Still Life with Strings (7 page)

“Oh, his body is
something to be coveted just as much as his talent, let me tell you. But
anyway, stop reading into this. I think I’m just fan-girling.”

There’s a knock at the
front door, and my heart leaps. I give each of my friends a look urging them to
be on their best behaviour and then rise to go answer it.

I stare at my
reflection in the hall mirror for a moment. Little zinging gold sparks radiate
from my chest, and butterflies flit around my head. I think I even see a love
heart or two. I swipe them all away, not reading too much into their presence.
When I finally open the door, Shane is standing on the step, holding a bottle
of sparkling grape juice.

“Hey,” I breathe.

“Hey, Bluebird.”

We both smile and take
each other in for a moment.

“You look great,” he
says.

I’m wearing an old
sundress, no shoes.

“Thanks, so do you. I
see you brought refreshments.”

“Yeah, I almost grabbed
a bottle of wine, but then I realised that would be counter-productive.”

“Counter-productive,
indeed,” I say with a smirk, taking the bottle from him and helping him out of
his jacket. I catch a whiff of his cologne and get assaulted by memories of our
one night together…if you could even call it a night. Swallowing hard, I hang
the jacket by the end of the staircase and lead him into the kitchen to meet
the others.

Jacinta Lennon
loved to paint pictures of her daughter.

It was one of
her favourite things to do.

She took one
final look at the painting she was about to sell to a passer-by, admiring the
brush strokes and the quality of the canvas.

Her daughter
stood within the frame, a blue beacon on the grey street, standing so still on
her box.

Closing her eyes
briefly, she made a wish that it would bring its new owner as much pleasure as
it brought her.

Then she handed
it away. She would never see it again.

Shane pauses halfway down the hall as he
turns to study a painting hanging in a dark wooden frame. It’s one of my
mother’s. She never really held down a steady job when she was alive; however,
she managed to keep the household afloat with welfare payments and the money
she made selling her paintings on St. Steven’s Green. She loved to paint
scenery and sometimes portraits. Often she’d make me sit for her. There are
dozens of paintings of me up in the attic. I hate looking at them because I
find it weird seeing myself through the eyes of another person.

“Where did you get
this?” Shane asks, his gaze roaming over the country scene depicted.

“My mother painted it.
She did lots of pictures like this one. Do you like it?”

“Ah,” he says with a
sharp breath, as though something has just made sense to him. “It’s very good.
Your mother was a talented woman.”

“She was. Come on,
everyone’s dying to meet you,” I say, linking my arm through his and leading
him into the kitchen.

Clark is the first to
greet Shane, thrusting his hand out for a shake and introducing himself. I
catch sight of Ben shooting Lara an
omg, he’s fucking hot
look. Lara
gives him an
omg, I fucking know
look back. I smile to myself a little
in satisfaction.

Though to me Shane’s
not just hot, he’s beautiful. Man-beautiful.

Dangerous,
slippery-slope thoughts I’m having these days.

I put the grape juice
in the fridge as Shane says hello to Ben and Lara, taking the seat at the table
where I had previously been sitting.

“Oh, Jade, Shane took
your chair. Now you’ll have to sit on his lap,” Ben chirps with a saucy wink.

Shane shifts to look at
me apologetically. “I’m sorry, I didn’t…”

“Oh, would you stop?
I’ll grab a chair from under the stairs,” I say, shaking my head at Ben. If I
know my friend, he’s going to go out of his way to try to embarrass me tonight.
Ben just has that way about him.

When I return with the
chair, I set it down beside Shane, and we watch as Lara has her hair cut. Ben
already washed it before Shane arrived. It’s hard to talk once he whips out the
hairdryer, but we just about manage to make casual chitchat.

Ben takes me upstairs
to wash my hair in the bathroom when he’s done with Lara. We return a few
minutes later, and I find with relief that Shane and Clark are deep in
conversation, about politics of all things. Lara looks like she’s ready to nod
off from boredom.

I can’t help myself
when I brush my hand along Shane’s shoulder as I pass him by. He stiffens and
then relaxes, turning his head to stare up at me hotly. I shouldn’t be teasing
him like this, but every time I see him I feel this overwhelming urge to touch
him.

“Clark, will you call
for the Indian now? That way it’ll be here once Ben’s finished with my hair.”

“Will do,” says Clark,
standing to retrieve his phone.

Shane watches as Ben
starts to trim the ends of my hair. I stare right back at him, unable to pay
attention to Lara and Ben, who are talking about the latest episode of their
favourite soap opera. My body gets all warm as we continue to fuck each other
with our eyes. Jesus, I want him so badly.

The eye-fuck Olympics
are interrupted only when Clark starts asking everyone what they want to eat.
Shane’s voice is gravelly when he speaks. I feel a silly little satisfaction
deep in my belly to know I’ve affected him. Immediately afterward I reprimand
myself for being so careless. I know I can’t have a relationship with Shane,
and yet here I am, leading him on.

The moment he breaks my
heart, I’ll be straight back on the vodka, and that just can’t happen. There
are too many people who need me sober and functioning.

The food arrives just
as Ben has finished blow-drying my newly trimmed hair. Shane bends forward and
reaches out to run his hand down it. I watch him curiously. A second later he
pulls away and clears his throat, getting up to assist Clark in dishing out the
Indian.

“So, tonight’s theme is
anger,” Clark announces once everybody’s seated with their food.

Hmm, we’ve never done
anger as a theme before.

“Someone care to
explain?” says Shane with a bewildered expression.

“Clark’s a counsellor,”
I tell him. “Every month he gives us a new theme, and we have to talk about it.
The theme is always an emotion. You have to discuss the time in your life you
felt the given emotion most intensely.”

“Ah,” he furrows his
brow. “Do I have to take part?”

“Of course you do!”
exclaims Ben, reaching out to pinch Shane playfully on the arm. “Otherwise it’s
just voyeurism, and that’s no fun unless there’s sex involved.”

Shane laughs
good-naturedly, and I’m surprisingly relieved at how well he’s getting along
with my friends.
You are not grooming him to be your boyfriend
,
Jade,
so stop it
. I have to scold myself into submission; otherwise, my
girl-brain will lose the run of herself.

I like to think that I
have two brains. One is my girl brain and the other is my boy brain. They both
have their good sides and their bad sides. For instance, my girl brain is great
for organising, while my boy brain is good for fixing shit, and when you live
in a house like mine, stuff gets broken all the time. My boy brain is crap at
counselling night. He doesn’t want to talk about his feelings. My girl brain is
ace at counselling night. She loves to talk about her feelings. In fact,
sometimes she likes it a little too much.

“There’s no need to be
anxious,” Clark reassures him. “What gets said on counselling night stays in
counselling night. Or something like that.” He grins and dips some naan bread
into his korma.

“Well,” says Lara. “I
think I’d like to go first because anger is something I know
all
about.”

“Here we go,” says Ben,
rolling his eyes teasingly. We all know the story Lara’s going to tell. In
fact, she’s told it for a number of different themes already: sadness, despair,
heartbreak. She eyes Shane, seeming eager to recount it again for new ears.

“Hey! Don’t take the
piss. I’ve had a lot to be angry about in my life. The thing that made me most
angry, though, was when I came home and found ‘he who shall not be named’
shagging my slut neighbour Leonie McEvoy. Leonie McEvoy lived in the apartment
next to mine for two years, and she’d always be hanging around making ‘fuck me’
eyes whenever my boyfriend came to visit, wearing the tightest pair of jeans
and the most revealing top she could find. She knew when he was there because
she’d recognise his navy Ford Fiesta parked outside.

“‘You’re crazy, Lara,’
he’d say whenever I’d warn him not to go near her. ‘I only have eyes for you,’
he’d declare, the lying toe rag. I swear to God I felt like I was turning into
the Hulk when I sauntered in tired after a long day at work, and there he was
going to town on that wrote-off walking advertisement for chlamydia.”

We all burst out
laughing while she pauses for breath before addressing Shane. She’s been
addressing him the whole time because she’s well aware we’ve already heard this
story before. “He’d moved in with me at this point, you see, and I was three
months pregnant with my little girl, Mia. I didn’t care that I’d have to raise
my baby by myself — I wasn’t going to stay with someone who cheated on me. I
was so angry I smashed almost every plate I owned before kicking him out and
telling him not to show his face ever again.”

“Well, that sounds
pretty hardcore,” says Shane with a low whistle when Lara’s finished with her
story.

She folds her arms,
looking satisfied with his reaction. Ben goes next, detailing how there’d been
a boy who’d bullied him brutally at school for being gay. Years later Ben had
been standing on the street watching the pride parade go by, and who did he see
sitting atop one of the floats wearing a crystal tiara on his head and a pointy
Madonna bra? The very same bully who’d made his life a misery. Ben was so angry
that he marched straight into the parade, climbed atop the float, and pulled
the guy off it by the hair before punching his lights out.

I can see Clark eyeing
Shane as Ben’s story comes to a close, and Shane looks sort of uncomfortable at
the prospect of having to share a story, so I volunteer to go next.

“Hmmm, do we only get
to tell one story?” I ask Clark. “I’ve been equally angry in the extreme about
a few things over the years.”

“Just one story, Jade.
Pick the one when you were most angry.”

I make a show of
scratching at my chin as Ben gives me a sympathetic look. He knows exactly when
I was most angry. It’s not something I’m ever going to share, and he knows it.
So I select a substitute and lie.

“Well, there’s not much
of a story to tell about when I was most angry. It was the day my mother was
diagnosed with lung cancer. She had a lot of years still left, but that bastard
of a disease took her. It’s hard to deal with anger when there isn’t an actual
person to focus it on.” I give Ben a sad smile. “You can’t pull cancer down off
a gay pride float and beat the shit out of it, no matter how much you might
want to.”

They all chuckle, and
relief washes over me as I push my true story back down into the recesses of my
mind. I can’t think about that. It was one of the main reasons why I began
drinking at such a young age. I might have been angry when Mum got her
diagnosis, but mostly I was just sad. Sad and determined not to keep living my
life in a drunken stupor so that I could block out the guilt and loss I felt
for so many years.

Shane leans forward and
squeezes my hand comfortingly, his eyes full of empathy. We stare at each other
for a long time, and then he excuses himself to go use the bathroom.

My friends get quiet
when he leaves. Ben breaks the silence by declaring, “Jade, that man seriously
wants to Channing all over your Tatum.”

I let out a burst of
laughter. “You watch far too many YouTube videos, Ben.”

“Oh, Channing Tatum,”
says Lara with a dreamy sigh. “Now there’s one hot slice of shepherd’s pie.”

“Number one,” says
Clark, pointing at Lara. “If you’re going to use the ‘hot slice of pie’
analogy, the pie in question needs to be dessert-based. Apple is always a
popular choice. Savoury pies just sound wrong. And number two,” he goes on,
giving me a cheeky wink. “I think Jade would much prefer if he Colined all over
her Farrell.”

“Oh, my God, would you
all shut up! He might hear you,” I exclaim.

“What? I know for a
fact you keep a DVD of
Alexander the Great
hidden under your bed. And
let’s face it, you’re not watching that movie for the history.”

I narrow my gaze at
him. “You’re evil.”

“I do try.”

At that moment Shane
returns to the room, and they all start smiling at him.

“So, Shane, I think
it’s your turn to share,” says Ben, clasping his hands together.

“Ah, right,” says
Shane, sitting down beside me and grimacing. “Anger. Well, I guess my story is
quite similar to Lara’s. I came back to my hotel room in Vienna after returning
from a party to find my fiancée of two years
in flagrante delicto
with
my best friend Justin. He was the cellist in my string quartet, and we’d been
doing a set of shows there.”