Abroad (10 page)

“I’ve learned to be this way, you see. The thing is, I play the men before they play me
.
”

I smiled. “So you’re some sort of X-treme courtesan, then?”

“No! Sadly for my wallet. I’d never pull it off. Besides, the girls from Belarus have that whole Grifonia whore angle rather cornered.”

“So that’s what all the sex you’re having is about? Playing?”

“
All
? Well, yes, silly. The more sex the less I care about it. It’s scientific, really.”

“I see.”

“You don’t, though, do you? I wish you did
.
The way to avoid it is to get out in front of it.”

“Avoid what?”

“It. The pile of dust.”

“So you’ve been a pile.”

Jenny smiled. Her eye makeup was running, and in the afternoon light she looked almost ghoulish.

“Oh, a huge pile.”

“And what’s the solution? Take a lover?”

“Take
ten
lovers. That’s how it’s done.”

I shrugged without conviction.

“It’s just … your time here’s been so
chaste.
I just wonder…” She leaned forward. “Are you holding back? I mean, is something wrong?”

“Wrong?”

“Like a health thing? Or something?”

“What?”

“It’s just that you told us about your past, Taz. That first night during the game, remember? So I just thought…”

“Are you joking? No. Nothing’s wrong.”

Jenny put her tea and saucer on the little plastic table beside her, then leaned forward, lowering her throaty voice. “There was this girl from Manchester back at Nottingham, Susan Dunhill? And she did that with a guy, and then she spent the rest of the semester in the infirmary with—”

“Zanopane,” I said.

“What?” Her voice betrayed an almost inaudible note of alarm.

“I’m just remembering,” I said. “Susan Dunhill’s roommate—she died from taking that stuff. Zanopane. Someone mentioned it—the drug—and I was trying to remember what it was.”

Jenny rose, taking her teacup and cigarette to the counter.

“Her name was Eleanor Peterfield,” she said, still standing. “Did you know her?”

“Not at all. I just remember the story. Everyone was so … surprised. I heard she wasn’t even the type.”

“She wasn’t.”

“So you knew her? Eleanor Peterfield?”

“From around. It was all very sad.” Jenny took a long, thoughtful drag and sat down again and looked at me. “Listen, Taz. I want to tell you something. Something I’ve never told anyone.”

“About Eleanor?”

“What? No, no. Don’t be dull. About what we were talking about before. Men.”

“Right. Men.”

She paused, crushing her cigarette. “My first year at Nottingham, I was completely plowed over by this upperclassman named Marshall Chapman. Know him?”

“No.”

“Complete wanker. Big rubgy player, rich as hell. No?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t—”

“Anyway, I followed him all over the place. A bloody puppy, I was. We were shagging for a few weeks, and one night he gets me stupid drunk. Next thing I know I’m upstairs at some party at a club in a room full of his arsehole teammates. A stranger has my knickers and my legs are over my head.”

“Oh God, Jenny.”

“Chapman
gave
me to them.” She shook her head. “It’s the worst thing that can happen to a girl. And you know? It was my fault.”

“I’d say not.”

“It was. Because I didn’t stay in front of it. You see? I let myself get … I don’t know. Weighed down.”

She looked away. A tear rolled down her powdered cheek.

“Oh, Jenny. Oh, God. I can’t believe you really think that. Of course it’s not your fault. Look, they have support groups for this. I’ll go with you.”

“Fuck your support groups.” Jenny patted her face delicately with the back of her hand. “I’m a realist. You get into a fix like that, it’s because you’re not watching out. You’re not in
front
of it.”

I put my fingers to my temples. “I don’t think—”

“Oh, we all know you’re not the type of girl to get herself into a situation like that. I can see that. But just don’t let anyone fuck you over. Literally or otherwise. Stay in front of it. That’s the key. Do you see?”

I was unable to move.
Jenny Cole had cried.
I waited for the sky to go black, for day to turn into night. Yet when I glanced over, she was already toggling through her phone, smiling slightly at a message.

“And you only have this once, you know,” she continued.

“What once?”

“
This.
We get to be this happy
now
, don’t you see? Before the awful things happen.”

“Yes.”

“And if they don’t happen, well, that’s almost worse. Then we’ll just be
old.
Skulking about, eating too much, complaining about … I don’t know. Babies? Work? I mean, look at the
Eat, Pray, Love
ladies. You’ve seen them, right?”

I knew exactly what she was talking about. They were all over. Forty and up, solo, filmy dresses, clutching guidebooks, nursing glasses of wine alone in public cafés waiting for their lothario to materialize.

“It’s pathetic. Life is going to get so horrible someday. For all of us. But it doesn’t have to be dreary
now.
We’re in a magical place, don’t you see? I want you to enjoy it. Because someday you may very well be miserable, or sick, or chained to a desk and living with a cat.”

She stood up abruptly and smiled. “All right then. Enough of this talk—it’s giving me a bloody headache. Let’s have a look at your closet. I’m so sick of everything … Maybe if you wear the white top,
I’ll
wear the peasant.”

She left soon after with a bag full of my clothes, but her words lingered, leaving me dizzy.

I went to my room and pulled out the white top. But it wasn’t just white. You see, without the details, every story is a lie. The top was, in fact, a sweater of some soft synthetic material. It was cream, and tight, showing the outline of my breasts. There were little ridges in the fabric at the edges. It was freshly washed and smelled of a little bit of cinnamon lotion I knew boys liked.

I pulled it on and looked at myself.

We get to be this happy now.

Was it a promise, I wondered? Or a threat?

8

The day before I left, my father and I had lunch in Dublin at Botecelli, his favorite Italian restaurant. It wasn’t very pleasant at first—he was pissed, and with good reason: I was an hour late. He’d been phoning me but I’d ignored his calls; my plane for Rome was leaving at seven the next morning, so I had loads to do. I mean, really, I thought—who makes their daughter go to lunch the day before she’s leaving for Italy? I’d offered other days, but he’d had too many patients, which was really
always
his line, during the whole of my life.

Of all of us, I was the most tolerant of my father. My sister, Fiona, barely spoke to him, and my mother mourned. But me, I cashed in on a dinner at least once a month. It had been fifteen years since he left us and moved to the city. He was a bastard, we all agreed. But for whatever reason, I always possessed, at least in some measure, the ability to forgive.

Not that in my way I didn’t punish him regularly for leaving us. That afternoon, for instance: my supposed reason for not rushing to lunch was … a shopping crisis. What if they didn’t have Zara in Italy? What if there was no Topshop? So I was in the shoe department, unable to decide which boots to buy, brown suede or black, brown suede or black—a monumental decision at the time. Fiona said I was gone in the head to buy boots in Dublin at all. I was going to
Italy
, for fuck’s sake.

And so, slightly aware of my tardiness yet not particularly sorry, I breezed into the restaurant with my shopping bags.

“Taz!” my father bellowed, looking up from his laptop. “An
hour
? Jesus fucking
Christ
!”

“Sorry, Da,” I said, using the name I called him as a baby for good measure. “I just—”

“—have no respect for fucking time?”

He wasn’t wrong. All my life I ran on my own schedule. “Taz Time,” my friends always called it. It wasn’t that I didn’t
respect
time; it’s that I didn’t understand it, really. I’d linger with friends for hours on the street. Minutes would go by as I stared at something pretty in a shop window. When it came to schedules and me, it was like trying to trap air.

“I got the brown ones,” I said, giving him my biggest, most dazzling smile.

“Brown?”

I opened the box and put the boots on the table. My beautiful, beautiful new brown suede boots.

“Tabitha, I’ve got people waiting.”

“Who? Someone who needs a nose job?”

“You know perfectly well—”

“Deviated septums. Yes.”

My father shook a finger at me, simultaneously signaling the waitress.

“It’s the deviated septums, and ear canal work, and throat cancer surgeries, that’re going toward your Italian rent, if you must know.”

“Perhaps I should thank these patients personally. Since you see them so much more than us.”

“Can we just have a nice lunch?”

“All right,” I said. “All right.”

We ordered pasta, wine, and a chocolate torte. He asked idly after my mother’s health.

“Not great,” I said. “Still depressed.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, fingering the tablecloth. “She taking her meds on time?”

I bristled. What he really cared about was her ability to keep taking care of us. Because what if she stopped? What then?

“Of course.”

“Good.” He took a sip of wine. “Boots. What the hell. You know it’s crazy to—”

“
Buy shoes before going to Italy.
I know. Fiona already said the same thing.” They were identical, those two, the way they thought. And yet they scratched at each other, like angry cats.

“I bet she did. She never did any Enteria, I can tell you.”

I shrugged.

“You living with friends?”

“I’d like to find a flat with Italians.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Finally breaking out on your own, eh?”

“I guess, yeah.”

“You’ve been in your sister’s shadow for too long, that’s for bloody sure.”

“That’s not what it’s like,” I said, secretly pleased, because in truth that was exactly what it was like.

Our food came, platters of bland pasta.

“How’re the lads?”

“Good, good.”

“The studies?”

“Good.”

“Anything that’s not?”

“Other than my mum barely getting out of bed? And Fiona shagging everyone in Dublin but never finding a good boyfriend? Not much.”

My father sighed. “Yes, your sister’s a mess. I know you think it’s my fault.”

“She could use some fatherly guidance.”

“She could use a bloody whip, Tabitha. At some point you have to take responsibility for your own problems. Everyone has some sort of awful thing happen. I couldn’t be happy at the house in Lucan. Your mother and I—”

“Agh. Da, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“The point is, it’s your sister’s turn to take care of herself. She’s twenty-six. She gets plenty of money from me. Speaking of which.” He slid over an envelope. “I already had it changed over from pounds.”

“What?” I peeked in to see euros, lots of them. “Dad, I’ve got plenty from my summer job at the movie theater. And I have the Enteria scholarship.”

“I get it, brainy. We’re proud as hell, yeah. But your scholarship’s not going to pay for the next thing you want to buy over there. Or a trip to Florence. You can’t miss Florence, you know.”

Humbled, I twirled my pasta into a spoon.

“I’m proud of you, Taz,” my dad said.

“Thanks.”

“Oh, what a life.” He patted my hand. “It’ll pass in the blink of an eye, though—mark my words—and then you’ll be an old codger like me.”

“Daaa
aaad.
” I hated it when he got sentimental. Not just because it was cringy, but because he didn’t deserve to be sappy as hell. You can’t just swoop in once a month with all of these feelings, I wanted to say. You can’t just ask about the “lads.” You have to be there. I mean, don’t cry over my leaving when you never really see me to begin with.

But I didn’t say that. And you know what? I’m glad.

“I know, I’m awful. All I’m saying is, make sure to make the most of it. You know?
Enjoy
it.” He took out his wallet to pay. Just then the sun hit the window, momentarily blinding me. “Look at you. An angel. How could I ever have created anything so beautiful?”

“Ew.
Dad.
”

He laughed and waved at the waiter. “Right you are, my darling. Shall we go?”

He had a surgery waiting; residents were scrubbing in, and just then his cell rang and beeped with a text at the same time. My father kissed me hurriedly, barely grazing my cheek as he focused on the glowing numbers in his hand. I reached for my phone as well, not wanting to be bested. And in this way, we parted: him looking elsewhere, me slipping into the streets, sure as a trout in a late summer river.

Goodbye, Da.

*   *   *

The night Jenny asked me to wear the white top was a different sort of evening. Jenny had suggested we slum it at the Red Lion, a basement bar always crowded with a particularly vicious blend of students and tourists. Having grown used to a more elegant scene, I was disappointed at the idea, but the others seemed keen enough. Luka was on a weekend trip to Athens, but we still met up at the Club before heading out in order to drink and preen. Anna brought a special curling iron, so all of us wore our hair in goddess ringlets. We smelled nice, wore clothes that sparkled and underwear that coyly showed through our shirts or peeped over the tops of our jeans. Delectable; that was the general idea.

Thanks to the social frenzy at Nottingham, I had come up in pubs and gone home with men; I was plenty used to that sort of slippery, shoulder-to-shoulder club scene. Though I was a good soldier, I never enjoyed these nights. The heat, the crowded floors, the shouting. The more of it a girl managed to survive, it seemed, the harder she became.