Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, my mind wandering, if something happened with me and Christy. If we fell in love. And if he came back to New York with me and we met Luke. And if Luke was gutted, and found out that he really loved me and begged me to leave Christy. And I’d get to say something horrible to Luke like ‘I’m sorry, Luke, but I’ve found out how shallow you are. What Christy and I have is real…’

I’d just got to the bit where Luke tried to hit Christy and Christy caught Luke’s arm and said with great pity ‘Come on, man, she doesn’t want you, right?’ when suddenly a couple of people threw handfuls of knives and forks onto the table with a great clatter. Christy was one of them, which surprised me because in my head he was still humiliating Luke.

‘Teatime,’ fatso Eamonn shouted joyfully.

What the…? What on earth…? What the hell were they doing? To my amazement, the inmates were setting the table! I had thought they were rattling the cutlery to let the kitchen staff know they were ready for their tea. But, no. The rattling had merely been a prelude to the table being set. They ferried jugs of milk, sliced bread and distributed dishes of butter and jars of jam the length of the table. (‘Here, pass that down to the end and don’t let Eamonn eat it.’)

‘Why are you setting the table?’ I asked Mike nervously. Because they needn’t think I’d help. I wouldn’t set a table ordinarily and I certainly wouldn’t do it while I was on holiday.

‘Because we’re nice people,’ he smiled. ‘We want to save the Cloisters money because we don’t pay them much.’

Fair enough, I thought, so long as they don’t have to do it. Although, for some reason, I wasn’t convinced. It might have had something to do with the burst of raucous laughter that followed what Mike had said.

12

The dinner was lovely in a totally disgusting way. We got chips, fishfingers, onion rings, beans and peas. Unlimited quantities, according to Clarence.

‘You can have as much as you want,’ he advised, in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Just go down to the kitchen and ask Sadie the sadist. Now that she knows you’re an addict you can have as much as you like to eat.’

I winced at the ‘you’re an addict’ bit, but then my great love for chips took over and I started to devour them.

‘I’ve put on a stone since I came here,’ he added.

I felt a cold hand clutch my heart and my loaded fork came screeching to a halt just before I stuffed it into my mouth. I didn’t want to put on a stone. I didn’t want to put on any weight, I was bad enough as it was.

While I tried to convince myself that one fat-laden meal wouldn’t do any real harm and that I’d start eating properly tomorrow, I became aware of an unpleasant noise to my left. It was the sound of John Joe eating!

It was really loud. In fact, it was becoming louder. How come no one else seemed to notice? I tried not to hear him but I couldn’t help it. My ears had suddenly become like those powerful microphones used on the television programmes to hear ants breathing.

I concentrated on eating my chips but all I could hear was John Joe slurping and chomping and puffing like a rhino. My shoulders got tenser and tenser until they were nearly up around my ears. The smacking and chewing became louder and louder until it was all I could hear. It was revolting. I felt acute rage, boiling, killing anger.

‘Say it to him,’ I urged myself. ‘Just ask him to keep the racket down a bit.’ But I couldn’t. Instead I fantasized about turning to him and belting him really hard, swinging my arm across his chest and thumping the chomping noises out of him.

No wonder no one would marry him, I thought, in a fury. Serves him right for never losing his virginity. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Who’d sleep with a man who made that kind of lip-smacking, disgusting racket three times a day?

The noise of a particularly enthusiastic mouthful reached me. This was unbearable! I threw my knife and fork down on my plate with a loud clatter. I would not eat another mouthful under these conditions.

To compound my annoyance, no one noticed that I had stopped eating. I had expected concern, ‘Rachel, why aren’t you eating?’ But no one said anything. Least of all that stupid old slurpy bastard John Joe.

I couldn’t understand why I was so angry. I’d been feeling red-hot rage on and off all day. As well as wanting to burst into tears. Neither of which were like me. I was a happy-go-lucky person most of the time. I should have been happy because I’d wanted to come to the Cloisters. And I was glad I was there. But maybe I’d be more glad when I’d clapped eyes on a couple of celebrities and perhaps had a little chat with them.

After the chips etc, there was cake. John Joe enjoyed it. They probably heard him in Peru.

But then, while I sat hunched into a ball of tense anger, imagining John Joe being tortured, the brown jumper who had been sitting on my other side got up and Christy appeared in his place. While I went all of a dither he called to Brown Jumper, ‘Brown Jumper’ (or whatever his name was) ‘are you finished? Is it OK if I sit here for a while? I haven’t had a chance to speak to Rachel yet.’ And he sat down as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I immediately wiped John Joe and his chomping from my mind and forced myself to smile brightly.

‘Hello, I’m Chris,’ he said.

His chlorine-bright eyes were so blue they looked as if the light must hurt them.

‘I thought your name was Christy.’ I smiled, in what I hoped was a cheeky, intimate way at him. (Like me, like me!)

‘No, that’s Oliver’s fault.’ (Stalin, I presumed.) ‘He can’t call anyone a name without putting an “ey” on the end.’

Mesmerized, I watched his quirky, beautiful mouth as he asked all the usual questions. Where was I from, what age was I, etc., etc. But I answered with a great deal more enthusiasm than I had in any of the identical conversations I’d had earlier. (‘Yes, haha, it’s a beautiful city. No, you can get most things that you can get here. Except for Kerrygold, hahaha.’)

He smiled at me at lot. It was gorgeous, wryness going on right, left and centre. He’s so cool, I thought in admiration, much cooler than Luke. Luke just thought he was cool and dangerous and living on the edge. But he had nothing on Chris. I mean, Chris was a drug addict. Beat that, Luke Costello!

And while I was all for men being cool, and being drug addicts if needs be, I was middle-class enough to be relieved that Chris was well-spoken and articulate. It turned out he lived about ten minutes from where I’d been brought up.