Juno+juliet

1 When Juno and I stepped off the bus in Eyre Square we were armed only with an enormous rucksack each and the scribbled address of a distant cousin. A blizzard of youth-hostel flyers immediately engulfed us, clearing only to reveal a blizzard of youths, smiling at us in French, Spanish, English, and Italian. Juno told them we didn't need a hostel, but thank you anyway. I told them we didn't need a hostel, so fuck off. And there I think you have, neatly illustrated, the essential difference between her and me. I had, to be fair to me, not enjoyed my journey much. The peace had held all through the morning's packing, but on the way out the door I managed to have an almighty row with our father. What was it about? Ah, what are they ever about. It was about nothing. All the way up on the bus I had stomach cramps and a headache. A drunk behind us spewed against the back of my seat. Then he tried to make light conversation. The driver spent the entire journey with the radio on at full blast as he attempted, with an ever-increasing lack of success which would have disheartened a lesser man, to tune in to a country-and-western station that seemed to be making its last, faint, desperate broadcast from somewhere beyond the edge of the solar system. Things rapidly improved once we'd got off the bus and through the blizzard. Pausing only to shovel fistfuls of flyers into the big yellow litter bins that disfigured the edge of Eyre Square, we headed for the nearest coffee shop. Apart from a couple of buskers and another drunk and a spotty boy with a clipboard who promised not to take up much of our valuable time and didn't, nobody bothered us for money, our names, or a kiss in the hundred yards to the G. B. C. Coffee Shop and Restaurant. Some kind of record. I should probably explain that Juno began to be beautiful around the age of fourteen and the process shows no sign of stopping. Her beauty refines and upgrades itself constantly. At the time this story begins, she has just turned eighteen and it's almost ridiculous how beautiful she is. No, it is ridiculous how beautiful she is. She's beautiful to the point where it might as well be a disfigurement. She's invisible behind it. It's all people see. Not just men. Everyone. That doesn't mean everyone's attracted to her. It just means everyone has an attitude, an opinion, before they know a damn thing about her. It's nobody's fault. It's the way we are. It annoys the hell out of me. I should probably also explain that Juno is my identical twin. We got a seat in the nook at the back. The coffee was lovely. My cramps and headache faded. We'd left home. I felt great. Eventually we paid up and went to look for the house of our distant cousin. We found it. 2 The front door of 14 Bishop Casey Terrace swung open and we stepped trustingly into what might as well have been deep space. It was so dark I had the sensation of falling, and grabbed Juno. Seconds later, as our eyes adjusted, we found ourselves blinking in the centre of a kind of smoke-blackened igloo constructed entirely from plaster statues of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, in assorted sizes, and large, framed pictures of Pope John XXIII. Turf dust covered every flat surface an inch deep. No light came through the shroudlike curtains. A tiny turf fire in the grate sent a little light halfway across the rug, while the small, sinister, glowing sacred-heart lamp on the far wall did its job of flooding the rear of the room with darkness. Our distant cousin was now close enough for us to count her teeth, even by that light. Five. Three up on top. She spoke in tongues, and vanished. I was terrified. "What the hell was that about?" I asked Juno. "She's gone to put her teeth in and put on the kettle," said Juno, who'd always been better at languages. "She hopes we had a pleasant journey." The tea was actuallGough, Julian is the author of 'Juno+juliet' with ISBN 9780385501729 and ISBN 0385501722.