetic, one minute thinking Oh come into me, fill me, touch me, and then wondering if your hair would get burnt in the fire, getting the smell of the damn paraffin from the fire lighters; Colin�
�s hands working up and down—he was like wire, his body like live wire between you, and you thought of all the women all over the world opening their legs like double doors for their men, opening and opening, and then you were wanting every hole in your body stopped up: your eyes, your mouth, your ears, your nose, and the gap between your thighs widening like a crack in an earth tremor, and you wanting deep, deep right inside and outside to let the whole world rattle the doors and rant and rave.

  —9—

  Colin left a note pinned to the bedsheet; it said he’d ring me during the day and tell me when he finished work and we’d go out for dinner together that evening. It said ‘You were fantastic.’ There was a drawing of a little man with a smiling face and a huge penis. Colin was always drawing things.

  I went out and bought flowers. It was a public holiday. I sat on the bridge by the canal. I smiled at an old man whose coat was fastened with a pin-—I thought, Oh the poor old people, how awful it must be to be old. But it made it even better to be young.

  Oh bodies, I thought, who would have thought bodies could be like this? People noticed and looked. It’s always like that—when you are dancing inside they’ll look and appreciate and when you’ve been skulking and cringing along they almost bark at you as you pass by. Or is that all just in your head?

  I had lunch with Valerie and told her I’d fallen in love. She said, ‘Good luck, but be careful.’ I laughed in her face with my strong, hot love.

  At five o’clock Colin rang. His voice so different over the telephone. He said would I mind if he came round for a bath, my flat was nearer to town. The flowers went into the bathroom and bath oil and clean towels and I was shy, washing him and looking at his hair curling, wet on his neck and then we were both in the bath and throwing water and shouting and before we went out the woman below came up and said, ‘I’d like ye to know me ceiling is wringing wet’ and gave a poisonous look and Colin said, ‘Well how about wringing it dry Missus?’ and we leant against the door bursting laughing.

  We went out to dinner. The restaurant had a special table for us with a candle and a little bowl of heather in the middle and the waiters knew Colin and one of them had a face like an owl and dry hands. He said he’d been a waiter since he was thirteen.