This Charming Man

by Marian Keyes

‘Our little Marnie’ must have been on the same page as Bid, because when September rolled around, a series of emotional upheavals kicked off and set the tone for the next three years:

  Upheaval 1

  ‘It’s all ruined!’ The sound of Marnie yelling came through the wall. ‘This summer has been the most perfect time of my life. Now I have to go back to school and you have to go to college. Don’t go!’

  Ma winced and muttered, ‘She shouldn’t have said that.’

  Ma, Dad, Bid, Leechy, Sheridan and I were sitting in the kitchen, while the shouting match played out in the next room. It was impossible not to hear them. Initially we’d tried to keep a pretence of a conversation going, but in the end we just gave up and listened.

  ‘But I have to go,’ Paddy cried. ‘This is my future, my life.’

  ‘I thought I was your life.’

  ‘You are! But I have to get qualifications so I can earn a living. How else can I take care of you?’

  ‘But you won’t want to. You’ll meet all these other… girls! You’ll fancy them and you’ll forget about me.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said Bid. ‘I’ve always thought she was a bit thick, but she’s right.’

  ‘I won’t!’ Paddy shrieked. ‘I love you, I only love you and I will never love anyone else.’

  ‘Well, well, if I had a pound for every time a man said that to me…’ Bid murmured.

  Upheaval 2

  ‘Sssh, sssh, I can’t hear,’ Bid said.

  ‘What’s it about this time?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘ “Let’s fight until six, then let’s have tea,” ’ Dad said. ‘Tweedledum to Tweedledee. Page eighty-four, ‘Alice in Wonderland.’

  ‘Ssssh!’

  ‘Paddy, what’s wrong?’ Marnie was pleading.

  ‘If you have to ask,’ he accused, ‘there’s no point telling you!’

  He had arrived, cold, imperious and very angry, and a nervous-looking Marnie had quickly closeted him in the living room.

  ‘I tried ringing you last night… but the phone was engaged… you’re meant to keep the line free from eight till midnight…’

  ‘But Paddy, other people live in this house, they might have made a call.’

  ‘But it wasn’t other people, was it? It was you. Look, I know, Marnie, you can stop lying to me.’

  ‘I’m not lying!’

  ‘I know who you were on the phone to.’

  ‘Who was it?’ Ma asked.

  ‘Graham Higgins,’ Leechy said. ‘His mum made him ring her, to get Marnie to explain Yeats’s poems to him, because she’s afraid he’ll fail English.’

  ‘Tall chap? Plays rugby?’ Bid said. ‘How does Paddy know who she was talking to?’

  ‘Leechy told me!’ Paddy yelled. ‘I know everything!’

  Shocked, Ma, Dad, Bid, Sheridan and I whipped around to look at Leechy.

  ‘I didn’t know that he didn’t know,’ Leechy wailed. ‘He rang me. He tricked me into telling.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Shut up! I can’t hear!’

  ‘But Graham is nothing, he’s nobody!’ Marnie declared.

  ‘He fancies you.’

  ‘He doesn’t.’

  ‘And you must fancy him. You spoke to him for at least seventeen minutes, while I stood in the cold, beside a phone box, trying to ring the girl I love, who couldn’t even be bothered to – Fuck this! I’m leaving!’

  ‘Oh Paddy, no! Don’t go, Paddy, no!’

  ‘God, it’s so romantic,’ Leechy said quietly.

  ‘You’re a sap, child,’ Bid said.

  ‘Is Paddy… crying?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Someone is.’ Energetic sobs could be heard clearly.

  ‘I think they’re both crying,’ Ma said. It was how their fights often ended. Either that, or one of them stormed from the house. Sometimes it was Paddy, sometimes it was Marnie, although she lived there. Whoever it was, they never went far. Within minutes, they’d ring the bell and one of us in the kitchen would have to answer the front door to let them back in to continue their shouting.

  The weeping noises eventually ceased. Silence prevailed. That meant they’d moved on to kiss-and-make-up sex.

  ‘That’s all, folks,’ Dad said, getting to his feet.

  ‘At times it’s as good as a soap opera,’ Bid said. ‘Speaking of which, I hope they’re decent because my show is starting and I’m going into that room.’

  Upheaval 3

  ‘It’s over,’ Marnie said. ‘Me and Paddy. It’s different this time.’ It was different. She was calm, rather than hair-tearingly distraught.

  ‘But you love each other!’ Leechy protested.

  Marnie shook her head. ‘We love each other too much. We’re tearing each other apart. It’s got to stop.’ Something about her composure made us begin to take her seriously.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ Leechy said. ‘He does love you but you bring out the worst in each other. All that jealousy… Maybe you need a different type of man and he needs a different type of girl.’ We didn’t realize at the time that she herself was planning to volunteer for the position.

  ‘Don’t.’ Marnie doubled over, clutching her stomach. ‘The thought of him with someone else…’

  ‘But you’ll meet someone else too,’ Leechy predicted.

  Marnie shook her head and produced a large green bottle, from which she swigged heavily. Dad’s absinthe. He’d go spare.

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘You will, you will!’

  ‘I don’t even want to. That’s it for me. Paddy was the one. I’m going to kill myself.’

  ‘Don’t be mad.’ Leechy was appalled.

  ‘People kill themselves. It happens. And I’m the kind of person who does it.’

  ‘I’m getting Ma.’

  ‘I always knew I’d die young,’ Marnie explained, curling up on her bed.

  ‘She’s been at the Bronteäs again,’ Dad whispered angrily. ‘And is that my absinthe she’s drinking?’

  ‘No offence,’ Marnie told Ma and Dad, ‘but I wish I hadn’t been born. I feel too much, all the time, and I hate it. I actually want to die.’

  ‘How would you kill yourself?’ Ma asked, following the advice given in the information booklet for parents of suicidal teenagers and calling her bluff.

  ‘Cut my wrists.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘This.’ Marnie fished out a scalpel from her jeans pocket.

  ‘Give me that! Give it to me!’

  Sulkily she surrendered it. ‘But Ma, there are blades in the bathroom, knives in the kitchen, more scalpels in my art bag. And if you take them all away, I can climb onto the roof and throw myself off or I can godown to the pier and fling myself into the sea.’

  Ma and Dad stood, their heads together, trying to formulate a plan.

  ‘Let’s just get her through tonight,’ Ma said. ‘Even if it means staying awake all night with her, then we’ll find a good Jungian first thing in the morning.’

  ‘I wish we’d had boys,’ Dad said. ‘We’d have none of this sort of trouble with boys.’

  Despite absinthe’s reputation for sending people bonkers, Marnie made a frightening amount of sense. She sat on her bed, quietly explaining how she was unequipped to deal with the feelings that everyone else could process. ‘I can’t survive the pain of not being with Paddy,’ she said.

  ‘But we all have to have our hearts broken at some stage,’ Ma said. ‘It’s part of the human condition. I remember being fifteen and thinking I’d never be happy again.’

  ‘But some people just can’t take the pain of being alive. Why do you think people kill themselves?’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘There’s a bit missing in me that Grace got. A stop button for the feelings. You got a whole person when you got Grace, but you just got a runt when you got me. I was the one made up of the leftovers.’

  ‘No, Marnie, no!’

  ‘I wish I could have chosen not to be born. Do
you think they have a holding pen for unborn souls? Some black place for all of us who are too defective to be born?’

  ‘You’re not defective, you’re perfect!’

  ‘You don’t know what I know. You don’t know what it’s like to be me.’

  Ma, Dad and I did our best but whatever we said, she countered it with her own certainty that she was better off dead. Eventually we lapsed into a despairing silence and listened to the hiss of the rain on the road and the roof. Dad was starting to nod off, when we heard the wailfrom outside.

  ‘What was that?’ Ma asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  Our muscles froze as we listened intently.

  Then we heard it clearly. ‘Maarr-nie.’

  The four of us lunged at the window. Outside the house, in the middle of the road, in the teeming rain, stood Paddy, wearing his Russian army greatcoat, a white dress shirt missing all of its buttons and his ancient black barman trousers, torn at the knee.

  ‘Maarr-nie.’ He flung his arms wide, exposing his bare chest. ‘I love you!’

  And then Marnie was off and down the stairs and out of the front door, running towards him. He grabbed her up, swung her round, then set her down, fastening his face to hers. Joined at the mouth, they sank to their knees, their tears mingling with the rain.

  ‘I suppose that means we can go to bed now,’ Dad said.

  ‘It was the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen,’ Leechy said the following day. ‘It was like Wuthering Heights.’

  ‘Gothic bollocks,’ Dad said scornfully. ‘Doesn’t anyone remember that Heathcliff was a psychopath. He killed Isabel’s dog.’

  Marnie and Paddy were curled up in Marnie’s bed, both sleeping peacefully, like children recovering from an ordeal. The rest of us were nervy and exhausted, wrung dry from the emotional rollercoaster.

  ‘Forgive me for asking such a bourgeois question,’ Ma said. ‘But all that, last night? Is that normal?’

  ‘No,’ Dad said. ‘You don’t see Grace behaving that way.’

  ‘Only because I haven’t got a boyfriend,’ I said, jumping to Marnie’s defence.

  ‘Why not?’ Bid asked. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Noth –’

  ‘Too choosy, that’s your trouble. Have you still not lost your virginity?’

  ‘Bid! Stop it!’

  ‘I’ll take that as a no. What about Sheridan? He’s a phwoarr, not as ridey as Paddy, but not at all bad,’ Bid said. ‘Would you not “go” with him?’

  ‘No.’ Sheridan was witty and dry and yes, good-looking, but I didn’t fancy him. And he didn’t fancy me either. He fancied Marnie. I was sure of it.

  ‘Even if Grace had a boyfriend, there wouldn’t be any shouting,’ Bid said. ‘Grace has always been dull. If it’s drama you want, Marnie’s your girl.’

  ‘Did you see the photo in the Indo of Kaplan looking very lovey-dovey with Zara Kaletsky?’ TC asked me.

  ‘Who? Oh the model?’

  ‘Actress, actress. I used to love her in Liffey Lives. Till she left Ireland for bigger and better.’

  ‘Has she moved back here?’

  ‘Just home on holiday.’

  ‘Can’t be serious with Kaplan so. What do you mean, “lovey-dovey”?’

  ‘Hand on her arse, what little there is of it. God, she’s beautiful, so she is.’ TC sighed. ‘What does she see in that plank?’

  ∗

  To: Gracegildee@spokesman.ie

  From: Pattilavezzo@oraclepr.com

  Subject: Interview with Madonna

  Thank you for your interest in Madonna. Regrettably it has been decided to go with another journalist.

  Bloody Irish Times, I bet. Disappointment slithered downwards, pulling all of me right into the pit. I rested my forehead on my hands.

  It was unbearably frustrating. I’d do a better job than the Times: I loved Madonna. I’d grown up with her, I got her.

  I sat and stewed and waited to feel better and waited a little bit longer, and when the disappointment still ached inside me I had a brainwave: I’d ring Patti Lavezzo in a last-ditch attempt to get her to reconsider! At this stage, there was nothing to be lost and if I did it with enough passion, she might change her mind.

  ‘Patti Lavezzo.’ She always answered the phone like someone was timing her with a stopwatch.

  ‘Hi, Patti, Grace Gildee here, from the Spokesman in Ireland. Can you please reconsider your decision?’ I talked fast so she couldn’t interrupt. ‘We’d do a stunning piece on Madonna. We’re the highest circulation broadsheet in Ireland. We have integrity and can guarantee an in-depth, intelligent profile, but at the same time we have an excellent commercial sensibility…’

  ‘Hey! Hold up! You’re calling from where?’

  ‘The Spokesman.’

  ‘Yeah, but… we’re giving the interview to the Spokesman.’

  Hope broke open in me and the sun emerged, warm and dazzling. ‘You are? But I just got an email–’

  ‘Yes, one moment please, let me just get you up on screen. Yes, here we are. Ireland. The Spokesman. Casey Kaplan. Is that you?’

  ∗

  I went to the Ladies and I actually shed tears. Then I rang Damien and shed more tears.

  ‘I’m trapped in the Dail,’ he said. ‘But I could get away in an hour.’

  ‘No, no, do your job. I’ll see if some lead-swinger here will come to the pub with me. I’m either going to drink or smoke and drinking seems like the safer choice.’

  ‘Look, I’m on my way over to you. It might be even less than an hour –’

  ‘No, don’t, Damien.’ I was touched by his willingness. ‘I’ll be grand.’

  I didn’t have to look far for a drinking buddy. Even though it was only three in the afternoon, Dickie McGuinness was game to down tools and accompany me to Dinnegans.

  ‘Why were you crying?’ he asked, putting a gin and tonic in front of me.

  ‘Who said I was crying?’

  ‘Mrs Farrell. She did a ring-round, told everyone.’

  Normally I’d deny it, but I was too sad. ‘Kaplan shafted me. He stole my Madonna interview. He knew how badly I wanted it.’

  ‘Did he, though?’

  ‘Everyone knew! Bad enough to lose to another paper, Dickie, but to one of your own… It’s too much. I hate him.’

  ‘So does everyone. We’re after finding out how much they’re paying him.’

  I paused. I didn’t know if I could take it. ‘How much?’

  ‘You sure you want to know?’

  I sighed. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Three times what you’re getting.’

  I let that sink in. ‘How d’you know what I’m paid?’

  He tapped his nose. ‘You know me, Grace. I know plenty.’

  I sighed again. What could I do? Nothing. The world was unfair. Since when was that news?

  ‘Tell me a story, Dickie.’

  ‘What would you like?’

  ‘Your first decapitation.’ There was comfort in the familiar.

  ‘Right you are, here we go.’ He settled himself into his seat and began his trip down memory lane. ‘I was a raw-boned youth, all of nineteen years of age, covering every dog and pony show for the Limerick Leader, when the call came in that a body had been found.’

  But the crime correspondent was in hospital with a gunshot wound to the buttock.

  ‘But the crime correspondent was in hospitalwith a gunshot wound to the buttock and Theo Fitzgibbon, the editor, says to me, “McGuinness, you’ll have to go.” Said I, flourishing my notebook and pen, puffed up like a peacock, “What can you tell me, Theo?” “It’s Mr Fitzgibbon to you,” says Theo. Old school, none of this first-name stuff.’

  Never saw him without a collar and tie.

  ‘Never saw him without a collar and tie, Grace. “Deceased was discovered in a disused freezer. Young, male, dead as a dodo,” says Theo. “And one more thing – he’s missing his head.” “His head? Where’s it gone?” says I, like a g
ombeen.’

  Someone must have cut it off.

  “‘Someone must have cut it off,” says Theo. “Don’t let us down, McGuinness,” he said. Meaning –’

  ‘– Don’t puke in front of the rozzers,’ we said together.

  ‘… He kept finding her. No matter where she moved to he always tracked her down. Her house was like a fortress. She had all kinds of security. Alarms, panic buttons, even a panic room. But there was a cat-flap in the back door.’

  I was in the offices of Women’s Aid, talking to their director, Laura Venn. Jacinta had, very reluctantly, agreed that I could write up a piece on domestic violence – not that she was promising to run it, she said we’d keep it in reserve for a slow news day.

  ‘What about the cat-flap?’ I asked, feeling anxious on behalf of this unknown woman.

  ‘It had no alarm, it was the one place in the house where you could enter undetected.’

  ‘But surely it would be too small for a man to get through?’

  ‘It was. But she went away for the weekend with her children and while they were gone he brought his toolbox and made the cat-flap bigger. Big enough for himself to crawl through and get into the house but not big enough so that they’d notice it had been altered.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘He got in. He hid in the attic.’

  ‘And then what happened?’ I was on the edge of my seat.

  ‘Oh he killed her.’

  ‘What? Completely?’

  Laura half smiled.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘That was a really stupid thing to say.’ But I’d been waiting for some sort of last-minute redemption, as if life was an episode of Happy Days.

  ‘When she left him, he’d sworn he’d find her and kill her and so he did. In front of their children.’

  ‘And that was the end of it? She was dead?’

  ‘She was dead.’

  I was left with a breathless emptiness. ‘And her children had no mother? Or father, I suppose, if he was in prison.’

  ‘He wasn’t in prison. The judge felt sorry for him. He walked free on a suspended sentence.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘It happens a lot.’

  ‘But why do women get together with these psychos?’ I cried in a burst of frustration. Of course I knew the answer – at least theoretically I did – but the reality maddened me.