rested his elbow awkwardly on the narrow sill and asked, ‘So, any boyfriends in the picture, Lucy?’
Lucy jolted and looked at him in astonishment. Did he know her at all? Was he blind? No man – or boy – had ever so much as looked at her. ‘No.’
‘Oh, come on, there must be someone,’ he teased.
‘Honestly Dad, there’s not,’ she said firmly and folded her arms across her chest.
He glanced over and said chirpily, as if her single status was something she actually had control over, ‘No, you’re quite right. You don’t want to be tying yourself down just yet. Plenty of time for settling down later. Meanwhile just enjoy being young, free and single.’ He grinned happily, content in the knowledge that Lucy was having the time of her life at uni. She couldn’t bear to see the disappointment in his face if she owned up to being what she was – a social outcast, a freak.
At the Broadway roundabout they turned onto Glenmachan Street, eventually joining the Lisburn Road heading north, back towards the city centre. They were almost there. Lucy put a hand on her stomach, hard as a nut, and took a deep breath to quell the nausea.
On Eglantine Avenue she racked her brains for a way to get into the house without him coming too. Too soon, they turned into Wellington Park Avenue, lined on both sides with gardenless Victorian terraced houses. Dad pulled up outside a red-brick house with bay windows on the ground and first floor – and peeling white paint on the windowsills. Lights blazed in every window. Her heart sank – everyone must be back already.
‘Here we are then.’ Dad turned off the engine and took the key out of the ignition.
Lucy quickly unclipped her seat belt and cracked open the car door. ‘Oh, don’t bother getting out, Dad. There’s no need for both of us to get wet, is there?’
He gave her an indulgent smile and, completely ignoring her, put his hand on the door handle. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Lucy. Your bag weighs a tonne. I’ll carry it in for you.’
He got out of the car to open the boot and Lucy had no choice but to follow him. While he’d seen the house, she’d so far managed to avoid him meeting her housemates.
When he ran up the path with the bag she grasped its handle and tried to wrench it out of his hand. ‘I can take it from here, Dad,’ she said firmly but he simply pushed past her with, ‘Don’t be silly, Lucy. Let’s get out of this awful rain.’
She stumbled into the hall and watched in horror as he dumped her bag on the sticky floor – she was the only one who ever cleaned anything in the house – and headed straight for the lounge from which pounding music, and the sound of female voices, issued forth.
‘No!’ she cried out, desperately. ‘Don’t leave my bag there. It’s in the way. Let’s take it upstairs.’
But though he must’ve heard her, he paid no heed. He disappeared into the lounge. She crept to the door, moving silently like a cat, and peered into the room. Four of them were there, in the process of preparing to go out, competing sounds blaring from someone’s iPod docking station and the TV. Fran was putting make-up on in front of a magnifying mirror balanced on top of the slate mantelpiece, the only original feature left in the house after its butchery of a conversion. Vicky, swaying her hips to the music, held a pair of hair straighteners in her hand. Bernie knelt in front of the coffee table, measuring Tesco Value vodka into a pint glass. A rag bag assortment of glasses, made cloudy by too many cycles in the dishwasher without dishwashing tablets, salt or rinse aid, littered the dusty coffee table, along with a carton of cranberry juice. The girls never went out without getting pole-axed first.
They all stared when Dad, looking like a lecturer in fine brown cords and an open-necked checked flannel shirt, appeared in their midst. His hands were shoved into his trouser pockets, his arms holding back the tails of the suit jacket he wore over everything.
‘Hi,’ he said, raising his big hand in a friendly greeting. Then, realising they could not hear him over the din, he shouted. ‘I’m David. Lucy’s Dad.’
Someone turned the music off and Bernie, blonde hair tied up haphazardly on top of her head like an untidy nest, got off her knees and said, all friendly like, ‘Hi ya. What about ye?’ No one touched the TV control so the rest of the conversation took place against the sound of Dancing on Ice.
‘Well, well, well,’ he said, surveying the state of the room – clothes strewn on the floor; an overflowing ashtray on the hearth; a tube of hair product lying on the floor, greasy contents oozing out onto the cheap laminate; the stale smell of a room never aired. The girls looked uncertainly at one another.
He looked at the bottle of cheap vodka and for one awful moment Lucy thought he was going to say something about their drinking. But his face broke into a beaming smile. ‘Getting ready to go out, then?’
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said Vicky, putting the straighteners down on a pink towel she’d draped over the arm of the burgundy sofa. Underneath was a horrible black scar where she’d already burned it. The landlord would take money out of all their deposits for that.
‘Oh, that’s great, Lucy,’ he said, turning around and taking a step backwards to expose her to everyone’s gaze. ‘You’ve arrived just in time.’
Lucy felt her face redden as the girls exchanged puzzled glances and then all stared at her. ‘Where are youse off to, then? Thompsons?’ she asked, slipping into the vernacular, and dredging up the name of a nightclub she’d overheard people talk about.
There was a subdued titter of laughter. Cathy, the only natural blonde among them, looked up from her place on the sofa, where she was stretched out reading Now magazine. ‘No one goes to Thompsons on a Sunday night,’ she said evenly, her thin lips unsmiling. Lucy gripped her upper arms so hard they hurt, praying that the ordeal would soon be over.
Bernie lit a cigarette, narrowing her eyes until they were no more than slits. She inhaled then removed the cigarette from her mouth with a little popping sound. ‘We’re going to Kremlin.’
Pretending that this statement constituted an invitation, Lucy cleared her throat and said, ‘Well, I’ve other plans for tonight.’
This seemed to annoy Dad for he said, sharply, ‘What other plans? You didn’t mention them in the car.’ And he held out his arm in a sweeping gesture towards the girls, like a cinema attendant showing her to her seat. ‘Sure, why don’t you go out with the girls?’
What was wrong with him? Couldn’t he see they hated her? Or maybe this was his awful, clumsy way of trying to force her on these unwilling airheads. He’d been doing it as long as she could remember. But she had tried to fit in, delighted that Vicky, who’d shared a maths module with her in first year, had invited her to join them – even though she got the poky room at the back of the house that never got the sun. But she’d very soon discovered, eavesdropping, that she’d only been asked because they couldn’t find anyone ‘sound’. After that she stopped trying to ingratiate herself with them. And in some ways it was a relief.
‘I just remembered. I’m going out with Amy,’ she improvised, holding up her mobile phone as evidence of some prior arrangement. Then she remembered that Amy always went to church on Sunday nights – but anything was better than staying here one minute longer. ‘Look, I’d better get a move on, Dad,’ she said, retreating from the room. ‘She’ll be wondering where I am.’
And, to her great relief, he followed
