Lazy City by Rachel Connolly

Author:Rachel Connolly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd

16

AT THE CINEMA BAR I order a bottled beer and olives. I get there early, like last night. This time wearing a black leather blazer instead of yesterday’s black suede jacket; flared jeans, which have gone out and come back in again so many times they are now always in, with a black leather belt; a top with thin straps over a grey t-shirt; and the same black boots as yesterday.

I smile at myself in the mirror behind the bar and fix my hair while the barman uses a teaspoon to usher my olives into a bowl. It is a slightly different kind of look to yesterday’s. Only slightly, but suggestive of a different girl. I can see that. Not on purpose though; subconsciously a different kind of girl.

There’s your wee olives there, the barman says, pushing the bowl towards me. He extends the card machine and I see I have to pay eight pounds. I smile, thinking of my few-hundred-pound bank balance. It would cover less than fifty rounds of this order. Less than forty, maybe. A good balance in the grand scheme of things, in the history of my bank balance. In the black at least. But still less than forty bottled beers with olives.

Brilliant, thank you, I say, smiling.

There are students – well, they look like students – standing in clusters in the foyer. Every group has at least one boy wearing a brown or mauve corduroy jacket or trousers. Sometimes both. This is a look for a sizable minority of the boys who go to Queen’s. I remember meeting them in clubs and bars as a teenager. They were always studying English or History; sometimes they came from the country, sometimes from England or Glasgow. Sometimes they would be holding a tattered book but you would know better than to comment on it. It would just be giving them what they wanted. If you spoke to them they would say things like: I’m a cultured culchie. Or they would quote lines of poetry and then act apologetic for doing it, like it was a big accident. That just came into my head, they would say. They were all the same. It was that thing where someone tries to do their own thing, to be an individual, and ends up as such a clear type they’re conforming more than any of the rest of us. I can see one is holding the tattered book under his arm. I can’t see what it is without being obvious. I smile and sip my beer.

There is one boy on his own, holding a programme, wearing a full Gaelic kit. A Gaelic man who likes arthouse cinema. There’s someone doing his own thing. Or on a date, maybe. Trying to impress someone. But would you wear the kit on a date? He looks up and sees me looking at him and I smile and go back to my drink.

I see one family outing. A dad and a teenage daughter. She is

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