The Shelter of Neighbours (28 page)

Greene's was not far from home. I took out my bike again and got the tyres changed with some of the money I was earning. I could fly down to the shop in the summer mornings in about ten minutes.

Usually, I parked it in the hall – they had a hall door that was not part of the shop proper, at the side. I'd drag it in there. I'd lost the key of the lock and for some reason hadn't bought a new one – I'd had to lash out on the tyres, I didn't feel like spending more money on my bike the minute I started working. I put it off till later. On my third Saturday, the door to the hall was locked, so I left the bike outside the shop at the side of one of the tables they had out there on the footpath, like
bouquinistes
in France. When I came out, the bike was gone.

You couldn't leave an unlocked bike unattended in Dublin in those days. It wasn't like Amsterdam or Copenhagen, those legendary cities, paradises for cyclists, where everyone is honest and most people ride a bike. In Dublin any unlocked bike was robbed while the saddle was still warm. So they said.

Chariot of fire

The day my red bicycle was stolen from Greene's Bookshop, I met my first great love.

He came into the shop looking for a copy of a novel and came to the schoolbook counter by mistake. (Later he told me that he had walked into the shop, looked to the left, where Eddie was sitting on his stool among the stands of paperbacks, and then to the right, where four beautiful girls were chatting together in front of a stack of textbooks. Naturally, he chose to turn right.) As always, when a customer came in and broke up our chattering, we all looked guilty (though there was nothing to do but chat, in these early weeks) and rushed to serve. I got there first.

The novel he wanted was
Nausea
. That's what he asked for. Just the title.

I was used to people just knowing the title – for the textbooks, of course, that was what you would need to know. Nobody knew or cared who wrote them. But I already knew that somebody could come looking for a novel called
The Sun Also Rises
, or
Wise Blood
, and say they'd forgotten the name of the author. Sometimes someone would not even know the title – they'd tell you what the book was about. It's about a girl whose sister has married a rich man and who isn't sure if she wants to get married herself or not. They're in London. It's got a bird on the cover.

It was a great thrill for us if we could identify the book for these customers.

‘Oh yeah,' I smiled. ‘Jean-Paul Sartre.'

He knew that, of course. He was just testing. Teasing.

‘It might be over there in the paperback section,' I said. Then, because I could see that this looked like bad service, I added. ‘Just hold on a second, I'll see if we have it.'

I went over to the other side of the shop and he followed. So I passed him on to Eddie (who had the Penguin edition).

‘Eight hundred and fifty-five,' Andrea, one of my colleagues, said thoughtfully, as we watched him go out the door with his orange paper bag in one hand and his red and white helmet in the other.

The boys – all the summer staff were eighteen or nineteen – had a silly joke. They gave all young women who came into the shop marks out of a thousand for looks. Top marks were for Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships. Great-looking girls got nine hundred. They were capable of awarding fifteen, or two, to women they didn't like the look of. For a while we girls did the same thing for men. We did it for a few days and then stopped, bored with the exercise. Nobody had played the game for about two weeks at this stage, so Andrea had to add, ‘Ships, featherhead', before I copped on.

Seán was chunky, with curly brown hair, and a confident, cheeky smile. He hadn't struck me as especially attractive on the Helen of Troy scale. But he did seem like the kind of person I'd want to know. (Any man who bought
Nausea
, if he was reasonably attractive and friendly, would have seemed like the kind of person I'd want to know. I believed people who read serious books were bound to be interesting.)

Two days later Seán came back.

I recognised him immediately – he was carrying his helmet. Not many customers had them. His big motorbiker's leather jacket also made him distinctive.

He sauntered up to the counter – the schoolbook counter, my counter.

‘Hi there,' he said. ‘How are you?'

‘Oh, hi!' I had no experience of courtship rituals. I'd never met a boy anywhere other than at a dance, and it did not occur to me that you could meet a potential date anywhere else. But, out of politeness, I batted the ball back to him. ‘Are you enjoying
Nausea
?'

He smiled. ‘I don't think anyone could possibly enjoy it.' I must have looked snubbed. ‘It's sort of bleak. Have you read it?'

I shook my head. ‘I'm going to do philosophy next year,' I said. ‘When I go to college.' I had no doubt but that I would get the Leaving, get the marks I needed for a grant, and go to college. Even though I hadn't worked very hard at some subjects, I was confident. But, knowing it was best to appear modest, I added, ‘That's if I get the Leaving, of course.'

The next night we went out, to the cinema.

I met him under Clery's clock. We were to meet at half past seven and go to a film that started at eight, in the Carlton.
Love Story
. I'd dashed home at half past five – it took half an hour, now that I had no bike. Washed and changed into suitable clothes for a date – my first. And it turned out that I didn't have anything, not a single garment that was right, for the occasion. I pulled all the clothes out of my wardrobe and got panicky, trying on one thing, then the other, as the clock ticked inexorably onwards. In the end I wore a pale green blouse and dark green maxi skirt, which looked, I imagined, a bit like a riding habit, one that might have been worn by a nineteenth-century heroine, by Catherine Earnshaw perhaps. Or
Lorna Doone
(I hadn't read
Lorna Doone
but I loved her name). My aim was to look like a romantic, dreamy girl, but so far none of the clothes I had matched up to my image of what they should be, what I needed to achieve my vision. (My legs were too fat, and that is one reason why I liked the floaty, long, romantic skirts that were just coming into fashion, after the tyranny of the mini.)

By the time I reached Clery's I was nervous and drained, after the ordeal of dressing. It was twenty-five to eight already and I worried that I had kept him waiting. Many people were standing around in the vicinity of the clock, and crowds of young people thronged the pavement, on their way to picture houses, or theatres, to other places of entertainment. But there was no sign of Seán. I waited for five minutes, at a slight distance from the clock, where I could see its big black hands jerkily making their way around its white moon face. I could also see Clery's windows and alternated glancing at the clock with examining the outfits on display. Miniskirts, tiny silk shifts in startling colours and patterns – orange and purple psychedelic blotches. Or black-and-white geometric patterns. So boring. There was nothing that I would want in the window. None of the clothes were designed for a girl who wanted to be called Lorna Doone and who was about to read
Nausea
and embark on a philosophy course in the autumn. Such clothes existed, and not only in my imagination. I saw the clothes I wanted sometimes, on girls who had spent the summer in Copenhagen or Paris or San Francisco. Indian smocks and gypsy skirts. Espadrilles, soft straw baskets. You could not get such things in Dublin then. You had to travel for them – which is what made them so desirable, and so sexy.

By a quarter to eight I had stopped worrying about espadrilles. I had other things on my mind. Where was Seán? It had never occurred to me that he wouldn't come and it still didn't. I had heard the term ‘stood up', but usually from girls in my class, the advanced kind of girl who would not be doing philosophy in the autumn but probably doing a shorthand and typing course at a commercial college. Those girls, whose eyes above the school uniform were framed in thick black make-up, would talk about how they had stood a boy up. ‘I had to stand him up,' they'd say. It didn't seem very important. They had to stand a boy up because they'd changed their mind about him, after making a date at a dance. Or because they had to wash their hair, or help a friend to manicure her nails. It was easier not to turn up than to phone and make an excuse, and not everyone had a phone, anyway. I'd never considered what it felt like to be that boy. To be waiting for a girl who just didn't show up. Our feeling was that the boy would just shrug and go home. We didn't attribute much sensitivity to them. We didn't believe they had feelings, not in the way we had.

At first I didn't fear that Seán had stood me up, because why would he have bothered coming to the shop and asking to see me if he wasn't going to keep the date?

But as the hands on the big clock jerked on, I began to get anxious. How long should I wait? I played the game you play in these situations. I said to myself, I will wait for five more minutes and then I'll leave. And then when the five minutes had passed, I said that again.

Other people kept meeting one another, in the vicinity of the clock. Mainly couples. The person who had been waiting would see the other one coming, and rush out of their niche to join the partner – they were like magnets, one would move out and the other would run in, and they'd join, kiss maybe, and then walk off hand in hand as often as not, laughing and talking.

Lucky, happy, people!

As eight o'clock drew nearer, I was almost the only person left under the clock, still waiting. The evening was growing colder. A big grey cloud scudded across the sun. The green double-deckers roared along the street, belching out grey fumes.

I was sure that everyone, on the buses, in the cars, was looking out the window at me, thinking, Look at your one, still waiting.

At eight o'clock he came.

He was not on his motorbike, and I hardly recognised him without his leather jacket and helmet under his arm.

‘Listen, I'm really sorry …'

He was pink and panting, wearing just a shirt, a pale blue shirt, no tie. His hair was tousled and much more abundant than it had been before (on account of not being flattened by the helmet). He smelt mildly of a mixture of fresh sweat and flowery soap.

‘It's
ok
,' I said, without giving the slightest indication that I'd been upset. And I didn't feel annoyed or angry, as I would have done if it had been anyone else who had kept me waiting. My main feeling was not even of relief, but of pleasure. All the waiting time was blotted out of my memory as if it had never existed.

We ran across the street, just where the pillar used to be, and up to the Carlton. There was a long queue, already moving, and we joined it.

‘God, hope we get in now,' he said.

I didn't care. Already I was happy just to be with him, standing beside him in a queue. I wouldn't have said to myself that I was in love, but I had never really felt like this before. I had never felt happy just being with a person – always there had to be something else. Something to eat, something to do, something to talk about. Even being with my mother, when I was small, had not been like this. I needed to be with my mother, to feel happy, but she was just a background against which my other desires would be fulfilled. She was like, say, the light that fills a room where you want to read, or play a game, or she was like the sunshine that is a background to the fun you have at the beach. Essential, but not by any means an end in herself.

I knew I'd enjoy this film (I loved most films I'd ever seen, which had been precious few). But being with this person, the guy on the motorbike, was the main thing. (I did not think of him as a ‘man', nor did I think of him as a ‘boy'. He was just himself.) The film was going to be the background to the pleasure of being with him.

I wouldn't have formulated it like that then, or formulated it at all. All I knew, standing there, on the shadowy side of the street, was that I felt at ease, and pleased in a way I had not felt before in my life until then.

One Saturday about three weeks after this he collected me from the bookshop when we closed at one o'clock. This time he had the motorbike – it was parked just around the corner from the shop on Merrion Square.

He wondered if I'd like to go for a walk in the mountains.

I would.

He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘That's a very nice skirt,' he said. And after a few seconds, added, ‘You look lovely.'

I was wearing a calf-length, black skirt and a high-necked Victorian blouse that I'd bought the day before at lunch time, using more than half my pay packet for the week. The skirt had a very high waist. ‘Hm,' Eddie in paperbacks said when he saw it. He was admiring it. Everyone was. ‘What would you call that? A cummerbund, I think, that's what it is.' I didn't like the sound of the word ‘cummerbund' much, but I was pleased that my outfit impressed people. I'd got it because it was a bit like one of the outfits Ali MacGraw wore in the movie.

For the pillion of a motorbike it was far from ideal.

‘Slacks would be easier,' Seán said. ‘But I hate slacks.'

I was glad I hadn't worn mine, although I had a new pair of Levis, of which I had been inordinately proud until that moment. (Ali had worn jeans, once or twice, in the movie. But Seán had been less enthusiastic than I about the film. In fact, when I asked him if he'd enjoyed it, as we made our way to my bus stop, he had used a comment of a kind he had plenty of, as I would find out in due course: ‘No comment!')

He insisted I wear his helmet.

I didn't think a helmet would suit me, and it didn't go with my high-necked lacy blouse. But I enjoyed putting it on all the same. It was like dressing up to play a game. I felt like an astronaut: an astronaut on top and Ali MacGraw underneath.