Ingrid Titterington, she confided in me a few weeks later, before she disappeared off the face of the earth, or went to Enniskillen, as Hugh maintained, made it her business the summer of her sixteenth birthday to sleep with as many boys of her acquaintance as she was able to. Her ex-best friend, Judith Waters, had pronounced her frigid one afternoon on the bus home from school, since when Ingrid had endured endless taunts and slaggings from Judith’s new friends who seemed to Ingrid to number by now almost the entire fourth form girls.
She started the Monday of the first week of the holidays with Norman Pavis, Judith’s boyfriend (Judith, she decided, was welcome to him: smelly dick), and carried on, the following Thursday, with Ian Sinclair round the back of the changing rooms at the King George V playing fields, Sydenham. Barry Lemon did it with her more or less non-stop two Saturday nights later on the carpet of the McAteers’s front room where Ingrid was babysitting the McAteers’s dead-to-the-world toddler, Sue, and did it with her again, frantically, the next morning in the long grass just out of sight of his own back garden while his parents called up and down the street telling him to come on and get into the car or they were going on holiday without him.
Walking home alone later that morning Ingrid congratulated herself on her flying start, calculating that at the current rate she should reach double figures by the middle of August. She even thought she was beginning to enjoy it. And then, just when she least wanted to, she found herself falling in love.
Albert Kennedy had taken over the Co-op milk float from his Uncle George, who had woken up the neighbourhood every morning for a decade with his smoker’s cough and had finally died a fortnight before of lung cancer. Albert was lean, long-legged and eighteen and from the day and hour Ingrid saw him, standing at her front door in his brown overall with the leather satchel slung across the chest, she could think of no one else.
‘No cream last Sunday?’ he asked her. ‘That’s five-and-four, then.’
Barry Lemon came back from the Isle of Man with his dick practically poking out of his trousers, but he was ten days too late. Though he pleaded with her and cajoled, though he took to standing at dead of night under the lamppost outside her bedroom window and even threatened to tell her parents (till Ingrid pointed out that whatever her father did to her, he would definitely beat seven kinds of shite out of Barry), Ingrid was unbending. She didn’t care any more what Judith Waters called her, she didn’t care if her tally of lovers never got above four – and in truth she was sorry now about the first three – she wanted Albert and Albert alone. The only problem was that Albert did not want her, though as he was at pains to explain the night she followed him around the neighbourhood on his collecting round, he had nothing against Ingrid personally, it was just that his heart was already pledged elsewhere. Albert Kennedy, it turned out, was the best-looking Seventh Day Adventist in Belfast; girlfriends, in the church or out of it, did not at present figure in his plans. If there was one thing the experiences of that summer had taught Ingrid, however, it was that all teenage boys could be won round sooner or later. (NB Judith Waters, twenty-five seconds in the case of Norman Pavis.) So, like a penitent going to prayer, she dragged herself out of bed every morning before it was quite light and waited at the open blinds for the battery-powered whine of Albert’s float. For two weeks he delivered the family’s daily pinta right into her hands, torn between answering her daily more complex theological questions and carrying on with his rounds, before finally he caved in and asked her would she like to sit up with him in his cab so that they could talk more. As she walked out to the milk float Ingrid saw two dogs sniffing and baying over a knot of Kleenex at the base of the nearest lamppost. Barry Lemon had not yet given up.
Albert Kennedy ceased to be a Seventh Day Adventist early one August morning in a secluded corner of Ormeau Park. He had dropped Ingrid off at the park gates before swinging round into Ravenhill Avenue and the Co-op depot, and then returned on foot with the intention of explaining to her the precise date of the Second Coming. The next morning, while everyone else was at work, they slipped back to Ingrid’s own house – Ingrid’s parents own double bed – and the next morning and the next and by the time Sunday came around Albert had barely enough energy to stagger to the nearest Episcopalian church, where his conscience slumbered untroubled through the booming empty sermon.
Ingrid was the first girl of her year to get engaged. Her parents were pleased. Even Judith Waters deemed her worthy of a new respect.
‘Haven’t you done well for yourself, snaring him?’ she said.
Already, though, Ingrid had ceased to regard snaring Albert Kennedy as much of an achievement. All I did was open my legs.
After the bliss of those summer mornings bumping through the east Belfast streets in the milk float, the thrill of falling, being in love was curiously void of excitement. She looked at the joyless faces of the women on the streets where she lived. Married one and all. It wasn’t Albert she had trapped but herself. And Albert too had changed. He watched her jealously, wanting to know where she had been, who she had been talking to, what she was thinking. Ingrid swore that as soon as she got out of love with him she would never let herself fall in love again. It took her two years to engineer the fight that led to Albert asking for his ring back. Afterwards she couldn’t understand why it hadn’t occurred to her earlier. One day when Albert, finding her daydreaming by a window, asked her what she was thinking – ‘Truthfully?’ she asked him. ‘Truthfully …’ – she told him she was remembering the boys there had been before she met him.
Things, not surprisingly, were pretty gruesome for a while, still she comforted herself that she was a wiser person for the whole sorry business.
Ingrid had found work in a draughtsman’s office and went to the tech on day release to study mechanical drawing. She was paid a pittance to begin with, but it was her money to do with what she would. She signed up for evening classes in art history and photography, she subscribed to magazines and periodicals, poetry and politics, and saw every film, good and bad, in Belfast. Her friends now were other tech students; she went with them to the Maritime round the corner from the college, to the Orpheus and the Boom Boom Room. R’n’B was their thing and Ingrid would dance until her hair collapsed in damp bangs and the teeth ached in her head. There were boyfriends, of course, but strictly on her own terms. She liked the touch of a man’s hands on her waist as they stood kissing outside a ballroom, once in a while she liked letting herself be undressed, the cold slap of her nakedness before she was entangled in arms and blankets, but after a few weeks she would bring the affair to a polite end. Pangs – and she did sometimes have them – were preferable to the slow souring of romance. Besides, times were changing, or such at least was the conclusion she had drawn from her magazines and periodicals. In one of these she read the oath of allegiance sworn by the free citizens of Aragon in the Middle Ages to their king:
We who are as good as you, swear to you who are not better than we, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided that you observe all our liberties and laws; but if not, then not.
If not, then not. It seemed to Ingrid as good a principle as any to live by. She cut the article out and pinned it to her bedroom wall.
She met Joe two days after her nineteenth birthday at a party in a firetrap of a flat off University Street. Joe had just graduated from the art college and was going to be a major painter, i.e. he had fuck all money, less even than the fuck all most of Ingrid’s friends had: fuck all at all. He lived on crisps and apples and was famous for having made a single black coffee last two days in a city centre café. Apparently he’d left the half-full mug behind a radiator overnight. He smoked most of the packet of cigarettes that Ingrid had bought for the party. She bought another box when she met him for a drink the next day and he smoked most of those as well. Ingrid didn’t mind, she had just been awarded a pay rise with the promise of a bigger one when she finished her course the following June. Anyway, she enjoyed talking to Joe. He argued with her that Ellsworth Kelly was a more important painter than Jackson Pollock – everything you needed to know about him, it seemed, was summed up in the precise sliver of white border down the left edge of Broadway – and said that Andy Warhol would be remembered more for his haircut than his canvases. A lot of what he said was bravado – he’d rather eat his own leg than compromise his art to make a fast buck (Joe liked to talk as though he was in Greenwich Village) – but she accepted that this was a necessary part of the process for him, before he could convince anyone else he had to convince himself. Ingrid was convinced from the day, a week after they first met, that he showed her his paintings. They were in a damp shed at the bottom of somebody’s garden on the Cliftonville Road. Joe was paying thirty shillings a week for the use of this ‘studio’. The windows were hung with greying net curtains tied in a knot to admit a weedy light. For warmth he had a paraffin heater, which gave the place the air of a thwarted picnic. The sheets of hardboard he painted on were solid blocks of colour with titles like The gods dispute their divinity. Ingrid didn’t pretend the paintings meant anything to her, but there was a rigour in their execution that she could only admire.
Interests weren’t all they shared. They were both, they discovered early on, the oldest child in a family of four; both had two sisters and one brother. Both, though this came out much later, lost their virginity at the same age. Spooky. The dissimilarities, however, were what really made Ingrid’s hair stand on end.
Joe’s family hailed from a market town in county Tyrone. He and his two sisters and one brother had grown up in a three-bedroom house his parents shared with his mother’s own father and mother and their son, Joe’s uncle, also called Joe. His parents had had their name on a council waiting list since they were married and each time a child was born they called at the council offices to see were they any closer to the top of the list, but always it seemed there were people whose need was more urgent. It wasn’t that there were no council houses to be had, there were, just not in Joe’s parents’ part of town. And it wasn’t that Joe’s parents cared particularly which part of town they lived in, they didn’t care about anything beyond getting a house of their own; but the council cared, the council cared very much. The council had ward boundaries to think of, majorities to return where no majority existed. It was a hard old job, people didn’t know the half of it.
Ingrid was not stupid, though you didn’t need to be especially clever to see that more than one local government in Northern Ireland could not have stood without the aid of substantial rigging, even so she was staggered by the cold calculation that crammed two families – three generations: four children and five adults – into the one house.
‘It could have been worse,’ Joe said. ‘The toilet could have been inside taking up room.’
They were spending more and more of their free time together. They told one another about the people they fancied and if either had a date they would meet the following day to go over the evening in detail: what way did he kiss? What did her hair smell like? How far did you go? Joe called Ingrid his buddy and she liked that. They were buddies for some months before they found themselves in his room, a forty-minute walk from his studio shed, removing each other’s clothes, all their buddy fingers thumbs, and lying in bed locked in a shocked embrace, hardly daring to breathe for fear of touching more. The second time they slept together they had no such inhibitions, but tore into making love with a ferocity that would have embarrassed them both had they been with anyone else. He screamed, she screamed, the people in the rooms either side hammered on the walls. They were a little surprised, disappointed even, when they were finished, to find the ceiling still intact.
Of course they weren’t seeing each other, not seeing seeing. It was a kind of friendship-with-sex thing. All the same they soon stopped talking about fancying other people.
That Christmas Ingrid bought Joe a present. The previous few wintry weeks he had been trekking across town to the Cliftonville Road each day in the same windcheater he had been wearing when she got to know him in the summer. He would arrive in the city to meet her in the evenings, shivering and blowing on his hands, scarlet with cold. There was a tweed overcoat Ingrid had been looking at in the window of Anderson McAuley’s, not cheap, but she was due a Christmas bonus; she let herself be persuaded that Joe would accept the gift as a share in her windfall. The parcel sat on the seat between them their last night out before he went back to Tyrone. She had wanted him to open it, but now, seeing his stricken expression, hoped desperately that he wouldn’t. Joe obliged her by not so much as glancing at it once. Ingrid was not entirely sure how he managed to smuggle it out of the bar without her seeing.
She didn’t hear from him again for a fortnight. Then, coming out of Mooney’s one January evening with a girlfriend, she bumped into him as he hurried through the rain towards Arthur Street. He still had on the windcheater. Ingrid’s friend took herself off to look in a shop window.
‘When did you get back?’ Ingrid asked.
‘Sunday. I was going to call you at work.’
Ingrid shrugged.
‘You’re soaked,’ she said.
‘I missed you,’ he said and then he kissed her.
He wore the overcoat eventually. Thanked her for it too, but told her she shouldn’t have. She said she knew, he said but really she shouldn’t have.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But it does look gorgeous on you.’
It was around then that Ingrid realised she was in love and though on some level she understood it was a necessary condition of love that each time felt like the first time, she began to think she could never have truly loved Albert Kennedy. She was nervous, naturally, this was not what she had planned for herself, but she watched as Joe arrived at the same conclusion, as surprised, she believed, as she was, and she thought if ever love had a chance it was this love, so softly entered into.
Through spring and into summer she sat at her desk in the draughtsman’s office, a model of conscientiousness, rewarding herself with certain minutes in the day when she would lay down her pencil and think of Joe. Nights they stayed together she held on to him and when he recounted to her his disappointments, the paintings that had not come off, the galleries unwilling to take a risk, she told him that she was certain his time would come and told herself that even if it never did she would be there to make sure he was always able to carry on. He had at last allowed her to buy canvases for him and sometimes when money was impossibly tight he accepted without complaint her gifts of brushes and paints: an investment, she assured him, against the day when he was rich and famous.
Towards the end of September a thunderstorm took the roof off the Cliftonville Road shed. The owner said there was nothing for it but to knock it down and build a sturdier one. He let it be known he would be looking double the money if Joe wanted to return there to work. Joe, needless to say, didn’t have double the money or anything like it and when Ingrid offered to pay a percentage he lost the rag shouting at her that he wasn’t a charity case yet. He moped around for a week or so, too forlorn to search out another studio.
‘What’s the point? They’re all too dear.’
And then Ingrid really was in no doubt that she loved him, because even as she wanted to slap him, her heart ached to see him so despondent.
The evening of the day she decided to move out of home and rent a flat – two bedrooms, ‘You’re going to have to pay your way,’ she would say, ‘but you’ll have your own place to paint’ – he met her after work, hopping from foot to foot, from the kerb to the road to the kerb again. He had run into a friend from art college whose parents had a cottage in Donegal which he could have for nothing till Christmas or even Easter. Ingrid tried hard to be pleased. She thought about mentioning the flat idea, but he was so full of Donegal and the solitude and the light that she let it go. When he gets back, she told herself.
‘Can I come and visit you?’ she asked.
‘Every weekend.’
‘How about every other weekend?’
‘It’s a deal.’
Only when he had gone did she notice how much of her old life she had let slip in the last few months. She was too late to sign up for her night classes, so she joined a camera club which met every Tuesday behind a barber’s shop in Lower Garfield Street. Ingrid was the only woman and the only member under thirty. Her presence seemed to unsettle one half of the men and titillate the other half. After three weeks the discussion turned to hiring a life model – the same life model, possibly, as last year? – and Ingrid decided to forget to go back.
She wrote to Joe two or three times a week, not love letters exactly, though there were nights when she allowed her longing for him to saturate the page, but letters nevertheless intimate with the minute details of her days. And to begin with Joe wrote back. He even returned to Belfast at the end of the first month, saving her the trouble of taking a Friday off work to travel to Donegal. Ingrid couldn’t remember a better weekend; for days after his departure she felt the ghostly shape of him reaching right up into her stomach. In her euphoria she took the plunge and rented a flat. One bedroom, but the sitting room was enormous, with a south-facing window where you would have no trouble imagining an easel. Soon afterwards Joe’s letters stopped. She waited a week before calling at her parents’ house, but there was nothing there for her either. She wrote every day asking Joe was he all right; she hunted down his Belfast mates to see had they had any word.
‘You know Joe,’ his mates said, and even as she said yes Ingrid wondered if she really did.
In the end she contacted his mother and father: Excuse me for writing like this, but I’m a friend of Joe’s and I was just wondering … It was obvious from the first line of his mother’s polite reply that his parents had never heard of her. The second line was even worse. They had seen Joe the previous week, with Anne. He was looking very well, if a bit thin. Anne was a lovely girl.
Still trembling, Ingrid walked straight out to the post office, the letter mangled in her hand, and telegrammed the cottage in Donegal, demanding to know what was going on. She went two nights without sleep, and got into trouble for dozing off at her desk. When she arrived home from work on the third night an envelope lay waiting for her in the hallway. Ingrid took the envelope into the flat and set it on the mantelpiece opposite the south-facing window. She made herself beans on toast, a pot of tea, and ate her meal sitting on the sofa looking anywhere but at the fireplace. Then she washed the dishes. She picked up the letter at length as though its contents were a matter of no importance. She was eating a dry cream cracker, one unbroken edge of which jutted from her mouth, forcing the corners into a tight grin. The letter was one long apology. Ingrid read to the point where he told her that he and Anne were to be married (‘I don’t know how to say this, I need her’), then folded the letter and the cracker crumbs into the envelope and placed it back on the mantelpiece. She was halfway to the bathroom when she threw up.
‘I never want to go through another couple of months like it,’ Ingrid said to me. This was late March; she had heard on the grapevine that Joe had gone to work for Anne’s father. ‘I’m only lucky I didn’t lose my job, though God knows it was a close-run thing.’
She got a doctor’s line for the first week, but she was twice as bad by the end of it as she had been at the start. The boss turned a blind eye for a day or two more, then called her into his office.
‘This isn’t good enough, is it?’ he said.
He was thumbing through a pile of line drawings. Ingrid tilted her head trying to see what it was he wasn’t happy with. He slapped his hand down, making her jump.
‘You’re on another planet, wee girl.’
He wasn’t a bad sort, Ingrid’s boss, but she hated it when he lost his temper; even more, she hated it when he called her wee girl.
‘You’re a good worker, I don’t want to have to let you go.’
He was leaning forward across the desk looking up into her lowered eyes. Ingrid drained them of everything that might betray her.
‘If I find out all this is over some boy …’
Ingrid remained silent. The boss straightened up, shook his head.
‘Have it your way, just don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
He had returned to the drawings on his desk. His hair was combed back, the strands straight as telephone wires over his freckled scalp. Ingrid imagined him at his bathroom mirror and wondered how he convinced himself he was other than he was, an unimpressive man. He would be here until he retired, but she only had to keep her head and sooner or later she would move on to better things. He was right, she was a good worker.
The boss glanced up again as if to ask why she was still there.
‘Nothing like this will happen again,’ Ingrid said. ‘I promise.’
In retrospect, she said, she had probably begun planning the wedding day that afternoon as she left his office. There were times indeed in the weeks that followed when the plans were all that held her together. Now don’t get maudlin, she’d scold herself. You’ve got to make sure and do this right. She would have to dress for the occasion, of course, something bright; it was a celebration after all. And she would have to take photographs: preserve the memories. Yes, there would have to be photographs, from the beginning of the day to the end. She wanted to have a complete record of how her world looked the day she gave up on love for ever.