‘Not only that,’ Luke said, his eyes twinkling at the memory, ‘but I was into mortification of the flesh, tying stuff too tightly on me, and all that. Sort of like, Junior S and M, you know?’ He cocked a questioning eyebrow at me, and I smiled encouragingly.
‘Only I couldn’t find any ropes in the garage, so I had to steal the cord of my mother’s dressing-gown and knot it round my waist. I had a couple of days of good, purifying agony until my brother found out and accused me of being a transvestite.’
I found myself drawing nearer to Luke, as I wondered how other people dealt with scornful older siblings.
‘Did he really?’ I asked, intrigued. ‘And then what happened?’
‘I suppose I should have done the decent thing,’ he said thoughtfully.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘Pray for him?’
‘No! Head-butt the fucker.’
I burst out laughing in surprise.
‘But instead I made a great show of turning the other cheek, then I said I’d do a novena with his name on it. The joys of a Catholic childhood.’
I laughed and laughed.
‘I was an awful eejit, wasn’t I, Rachel?’ He invited me, with a charming, disarming smile.
I liked the way he said my name. And I decided to wait a while longer before cruising the room. I discreedy shifted so that I was in a corner, with Luke facing me. That way, no one who mattered could see me.
‘Why do you think?’ I asked awkwardly. ‘Why did we want something so peculiar? Could it have been incipient puberty? Hormones gone haywire?’
‘Could have been,’ he agreed, as I searched his face for answers. ‘Although maybe we were a bit young. I think with me it had something to do with having just moved house and having no friends.’
‘Me too.’
‘You’d just moved house?’
‘No.’
We looked at each other for a few bemused seconds. He didn’t know whether to feel sorry for me, or to laugh or to offer advice. Then, luckily, we both laughed, holding each other’s eyes, united by the laughter, encircled by it.
And for the next couple of hours Luke had me in hysterics. He told me about an Indian restaurant on Canal Street where he said he had a curry so hot he swore he went blind in one eye for three days. Talk of food led to the revelation that, like me, Luke was a vegetarian. That opened up an entire new pasture of shared experience, and we talked at length about how vegetarians were discriminated against and not taken seriously. And we enthusiastically told great stories of Times I Was Nearly Forced To Eat Meat.
Luke took the biscuit with a tale of a guest-house in County Kerry where he asked for a vegetarian breakfast and the plate arrived with the best part of a cooked pig draped seductively across it, almost grinning up at him.
‘So what happened?’ I asked gleefully.
‘I said to Mrs O’Loughlin “Woman of the house, didn’t I say I’m a vegetarian?”’
‘And what did she say?’ I asked, thoroughly enjoying myself.
‘She said “You did, alanna, you did. And what’s up?”’
‘So what did you say?’ I joyously fed Luke his lines.
‘I said “Rashers, missus, is what’s up.”’
‘And what did she say?’
‘She nearly burst into tears and said, “But it’s not right, and you a growing lad, to be only ating a few oul’ musharoons and four or five oul’ eggs. What harm can a rasher or two do?”’
We energetically threw our eyes heavenward and tisked and pshawed and felt great.
We complained for a bit about how people overcon-sumed protein anyway, and how alfalfa sprouts were a much-maligned foodstuff and were actually a wonderful source of everything.
‘What more do we need?’ I demanded rhetorically. ‘Only alfalfa sprouts?’
‘Exactly,’ Luke agreed. ‘An adult male can survive on a handful of alfalfa sprouts every couple of months.’
‘Cars can run on them,’ I pointed out.
‘Not only that,’ I went a step further. ‘But alfalfa sprouts give you X-ray vision, superhuman strength and… and… let’s see…’
‘A glossy coat and tail,’ Luke offered.
‘That’s right.’
‘And the secret of the universe.’
‘Exactly,’ I smiled. I thought he was great, I was great, alfalfa sprouts were great.
‘It’s a shame they taste so horrible,’ I added.
‘Isn’t it?’ he nodded.
I tripped over myself to match Luke hilarious anecdote for hilarious anecdote. He had a marvellous turn of phrase and did a great line in accents so that one minute he was a Mexican bandit, the next a Russian president, the next an overweight Kerry policeman making an arrest.
He seemed to exist in vivid colour in a world of black and white.
And I, too, was at my entertaining best because I was totally relaxed. Not just because massive amounts of alcohol had been ingested, but because I didn’t fancy Luke.
In the same way that I never felt nervous with a gay man, no matter how extravagantly good-looking he was, I just couldn’t take Luke or his pals seriously as potential boyfriend material. Try as I might, I simply could not make myself blush or become a brain-dead mute or pull my wallet out of my bag only to find it was a folded sanitary towel or run my fingers through my hair leaving a false nail trapped in it or try to pay for a round of drinks with a phonecard or any of the other things I did as a matter of course when I fancied a fella.
It’s tremendously liberating when you don’t fancy someone because you don’t have to try and make them fancy you.
With Luke, I was able to be myself.
Whatever that was.
Not that he was bad – looking. He had nice dark hair, well, it would have been nice if he’d had it cut properly. And he had twinkly eyes and a very animated, mobile face.
I told him all about my family because, for some reason, people found that amusing. I told him about my poor father, the only man among six women. How he’d wanted to move to a hotel when my mother’s menopause arrived on the same day as Claire’s puberty.
How he’d bought a cat to try and even the sexes up, only to discover that the cat wasn’t a male. And how he’d sat at the bottom of the stairs and wept ‘Even the shagging cat is a girl.’