Smile by Roddy Doyle

Author:Roddy Doyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

Rachel had moved in with me. She wouldn’t live in the same house as her father any more. We fucked till we were starving. But it was awkward. It was only one room – two windows, two chairs, one table, one single, sagging bed. The typewriter had to be shifted if we were going to eat at the table. I had to add new pages every day to the pile beside the typewriter. I had to let her see that the book was growing. I got a key cut for her and I didn’t bother telling the landlord; I knew we wouldn’t be staying. We needed somewhere bigger – a shower of our own, a toilet, a proper cooker, a bed made for two. I needed an office to hide in.

I loved falling asleep against her. I loved the smell in the room. I loved watching her move, any movement at all, her steps across to the tap or just scratching her ankle. She saw me watching, and smiled.

—What?

We put the telly on the floor beside the bed and lay on our sides, watching Remington Steele. I was behind Rachel, with my chin on her shoulder. The ads came on. Rachel leaned out and turned down the sound. She let herself fall back, and felt my erection tapping her.

—Oh dear.

She kicked off the sheet, lifted her left leg high and put me inside her.

—Quick, before Pierce comes back.

She loved Remington Steele, one woman’s cheerful fight against male domination and Pierce Brosnan. We were kind of proud of Pierce, an Irishman holding his own in the middle of all that Americanness. That was where we were headed, I thought. America, or at least a bigger place. We were publicly together now, the gorgeous young businesswoman and the pup who kept shocking the nation by saying words like ‘condoms’ and ‘atheist’.

But we were photographed just once before the loft, for the Sunday Independent. We were in an apartment that Rachel borrowed for the afternoon from a school friend’s mother. Dalkey Island was behind us. Rachel wore black, including the apron. I refused to dress up; I tried to look like I’d been hauled from my study. I refused to look at the camera. I even held some sheets of A4 paper. In the shot they used, I stared at a page – it was blank – while Rachel leaned against me and pointed at an invisible sentence with a white plastic spatula.

—Interesting, she whispered.

—Spatula, I whispered back.

She’d told me what it was called just a minute before. We helped the photographer and his assistant pack the gear; we bullied them out the door. Then we fucked for the half-hour we had before the school friend’s mammy came home. Rachel picked up the blank pages and looked at them.

—No work done today, Victor. You have been a naughty boy.

She sat back on the leather couch – she looked quite small on it – and patted her knees. I lay over her and she whacked me on the arse with her spatula.

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