Huddleston Road. John Toomey

back with contorted expressions, and everyone breathed easy. As she ambled back to the table, unaware of the ripples of relief flowing, like a wedding train, back through the room behind her, Vic felt exhilarated by his closeness to her. Once back at the table, she promptly sent out the call for a round of shots.

      They stumbled into her flat around three in the morning, made toasted cheese sandwiches and did what all couples at that stage of knowing each other do.

      When Vic awoke in the morning, his throat was raspy. He leaned over her and whispered in her ear. Obviously suffering, she remained entombed under the duvet. He left the flat for the local mini-market.

      He hoped that by the time he got back she’d have come round and they’d pick up where they left off the night before. But when he returned, the latch was on the door. He rang the bell. He called in the letterbox. It was all he could do just to get her out of bed and let him back into the flat.

      Finally, she staggered to the door with the duvet wrapped around her, pulled up over her head so that only a few unkempt strands of tangled hair could be seen, as they drooped down over one of her eyes and across her nose. She turned the key, undid the latch, and let him in.

      ‘Oh,’ she sighed, ‘you’re back.’

      ‘That’s nice,’ he replied.

      She turned and went for the sofa, where she lay out. ‘I thought you were gone,’ she said, turning on the TV.

      ‘I told you where I was going. To get us breakfast. I got some bacon and eggs. I’ll make breakfast.’

      ‘Go ahead.’

      ‘I meant for the both of us. I’ll make breakfast for the both of us.’

      ‘Not for me.’

      The offhandedness unsettled him but he made her coffee anyway.

      ‘I told you – I don’t want anything!’ was her irascible response. He placed it down on a coaster on the floor beside the sofa. In the kitchenette, he fried breakfast for himself and took it to the living area on a plate. After hovering around the sofa, thinking she might lift her feet and make room for him, and being disappointed, he took a seat in the only other proper chair in the flat. It was a battered old chair in the corner of the room, with no view of the TV.

      ‘Is there anything on?’ He waited. ‘No?’

      ‘Oh,’ she said, surprised he was talking to her. ‘No. Nothing.’

      ‘Jesus, I’m fairly wrecked today. Heavy old night, last night.’

      ‘Hmm?’

      ‘Heavy night, I said. A lazy day ahead I’d imagine. I wouldn’t be fit for much else.’

      She said nothing.

      With his appetite lost, he gave up and took the breakfast to the kitchen and dumped the plate, unrinsed and including the food, into the sink. He told her he was going home for a shower and a change of clothes.

      ‘Oh, right.’

      ‘Have you any plans for later? For tonight?’ he asked, with saintly reserve, making one last attempt to wrest some sense from the confounding experience that was the night before and the morning after; a single happening, yet completely discrepant.

      ‘No.’

      She was impregnable in her quilted cocoon.

      He went home wondering what he’d done wrong. She’d just flipped. They had dropped off to sleep, spooned air-tightly together, with his hand lightly caressing her upper-thigh. No worse than light snoring had passed between them, but when he awoke she’d transmogrified; alien, dislocated.

      For a moment he did what all men do when they’ve just slept with a woman who fails to express sufficient gratitude – he wondered had he been no good. Did she lie there awake after he’d fallen asleep, wanting more? Disappointed? Unsatisfied? Or had her head been turned by the two men at Marlowe’s? Had she grown tired of him already?

      Several days passed before she called him. She was at Rococo’s when she rang, which provided her with a conveniently short window for conversation. She asked whether he’d like to come over for dinner with her and Donna; some Thai food and a film.

      When he asked was she okay, attempting to open up the issue of her irrational indifference to him, she evaded it. She had customers to attend to, she said, and needed to go. ‘But come over,’ she insisted.

      Her insistence on him coming over put his mind at rest. She’d been out of order and she just wanted to move on, he thought. It was as good as an apology.

      * * *

      An invitation to Geoff ’s forty-fifth birthday was met with suspicion and reluctance. It had been extended as a matter of courtesy, after Vic had told Orla about Lali. Vic viewed it as an opportune occasion for Lali’s casual induction; a few drinks and some finger food.

      ‘I don’t think so,’ was Lali’s response.

      She moved then from not wanting to go, to the barely more substantial inability to go. She cited a pre-existing arrangement with Donna for the same night.

      Vic saw the excuse for what it was and called it as such: a sham. He tried to impress on Lali the significance of Orla, and the decency of her. But Lali could be moved to nothing through obligation.

      Then the girls, Lali and Donna, fell out in a dispute over working hours. Lali cut Donna to pieces, turning on her closest friend for having the gall to question the roster. It was so personal that Vic suspected their friendship was over. Donna objected to being rostered for both the Saturday and the Sunday, and was unusually adamant that it was Lali’s turn to open up on the Saturday.

      ‘Owner’s prerogative, surely,’ Vic said.

      ‘Exactly! She said I was taking advantage. I’ve been carrying that whale since we were kids. And I pay her well. Especially considering she’s a fucking liability.’

      ‘Is that the line of diplomacy you went with?’

      ‘Not exactly.’ Then, beginning to laugh, Lali said, ‘But I did threaten to take her doughnut allowance away.’

      Donna irritated Vic greatly. She seemed always to be in the way. To a significant degree, and wrongly, he viewed her as an obstruction. So he laughed along, indulging Lali’s cruelty, because it suited. And because it was always nice to know, with certainty, that you were on the same side as Lali.

      ‘But now you have to open up yourself, Saturday and Sunday,’ he said, thinking that any chance of her accompanying him to Orla’s was gone for sure. But Lali always had a distinctive logic, distinctive in its utter deficit of reason.

      ‘Yeah, but I suppose that means I can come to your cousin’s lame party now.’

      He just accepted. ‘Good. We’re to be there for eight.’

      He met her after work and as they made their way back to her flat she was quiet. He had been braced for resistance, or manic hyperactivity, fuelled by earlier than usual drinks, but not for her open but seemingly unconscious lassitude.

      At her flat, Vic began by showering and dressing, and having something small to eat, while Lali pulled her knees into her chest and propped her head on some cushions on the sofa. The sound of the TV lapped over her and there was no indication that she would initiate anything any time soon. He wondered was she preoccupied by her fight with Donna, or whether she was daunted by the prospect of meeting his cousin and her family, by a perceived formality of occasion. Whatever it was, a morose stillness hung about her. Then, around a quarter to eight, she finally began readying herself. Vic said nothing, resisting the urge to move her along more swiftly.

      On the doorstep of Orla’s house, with the doorbell already rung, Lali spoke. ‘So what do these people do with themselves?’

      Through the frosted glass of the front door Vic could see the undefined shape of Orla coming down the hall. Rushed and ill-prepared, he condensed