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  “C’mon now, don’t be shy.”

  Claire, burdened by the platter, wedged between the door and the table, felt helpless, felt her chest cramp up, her face burn. She looked up, looked round the snug. Smiling, most of them. One lifting a pint glass to his lips. Watching her over the rim. The hand slid down still further.

  “No—”

  She jerked away, her tray crashing down onto the table, sending glasses skidding off the edge. The ashtray, shunted, coughed up a sputter of fagash. She stumbled out of the snug, she heard the door slam shut behind her. A moment’s silence. Then—inevitably, she thought—laughter. Walking unevenly down the bar, she felt the regulars staring, the teatowel hanging over her wrist, her hip burning as if branded. She felt hot. She didn’t know what to do with her hands.

  Because it was nothing, she thought, nothing really. Not as if a glimpse of washed-grey BHS bra through the gaps between her buttons had driven them wild with lust. Not as if she was in danger of her life. Just a touch. The slightest of invasions. A couple of words would have sorted it out. An eyebrow, properly raised, could have defused the whole situation. Arsehole. Stupid arsehole. She caught up the teatowel, folded it, unfolded it. Jennifer would never have lost it like that. Jennifer, with a slight twist of her lips, with half a dozen words at most, would have cleared the air completely. Like opening a window. Claire could almost see her there, at the bar, perched on a stool, sleek and glossy and completely at her ease. She would be shaking slightly, perhaps; she would be trying not to laugh.

  “Fucked that up, didn’t I?” Claire said inwardly.

  “Too right you did.” Jennifer would shake her head in mock despair.

  “Well what would you have done if you’re so bloody smart?”

  “I wouldn’t be working in this fucking hole in the first place. You’ve got no class, Thomas. That’s your problem.”

  Claire was still nodding slightly to herself as she climbed the steps, turned the corner into the main bar. You work in a pub, she thought, you serve wankers. You deal with it. And while they were laughing at her, they couldn’t be too pissed off. So no big deal, no real harm done. But her hands, as they folded and refolded the cloth, were shaking.

  Paul was still at the bar. He leant one elbow on the counter, one hand on his thigh. He was listening to Dermot. Two pints, half-drunk, the glasses ringed round with foam, stood on the bar. Dermot was talking, glancing at Paul, then back at his hands as he shredded a beermat, peeling away little flecks of cardboard and dropping them into an ashtray.

  That was it. That was exactly what it did to her. Talking to Paul always left her stammering, fidgeting like that. Paul never fiddled with anything, never played with a beermat or a cigarette. When he smoked, you knew it wasn’t nerves. It was with some people: not with him. With him it was a ritual; deliberate, neatly done. He never tapped off the ash too soon, never sucked too frequently on his cigarette. He was monumentally still. And that just made you fidget.

  And he made you talk, Claire thought. He forced you to, just as much as if he twisted your arm up your back and growled threats in your ear. He always seemed sympathetic, but he never gave the impression of registering much of what you said, so you kept on talking to him until you knew you had said too much, but still you blundered on, giving yourself away. Trying to make an impression. You always ended up saying something unforgettably stupid. And you could never tell if he’d even noticed. Nothing, Claire thought, ever bothered Paul.

  That Thursday night back in October. Bar Twelve. Two steps behind Alan, Claire had gazed round the bright bustling room looking for she didn’t know who, cheeks glazed from the cold driven rain, hair dripping. Paul was dirty-fair, wore glasses, was an architecture student, Alan had said. So Claire had imagined another Alan, abstracted and dishevelled, blinking out at the world through smeary lenses.

  Alan had set off across the room, towards the bar, and she had followed. They had got there first, she decided, before the others. Then she saw the suited slight young man with honey-coloured hair, and next to him a slim dark-clothed woman. He reached out and grabbed Alan’s hand and for a minute there was noisy good-willed confusion.

  “Alan, how you doing?”

  “Paul.”

  So this was Paul. His hand, when she shook it, was dry; not too soft. It made her own feel damp and grubby. And this was Grainne. Slender, smooth-skinned, she took Claire’s arm and began to talk. Kind, quick-fire questions that she never got the chance to answer. Paul bought a round of drinks, and they sat down.

  “So, you’re back,” Paul said. He settled himself, glass in hand.

  “I’m back,” said Alan.

  Throughout the evening, with Alan’s arm clamped around her shoulder, faced with Paul’s cool smile and Grainne’s kind questions, Claire rolled up the till receipts from the bar, pulled her rings round and round on her fingers, twisted her hair into tangles. She tensed every time she felt Alan’s ribcage and diaphragm swell as he prepared to speak. For some reason he was telling them everything, every little thing he knew about her. Her family, her home, her Jewishness; Jewishness, she thought, but didn’t speak. And all the time they were talking, she just wanted to lean across the table towards Paul and tell him, this is not me. She thought that he might understand.

  Now, she met him most nights on the stairs from the bathroom, or in the kitchen at weekends when he made the morning coffee. His neat body in Grainne’s green towelling dressing-gown, his specs upstairs on her bedside table. His hair sticking up in odd tufts, the warm skin of his throat. Claire slipping anxiously from Grainne’s spare room, parched and headachy from another night’s insomnia, guiltily conscious of the memory of listening last night to what she should have tried to ignore.

  Paul ran a finger over his collarbone. He looked up, saw Claire, smiled. “How you doing?”

  “Fine.” She wound the teacloth round her hand, unwound it. “Is Grainne coming out later?”

  “She’s gone home for the weekend. You’ll have the place to yourself.”

  “Oh.”

  That meant an empty house all day Saturday, all day Sunday. An empty house tonight when she got in. Not even the dubious comfort of a stranger passed out in the front room. Anyone who needed a bed for the night seemed to end up on Grainne’s sofa. Friends of friends, little brothers, anyone who got stuck without the cab fare home. Claire kept stumbling in on them after work, switching on the light to find the room a stinking haze of smoke and alcohol and sweat and dirty carpet, and an unconscious drooling body lying on the couch. Grainne picked up strays like other people picked up colds.

  Paul was still looking at her. She could feel him looking at her. Was her make-up smudged, could he see up her nose? She held a hand up to her face, touched her upper lip which felt damp. “Dermot, if it’s no bother,” she said, “would you tell Gareth, when he gets back, if you see him, will you tell him there’s some guys in the front bar—” She felt the sentence bloat and twist and fall out of shape, but lumbered on, blushing. “It’s no big deal, I mean, they were just being a bit—you know—”

  “What?” Dermot said.

  “Just, well, just blokes in the snug, a bit drunk, a bit hassly. I don’t know, a stag party or tourists or something. No big deal.”

  “What happened?” Paul asked.

  “Nothing, really. Nothing.” She paused, glanced at him, embarrassed. “Just thought Gareth ought to know. Just in case.”

  “Should I get Dave?”

  “No. Really, it’s no big deal. It’s just it’s early days yet. There’ll be a lot more drink drunk before the night’s out.”

  “Aye, well,” Paul said, drawing himself up, puffing out his chest. “If you get any more trouble from them, you let me know.”

  “Right,” she said. She smiled at him.

  Music so loud that you had to shout to make yourself heard, shout louder to be heard over the shouting. The late custom swarming in. Young women in tight man-made fibres and unstable shoes, suntanned flesh and gl
ossy hair. Claire, collecting glasses, rubbed a grubby hand through her own crop, thought she shouldn’t have cut it, realised it didn’t matter. As she slid between the close-packed bodies, drifted from table to table, lifted greasy empties and stacked them one inside the other in a Lego-like tower, leaning up her chest and against her shoulder, she knew that she was invisible. It was as if the glasses gathered themselves. She was more transparent than they were, only noticed when she lifted a glass with a breath of drink still in it, and the owner protested and clutched at it as it floated away.

  In the bottom bar, with its dark wood and its drink-tanned regulars, the spaces had been filled up by the younger crowd. Tommy still silent at the counter, Joyce and her husband’s still stares still parallel, the other tables full of the chattering slabbering blethering night-crowd, glad of a seat and the chance to talk over each other without straining their voices. One hand clutching the stacked glasses, the other reaching out for empties, Claire slid between the tables, slotting each glass into the one before. The barstaff were supposed to clear the bar, but she reached out to pick a glass, in passing, off the counter, and her hand was caught.

  The touch materialised her. She was suddenly horribly conscious of her body; vividly aware of the stickiness under her arms, the warm greasiness of the glass in her hand, the raw cut on her ankle.

  The hand that held hers was hairy. The nails were neatly cut. She looked up from it. Squarish specs gleamed back at her.

  “Pint of Carlsberg,” he said.

  She wondered, briefly, if this was the same hand that had touched her before, if this was the same man, or whether some composite had pulled itself together from the soup of limbs and features she’d seen in the snug. He was smiling. The teeth were uneven, tea-stained.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t work the bar. You’ll have to ask one of the barstaff.”

  “I’m asking you. You spilt my last one. In fact, you spilt everyone’s. So you’d better get a round in.”

  She tried to tug her hand away; he held on tighter.

  “D’you want me to call the manager? Because I will.” He leaned forward over the counter, still holding her by the wrist, and stared impatiently down the bar, towards where Gareth stood, angling a glass under a tap, watching it fill. Claire twisted her hand round in the man’s grip. It hurt, reminding her suddenly of school, and the slow sting of Chinese burns. The columned glasses shifted in her grip, teetered. She felt hot; it was becoming difficult to breathe.

  “Excuse me,” the man called, and Claire saw Gareth turn towards them.

  She wrenched her hand out through the man’s fingers, lost her balance, stumbled. The glasses slithered out of her grip and fell. They hit the boards, smashed. Glittering splinters skidded out across the dark floor. The bar fell silent. Eyes turned on Claire. Somewhere someone laughed. Claire cupped her hand round her sore wrist, glanced back up at the man, and felt a sudden stupid urge to cry.

  The man grinned at her, shook his head a little, held his hands up as if capitulating. He turned and walked away.

  “What’s going on?” Gareth was behind the bar.

  “Sorry.”

  He looked at her a moment, then leaned over the counter to glance down at the floor. Raised an eyebrow.

  “You causing trouble again, Thomas?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Here.”

  He passed her a dustpan and brush over the counter. Her hand, as she reached out and took it, looked shaky.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Are you sure? What happened?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. Just me being a dick.”

  And she bent to sweep up the broken glass, crawled among the feet and handbags and chairlegs, breathless, her face burning, her hands sticky and hot.

  The kitchen was empty. Jim stood just outside the back door, in the alleyway, smoking. Unnoticed, Claire lifted down the first-aid kit from the shelf and walked through to the back of the kitchen. She slipped into the store cupboard, sat down at the back on the floor amongst the five-litre tubs of barbecue sauce and giant jars of mayonnaise and pulled off her shoe. The plaster had got rolled up and rubbed off, that side of her foot was tacky with old blood, but the cut had stopped bleeding. The blood was congealing, a scab was beginning to form. She touched it gingerly, with a fingertip. It stung. It always puzzled her, every time, that something that had hurt so little while she did it should hurt so much later, while it healed. She rummaged in the first-aid box: safety pins, antiseptic cream, a bandage and bright blue caterers’ plasters. She stuck one on, pulled on her shoe, tied the laces. The edges of the plaster stuck up above the cuff, conspicuous, but there was nothing she could really do about that.

  Faces blurred now, voices loud and thick. The crowds swayed and stumbled in the viscous, heavy air. Sober, Claire felt as if she was walking through a different dimension, in which she alone was agile, alien. She was emptying ashtrays.

  The wooden floor had grown sticky. Spilt drink and ash and spit and dirt off the street churned together by hundreds of feet into a black tarry glue. Down below, in the main bar, the crowds were jostling, packed shoulder to shoulder, jaw to jaw. Narrow streams of movement wove between the bodies, to the bar, down towards the toilets, to and from the exit, searching out the line of least resistance, like water. Up on the higher level, Claire threaded her way among the tables, sliding between the close-packed elbows, stacking up dirty ashtrays to take out for washing, putting down clean ones in their place. There were streaks of fagash down her front, her nails were edged with grey. Leaning over unnoticed between two seated backs, she laid her last clean ashtray down on the end of a table, turned to descend the slippery blackened steps and go to the kitchen with the dirties.

  She didn’t see how the fight broke out. She was shunted sideways as the crowd swayed, broke, and someone fell. A young man in dark clothes. He pulled himself up, disappeared back between the moving bodies.

  The crowd swayed again, pushing against her. Her feet were trodden on, her shins scuffed. She was forced back towards the steps. A woman was shrieking, the sound thin and high over the dark rattle of men’s voices. Claire caught hold of the railings, was pressed back against them. A damp checked-cotton back squashed her cheek, pressed her nose askew. She smelt washing powder. A heavy foot crushed her toes. Her shirt stuck to her belly. Something had been spilt down it. She had lost her ashtrays.

  Suddenly, it was over. The pressure against her lessened. The floor began to clear, the bar was emptying. Through the thinning crowd she could see the last of the brawlers being chucked out. They buckled and writhed, their arms were twisted and held up their backs as they were steered towards the door. The place had fallen strangely quiet. She could hear the close-by throb of police sirens. Gareth had switched off the music. He was behind the bar, speaking into his mobile phone. Dermot was standing nearby, awkward. Leaning on the counter, hand to his head, was Paul. He was bleeding.

  “Cab’s on its way,” Gareth was saying.

  “I’m alright,” said Paul.

  “What happened?” Claire was breathless. Her ribs ached.

  Paul’s collar was open, his tie loosened. There was blood on his shirt, blood trickling down his cheek. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a clean tissue. She handed it to him, nervous of touching. He took it from her, folded it and held it to his cheek.

  “You should see the other guy,” he said, and smiled.

  “Girl, you mean,” Dermot said. Gareth cuffed him lightly round the head.

  “Didn’t see you tackling her.”

  “Fuck no. See what she did to Paul’s pretty face.”

  “Are you going to the hospital?” Claire asked.

  “No. I’m alright. I’ll just go home.” He lifted a hand to his forehead, closed his eyes. “Fuck, my head hurts.”

  A pause. Gareth glanced around the bar.

  “Claire, you go with him,” he said. He pulled his wallet out, held out a
fiver. “Take that for the cab.”

  “But, my shift—”

  “Never worry. Just get him home and keep an eye on him. He hit his head. I don’t know if he’s concussed or what but he won’t go to casualty. You could clean him up a bit, anyway. Put some Savlon or something on that scratch.”

  She took the money. Gareth stuffed his wallet into his back pocket.

  “Just you sort him out. We’ll take care of things this end.”

  Claire sat silently beside Paul. Eighteen inches of skin-like velour separated them. She had followed him to the taxi, anxious, hands stretched out in case he fell, wanting to ease him down from step to step and out of the back door of Conroys, curl him gently onto the seat, strap him in like a baby. It made her panic, almost, to see Paul so unsettled, so altered. He reminded her of her father.

  The car sped them through the empty, orange-lit streets. Past a derelict church, shuttered shops, darkened offices. They crossed the river. A wide dark expanse of park opened out to the left, a row of gothic Victorian buildings rose along the right. Nothing was familiar. She was out far beyond her knowledge of Belfast.

  “Is it far now?” she asked, quietly.

  “Not far.”

  She waited awkwardly at his elbow, watching him fumble the key into the lock. He pushed the door open, found the light switch, flicked it on. An unshaded bulb hung from the ceiling. Uncarpeted stair-treads led up to the first floor, edged with old white gloss paint. A telephone on an upturned box. He walked past it, up the stairs. Claire followed him up to the landing.

  He tugged on the lightcord. Clean white ceramic glittered in the sudden light. He leant on the basin, looking in the mirror for a moment, then turned on the hot tap, rolling his sleeves up to the elbow. His skin was brown against the white shirt.

  Claire felt useless, helpless, out-of-place. Grainne, she thought, regularly woke up in his bed, showered in his shower, dried herself on his towels. She probably got splinters off the stairs. She would know what to do with Paul, what to say, where to find cotton wool, lint, plasters. All this would be familiar to Grainne, almost home. Claire leant awkwardly in the doorway, asked again, “What happened?”