Herself by Leslie Carroll

Author:Leslie Carroll
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

“Can I invite yiz back to my place for a nightcap?” Jamie asks me, once we’ve made our farewells. “Ya look like ya need it.”

“Your father’s very pleasant,” I sigh. “Your ma…well, she’s…something else. And I don’t know about her born-again dolls; I’ve never been much of a doll person. I like Brigid a lot. She was helping me understand the nun thing. I kind of envy her in a way for knowing what she believes in. Spiritually, I mean. Or at least thinking she does.”

“She’s young.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What I said.”

“I’ll take that nightcap now. What’re you pouring?”

Jamie lives in a brick-faced freehold house not far from the center of Dublin; its façade, including the fire-engine red door, is one I can imagine Joyce’s Leopold Bloom strolling by during his 1904 progress through the city. Perhaps it’s an inside joke that Jamie uses a bronzed copy of Ulysses as a doorstop. “I moved here from Clontarf back in 1988,” he tells me. “Before the Celtic Tiger bared its claws and prices shot through the roof. It’s worth a feckin’ fortune today if I had a mind to sell it. I’m doing all right, though. Each of us Doyles gets a piece of Blackpools’s profit. And the place is hoppin’ like a Mexican jumping bean most nights, so none of us is hortin’ for money—providing we keep an eye on our own expenses.”

His apartment is nicer than I expected it to be. Better maintained. Although the living room’s mandarin orange walls make an already cozy space seem smaller, it’s kind of an interesting (unexpected, certainly) contrast against the white marble fire-place.

“It has a homely feel, doesn’t it?” Jamie says, grabbing a pile of dirty clothes and dashing up his cast-iron spiral staircase with the laundry stashed under his arm. I have to smile. What are the odds that both of us would reside in picturesque duplexes?

“You know that word doesn’t mean the same thing in America,” I call after him.

A few moments later, he bounds back down the stairs. “Sorry about that. Why, what’s wrong with homely? You don’t find my flat pretty?”

“Where I come from, the word means ‘ugly.’ We say homey to mean your ‘homely.’”

Amused, he shakes his head. “You’re confusing me, gorl. I thought in America ‘homey’ was a black guy.” Jamie cops a hip-hop attitude, splaying his fingers; on him it looks laughable. “You know, a home boy.” He arranges the scattered newspapers on his coffee table into a presentable pile, revealing an empty beer bottle. “Whoops. I should have hired me a house keeper before inviting a lady over.” He grins at me.

I think about how immaculate his mother keeps her home and consider that the apple fell so far from her tree that it landed in another county. I chuckle. “Unable to clean house yourself?”

“Ach. I hate it. They’ve been makin’ self-cleaning ovens for years now. When’re they going to make self-cleaning flats? So, do yiz like the color down here? Me decorator did it.

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