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“I’m not vegan, no,” she laughed the words with a single, squinted eye. “Dublin has made nothing out of me except maybea little more pessimistic. And you’re very good to offer, but I clock off at seven.”
He clicked his tongue. “Pity. Maybe it will be sixty years after all until we see each other next.”
With nothing left to keep him there, she resigned herself to offering him a final, familiar pleasantry, “Fionn.”
“Áine.”
He turned then, heading for the carpeted stairs.
Watching on, Áine’s belly brimmed with more bitter than sweet by the second. She wracked her brain for one last thing to say to get a final glance at his face. To embalm its kindness in her memory and not allow herself to forget him again.
“Wait!” she called with a reaching hand she managed to drop to her side before he noticed.
He paused on the first step, “Áine?”
“I’m not being funny, Fionn, but where the fuck are your shoes?” Her hands rested triangular on her hips as she smiled—hopelessly, knowing it wasn’t the most complex question to leave them on.
His stare switched to his socks, then he threw his head back with laughter only changed in six years for its depth. No sooner he collected himself, eyes closed as he subtly shook the humour from his head. “They’re down the road. Sure look, I didn’t need them anyway.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Okay.”
He took four more steps, taking with him any chance she had of stopping the unbearable bitterness filling her.
“Wait!” she called a second time, the red hue warming her cheeks so blatant now she stretched her bent body back from the desk to somehow hide it.
God, what am I doing?
He just paused this time.
“Did you ever go? To college, I mean. Did you get to do the writing like you wanted?” Áine’s eyes embedded into his, desperate to hear if he’d done better with his life than she had.
Fionn ran his hand up the bannister and back down again before answering: “No, I didn’t, no. I suppose life had other plans for me—worse ones. But hey, isn’t that very Irish of me, to suffer and in turn have things to lament about. They just won’t be conveyed as well. And who knows”—he shrugged and the bag slipped again—“a better man than the one I am might wake tomorrow fruitful.”
She grinned. “I’ve not heard that one before.”
“Conveyed better than I imagined then.”
He really left then, and the bitterness filled Áine whole. Her organs felt crushed, and yet she also felt quite hollow, like the only thing holding up her body was sheer will and not bones.
He didn’t get his dream, and neither did she. Her mouth downturned back to the mime’s sad face like clockwork. From it, she released a stifled sigh, relieved he hadn’t asked the same question and discovered her failure.
Áine and Fionn were once two children sitting in a room full of people with promised futures while they could only speculate in the hope that faith, a part-time job and a decent grant was enough. Áine’s dream was to become a solicitor because what better job than to debate for cause and impose a change in the lives of those who needed it most? To her credit, she’d managed to complete the first two years of her law degree. But when denied a third-year grant, let alone the future cost of sitting the FE-1s and having her hours reduced just to pass them, deferring was inevitable.
Now everything Áine did was in some way a deferral. She deferred finding a nicer job or finding love. Deferred visits home to avoid seeing her mother’s disappointed face for both the former. The disappointment didn’t actually bother Áine. Or eventhe rotten face her mam pulled with no favour to her deep-set wrinkles.
Rather, it was the pointless conversation they’d always have after the expression that rubbed Áine wrong. She’d try to explain to her mam how it wasn’t her duty to live up to a parent’s expectations. That giving birth didn’t equate to permanent ownership.
Áine’s mother would argue she only wanted the best for her and that she was letting her intelligence go to waste. Then Áine would have to silently leave before the inevitable question slipped out: “If you wanted the best for me, why did you have seven children?”
Áine was aware she was the youngest of the seven, so her argument became void on the basis of her existence, but the glass-eyed anger and meaning behind it still stood.
Looking around the bleak foyer, she realised hewouldhave known she’d failed her dreams too, temporarily. But he couldn’t have guessed that part. Solicitors don’t work in shoddy B&Bs. They wear fancy pantsuits and drink wine that isn’t the cheapest bottle in the off-licence.
She ran her fingers through her knotted curls, wishing she could have explained. Told him it came down to money, how it always did. Áine had even considered taking up sex work after one of the B&B frequenters suggested it. For all her support of them, the false narrative accompanying the build-up to the sex wasn’t something she could stomach or manufacture. It wasn’t the same as what she did on nights out. Her gut told her that much. So instead, it was the long game she had to play. Two more years working in the B&B, and she’d have enough to return to DCU. Then she could tell Paddy to shove the job up his hole and that itwasher who chipped his beloved tray.
Banging a stack of pages on the desk to do anything with her weary hands, it dawned on Áine, for all her supposedintelligence, she’d been stupid tonight. She had let something, someone, slip through her fingers.
