Read an Excerpt
One
any old moment
It is almost midnight, and the three of them are trying to persuade a member of door staff to let them bring a houseplant into the nightclub. Maggie, Harley and Róise take turns to explain that the plant was a birthday present given earlier this evening by a friend who went home around nine, apparently blind to the practical challenges of accommodating a cactus on the dancefloor. Róise turns thirty next week and was informed by the gift-giver that this particular breed is known as an old lady cactus, on account of its white cobweb of spines. Maggie resents overhearing this information. The sea-urchin crown of the plant has, in her mind, taken on the earnest personality of an elderly woman for whom Maggie now feels responsible, despite Róise having been assured that it doesn’t need much watering and should in fact thrive on neglect. They are allowed eventually to check the plant into the cloakroom with their jackets, and Harley pays the attendant with a five-pound note she has folded into eighths to stop it springing back scroll-wise.
In the club, Maggie notes with disappointment that the spinning pole has been removed from its plinth on the dancefloor.
Maggie has been coming here with Harley and Róise since they were eighteen. She once engaged the pole too aggressively in a dance tribute to Wham! and needed medical attention for a bruised perineum. She claimed to the doctor that it was a cycling injury and had to sit on a ring-shaped cushion for a week afterwards, feeling like a humbled pet in a cone collar. That night has gone down as one of the greats in their group lore. They had gone into town on a Friday afternoon, chasing a rumour that Jimmy Nesbitt was drinking at the Sunflower; the rumour turned out to be unfounded, and the night ended at four a.m. with Maggie injured and Harley getting off with two cast members from a touring production of Cats. Only Róise had been uninvolved in the drama of it all, spending that night on the edge of the dancefloor with her face lit by the midnight fridge glare of her smartphone screen, messaging her new boyfriend. She does not use a smartphone anymore; her new phone is an old phone without any apps or features. Her then-new boyfriend is her now ex-boyfriend. The two things are not unrelated.
Harley offers Maggie and Róise a hit of her MDMA in the club toilets in the same casual way you might ask shall we get a flatbread to share? As a rule, Maggie declines when people offer her recreational drugs, citing a previous ‘bad experience’ which she hopes makes it sound like she did something fiercely rock and roll like smoking a load of crystal meth and waking up on an ostrich farm in Lurgan four days later. (Her friends have pointed out that Lurgan is not remotely rock or roll, nor does it, to their knowledge, have an ostrich farm. ‘No, but you get the gist,’ Maggie says.) When Maggie claims she had a ‘bad experience’, she means that her sole previous experimentation with illicit substances was at a house party in the Holylands many years ago when she accepted a bump of coke that turned out to be heavily cut with washing powder. She sneezed and it stung with flowery freshness; it is not an experience she has been keen to repeat.
This time, Maggie accepts a line from Harley and it feels like someone has pushed a cocktail umbrella up one nostril and opened it inside her head. Harley is cursing, her face performing a montage of elastic contortions like an actor preparing to go onstage: lion-face, lemon-face, lion-face, lemon-face. Róise is ostensibly unaffected by her own line until a single traitorous tear crawls out of the corner of her eye.
‘F*** me,’ Harley rasps, ‘that burns. Should’ve crushed it more.’ She swipes her bank card clean of residue on her tongue as if she’s clocking in (or out), then pinches between her eyes with a pained expression. ‘Sorry. It’ll pass,’ she says. ‘Give it time.’
Back on the dancefloor, a cool, white buzz begins to creep outwards as the glass shards dissolve in the bridge of Maggie’s nose. She plucks absent-mindedly at her top where the undercarriage sweat has fused it to her skin. She is wearing a light grey Blondie T-shirt with no bra, and is regretting it now that two dark, drooling crescents are imprinted on its fabric. She makes accidental eye contact with a woman as she does so, and the woman smiles at her in a way that implies underboob understanding. The woman fans her face with her hands in sweaty solidarity and shouts over the pounding dance track, ‘IT’S BOILING, ISN’T IT?’
‘I’M MELTING!’ Maggie hollers in agreement, her reply helpfully coinciding with a drop in the music to sound like the frenzied screech of the Wicked Witch of the West.
‘WHO’RE YOU OUT WITH?’ the woman asks.
‘JUST WITH FRIENDS!’ Maggie snatches at the air vaguely behind her.
‘HAVE YOU PULLED?’ Harley blares in her ear, closer than Maggie realized.
‘WHO ARE YOU HERE WITH?’ Maggie asks the woman, ignoring Harley.
‘WORK NIGHT OUT!’ she says, indicating the group dancing near her. One of her colleagues jabs a thumb towards the smoking area, and she asks Maggie, ‘DO YOU WANT TO COME OUT FOR SOME FRESH AIR?’
‘OH I’M GRAND, I DON’T SMOKE!’ Maggie deliberately misinterprets. The woman smiles but does not persist, vanishing in the dense crush of the crowd around them. Maggie unlocks her phone, snaps a blurry panorama of the club, a swaying wheat field of arms against a neon sky.
‘You’re lit,’ someone assesses (accurately) from behind her. Maggie turns and sees Cate there, smirking at her. Her pale face and witch-black hair are bleached with blue light, her eyes are smoky and wicked. Maggie starts and, spooked, her breath briefly deserts her. She is suddenly very conscious of the perspiration gathering in the hollow of her back. Cate is wearing a black vest and denim shorts and there seems to be not a lick of sweat on her, as though her body has its own microclimate unaffected by the claggy humidity of the nightclub. She seems somehow able to make herself heard without screeching over the music as Maggie has been doing since they arrived.
‘WHAT BUSINESS IS IT OF YOURS?’ Maggie shouts back. The euphoria from the drugs has begun to blissfully saturate her body, and the impulse to pull Cate into her arms is suddenly so strong she almost forgets she is dripping with sweat like a basted chicken. In her first year of university Maggie had gone out a few times with a classics student who told her jokingly about the lesbian rule, which Maggie initially thought must be some unofficial commandment of the community, but turned out to be a historical tool of masonry made from lead on the island of Lesbos, an instrument that could be bent and fitted to any curve. She feels in this moment as though she could pliantly and happily mould her entire body around Cate’s like a second skin, flattening and shrinking and concaving to fit.
