Most of the cards are drawings of people, the colours in brilliant reds and golds and purples, each character engaged in deep concentration with whatever task they’re doing. There’s a man carving a plate, but, like, he’s really carving it. No one has ever applied himself like this dude is applying himself. He is the eight of pentacles, the card tells me. I wonder what he’s supposed to mean. You will carve a plate today?
I’ve seen tarot cards before, obviously. They come up in films sometimes. A fortune teller draws the cards and says something vague, and you, the viewer, are convinced she’s a con artist. Then she says something specific to make you sit up and pay attention: “And how does your husband Steve feel about that?” Or something.
I flick through them quickly, noticing that each card is marked by a very similar system to ordinary cards. Every suit is marked ace, two, three, four, five, and so on until ten. There are royal families, too: pages, knights, queens, kings. My old best friend Lily would love these. One of our first made-up games was called Lady Knights and mostly consisted of us pretending to ride horses around her back garden, defeating dragons and saving princes. Maybe she’s still playing Lady Knights in her head, but we don’t speak any more.
As I think about Lily, another card catches my eye. One that seems different from the other cards, and makes my stomach swoop when I touch it. My eyes go bleary for a second, like I’ve just woken up. Is that a woman’s face? I pull it out to look, but there’s a noise at the back of the bus that forces me to turn around. It’s a clutch of boys from St Anthony’s. Why are boys so unbelievably loud on the bus? They’re passing around something, then screaming with laughter. It’s not a nice, joyful sound, though. It’s mean. I catch a flash of something and see that they also have cards.
Now that’s weird. The one day I find tarot cards is also the day the St Anthony’s boys take up tarot?
Suddenly, Rory O’Callaghan gets up from his seat and saunters up the aisle, even though I know his stop – the same as mine – isn’t for ages. “Hey, Maeve,” he says, pausing near me. “Can I…?”
“Sure,” I say. Today keeps getting stranger and stranger. Here I was, just thinking about Lily and over comes her older brother. Rory and I have known each other since we were small kids, but we’ve never been friends. Remote, impressive and seldom seen, he was like a comet through my childhood.
He sits down, and I see that his face is completely red, his eyes shiny. I don’t ask what happened. Rory has always been a bit of a target. His big, soft features and solitary habits make him an outsider at a school like St Anthony’s, where if you don’t play football or hurling, you might as well be dead. It probably doesn’t help that the O’Callaghans are Protestant in an almost entirely Catholic city. They’re not religious; no one is, not really. But their being Protestant gives them an air of slight Britishness. A kind of polite, retiring energy that boys will prey on.
“Rory!” one of the boys shouts down. “Hey! Rory! Roriana! Roriana Grande! Come back!”
Rory blinks his big hazel eyes, which really do look a bit like Ariana Grande’s, and turns to me. “So, how are you?”
“I’m OK,” I say, shuffling the cards. I like the way the cool cardboard feels. It’s very nice if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t know what to do with their hands.
Rory blanches when he sees the cards. “Oh, crap. You have them, too.”
I’m puzzled, and put the cards face up, showing him the swirling illustrations. “Tarot cards?”
At that moment, one of the boys comes sprinting down the bus. “Hey, Roriana Grande, has your girlfriend seen these?”
The boy, whose name I don’t know, shoves some cards under my face and all at once, I get the joke. They’re not tarot. They’re the kind of gross, porn playing cards you get on holidays. Naked girls with huge boobs and thongs so tight they’d give you thrush. And stuck to every face is a photocopy of Rory’s school photo. Rory pretends to look out of the window, knowing that if he grabs for them or reacts in any way, they’ll get exactly what they want.
This is, quite simply, the most awkward moment ever experienced on the Kilbeg bus.
“Wait a second,” I say, my voice studious, like I’m cross-examining someone on their term project. I look at the boy. “So you photocopied, cut out and glued Rory’s photo onto fifty-two playing cards?”
He laughs and gestures at his friends in an “aren’t I hilarious?” expression.
“Wow, you must be totally obsessed with him,” I say loudly, and the boy gives me a dirty look and returns to the back of the bus. Rory and I sit in silence. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice that his fingernails are painted pink. Not loud, hot fuchsia. But soft pink, the colour of a ballet slipper. So close to his actual skin colour that, at first, you’d hardly notice it.
When we get off at our stop, he walks in the opposite direction, with barely a murmured “Bye.”
My house is a good twenty minutes away from the bus stop, but it’s a nice route, and on days like this I actually look forward to it. I have to walk alongside the riverbank, the huge blue-grey water of the Beg on the left-hand side of me, the stone walls of the old city on my right. Kilbeg used to be the city centre a hundred years ago, because the docks were here. It was
