Stir-Fry Read Free Page A

Students.” Jael lifted a curl away to point out invisible crows’ feet round her eyes. “Your charming hostess is twenty-four, and I, loath though I am to admit it, am twenty-nine.”
    “You’re not.” Maria’s eyes shifted from one to the other. She took another sip of wine. “Neither of you look it. I don’t mean you look young, exactly, but not nearly thirty.”
    Jael cackled, balancing her last mushroom on a forkful of broccoli. “I retain my youthful appearance by sucking the blood of virginal freshers by night.”
    “You look much more aged than me,” Ruth reflected. “Doesn’t she, Maria?”
    “I’m not taking sides, I’m just a visitor.”
    Ruth reached past Jael for the wine. “If her hair wasn’t red, the grey would be much more obvious. And you should see the cellulite on her hips.”
    Jael made a face of outrage and flicked a pea at Ruth; Ruth retreated to the sink to fill the kettle.
    “So what about you?” Jael asked.
    Maria jumped; she had been engrossed in making a swirl of wine with her fork on the table. “What about me?”
    “Oh, the usual things,” said Jael, tugging her frayed, multicolored jumper over her head and tossing it just short of the sofa. “Place of origin, college subjects, vital statistics, bad habits, thoughts on the meaning of life.”
    Maria considered, the fork tasting metallic in her mouth. “I don’t like listing myself,” she said, smiling slightly to cushion the words.
    Was that respect in Jael’s salty blue eyes, or amusement?
    Maria edged her glazed mug over to be filled from the cafetière.
    “But then,” Jael went on, “how are we meant to know whether you have all the necessary attributes of a good flatmate?”
    “Guess.”
    Her mother would slap her hand for being rude, but then, her mother was more than a hundred miles away. And they never had cream in coffee at home. She took the jug from the outstretched hand of Ruth, whose eyes rested on her. “Tell us this much—how did you come to answer our ad? I’d have thought you’d have friends from home coming up to college with you.”
    “Oh, I have. Well, school friends, not real friends. They’re mostly doing commerce or agriculture. They’re nice, there’s nothing wrong with them,” she added uncomfortably. “It’s just that I’ve had enough of pretending to be equally nice.”
    Ruth nodded. “I used to have some friends I could only describe as nice. Life is too short.”
    “Besides,” Maria went on, taking a scalding mouthful of coffee, “I can just imagine what sharing a flat with schoolfriends would be like. Borrowing stamps and comparing bra sizes, you know the way.”
    Jael coughed so hard she had to put her cup down. “There was none of that in my day. Support girdles we wore, back then.”
    “Oh and also,” said Maria, turning back to Ruth’s gaze, “why I noticed your ad was the bit about no bigots.”
    Hunched over her mug, Jael sniggered, for no reason that Maria could see.
    “That was my idea,” Ruth murmured. “It simplifies things.”
    “It was eye-catching,” Maria assured her.
    Another snort.
    Had she said something stupid? Was she showing her youth again? She leapt into speech. “I was once stuck in a Gaeltacht in Mayo learning to speak Irish for three entire weeks with a pair of bitches who supported apartheid. I don’t think I could stick a flat unless everyone in it was basically liberal.”
    “We Dubliners are very liberal altogether, you’ll find,” Jael commented, shovelling the coarse curls back from her forehead. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Guinness.”
    “I’m the only Dub here,” commented Ruth.
    “Ah, Kildare’s only a county away. Besides, I’ve been soaking up the metropolitan atmosphere for a fair while now; I’m as much a true Dub as a snobby Southsider like you anyway.” Jael ducked to avoid the tea towel. “Listen, why don’t we start showing this bogtrotter round our bijou residence?”
    In the half-light of the