We present an extract from celebrated author Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's new volume of Selected Stories.
For almost forty years, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne has captivated readers and critics alike with the dazzle and daring of her stories. Hailed as an original voice from her first collection, she has gone on to create a body of work that has established her as one of Ireland's finest and most compelling storytellers. The fourteen stories gathered in these Selected Stories demonstrate the breadth of Ni Dhuibhne’s achievement across her long writing career, particularly in terms of her depiction of the richly complex territory of women’s lives.
LITTLE RED
A thing Fiona does is online dating.
Not exactly dating. She hardly ever goes on an actual date. But she writes quite a lot of messages to people on a site called NEVER TOO LATE. Sometimes the messages are one line long. Sometimes they are just those little smiley things: emoticons. This is called 'a wave' on dating websites. Or maybe ‘a wink?’ She sends a lot of winks, because winking is a new experience for her; she has never winked in real life, with her actual eye, and doesn't know how to do it. It turns out that winking is one of the many actions which is easy to perform electronically but not in person.
This is how all that web winking started.
She was flying back to Dublin from a trade fair in Spain. That was maybe a year ago.
As Fiona was making her way to a free seat in the waiting area, a woman doing the same thing dropped her glasses on the floor, and sighed. ‘Feckit!’
Fiona put down her stuff, picked up the glasses, and handed them to the woman. ‘Thanks pet!’
She was large – the woman who said Feckit. Dressed in white trousers and pink flowery blouse. ‘You’re very good!’ Fiona nodded. The woman sat down with a group of companions. Companions who were in good humour and expressed this with loud enthusiasm. Fiona sat as far away from them as she could, and buried her head in her book – which was not a real book but an e-book. ‘I only use it when travelling,’ Fiona lied to people - colleagues in the book trade whose lives were passionately devoted to the preservation of the traditional book in the face of competition from non-traditional books and all the innumerable other post-Gutenberg ways of disseminating stories and information. Everyone she knew believed that a book printed on paper and bound in paper or cardboard (not to mention leather) was a precious and beautiful thing, a sacred thing. They all had eBooks but only for travelling (to book fairs and writers’ festivals, and of course ordinary holidays). Actually Fiona used hers all the time. ‘It’s just so handy!’ But it has disadvantages. It’s hard to ‘bury you head’ in a Kindle, and it doesn’t send out the signal at which a real book is adept: ‘Do not Disturb this Reader, who is lost in another world, buried in her book.’
She wasn’t lost. Far from it. Keeping her eyes on the screen she eavesdropped eagerly on the woman talking to her friends, regaling them with stories. Cushy Butterfield, Fiona named her, in the privacy of her own head. The name just popped in, from nowhere, it seemed, although she knows perfectly well that all names, all images, all ideas, actually come from somewhere, somewhere in the thorny forest of your past, in your personal flesh and blood computer, until out of the blue something hacks in and wakes them up.
After an hour the crew came around with the food and drinks trolley. For something to do she ordered the snack pack - four ritz crackers and a piece of cheddar cheese - and a little bottle of wine.
Cushy Butterfield got four little bottles of wine, two for herself and two for her husband.
Fiona had never seen anyone doing that before. Most passengers didn’t buy the wine at all, these days. They have a bottle of water, the bottle of water people carry with them everywhere, these days, rain or shine, in case they might get dehydrated as they go about their business and faint, or die. She felt
more positively disposed towards Cushy. A woman who didn’t mind passing the time on the plane with a drink, or being mildly outrageous.
‘Sláinte!’ Fiona raised her plastic glass to her.
The husband was snoring gently in his cubbyhole by the window.
‘I’m Molly,’ Cushy said.
Fiona introduced herself.
‘Were you on holidays?’
Fiona told her she had been on a work trip. She never liked to tell people what she actually worked at - publishing sounded too exotic, too rarified, for people not involved in books. 'I work in retail', she added. Most people were content to leave it at that but Cushy was persistent. 'In pharmaceuticals', Fiona said, because that usually stopped further questioning (unlike 'in clothing' or 'in furniture'). 'Oh, interesting,' said Cushy, who herself was a teacher, retired. She had been on a holiday with a group, with the Grey Explorers. They had a great time. She gave the name of the resort where they’d been based, in a nice hotel where the food was OK but the swimming pool absolutely fantastic.
When Cushy was starting the second bottle of wine, Fiona told her a bit about herself. (Divorced. Two children, adult. Two grandchildren. Recently moved house to the country, on a whim.) She had also finished her first bottle of red.
‘Get yourself another,’ said Cushy. ‘There isn’t much in these little bottles.’
Fiona had never rung the bell in a plane before, for anything, even though she flies several times a year. But she rang it and got a second little bottle of red.
Cushy told her about a friend of hers, who was a widow. (That’s not the same thing, Fiona thought but did not say. Being divorced is different. Being divorced is worse.) But she - the widow- met a member of the trouser brigade on one of the Grey Explorer holidays last year. ‘And now they’re living together!’
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
‘It’s time for you to meet somebody,’ she went on. ‘That’s if you’re still interested in the trouser brigade.’
Fiona said: ‘I’m sixty-four.’
‘Never use the ‘a’ word,’ Cushy wagged her finger at her. A? Age. ‘Forget it. You’re a beautiful woman.’
Some lies are good to hear.
‘And he’s not going to come knocking on your door and ask you for a date.’
‘What do you recommend?’
The Grey Explorers. Or… one of those online things.
The very next day, as soon as she got up, and before she had unpacked, Fiona signed up for a dating agency. Never Too Late, specializing in introducing people of a certain age to other people of a certain age.
Selected Stories by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne is published by the Blackstaff Press
