An extract from a new novel by Julie Parsons
`They're all like that, you know, all these apartments on the Quays. They're all furnished exactly the same way. Same sofas and chairs, same wallpaper, probably the same people in each one." And he'd laughed. She didn't like his laugh. It was hooting, far too loud. Drew attention to him. Made people turn around and look. And she didn't like that. She'd been surprised by the laugh. It didn't go with the rest of him. The rest of him was smooth and pretty. She'd picked him out immediately. To follow. Just for fun. To see where he was going and what he was doing.
A game, that's what it was. The girls inside used to play it when they were let out. They'd tell her all about it.
"What you do," they'd say, "is you spot someone. In the street, or in a bar, or maybe even on a bus or a train. And you watch them. And then you go wherever they go. And after a while they notice you. But they don't notice that you've been following them, they just think you look familiar. And then it's dead easy, fucking ridiculously simple."
"What is," she asked, the first time they told her. "What's simple?"
"To do what you want with them. Fuck them, rob them, have fun with them. It's the best game."
And she had told them they were crazy. It was stupid. It would get you into trouble, big bad trouble.
"After all," she said, "they'll recognise you, they'll know what you're like, they'll go to the police, and they'll be able to identify you. Won't they?"
And the girls had giggled and sniggered and nudged each other. And told her she didn't understand.
"For all your brains and fucking degrees and that kind of crap, you don't have a clue. About people, that is. They don't do anything about it, because they feel guilty, responsible, stupid. They've let you in, they've opened themselves up to you, they've judged that you're OK, and they can see how crazy they've been. And you know, Rachel, specially men. They've such huge fucking egos, they can't stand admitting that they've been wrong. So you're made."
They were right. She wished she could tell them. They were right and she was wrong. It had worked just the way they said it would. And she had done it. She had spotted him on the train. He was young, good-looking. A tourist, perhaps, or a visiting businessman. He had a guidebook open on his lap, and he was tracing his route with one well-manicured fingertip. She moved her seat so she was sitting diagonally across from him. She stared out of her window, watching him in the reflection that played like a wide-screen movie in front of her eyes. He was wearing an open-necked shirt and a pair of light-coloured trousers. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, showing tanned forearms, covered with fine fair hair that gleamed as the sun fell upon it. She glanced over towards him, making sure not to catch his eye as he stood and stretched up to open the top part of the window. She watched the way the muscles in his back and buttocks tensed and moved as he struggled with the catch. She looked away and waited. Not for long.
"Excuse me, I can't seem to get the hang of this." His accent was North American. His voice was low. She didn't respond immediately.
"Sorry. Miss?" He had that quaint, old-fashioned courtesy, like something from an old American TV series. "Could you give me a hand?" He took a step towards her, moving awkwardly as the train gathered speed.
She had shown him how to open the window, answered a couple of questions about the passing scenery, then retreated to her own seat again. And when he got off the train at Pearse Station she had followed him. It was surprisingly easy. She had never followed anyone before, but maybe it was because she could tell that he had no purpose to his wanderings that she could easily keep him within her sights. He rambled along Nassau Street, then turned left up Kildare Street, heading towards the museum. She walked on the other side of the road, her heart leaping suddenly as she saw the uniformed guards on duty outside the Dail. Felt the sight of their blue shirts, their silver buttons, their peaked caps take her breath away with anxiety. So she waited until her breath had slowed, her pulse had calmed, before she followed him through the ornate wrought-iron gate, and stepped into the cool dimness inside. It wasn't hard to find him. He was looking at the exhibit of ancient gold.
The light from the glass case shone up into his face, showing up the fine lines and wrinkles under his eyes and around his mouth. She moved closer and looked down at the gleaming yellow necklets, the metal twisted into fine spirals, the huge flat buttons and cloak-fasteners, the heavy ornate collars. She saw both their faces reflected in the glass and the way he was looking at her, recognising her from the train. She smiled.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?"
She was proud of herself, the way she had managed to initiate the conversation. She had opened her mouth and wondered if the words would come.
She knew about these things. She had studied archaeology in first year in college, part of her degree. The knowledge was all still there. Lodged in her memory. She explained. The kind of artefacts they were. The date they were made. She talked about the people who had worn them, the way they had lived. And he was charmed, she could see. "Here." She led him from room to room.
"You're better than a tour guide," he said, his hand casually brushing against her back as they walked out into the sunshine again. And the hairs on her arms rose up as she felt her skin tighten.
"Can I buy you a drink?" he asked. "As a thank-you for your time."
And she nodded, unable for a moment to speak. She could see that he hadn't noticed. He was too busy telling her all about himself. He was thirty-two.
He was divorced. He was from Ottawa. He worked for a software company, installing telephone and computer systems. He was in Dublin for two months, working on a big job debugging some of the programmes here. And he laughed his loud, ugly laugh.
"You wanna see the mess that some of your guys have made of the system. And will they be told? You wanna bet?"
He was lonely, he said as he moved closer, his thigh rubbing against hers, one hand sliding up and under her shirt, pressing against her vertebrae. She could smell his sweat. She watched him drink. They way he lifted up his chin as he raised the glass to his lips. The way the skin stretched tightly over his throat, so she could see clearly his Adam's apple and the tendons in his neck. His hand clutched her thigh under the table, his fingers digging into her crotch. She reached down and slid open her zip and felt him touch her, then take her own hand and press it hard against himself. So long since she had done this. Years and years and years. She felt his mouth against her ear, and his whispered instructions.
`Come with me, come back to my place. We'll have some fun." She followed him out of the bar, waiting while he hailed a taxi, gave an address somewhere on the Quays, then pushed her back against the seat, forcing open her mouth, his hands reaching for her breasts. So long since she had felt anything like this. And she remembered suddenly, so vividly that she wanted to cry out, her first time with Martin. Outside in the open air. Midwinter. The night they met. A retirement do for a friend of her father's. She hadn't wanted to go but her father had persuaded her. Bought her a new dress. Halter-neck. Silk. Pleated. Beautiful. And she had met Martin, the son of her father's friend. And left with him, long before the speeches were over. Walked out of the hotel. Walked as far as the car park. Opened her coat. Felt the cold on her breasts and the warmth of his mouth. Leaned back against a tree and felt him inside her. Laughed out loud at their pleasure together. Afterwards they drove away in his car to sit by the little beach at Sandycove and watch the sun rise over the sea. And they touched each other as if each was precious and new and perfect.
There was a security gate at the apartment complex. He punched in his code. Five, eight, three, seven. She remembered it. She looked for cameras. There were none. He used a swipe card to open the door.
"Better than a hotel," he said as he pulled her in behind him.
More private, she thought. He put on music. She knew it. The Cranberries. The girls inside had been mad about Dolores O'Riordan. She looks like one of us, they always said. He turned up the volume.
"Aren't you worried?" she asked him as he poured glasses of vodka and took a plastic sachet of what she was sure was cocaine from his briefcase. "About the neighbours complaining?"
"Neighbours, complaining? It's live and let live here. I don't know them, nor could I give a fuck. And the feeling, I'm sure, is mutual." He looked down at the two lines of coke he had laid out carefully across a small rectangular mirror. "Now." He handed her a rolled-up ten-pound note. "Ladies first, I do believe."
They'd have been proud of her, all her old friends from the prison. Not just the way she snorted the coke with practised ease but also in the way she sorted through his clothes before she left the next morning. Taking the cash from his wallet, his credit cards, the identity card for his job. She hesitated over his passport. It was worth money, lots of it, but on the other hand he'd have to report it stolen to get it replaced. No embassy official would believe that he had just lost it. And she didn't want to do anything that would force him to go to the police. Just in case, she wiped her prints from everything she had touched. Except his skin, she thought. He was still sleeping deeply when she had dressed and was ready to leave. Sleep suited him. He looked young and beautiful. It was a pity about the sex, by the time he was ready for bed he couldn't manage it at all. Too much drink, too many drugs. The girls had always said that the stories about coke and sex were a myth.
"It's just like any other drug," they told her. "Once they've got a taste for it they're fucking useless when it comes to bed. You always end up finishing it off by yourself."
Such a pity, she thought, that they were right.
She stood by the river in the early morning sunshine and watched as a school of grey mullet made the journey from the sea towards O'Connell Bridge. They hung five-deep in the murky water, a lazy flick of their tails pushing them forward. What brings them up here, she wondered, away from the cleansing tide into the sluggish greasy sink of the river. Then she answered out loud her unspoken question. "Food, of course, what else."
She turned and walked away from the city towards where the river opened out into the bay. She raised her hand to her face. She could still smell him. His aftershave and his sweat. He had been so helpless, lying there beside her when she woke. She had sat and watched him. She had pulled back the sheets and looked at his body. She hadn't seen a naked man since Martin had died. As he rolled over towards her she saw the place where the shot from the gun had torn Martin apart. She remembered the colour of the blood as his heart pumped it from his body. Now she watched the pulse at the base of his neck, rising and falling. She reached out and touched it. It didn't take much to end someone's life. They had talked about it inside. The ways it can be done. The quickest, cleanest, neatest. They had told her and taught her, and she had listened and learned, stored up the knowledge for later, for when she would need it. She put her hand around his neck and felt his blood throb against her skin. He stirred and made as if to turn. She opened her fingers and pulled her hand away. She got up. She left.
Now the sun shone upon her face. She closed her eyes and tilted back her head. Then she pulled the credit cards and the money from her pocket. She had no need for them. She had all the money she could possibly want lying neatly in its hiding place in her room. She just wanted to know that she could do it. Break the commandment. Thou shalt not steal. Then get away with it. It was practice, that's what it was, for what was to come. She held her booty out in front of her, then flung the lot of it down into the river. She watched it settle on the surface, then waited until slowly and gradually the water dragged down the plastic and paper until all that was left was a tiny spreading ripple. Then she turned away.
Julie Parsons 2000
Biography
Julie Parsons was born in New Zealand but moved to Ireland at an early age. She studied the sociology of music at UCD and worked for many years as a radio and television producer with RTE. She has published two thrillers, Mary, Mary (1998) and The Courtship Gift (1999). This extract is taken from her new novel, Eager to Please, published this week, (Town House, £11.99). Her work is published in the US, Australia, South Africa, Europe and her native New Zealand. She lives outside Dublin, near the sea, with her family.
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