Freckles(28)

Rhubarb, away, she says, voice nearing me. Custard, get out of there.

Marion comes towards me down the porch and makes her way through the maze of cars. I step out of my hiding place, feeling foolish.

Oh Marion. Hi.

What the hell are you doing.

Her cardigan is wrapped tight around her, held by her arms across her stomach. I see a baby bump where there isn’t one, there couldn’t be any yet, she’s only eight weeks, it’s probably the size of a tab of e. Cyclops used to get them for us, he took them when he was DJ-ing, supplied them too. They never did much for me; mild euphoria, I suppose, but Jamie used to experience higher pleasure from physical touch so he loved it. If anything it gave me moments of clear focus and some of those moments, while I had my hand down Jamie’s pants, I was plotting and planning on leaving Valentia. Focused on my next goal. I never deserved him.

JP told me you were home. For the Easter break, is it, she asks.

I can’t stop looking at her stomach, I wonder if they talked about me. They must have. Even if it wasn’t malicious, they must have poured their hearts out. Pillow talk, quiet whispers of the things about me that bothered them. I know I used to do that with Jamie about Marion. I wonder if he told her the things I’d said. Innocent things really, but hurtful if you ever heard them about yourself. Stuff you’d mull over and wonder about changing your personality to fix. Lying in bed with two of us. I feel hot and angry, my heart pounding. Connecting over their shared frustration of me. How dare they. There’s so much that I could say to her, and I don’t want to say any of it. It couldn’t make anything better.

I wish you’d told me you were coming back, she says.

She shifts from foot to foot. Cold. Awkward. The mist has thickened now, is spraying our faces. Pummelling around us dramatically before it takes off. I feel droplets drip down my forehead. My hair must truly be a sight now. Too thick for this island. It was made for the Catalonian sun and mountains. She looks back at the house, checks to see if we’re safe, maybe if she’s safe, then back at me.

Look, JP told me he told you about us, and about, you know. I could’ve killed him. It’s too early. We’ve told no one yet, you know anything could happen and then there’d have been no point in telling you at all.

Oh right yeah, like a miscarriage, I say, and she bristles.

Again there’s so much I want to ask her but I can’t be bothered. I don’t want to sound desperate, I don’t want to hear the bitterness that will drip from my words when I know I’m not entitled. My ex-boyfriend and my best friend. Ex-best friend now probably. We haven’t talked for months. When did the texts end. She was supposed to visit. Something came up. She never did. Maybe it was Jamie’s knob that came up. But I didn’t invite her again. I don’t know why I didn’t do that. I wasn’t planning on staying in Dublin for so long … well, yes maybe this long, but not permanently. My friends were supposed to be here when I got back, whenever that would be. Not screwing each other and making a baby. Just here, like on pause. Him on the car ferry, or working behind the bar in the hotel, her at the community hospital and doing hair nixers when she could.

We didn’t plan it, Allegra, she says. It was an accident. Me and Cyclops broke up. He’s changed, gone weird from the drugs. Like even more weird than usual. He’s concocting his own shit now. It was just me and JP. We missed you. I mean, I missed you.

I can’t help but picture her corned-beef thighs wrapped around his skinny waist. She was always bottom heavy, pear-shaped and pear-like with her pale skin with purple and blue spots, pockmarked with cellulite. She hated wearing a bathing suit. Always wore little shorts over it. A red rash from shaving her bikini line every day because she was allergic to the wax. I wonder what he thought of those legs when he saw them for the first time. Her pocked pear legs.

She keeps talking.

We got along better than I thought. Never really got to know each other properly before. When it was the four of us, you know, anyway JP encouraged me to stop being so afraid of doing the things that I wanted. The salon was his idea. I mean it was mine, but I’d never have done it without him.

She looks back at the house again. I don’t know why she keeps doing it, maybe she’s got a client sitting there with bleach burning through to her skull. It’s in the front room, I can see some equipment set up, they’ve also knocked the front wall and added a new patio door, for direct entrance to her business. Just a room in her parents’ house. The room we watched cartoons in. Hardly a business. Even with her cheap signs plastered all over the island I wonder who would go to her, past the scrap metal in the junkyard, to get their hair done. Well, maybe I would have.

I did it, she says proudly, with a huge grin that reveals her deep dimples, and a twist of fear that’s cute. And maybe it’ll be easier to work from home with the baby and all, she adds.

All that information and all I can wonder is why she’s called him JP. Only his mother calls him JP. All his friends call him Jamie. It’s twisted.

Most people have to leave the island to make things happen. Most of the people we grew up with are gone. Decimated with emigration a Wi-Fi ad for the Aran Islands says in its efforts to lure people back. I left. But not Marion. She stays here, opens a hair salon, has a baby. Dream made. By her. In the place I thought I had to leave to accomplish.

So did you see her, she asks, changing the subject. Allegra, say something, she says, smile gone now.