It was three weeks before I actually did get to see her. There were several phone calls in between, the Belfast accent fading with each until it was an embarrassment for her even to have it mentioned. In the interim, she was leading an exciting life: Tommy brought her to Cork, Tommy stayed over, Tommy crashed his car, but he’s OK, he just has a cut on his head. Then one Saturday afternoon at the beginning of December there was a text message: “do u want to come over?”
“Sure”, I texted back. I hadn’t seen her flat, even though I’d signed as guarantor for it a few months before. I steeled myself and set off. She was waiting at the street door as I parked the car.
“Hey,” she said, running her hand through half centimetre long hair and looking at me with a kind of trepidation.
“Hey,” I said back, a genuine smile engulfing me. She was herself, the same girl I’d known from “before”. I saw it the minute I looked in her eyes. “Suits you,” I said, indicating the hair. She made a face.
“It’s growing back. You should’ve seen it when I first did it.”
We spent a few seconds just looking at each other, the way people who were lovers once sometimes do. She was the first to break off. “Are you coming up?”
“Yeah, sure. Interested to see what you’ve done with the place.” She led me into the little hallway and up the stairs. I watched her all the way up to the second floor.
“It’s really small,” she said, then added, “But I really like it.” She flashed me a smile down over the banister. She was an extremely pretty girl, but when she smiled that big, wide smile of hers … I think every time she did it I fell for her all over again.
“Ta-dah!” she said with a theatrical flourish, leading me into the flat proper. She let me walk in first and waited for my impressions.
It was small – a living room like a large cupboard, with a tiny kitchenette in one corner and a foldaway table with two little chairs. Off to one side I could see, through strategically open doors, a bathroom with stand-up shower, and a bedroom whose entire floorspace appeared to be taken up with a double bed. But it was also filled with all the things I remembered from her old place, from the time before she was ill. There were bookcases and books, all carefully placed in a scheme that seemed to rely more on the colours of their spines than their contents; tiny teddy bears and cute little jewellery boxes; pictures, and posters, and dried flowers, and pot-pourri. More than that, it was infused with the scent of her, scrubbed skin and subtly-perfumed soap, shampoo and freshly laundered clothes – these and a dozen others, all compounded into a aroma as unique and individual as a fingerprint.
“It’s lovely,” I said, turning to her, moved as much by the normality as by the familiarity of it. She smiled and blushed and did that shy thing, but she beamed, too, and I saw how proud she was of getting back on her feet, back out into a place of her own. “Really. It’s really great.”
“You want tea?” she said, moving into the kitchenette.
“Coffee if you have.” I eased into one of the two armchairs in the little room. Each was draped in a woollen coverlet, what Irish people call a “throw”. As my hand touched the fabric I had a weird moment of fugue that blossomed into memory: we’d made love on this, years before.
“So,” I said, watching her fetch big green mugs from a corner cabinet. “How’ve you been?”