Free Mother of Pearl by Mary Morrissy Page A

switch. A gargler in the bathroom. She tried to visualise the other guests but all she could come up with were identikit pictures, a juggled collection of cruel noses, narrowed eyes, thin, twisted smiles. She did not wish to meet any of them. She listened intently at her door before opening it and crossing the landing to the bathroom. It was a large, draughty room painted an icing blue. All the fixtures were at one end like a capsizing ship. It catered for the cleansing of several bodies not intimate with one another. A few gnarled knobs of soap lay in the wire tray over the bath. There was a green stain under one of the taps like the ghost of a waterfall. The beaker clamped to the mirror above the basin, which should have held a cheery array of toothbrushes, was empty and foul-smelling. The ill-tempered geyser shuddered noisily into action when she turned it on, issuing a jet of boiling water into the sink and sending clouds of steam wafting towards the ceiling. The mirror became opaque. Irene stood in the seamless fog, her hands pale and blameless beneath the still surface of the water, and felt cleansed. Forgiven. It was not too late for her. An impatient rattling of the door knob shattered the moment. Hurriedly she splashed her face. She brushed her teeth fiercely. Then, furtively checking at the door, she slipped back across the landing and into the haven of number two.
    She undressed self-consciously. She couldn’t remember the last time she had disrobed in a room where no one was looking. As she climbed into bed she caught a glimpse of the small patchwork of city visible through the thinly curtained window – the lapping slate roofs, a trio of chimney pots, puddles in the valleys, the splutter of a broken drainpipe streaming heedlessly below. She was naked; there was nobody to see her. The feel of her own unobserved skin next to her was strange and lurid. She stroked the crowns of her nipples; she sought the cleft of moisture between her legs. A shiver of joy made her gasp. She was, at last, invisible.
    The morning had a glowering air, a sulky, hangover feel. Seagulls swooped, brayed and scattered. Irene wrinkled her nose at the smell, from the brewery, she guessed, yeasty, like chicory. Street hawkers passed her pushing prams stacked with pyramids of apples glistening from a dawn shower. A few grizzled old men stood listlessly in doorways dragging on flattened butts. A street sweeper gathered armfuls of wet leaves and deposited them lavishly in a barrow. The dismal streets made her melancholy, reiterating her sense of homelessness. It was only eight-thirty and she had several hours to kill. She felt resentful at having been turned out of the Four Provinces after breakfast. House rules indeed! They just didn’t want her here. She turned on to Gloucester Street. She made a mental note of it. She could not afford to get lost. If she did she might have to ask for directions and they would know she was a stranger. Afterwards somebody might remember. In fact, nobody remembered the gaunt woman in a black beret and severely belted maroon coat and rubbed-looking gloves with a pearl at the wrists. The girls playing piggybeds among the peelings or swinging languidly from a lamppost barely looked up as she wandered, like a careful ghost, through the battered landscape of their games. It was the season for skipping. Thwack of rope and a strange, sour chanting. Or they stood idly in twos and threes chewing the split ends of their hair as Irene threaded her way through them, intent only on their own whispered secrets. There were small boys crouched in knots over games of marbles, their mittens sewn with elastic to their hand-me-down coats. They seemed in thrall to the glassy baubles shot through with seams of ochre and Prussian blue and would have registered Irene only as another pair of mottled female legs passing by.
    A bald infant propped up in a large, spoked carriage on the path gnawed on a dummy and watched her