chair, raises one haunch and pulls out the melon as if she has just birthed it. She takes the little packets of sugar out of the bowl on the table and balances the melon on top of it, like a golden fairytale egg in an ordinary egg cup. She looks like she does this kind of thing every day.
“What’s your favourite colour?” I ask.
“Red.”
The lady brings Penelope’s tea. She looks at the melon, but says nothing.
“Favourite animal?”
“Cat.”
I feel a twinge of unease, as if a cat has slunk between my ankles and curled its tail around my leg.
“I don’t like cats,” I say.
“Oh, you’re one of those.” She narrows her eyes and spits out “those.”
“Those what?”
“Cat bigots. Catists. Member of the anti-cat brigade.”
I start to sweat. We haven’t spoken many sentences to each other and an argument is already forming. I jerk my arm and knock over the remains of my coffee. A grease-bubbled liquid flows across the table; Penelope grabs a napkin and wipes the stream. The cat conversation has vanished.
“Do you work?” I ask.
“Not a suit-and-desk job,” she says. “I paint.”
“What do you paint?”
“Cats, mainly.”
She grins at me, and my eyes are drawn to her tooth gaps. A piece of corn is wedged between two particularly wonky teeth.
“Did you have corn on the cob for breakfast?”
“I had it for dinner yesterday.”
“It’s in your teeth.”
“Oh.”
She digs it out and puts it on her saucer.
“Sometimes I forget to wash my teeth. I believe hygiene is overrated.”
The way she drawls her “L”s rips through my ears, but I allow her this fright of a vowel, because we have found common ground.
“I agree,” I say.
I look at the piece of corn—it’s yellow and inscrutable.
“Do you think it’s lonesome without the rest of the cob?” I ask.
“Probably. It’s like separating thousand-tuplets.”
“Are frogspawn called million-tuplets?”
“I don’t see why not.”
This is the kind of conversation that I’ve been dreaming of, or half-dreaming of, in that part of my brain that conjures up the nicest most suitable things, things that never enter my mouth or my waking brain, things that I feel for a few seconds somewhere on the edge of my eyeballs, on the edge of my waking.
“What do you do, Vivian?”
I haven’t prepared this question and I start to feel sticky.
“I had a job once but the company put me out of my desk.”
“I’m sorry. The job hunt can be a bit grim.”
“I used to hunt,” I say, “but I’ve had hundreds of silences from employers, so now I regard my job seeking as more of a hobby, rather than an action that could produce results.”
Penelope laughs, the sort of laugh that makes me think of wolf cubs being reunited with their mothers: it’s the tail end of despairing. I think about how to end our meeting and my heart thunks faster. I hate arriving, but I hate leaving even more. Penelope gulps down the rest of her tea and claps her hands.
“Must rush, Vivian, I’ve to bring one of the cats to the vet. Come over to my place next week?”
“Yes, please.”
She says her address and I say mine and she says, “It’s in the computer,” which must mean her brain because she taps her temple with her finger. We say goodbye and her body seems to be shaping up for a hug, so I move backwards and wave. I walk home and close the front door behind me.
“It’s in the computer,” I say, in what I think is a light-hearted tone, and then I tap my left temple, but the two need to be done together so I try again.
“It’s in the computer.”
I’m so happy about how my Penelope meeting went that I consider burning down the house with me in it, so good things can’t unravel. My legs are too excited to sit down and the day hasn’t yet been emptied of light, so I decide to visit my thin places—places in which non-humans might live, potential gateways to the world I came from. My parents used force to try and shunt me back to this Otherworld; I will use willing.
After the Phibsborough crossroads, I walk down the steps into Broadstone Park. A sign tells users not to drink alcohol or cycle and to keep dogs on leashes; in this part of the park alone, people are disobeying all of these rules. At the end of the park, I close my eyes and pass through a black door in a wall into Blessington Basin. Doors in outdoor walls remind me of the magic door of a red-haired puppet in a children’s television programme that I used to watch as a child. No magic world opens for me now. I emerge facing the basin and walk to a bench to sit for a while and watch the birds. I like pigeons; I like their greed and their laziness and their determination to avoid flying if at all possible. A sign says: DON’T FEED THE PIGEONS, which seems unfair. I don’t understand how people are supposed to feed the swans and ducks without feeding the pigeons. I watch a thin pigeon eating a chunk of bread. A fat pigeon comes along and pecks him until he drops the bread. I wave my arms to shoo away the fat pigeon, but both fly off and I’m left with a half-pecked chunk of bread. When a woman in a fluorescent yellow vest passes, I stop her.
“What’s your policy on bird bullying?”
She looks at me like I’m Christmas in July.
“Sorry, what’s that?”
“I’m just wondering how you deal with the issue of big pigeons bullying smaller ones.”
The woman checks her walkie-talkie.
“I’ll have to get back to you on that, excuse me.”
And before I can ask about the possibility of kitting out Thin Pigeon with a helmet and wing pads, she quickly walks away. The gate leading onto Blessington Street isn’t as good as a door in a wall, but I make a wish as I pass through, just in case. I walk straight down North Frederick Street and stop by the Gate Theatre, in front of a small grey metal box that could be a small hut (or hutlet) for elves. It’s rectangular, with a slanted metal roof and two metal doors, the perfect size for a shin-high elf couple. I picture rocking chairs on either side of a stove, and a spiral staircase leading to a four-poster bed covered with a patchwork quilt. I stop and crouch down on my hunkers, pretending to fix my shoe and peek in, but I don’t
