Belinda McKeon - Solace

‘Yeah.’ Mark waved back in the direction of the other room, slapping someone on the side of the head as he did so. He apologized. They seemed not even to have noticed.

The blonde — the blonde friend — looked down to see what he was carrying. ‘Cans?’ She laughed as though he’d turned up with a vault of Buckfast.

‘I was going to bring wine,’ he said, and it was true, he had stood for several minutes in front of the small shelf of wine at the off-licence, but had given up; for as little as he knew about wine, he had reckoned that a bottle should cost more than a tenner to be any good, and, with the dinner party paranoia still ringing in his head, he had not wanted to show up on the doorstep offering a bottle of plonk. So Heineken it was. A lot of Heineken, which he was tired of carrying by now.

‘Oh, there’s loads of wine. .’ the blonde girl was saying. ‘Do you want a glass?’ And she turned and was gone. To the table, or the garden, or the extensive wine cellar, he didn’t know. He elbowed his way through to the fridge. It was packed; there was certainly no room for six-packs. Bottles, and jars, and packets, and tubs, and as much fruit, nearly, as you’d see in one of the Moore Street women’s prams, and lumps of cheese and schlongs of salami and the gold-foil knobs that meant champagne. He closed it and shoved the cans, instead, into one of the kitchen presses, between a food-processor and a little tower of painted clay bowls. Morocco. Or maybe just Spiddal. More money than sense, anyway. He snapped a can off the six-pack and opened it. When he turned, she was standing in front of him, grinning. Off her head? No time to think about that now. It was her. Joanne.

‘Your stash?’

Blondie must have sent her. She was holding a bottle of wine and an empty glass, which she offered to him now. He took it. This left him with an open Heineken in one hand and a wine glass in the other.

She laughed. She was even better than he remembered. Green eyes, yes, and you didn’t see those too often, and her fringe dipping low, and her skin freckled, maybe from the sun that day, and her shoulders were brown and bare. ‘Glad you could make it,’ she said. That gap between her teeth when she smiled.

He put the wine glass on the counter behind him. ‘Just about,’ he said, which made no sense, he knew, as a reply, nor was it true, but it seemed like the right thing to say, seemed to sound as though there had been other options, as though he had gone to great lengths to get there, so she should be grateful as well as glad, and should show that gratitude by, say, talking to nobody but him all night, and that just for starters.

She nodded. ‘So, did your friends come, too? Mossy and. .’

‘Nagle. Eh, Niall. Yeah, Niall’s not really our. .’ He stopped. There was no point in getting into what Nagle was and was not.

‘Mossy’s a cool guy, though.’

Mark made a noise of agreement, feeling the return of his earlier anxiety. Had he even, really, been invited to this party? Mossy had said so, and he hadn’t said anything to suggest that he was interested in this girl, but then, he hardly ever did, and even so, that didn’t mean she wasn’t interested in Mossy, that she wasn’t just killing time, now, talking to Mark so that she’d look busy, or popular, or whatever it was that women wanted to look when the guy they fancied walked into the room. Which Mossy would probably do any minute now. Mark willed him to stay away. To go into the coke room and snort himself into oblivion. To meet some other girl out there, fall on to a couch with her, take her home to the flat and screw her on their couch, on Mark’s bed — on Mark’s table of notes and orderly printouts, if necessary.

‘Anyway.’ She leaned towards him, suddenly, and he was startled — and then, all in the space of an instant, delighted, disbelieving, flattered and aroused — but she was just reaching past him to pick up the wine glass he’d put down. She filled it — really filled it — with red wine. He took a swig from his can. As he did so, she leaned in and around him again, this time with the wine bottle, and this time she looked right into his eyes, in a way that meant something — he didn’t know what, exactly, but something, and possibly something good.

‘Anyway,’ she said again. ‘So how do you know Mossy?’

Fuck Mossy, he wanted to say. ‘I live with him,’ he said instead.

‘Loads of free DVDs, so.’

‘Yeah,’ Mark said. ‘Though most of the stuff Mossy brings home isn’t really to my taste.’

‘Really?’ She raised her eyebrows.

‘Animals, you know,’ he said. ‘I mean, it’s cruel. It’s just wrong.’

She squinted at him for a moment, then caught his meaning; she laughed, shaking her head at him, her tongue touching her lips, in a way that made him decide. He was not going to leave this place without this girl.

‘So you’re. .’ He wasn’t sure what he was going to say. What did he want to say to her? What did he want to know about her? Anything? Did they really have to go through the checklist of introductory prattle, talking about their jobs, talking about the neighbourhoods they lived in, talking about the last gig they’d been to — or the last gig they’d pretend to have been to for the sake of making the right kind of impression? He didn’t want to have to launch into a chin-stroking commentary on whatever band he’d last seen at Whelan’s, and he definitely didn’t want to find himself trying to explain a PhD on Maria Edgeworth and the Realist Novel. It wasn’t that he just wanted to push her up against the fridge and kiss her; he did want to talk to her, but not about anything to do with the real world, not about anything that was going to make him have to try too hard, or work too hard, or think too hard.

‘So this is your friend’s house?’ he said.

‘You don’t recognize me,’ she said, at exactly the same moment.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Do you?’

He wondered how drunk she was, or how much she’d put up her nose.

‘I saw you back in the pub,’ he said uncertainly. ‘I saw you leaving.’

‘Not from the pub.’ She shook her head, ‘Obviously you recognize me from the pub. We’re talking, aren’t we?’

Mark exhaled noisily. ‘I mean, yeah?’ he said, and he cringed at how moronic it sounded. He was now very unclear about what was happening. He wanted to turn around and get himself another beer, but she was looking at him expectantly.

‘You don’t,’ she said. ‘You haven’t a clue who I am.’

Jesus, was she famous or something? Mark stared. Maybe she did look familiar. What, was she a newsreader, or an actress — was she in Fair City or something? He never watched it. Well, that wasn’t true: it was just on, sometimes, and he found himself following it, but no, she didn’t look familiar, and he told her so. Anyway, it was a bit fucking arrogant of her to expect to be recognized. He was having second thoughts. Maybe he didn’t want to push her up against the fridge after all. Except maybe to get away from her.

‘But I know you,’ she said, and now he felt panic judder into his perspective. Was she someone he had already slept with? And forgotten? There had been one-offs. He had been plastered. But he didn’t think she was one of those. He would have remembered her. He looked at her more closely. He shook his head. She wasn’t anyone she knew.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘Fuck’s sake,’ she said, with a huge grin. She gripped him by the arm; startled, he stared at her hand. ‘We’re neighbours. You seriously don’t recognize me?’

‘From Smithfield?’ Mark said.

‘No,’ she said, taking her hand away, running it through her fringe. ‘Not neighbours in Smithfield. I mean really neighbours. In Longford. At home. You’re Mark Casey, right? From Dorvaragh?’