Belinda McKeon - Solace

He had let himself out of the house half an hour later — there had been no chance of any more sleep: the self-loathing had already been too intense — and it was only when he hit the fresh air that he realized how bad he smelled. When he had found Mossy asleep on the couch in their place he had woken him with a dig in the ribs and told him that they were never going to another early-house, ever again, and Mossy had grunted and sat up and produced Mark’s phone from his jeans pocket, and then he had flopped back down on the couch. Then, in the shower, there had come the next high point — throwing up all over the little corner gang of shower gels and shampoos, and for a moment Mark had considered leaving the clean-up to Mossy, as a sort of thank-you note. But it would probably be bad karma, he thought, and he needed all the help he could get.

Nor could he remember anything he had said to her at the party — at least, not after the coke had kicked in. He was not sure he wanted to remember. And he felt pretty shit about the coke as well, about having taken it with her. He felt guilty, but not guilty because he had somehow led her astray — it was obvious that she had done it before. Guilty, rather, that he had let her see him in such a fitful, shit-talking state, because that was how he was on coke, that was how everybody was, and he wished she hadn’t seen him like that. He didn’t know how many lines they’d ended up doing, but he knew it was more than was wise. One was more than wise, for fuck’s sake. He’d promised himself he was finished with that shit for good. It wasn’t like he did it very often, maybe once every couple of months, maybe more at certain times of the year than others; it was just that he was getting a bit fucking long in the tooth for all of that, by now; it was that he wished he hadn’t had to go and make such a jabbering prick out of himself in front of her the first time they’d talked. And he couldn’t remember what, if anything, they had done in the bedroom — had they even been in a bedroom? He had a vague memory of a bed, but he also had a vague memory, now that he thought of it, of someone else already being on the bed, on top of someone else. So where had they done it, whatever they had done? He had a vague memory now, too, of having spouted some stuff to her, while he was touching her, while he was getting off with her; he groaned. That was the problem with coked-up sex, or with any kind of physical contact while you were on coke: you just ended up saying — shouting — the most excruciating things. You went from being someone who knew how to make all the right moves — all the hair-stroking, all the eye-contact, all the kissing and caressing it took to get over the threshold of the bedroom door — to someone who was bellowing at a girl to know who her daddy was while at the same time trying to ignore the fact that you couldn’t really get properly hard.

At least, at least , he had not said that to her. But it was hardly as though the question had not been, and was not still, hanging over their heads. At the party, after she had told him who she was, before they had gone anywhere near the coke, he had tried, by a series of apparently harmless questions, to work out whether she knew anything about the history between their fathers. About what her father had done to his. About how his father had reacted. About the fact that his father still held a grudge. But she had given no sign of knowing anything. She talked mainly about growing up where they had grown up, about trying to get into the pubs in Edgeworthstown, about hitching lifts to the shitty clubs in the Fountain Blue, about seeing Mark around the place sometimes, and — this part had swollen his head pretty nicely — wondering about him, wondering if he had noticed her. He could remember that part. And he could remember, too, that she had talked for a while about her father, about working for him one summer and hating every minute of it; he remembered being relieved to hear that, relieved that he would not have to listen to her gushing about the dead father she still worshipped and adored. He had been crooked, she said; as crooked as a briar and just as nasty to come into contact with. Mark had said nothing. She had fought with him, she said; he had wanted her to fiddle with a will or something, and she had refused, and had walked out of the job, and she had never talked to him again before he died. That had been an opportune moment for hair-stroking, and for a concerned arm around her shoulders, and for a comforting little hug that had had the very satisfactory ending of a long, deep kiss, and it was a couple of minutes after that, actually, that he had suggested they take a trip into the room with the mirror and the marching powder. It had got him high, the feeling of her body in his arms, her tongue moving against his, her gorgeous, full little ass in his hands, and he had wanted to get higher still, had wanted to go that high with her coming along for the ride. And so that was how it had started. But where they had gone, in terms of talking and touching and everything else at which they had spent the next seven or eight hours, he didn’t know. All he knew was that she had seemed pretty friendly to him this morning. She had been smiling, and slagging him, and she hadn’t seemed to be pissed off with him, or wary with him, about anything he had said or done, and when he had asked her if he could call her during the week, she had given him her number, and given him this cheeky little look at the same time. So maybe, after all, things weren’t that bad, but Mark couldn’t believe that; maybe the reason for her cheerfulness was actually that he had given her so much ammunition against him that she felt, he didn’t know, powerful or something, standing over him like that in her business suit. That suit: if he could see her again right now in that suit it would do a million good things for his mood. But he had to see someone else in a suit now. And it was not going to go well.

He looked rough enough. That was some reason for hope; his skin was pale, his eyes were heavily shadowed. So the excuse he had invented for his supervisor might just work. And in case McCarthy brought up the obvious point — that he had had a year, not just a single weekend, to write this chapter — Mark stuffed a folder of notes into his rucksack. He could offer it to McCarthy as evidence that he’d been working.

The nerves really started to hit as he walked through Front Arch. McCarthy had the power to take his funding away, and without his funding, Mark could not continue his PhD. He could not afford to. A part-time job would not pay his rent, and a full-time job would make it impossible for him to do his research and to write. He did not allow himself to think about the fact that a year of not needing to work at all had done nothing to advance his writing, and little to advance his research; that was the way with most PhD students, he told himself. Most of his peers in the department were in similar positions. And the ones who weren’t just had less complicated relationships to their thesis subjects.

McCarthy was in his office with the door ajar. He answered Mark’s knock with a lift of his eyebrows. ‘Reporting for duty?’

To his horror, Mark felt himself blush. If he was blushing now, even before he started to tell the lie he needed to tell, what chance did he have of getting around McCarthy? He shook his head, more in disgust at himself than in reply to McCarthy’s question, but it seemed to do both jobs at once, because immediately, McCarthy’s face took on an expression of practised exasperation.

‘You’re not serious. Are you serious?’

‘Sorry,’ Mark blurted. ‘I was sick the whole weekend. Food poisoning. I ate something Thursday evening. . Salmon. .’ He could see from McCarthy’s set jaw that he didn’t believe a word of it.