After a Dance by Bridget O’Connor

Author:Bridget O’Connor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2024-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Shop Talk

She was pulling out Hoover coils. ‘Well, he just goes into a moody so I think . . .’

‘I’m not joking, his eyes bored into me like that snake in The Jungle Book.’

In the back of the shop the click of the kettle, coffee clouds, the gold crusts of microwaved croissants. Quarter of an hour before the soundtrack reeled on. Sal drew on a wide purple mouth.

‘What did you do last night, Sal?’

‘TV. Dinner. Bed.’ Fight.

+

Loll’s armchair. Her couch.

In the bathroom her toiletries on two packed shelves, some of them gluey and furred with dust. Some of them laced together with cobweb. He saw a spider strung between a Vosene bottle and an exfoliating skin cream, short, iron trapezing legs. His toothbrush and electric shaver. His toothbrush and electric shaver took up four square centimetres. ‘Four square centimetres.’

‘If you’re measuring I’d make that two,’ she leered.

He laughed. But thought: You bitch. And took that thought to work.

+

And crushed it with a spanner, under a Nissan’s dark low troubled sky. Twisted it round a nut. ‘And suddenly, she’s wearing panda slippers.’ He rolled out on his back, looked up through the sheen of navy-blue covered yard, at Steve in his goggles, flame-throwing wrecks. The silhouettes of his springy mustard-cress hair. ‘What ja think, Steve?’

Steve said, ‘Chuck her.’

+

‘That really suits you.’ Sal ran the back of a hand down the rack of Ghost, Nicole Farhi, French Connection, Sturgeon, the corral of alarm-rich black leather shirts. All day she galloped round in faux fur boots, tilting like a pretty seahorse, whacked by texture, colour, sounds. By four o’clock, shaking with caffeine, they all went really, really mad to Gypsy Kings, running in and out of the changing rooms, plaiting their hands in front of their faces like four Björks. She loved working here. Dressing up as a different woman every day.

She wrote lyrics on the back of paper bags. She sounded so great in her pink soapy bath. Hair piled up like a sparkly cone of vanilla ice cream.

+

‘I’ve always loved, don’t know why,’ Steve said, holding up a flaking orange socket spanner, ‘short, you know, fat girls.’

+

‘Mmm,’ said the customer, wriggling down a pink sausage skin, ‘do you think it makes my bum look too wide?’

Yes, Sal thought. ‘No. It really suits you . . . That’ll be four hundred and seventy-five pounds.’

‘That’ll be a month’s mortgage and a trip to Safeway’s.’

‘Bye now, don’t forget your receipt.’

She had to swallow hard sometimes. Tongue dry. Like she was going to cry. She wrote on a gold-sprayed paper bag: ‘Surrounded by plenty baby, baby, tears in my throat, la la la.’

‘He came in, right, said he’d like to try it on as he happened to be exactly the same size as his wife. Looked straight at me. I looked straight back.’

‘What you doing tonight, Sal?’

‘Dinner. Video. Pub.’ Fight.

She saw Loll on his armchair, scowling.

+

Steve said, ‘Wear two condoms from now on. Once it gets domestic . . .’

Domestic. It rang in his head.

‘Once she, she washed my overalls, right.

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