Last Night

Her flat was an extension to the house, out the back, on Tudor Road. It had a tarred roof, like a prefabricated home might have. It was made of strong wooden beams, halved and stained dark brown. Two small windows at right angles to each other let in the dull light of summers spent reading Michael Crichton and Jane Austen. In winter, they kept out the muffled thunder that gathered on the horizon over the sea.

Samantha was a hoarder. In her flat, she had kept everything since her teens. The last few dolls that had survived various battles with time. Empty perfume bottles from seasons gone by. An old school photograph that showed her, blurred, in a rank of children, like an academic football team, a nun as coach. Her long red hair was striking, even then, making her stand out from the other children in the shot. Records unplayed in donkey's years, because the belt on the turntable had snapped and not been replaced: Echo and the Bunnymen, Steve Hackett, The Boomtown Rats. She had lived in this room for years, having not graduated into student accommodation when she had started college, some years earlier, to study law.

The night in August that Andy saw where she lived, he imagined that it was still as it had been when she had first moved in, as though her adolescence were a star whose light, ten years old, was only now reaching her.

They spent the first part of the evening in Finnegan's in Dalkey. At nine, he arrived, nervously glancing about in case he saw any face he recognised that was not hers. But, down the left hand end of the lounge as he walked in, there she was, in a corner, cut off from the rest of the room by a frosted glass panel through which she appeared to be an impression of herself, moving indistinctly. As he turned into the corner, she was reaching for her zippo. She lit a Camel Light and drew heavily on it, looking up. Smiling, she took the cigarette from her lips, exhaled a long, thin cloud that dissipated around his head as he bent over to kiss her. Lipstick on his nose: she had got up from her seat at the same moment.

"Hi," she said.

"I love you," he replied. She stopped smiling, stared at him as he sat down beside her. He was dressed too young for her, black bomber jacket, blue jeans, Doc Martens. Aged twenty, the younger man. She hated being the older woman, but there was not much she could do about it.

"I'm going to London tomorrow," she said.

"Oh," he said, noticing that her pint of Guinness was ringed with white haloes, almost empty.

"We need to talk," she said.

"Can I get a drink first? What are you having?"

"Guinness."

He went to the bar, a gut-tightening feeling in his stomach. At the bar there were customers that he did not recognise; perhaps they were regulars. One couple bickering over not going out enough, another sharing a quiet conversation about mortgage interest rates, another talking about yachting. Couples everywhere, he thought. Andy caught the attention of the barman, ordered two pints of Guinness, warm and slow. In the few minutes it took for the pints to settle, he raced two thoughts against each other. Is she going for good? came in on the outside and overtook I can't live without her, but the race ended in a dead heat. He took the pints, beer mats clinging to the wet bases of the glasses.

He walked back to where Samantha sat, set the glasses down on the table.

"Thanks," she said. "You're a honey."

"What time is your plane?"

"Check in is at twelve."

"Right."

They sipped in silence for a few minutes, as though they were characters in a radio drama, waiting for the other actors to say their parts. And what a cacophonous radio play this was: voices reclaimed from static, a hundred channels trying to come in on the same frequency.

Then she spoke. "I'm sorry. He's expecting me over. I've been avoiding going there. But this weekend, he's having a party with his friends from the law firm and I can't get out of it."

"You'll be back," he said.

"I'll be back. But I think we should take a break from each other when I do."

It was what Andy did not want to hear. The old phrase came out. "We'll still be friends."

"Yes," she said. "Don't be too sad. I mean, you're only twenty. There's plenty of time for you to find someone ~"

"My own age."

"I don' mean it like that. But Ciaran and I have been together for six years. I can't just let it go. Do you know what I mean?" A pause, then: "I'm sorry."

Andy sipped his stout. Rather than storming off, as he imagined he might do in such circumstances, he brooded, finishing his beer instead of the conversation.

"I'll get these," Samantha said, rising from her seat. "Back in a minute."

"All right," he said.

While she was away at the ladies' room, and then at the bar ordering a couple of pints, he remembered when they had met for the first time, three months previously.

It had been a wet summer night in the RDS at the launch of a talk-friendly radio station that would later be renamed and repositioned as a talk-free formula pop channel. He was there with his colleagues from the advertising agency in Fitzwilliam Square where he had just started his first job as a junior art director. The whole place was filled with advertising and radio people. A thousand at least. The scene reminded him of Armistice day celebrations he had seen in films, without the returned, broken, shell-shocked soldiers and the bereaved but optimistic women. There was a covers band on stage, grinding out bass-heavy versions of chart hits and oldies. Alcohol ran in his veins like plasma. He was thinking alcoholic thoughts. Others, he knew, were taking stronger drugs. The men's room was like a clearing house for a currency in cocaine. The pungent smell of spliff smoke permeated the air, easily mistaken for the aroma of Marlboros burning paper in an ash tray.

Twenty feet away, he saw her, dancing. Hair scraped back into a bun. Pale, freckled skin. Lipstick like a warning beacon. Long, slinky black dress, backless, strapless, miles of legs ending in fuck-me pumps. He did not know her name, who she was, who she was with. He stared. Caught her looking at him. It was instantaneous, magic. Seconds later, they were outside in the grass, blades dabbing rain into his jacket as she sat astride him, bending down for a kiss. Andy, Samantha, the exchange of names as thrilling to him as if those words had been body fluids. Companies. Fax me on Monday. Then she was gone back into that incredible throng. My boyfriend is here tonight. Gotta go.

Now he knew that she was out there, the mass of people seemed to have a heat at its centre that was brighter and other than that generated by all the bodies dancing wildly to the fugue of cocaine, the ragged music, the bitter alcohol. He was stunned. The night was already over. He told no-one.

A few minutes later, he found his friend from college days, Josephine, who was now a budding sales executive at the new radio station. She was inches taller than Samantha and was also wearing a long black dress, high heels. It seemed that Andy and Josephine had been pals forever. Now, they danced, his heart thumping Blue Monday. They did not try anything, boundaries implicit. Later, for a laugh, they walked all the way to Ranelagh in the rain, Josephine wearing no tights and barefoot from a broken shoe, Andy aching all over, his thin shoe soles letting through the grit on the road. They stopped for chips at the Triangle and ate them, grinning, grease and vinegar on their lips and fingers. They were sitting on the kerb, putting themselves in danger from taxis hurtling to a sudden stop at changing lights. He felt elevated. Drunk on the night and the possibilities he had opened himself to. A chaste kiss on the cheek sent Josephine home in a cab. He walked the fifty remaining yards to the house, flew up the stairs, collapsed on the bed, passed out.

The weekend. He heard nothing from Samantha and realised only late on Sunday evening that they had not exchanged home numbers.

Monday. It was approaching five when a fax came through to Andy's office. They met, walked on Sandymount beach, watching people chase dogs yelping after seagulls.

"Don't the dogs know that the seagulls are out of reach?" he had asked.

"They're funny. Look at that one. He's got them in his stomach already."

Now, three months later, here in Finnegan's, it was as if the seagulls had flown too high for this particular dog to ever catch up.

Samantha came back from the bar.

"I got your letter," she said, when she sat down. "It was sweet. I couldn't write back because it only arrived this morning and I had a bloody awful day with meetings."

"That's OK," he said, half-heartedly. "I wrote you another one. It's in the post."

"You shouldn't," she said. Then, seeing his hurt, puppy-dog eyes, added, "I'm sorry."

"Anyway, it's not as if we hate each other," he blurted. "See what you feel when you come back from London."

She said nothing for a moment. "All right," she allowed him. "But don't expect anything."

He seemed satisfied that she would naturally come back to him.

For the next hour in the pub, they talked about old times which, for them, stretched all the way back twelve weeks. They revisited that night on the grass in the RDS. Then the conversation moved on to his first ever toe job when, one night in July, she had arrived in the small flat he shared with a student who had gone away for the weekend. She had woken him at three a.m. with her tongue, though they had been sleeping in separate beds on account of a sudden pang of guilt that had attacked her. Afterwards, although they went no further with sex, they had slept in his single bed for the rest of the night, waking to the sound of birds chirping in the trees outside and the drag of cars on the road that was being given a new layer of tar macadam by slow-coach corporation workers. Andy had gone downstairs and across the road for a newspaper, returning with a pint of milk and croissants that turned out to be not as soft and moist as they had looked in the shop.

A wistful silence descended between them in the pub, memories trailing away like unfinished thoughts. They began to talk about music. She championed Peter Gabriel, but only his solo stuff. He expressed a preference for, as he put it, "Black Francis, David Lovering, Mrs John Murphy and Joey Santiago, the finest four-piece from Boston the world has ever known."

"Three months in and we're only finding out what music we like," she said, looking him in the eye, then putting a hand to her mouth as if to say oops.

There was another awkward lull in the conversation. Then, he asked, "Who was your first love?"

She did not answer him directly, but talked about how, when she had been younger, she would discuss boys with her friends. Like sailors on a shark hunt, showing off their bites, they would pass around amongst themselves tales of how they'd first been handled by some pubescent wunderkind who thought himself majestic, suave despite his acne. The first one was always a benchmark: was it down the front of the blouse from behind, or up the back of cotton from in front? The freeing of a bra strap, the loosening of calico, the liberating of a button on the strobe-lit dance floor of the Top Hat. She would nearly always stop the game with finger-handcuffs on the boy's wrist or a tongue inside his ear.

Andy stared at his shoes as she spoke. Seeing his despondent look, she said, as they had almost finished their drinks, "Do you want to see where I live?"

Allowing himself to be led, he nodded. They drained their glasses, got up. Samantha gathered her coat, a long beige Burberry. She put her cigarettes and lighter into her handbag. One last time, she took his hand and they walked out of the pub. Around the corner was the DART station. They went in through the night gate. In a minute, the train arrived, two bullets of green metal and yellow light.

They got off at Dun Laoghaire and had to walk half a mile to her house. The lights were still on. Her parents were up. Samantha said, "Be really quiet. They don't know about you."

Like mice, they scurried, laughing quietly in the dark, round the back of the house. She took out the key to her granny flat, opened the door and, quickly taking off her coat, said, "Get under the blankets. For a moment."

He did as he was told, still wearing his jacket, his jeans, his Doctor Marten's. His short brown hair was pomaded with a light night rain, his face dewed with little droplets. Without turning on the light, Samantha went into the house through the communicating door. She was gone for several minutes. He assumed that she was saying good night to her parents.

Under the blankets, he could hear the door opening again. Then, he saw her face smiling down on him as she lifted the covers.

"All clear," she said, then began looking for something.

He sat up on the bed, watching her and surveying the room. Over there, the dolls were ranked like a rag-tag army of playtime conscripts. Above them, on the window sill, stood a framed photograph of school children. Leaning by another wall, there was a pale wooden Hohner guitar with no strings. The record player squatted on the floor. Beside this, an armchair was covered in a wild outgrowth of clothes: summer dresses; stockings; suspenders; a garter belt; an ornate white basque that she had worn for him one night.

She picked up a shoe box, came over to where he sat on the bed. "Your letters," she said. "I've kept them."

He said nothing.

"Would you like to see me in school?" She put the box on the floor and walked over to the photograph on the window sill. He followed and bent over to peer into the frame.

"You were beautiful then, too," he said awkwardly.

"Puppy fat," she dismissed his compliment. "I look awful in that horrible uniform."

They stood up, looking at each other. She could see that he was on the verge of tears, so she took his head, with tenderness cradling it in her arms, his left ear against her breast. "I can hear your heart," he said.

She began to stroke his wet hair, then lifted his head and quickly kissed him full on the lips. "I'm sorry," she said then. "But you sure can pick 'em."

"I sure can."

"Do you want a towel? The bathroom is over there." She showed him to a little closet in the corner of the flat. A light bulb hung from a long wire in the ceiling. He went over, took a pink towel off the rack, began to dry his hair.

"Let's go to bed," she said. He smiled sadly, handed her the towel. As she dried her hair, he went back into the bathroom, urinated, flushed and washed his hands, his face.

"You can use my toothbrush," she said. He saw that, in the glass by the sink, there were two.

"The red one?"

"No, the green one."

When he had done brushing, he gargled, spat into the sink, ran the water briefly, wiped his mouth with a hand towel.

"Meet you in bed," she said, passing by him on his way out of the bathroom. She closed the louvred door behind her. The light spilling out suggested her legs, her shirt, her hair. He walked over to the bed, sat down, took off his shoes.

By the time she got out of the bathroom, he was already naked under her covers. In the half light, he watched her undressing, the moon through the window making her beautiful pale face silver as though she were an actress in a black and white movie.

He loved her body. Her shoulders gently sloping towards the slender arms that would tonight hold him for the last time, her breasts with just enough fullness and gravity, her little freckled belly with its cute appendix scar, her red hair: all of these elements giving her the aspect of Venus, he thought, although there were no seraphim sailing in on the wind with veils in which to cover her. Her delicious pussy, he thought. I'll never see it again.

She took herself under the sheets, rolled on top of him. Delightful pressure on his stomach and chest as, head in hands, she leaned on her elbows and stared down at him through a curtain of hair.

"One last time, then goodbye and no regrets," she whispered, as if this was a bright idea that she had just thought of, then she began to land little butterfly kisses on his forehead, eyelids, nose, lips. She fluttered on his left ear, trailed sweetness down the line of his jaw and onto his soft neck, then along his shoulder, planting a row of pecks on the path leading to his left nipple which she brushed flippantly with the tip of her tongue before starting on the downy rivulet of hair that rose between his floating ribs and flowed into the delta between his legs.

He clung to her with the heels of his hands, fingers playing lightly on her back, pianoforte on her spine. It was delirious, he thought, it is over. But he was too sad to say anything when she took off, sitting astride his chest, and began to move rhythmically, hovering over his belly button, brushing the sides of his torso with the insides of her thighs, the outermost curls of her pubic hair like an opposing magnetic field on the silk skin of his belly. Then, in one astonishing movement that hammered a jolt through him as though he were strapped into an electric chair and the executioner was teasing him with a non-lethal voltage, she took him deep inside herself, while simultaneously stoppering his mouth with her right hand.

*

The next morning, Saturday, everything was calm. Samantha woke first, arms wrapped around Andy as if she and this curiously unfamiliar young man had been born that way. The sheets were tied around them in loose knots that would not hold.

She stirred him with a kiss on each of his eyelids, as though to open them she must first seal them. A few moments of drowsiness, then he almost realised where he was.

"Wake up. It's half nine," she said.

"Unnh," he managed, then opened his eyes fully and smiled at her. His lover.

"I'd offer you a shower but I have to be going."

"What time is it?"

"After nine thirty. Come on, it's time to get up."

"Nnnnh," he said, and fell back into sleep.

By the time he had come around again, she was already dressed. "Put your clothes on," she said. "Let's go out for breakfast."

"Breakfast."

It was only when he had sleepily pulled his clothes on and was tying his shoes that he realised what day it was. "You'll miss your flight," he said.

"I've got time yet," she said. "Now, stay here. I'm going to say goodbye to my mother. She's in the kitchen, so when I'm there, you go out this way," she pointed to the door of the granny flat, "and go under the kitchen window. You'll have to bend down so she doesn't see you."

"OK."

With that, Samantha walked into the house and closed the door behind her.

Looking around, Andy checked that he had all of his things. The jacket he had come here in, his jeans, his DMs. He wondered if he should steal his love letters back. But no. With a nagging fear in his stomach, he walked out the door of the granny flat, closed it behind him. Then, bending down, he dashed beneath the kitchen window, which overlooked the driveway, like a man escaping a house fire. Out onto the road, in front of the wall and hedge that obscured the front of the house, he waited for Samantha.

It seemed like a long time, but after a few minutes, she came out of the front door, kissing her mother on the cheek. Samantha was wearing her Burberry. She had a travelling bag in her right hand. The front door closed behind her. She smiled at him as she spotted his head peering around from behind the hedge. Samantha waved her left hand to indicate that he should walk a little further down the road. He did not understand, so he waited until she reached the gate, then walked on a little.

"Carry my bag?" she said.

He took her holdall. "You'd packed already," he said.

"No shit, Sherlock," she said. "Let's go into town."

They walked to the bus stop and waited for what seemed like an age, neither speaking. When the bus arrived, she paid the two fares into the city centre, tore the strip of tickets in half and stuffed his into the left hand pocket of his jeans. "One last feel," she whispered in his ear as she did so.

They went upstairs on the bus, taking a seat at the front so that they could look down on the road as the bus ate it slowly.

"YouÆll call me when you get back," he said.

"I'll give you a buzz on Tuesday at work," she replied.

The long journey into town afforded them both time for reflection. As they passed by Blackrock, she said of the two shopping centres that faced each other across the motorway, "The Frascati is less frantic, but the Blackrock Centre is nicer. They have people-mover escalators there. You just stand on one and it looks like you're gliding. No steps."

He wondered why she should find this fact so marvellous, but said nothing.

The bus crawled on through Merrion. She had nothing to say about this locality. Then, Ballsbridge.

"The RDS," he said.

"Crazy," she whispered.

Fifteen minutes later, the bus lurched to a halt at Hawkins Street corner on Eden Quay. They disembarked and walked towards O'Connell bridge. It was nearly eleven.

"Come for breakfast with me," she said, taking her bag from him as they stood on the kerbside. "We have time for a Bewley's. On me?"

Mute, smiling, he followed her.

As they went, she said, without looking at him, "I really will call you on Tuesday. I get back Monday night. I thought last night I can't do this. I'm really sorry for messing you around. I don't want to hurt you any more than you're hurt already"

"That would be difficult," he said, sourly.

"I know. So I've thought about it," she said, surprisingly breezily.

They crossed on to the traffic island then waited at the lights to walk over to Westmoreland Street. The green man. Saturday morning traffic, cars stalled like greyhounds waiting for the traps to open. Samantha and Andy walked over to the other side, among a crowd of pedestrians. The lights changed behind them, the cars growling off across the bridge.

"I'm going to make up my mind this weekend," she said, as they walked into Bewley's.

But, just inside the door, he turned, seeing the long queue that was a permanent feature of this place. "I think I'll skip breakfast," he said, hesitantly. "I think ... I need to think about things, too."

They stopped and looked at each other. She put her left hand on his right cheek and brought his face to hers. They gently rubbed noses, like Caucasian Eskimos. "You go and think about things, then," she said, and released him. One more kiss on the lips. He stood away from her, reached out and tapped her right shoulder, then turned towards the street.

On College Green, he would wait for the number eleven bus to arrive. Had he looked back, he would have seen her walk away, out of the café and towards the quay, where she would get the bus to the airport.

Instead, the memory of London's asphalt smell flooding his nostrils, he imagined Samantha at the boarding gate, showing her pass, then disappearing down the gangway to the plane.

^

Biography

Patrick Chapman, 31, is the author of three books of poems: Jazztown (Raven Arts Press, 1991), The New Pornography (Salmon, 1996) and Proximity (Salmon, forthcoming in 2000). He lives in Dublin, where he works as a copywriter. He has completed a collection of short stories and is writing a novel. Chapman has been shortlisted twice for the Hennessy Literary award (1995 for poetry, 1999 for fiction), and once for the Ian St James fiction award (1990). His poetry has appeared in many anthologies around the world.