The Valentine's Card

by Juliet Ashton

  ‘Ooh, thank you. They’re just her thing.’ Orla took the pop socks. ‘Is her order ready?’ Maude eschewed the BOGOF bait of the supermarkets to give Sheraz her custom.

  ‘Yes. I’ll drop it in later.’

  ‘I can take it.’ Orla held out her hands.

  ‘No.’ Sheraz looked injured. ‘I deliver. He can watch shop.’ He flicked a thumb in the direction of his son, an elongated male of indeterminate age who never spoke, never smiled and loped up and down the aisles of his father’s fiefdom day in, day out. ‘New hair?’ Sheraz queried.

  ‘Yes. D’you like it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thanks. You look stunning, by the way.’

  ‘Get out, silligirl.’

  The phone hopped up and down inside her bag. Orla paused on the pavement to scrabble for it.

  ‘Orla Cassidy? Please hold. I have Reece Dodds for you.’

  ‘Orla? Hi sweetheart.’

  ‘Reece, howaya?’

  ‘Are you in the street? Or are there roadworks in your bedroom?’

  ‘I’m just outside my flat. The delightful music of London is what you hear.’

  ‘Come on, Orla. There’s something about this town you like. You’re still here.’

  ‘True.’

  Time had still not recovered its equilibrium. It dragged its heels, only to break into a sudden sprint, or appear to loop back on itself, but its most impressive trick by far was to turn Orla’s ‘couple of days’ in London into a staggering five months.

  She’d never been a foreigner before and to Orla’s surprise she relished it. London – flawed, grubby, relentless, just as she’d prophesied – had turned out to be an easy date. She owned the street just the same as the next incomer.

  It brought her closer to Sim, walking the same route to the tube he’d walked, waking up in his bed, hearing the ping of his microwave. Like him, she had fallen hook line and sinker for London and at some point – though she couldn’t pinpoint when – she had decided to stay.

  ‘How, you know, how are you, Orla? Really?’

  ‘I’m doing better, Reece. And you’re very kind to ask.’

  ‘No. I’m a git. I owe you a dinner. I’m neglecting you.’

  ‘Whisht. You spoil me! How are you? I know you feel it too.’

  ‘I’m busy. Which is good. Weirdly, though, at the moment I’m busy with our boy. You know Courtesan starts in October, don’t you?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Listen. Dinner must happen. What are you to up to a week from today?’

  ‘Hold on while I consult my PA.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘Hey Emma Posh-Totty! Am I free to dine with a top London agent next Thursday? She reckons we’re good to go, although she’s not the sharpest knife in the box. Inbred, doncha know.’

  ‘I think I know her.’

  ‘By which you mean you think you slept with her.’

  ‘By which I mean I think I slept with her. Will my club do?’

  ‘Reece, your club will do.’

  Snapping her phone shut, Orla squinted at her reflection in the plate glass of Maude’s Books. Sheraz was a peerless mini-mart proprietor but he was no stylist: the fringe was a triumph. Sim had been right when he’d nagged her to cut one in all those times.

  Beyond the glass, Maude stood on a decaying tapestry footstool, reaching for a book on a high shelf. Her cotton wool bun wobbled in its customary half-collapse.

  Not a customer in sight. The sums didn’t add up. Maude’s Books’ clientele, although devoted, was tiny. It ran on enthusiasm and its proprietor’s deep pockets. Catching Maude’s eye, Orla executed a quick mime she hoped would translate as see you upstairs later.

  Even with all the windows open, the flat was torpid. With the velvet curtains, the fringed sofa and the conga line of ornaments, Orla could fancy herself madam of a New Orleans brothel were it not for the incessant squawk of the crossing signal and the wheeze of slowing buses.

  She switched the radio on. Sim’s death had made silence intolerable; Orla’s life had a constant soundtrack now, be it radio or television or iPod. Unwelcome thoughts barged nearer in the quiet.

  ‘Hello sweetheart.’ Orla picked up the valentine on her way to the fridge to deposit the milk. ‘Miss me?’

  The valentine was showing its age. It had lived a little since February. It had been cried over, stuffed in handbags, taken out again, screamed at in the darkest dip of the night. Now it was resting by a vase of roses the colour of dried blood, sent by Reece.

  ‘Work was so-so, thanks for asking,’ Orla called over her shoulder as she fixed herself a baguette of leftovers. ‘Gan disrupted the class again but I dealt with him.’ Orla recoiled from the mouldy polka dots in her mayonnaise. ‘We were so worried about taking this summer school job, weren’t we? Remember me saying I couldn’t handle adult students? Well,’ she paused, knife in mid-air, ‘I say adult, but they’re late teens which is still a kid in my book. Anyhoo, they’re no different really to Year Two back home. Bigger, granted, but all the same gripes and excuses and tics.’

  Banging the fridge’s tiny door, she muttered, ‘Remind me to get that seal fixed,’ before collapsing onto the sofa with a grateful sigh to wind down from the sweaty tube journey home. Orla had baulked at the tube when she’d first arrived. It had seemed incredible that anybody would choose to stand on a crowded, reeking platform waiting for a train that screamed in like a dragon. Now she barely noticed the smell or the noise or the fact that she was pressed hard against five people she hadn’t been introduced to. The tube was simply the most efficient way of travelling to the repurposed Victorian primary school in Hammersmith where she taught overseas adults to speak English like a native – better than a native, in a few cases.

  Orla had allowed Maude to bully her into taking the job.

  ‘I am starting to disbelieve your one more day then I’m off routine,’ Maude had said, handing Orla the small ads. ‘Your students would be immigrants too. You’ll have plenty in common.’

  Orla had prevaricated.

  Maude had made noises about rent.

  Orla had capitulated.

  It turned out that helping privileged teens from China, Russia and Europe vault the language barrier was satisfying, but Orla wasn’t just a stranger in town, she was a stranger to contentment, to the everyday fulfilment of ordinary life.

  There had been progress. Her emotions were warming up. She could laugh at jokes. She rediscovered a pleasure in small things – the softness of a new towel, the green smell of chopped chives. Maude noted each trifling improvement and celebrated them as ‘another step on the road to recovery’. Orla couldn’t see it. Only the valentine truly understood.

  ‘It’s like a funky United Nations in my classroom. All chinos and great hair.’ Orla swivelled round to get a better view of the pink envelope. ‘That Italian fella is doing his level best to flirt with me. You’d laugh. I give him the full-on Cassidy freeze. Fair play to him, he doesn’t give up. Oh, and listen to this. The deputy head – you know, the one with the perm – at least, Jayzus, I hope it’s a perm – asked would I be interested in applying for a full-time post in September. I said I’d get back to her.’ She put her sandwich down. ‘What do you think?’

  Sim’s journal

  18 April 2009

  Another terrible party. Halfway out of the door a girl caught my eye. Coal-black hair. She half turned and I thought HOLY SHIT (yup – capitals). It was the fairy. I tiptoed away backwards but she turned and looked straight at me.

  Nothing.

  Nada.

  Not a flicker.

  The old ego took a moment to reboot. I mean, we kissed. I’m good at that stuff. She turned away, calm, a little bored. She wasn’t half as cute as I remembered. I’d exaggerated the tilt of her nose, the Snow White-ness of her skin. And where was the mischievous half smile? I approached her, asked if she forgets all the men she snogs at parties.

  Fairy looked irritated.

  Then anothe
r smaller woman came over, made to the same basic design as the first, but … Oh Jesus. She was the fairy! Not her friend, no wonder I’d been blanked. Fairy was soft, and she was blazingly pale, and she was all woman and she made me think that things might be simple and people might be kind.

  Turns out she was with her sister Caitlin over from New York (NOTE TO SELF: ask C if she knows any agents in NY). ‘I wrote my number on this bastard’s arm,’ she says to her, right there in front of me, ‘and he hasn’t found a gap in his busy schedule to call me in two whole months.’

  Orla was in bed, correcting coursework, but memories were making it hard to concentrate. She took off her glasses.

  ‘Truth please. No bullshit,’ she’d said to Sim at that crappy party in that manky club when he’d sworn he had a good excuse for not calling her.

  He told her later her ‘no bullshit’ had stopped him in his tracks. He’d ditched, so he said, the usual guff and plumped for a simple, I washed your number off.

  Orla had shrugged, told him she couldn’t care less, but secretly she’d hoped he’d stick around. He had. The less encouragement she gave him, the more he followed her. It was a powerful feeling, having this magnificent lump of maleness tail her all evening, desperately trying to get back in her good books.

  He’d had her at hello, as the quote goes.

  Why didn’t I ever tell him that?

  Caitlin had been disapproving but Sim had persevered, and when Caitlin was safely on the last bus back to Ma’s, Orla had agreed to a coffee. She was wearing the most hideous bobble hat in the history of hideous bobble hats and decided if that didn’t put him off, perhaps they were on to something. ‘Come to mine,’ he’d said. ‘I’m on Fitzwilliam Square.’

  ‘Aren’t actors traditionally poor if they’re not famous?’

  That winded him. He was accustomed to women going weak-kneed at his flashy address. He’d been disappointed, too, with her reaction to discovering his father was a senator.

  ‘Ah,’ she’d said wonderingly. ‘You’re one of those Quinns.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Sim told her a few months later, ‘about the way you said it suggested you were a fan of Dad’s.’

  Inside his flat, Orla maintained a strict six-feet rule. She sat on the far end of the sofa, and when Sim inched closer, she stood and relocated to an armchair.

  ‘You honk when you laugh,’ he told her, and she honked at that.

  The coffee never appeared: wine, a good bottle, was poured instead.

  ‘As we’re on the subject,’ Orla told him. ‘You have a great laugh.’

  ‘That’s my real laugh. The one my agent tells me never to use. The one that shows my back teeth and makes me look, and I quote, “like a masturbating baboon”. You make me laugh, Fairy.’

  Orla relaxed the six-feet rule.

  Frustrating, then, to discover that Sim was implementing it on her behalf. He hadn’t wanted to conquer or compromise her. A personal first.

  About two in the morning the chat dried up. They were both tired, and looked it.

  In Ladbroke Grove, a changed and wiser woman, Orla closed her eyes and lay back beneath the juggernaut of memory as she recalled the next part in vivid, comprehensive detail. She had put her glass down, closed the six feet between them, straddled him on the sofa and kissed him.

  There followed, in Sim’s words, ‘the most amazing sex ever to occur in this postal district.’ Fast, hungry, Orla tore at his shirt and he pulled her Lurex top over her head. She peeled off his jeans and he lifted her out of her little cord skirt. Joined at the lip, they kissed the whole time, as if wary of a heavy fine for persons caught not kissing.

  It was good. It was filthy. It was wholesome. They sighed, sated, and wrapped themselves around each other like kittens. Falling into a dazed sleep, Orla had felt able to say, into Sim’s chest, ‘Something real is happening, isn’t it?’ She couldn’t help but sound amazed.

  Dazed, Sim had agreed. ‘I rather think I’ve sealed my fate.’

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Settle down, everybody. Including you, Fabio. In fact, especially you, Fabio.’

  The class laughed. A fortnight in and cliques had formed, characters emerged. Orla was proud of their progress, and she had her pets already, the shyer ones: a gangly Chinese boy, a bruise-eyed Russian girl.

  ‘Who’s up for a bit of role play? OK. Fabio, seeing as you’re so chatty, you’re taking a pair of trousers back to a shop. They don’t fit. Ning, you’re the shop assistant.’

  Ning looked bemused.

  ‘The shop worker. The person who works in the shop.’

  ‘Ah!’ Ning grinned.

  ‘I return this trouser,’ said Fabio. His narrow eyes slid back over to Teacher. ‘They are too small for my girlfriend’s bottom.’

  The class laughed again. The hive mind had decreed it was too sunny to study.

  ‘Concentrate, people!’ Orla surreptitiously clocked her reflection in the glazed book cupboard. The grief diet had erased her pound by pound with frightening speed, but now she saw her bottom was back, and she was glad.

  ‘Ning! Remember your pleases and thank yous.’

  Turning away food had been a denial, one that bound her to Sim who would never eat again. It was something she could do for him. Orla appreciated the faulty logic, yet couldn’t quell the prickle of guilt that she was able to eat again.

  ‘Sick, I know.’

  ‘Not at all, darling.’ Maude was setting the shop to rights. ‘A strange fancy, yes, but understandable. I’m just relieved your appetite has returned. The leftovers made me weep when you first arrived.’

  Helping out with Wednesday’s late closing had become a ritual. Maude always anticipated a rush. None ever came, and tonight was no exception.

  Orla gathered together some Irish playwrights to make a window display. ‘I’m one of your lame ducks, aren’t I?’

  ‘Don’t know what you mean.’ Maude was brisk as she repositioned the standard lamp. Ambience was important in the shop. Her conceit was that it should feel like a comfortable sitting room, tempting the customer to lounge on the sofa with Will Self or Jackie Collins.

  ‘You collect us. I’ve seen you giving Sheraz’s hopeless son pep talks when he delivers the shopping. You’re letting that girl with the frizzy hair pay for those amazing books on the impressionists in instalments, even though she’s always behind.’

  ‘She’s an art student. She’s had a difficult life and her hair is curly, not frizzy.’ Maude switched off the lamp. ‘It doesn’t feel right here,’ she murmured and lugged it across the white floorboards.

  ‘Here. Let me.’ Orla took the lamp. Everybody jumped to help Maude, despite her spindly strength. Five foot nothing, with arthritic fingers, this woman had deftly remoulded Orla into something resembling a human again in the past weeks. ‘Don’t make another duck of the student who’s coming for a job interview with you tomorrow, Maudie-pops. She’s far from lame.’ Bogna, with her pointy nose, straightened hair and smart mouth, did not fit the rich kid profile of her fellow summer schoolers. ‘She’s a little toughie.’

  ‘Good. Women need to stand up for themselves.’ Maude shook her head, irritated, as Orla placed the lamp. ‘To the left. More.’

  ‘Do you really need an assistant?’

  ‘Don’t rehash old conversations, Orla dear. I know my business. Try it nearer the counter.’

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘Yes. Right there. The light is kinder. And now,’ smiled Maude, ‘switch it off.’ She turned the handwritten sign on the door to SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED and moved gently around the shop, patting a book here, righting a rug there.

  Outside was London-dark, a milky navy that never approached the dense ink of a Tobercree night. The busy street had a different ebb and flow by night than it did by day. Orla looked out on it, and felt, tentatively, that she was starting to belong.

  She’d been resuscitated. This feeling of rebirth had circled for a while, teetering on the edge of her consciousness, but eac
h time the thought had begun to take shape, Orla had batted it away: to flourish was disloyal. It was not the behaviour of a woman in love, nor a woman in mourning. Five months ago, Orla had wanted to leap on Sim’s funeral pyre yet now here she was, in a new job in a new home with a new friend. Listing her small accomplishments – her little acts of bravery – made Orla want to take the stairs three at a time and press the valentine to her chest.

  Two years ago – or was it more? – as they’d walked back to his place with the makings of an omelette, he’d asked her about marriage.

  ‘Are you horribly feminist about marriage? Do you think it’s patriarchal shit? Or do you think you might marry me some day?’

  What she’d thought was: you mean you want to marry me? Me? The actual me married to the actual you? What she’d done was take the bait, home in on his deliberate misreading of feminist attitudes to marriage, and explain that, ‘If some chap I loved madly wanted to enter into a contract with me and call it marriage then I’d join him.’

  Orla cursed her priggish younger self. Couldn’t she have allowed herself a little soppiness? Given him something more?

  ‘You look tired.’ Maude had crept stealthily to her side. ‘There are lovely little lines gathering under your eyes, like cracks in the ice.’

  Only Maude could romanticise wrinkles.

  ‘Mmm, I’m knackered.’

  ‘You Irish and your poetry …’

  Orla laughed good naturedly. ‘I didn’t sleep well. This morning, the five-second horrors came back.’

  ‘Oh Orla.’ The word was steeped in empathy. ‘I thought we’d done with them.’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  Early in Orla’s tenancy, she’d described for Maude how she felt at the start of each day. How she awoke underneath the duvet, limbs all warm and heavy, senses shaky, and how, for five whole seconds, Sim wasn’t dead and everything was more or less right with the world before the room’s edges shifted and firmed up and Sim would disappear, leaving her alone all over again. The five-second horrors.

  And then one day – no terrors. Then another day without them, then the terrors again; then three days off. This halting progress had continued until Orla had dared to believe she was cured.