Stir-Fry Read Free

pronounce it wrong anyway.” God, how seventeen.
    “Did you deliberately pick it to rhyme with
pariah
?” asked Jael, her chair scraping the bare board floor.
    “Eh, no, actually.” Go on, don’t cop out. “What does it mean?”
    Struggling with a bootlace, Jael paused, one foot in the air. “D’you know, I couldn’t tell you. Some sort of deviant. It’s one of those words you throw around all your life until someone asks you what it means and you realise you’ve been talking through your rectum.”
    Maria cleared her throat.
    “Outcast,” murmured Ruth as she carried the wok to the table, her face averted from the steam. “Pariah is the lowest of the Indian castes.”
    “And knowall is the second lowest.” Jael slid her hand into the crocodile oven glove and lunged at Ruth, who dipped out of the way.
    The nearest seat was taken by a red-socked foot. “Sorry, Maria, my size tens need a throne of their own. Sit up there at the head of the table,” commanded Jael. “Only don’t lean back too far, or the chair might collapse.”
    Maria slid onto the chair and accepted a smoking plateful. She tackled a mushroom.
    “Don’t mind the woman,” said Ruth, unrolling her denim sleeves and passing the basket of garlic bread. “She broke it herself last summer; we had a few people in for dinner, and she got carried away in the middle of an impromptu guitar recital.”
    “All my guitar recitals are impromptu,” said Jael in a depressed tone. She wrenched the corkscrew from the wine bottle gripped between her knees and bent toward Maria.
    Automatically Maria covered the glass. “None for me, thanks.”
    Jael trickled the wine through Maria’s fingers. Maria snatched her hand away. Red drips scattered on the table; one ran along a crack in the wood. “I said I—”
    “I heard what you said.” The round-bellied glass was two thirds full. “But you can’t insult Ruth’s cooking by drinking water, especially not plague-ridden Dublin tap water.”
    Maria sucked her fingers dry one by one as the conversation slid away from her. The wine tasted as rich as the overpriced bottles her Da kept in the back of the shop for the occasional blow-ins from Dublin on their way to a holiday cottage. They often chose her town square to stop in, to stretch their legs and fill up the boot of the car with ginger cake and firelighters. How many years before she would become a foreigner like them? She reached for her glass and took a noiseless sip. Three years of the uni, that’s if she had the luck to pass everything first time. Then some kind of a job for which her statistics classes would in no way have qualified her. Or maybe she could cling on and do an M.A. in art history. Go on the dole and help kids paint murals on crumbling city walls. On what day in what month of this queue of years would she find that she had become a rootless stranger, a speck in the urban sprawl? The accent was waveringalready; her “good night” to the bus driver this evening featured vowels she never knew she had.
    There was something glinting on the window behind Ruth’s bobbing head; a hawk shape, a giant butterfly? Maria didn’t want to interrupt their argument, which seemed to be about the future (or lack of it) of the Irish language. She could look more closely at the window in daylight. If she was ever here in daylight. If she didn’t catch the train home tonight and start sorting potatoes in the shop on Monday morning. At least in a small town people knew how to pronounce your name.
    By the time Maria had forked down her cooling dinner, Jael was boasting of her twenty years’ experience of fine wine.
    “They put it in your baby bottle?” suggested Maria.
    She turned, big-eyed. “You mean you didn’t warn her?”
    Ruth was staring at the fridge with an air of abstraction. “I knew I’d forget to add the bean sprouts. Sorry, warn what?”
    “That we’re old fogeys. That dreaded breed who lurk under the euphemism of Mature