Painted Faces Read online

  One time when I was walking by he made the wrong joke about the wrong guy, a guy who stopped walking, turned around, approached McSavage and gave him a punch smack dab on the nose. Needless to say, the man has a pair of balls on him to keep on doing what he does after that episode. At the moment he's accusing a dad with two little kids of being a kidnapper to the swift tune of his acoustic guitar. The dad hurries away looking embarrassed as the crowd laughs uproariously.

  Nicholas laughs quietly by my side. He has a lovely low and husky sort of laugh. He folds his arms over his chest, creating a delightful strain in the t-shirt fabric across his pecs. I only realise that I'm staring when I hear him give a short cough to garner my attention.

  My eyes flick up to his. “What?” I ask, my voice containing all the guilt of a murderer caught with a bloody knife in her hands.

  “Enjoying the view, Fred?” he replies.

  “Um, no. Yes. Maybe,” I sputter like a complete and total fool.

  He leans in close to whisper in my ear, “If you play your cards right, I'll let you cop a feel some time too.”

  I notice that we've just arrived at the entrance to the park at Stephen's Green, so I quickly take advantage of that fact by announcing, “Well, here we are,” while in my head I'm hearing his words repeat over and over, I'll let you cop a feel, I'll let you cop a feel.

  “So we are,” says Nicholas.

  There are people everywhere, soaking up the bit of heat. There's something you should know about Irish people, once there's even a hint of sun in the sky we'll be out in our fucking droves, our pasty pale skin all on show.

  The annoying thing is that when you live in the city you'll always come across the less than savoury males going around topless. They walk around with thick gold chains around their necks, showing off their skinny birdlike chests, most likely sporting a prison tattoo somewhere on their skin. It's a gut curdling sight, in my humble opinion. A group of said males are currently lying on a patch of grass close by, numerous open cans of beer spread out around them.

  Nicholas spots me eyeing them with thinly veiled disgust. “Now, now Fred, don't go coming in your pants or anything,” he jokes.

  “I think I just did a little sick in my own mouth,” I throw back.

  We pick a spot of grass and sit down. A minute later a park attendant walks up to the group of guys and tells them to move along. They put up a bit of an argument at first, but then they finally pick up their beers and leave.

  My eyes are grateful for the small mercy. Their tattoos make me remember the ones I saw on Nicholas last night. I never had the chance to get a proper look at them.

  I eye the one on his forearm; it says Dolores in fancy black lettering and there are little shaded shooting stars all around it.

  “Who's Dolores?” I blurt out. Not because I'm eager to know if she's a past girlfriend, but more because my internal filter is on the fritz as per usual.

  Nicholas gives me a warm smile. “My mother, all of my tattoos are dedicated to her.” He presents his arm for me to study the details. I run my finger over the slight bumps created by the ink beneath his skin.

  “What about your other one, the half sleeve?”

  He shifts in his place and pulls up his t-shirt to reveal an intricate picture of a woman with long black hair that covers his entire upper arm. She's looking away as though she's shy, her hair covering up most of her face.

  “That's my mum. I got it copied from a photograph I have of her,” he says, as my eyes take in the beauty and craftsmanship of the tattoo. I don't think I've ever seen one so intricate before. It's really detailed, all black and shaded grey, no colour, as though taken from a black and white picture.

  “She was beautiful.” I say in awe, taking in his mother's appearance and realising exactly where Nicholas' beauty comes from. “I wish I had the guts to get a tattoo. I think I'm frightened of the permanency.”

  “Yeah, a lot of people feel that way. They think they won't always like what they get. I suppose it's all about conviction. If you choose something that means a lot to you then you're not going to regret it. I lost Mum when I was so young. It's nice to have a little reminder of her always on me.”

  I stare into his eyes for a second and get caught, like a fly in a spider's web. There's deep, deep pain in him somewhere, underneath the flirty, confident surface. Is it strange that I suddenly feel like pulling it all out of him so that I can spread it before me and study the cracks? Like the little broken pieces of a lost relic, you try to put them together to create something that you can understand.

  I drag my gaze away from him and my eyes land on something brown and furry scuttling around on a blanket where a woman is lying on her stomach reading a book. It's some sort of animal. It takes me a minute to see what it is.

  “She has a ferret,” I burst out, ruining the serious moment between us. “I'm going over.” I hop to my feet and start galloping towards the woman, like an overly enthusiastic child. “Oh my God, I'm so sorry for disturbing you, but I just had to come say hello to your ferret,” I declare.

  The woman lifts her head from her book and pulls her sunglasses up to rest on her dark brown hair. She's got a real nice tan and when she says, “Oh yes, he's so cute isn't he,” I notice she's got an Italian accent.

  She also has massive cushion-y lips like Monica Bellucci. She looks like she's in her late thirties and is very well put together. I knew she had to be foreign. No Irish person would have a ferret for a pet, let alone be eccentric enough to take it out to the park with them. This bizarre action immediately makes me want to befriend her.

  I kneel down on the grass as the ferret stares up at me with shiny brown eyes. I lift my hand to slowly pet him and he actually lets me. My fingers drift over his silky fur. I'm so consumed with the ferret that I hardly notice that Nicholas has come over to join me and is currently chatting with the Italian woman.

  “What's his name?” I ask her excitedly.

  “I call him Ollo,” she says, turning away from Nicholas for a moment to answer me.

  I look back at the ferret and immediately begin crooning his name to him as he scurries between my legs. I laugh with such joy you'd think I was a bit of a simpleton. When he runs off to huddle inside the woman's bag I stand back up to join her and Nicholas, who is currently talking to her about the town she comes from in Italy.

  He seems interested in what she has to say and I can't help feeling a pang of jealousy. She's got those really firm, high boobs that look like two ripe peaches. They'd make an attractive couple, I think to myself sadly.

  “Thanks for letting me play with Ollo,” I say, in an effort to join their conversation.

  “It's no problem,” says the woman, who Nicholas proceeds to introduce as Dorotea. She's been living in Ireland for a couple of years and works as a hairdresser in Peter Marks. I nod and smile politely, but suddenly I feel like I've got a brick in the pit of my stomach with the realisation that Nicholas might have exchanged phone numbers with her while I was so ridiculously amused by playing with Ollo.

  I probably have an awfully dejected expression on my face as I imagine the two of them doing the horizontal tango in Nicholas' bed. I've not yet seen it, but my mind conjures up a vision of black silk sheets, dark wood and debauchery.

  “Are you okay, Fred?” Nicholas asks with concern.

  “I'm fine. I just remembered that I promised I'd bake my mum a sponge cake for a dinner party she's throwing tomorrow, so I have to be getting back to the apartment.” This is a massive lie, but I don't think Nicholas cottons on.

  “All right, I'll come with you,” he says, and we say goodbye to Dorotea and Ollo. It can't be healthy that I'm so upset over the prospect of him with another woman and I've only known him two days. I'm going to make a fool of myself over this man, I can just feel it.

  “You must have visited a lot of countries over the years for your work,” I say to Nicholas on our walk home, thinking of how he knew the town where Dorotea comes from.


  “I have. The first place I went when I left home was France.” He smiles nostalgically. “I wanted to live in Parisian Bohemia, experience the life of a tortured artist. I spent two years there before I moved on. I haven't lived long in any one place since. I've gone from Germany to Spain to Italy to America. I've not seen much of Asia, but I've been almost everywhere in Europe and the US.”

  “It must be hard, never putting down roots anywhere,” I comment.

  He looks at me with interest. “That's not what people usually say. Normally when I tell someone about all of the places I've been to they'll say something like wow, your life must be so exciting doing all that travelling.”

  I shrug. “I suppose it would be exciting for a while, but then you'd just be jaded with it all. That's what I think anyway.”

  “Oh Freda,” he smiles. “You've hit the nail on the head. I was so completely jaded, almost irreparably so. But then my friend offered me the permanent job here and I thought, why not go and live in Ireland, it is after all, supposed to be the friendliest country in the world.”

  I laugh and sarcastically reply, “Supposed being the operative word.”

  He glances at me sideways. “You don't think your people are friendly? I've had nothing but smiles and welcomes since I arrived here.”

  I reach over and pinch him on the cheek. “That's just 'cos you've got such a pretty face, Viv. I doubt you've ever gone anywhere and not received an enthusiastic welcome.”

  He turns away with a sheepish grin and a slight blush. Oh my God, is he bashful? It's so out of place on him, and therefore completely adorable.

  I decide to change the subject and ask him what Paris is like, since I've never been, and for the rest of the walk he paints me a picture of the city with words.

  Chapter Five

  Be Italian

  I leave Nicholas at his apartment and he tells me to call in at around eight tonight to head over to The Glamour Patch for his gig. I'm incredibly nervous about my first stint as his assistant. It still seems rather surreal when I think about it.

  I go inside my own place to find Nora sitting on the couch, furiously typing on her laptop. I throw my handbag on the kitchen counter, before slumping down beside her. She's on Facebook, wouldn't you know, gossiping with some girl she was friends with at school. Nora and I went to different secondary schools. She attended a private all girls school, while I went to my local mixed public school. I've met a few of her old friends, and by God are they the bitchiest girls I have ever come across.

  I think there's something that happens to girls when they're all cooped up in a classroom with no males to keep them occupied year after year. Instead of vying for the affections of the absent boys, they resort to separating off into groups and making up rumours about one another. All sorts of back biting and viciousness takes place.

  I mentioned earlier that I don't have an online presence, so I'm not on Facebook like Nora is. To be honest, the whole process of putting your entire life out there for other people to have a nose at gives me a sick feeling in my stomach. This lesson was learned the hard way. My stalker ex-boyfriend used to go on my MySpace page (yeah, remember MySpace?) to see what I was up to and where I would be on any given day. I was so fucking dim back then. I would basically provide people with my every movement, down to what I had for breakfast. I wouldn't be surprised if I mentioned a bowel movement once or twice.

  I can joke about it now, but it was so scary when it was happening. Aaron would show up randomly in places where I was and begin hassling me to rekindle our relationship. Nora doesn't know anything about this whole episode, since it happened before we decided to move in together. I barely even like thinking about it myself, never mind actually putting it into words and reciting the entire story for my best friend.

  Needless to say, I deleted every piece of information I had put up about myself online once I realised Aaron had been following me. It's a good thing I learned my lesson before Facebook became all the rage. People are even worse now than they were back then.

  It's sad to think how humanity has been reduced to being more comfortable communing through the medium of a keyboard, rather than having a real life conversation. Okay, so I'm ranting. I'll get off my soap box.

  I scan down Nora's chat window to discover that her friend is informing her of the recent job loss of a girl from their old class. Nora's soaking up the gossip with barely contained relish. This is one instance where I find myself thoroughly disgusted with her behaviour.

  “You need to step away from the internet, Nora,” I say to her.

  Sometimes she'll spend her entire day off from work trawling through the pages and photographs of ex-boyfriends and old acquaintances. It's like a drug or something. Her eyes become all glazed over like she's been lured into a technological cult.

  “I'm talking to Saoirse, Fred. Leave me alone.”

  “Tell Saoirse I said she's a cruel bitch for spreading rumours about some poor woman who's fallen on hard times.”

  I have never met Saoirse, but Nora talks about her a lot and I get the impression she's a bit of a cunt. This impression is mainly derived from the fact that she and Nora never have a conversation that doesn't involve intense bitching about someone else's bad luck or public embarrassment.

  Nora stands up from the sofa and carries her laptop to the kitchen table, away from my prying eyes.

  “You shouldn't be nosing at other people's conversations,” she tuts. “It's your own fault if you don't like what you see.”

  “Very high and mighty talk coming from someone who's dissecting the misfortune of a woman she hardly knows for the sake of having something to gossip about,” I say.

  We're not normally so snippy with one another, but I'm still annoyed at her for being a bitch to Nicholas, and she's still annoyed at me because Nicholas' penchant for dressing up as a woman hasn't caused me to write him off as a freak. It's also getting on her goat that Nicholas has been paying far more attention to me than he has been to her.

  We've been friends since we were sixteen, and over the course of the nine years that have passed since then Nora has never been overlooked by a man in favour of me. I'm the one who guys like to have as their friend. She's the one they want to lure into bed. It's always been the way of things. I can't really blame her for being a little muddled up over the recent turn of events.

  “So, where were you all morning?” she asks, her eyes still glued to the screen of her laptop.

  “Out having coffee with Nicholas. We went to the park and guess what? I saw a woman there with a ferret. She had it with her as if it was the most normal thing in the world. I was well impressed.”

  Nora scrunches up her nose at me. “You were impressed because she had a ferret with her? Is that even legal? I thought those things could bite you and give you rabies.”

  “Don't be so melodramatic. Besides, this one didn't bite. He even let me pet him and he kept running in and out between my legs like a four year old all jacked up and hyper on sugar.”

  One end of Nora's mouth turns up in a half smile. “I hope you're going to have a shower after that, who knows what kinds of fleas it might have left on you.”

  I throw my head back and roll my eyes. “I'll take my chances. Oh, I have other news,” I continue.

  “What's that?” Nora asks, as her fingers are tap, tap, tapping away at her keyboard.

  “Nicholas offered me a job working as the assistant for his shows. You know, helping him choose his outfits and putting on his make-up. How cool is that?”

  Suddenly her tapping ceases and she looks up at me. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes, why wouldn't I be?”

  “Um, one because you already have two jobs, two because you have no experience in that area, and three because, well, it's just a little odd, don't you think? Why would he offer the position randomly to you when he could do a couple interviews and hire someone who actually knows what they're doing?”

  Her reasons disgruntle me. “Maybe he doesn
't like doing interviews,” I say. “And for some reason he thinks I'm the funniest person ever, he said he likes having me around.”

  I add on this last bit to get a rise out of her. It's not very successful. She lets out a derisive snort. After having lived with me for almost three years, she finds what other people would term 'funny' as me being an irritating, loud mouthed bitch.

  “Perhaps he's laughing at you, rather than with you,” Nora suggests with a cheeky grin.

  “Meh. I'm not bothered either way.” I lie “You should see his apartment. It's chock full with boxes of wigs and women's clothing. I can't wait to have a look through it all.”

  “You really need to find yourself a decent hobby Fred,” she remarks, returning to her bitch-fest with Saoirse. Her comment makes my stomach sink to the floor, like when you pop a balloon with a pin.

  Telling myself that my interest in Nicholas' woman clothes is perfectly normal, I make a sandwich for lunch and head into my bedroom for a bit of a lie down. I open my window and let the city noise drift in.

  I tend to get a little antsy when it's too quiet. It's like my brain has made this strange evolution that helps it to adjust to the stress of living in a city. If there isn't at least some kind of ambient noise in the background I get freaked out. My favourite is the hum of the oven as it's baking a cake or a nice lasagne. That way you get the comfort of the noise and the prospect of a bit of grub on the horizon.

  The sounds of traffic and people talking patter in through my window. I finish eating my lunch and then lie back on my bed, slipping off my flip flops. Before I know it I've drifted to sleep and I'm dreaming of Nicholas wearing boxer shorts, high heels and a lacy black bra over his muscular chest.

  He's wearing make-up too, but not much; a little mascara and some dark lipstick. For some reason I am incredibly turned on by the sight. He's half boy, half girl. All gorgeous. His hair is messy and his eyelids are lowered. Bedroom eyes, my aunty Margaret would call them. She reads a lot of erotic romance novels, so she's always coming out with these random phrases that you'd never use in real life.