On the Floor (28 page)

I'm thinking how all stars die, just in lots of different ways. The biggest ones die soonest and in the most spectacular fashion. A red super giant that explodes into a supernova and for the briefest of moments shines brighter than all the other stars in the galaxy put together. But collapse is inevitable, it all ends in a black hole so dense that not even light can escape.

Burnout is final. That's how it goes.

‘Open the robe,' he says.

I look up but his is not a stare I can hold, something in his extinguished eyes makes me think of the tabernacle on Good Friday when the light has gone out, when God is dead and we are left alone with our darkness.

‘Open the robe.' Rex growls faintly, a little ridge of fur stiffening on his spine.

‘I've already seen everything, you know,' Pie Man is breathing hard. ‘And you're not even all that great.'

He reaches forward and opens the robe, slides it apart right to my shoulders. ‘Your tits are small.' Lips curled downwards like he's looking at a piece of dogshit. ‘Not what you'd call sexy.' There is something like nausea rising in my lungs and I swallow hard though maybe spewing all over my skinny tits would be the best thing that could happen right now. His eyes narrow and blackening, his fat finger prods my collarbone and begins a slow trail down the middle of my chest, he is watching me clench my teeth, his finger slipping slow and steady down over the swell. It stops, hovers just above my breast. I close my eyes.

Out of my limbs a sort of spasm, I am trying not to shake. Rex stirs, turns his golden head and I open my eyes to see him twist his neck and look at me. Sadly, it seems.

‘If you hurt me, he will bite you.'

Pie Man doesn't register my voice, his eyes are closed and all air sucked out of me now, my throat in some kind of traction, he slumps forward making some kind of moan and I scream ‘HELP' but his hand clamps down over my nose and mouth, my jaws so wide I cannot bite into the flesh and I am kicking underneath the tangle of sheet and Rex is barking, Pie Man is saying ‘All right Rex, all right Rex,' and Rex, who is backing away, off the bed, then Pie Man's curdled face close up, holding my head in his hands.

‘If I wanted to fuck you I could have done it while you were passed out.' He pushes me back and sideways, my temple snaps against the board and it is this that roars my brain and I swing my left arm wide, high, close, my wristwatch catching his cheek, but he does not release me, just holds it in easy victory. I am so completely disarmable.

‘Don't you get it? Don't you understand anything, Geri? Any man can take whatever he wants from you.' A pronouncement or a forecast. A lesson taught or delivered.

I hear my own whimpering and Rex's nails clicking away on the wooden hallway. He wants no part in this humiliation. And so I am truly alone. This has the feel of my soul shrivelling up to die. Pie Man lets my arm slip, grabs a pillow and strips the case from it, twists it and stuffs it in my whining mouth, ties it fast and hard behind my head. I am gagged, bound, the sound of my own shortening breaths against the cloth. He pats his cheek, inspects the little smear of blood on his fingers. My saliva coming fast and free. I cannot swallow, I will be sick and I will choke, so I close my eyes. I must will myself out of this body, detach and disengage like a shuttle that sheds its casing, my own self unhooked from all this. For this is only one possible world. In another I am running free now, like Setanta whose feet never touched the forest floor. My hair is a streaming banner behind me, Rex bounds alongside like a fearless warrior hound, and in this world I can ford the deepest rivers, scale the highest mountain, I am untouchable, uncatchable, I am soaring above it all.

The mattress heaves upwards. Pie Man rises without looking at me.
He turns and leaves but does not close the door. There is a rustling sound from the galley kitchen and I strain to listen. He is muttering to Rex, he could be reassuring him with food, bamboozling him with biscuits to make him forget that I lie bound and gagged in the bedroom. But I get to work on the pillowcase gag, scrabble and tug and it slips down my chin just as he walks back into the room.

‘Corporate Slave Animal,' I tell his approach and he stops by the bed, takes in the pillowcase lying crumpled around my neck. He nods. But at least his hands are empty. I am too scared now to keep silent, to leave him alone with his thoughts and I am a salesperson after all and I am not without resourcefulness. This would be the wrong time to cave. So let's just be clever about this, Geri, let's keep talking, keep him interested, and steer him away from thin ice to safer ground. Let's just stay alive till the next best thing.

‘Corporate Slave Animal,' I repeat. ‘You know Kenichi-san out in Tokyo? It's what he calls the office workers. It's a way of thinking about things. When you don't own yourself anymore.'

There is a fading flush about his cheeks, a patchy unshavenness and a whiff of stale flesh. And in the slump of his shoulders, his flab seems to be pulling him lower as if a great tiredness adds to the weight. He takes a step towards the window where the night sky is washed with light glow. His lips move, he seems to be whispering something and then he yawns, a great long hippo gape of the jaws, that from down here on the bed seems to play in slow motion.

‘You're tired,' I say, ‘you haven't slept.' He shakes his sagging head and looks wildly around the room and the chaos he has created. And I realise that he needs me to show him a way out of this. So I must tread carefully, proceed with caution. My heart batters against its cage. ‘You look exhausted,' I say again and pat the bed. ‘Sit down.'

He nods at me, at the mattress and then lowers his bulk onto the bed so that he is facing the window with his back to me. ‘Lie down,'
I tell him and he reels backwards like a felled log, his head at right angles to my hip. And the light sinks, as if a dimmer switch has been thrown over the city. From this view his hair is thick and brown, dull and choppily cut, an uneven stab at layering around the crown. His lids close, perhaps he is just exhausted by event, by all that has happened to him at the hands of others, defeated by the bit players and the jocks who steal the spotlight and get the girls. His huge red legs anchor him to the floor and now he spreads his arms wide in cruciform.

Rex appears in the doorway, head cocked in uncharacteristic hesitation as if he is weighing up the alternatives. But instead of bounding over to the bed he stands silent and watchful. There is a new sobriety here, a new attentiveness to the situation, as if he has finally arrived at the gates of adulthood. He pads demurely over and hops onto the bed with an impressive delicacy, positioning himself democratically between Pie Man and me.

‘You want to know about my circus trick?' Pie Man doesn't answer. ‘You want to hear the story?' He doesn't even open his eyes, but there is a quality of stillness that I will take for assent.

‘Long multiplication was the beginning of my unmasking.' Rex turns over to lie on his back with his paws in the air. I scratch his tummy and he sighs contentedly in a trusting sprawl.

‘Mrs Donovan, fourth class. So I was nine.' A sea of plaits and bobbles. Desks with sloped lids, stained with old ink.

‘Geraldine Molloy, show me how you worked it out.' She slapped the ruler on my desk.

‘I did them in my head.'

‘Don't be a silly, Geraldine. Those sums are far too complicated to do in your head. Now show me where you worked them out.' She slid the ruler underneath my orange copybook and lifted it, as if there might be something hidden underneath. ‘Open it up and show me.'

I opened it slowly to reveal the graph paper, a pristine universe of unsullied squares, the backdrop for all the numbers I could project in my head.

‘Right then, Geraldine.' Mrs Donovan stiffened inside her cardigan. ‘So I suppose you can work out 276 times 98 in your head?'

‘27,048.'

The girls shuffled in their chairs. Orla sniggering behind me. Mrs Donovan tightened her grip on the ruler.

‘Or 322 times 59?'

‘18,998.'

Her hand twisting at a pink button. My fingertips damp, barely pressing on the wood, a hot buzz of defiance blazing at my neck. I tipped my chin upwards.

‘Ask me another,' my little girl voice swelling thick in my throat. Emer's thumb drifted into her open mouth, the way it did when she was nervous. Mrs Donovan staring down at me the way you'd take the measure of a snarling dog. Suspicion glittering in her dark irises, the deep furrow of her brow. That she might be the butt end of some unpleasant prank here, some trick played by silly girls to make teachers look stupid in front of a class that was growing restless now, gripping the desk edges with excited fingers.

‘433 times 78.'

‘33,774.'

‘45 times 23.'

‘1035.'

She stalled. A little quiver in her peach lip. I stood up, stepped to the right so I could see the test questions on the backboard behind her and I reeled off the answers in loud sing-song:

‘And 872 times 63 is 54,936.'

‘469 times 86 is 40,334.'

‘777 times 99 is 76,923.'

The wall clock ticked. The girls held their breath all around me. Pink blobs appeared on Mrs Donovan's cheeks like she'd been slapped.

‘You're not even checking my answers,' I told her.

Through the corner of my eye I could see Orla suck in her cheeks with the effort of suppressing giggles, she threw a covert glance at Emer
and then there was a loud explosion from Marian, helpless over by the window and then they were all at it, the whole class laughing their heads off and I was laughing too and looking round, laughing at them laughing at me, for they too believed I had found some clever trick.

Mrs Donovan banged her ruler down on my desk, slammed so hard it snapped and a piece clattered to the floor. She stood clutching the broken stub like a knife. No one was laughing now. The bell hammered above the door.

There was a little plaque that read ‘Headmistress' on Mrs Murphy's door. A half-eaten Rich Tea beside her teacup.

‘No one likes a cheat, Geraldine.'

‘I wasn't cheating. I was doing the sums.'

‘Enough now,' Mrs Murphy raised her hand. ‘Concentrate on your lessons. Your brother was always a such good boy. Why don't you take a leaf out of Kieran's book?'

In the playground the girls were playing hopscotch. Orla stopped on one leg.

‘God, did you see Donovan's face, I though she'd burst.'

‘What did she say?'

‘Did you get lines, did you?'

‘Where did you have the answers?'

‘Had you the sums up your sleeve or something?'

‘Did you learn them off by heart?'

‘Will you show us how you do it?'

‘Will you do it again tomorrow?'

‘I didn't have anything up my sleeve. I didn't learn them off by heart. I just did it, like I said.'

‘Yeh, course you did.' Orla tugged her plait frowning.

‘I worked them out in my head.'

‘Course you did.'

Emer picked at her pinafore pocket. Marian bit her fingernail, stared.

‘I DID.'

‘Liar.'

‘What did you say?'

‘You heard.'

‘Say that again.' I pucked Orla with my elbow.

‘No one can do those sums in their head. Mrs Donovan said so.'

‘I can.'

‘You're such a show-off,' she said, hands on hips. ‘It's a trick.'

‘It's not a trick.'

‘Like magic or something,' she flicked her plait behind her shoulder. ‘Like when they take rabbits out of hats.'

‘Or pennies behind your ears.'

‘My dad can do that.'

‘It's a trick.'

‘Yeah, it's all tricks.'

‘It's not.'

‘Is so.'

‘NOT.'

‘SO.'

‘Not.'

‘Liar. Cheat.'

‘BITCH.' I pushed her hard. Orla wobbled backwards, then flew at me but I grabbed her plait, thick and rough like rope, yanked as hard as I could. She screamed, ‘GETOFFMECHEAT', and I kicked her shin. She was on her knees and I jumped on her, ground her ugly face into the tarmac, the girls were yelling, ‘Miss, Miss, come quick,' and I was screaming ‘I AM NOT A CHEAT' and Orla lay there roaring until the teachers' hands like clamps on my arms dragged me away.

‘Now, Geraldine,' prompted the headmistress. I stood beside her desk facing down the audience that was arranged in a little semicircle before me. My mother sat fidgeting with the clasp of her handbag. There was an empty middle chair where Orla should have been, but instead she squirmed on her own mother's lap, trying to make herself small and cuddlable, a big pink scratch on her cheek, a plaster on her knee with iodine smeared underneath, a bruised shin. Eyes sparkling with the righteous thrill of the wounded.

‘Geraldine?' Mrs Murphy's voice was sharp.

I stretched my neck as high as it would go. Facing down my mother's tight lips. Refusing to offer the expected apology.