Conversations with Friends(47)

We’re friends, I said.

But he definitely has a crush, said Philip.

Frances, you temptress, said Marianne. Isn’t he married?

Blissfully, I said.

To change the subject, Bobbi mentioned something about wanting to move out and find an apartment closer to town. Marianne said there was an accommodation crisis, she said she’d heard about it on the news.

And they won’t take students, Marianne said. I’m serious, look at the listings.

You’re moving out? said Philip.

It shouldn’t be legal to say No Students, Marianne said. It’s discrimination.

Where are you looking? I asked. You know we’ll be letting the second bedroom in my place.

Bobbi looked at me and then let out a little laugh.

We could be flatmates, she said. How much?

I’ll talk to my dad, I said.

I hadn’t spoken to my father since I’d visited his house. When I called him after coffee that evening, he answered, sounding relatively sober. I tried to repress the image of the mayonnaise jar, the noise of bluebottles hammering themselves against glass. I wanted to be speaking to someone who lived in a clean house, or someone who was only a voice, whose life I didn’t have to know about. On the phone we talked about the apartment’s second bedroom. He told me his brother had some viewings arranged and I explained that Bobbi was looking for a place.

Who’s this? he said. Who’s Bobbi?

You know Bobbi. We were in school together.

Your friend, is it? Which friend now?

Well, I really only had one friend, I said.

I thought you’d want another girl living with you.

Bobbi is a girl.

Oh, the Lynch girl, is it? he said.

Bobbi’s surname was actually Connolly, but her mother’s name was Lynch, so I let that one go. He said his brother could give her the room for six fifty a month, a price Bobbi’s father was willing to pay. He wants me to have somewhere quiet to study, she said. Little does he know.

The next day her father drove her over in his jeep with all her belongings. She had brought some bedlinen and a yellow anglepoise, and also three boxes of books. When we unloaded the car, her father drove off again and I helped Bobbi to dress the bed. She started sticking some postcards and photographs onto the wall while I put the pillows into cases. She put up a photograph of the two of us in our school uniforms, sitting on the basketball court. We had long tartan skirts on and ugly, dimpled shoes, but we were laughing. We looked at it together, our two little faces peering back at us like ancestors, or perhaps our own children.

*



Term didn’t start up for another week, and in the meantime Bobbi bought a red ukulele and took to lying on the couch playing ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ while I cooked dinner. She made herself at home by moving items of furniture around while I was out for the day and sticking magazine cut-outs on the mirrors. She took a great interest in getting to know the neighbourhood. We stopped into the butcher’s one day for mince and Bobbi asked the guy behind the counter how his hand was. I had no idea what she was talking about, I didn’t even know she’d been in the place before, but I did notice the guy was wearing a blue cast on his wrist. Stop, he said. Needs surgery now and everything. He was shovelling red meat into a plastic bag. Oh no, said Bobbi. When will that be? He told her Christmas. Fucked if I’m getting a day off either, the guy said. You’d have to be across in Massey’s before you get a day off in this place. He handed her the bag of meat and added: in your coffin.

The profile was published just before classes started up again. I went to Easons the morning it came out and flicked through the magazine looking for my name. I stopped at a full-page photograph of Bobbi and me, taken in the garden in étables. I had no recollection of Melissa taking such a photograph. It depicted us sitting at the breakfast table together, me leaning over as if to whisper something in Bobbi’s ear, and Bobbi was laughing. It was an arresting image, the light was beautiful, and it conveyed spontaneity and warmth in a way the earlier posed photographs hadn’t. I wondered what Bobbi would say about it. The article that followed was a short, admiring account of our spoken word performances and of the spoken word scene in Dublin generally. Our friends read it and said the photograph was flattering, and Sunny sent me a nice email about it. For a while, Philip liked to carry a copy of the magazine around and read from it in a phony accent, but that joke exhausted itself eventually. Pieces like this were published in small magazines all the time, and anyway Bobbi and I hadn’t performed together in months.

Once term started, I had academic work to keep me busy again. Philip and I walked to seminars together having minor disagreements about various nineteenth-century novelists, which always ended with him saying things like: look, you’re probably right. One evening Bobbi and I called Melissa to thank her for the article. We put her on speakerphone so we could sit at the table to talk. Melissa told us all about what we’d missed in étables, the thunderstorms, and the day they went to visit the castle, things I had already heard about. We told her we had moved in together and she sounded pleased. Bobbi said: we must have you over some time. And Melissa said that would be lovely. She told us they were coming home the next day. I pulled my sleeve over my hand and rubbed absent-mindedly at a little stain on the tabletop.

I continued to read through my log of conversations with Bobbi, entering search terms which seemed wilfully calculated to annoy me. Searching for the word ‘feelings’ unearthed this conversation, from our second year of college: