Free Stir-Fry by Emma Donoghue Page A

chomp your way through my peaches anytime, sweetheart.”
    “I wouldn’t worry about it, Maria,” said Ruth, her voice muffled as she bent down to the oven. “I’m living off savings from my years as a civil serpent, and Lady Muck here gets monthly checks from her loving family.”
    “Loving, is it?” snorted Jael. “All they love is their stud farm and their station wagon. They pay me to stay away.”
    “That’s shameful,” said Maria.
    “Isn’t it just! Thrust out into the cold at seventeen by my nearest and dearest.”
    Maria couldn’t hide her smirk. “No, what I meant was, it’s shameful for a grown woman of twenty-nine to be still collecting pocket money.”
    There was a short pause—had she managed to hit a nerve? She began plaiting the tartan fringe, three strings at a time.
    Jael bounced back. “Every time I feel a pang of guilt, I remember that as a communist it’s my duty to squeeze my capitalist parents dry.”
    “You’re a communist in your hole,” called Ruth, clanging cutlery in the sink.
    “Especially there,” said Jael, giving Maria a lecherous wink.
    Maria combed the blanket edge loose again and went over to dry the saucepans. “Yes, but what about me?” she asked Ruth as she took a dripping bowl from her hand. “It’s not my food.”
    “You, my dear, are helping us to squander our ill-gotten gains,” called Jael, her chin on the sofa back. “We’d be buying the odd chocolate cake whether you were here or not, so don’t bother your pretty little head about it.”
    Maria wiped between the tines of a fork. “But why did you advertise for a flatmate, then, if you could afford the flat yourselves?”
    “Wasn’t my idea.” Jael snapped open the
College Echo
.
    Ruth scrubbed at the edge of a plate with steel wire. “It’s hard to remember. It seems years ago.”
    “You were lonely,” Jael prompted from behind the paper.
    “Didn’t realise you’d noticed.” Ruth turned back to Maria, and her voice livened. “But it’s just as well you’re here, or we’d be at each other’s throats. One Sunday last summer we came to physical blows over who got to read the newspaper first.”
    “Mmm,” said Jael, “and I remember who won.”
    Maria looked from one to the other, as she folded up the damp cloth. “So I’m to consider myself some sort of cushion?”
    “More like a kept woman,” suggested Jael.
    “Now try O’Connell Street.”
    “Shrawd Ee Cunl.”
    “It’s a
ch
.” She pointed at the sign, three stories up. “Try again: Sráid Uí Chonaill.”
    Galway twisted his mouth with effort. “Shroyige Ee Hunil. Oh, boy, I give up. Why can’t they spell it like it sounds?”
    “It’s like a wartime code,” said Maria, watching for a gap in the cars. “The invaders aren’t supposed to be able to read the street names,” she called over her shoulder as she dashed across the street.
    Galway followed her more cautiously. “I guess I won’t be fluent in Gaelic by Christmas, then? My grandma will be mad.”
    “I wouldn’t waste your energy on a dying language,” Maria advised him. They crossed the bridge, skirting the beggar and her baby wrapped in a striped blanket. “I only know it because it was drilled into me for thirteen years; I’ll have purged my mind of it soon enough.”
    He paused to peer over a scrolled parapet to the dank Liffey rolling forty feet below. “You shouldn’t deride your heritage,” he told her when she joined him. “Smell that.”
    She bent obediently for a sniff.
    “Full of bones and battle-axes, that smell is. Pure history.”
    “Dead fish, and Guinness leaking from the export ships, more like.” Maria straightened up. “I’ve had enough bloody history for one morning. I was tired when I woke up, and those cathedral steps nearly finished me off. If I’d known you were going to be such an enthusiast, I’d never have brought you.”
    He caught her up at the traffic island. “I’ve just noticed that all the shops are