Close to Home by Michael Magee

Author:Michael Magee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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I sat at the corner of the table in the beer garden, across from Mairéad, who was squeezed between that girl who had introduced the readings upstairs, the one with the fringe, and another girl I had been introduced to, but whose name I couldn’t remember. There were about twenty students from Queen’s spread across three tables. They drank craft beer and smoked rollies, talked about the poems that had been submitted to workshop that week, and slabbered about how they had been rejected from magazines who had published people I’d never heard of before, but whose poems were shite.

I drank my stout and sat there quietly, nodding along, laughing when I had to, acting like I understood their quips and jokes, their weird cultural references. It got to the point where I was afraid to say anything. The few times I worked myself up to it, people set their drinks down, looked at me, and then carried on with the conversation as if nothing had happened. I tried to catch Mairéad’s eye, but she was too distracted by all the craic she was having at the other side of the table. She was right in the middle of it, her voice pitched, her speech sharp and clear and full of the kind of witticisms that seemed to go down a treat with people who got a tickle out of posing questions like, What would you rather have, hands for feet or feet for hands?

It’s gotta be hands for feet, she said. I want to be able to drink my pint with my hand-foot. Or smoke a cigarette. She glanced playfully around the table. I could smoke a feg with my feet, no sweat, she said.

Could you really?

Mairéad pulled her sock off and slapped her foot on the table. Somebody roll a feg for my foot, she said.

Conor took the rollie he was smoking and placed it between her toes.

Not that way, the other way. Turn it round.

Mairéad leaned forward and used her hands to bring her foot up to her mouth. She did this so easily and without effort that her foot seemed to function as a third hand she rested on her chin with the feg poking out at just the right angle for her to smoke casually, as if it was second nature to her. Her mates cheered. I could tell they liked having her around. She added a bit of an edge to what was a fairly bookish crowd. They were all studying for PhDs. The few that weren’t were either Masters students who had made a name for themselves, or gifted undergrads who had been brought into the fold. Mairéad fell somewhere between. She had proved herself at undergrad but couldn’t afford to do a Masters. Her mates sympathized because she was good, she deserved to have the option to do a Masters if she wanted to. But they couldn’t get their heads around why she was moving to Berlin. They thought she

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