Free Stir-Fry by Emma Donoghue Page B

shut. Has there been a bomb alert or something?”
    “Sunday, remember? The Lord will smite thee if thou buyest a packet of biscuits.” She led him round College Green. “Which reminds me, I’ve missed mass. Still, my mother used to say it’s all right if you visit a cathedral instead, so I suppose they have their uses.”
    “But wasn’t the Viking settlement awesome? And thattrash heap, with bits of eggshell from prehistoric dinners?”
    “Please, I’ve had no breakfast.” As they rounded the blackened facade she said, “We should probably go and gaze at the Book of Kells, but I’d rather a coffee and a cherry bun.”
    “I have to tell you, I’m totally broke.”
    “Galway, may I buy you a small beverage out of my grant money? Come on, let me feel rich. New Men are meant to be into role reversal.”
    He looked young in the morning light. “Our tour guide couldn’t have been described as a New Man. Did you catch his little jest about the hygiene habits of Viking women?”
    “What got to me was the way he kept calling ‘Step this way—but mind the step, ladies!’”
    Maria found a tiny café, the only door open on the street. “Hey, I didn’t tell you,” she said over the menu, “I’ve got a job at last. Office cleaning, at night.”
    “Go for it,” said Galway. “I was a chambermaid in Boston the summer before last. It gives you lots of dream time.”
    “I’m glad you approve. Everyone else says why don’t I do waitressing instead.”
    “I’d rather sell sweat than smiles,” he told her.
    “Me too.” Maria was always convinced by epigrams. “It’s not the sweat I mind, though, it’s the stink of window-cleaning fluid.”
    “Soon get used to it. Who are you working with?”
    “A woman called Maggie. She has a lavender overall and flat grey curls and never speaks.”
    “You’ll get some peace and quiet, then.”
    “Oh, stop it. You could get a Ph.D. in looking on the bright side.”
    The grey steps of the administration building were littered with several dozen bodies and three banners. “Rubbers forRevolution,” she read, and one long sagging one that included the letters “HIV” and something that looked like “Cabbage” but couldn’t be. Maria dawdled at the edge of the gravel till she spotted Galway’s arm waving in a leisurely fashion. She waved back but walked on; it was too bright a day to sit on concrete in the shade. Of course the college should install a condom machine, but somehow she couldn’t work up the energy to demonstrate for a product she had never even seen out of its packet. As she strolled toward the main gate, she heard rising from the crowd a slow clap and several chants, including an irreverent “Johnny, I hardly knew you.”
    Maria got off the bus a stop early, to soak up the yellow sunlight. She considered her new boots with satisfaction: slightly imperfect matte-brown Doc Martens, £15.99 from the stall that shifty-looking guy ran in the arcade she discovered last Saturday. Now she could pass for a real student. Their broad toes scuffled through gutterfuls of sharp leaves.
    The door at the top of the stairs was swaying open, so she strolled in and glanced through the bead curtain.
    It wasn’t her fault; she was in no sense spying. She couldn’t help but see the shape they made. Her eyes tried to untangle its elements. Ruth, cross-legged on the table, her back curved like a comma, and Jael, leaning into it, kissing her. There was no wild passion; that might have shaken her less. Just the slow bartering of lips on the rickety table where Ruth chopped garlic every night.
    Maria clamped her eyes shut, as if they had not already soaked in the scene as blotting paper swallowed ink. When she raised the lids, the women had not moved. The kiss, their joint body, the table, all seemed to belong to a parallel world. She had the impression that no noise from behind this shifting skin of beads could reach them.
    She doubled back to the door, making her brash