‘What?’ I asked, barely able to keep the impatience out of my voice.

‘You forgot your earrings.’

Brigit and I hobbled home, scuzzy and slit-eyed, still in our party dresses. Although it was only eight in the morning, it was already hazy and hot. We stopped at Benny, the Early Morning Jew’s stand, where we always got our coffee and bagels on the way to work and underwent intensive interrogation regarding our dishevelled states.

‘Well, lookee here, lookee here, whadda you two goils bin doin’? Huh? Huh?’ he demanded. He came out from behind the stand to inspect us. Half the street was looking and traffic was almost at a standstill as Benny gesticulated at the passers-by.

‘I yask myself,’ he thumped himself in the chest, ‘what’s goin’ on heah.’ General flailing of his arms to indicate Brigit and me, our uncombed hair and make-up that had run amok.

‘And what do I see?’ Gestures at his eyes.

‘I see a mess, dats whad I see.’ More flailing of the arms.

‘I taut youse two was nice goils,’ he complained.

‘Get a grip on your head, Benny,’ I said. ‘You did not.’ Great sex or no great sex, I had no intention of seeing Luke again. I could never live it down. I had a postmortem with Brigit. Not one of the nice ones where we shivered with delicious recall as we discussed a sexual encounter in minute detail and sometimes used the aid of diagrams to describe the man’s penis.

It was more of a damage-limitation type of chat.

‘Do you think anyone saw him kissing me?’ I asked Brigit.

‘Plenty of people saw you,’ she said in astonishment. ‘Me, for one.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Anyone who might, you know… matter.’

Luke rang me. Of course he did. The ones I wanted to ring me never did. He must have fished the crumpled piece of paper out of the bin after I left.

Brigit answered the phone.

‘Who’s speaking please?’ She asked it in such a strange voice that I looked up. She was waving frantically at me.

‘It’s for you,’ she said in a strangled voice.

She put her hand over the mouthpiece, made an agonized face, bent at the groin and turned her knees inwards the way men do when they get a cricket ball in the goolies.

‘Who is it?’ I asked. But I already knew.

‘Luke,’ she mouthed.

My head swivelled round the room, looking for an escape.

‘Say I’m not here,’ I begged in a whisper. ‘Say I’ve moved back to Dublin.’

‘I can’t,’ she whispered back. ‘I’d laugh. I’m sorry’

‘You whore,’ I hissed, as I took the phone from her. ‘I’ll remember this.’

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Rachel, babe,’ he said. Funnily enough his voice was nicer than I’d remembered. Deep and with the suggestion of a laugh in it. ‘It’s Luke. Remember me?’

I was pierced by the ‘Remember me?’ How many times had I said that to men I knew weren’t interested in me, but that I’d persisted in ringing anyway?

‘I remember you, Luke,’ I said.

Which was more than some of the men had said to me.

‘So how’ve you been?’ he asked. ‘Was work OK for you on Wednesday? I was in rag order all day myself.’

I laughed politely, and toyed with the idea of hanging up and pretending that the phone had suddenly broken.

He told me about his week and I was sure he could sense my wild impatience barely concealed under my forced courtesy. I responded in the same wary, over-polite way that men who weren’t interested in me had done. A lot of ‘Is that right?’s and ‘Really?’s. It was fascinating to see it from the other side.

Eventually he got to the point. He’d like to see me again. Take me out for dinner, if I liked.

For the entire phone call, Brigit stood a few feet from me and energetically played an air guitar. She stood with her legs apart and wildly shook her hair up and down.

As I clumsily, awkwardly, declined Luke’s invitation, she thrust her groin at me repeatedly and waggled her tongue. I turned my back but she followed me.

‘Er, no, I don’t think so,’ I mumbled to Luke. ‘You see, I, ah, don’t want a boyfriend.’ A large lie. It was just him I didn’t want as a boyfriend.

Brigit was on her knees, playing frantically and facing the ceiling with an expression of ‘I’m having an orgasm’ that those guitarists are always going around with.

Luckily Luke didn’t try to persuade me that we could meet as friends. Boys that were Mistakes often tried that. They pretended they didn’t mind that I’d told them to stick it and insisted, they’d be happy just to be friends. I usually felt guilty enough to meet them. And the next thing I knew, I was slaughtered drunk and in bed with them.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I felt ashamed, emotionally itchy, because he was very nice.

‘Not at all,’ he said easily. ‘Sure, I’ll see you round anyway. We’ll have a chat.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Bye,’ and slammed down the phone.

‘You bitch!’ I shouted at Brigit, who by then was trying to slide along the kitchen tiles on her knees. ‘You wait until Joey rings you.’

‘Joey won’t ring,’ she said smugly. ‘He didn’t ask for my number.’

I sat down and rooted through my bag, looking for my Valium. I tipped three into my hand, then thought better of it and added another two. What an ordeal! I hated him for having rung, for putting me through that. Why was my life such a series of unpleasant events? Was there some sort of curse on me?

17

In the middle of a lovely dream, I was woken by a strange woman sticking a flashlight into my face.

‘Rachel,’ she said, ‘it’s time to get up.’

It was pitch-dark and freezing and I had no idea who she was. I decided I must be hallucinating, so I turned my back and closed my eyes again.

‘Come on, Rachel,’ she whispered loudly. ‘Don’t wake Chaquie.’

The mention of Chaquie brought reality crashing in on me. I wasn’t in bed in New York. I was in the Cloisters where a roving madwoman was trying to rouse me in the middle of the night. She must have been one of the more deranged inmates, who’d escaped from her locked room in the attic.