Every gift a curse, p.18
Every Gift a Curse, page 18
“OK,” I say.
“OK?!”
“OK,” I repeat.
And we’re off. The club, Scarlet, is at the end of the road. I don’t have an ID, but one of Michelle’s friends just turned eighteen and has her sister’s old learner’s permit with her, and she very generously gives it to me. For tonight, I’m not Maeve Chambers, witch, ex-girlfriend, and cursed teenager. I’m Sophia Mulready, older sister to Dani Mulready, and I can drive.
I’VE NEVER BEEN TO A PROPER CLUB BEFORE. Just gigs, usually, or pubs with sticky little dance floors. The bigness of Scarlet is immediately daunting, as is the darkness. All the walls are black, and a thin fog is coming from behind the DJ booth, so it’s difficult to tell what is space and what is boundary.
Waves of colored light pass over my face, blinding me a little, sending my brain into process mode. I remember those epilepsy warnings you sometimes get before films or concerts: This contains flashing lights, which may affect people prone to seizures. I never thought they could ever apply to me. Now, I realize, they do. The fireworks did it first. Color and light set my mind off, give it a job to do. It immediately starts looking for heads to enter. Like an underworked police dog, my gift is seeking a scent.
Michelle and her friends pull me toward the dance floor, and then Danielle, the girl who is supposed to be my little sister, hands me a shot of something that tastes like licorice. “Sambuca,” she yells at me, and then everyone starts dancing.
They’re a nice bunch, Michelle’s new girls. I’m not sure what happened to her friendship with Niamh. Maybe that was one of the many decisions she made about herself after she changed schools. The new girls are loud and sweet, and none of them recognize me from the newspaper. They think I’m kind of cool, actually. They wish, privately, that they had the confidence to wear boots and jeans to the club.
I get a little drunker. My dancing gets bigger, the silly expressive way that Fiona and I like to do when we’re out together, when we try to be Kate Bush. The girls laugh, but in a nice way, and slowly start to abandon the sexy bum shuffles that they began dancing with. We’re throwing our arms all around the place, and one girl breaks into an Irish dance out of nowhere, and we all laugh and make a circle around her.
Then another girl, from another group, makes a funny show out of “challenging” her to a Riverdance-off. The DJ notices and puts on a sort of electronic Irish trad mix, and we go wild, believing ourselves to be the controlling stakeholders of the club, and wonderful dancers besides.
And it’s all just girls, girls being stupid together. There’s a touch of mourning to every movement, the grief of being without Roe, the loss of Fiona to Belfast. But there’s hope. A tiny dash of it. Life isn’t school, I realize. I don’t need to live and die by Fiona’s approval. I don’t need to be afraid of other people. Some pal of Michelle’s puts her arm around my shoulders. The collective noun for a group of girls is not “a threat.” It can be anything. A gaggle of girls. A choir. A parliament. A galaxy.
The Caroline Polachek cover of “Breathless” by the Corrs comes on, the DJ attempting to gracefully transition us out of the trad mix back into proper dance music. A wash of colored light kicks me back into sadness like a hoof to the chest. Roe used to cover this song, played it the first time I ever saw Small Private Ceremony live. I still made Roe play it all the time, the two of us in their bedroom with an acoustic guitar.
And now I’m crying, of course, because I will never coax Roe into a shirtless rendition of a twenty-year-old pop song ever again. I have lost that right entirely.
“Oh, god, Maeve,” Michelle says, rushing to me. “What’s wrong?”
I cling on to her, this girl I never confided in even when we were friends, and bury my face in her shoulder. Gently, she whispers into my ear, “Is it Roe?” and I nod. “Let’s go to the bathroom,” she says, and shuffles me toward it.
In the restroom, Michelle mops me up, and even though I tell her very few details about Roe, the magnitude of my sadness attracts a circle of girls around me. “Fuck men,” someone says, and I don’t have the energy to correct her because I am crying too much.
“We’re just,” I hiccup. “We’re becoming two different people.”
Which is, in its purest sense, the truth. Roe is becoming a rock star, and I am becoming the Housekeeper. Funny how casually that fact comes to me, now. A dim, grinding realization, like knowing you have to take over an unprofitable family business, one day, but not quite now.
The tears finally dry up, and Michelle gently suggests returning to the dance floor. I nod, and she buys me another shot at the bar, and I swallow without bothering to taste it.
I’m not sure how long we were in the bathroom, but in that short time, the mood of the dance floor has shifted. The jolly silliness has morphed into something sexier, a crowd of boys having attached itself to our group. Girls are being spun out and back into the arms of their partners, half making fun of old-school Fred Astaire moves and half sick with longing for it.
I’m happy for them, but it’s like looking directly at the sun after eye surgery. I can’t bear the idea of it. Of someone touching me. Of being danced with like that by someone who isn’t Roe. Of not being danced with at all. Michelle tugs my arm. “You wanna dance?” she asks.
“Nah,” I say. “You go. I need a breather.”
I lean against the bar, attempting to disguise my misery as mystery, and that’s when I notice someone else leaning, too. It’s a girl. My age. Slick blond hair, wobbly limbs. Her eyes half-closed, trying to bob along with the music, yet strangely unable to support the weight of her own chin. It keeps sinking down, her forehead falling forward, and then she wakes herself up. Her brain is a fog. A dim purple light, weak and distressed. There’s a haze on top of her, and I assume she is just drunk, but underneath the sleepy distance is a hard nut of panic. Why can’t I think? she thinks. What’s going on?
She’s clasping a glass, Coke mixed with something, both hands around it.
“Hey,” I ask. “Are you OK?”
“Hmm?”
“I said, are you OK?”
She opens her eyes, too widely, her forehead creasing with the strain. “Did Ellie go home?”
“I don’t know who Ellie is,” I say slowly. I remember the twenty in my purse that Pat gave me. “Where do you live? Do you want me to get you a cab?”
I ask her a few more times, and she dithers, asks about Ellie again, but eventually I get her address out of her. It turns out she lives not far from Roe and Lily. Just one street behind.
“I live really near there,” I say. “I’m going now, anyway. Do you want to share a cab with me?”
She twists her mouth, tempted but confused. “I shouldn’t leave without Ellie,” she says.
“I think Ellie might have left without you,” I counter.
“Still, I can’t leave without her.”
I dig into her brain and get a vague picture of Ellie, curly short hair and a black dress, and glance around the club for her.
“If I take a look around for Ellie,” I say, “and can’t find her in five minutes, then can we go?”
“Yes.” She nods. “Then we can go.”
“And you’ll stay here?”
But she has already zoned out, her chin falling again. I do a quick circuit around the club, looking for Ellie, mostly just to say I did. Danielle tugs me back onto the floor, and I fish into my wallet to hand her back her sister’s ID. “Thanks,” I say. “I’m going now.”
“You’ve been a great sister,” she laughs, hugging me. “Better than my real one. You can keep it if you want. I don’t need it anymore.”
“Won’t she want it back?”
She shrugs. “I don’t see her.” Danielle gives me a sad half smile, a these-things-happen smile.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” she says, shrugging again. “She’s a Jesus freak now.”
I want to ask her more about this, but my eyes flicker to the blond girl at the bar. A boy is talking to her now, and I feel relieved because maybe she’s found a friend and I won’t have to look after her. But the more I look, the less easy I feel. The boy is close to her, whispering, and she continues to just bob her heavy head to her chest.
I move closer. Notice the hand on her back, a slow patting motion, as if he were soothing a spooked horse. Pushing past the crowd on the dance floor, I see that he is not really a boy but a man. Older, about Pat’s age. Which is odd in itself because Scarlet is kind of a young crowd. I mean, there’s a reason Michelle’s gang chose here. It’s notoriously a little easier to get in, if you’re under eighteen, than most clubs.
I’m already tapped into the blond girl’s mind, and it comes back into focus as I move closer to her. I hear his words landing in her ear, vibrating with the heavy bass. “You promise you won’t be sick,” he says, “if I get us a cab?”
Her reply is mumbling, but her thought is clear. But I’m already getting a cab, she thinks. With that girl in the blazer.
When she speaks, it comes out slightly muddled. She makes a few efforts. “The cab is coming,” she eventually says. “I’m leaving with her.”
“I think it’s better if you got a cab with me.”
I’m next to her now. “There you are!” I say, grabbing her wrist. “We’re going, come on.”
“Hello,” the man says, and I look at him. He is very fair, with invisible eyebrows and a long, strange haircut like a medieval knight. A big white shirt, maybe a size too big, and with creases still molded into the front from the cardboard it came wrapped around. For a second, I think he might be her brother, just because they’re both blond.
“Chantelle,” he says, “I haven’t met your friend.”
He waits for Chantelle to introduce us, but she’s miles away.
“Ready for bed, I’d say,” he says to her, stroking her back. “Shall we head off?”
Chantelle wrinkles her nose. “Where?”
I look from Chantelle to him and back again. “Do you know her?” I ask.
He starts to look annoyed. “Well, of course I know her. Hasn’t she ever mentioned me to you?”
He doesn’t know her at all, clearly. If he did, he would know that I don’t know her at all. I stare at him, worming my way into his brain, trying to find a quick route in. My expression must look doubtful, because he tugs at Chantelle again. “I’m one of her regulars,” he says. “At the bakery. We chat every morning. Every morning she’s working, anyway.”
A fuzzy image from Chantelle slams into my head, of awkward chatter while she serves this man coffee and plucks croissants from a tray with long silver tongs. He asks her about weekend plans, he asks her about clubs, he asks her what “students get up to these days.” He annoys her on good days, freaks her out on bad ones. Her manager makes sure she’s never alone in the shop with him. He is overfamiliar, but never oversteps enough to be barred completely.
“We need to go,” I say, and I practically yank her arm out of its socket getting her away from him. He looks at me, furious, and in that rage his brain unlocks and lets me in. I’m back in the takeaway bakery. He hates his own awkwardness, despises how frequently he messes up conversations with Chantelle. He knows he would get along great with her if only she wasn’t so judgmental. He reads about a thing online that makes women easier to talk to. It’s actually a natural herbal remedy. It’s not Rohypnol, crucially. That’s for rapists. This is more of a helping hand for people who find modern life a little fast, women a little distant. It’s a leveler.
The word spiked hits me like a truck. I’ve heard about it, obviously. But it seems so impossible, so scary, a thing that happens in Dublin or London or New York, not in provincial clubs.
“You’ve spiked her?” It comes out like a question, when I know it’s a statement.
“Don’t be insane,” he says, but panic cuts across his features. “Fucking crazy bitch.”
“How fucking dare you?” I scream, and Chantelle wakes up a bit, looks around. “You’re a rapist.”
The bouncer starts to walk over and I signal to him, ready to explain everything. The guy, the rapist, starts to move back from me. Eyes on the exit. Chantelle lurches forward, her face stricken, and I think she is about to cry until she suddenly gets sick on herself. It’s white, gluey, and trails down the front of her top.
People back away from her with shrieks and the man weaves through the crowd. The bouncer is furious. “All right, girls,” he says. “Out. Get her out.”
“This girl has been spiked.” I’m the one shrieking now. “You need to catch the guy. Call the police.”
He doesn’t hear me, and just tries to shove Chantelle toward the door without getting vomit on his suit. “Fucking hell,” someone says as she passes. “What a waster.”
My brain starts to burn. Another wave of colored light passes over my eyes, and suddenly I am with the woman in the wheat field, two hares in Tutu’s mouth, as we both discuss the fate of her teenage daughter. I will keep her, I said. I will keep her.
That’s who she was. Just a woman who kept other women safe from men. It was that way a hundred years ago, and it’s that way now. A demon is a cursed person who has no humanity left in them. But, good god, her humanity was huge.
There’s a sharp burst of something in my head. A kind of falling shock, not dissimilar to the blast of adrenaline that you sometimes get moments before falling asleep. The music cuts. The lights cut, too. There’s a moment of confusion, of “Awwww, what?!,” of irritated glares at the DJ. It doesn’t last long, though, because what comes next is a scream so loud it’s like the room is being ripped in half.
The man, the spiker, the rapist, has crashed to the floor. He’s inches away from the fire exit, was already finding an alternate escape route in case I really did manage to call the police.
The sound of no music in a club, of just voices, of just one man’s scream, is a strange thing to take in. He becomes the de facto DJ by virtue of being the loudest thing in the room.
There has been, perhaps, a disproportionate amount of screaming in my life in the past year. The panicked crush of the gig at the Cypress. The shrill, frantic pitch of the fire at the tennis courts. These were the screams of young people as danger slowly enveloped them; the spiker’s screams are different. They are contorted, malfunctioning, an animal with its leg caught in a trap. He writhes, and as I move closer, I start to see pink spots of blood emerging on his white shirt.
Another bouncer has appeared, and they try to pull him up, but he keeps tearing at his skin. I try to see, but there are too many people in front of me. But I can see gray streaks on his neck, on his hands, his collar and cuffs streaked in watery pink bloodstains.
“What’s that?” someone asks. “Ash?”
“No,” says someone else. “Fur.”
THE BLOOD ON THE SPIKER’S SHIRT ISN’T the deep red of horror movies, or the stale black of a congealed clot. It’s pink. It’s light with fluid and is emerging in pinpricks as each new patch of fur pushes itself through the skin.
There’s the sound of smashed glass. Someone has dropped a big bottle of something behind the bar. Another scream. A symphony of “What the fuck?,” of “What the hell?,” of “Someone help me!” ricochets around the room.
I scan the club and see that gray streaks are emerging everywhere. On arms, necks, shoulder blades. Not very much, and not very consistently. Someone has a patch on their hand, someone has it all the way down their forearm. All the fur is different, but it all has two things in common.
All of it is gray, and all of it is on the boys.
The girls are seeing it on their boyfriends, and the girls are screaming. Strangers who had been kissing have stopped, the girls clutching themselves, horrified. The girls keep looking at themselves, turning their wrists over, lifting their shirts to look for gray, for blood, for this strange new disease that is bristling through the club from nowhere.
“Is this real?” I hear someone say. “Is this happening?”
I back away, toward the DJ booth, trying to distance myself from the commotion. You did this, Maeve. You and the Housekeeper.
You as the Housekeeper.
The bar manager is talking into a walkie-talkie. “We need to get everyone out,” he says tersely, fur on his knuckles. “Now.”
He doesn’t want anyone blaming the club for this. But who on earth could blame the club for this? This is inexplicable: a biblical plague, a freak occurrence, a collective hallucination.
Through the mayhem, I notice that Ellie, the girl who I was convinced had gone home, has found Chantelle. The shock of the situation seems to have woken Chantelle up a little, and she’s taken to the restroom for a cleanup.
I suppose we always thought of the Housekeeper as a straightforward killing machine. Maybe the more human she is, the more creative and flexible her punishments become. What else can I do? I wonder.
A voice booms out over the speakers. “The club is now closed,” the DJ says. “Please make your way to the exits.”
Some of the boys are scratching at their skin, worried, but basically unharmed. Some are rolling on the ground, the combination of physical shock and too much alcohol having burst something within them. I have to literally step over men on my way to the exit.
“If you are too . . . unwell to leave,” the DJ says, stuttering slightly, “an ambulance has been called, and will be here shortly.”
Girls won’t leave their boyfriends. They are screaming at the bouncers, who are trying to get them out while tracking their own fur growth.
Animals, I hear her say, somewhere deep within my inner ear—the place where water gets trapped after swimming. They’re all animals, no matter who they are.
“Stop it,” I whisper.
It’s hard to get down the stairs to the exit. The club just wants everyone out, quick. The bouncers form a wall at the top of the stairs as they usher everyone down. People get halfway down before realizing that their keys are in their coats and their coats are in the cloakroom. They turn back, but the club is too spooked to let anyone back in, for any reason. People push up the stairs as others are coming down, and a knot of violence forms on the landing between the club and the exit.
