Selected Stories

After the convent, Aisling acquired a qualification that led to a post in the general office of educational publishers. She had come to like being alone and often in the evenings went on her own to the cinema, and at weekends walked at Howth or by the sea at Dalkey. One afternoon she visited the grave, then went back often. A stone had been put there, its freshly incised words brief: the name, the dates. People came and went among the graves but did not come to this one, although flowers were left from time to time.

In a bleak cemetery Aisling begged forgiveness of the dead for the falsity she had embraced when what there was had been too ugly to accept. Silent, she had watched an act committed to impress her, to deserve her love, as other acts had been. And watching, there was pleasure. If only for a moment, but still there had been.

She might go away herself, and often thought she would: in the calm of another time and place to flee the shadows of bravado. Instead she stayed, a different person too, belonging where the thing had happened.

An Afternoon

Jasmin knew he was going to be different, no way he couldn’t be, no way he’d be wearing a baseball cap backwards over a number-one cut, or be gawky like Lukie Giggs, or make the clucking noise that Darren Finn made when he was trying to get a word out. She couldn’t have guessed; all she knew was he wouldn’t be like them. Could be he’d put you in mind of the Rawdeal drummer, whatever his name was, or of Al in Doc Martin. But the boy at the bus station wasn’t like either. And he wasn’t a boy, not for a minute.

He was the only person waiting who was alone apart from herself, and he didn’t seem interested in the announcements about which buses were arriving or about to go. He didn’t look up when people came in. He hadn’t glanced once in her direction.

In the end, if nothing happened, Jasmin knew she would have to be brazen. She called it that to herself because it was what it amounted to, because you didn’t get anywhere if you weren’t. All your life you’d be carrying teas to the lorrymen in the diner, wiping down the tables and clearing away plastic plates, doing yourself an injury because you were soaking up the lorrymen’s cigarette smoke. ‘Now, you don’t be brazen, Angie,’ her mother used to scold her when she was no more than five or six and used to reach up for the cooking dates or a chocolate bar in Pricerite, opening whatever it was before her mother saw.

‘You carry that to a woman doing the shelves. You say a mistake, you tell her that. Brazen you are,’ her mother always ended up. ‘You just watch it, girl.’ She kept quiet herself. She never approached a woman who was arranging the shelves, just put whatever she’d taken behind the cornflakes or the kitchen rolls.

Jasmin was her own choice of name, since she’d always detested Angie and considered it common when she was older. ‘Oh, la-di-da!’ her mother’s riposte had been to this further evidence of brazenness. ‘Listen to our madam!’ she would urge Holby, trying to draw the husband she had now into it, but Holby had become fly about things like that, having learned a lesson when he’d been drawn into a no-go marriage. It wasn’t even the way you spelled it, her mother witheringly commented, no ‘e’ at the end was your bloody Muslim way. But when her mother wasn’t there Holby said all that was a load of rubbish. ‘You spell your name like it suits you,’ he advised. ‘You stick to how you want it.’ Her mother was a violent woman, Jasmin considered, and knew that Holby did too.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, crossing to where the man was waiting. ‘I’m Jasmin.’

He smiled at her. He had a peaky face, his teeth crowded at the front, light-coloured hair left long. He was wearing flannel trousers and a jacket, and that surprised her. A kind of speckled navy-blue the jacket was, with a grey tie. And shoes, not trainers, all very tidy. What surprised her more than anything was that he could have been mid-thirties, maybe a few years older. From his voice on the chat line, she’d thought more like nineteen.

‘You fancy a coffee, Jasmin?’ he said.

She felt excited when he spoke. The first time, on the chat line, she’d felt it when he’d called her Jasmin. Then again yesterday, when he’d said why don’t they meet up?

‘Yeah, sure,’ she said.

All the time he kept his smile going. He was the happy sort, he’d told her on the chat line, not the first time, maybe the third or fourth. He’d asked her if she was the happy sort herself and she’d said yes, even though she knew she wasn’t. Droopy was what she was, she’d heard her mother saying when Holby first came to live in the house; and later on, when her mother wasn’t there, Holby asked her what the trouble was and she said nothing. ‘Missing your dad?’ Holby suggested. Seven she’d been then.

‘You like to go in here?’ the man suggested when they came to a McDonald’s. ‘You all right with a McDonald’s, Jasmin?’