City of Lost Girls

by Declan Hughes

  Jack passes the thirty bills across to me, his grin broad, his eyes twinkling. At least as many bills again remain in the clip, and I have a slight twinge, as if I’ve been hard done by: it’s never easy being around someone quite so flush, and so damn casual with it. Jack whips up the clip and winks and claps his hands, as if to say: now the deal is done, now the money is down, the world is remade once more: let’s sit up and watch what happens. Make it happen, Ed. And I wonder what the artificer wants to happen, what the manipulator hasn’t told me, what secrets the old rogue holds that he wants me to expose.

  Glenda arrives with fresh drinks: under the new, sober dispensation I have arranged for myself, this should be my cue to leave. I have already had more than enough, especially since I started from the position that I wasn’t going to have any. But I can’t leave now, nor do I want to. Money and booze have changed things, but that isn’t all. I finish the Red Hue I had, and sink the one I am given, and another couple besides, and we talk about this and that, everything and nothing, or so it seems, like it wasn’t ten years since we’d met but ten days, talk like we know one another’s mind inside out, which is not and never has been and never will be true. Sometimes it seems that way, though, and tonight is one of those times. So when Jack suggests, or rather, announces, at four in the morning, a swim, it seems like the most natural thing in the world, as I guess it would to a man who has forgotten what it’s like to be drunk.

  Jack’s car takes us out in stately splendor along Strand Road in Sandymount and the coast road by Monkstown and Dun Laoghaire Harbor and deposits us in Sandycove beside the Forty Foot, in sight of the Martello Tower James Joyce once lived in and fled from and used as the setting for the opening scene of Ulysses. The Forty Foot used to be called the Men’s Bathing Place but it’s now open to swimmers of both sexes and ultimately, if the water is cold enough, which it generally is, of none. After the brief interval of indigo that passes for night as Dublin heads toward the summer solstice, a musky summer predawn is softening every hard surface as we walk down the steps of the Forty Foot and strip and fling ourselves off the rocks. Before we get in, Jack warns me gravely not to piss in the sea. It doesn’t seem to me that where or when I piss is any of his business, but when it looks like I’m going to say something to this effect, he stops me and says he has his reasons.

  We swim in silence, Jack getting out regularly to dive back in again. I stay in the water, looking up at the white Art Deco–style house that flanks the Joyce Tower, a little glimpse of California on the south Dublin coast, and recall that the last time we swam together, it was in the ocean at Zuma Beach, north of Malibu, and that my mother had been with us, indeed, that the trip had been Jack’s idea. Jack had worked hard to charm my mother for no other reason than that she was my mother, taking her to tea at the Biltmore, and to see Tony Bennett at the Hollywood Bowl, and my mother was very taken with Jack; you could say he was the highlight of her trip. And she always asked after him, and continued to do so with more than a note of reproach in her voice after she learned we had fallen out, as if, in any such rift, the fault would obviously be mine. Now she is no longer able to ask anyone anything, but I think of her often, of course, and I think of her now, as we swim at dawn in Sandycove.

  When it is too cold to stay in the water any longer, and when Jack breaks the unreal spell an early summer morning casts by announcing that he is due on set in an hour, we get out and get dressed, and Jack declares that we will now take a piss at what he calls the urinal with the greatest view in the known world. I’m not an expert on urinals with views in either the known or the unknown world, and I imagine it’s a fairly small field on which to post odds, but I’m prepared to bet the urinal at the Forty Foot is among the favorites: a half wall with a gutter beneath, washed by the water but rank with piss and seaweed; above the wall you can see whatever there is to see right out across Dublin Bay to Howth promontory on the Northside; this morning, we can see the sun rising slowly above the sea. Jack says we could have pissed in the sea, but then we would have missed out on the perspective, the perspective gained, he says, emphasizing the last word. And we wouldn’t want to miss out, would we? No, Jack, we wouldn’t. As I had forgotten, as I am reminded again this morning, every hour spent with Jack Donovan is a lesson in not missing out.

  CHAPTER 3

  Anne Fogarty sometimes wonders if her daughters disrupt the morning routine deliberately, with malice, or at least, mischief, aforethought. She has it all worked out: shower at 7:10, dressed by 7:25, wake the girls and leave their clothes ready for them and straight downstairs to set out breakfast cereals and prepare lunches. They used to have porridge when they were little, and Anne has fought the good fight against cereals with added sugar for a long time, but when the kitchen table began to play host to scenes of female aggression and hysteria worthy of a women’s prison, she gave in, drawing the line at honey in the title or anything that colored the milk brown. First they both wanted Cheerios, which was easy, too easy as it turned out; Aoife quickly decided she preferred Rice Krispies Multi-Grain Shapes, and then Ciara, ever anxious that her elder sister might be gaining even greater advantage, decided she preferred them as well; within a couple of days, exhibiting her customary restlessness and discontent, divine or otherwise, Aoife moved on to Frosties.

  Now upon the kitchen counter sits a veritable library of breakfast cereals; they remind Anne of the slogan for the Armada books she used to read as a child: “Imagine how colourful they will look upon your bookshelf! Four for ten shillings, eight for a pound!” She bagged a cache of original Armada Books at a church fete a few years back for half nothing, Enid Blyton mostly, but also some gymkhana books by Christine and Diana Pullein-Thompson and a dozen Chalet School titles by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer. However, she has failed in her attempts to persuade Aoife to share in her childhood enthusiasm: Aoife, even at seven, favored books in which young American girls dreamed of boyfriends, clothes, and makeup, and refused to contemplate anything published in what she sniffily referred to as “the olden days” (“Mum, what was it like growing up in the olden days?”). Anne has been meaning, once she summons up the moral force, to try the Armada Books on Ciara, who, while no less stubborn than her sister, is at least not as argumentative.

  Anne sets the bowls of cereal on the table, pours milk into a jug and goes out into the hall to yell up the stairs. This would be an excellent opportunity for one or other girl to register her objections to the choice of outfit her mother had laid out for her. (Anne and several other parents have tried on more than one occasion to get the PTA to introduce school uniforms, but they have been defeated by what Anne thinks of as generic “school project” parents who object to anything even faintly redolent of discipline or authority; one of the mothers among this rather sanctimonious, hippyish group whose marriage has recently broken up and who has taken, in what looks very much to Anne like her late forties, to wearing denim miniskirts and very tight low-cut tops, would benefit greatly from some kind of uniform herself, Anne has forborne from observing, as would the parents who wear pajamas and Crocs when they drop their children to school.)

  But the outfits are approved, or at least consented to, this morning, and the cereal choice also passes without demur, and as her two tousle-headed daughters tuck into their breakfast in relative silence, Aoife reading a Meg Cabot and Ciara lost in a Teen Titans comic, Anne thinks this just might be the morning it all goes smoothly, the morning Hello! magazine could be admitted into her lovely home to see how idyllic it all is. Maybe they could take a photograph of Ed Loy’s text, which she looked for first thing she awoke, and is looking at again now, sitting at the breakfast table with a hot mug of tea and a slice of brown bread with the last of Kevin’s mother’s marmalade. (The etiquette of divorce is uncertain and improvisatory, and lapses of dignity are inevitable: Anne feels one coming on in the next couple of days, as she doesn’t see how she can survive without more of Kevin’s mother’s marmalade, and yet fully understands not only that she is no longer
entitled to it, but that if she contacts Iris directly to ask for it, she will lose face in some not entirely definable but nonetheless certain way. She and Iris are still in contact anyway, of course, Iris being the girls’ grandmother. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal. Maybe she could say Aoife liked it? Could it ever be ethical to use your child in order to get marmalade? She might ask Ed Loy that, it would make him laugh, at the very least. Most things she says seem to make him laugh. In any case, if she told Iris Aoife wanted marmalade, Iris would ask Aoife if that were so, and Aoife would say “Ewww!” and “No Way!” and Anne would be Found Out.)

  Ed’s text reads…no, she’s not going to repeat it, she finds they work best if she glances at them quickly and then turns away. When he first started texting her, he’d send things like Yes. and See you later. and After nine. and while it’s always nice to know a man is more direct and practical than you are, there’s a limit to how much of that a girl can take. So she told him he was only to send her dirty texts, and when he refused (he blushed, in fact, which took her aback: she didn’t think he was the blushing type, knew for a fact he wasn’t, except, it appeared, in print), she sent him some samples he could use as templates, and eventually, when she had been away on holidays with the kids for a week and he was home alone and drunk, he used up all the templates and got into the swing of things himself, and the one he sent her last night was very good indeed, so much so that Aoife had asked her what she was smirking at and she said she certainly wasn’t smirking at anything, she had just remembered something, which was one way of putting it. Just as well Aoife had got her own phone for her tenth birthday, so she leaves Anne’s alone now.

  Anyway, there was no point in mentioning the text to Ed, as he would shake his head blankly and affect not to know what she was talking about. She couldn’t remember fancying anyone the way she fancied him, not even Kevin, or at least, not for ages, she could feel it in her teeth, for Christ’s sake. Even if she and Kevin still occasionally…out of habit more than anything else, sometimes he stayed over if there was a birthday and they’d all had too much to drink, and even though he’d stay in the spare room, she found herself needing to…check up on him…obviously it wasn’t a good idea, but as she said, divorce etiquette is uncertain, and she is only human…and she knows fine well Ed Loy was carrying on with that Donna Nugent one when they met, not that he had promised anything but she couldn’t bear the idea of anyone else getting her hands on oh for God’s sake Anne get a grip, it’s eight o’clock in the morning you horny old cow.

  True to form, with hair brushed and shoes on and lunches in schoolbags and all looking set to be A Banner Morning in the Fogarty household, Ciara suddenly gets all teary at the possibility that she might have had a project to do for the last four weeks (the first Anne has heard of it) involving family trees and photographs of grandparents and a scale model of the family home set in location with neighboring houses, said project being due this morning, and once Anne has tamped down a perfectly human reaction to scream Four Weeks And You Tell Me Now? she says she will come into the class and talk to Miss Redmond herself and explain…what? That she is on heroin, and can’t be expected to help with homework? That she never looks in Ciara’s homework journal because she is too busy gallivanting with a fancy man? (There is no mention of this project in the homework journal.) That sure Ciara is allowed do as she pleases because she is a little dote, isn’t she? Anne doesn’t know. Mum will make it right, in some undisclosed fashion. At eight o’clock, she had felt on top of the word, efficient, desired, loved, a capable, sexy woman more than ready for the day; ten minutes later, with Ciara’s tears dried and the girls in the back of the car (the plan had been to walk because it was so fine, but at this stage, to be honest, fuck that), she wonders whether, once she’s dropped them at school, she can just cancel her appointments and crawl back into bed.

  She can’t, of course, and doesn’t need to, Miss Redmond having explained that the project is only beginning and will run for four weeks, she is handing out fact sheets about it today and parents can consult with their children and help to plan the work together. Mrs. Mini Skirt casts a superior look in Anne’s direction, another salvo in the ongoing low-level attrition between the Mums Who Work and the Mums Who Don’t; fair enough, Anne supposes, she has been a bit untogether, but if she were wearing kitten heels and shorts like Mrs. Miniskirt is this morning, she’d at least take care to try to not look superior to, well, anyone, really.

  Anne swings back to the house to grab a cup of coffee and fill a tote bag with her pile of samples and magazine references. In the long wait for the lights at Donnybrook Church, she glances at the bag and wonders whether she’ll even get to remove its contents. A few years back, it had been so different: no sooner would she get through the door than the client would be pouncing on the samples and squealing over the color schemes, credit card vibrating like a tuning fork in anticipation. One woman could stand for many: Merilla (possibly not her given name), the Lancastrian wife of an Irish boy-band singer living in a 3,500-square-feet new-build mansion in Portmarnock, immaculate if a little portly at nine in the morning in brilliant white Juicy Couture tracksuit, snow-blond porn hair framing hard features made even harder by a full face mask of orange makeup, brilliant white acrylic nails, rings on every finger and, for all Anne knew, bells on every Ugg-encased toe, twin babies safe in the care of a silent Brazilian nanny. Anne had to explain patiently that the references she had prepared for French Rustic, English Country House and Swedish Gustavian designs for the house were alternatives, and that it would be difficult to combine them, especially if, as it seemed, Merilla wanted bathrooms, kitchens and reception rooms in all three styles. Difficult, but not, as it turned out, impossible, especially given the extent to which Merilla was prepared to pay for the privilege. The result, which looked like the interiors of three houses in one, certainly pleased Merilla, who exclaimed, “It’s absolutely gorgeous, just like a hotel so it is.” Anne was less keen, and when Merilla was desperate for the house to be featured in an interiors magazine, Anne, fearing career-ending humiliation, went out of her way, using every contact she had made in the business and reeling in several favors, some dating back to school days, to ensure that it would appear nowhere. Eventually, Merilla concluded that the problem had been an excess of subtlety and commissioned a new designer to incorporate Arts and Crafts, Tuscan and Classical/Etruscan themes into the house, which by then had swollen to five thousand feet with the addition of a glass-and-steel extension.

  In its new incarnation (with sole credit going to the second designer, Anne having successfully written herself out of its dynamic history), the house was featured in every magazine and property supplement in the land, serving as a cautionary tale of high Celtic Tiger vulgarity and the ever-present danger of having more money than taste, or indeed, sense. Not long afterward, amid the storm of humiliation this and her husband’s public affair with the judge of a reality-TV talent contest provoked, the marriage broke up amid a welter of slur and counterslur and Merilla retreated to Burnley, where, from what Anne can make out, she lives a busy life gaining and losing weight, taking and not taking drugs, finding and losing unsuitable boyfriends and giving exclusive interviews on these and every other aspect of her life to the tabloid newspapers and glossy magazines that must have reporters assigned to her around the clock.

  The house in Portmarnock went on the market five years ago for four and a half million. You could pick it up for 1.2 now, but nobody wants to, figuring, perhaps correctly, that even that is too much to pay for such a folly. There is still a lot of money around, but there aren’t many Merillas left these days, and even the people ready and able to spend are either too cautious, not knowing what economic rupture might come down the line next, or simply too embarrassed to risk looking like middle-class Marie Antoinettes.

  In fact, Anne has begun to wish she could charge a consultancy fee for the first meeting, because for the last six months or so, the first meeting generally turns ou
t to be the only meeting. It is also a very long meeting, and it tends to revolve not so much around interior design as interior psychology: how to fill the days now the money supply has tightened. Anne feels a little like a district mental health care nurse, driving door-to-door providing psychotherapy for recovering spendthrifts. But don’t you understand? she wants to scream as another anguished housewife explains bravely that rediscovering how to make do and mend is so much more fulfilling spiritually than all that dreadful materialistic self-indulgence, my living depends on your preposterous vanity and greed, you spoilt rich brat!

  As she parks on the tree-lined street outside Geri Foster’s thirties detached Foxrock house, Anne’s hopes are not high, even though this meeting is at least a follow-up. Much of the initial meeting had been taken up with Geri sighing and tossing her curls around and talking wistfully of her acting career and how she needs to get it back on track again after a long time spent behind the scenes. Anne had never heard of her, although that is saying nothing much; she doesn’t go regularly to the theater, and so only catches up with new Irish actors when they are so famous you can’t avoid them. She looked her up on the Internet Movie Database and drew a blank, but maybe she had another professional name. She appeared to own this house, so maybe she had been incredibly successful back when the girls were babies and Anne’s brain had taken a five-year vacation. Anything was possible. Somehow her instinct told her it was unlikely, though. At their first meeting, Geri Foster had struck Anne above all as being lost.

  Not that she is unfamiliar with lost girls. After all, she had very nearly been one herself. And she still has her moments. Applying her makeup in the rearview mirror now, she wonders if that was the attraction for Ed Loy, if he sensed that once upon a time, all had not been well. Of course, they met when she hired him to investigate her father’s unsolved murder, so it wasn’t as if he’d been trawling the farmers’ markets and cafés in search of a bored suburban mum. The idea makes her grin; Ed, in black suit and white shirt and Church’s shoes, invariably looks incongruous in the park or on the beach among the baseball caps and shorts and chinos, and positively outlandish in a domestic setting, even if he is giving it his best shot.