THE CITY HAD SWELTERED under the heat wave for twenty-one days now. Citizens checking their barometers first thing in the morning found the needle sitting stolidly on 1030 millibars and the thermometer heading for the upper eighties. Living memory had never seen the like. “Three weeks and still no relief in sight!” the newspapers bewailed. Lunchtime saw the city’s green spaces populated with typists and shop assistants and legal secretaries and junior clerks rolling down stockings, removing jackets, loosening collars, eating sandwiches with hair oil dripping onto them. A warehouse fire in which the entire national stockpile of powdered ice cream mix was destroyed provoked citywide panic. The wireless reported scenes reminiscent of the Crash of 1929 as customers fought over tuppenny cones. An extreme Protestant sect prepared for the imminent end of the world by buying every last can of pork luncheon meat in the city. Fears of a wave of lawlessness as heat-crazed young hooligans ran amok never materialised, but that did not prevent the Evening Echo from reporting, with some glee, an outbreak of boot-polish-eating among sixteen-year-olds. There were daily reports on the level of the Blessington reservoirs. “To pot with the reservoirs,” a well-known wag was reputed to have said. “The only water I ever drink is with me John Jameson’s, and not much of that.” Reliable sources reported that in the original, the words to pot had been somewhat more emphatically expressed. Assorted weather workers, rainmakers, prophets, and shanachies were consulted on when the drought would end. They promised rain next month next week tomorrow this afternoon but the anomalous lens of dense, hot air remained moored like a vast airship over metropolitan Dublin. It rained in Wicklow, it rained in Arklow, it rained in Naas, and there were reports of a spit or two in Balbriggan, but not a drop, not even a cloud, darkened the city’s streets.
Twenty-one days. Exactly five days longer than Jessica Caldwell had been going out with Damian Gorman. It was as if Nature herself were bestowing a blessing on the relationship. Strolling in the stately cool of the National Museum’s corridors, pottering about Sandycove Harbour in a hired rowboat with a gramophone in the stern playing “You’re the Cream in My Coffee,” evening promenades along Dun Laoghaire Pier, passing themselves off as gentry from Kingstown Yachting Club; bicycle expeditions to the wilds of Dalkey and Killiney Head with its view over the bay that the tourist brochures likened to the Bay of Naples but which bore no comparison; or into the Wicklow Hills; by charabanc to Glendalough with jaunting car ride and boat trip to the cave known at St. Kevin’s Bed, all in for one-and-sixpence. In the sixteen days since that first tentative Sunday morning rendezvous by the pond in Herbert Park, she had been out with Damian twelve times.
She would have loved to have been able to tell someone about those sixteen days, but from the first meeting, secrecy had been an unspoken compact between them. She had told her parents she had been out with Em and Rozzie, but she already suspected that they suspected she was seeing a man and questions could not be long forestalled. Under no circumstances could they know that their daughter was seeing a unit commander of the Irish Republican Army.
She found some outlet for her confessional need in Jocasta. Her younger sister had always possessed this rocklike, near-ecclesiastical trustworthiness. When you told Jocasta it was you had painted the wash-hand basin black or poured molten lead smelted down from the seals of wine bottles down the plughole, you felt the double satisfaction of having confessed and the knowledge that Jocasta would take that confession to her grave rather than squeal. Jessica found herself regularly well after midnight on the end of Jocasta’s bed enjoying the catharsis of feelings teased out like tangled wool. Dates, times, the exact anatomical location of each kiss and its rating on a scale from one brotherly peck on the cheek to ten impending suffocation; hopes, wild romantic dreams, fantasies. Jocasta sat through them all, silent, listening, lit with her own peculiar inner luminosity. At an early age Jocasta had decided to orient her life along a different axis from the rest of the planet. Jessica suspected that her confessions were as incomprehensible to Jocasta as propositions in analytical chemistry. When she crept back to her room, temporarily shriven, she was certain she could hear the click of a bedroom door shutting. She could never catch her in the act, but she knew The Shite was spying. Let her listen, Jessica thought savagely. Little bitch is probably jealous.
The one thing she did not confess to Jo-Jo was that her flights of fancy were causing her increasing alarm. The new vividness they had taken on since she had begun the sessions with Dr. Rooke had been initially enjoyable; a private reality she could summon and superimpose over the cabbage stench of Mangan’s kitchen and the endless mastication of the Shopper’s Special Luncheoners was a mental balm. But she was losing control of them. They came to her unbidden, in the kitchens, at the tables, on the tram, at dinner with her parents, listening to the wireless. They would descend, a cloud of unknowing, and carry her away. The tram seemed particularly attractive to visions. She regularly missed her stop because she was caught in a daydream that seemed more concrete than any reality. Once she had dreamed of a tiny woman dressed only in strips and scraps of red leather, which Jessica thought rather becoming in a vulgar sort of way, and a blind harper, a man blind from before birth, for blank skin covered the sockets where eyes should have been. Rags and snippets of cloth were tied to his hair, his blond beard, his fingers, the strings of his harp, so that he could feel the world about him in the slightest movement of the air about his body. He played upon the harp, and the small, almost naked woman danced a lewd jig.
That other, ur-Dublin, was growing closer to the true Dublin every day. So close now that pieces of that alien city were crossing over into familiar streets. After an inconclusive round in her internecine warfare with Fat Lettie, she had retired to the ladies’ jax for a Woodbine and summoned a vision of herself seated on one side of the unbridgeable gulf the Bible teaches is fixed between heaven and hell, while on the other side, pinch-faced demons were basting Fat Lettie in her own lard on a giant iron griddle, a shrieking, naked mass of melting blubber.
The scream from the kitchens had frozen every forkful of Shopper’s Special between plate and oblivion. Jessica burst from the toilets to find that an entire pan of boiling fat had somehow spilled itself over Fat Lettie. “All over her face and front,” said a shocked Brendan. “Just fell off the stove. She never even touched it. It just fell off the stove.”