Thirteen Stops Read online

  Suzanne wondered if there was a double meaning behind those words. How she would love it if there was, although the thought was nerve-racking too. They continued talking, and Suzanne told her new friend that she was busy making a small name for herself as a painter who had just had her first exhibition, at which she had even sold a couple of paintings, rather miraculously, or so she’d thought at the time. She was hoping to have another exhibition sometime next year. To pay the bills in the meantime, she taught art classes three nights a week at a local college and sometimes gave grinds to art students who were working on their portfolios for art college.

  “You must be very creative,” Ida said.

  “Well, um, I suppose so.” Suzanne blushed and laughed self-deprecatingly.

  “Then do not play it down. You must own it and be proud of it.”

  “Well, we weren’t brought up to be proud of ourselves.” Suzanne remembered how her parents had always been offhand and dismissive whenever she’d brought home good marks on a test, or a drawing the teacher had particularly praised. They’d been the same with Barbara. “We were seen as showing off or boasting if we tried to make ourselves look good in any way. It’s the Irish way. You mustn’t make yourself out to be special or talented or better than anyone else at something, or you’re asking for a fall. Don’t stick your head up over the parapet or you’ll get it shot off type of thing.”

  “That is the wrong way to bring up children, surely,” Ida said firmly, her eyes shining earnestly. “If a child does well, you tell the child. Why not?”

  Suzanne was warming more and more to this plain-spoken, slight-of-stature Swiss woman with the winning smile. They chatted until nearly half-ten, at which point the café was closing and the woman behind the till was starting to look decidedly grouchy. She was passive-aggressively clearing up all around them, putting chairs up on tables and turning the Open sign on the door to Closed.

  “I have a rented house in Ranelagh,” Ida said simply, gathering up her coat and bag under the bleary-eyed gaze of the waitress. “It is only a short taxi ride. Will you come and drink a glass of white wine with me?”

  It was getting late, and Suzanne knew she should be at home painting, working on the recalcitrant project that wouldn’t oblige her by coming right, or up in bed sipping a nice soporific camomile tea and reading the latest Karin Slaughter thriller, even if the gory nature of the book did tend to cancel out the tea’s calming benefits somewhat. And there were always classes to prepare for, and those essays on art theory to correct. Instead, she found herself agreeing to share a taxi to Ida’s charming little house.

  “I rent this house because it has a garden with a good long clothesline,” Ida told her as they hung up their coats and bags in the tiny cramped hallway. “In Switzerland, we hang out washing on the line and mountain breezes dry it, so always I like to have somewhere outside to hang washing.”

  Suzanne pictured that Swiss clothesline full of spotlessly clean white sheets billowing away in the fresh Alpine air, just like in an ad for washing powder. “It sounds lovely,” she said wistfully.

  They drank the wine and talked some more, and then they went up to bed together.

  “Tonight, we just sleep,” Ida said sensibly as she pulled back the bedcovers, and that was exactly what they did – two tired women sleeping deeply side by side, their arms wrapped lightly round each other.

  They didn’t have any other contact until the following morning, when Ida woke Suzanne with a kiss that made Suzanne think of blue Alpine skies she’d never seen, and a mountainside dotted with little white flowers she couldn’t name that looked like snowdrops.

  Afterwards, they lay together and cuddled and chatted.

  “Am I making you late for work?” Suzanne asked Ida at one point.

  “I mostly work from home,” Ida said with a broad grin. “So, if we want to stay here in bed all day, who is there to stop us?”

  And that was exactly what they did. Now, of course, they lived openly together as a gay couple in Ida’s little house. Suzanne painted and marked essays while Ida wrote her computer programs and they hung their washing out on the clothesline no matter what the weather. (Suzanne loved that Ida didn’t rush out into the garden, shrieking like a dervish, like every Irishwoman ever when a drop of rain threatened to fall. She simply let the clothes get wet and waited until they were dry again to bring them in.) They owned a big fat ginger cat called Rembrandt, and in their spare time they listened to music and went to symphony concerts and poetry readings. Barbara had a close-knit circle of female friends, all either artists like herself or writers or musicians, who welcomed Ida unhesitatingly into their midst, all genuinely thrilled for Suzanne for having found her soulmate at last. It was the happiest Suzanne had ever been in all her thirty-eight years and Ida said the same.

  But Ida didn’t know yet about the lump, the stupid fucking lump that Suzanne had found one day in the shower, the lump that was probably going to ruin everything. It was under her arm, perilously near her left breast. In secret, she’d gone to have the biopsy, not telling Ida or Barbara, and within a very short time, less than an hour probably, she would have the results.

  Isn’t it weird? she thought as she alighted from the Luas at St. Stephen’s Green and began to make her way to Dr. Cross’s office nearby. In less than an hour, I’ll know whether life goes on for me or not, whether I’m to carry on living and painting and being with Ida and being truly alive in the best sense of the word, or whether I’ll be six feet under in a year or even less, pushing up daisies in an overcrowded fucking graveyard. And did she even want to be buried, she wondered, or was cremation the best way to do it? It struck her that she didn’t even know. I can’t die yet, she thought frantically, slowing her walk so that she wouldn’t show up too early at the doctor’s office and have to sit twiddling her thumbs or, worse, flicking idly through an old edition of Hello! magazine. Suzanne didn’t give a flying fuck about so-called ‘celebrities’ at the best of times, never mind their complicated love lives, and she certainly didn’t today. No, she couldn’t die yet. What about her sister Barbara and her two little nieces, who she loved as if they were her own? They’d all need her more than ever now, especially if Paul was acting the maggot again. There was Barbara’s new baby to consider too. And what about the baby that she and Ida were talking about having together some day? And what about Ida herself, the first person Suzanne had ever known with whom she could be her real, true self? How cruel it would be to have her first bit of real happiness snatched away from her, and after they’d been together for such a short time!

  They’d been talking about going to Switzerland for a good long holiday once Ida’s contract in Ireland was up. Ida was going to introduce Suzanne to her parents and all her aunties and uncles and even her grandparents, all of whom were apparently perfectly okay with Ida’s sexuality, even though gay marriage hadn’t yet come to Switzerland. Suzanne had been envious when she’d heard about Ida’s loving, liberal relatives. Although Ireland had recently voted for same-sex marriage, there nonetheless still existed a smattering of decidedly unenlightened folks who weren’t happy about it (as there would in any country in the world, Suzanne supposed), any more than they were okay with divorce or cohabitation or any of the other things that it was perfectly all right to do nowadays because this was the twenty-first century and no longer the Dark Ages. Suzanne’s parents definitely belonged to that handful of people who disapproved of pretty much everything that smacked of liberalness and wouldn’t hold with chats about feelings, or sexuality, or bodily urges or even bodily functions that everyone has and that people therefore shouldn’t be ashamed of or embarrassed about. Even if Suzanne was able to tell her mother about Ida, it would have to be kept a secret from her father, and Suzanne didn’t want Ida, her lovely Alpine Ida, to be a sordid little secret that had to be kept from people. If she couldn’t talk openly to her parents about Ida and their love, then she wouldn’t talk about the subject at all. It made her sad, though. She misse
d her dad and sometimes wondered if he missed her too. If he could only get over this mental block about his daughter’s sexuality, they could be friends again and play chess together once more in the front room of the family home, while Suzanne’s mother knitted and watched television in the background. The comforting click-clicking sound of those needles while Suzanne pondered her next chess move had formed part of the soundtrack to her childhood and adult years, and she missed it more now than she would ever have thought possible.

  “You can go on in now, Ms. Carragher – you’re the last client of the day,” said Dr. Cross’s receptionist, a good-looking, chatty young woman called Fauve whose bright dyed-red hair was a welcome splash of colour in the cream-and-beige waiting room. There were no copies of Hello! on the table, only well-thumbed old medical journals and a few broadsheet copies of that day’s Irish Times.

  Suzanne found that her mouth had gone dry. She wished she’d had the foresight to drink a cup of ice-cold water from the water cooler when she’d arrived, but she hadn’t thought of it and it was too late now.

  Dr. Cross, a specialist in cancer, in her mid-fifties, got up from her seat and held out her hand to Suzanne with a warm smile.

  “Right, now,” she said when they were both seated. She reached for a brown folder on the desk in front of her and opened it. Taking out a few sheets of paper, she studied them intently with her glasses halfway down her nose. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  Suzanne swallowed hard and dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands.

  STOP 3: KILMACUD

  Fauve

  Fauve Delahunty was dog-tired when she got off the Luas at the Kilmacud stop and started to walk home to Ashley Crescent. She had managed to get a seat for once on her normally jam-packed homebound tram from St. Stephen’s Green, and she had nearly fallen asleep to its rhythmic movements and the sleep-inducing tones of the automated female who said things that passengers mostly ignored, like “Please move down the tram”. Dr. Marcia Cross was one of the top cancer consultants in the country and her outer office was always crowded with people seeking her expertise, so Fauve as the receptionist was always busy. Today hadn’t been too manic, though, but she was still knackered. And sometimes watching all those people troop in and out of Dr. Cross’s office to receive their (mostly) bad news could really get you down. Fauve could always tell when someone had been given bad news, even before she got to peep at the files. They would come out pale-faced, looking shell-shocked. Sometimes they’d be crying. Mind you, some people cried buckets when they were given good news. Take today, for example.

  The last patient of the day, a dark-haired woman in her late thirties who had been so wound up when she’d gone into Dr. Cross’s inner sanctum that Fauve was worried for her, had practically danced back out into the reception area after her appointment, beaming from ear to ear while crying tears of sheer happiness. Another one of those patients whose cyst or lump had thankfully turned out to be benign. Fauve loved when that happened, but unfortunately it didn’t happen nearly often enough. The dancing woman, however, a Suzanne Somebody, Carragher maybe, or Farragher, had been a sight for sore eyes and Fauve had smiled at her warmly before saying goodbye. No follow-up appointments for this patient – just a clean bill of health and off you go now to live a full and happy life.

  Fauve sometimes wondered if the patients who had been given the all-clear did, in fact, make the most of their remaining time like they’d surely promised God they would when they made their frantic bargains. Oh, please God, if you’ll only give me some more time, I swear I’ll never waste another minute! How long, she wondered, did it take them to slip back into their old ways? Or did they keep their long-dark-night-of-the-soul promises and become useful, productive and compassionate members of society who, like Good Samaritans, always had a moment to spare for their fellow human beings?

  Fauve sighed heavily as she trudged up the road. She herself had lived rather too full a life recently, which was how she came to be in her present predicament. She thought now about the contents of her handbag. Oh Jesus. Well, she’d put it off long enough. She’d do it tonight or she’d bloody well die trying. It had been so embarrassing in the chemist’s, though. She’d felt like everyone was looking at her and judging her, even though they were all probably fully preoccupied buying their own cough-and-cold remedies and having their prescriptions filled. Cough-and-cold season had come in with a bang the minute the summer slipped away, allowing autumn (and the flu) to make her debut for another year.

  No. 16 Ashley Crescent was lit up like a Christmas tree when Fauve walked through the gate and up the path. It wasn’t even properly dark yet. Just let them wait till the electricity bill comes, she thought crossly. Let’s see if they’ll be so bloody free and easy then, with their lights and their immersion for the hot water on round the clock, as if we’re all made of money.

  “Coffee, my love?” Doireann offered the minute Fauve set foot in the brightly lit kitchen.

  Fauve immediately felt guilty for having just been thinking bad thoughts about her three housemates, and Doireann in particular, who switched on the light every time she entered a room, even during the day, if it was just the teensiest bit overcast. Doireann’s family were super-rich and so she was unfamiliar with the concept of scrimping and scraping. Not that Fauve was particularly au fait with the concept herself – her own parents were far from poor – but at least she’d been brought up to have some common sense about it, unlike Doireann.

  “Yes, please,” she said gratefully. “I’m bloody gagging for one. Are the others home?”

  “Sasha’s not back yet, and Orla’s upstairs hogging the bathroom for her date with Nathan. So if you need the loo, you’re going to have to hold it in. Or nip out the back and wee up agin’ the wall!” she finished with a laugh.

  Doireann, filling up the kettle, had made a face when she said ‘Nathan’. None of the other three girls in the house liked Orla’s loud, obnoxious boyfriend. He was always boasting about his big fat salary as a Mercedes salesman and holding forth on the subject of women saying ‘no’ when what they really meant was ‘Oh yes, of course, please fuck me now, I’ve been waiting my whole life for this very moment, you virile stud-muffin, you!’

  Fauve couldn’t stand Nathan. He was constantly trying to grope her tits when Orla’s back was turned and asking her what her original hair colour was under the bright red dye. Ever since she’d once answered, rather sourly, “Mousy Brown,” he’d made a point of calling her his Little Brown Mouse and feeling her arse to see if she had a tail back there, the odious creep.

  “What does she see in him?” she said. She was seated now at the kitchen table. She felt completely done in. A nice hot strong cup of coffee would surely revive her, and Doireann made the best coffee out of the four of them. Orla’s in particular was revolting, tasting like burnt hair for some reason, and Sasha’s was always as weak as piss.

  “His big fat wallet?” Doireann said cynically as she poured the hot coffee into the two mugs. “It can’t be his big fat prick anyway, because that simply doesn’t exist.”

  “You’ve seen his knob?” said Fauve, her eyebrows shooting upwards.

  “Oh yes.” Doireann nodded sagely. “One morning when he’d been staying over and he must’ve forgotten that he wasn’t at home or something, because he went to the toilet in the nip. I was coming out of my room and I saw it then. It looked just like a slug stuck to his inner thigh, and not a very big slug either. I nearly puked at the sight of it.”

  “Eurgh!”

  Both women shuddered and then laughed.

  “Imagine being Orla, though,” said Fauve, “and having to, you know . . .”

  “What, suck it? I’d rather eat nettles stewed with my own pubes, thanks very much.” More laughter, then: “Have you heard from him yet, sweetie?” Doireann’s tone was serious.

  “Who?” said Fauve, feigning surprise.

  “You know. Him.”

  Fauve shook her head miserab
ly, willing the tears not to fall.

  It sounded clichéd to say it, but she had really, really thought that this one was The One. She’d been so happy to think that she might just have met the love of her life at the tender-ish age of twenty-six, but it was looking less and less likely now that she’d ever even hear from him again. One morning recently, Doireann had come down early to breakfast to find Fauve in floods of tears at the kitchen table, clutching her phone. Over copious amounts of Doireann’s (decent) coffee, Fauve had confided the whole sorry story to her friend.

  A few weeks ago, she’d gone out to Copper Face Jacks nightclub on Harcourt Street with another girl from the medical practice where they both worked. They had drinks together after work, on the strict understanding that if either of them pulled, the other would fade graciously into the background and not be a problem by springing a guilt-trip on the other. Both girls pulled early on in the evening. But, from the moment the tall, dark and handsome stranger had wandered over with the two blue cocktails in his hands and offered Fauve both of them because he’d observed that she’d been drinking blue cocktails, she’d had the feeling that this wasn’t going to be just another rubbish Copper’s shag, best forgotten. His name was Jack and he was over six feet tall and almost criminally good-looking.

  “You’re called Jack, and we’re in Copper Face Jacks,” she marvelled in tipsy wonder once he’d introduced himself. Then she kicked herself mentally for saying something so moronic.

  “It must be Fate, so.” He reached out to gently touch one of the many stray tendrils that had come loose from the messy bun into which she had carelessly piled her tresses that morning. “I love your hair colour. It’s just so damn vibrant.”

  “It’s not, um, it’s not real,” Fauve said, wishing she’d been able to come out with something a bit more cutting-edge. Mind you, witty repartee wasn’t usually called for in Copper’s, just a Wonderbra that pushed your tits out and up balcony-style and a packet of condoms from the machines in the jacks.