Once in a Lifetime (34 page)

Her brother Greg fancied Ruth. Dara wasn’t sure how it happened. They saw each other often, living across the green from each other as they did, and sometimes Greg travelled to school with Dara — something that was almost unheard of in Greg’s school, St Dominic’s. Big brothers didn’t usually walk with little sisters. But Greg and Dara were different; they were very close: they had to be. They didn’t have anyone else, just their dad and no mum. On those walks to school, Ruth and Greg somehow fell for each other. Greg was tall and good-looking, Dara could see that. And Ruth was pretty, even though she didn’t have good clothes or much money for make-up. She had a glow and a beauty that came from the inside.

Dara wasn’t jealous, she loved them both. But she didn’t want Ruth to know everything, especially when it came to what really went on in their house. She’d never told her. It was too shaming. And now if Greg was going out with Ruth, he’d tell her everything.

‘You won’t, will you, please?’ she asked him.

‘Don’t be daft, Dara,’ he said. ‘What am I going to say?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said quietly.

‘She is your best friend,’ Greg went on.

‘I just don’t want her to know,’ Dara said, ‘that’s all.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell her.’

At night, when all the kids in the neighbourhood played football on the green or sprawled on the grass, Greg and Ruth sat on the low wall near the swings and talked. Sitting on the wall was like taking out an ad in the newspaper: We’re going out, it proclaimed. It was the couples’ wall, dotted with people sitting beside each other, not always touching, but close. There was never too much open affection between the couples on the wall. They might be laughed at. The boys playing five-aside would jeer, rude jokes would be made. They might roar lustily that the girl needed an aspirin for contraception.

‘Keep it between your knees,’ they’d shout. ‘If it falls out, you’re fucked!’

Dara went in early the first evening Ruth and Greg sat together on the wall. Not that Dad cared what time she went home. She could come home at three in the morning with the Rolling Stones trailing behind and he wouldn’t mind. The more the merrier, especially if they brought booze.

When Dara left school she went to work in the bank. She both loved and hated the bank. It was her first proper job working Saturdays in the supermarket near home didn’t count.

She loved the fact that people weren’t allowed to shout at you no matter what happened, but she hated the groaning inevitability of it. The long, slow slog of the week would be followed by a veritable titbit of a weekend, like a teeny taste of chocolate cake and you’d barely have enough before the week was back, dull and tiring.

Work itself was a disappointment to Dara. Everyone wanted a job in the bank. Pensionable and safe in a time of uncertainty, the bank was a dream job - according to everyone else.

But they didn’t have to put up with being a junior in the Inchicore branch of Harp Bank, and spending their days sorting the reams of post into piles according to the eight-digit account

numbers and then matching each item with a piece of microfiche - a four-inch by six-inch piece of see-through plastic that could be viewed through a magnifier - on to which eight sheets of paper could be copied. The letters were then taken to the microfiche department for transferring on to the tiny plastic sheets. Once copied, the letters were delivered to their destinations within the bank and Dara had to file the microfiche in the correct filing cabinet. This process had to happen within one day. It was tortuous work and searching through boxes of microfiche hurt like hell when the hard plastic scratched against her fingers. Worse was trying to decipher people’s writing on their letters. Possible account numbers had to be checked against their microfiche matches in order to find out whether a number was supposed to be a 6 instead of a 0.

‘Why can’t people write clearly?’ complained Dara’s friend Elaine. ‘How hard can it be to write their account numbers legibly? Monkeys would write better than most of these idiots.’

‘Hey, some of my best friends are monkeys,’ joked Dara.

Then she moved on to their favourite subject: ‘What are we going to do for lunch?’

Elaine stopped filing for a minute and looked thoughtful.

Sometimes, the whole staff piled into cars and went up to Kitty O’Shea’s, which was always fun. The problem was getting the last customers out of the bank before it closed at 1.25 p.m.

On Kitty O’Shea mass exodus days, there was always some mad old bat who came in at precisely 1.24 p.m. with sack loads of ha’pennies to be weighed.

The counter staff would then have to stay at their posts, smiling and trying to look as if they didn’t mind the stench of dirty coppers when what they really wanted to be smelling was vegetable soup and a ham sandwich.

And the people without cars, like Dara and Elaine, had to hop from foot to foot, waiting for their lifts.

‘We’re broke,’ Elaine reminded Dara now. ‘We brought in sandwiches, remember?’

‘Cheese on its own, because I’ve no butter,’ said Dara with a certain gloom at the memory. ‘I hate my own sandwiches.

They always taste horrible. The same thing in a pub is delicious.

Why is that?’

‘Because you can’t cook?’

‘You don’t cook sandwiches.’

‘OK then, because you can’t have a lager with your sandwich if you eat it here,’ Elaine pointed out.

‘Yeah, that’s it. Magic ingredient in sandwiches is lager.’

The uniform didn’t help. Harp Bank’s uniform was Kelly green, with an ill-fitting A-line skirt clearly designed by someone who’d never seen a skirt before, a cream polyester blouse with little green harps scattered over it, and a jaunty little green scarf tied like a bow in the collar. In summer, the polyester made the wearer smell of perspiration, and in winter it made them shiver with cold. The plus of the uniform was that it transformed the most unbanklike person into a demure office worker because it was simply impossible to look either cool or uninterested when wearing Kelly green harps. The colour went well with dark hair like Dara’s, and Elaine believed that the bank hired more brunettes than any other hair colour because of this.

‘You’d be fired long ago if you were a blonde,’ she said sometimes.

‘If I was a blonde, I’d be sitting on the manager’s lap all afternoon - and nobody who does that ever gets fired,’ replied Dara. The bank manager had never even so much as flirted with her, for which she was profoundly grateful. She didn’t know what she’d do if he did. Her defence was a bold, slightly confrontational stare and a slash of dusty purple shadow blazed above her brown eyes. Don’t mess with me was the message from both the stare and the cosmetics.

‘Where should we start tonight?’ Jean asked Dara and Elaine.

It was Friday, the cue for major partying. Dara had been

astonished and thrilled to find that people who worked in banks were mental. Once the clock hit the magic number five, the whole place cleared out.

‘Dunno,’ said Dara.

Jean was new and was not entirely allowed into Dara and Elaine’s little gang of two, but she was nearly there.

‘Captain Americas?’ said Elaine.

‘Ace,’ said Dara, relenting. ‘I love that place.’

‘I’ll phone Jason,’ Elaine said. ‘It’s only a quarter past, he’ll still be at his desk.’ Jason was Elaine’s sort-of boyfriend, He worked in a bank in town with lots of people who also loved to party.

When Elaine had mustered up a crowd, they took turns in the small women’s toilet, changing clothes and applying makeup.

Dara owned one fabulous going-out coat: a long, velvet, frock-coat. The sort of thing Siouxsie Sioux might wear. With her crochet fingerless gloves, plenty of eyeliner and her fishnets, Dara felt she could do Siouxsie better than Siouxsie herself. Her hair wasn’t the right colour and her eyes weren’t as feline despite the eyeliner, but still.

Jean, who had forgotten to bring black tights to replace her work American tan ones, almost spat with jealousy at the sight of Dara in her finery.

‘You look cool! I look like a dork.’

‘You look fine,’ Dara said. ‘You could buy black tights when we’re out.’

Jean grimaced. She was saving up to buy a moped. She had her eye on a lilac one. She’d be mobile, no more waiting at bus stops. ‘It’s a waste when I’ve so many black ones at home.’ Dara shrugged. Saving was an alien concept to her. She never had a penny to her name. As soon as she got paid, the money was tied up: on rent, on paying people she owed, on going out.

When she was dressed, she went back to her desk to collect the rest of her stuff.

‘Where are you and your little peachy friends going?’ said James. James was three levels above her in bank hierarchy, and therefore couldn’t be cheeked. He perched on the edge of Dara’s desk, leaning ominously over her. Dara’s radar fizzed when he was near, she couldn’t quite get a reading on him.

Was he harmless and interesting, or dangerous? It was impossible to tell.

‘Out,’ she said crisply. Less was more with the likes of James.

‘Out. Interesting,’ murmured James, leaning closer so that she could smell his breath.

She felt a momentary flash of fear at his closeness, the sense that he was a feral beast and the normal rules of human behaviour wouldn’t apply to him. But she cast it off. Fear was deadly. If you let them know you were afraid, then they’d won, they’d take what they wanted.

Dara grabbed her stuff. ‘Yes, out,’ she said, and gave him the benefit of her Siouxsie glare. Go away, it said.

Jason’s friend, Felippe, held her arm and they stood by the side of the road on Stephen’s Green, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city, even at half past midnight. Dara tried hard to concentrate, but it was too difficult. Her vision was cloudy and no matter which eye she closed, she still couldn’t see properly.

‘Gotta get a taxi,’ she managed to say. ‘It’s furry late.’

‘Sure,’ Felippe said.

Together, they weaved their way into the middle of the road and started hailing cars. As if they were stones in a river, cars swerved to avoid them.

‘They’re not taxis!’ shouted someone else from the footpath.

‘They’re ordinary cars.’

This was unbearably funny and Dara collapsed on to the road laughing, trying to haul Felippe down with her. ‘Not taxis!’ she giggled. ‘Ordinary cars!’

‘You’re soo funny,’ Felippe said. ‘Ooh look, I think the Green’s open.’ He unhooked his arm from hers and wobbled

over to the other side of the street where he began to rattle the Stephen’s Green park gate in the manner of a person trying to get out of jail.

‘Get off the road, Dara,’ shouted someone. ‘You’re going to be run over.’

Offended, Dara got unsteadily to her feet. ‘No, I’m not,’

she claimed. ‘Look. Up. Not run over.’

A car came perilously close to her, skidding in a flash of steel to avoid her. ‘Oops,’ she said, and that was very funny too, so she had to sit down again for a minute.

‘You’ll be killed, you stupid cow.’

Somebody sounded angry, and whoever it was had grabbed her and was pulling her back across the road to the safety of the pavement. It was Lawrence, another friend of Jason’s, a very boring straight person who didn’t know how to enjoy himself. But cute, Dara thought. Hard to tell because he was so wobbly in front of her but she thought he might be cute.

Nice shirt, striped and with purple in it. She liked purple.

He’d got her a cab and was holding the door open and trying to shove her in.

Charming.

‘- please take her, she won’t get sick in the car.’ ‘I won’t,’ Dara said loudly. ‘I’m not drunk, you know. Not even a little bit. I could drink much more, but I have to get up for work in the morning.’

‘Tomorrow’s Saturday, you moron. Shut up, Dara, will you?’

She was facing Lawrence and she had a nice idea of how to say goodbye to him, a memento of the evening. Swiftly, she pulled up his purple-striped shirt, found his nipple and bit it.

‘Goodnight,’ she said, and let herself slump into the back seat of the taxi. ‘Home, driver, and don’t spare the horses.’

Morning slammed into her consciousness. No gentle opening of the eyes but a rapid sit-up-in-the-bed moment as her pulse

thumped drumbeats in her body. Where was she? What time was it? What…?

Her own bed and in her own clothes, which was good. She felt carefully and found she was still totally dressed, everything on. No items of clothing gone - that was always scary.

But fully dressed. In her own bed and she was - she looked around with anxiety - alone. No sign of another person with her and since she was still clothed, it was unlikely she’d brought anyone home. People home, men, meant she’d have taken some of her clothes off and even if she couldn’t remember anything actually happening, it was always there, the possibility. On those days, she’d shower for ages, scrubbing with the loofah she’d bought in the Body Shop until her flesh was raw. Like monks from the olden days, scrubbing away their sin. Today though, she was dressed. No man, no body snoring beside her.

Which was one good thing, but instantly she began the roll call of possible bad things, piecing together the night before.

Where she’d gone, what she’d done there. Sometimes, the receipts in her handbag were the only clues, clues that added up to lots of her salary. Being broke never upset her when she was drinking. Then, she was rich as J.R. Ewing, ready to order wine no matter how expensive or how awful it was.

She’d done it again. She’d only meant to have one drink, just the one, and what had happened? Millions of drinks, shots and tequilas and you name it pumped into her.

The wave of shame that rose up in her was physical. Shame could be physical. If flirtation made a person blush with a rosy hue, then shame was a fire of pain.

Rhona had been in the bank longer than Dara and had moved on from microfiche filing to answering telephone calls about deposit accounts.

‘You don’t drink like the rest of us,’ Rhona said. Dara felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.