The Green Road by Anne Enright

a huge and tatty suitcase and, after all the shouty, funny letters, she discovered the place was indeed a kip and the others were rarely around. Constance suffered much tension about the rent which her friends did not seem to share; Lauren turning up one Saturday morning with a stained cheque saying, ‘Did you not get this?’ as though it was Constance who had let things slide. But it was worth it for the wildness of being with the girls unleashed – Lauren especially, who went through the men they met like the world was on sale and they were a rail of clothes.
    Awful!
    Hmmm.
    Nothing was right.
    Look, oh he’s gorgeous, Oh no! He doesn’t fit.
    Constance could never figure out what the problem was – either they were too keen or they didn’t call – but there was no persuading people about such things, you can’t order someone to fall in love.
    Constance wasn’t sure what she liked herself, when it came to men, though she knew what she wanted. She wanted to have sex on Irish soil. Her virginity, she declared, was not getting on the plane with her to JFK. Constance was working in Dublin city centre and every customer who walked in the door came in with a look on their face and a prescription for condoms folded four times. They came in to town so their local chemist would not know. It was like working in a porn shop, she said. They bought hundreds of the things. Ribbed for extra pleasure. They bought lubricant from behind the counter, where it sat between suppositories and steroidal creams. Some of it was flavoured.
    ‘Stop!’
    ‘Oh no!’
    Lauren said that lubricant was a sign of an old or a frigid wife. Though the girls all took a tube, when Constance offered them around, along with many illegal packets of Durex, both plain and multicoloured.
    Despite the fact that Constance was living in sex central, the men who came up to her till ran away from her. It wasn’t just that they would not flirt, they wouldn’t even look her in the eye. It was all so unthrilling. She went out for a couple of weeks with a Malaysian guy from the College of Surgeons she met at a medical do. Constance would have done anything he asked, but he didn’t ask, and then, somehow, he was gone. To cheer her up, the girls went for cocktails in the Coconut Grove with some suburban rugby types who were all chasing Lauren. They ordered from a drinks menu and the men paid and they clinked glasses and laughed before Constance was roughly deflowered in the back seat of a car by a man whose big fingers had grown around the signet on his pinkie and also around his wedding ring. When Constance threw up afterwards, it came out blue. The guy, whose manners were impeccable, put her in a taxi home.
    ‘Make sure she gets in safe,’ he said, and pressed some notes into her hand to cover the fare. He even rang a few days later to ask if he might see her again. Constance, standing by the payphone in the hall in Baggot Street, suffered a moment of absolute confusion. Like maybe she was in some sort of parallel universe, and this guy was in the real world. He certainly sounded real.
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Lovely. Where?’
    In the end she stood him up. She lay face down on her bed and hung on to the mattress, as though it might start to spin and throw her off. She imagined him under Bewley’s clock in his sheepskin jacket, standing in the rain.
    It was rape, she thought now, or it would have been, if she had known how to say no. Not a word she was ever reared to use, let’s face it: What do you mean, ‘No’? And the men who bought lots of KY but no condoms were probably gay, that was another thing Constance realised, many years later. And it seemed to her a raw business, penetration – at least in those days, when the body was such a stupid place: when her skin was the most intelligent thing about her, for knowing how to blush, and she could not even name herself below the waist.
    ‘I’d say that one’s got bad news.’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘She’s