Angels

by Marian Keyes

  ‘It’s as good as a cabaret,’ Mum said, after a particularly ginormous pair passed us. ‘Just as well your father didn’t come. He’d probably banjax his neck again.’

  ‘Look at her,’ Emily said in an undertone, indicating a woman wearing HUGE big sunglasses.

  What was it? Someone famous?

  ‘Nah, that Jackie O look is so over. No, she’s had her eyes done. Any time you see someone wearing those glasses indoors, they’ve just had their eyes lifted. Will we get another drink?’

  We’d just embarked on our second round of Complicated Martinis when, across the room, I saw someone I recognized.

  ‘Oh. My. God.’

  ‘What? Who?’ Emily asked.

  ‘Look,’ I nudged her. On a nearby couch, no more than twelve feet away from us, sat Mort Russell. He was on his own, ostentatiously reading a script, just so everyone would know he was in the Business. Gobshite. He hadn’t noticed us.

  ‘Who’s he?’ Mum, Anna and Helen clamoured.

  Maybe we shouldn’t have said anything but, like I said, we were garrulous to the tune of one and a half Complicated Martinis, so Emily and I spilled it all: the story of the pitch; the wild enthusiasm from Mort and his acolytes; the talk of Cameron Diaz and Julia Roberts; the possibility of opening on three thousand screens across America… and how it all came to nothing.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Dunno. He might have meant it at the time.’

  ‘Could have been he was just being cruel. Leading you on, like,’ Helen posited, her eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

  ‘That’s no way to behave,’ Mum scolded. ‘And letting your poor mother buy that navy spangledy dress under false pretences. And it was a shocking price. Even though it was at –’

  ‘– forty per cent off,’ we all finished for her.

  An attempt to explain that Mort Russell had had nothing to do with Mrs O’Keeffe’s navy spangledy dress, that that was the fault of an entirely different and unrelated executive, was fruitless. All Mum cared about was that Mrs O’Keeffe had been swizzed into buying an expensive dress to wear to a film and that, as yet, no film had materialized.

  ‘She’s had to wear it to the Christmas party and the Lions’ fundraising barbecue to try to get the wear out of it. And her manning the sausages.’ Tight-lipped, Mum shook her head at the injustice, the downright indignity of it all. ‘Getting it splashed with some honey marinade stuff. I’ve a good mind to go over there and tell that pup what’s what.’

  ‘Haven’t we all?’

  The five of us were looking at Mort Russell so hard I was surprised that he hadn’t intuited it. Perhaps he was used to it. Maybe he thought our stares were admiring ones.

  ‘Do you know what? I will go over to him!’

  We tried to talk her out of it. ‘No, Mum, don’t. It’ll only make things worse for Emily.’

  ‘How could it make things worse for Emily?’ she asked with irrefutable logic. ‘Didn’t he waste her time, lead her up the garden path with false promises, then turn her down? And hasn’t she a contract with someone else now?’

  She had a point.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Emily said quietly. ‘Just don’t humble him in front of anyone else.’

  My head snapped back to Emily. She was giving the OK!

  ‘They can live with humiliation so long as none of the people they want to impress know about it,’ she explained to Mum. ‘Try and find out why he passed on my script. And Mrs Walsh, if you can make him cry, I’ll make it worth your while.’

  ‘You’re on!’

  And without further ado, she was up and off! Appalled and thrilled, we watched her go.

  ‘It’s the Martinis,’ Anna muttered. ‘It was too much for her delicate, two-spritzers-a-month constitution.’

  My mother isn’t a small woman, and I almost felt sorry for Mort Russell as this Irish battle-axe descended upon him, bristling with righteousness.

  ‘Mr Russell?’ we saw her mouth.

  Mort assented, his face withholding friendliness. Then Mum must have explained who she was, because Mort twisted his head to have a look at us, and when he registered Emily his tan retreated by a couple of shades. Emily wiggled her fingers at him in a travesty of sociability and then the berating began: a wagging finger, a voice high with indignation.

  ‘Oh God,’ I whispered faintly.

  We followed the action closely and our anxiety was tempered with glee. Mort’s face was sullen and hostile. I’m sure they never have to deal with the consequences of their wild promises, these Hollywood types.

  We could hear most of what Mum was saying. ‘There’s a name for people like you,’ she scolded – then abruptly faltered. ‘Except it’s usually for girls… But never mind!’ Back on track, the dressing-down resumed. ‘A tease, that’s what you are. You should be ashamed of yourself, getting the poor girl’s hopes up like that.’ Then she told him about Mrs O’Keeffe’s navy spangledy dress, with no mention that it had been at forty per cent off.

  Mort Russell mumbled something and Mum said, ‘So you should be,’ then she was back.

  ‘What did he say?’ we clamoured. ‘Why did he make all those promises and not follow up?’

  ‘That’s just his way, he said. But he said he was very sorry and he won’t do it again.’

  ‘Did he cry?’

  ‘His eyes were wet.’

  I didn’t really believe her, but so what?

  ‘I think this merits another round of Complicated Martinis,’ Emily said gaily.

  43

  I was already awake when the doorbell rang at eight-thirty on Sunday morning. I went to answer it but Emily was ahead of me, pulling up her pyjama bottoms and complaining about the earliness of the hour.

  ‘Why are we both awake?’

  ‘Worry?’ I suggested.

  ‘Guilty conscience?’

  I didn’t answer.

  Mum and Dad were at the door. ‘We’re going to Mass,’ they chorused cheerfully. ‘We wondered if you’d like to come.’

  I waited for Emily to hastily assemble an excuse, but instead she hitched her pyjamas even higher – so that she looked like a fifty-four-year-old psycho man who lives with his mother and wears his waistband up around his chest – and said, ‘Mass? Why not? Maggie, how about it?’

  And then I thought, why not?

  I hadn’t been to Mass for so long I couldn’t remember the last time – perhaps when Claire had got married? I was a foul-weather Christian, and only prayed when I was afraid or when I desperately wanted something. Same with Emily. Seemed like we were both afraid – or desperately wanted something. So we pulled on some clothes, stepped out into the butter-yellow day and walked the four short blocks to the church.

  Mass, LA style wasn’t how I remembered it from home. The young, handsome priest was standing outside making people shake hands with him on the way in, and the pleasantly cool church was packed with good-looking – and here’s the weird bit – young parishioners. As we squeezed into a polished pew, someone was intoning, ‘Testing, testing,’ into the altar microphone, then a manic woman shrieked, ‘Gooood Mor-naane! Welcome to our celebration.’

  A bell jingled and a girl with swishy hair and Miu Miu shoes walked slowly up the aisle, holding a huge Bible above her head like someone about to do an exorcism. Following her dramatic lead came the priest and a coterie of the handsomest altar boys I’d ever seen. They climbed the marble steps and suddenly it was SHOWTIME!

  Were there any visitors to Santa Monica, the padre asked, or anyone who’d been away? The away was said meaningfully, so I took it not to mean ‘away’ in the geographical sense. Someone stood up, then everyone started to clap, so several more stood up. ‘Out-of-work actors,’ Emily murmured. ‘Their only chance of applause.’

  Mum, who’d stretched up like a cobra, checking out the Standers, turned to me – to cuff me for talking, so I thought –but she whispered, ‘That last fella was in Twenty-One Jump Street. Got taken out by the mob.’

  Another few
people stood up and got clapped. Beside me, I felt Mum get twitchy. ‘No,’ I begged. ‘No.’

  ‘We’re visitors,’ she hissed. ‘Why shouldn’t we?’

  ‘No,’ I repeated.

  But, dragging Dad and me with her, she was rising to her feet and smiling around graciously. ‘We’re from Ireland,’ she told the congregation, meaning: We’re REAL Catholics.

  Everyone put their hands together for the über-Catholics from Ireland and then I was allowed to sit down again, my face burning.

  Next we had to turn to the person on our right and greet them. Dad turned to Mum, Mum turned to me, I turned to Emily, and Emily, who was at the end of the row, refused to look across the aisle.

  Then it started. My clearest memory of Mass in Ireland was of a miserable priest droning at a quarter-full church, ‘Blah blah blah, sinners, blah blah blah, soul black with sin, blah blah blah, burn in hell…’ But this was more like Mass: the Musical Lots of singing and melodramatic acting-out of the readings – I suppose you never knew when a hot-shot producer might be in the audience – sorry, I mean congregation.

  I wasn’t exactly comfortable with so much unbridled zeal, and Emily and I nudged each other and sniggered a fair bit, as if we were nine years old. The upbeat and celebratory mood reached its cringy zenith in the Lord’s Prayer, where the people in each row held hands and sang. Emily smiled smugly, letting her end-of-aisle hand swing emptily. But her smirk turned sickly as the man across the way stretched out his hand and clasped hers, pulling her out of her seat and me with her. In the row in front of me, a slender young man with a disproportionately large bottom sang the whole thing into his girlfriend’s avid eyes. It was creepy.

  At a certain sentence (‘And lead us not into temptation,’ if I remember correctly), we had to raise our joined hands above our heads. I couldn’t help thinking that if you’d had a camera on a pulley above the crowds it would’ve been a really good shot, like a Busby Berkeley musical. Maybe.

  No sooner was the mortification of the Lord’s Prayer over than the padre uttered words that struck new dread into my heart. ‘Let us offer each other the sign of peace.’ All of a sudden, I remembered that this was the main reason I’d stopped going to Mass. It’s an awful thing to do to people, make them be affectionate, especially on a Sunday morning. In Ireland we do the bare minimum – touch paws, mutter ‘Peace be with you,’ and defiantly refuse to make eye contact. But I suspected we wouldn’t get away with that here, and sure enough, we ended up practically having sex with the people around us. People were stepping out of their pews, confidently crossing the aisle and giving bear hugs all round. It was horrific. I got smothered into the shoulder of the boy with the big arse who’d sung to his girlfriend.

  But then the priest invited us to bow our heads and pray for our ‘special intentions’, and the we’re-only-here-for-the-laugh air abruptly lifted from Emily and me. Emily buried her face in her hands; no prizes for guessing what she was praying for. And me? I knew what I wanted, but I was afraid to pray for it.

  The comfort I’d hoped to get from going to Mass evaded me, and for the rest of the day a nervy excitement hummed within me. When the Goatee Boys invited everyone over for an evening barbecue, I had to take Emily aside. ‘This barbecue tonight,’ I said, flooded with anxiety in case it scuppered my plans, ‘I can’t go, I’m sorry’

  ‘Why, what are you doing?’ Emily was alert – and alarmed.

  ‘I’m going to see Shay.’

  ‘On your own?’

  I assented.

  ‘But Maggie, he’s married! What are you at?’

  ‘I just want to talk to him. I want…’ I picked a word I’d heard on Oprah, ‘… closure.’

  In exasperation she said, ‘We all have ex-boyfriends – it’s called life. We can’t go tracking them down and getting closure off every one of them. We just live with it. If you’d had more boyfriends in your time you’d know all this.’

  ‘He’s not just an ex-boyfriend,’ I said. ‘And you know it.’

  She nodded. I had her there. ‘But I still don’t think you should see him,’ she said. ‘It’s not going to help.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ I said, then went to my bedroom to try on everything I owned several times.

  The Mondrian is another of those hotels where you’d get snow-blindness; any colour so long as it’s white. The lobby was overrun with chiselled, bronzed men in Armani suits, and they were just the staff. Kitchen porters, probably. I jostled my way through them to the desk clerk and asked him to call Shay’s room.

  ‘Your name, please?’

  ‘Maggie… um… Walsh.’

  ‘I have a message for you.’ He handed me an envelope.

  I tore it open. It was a slip of paper, with a typewritten message. ‘Had to go out. Sorry. Shay.’

  He wasn’t there. The fucker. My tense anticipation flipped into hollowed-out let-down and I was so disappointed I wanted to kick something. I’d dressed so carefully, I’d spent so long taming my hair, I’d been so buzzy and hopeful. All for nothing.

  Well, what did you expect? I asked myself bitterly. What did you expect after the last time?

  I am bad at being bad. Terrible, actually. The one time I tried shoplifting, I got caught. The one time I sneaked in Shay Delaney when I was babysitting for Damien, I got caught. The day I bunked off school to go to the snooker with Dad, I got caught. The time I threw the snail at the Nissan Micra packed with nuns, they pulled over, got out and told me off. So you’d think that that would have taught me that I couldn’t get away with stepping out of line. But it didn’t, and the one time I had unprotected sex with Shay Delaney, I got pregnant.

  Perhaps it wasn’t the only time it was unprotected – the way we had sex was often so fraught and hurried that slips and spills might have happened anyway. But there was one definite occasion when we didn’t have a condom and we couldn’t help ourselves. Shay had promised that he’d pull out in time, but he didn’t and somehow I ended up assuring him that we’d be OK, as if my love for him was so powerful I could tame my body into obedience.

  When the time for my period arrived without anything happening, I told myself that it was study stress that was keeping it away – I was due to sit my Leaving Cert in less than three months. Then I tried the trick of telling myself that my period wouldn’t come until I stopped worrying about it not coming. But I couldn’t stop fretting – every twenty minutes I ran to the bathroom to check if it had arrived yet, and I analysed everything I wanted to eat to see if it could be classed as a craving’. But that I might be pregnant was literally almost unimaginable.

  I couldn’t bear the not knowing, I had to find out that I wasn’t pregnant, so when I was three weeks late I went into town and – anonymously, I hoped – bought a pregnancy kit, and while Shay’s mum was out, we did the test in the Delaneys’ bathroom.

  We grasped sweaty hands and watched the stick, willing it to stay white, but when the end of it went pink I lapsed into deep shock. The kind of shock that people end up going to hospital and getting sedation for. I couldn’t speak, I could barely breathe, and when I looked at Shay, he was almost as bad. We were terrified children, the pair of us. Sweat broke out on my forehead and gaps began to break up my vision.

  ‘I’ll do whatever you want,’ Shay said dully, and I knew he was just acting a part. He was petrified as he watched the bright star of his future implode. A father at eighteen? ‘I’ll stand by you,’ he said, like he was reading from a crappy script.

  ‘I don’t think I can have it,’ I heard myself say.

  ‘What do you mean?’ He tried to hide his relief, but already it had transformed him.

  ‘I mean… I don’t think I can have it.’

  The only thing I could think of was that it didn’t happen to girls like me. I know unplanned pregnancies happen to lots of women; even then I knew it. And I’m certain most people are distraught and wish it hadn’t happened. But I felt – and maybe everyone feels this – that it was somehow worse
for me.

  I suspected that if someone wild and breezy like Claire had got pregnant at seventeen, it would be as if everyone had almost expected it from her, and would just sigh a little and shake their heads, ‘Oh, Claire…’

  But I was the well-behaved one, my parent’s comfort, the one daughter they could look at and not have to say, ‘Where did I go wrong?’ The idea of having to break this news to my mother was unimaginable. But then I thought of having to tell Dad and I shrivelled entirely. It would kill him, I felt.

  I was gripped by intense panic. Being pregnant felt like one of the most frightening things that could ever happen to anyone. Within the boundaries of my middle-class world, it was as bad as it got. I thrashed around like an animal in a trap, torn asunder and trapped ever deeper by the ugly realization that no matter what choice I made, it would have terrible implications that I’d have to live with for the rest of my life. There was no way out – every one of my options was terrible. How could I have a child and give it away to someone else? It would break my heart wondering how it was getting on, if it was happy, if the new people were looking after it and if my rejection had scarred it. But I was also terrified of having a baby and keeping it. How would I take care of it? I was only a schoolgirl and felt young and incapable, barely mature enough to take care of myself, never mind a helpless scrap of life. Like Shay, I too felt my life would be over. And everyone would judge me: the neighbours, my classmates, my extended family. They’d talk about me and scorn my stupidity, and they’d say I’d got what I deserved.

  Fifteen years later, I can see that it wouldn’t have been that much of a disaster. It was all survivable – I could have had the baby, taken care of him, eventually sorted out a career for myself. And of course, while my parents wouldn’t have hung out the flags, they would have got over it. More than that, they would have loved him, their first grandchild. In fact, as the years passed I saw people live with far worse stuff than being presented with an illegitimate child by their best-behaved daughter. Keiron Boylan, a boy from our road a few years younger than me, got killed in a motorbike accident when he was eighteen. I went to his funeral and his parents were beyond recognition. His father was, quite literally, wild with grief.