The Valentine's Card

by Juliet Ashton

  ‘Yeah?’ Bogna was careful not to look interested. She hoisted her bra strap with her thumb, manoeuvring one breast so it sat up and begged beneath her slash-necked tee.

  ‘She’s accepted a full-time job at the college.’ Maude beamed: her plan had come together. ‘From September the tenth Orla will be a TEFL tutor to adult students. That stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language. Her contract’s for one year. After that,’ said Maude mysteriously, ‘we’ll see.’

  ‘Why does she do this?’ Bogna looked disgusted, as if Orla had belched. ‘College is rubbish and boring.’

  ‘Not to me,’ said Orla patiently. ‘I love teaching.’ She noticed that the roses were stripped of their thorns.

  The bell above the door sang and Maude scurried over to greet the customer, wafting talc in her wake. Orla leaned on the counter and recalled the latest Wednesday call from home.

  ‘Orla? It’s Ma. Can you talk?’

  ‘Howaya Ma?’

  ‘Grand. Grand. Lookit. I had a queer owld conflab with your headmaster outside the butcher’s.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes, madam. Oh indeed. Says he, Orla’s staying on in London. Says I, No no no, Orla wouldn’t make a decision like that without telling me.’

  ‘Ma, I’m sorry.’

  ‘So am I. That I raised a chit with no manners.’

  ‘Ma! No, don’t cry! Please, Ma.’

  ‘What makes you want to be so far away, amongst strangers?’

  ‘You don’t say that to Caitlin. Or when Brendan went backpacking.’

  ‘They weren’t bereaved. Grieving. Half mad with—’

  ‘Ma! I can cope.’

  ‘You’re half dead, Orla!’

  ‘I know! I bloody know, but we mustn’t say it.’

  ‘Oh, love. I’ve made you cry.’

  ‘I hate crying, Ma. Eighteen days tear-free and now I’ll have to start at day one again. How’s everybody?’

  ‘Grand. Deirdre’s suing the man who put up her conservatory.’

  ‘Good for her. She hasn’t sued anybody for ages.’

  ‘And her little Roisin is after winning a prize for reciting poetry.’

  ‘She sent me the clip. It was almost as long as Titanic.’

  ‘Don’t. We shouldn’t laugh. But Jaysus, there’s only so many times you can watch a child recite a Viking saga. You’re coming home for Christmas, aren’t you?

  Maude’s reaction to the job offer had been to toast Orla’s burnt boats. It had troubled Orla, who preferred to imagine a serviceable bridge behind her rather than a flotilla of burning wrecks. True, she thought as she checked an old edition of A Sentimental Education for marks and scuffs, this new job was to her liking. The students would be more motivated than the summer schoolers, less privileged, champing at the bit to embed themselves in UK society. To enable them would be satisfying. Yet despite it all, a little line of seven-year-olds snaked through her thoughts, with all their credulity, their enthusiasm, their need. They were in the boats she’d torched.

  The bell above the door sounded again; this was a busy Saturday by Maude’s standards.

  ‘Not you,’ snarled Bogna.

  Orla looked up, a tut springing to her lips: three times today she’d had to chastise Bogna about her people skills.

  ‘I don’t finish until five, Marek.’ Bogna was scowling at her brother. ‘Come back then and drive me home.’

  ‘I have no intention of driving you home,’ said Marek. ‘Orla, come for a coffee with me.’

  Maude looked up from her accounts, ears pricked, like a dachshund who’s heard the fridge door squeak.

  ‘Now?’ Orla stalled.

  ‘Yes.’ Marek held the door open. He regarded her squarely. He didn’t elaborate.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Bogna loudly as the door closed behind them.

  ‘I’ve never noticed this place before.’ Orla took a corner seat in the unpretentious café two streets away, with its fluorescent lighting and a beehived proprietress.

  ‘It’s Polish.’

  Marek sat opposite, slid a laminated menu across the checked plastic cloth.

  ‘Ah.’ Orla smiled. ‘Good. I’ve never tried Polish food.’ Shut up, she counselled herself. Don’t fill the gaps. The walk to the café had proved that Marek didn’t do small-talk; a bonus, in Orla’s view. There was too much small-talk in the world, filling up each nook and cranny, leaving no room for contemplation. She scanned the offerings, stumbling over G’s and S’s and Z’s.

  ‘Do you like biscuits? Cake?’ asked Marek.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘OK.’ Marek stood. ‘What sort of coffee do you like?’

  ‘White, thanks.’ Orla had withstood the siren call of coffee chains, and stuck to ‘old-fashioned’ coffee.

  At the counter, Marek ordered in Polish, his deep bass voice rumbling over the hard edges of his mother tongue like a tank. Orla watched him, noted that he didn’t turn and smile at her. She wasn’t sure he’d smiled at all on the way, just strode on as she scuttled to keep up. She wondered why she’d acquiesced. She put it down to the opiate quality of that dark voice with its merest tang of an accent. As Sim would attest, Orla was not a natural yes-girl: Celts are suspicious and she tended to respond to direct invitations with ‘maybe’, ‘why?’ or ‘feck off’, and yet here she was, in a corner, watching a tall black-haired man bring her a chipped plate of little sugared crescents.

  ‘They are rogalicki,’ he told her. ‘Try one.’

  Orla did as she was told. ‘Delicious,’ she said, licking sugar from her lips. ‘I’ve never come across them before.’

  ‘In Poland they’re everywhere.’

  ‘Right. Mmm. Lovely. Yum.’ Stop. Stop filling the gaps. She chewed on.

  Marek sipped his coffee, which came in a doll-size teacup and was as sticky as tar.

  ‘So,’ said Orla, when the silence had lost its elasticity. ‘D’you come here often?’

  He got the reference, as she knew he would.

  ‘Actually yes. My first job was around the corner. I still come here every Thursday for lunch.’

  ‘What do you do for a living?’

  ‘I am a cliché.’ He nodded his head in acceptance of the fact and his shiny fringe fell across his eyes. Orla noticed that his hair needed a trim: neither one style nor another, it flopped, glossy as a Georgian front door and charming despite its neglect. ‘I am a Polish builder.’

  ‘Hmm. There’s a lot of you around,’ smiled Orla.

  ‘Or I used to be. Now I have builders working for me. Men from home. I am a developer.’

  ‘Is that a tricky way to earn a living? In the recession?’

  ‘Not for me.’

  He wasn’t bragging, she knew, he was stating a fact. Orla took in the cut of his black velvet jacket, the heft of his watch, and realised that Marek was a man of means. A self-made man of means.

  ‘What kind of property do you develop?’ He asks me out; I ask all the questions.

  ‘Nowadays, I concentrate on building from scratch. Mixture of social housing and high end. You understand this?’

  ‘Sort of. You get permission to build expensive houses if you agree to sell some of them to people who find it hard to get on the property ladder.’

  ‘Exactly so,’ said Marek, pleased. Not pleased enough to smile, she noted, and wondered what it would take.

  ‘It must be satisfying. To give people a home.’

  ‘It is.’

  Another silence, filled with more rogalicki, doughy and comforting.

  Marek said, ‘So, when do you go home? To Ireland.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not. I’m staying on.’

  ‘Good.’ Marek nodded, looking directly at her, his blackish gaze steady. ‘Good. Why?’

  ‘I’ve accepted a full-time job at the college where I taught Bogna.’ She left it at that. The silence lay between them on the red and white check. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she carried on, like a drowning swimmer c
oming up for air, and gabbled, ‘I’ve given up my old job at home, decided to give London a proper go, stopped pretending it’s a temporary thing or a stopgap, accepted I’ve made a quantum leap and that I’ve changed.’ Orla stopped herself, shocked at what she would blurt out to neutralise a silence: she’d never admitted out loud that this was such a gigantic prospect for her. ‘Listen to me!’ she fluted, embarrassed at answering questions he hadn’t asked.

  ‘I am.’ Marek pulled a biscuit apart. A tinny tune sounded from the breast pocket of his jacket. Taking it out, he frowned at it. ‘Work,’ he said.

  ‘Take it,’ Orla sat back, ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Marek was stern. He silenced the little machine with one fleet stab.

  ‘You’re not a slave to your mobile phone, then?’ smiled Orla. It pleased her that at least one modern human had the psychological strength to leave a call unanswered. Sim had been welded to his iPhone, allowing the world and his wife access all areas.

  ‘No. Otherwise the tail wags the dog, and life is the wrong way round.’

  ‘Just a lump of metal, after all,’ said Orla vaguely, as she flushed at her treason in comparing Sim, unfavourably, to this stranger. Her quantum leap was going a little far, and a little fast.

  The weather, huffy since the start of September, finally collapsed into a sulk.

  ‘Looks like rain out there. I should get back.’

  ‘Yes.’ Marek stood, his chair scraping on the lino.

  ‘What do I owe you?’ Going Dutch would convert this potential date into a simple coffee between two consenting adults.

  ‘Nothing.’ And, tickled by her disgruntlement, Marek smiled at last. ‘You owe me nothing. I paid already.’ The smile was wide, artless, pitched his face into a whole different gear. He had even white teeth, except for his pointed canines. The fairy tale prince could also play the wicked wolf, it would seem.

  ‘Thanks. It was lovely. Thanks.’ Orla scolded herself for her effusiveness. It was coffee and a damp biscuit. Just go!

  Reaching the door first, Marek held it open for her, squinting up at the foaming sky. ‘Don’t like the look of that.’

  ‘It’s going to pour.’ Orla dipped beneath his arm, out into the street, turning to him with a genial look of farewell. She didn’t get to say her goodbyes, because he began to talk rapidly, steadily, eschewing punctuation.

  ‘We are a cliché, talking about the weather like two old people. I know this didn’t go well. It was dull. I was boring. But I think we should meet again. I know what has happened in your life to make you sad. I’m sorry about it. I’ve lost people. You’re coping well, I think. I’m going to persevere, Orla, I warn you. I won’t rush you but I see something in your face, something that I recognise, and I can’t ignore it.’

  Orla blinked.

  Without allowing her time to speak, Marek said, ‘Here, take this,’ and draped his scarf, grey and soft and musky, around her neck. ‘It’s turned cold and you’re dressed for summer. Pozegnanie, Orla Cassidy.’ He turned and walked away.

  A fat blob of rain stained the pavement. Orla held the scarf to her nose. Cashmere, she guessed. She turned and ran back to Maude’s Books.

  The rain chased Orla, falling harder with every step she took. By the time she turned the corner onto her stretch of the high street, her hair was plastered to her head and her sandals were ruined.

  She squelched to a halt.

  Across the road, a man teetered on a ladder against a hoarding, pasting down the last corner of a huge poster of a twenty-foot-tall Sim in a frock coat. Airbrushed, his face was smooth and perfect, with a heart-shaped beauty mark pencilled above his top lip. His eyes, greener than she remembered, looked straight down at her. Impish, sexy, and not at all dead.

  Sim’s journal

  11 December 2011

  It was a fib by my rules, but Orla would file it under ‘lie’. Whatevs. With my best my-puppy’s-been-run-over voice I told her the Skype camera is broken. And it isn’t. So. No Skype sexiness tonight. She was devastated. Who’d have thought she’d take to it so enthusiastically? But if we Skyped, if she saw my face, she’d know everything, in a flash.

  That’s the way it is with fairies.

  ‘You’re loving this, aren’t you?’ Orla took it out on the valentine as she nibbled her fingernails, hunched by her window in a darkened sitting room tinged a seasick yellow by the street lamps. A glass of wine sat neglected, as, somewhere on the floor above, did Maude, whose offer of company Orla had spurned, preferring to sit on her own at the window and contemplate Sim.

  ‘Bastard,’ she whispered, holding the valentine to her cheek. This was a luxury she allowed herself only now and again, knowing it could age the envelope. ‘How many other widows have to put up with a gigantic cardboard clone of their deceased other half leering down at them?’ The universe – which had excelled itself of late – demonstrated yet again just how nasty its sense of humour could be. Orla treated herself to a kiss, a chaste one, on the card’s flat pink front. ‘I love you.’ She enjoyed the words, enjoyed meaning them. ‘I do, I love you Sim.’

  The beauty spot mesmerised her, perfectly placed on the curve of his lip at the exact point where Sim’s smile changed from innocent to knowing. That curve had incited Orla to devilment on countless occasions. It had brought her back to bed when she should have been jogging, made her miss the last episode of a favourite serial, had promised much and then delivered. And there it was, for all the world to see. Pimped out on the high street. Those lips are mine, dammit!

  With a slug of wine that both anaesthetised and warmed her, Orla reminded herself that Sim was just acting for the camera. ‘But you meant it when you looked at me,’ Orla told the valentine, ‘I could always tell when you were faking it.’

  Not that he could always tell when Orla faked it. ‘You twit,’ she said fondly to the valentine, laying it carefully on her lap. ‘You really thought I enjoyed sitting like an eejit in red lingerie and saying I’d been very naughty and please would you slap my bum. Jaysus, Sim, I can tell you now that I am not the woman for a peep-hole bra. It dug right into me. And the crotchless panties struck me as hilarious. But you pleaded – don’t deny it, you feckin’ pleaded – and once I’d got over the embarrassment it was just like any other household chore.’ She stroked the valentine, sighed. ‘It wasn’t the real thing. It wasn’t like having you in my arms.’ She choked a little at that. She capsized against romantic language these days. A platitudinous pop song could catch her unawares. ‘Do you remember …’ Whispering now, this was personal. ‘Do you remember how it was for us?’

  Orla did. She had been unlocked by Sim. By her own lust for him. By his insouciant sexiness, his readiness to play. Being rugby tackled and ravished by Sim Quinn was a memory that would warm her all her life. Orla’s sexuality was direct, wench-like, fun. She liked to jump on the bed, then jump on him. Before him, she’d acted and reacted, taken some pleasure with her lovers, but she’d never dived down to the depths, never luxuriated in passion.

  It’s pure with you, Sim had said, early on. He’d likened her to a milkmaid, called her that for a while. It became shorthand: Any chance of my encountering a saucy little milkmaid on the way home from this pub?

  Every chance, koind sir.

  ‘So, you see,’ she told the valentine, ‘the sexy underwear, dirty talking thing never did it for me.’ She had been relieved when the Skype camera broke down. Orla had no dark streak, sexually. She tried not to wonder whether Sim had found his milkmaid too wholesome. ‘I wore that nurse’s uniform whenever you asked,’ she admonished the valentine, huffily.

  Across the road, Sim’s eyebrow arched, daring, provocative. Orla swallowed. Her hand felt the soft jut of her tum. She cupped a breast, braless and heavy in the folds of her dressing gown. Orla put the valentine to her forehead as if it could cool her. The breathless denouement of tussling with herself beneath the covers wasn’t worth the crushing sadness of the long night afterwards, when she had to a
dmit that her lover was a phantom, his words of desire script-edited by herself.

  Across the road, Sim’s eye was unblinking. Orla wasn’t reflected in it. She drew the curtains, ran a bath, lay in it too long. Damp, marshmallowy, her thighs peeped through the bubbles. She wondered if love was over for her.

  Allowing another man to study her flesh, her familiar dips and gullies, felt fantastical. What if he was cruel? What if she felt mocked? What if he pounced, and she felt violated? And where would she find the energy for all the legwork of a new relationship, the two steps forward, one step back of sexual discovery? All those men out there, naked under their clothes, each one a different planet, requiring its own etiquettes and language. The thought exhausted her.

  And what was Marek like under his black clothes? The leap to him was instinctive and shocking. Why jump from half an hour in a Polish café to sex?

  Orla’s soapy sponge slalomed down a calf.

  It had been an odd half hour. Something else had gone on, parallel to two strangers sipping coffee and trading polite comments. Like spies, they had communicated beneath the surface. They had been working up a code.

  Marek’s declaration in the street remained undigested, usurped by the Courtesan poster. She’d been blank with shock and admiration at his candour and his courage, even if she did reel at the importance he attached to her on such short acquaintance. And then a few steps around the corner – Pow! As messages from beyond the grave go, that poster was a doozie.

  Orla dropped the sponge, lay back, closed her eyes. Ma would say it was a sign.

  Sim’s journal

  13 November 2011

  Poor Maude. I’ve worked it out. It’s obvious, once you realise. I want to help but … There shouldn’t be a but. I’m a shit. I just don’t have any energy left over from dealing with my own mess. Reece doesn’t hold back. ‘You’re screwing up,’ he says. ‘Fucking idiot.’ If O was here, none of this would be happening. So it’s her fault, too, in a way. Poor Maude. Poor me. And although she doesn’t know it yet, poor Fairy.