‘Tasha’s meant to die in this tonight,’ she said solemnly.
‘She doesn’t die,’ Joanne said. ‘She just gets lost in the bush for a while.’
‘Ah, fuck you,’ Sarah said. ‘I was looking forward to that. Can you stop telling me spoilers from the Internet?’
‘I’m fucked,’ said Joanne. ‘How the hell am I going to come up with something for dinner?’
‘I’ve had mine, don’t worry about me,’ said Sarah, gesturing to an empty plate on the coffee-table. ‘But I’d murder a cup of tea.’
This was how they lived. A Boston marriage, Sarah called it, and then Joanne’s part of the gag was to tell her she should be so lucky. Since their last year of college, when Sarah had moved into the house in Stoneybatter, their evenings and their weekends had melted into a comfortable routine; dinner in front of the television Monday to Thursday, sometimes, they went for a pint in Walshes down the road. Always, they went into town on Fridays and Saturdays, usually with different sets of friends, but always, at some stage, crossing paths with each other. After the pub on weekends, there was often a house party somewhere. And then on Sunday nights, as they grimaced and brooded in the face of the coming week, they’d have an Indian takeaway and a bottle of wine.
‘I’m making dinner for Mark,’ Joanne said, and Sarah gave a whoop of innuendo.
‘Don’t,’ Joanne said. ‘Did you hear anything from Deirdre today?’
Sarah shook her head. Deirdre was the girl she had got together with at the party on Saturday night; Joanne knew that Sarah had been out with her again on Sunday night, and the next night. She had just qualified as a solicitor; Joanne knew her to see from Blackhall Place. Sarah had been into her from the first time she had met her with Joanne, in the Stag’s Head one night after Christmas, when a load of trainees had met up for a drink; Sarah was tagging along, and clearly bored, until Deirdre arrived and squeezed in at the table beside her. After that, Joanne had been under orders to text Sarah whenever a trainee get-together was planned. There weren’t that many — everyone was usually too exhausted — but there had been one about a month ago, when Sarah had been talking to Deirdre for hours. And then there was the party, when one or the other of them had finally made their move. Which was something about which Joanne was still not quite clear.
‘So, wait,’ she said now, and Sarah looked at her warily. ‘You never told me the full story about how it happened the other night. Who kissed who?’
Sarah shrugged and pointed the remote at the television. But she did not change the channel. ‘It was a mutual decision,’ she said. ‘We both wanted to.’
‘That was handy.’
‘I could say the same thing about you and Farmer Joe. Handy. The two of you were definitely handy.’
‘Shut up,’ Joanne groaned.
Sarah stretched. ‘I’m only messing. So, he’s coming around tonight, is he? Do you want a hand with dinner?’
‘No, you’re all right,’ Joanne said, as she got up to go to the kitchen.
‘Good,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m knackered after those bloody Koreans.’
Sarah taught English to Korean students in a language school on Dawson Street. She had studied English at Trinity, and every year she made noises about going back to college to do a master’s in something related to her degree, but she had just watched another round of application deadlines pass by. She complained incessantly about the students yet always warmed to a few of them, and they seemed fond of her, piling her with gifts of flowers, or packets of biscuits, or magazines they thought she would like. That she was considered the target readership for magazines filled with real-life stories about broken marriages and botched surgery caused Sarah real dismay, but she ate the biscuits, and she placed the flowers in vases around the house.
There was a particularly gaudy arrangement on the kitchen table now.
‘Can grass be blue?’ Joanne shouted back to the sitting room. There came no reply. She plugged the kettle in. As it boiled, she looked through the cupboards over the sink and then through the fridge. There were eggs, and noodles, and a head of broccoli that looked past its time. She scanned a recipe book, but everything seemed to require ten different spices and at least one type of vegetable she doubted it was possible to get in Ireland, let alone in the Centra around the corner. The kettle clicked. She made two cups of tea and brought them to the sitting room.
As she walked in the door Sarah gave her a doleful stare. ‘You didn’t tell me that Maxwell was going to die instead,’ she said.
They watched the ads in silence until the next show began. It was a regional news round-up, opening with an item about how another Viking settlement had been found on the site of a motorway. Bare-chested men in mud-caked trousers flung clay up from a deep trench into a wheelbarrow. A woman with streaks on her face drank from a bottle of water. Three yellow excavators crawled over a vast brown field, a valley of dirt scattered with barrels painted like barber poles.
‘The diggers will win,’ Sarah said, as she reached for the remote. She found another soap, an English one, and she lay out on the couch.
It was time, Joanne knew, to start cooking if she wanted to have dinner ready for eight. But she found herself resisting: she didn’t want to shop for food, didn’t want to cook, didn’t want to go upstairs and shower and change before Mark arrived. She wanted to flop down on the armchair and watch junk television with Sarah all night. She wanted to drink tea and eat biscuits and not bother with dinner.
‘Get moving,’ Sarah broke into her thoughts. ‘Lover boy will want to get his hands on more than that mouldy broccoli.’
‘I’m going,’ said Joanne. ‘I just want to see how this bit ends.’
‘He finds out about the brain tumour,’ said Sarah, through a yawn.
*
As Joanne returned from the Centra she met Clive Robinson. He was thinner now, and his hair had gone completely white. As soon as she saw him she felt herself blush: he had been one of her favourite teachers in Trinity, and in front of him she had always felt shy. But when he smiled at her and exclaimed her name, she relaxed and felt glad to see him. They stood in under the awning of the butcher’s shop and he showered her with questions, asking about her job, her exams, her friends from college. When she told him that she was working on the Lefroy case, he looked at her in surprise. ‘That’s the woman in the house up on Baggot Street?’
‘Fitzwilliam Square,’ Joanne said. ‘Yes.’
‘But she sounds like a wonderful woman!’ Robinson said, with a slow shake of his head. ‘I’ll tell you, there aren’t too many women like her around any more.’
‘She’s really fascinating,’ Joanne said.
‘Indeed,’ said Robinson, carefully. ‘I honestly don’t know how your employers can live with themselves, lending an ear to that hooligan of a son of hers.’ He was smiling again, if only faintly. ‘But you like the work?’ he asked then, coming back to meet her gaze. ‘You think you’ve found your trade?’
She wanted to tell him everything then. The way she could hear the old woman’s voice coming through the transcripts, her diction, her strange formality, her old-fashioned words — words that nobody bothered to use any more, words that nobody Joanne knew had bothered to use in the first place. She wanted to tell him about the nights she had stayed late over the case notes, and the afternoons she had had to grit her teeth and listen to Rupert’s bullshit, and Mona’s drivel, and Eoin’s and Imelda’s comments on Elizabeth.
‘The work is fine,’ she said.
‘I’m done with my trade now, of course,’ Robinson said.