by Cathy Kelly
Jojo was adamant that nobody could know apart from Cari, and she hadn’t told Cari the exact dates this time. Last time, Cari had texted not long after they’d done the pregnancy test, and Hugh had had to answer it. Jojo hadn’t been able.
‘Yeah, fine, let’s tell nobody then, if that’s what you want,’ Hugh had agreed when it came to this secrecy. He was sure this was a mistake: people needed support when they were having infertility treatment – OK, not everyone they knew, but still, a few people to support them. Now Jojo had Cari and he had no one.
He rubbed his hand across his eyes. He was awake. A run might help. He dragged himself out of bed and went into the bathroom. Ten miles, no fifteen. Make it hurt. Sometimes that helped.
There were pluses and minus to living alone, Cari knew. Plus meant there was nobody to take control of the zapper and mutter that they really wanted to watch the whole series of Breaking Bad again when you were starting onto the second series of The Bridge.
Another plus was the ability to repaint the entire second-floor flat of the Georgian house a gleaming white, so that it resembled a home magazine shoot when tidy – or a post-burglary scene from a crime show when not. Men – well, Barney or He Who Should Never Be Named Apart From Scumbag – thought that all-white was a bit girlie.
Cari liked her gleaming floorboards, and being able to have a pretty white distressed antique-style cabinet on one side of her living room with crystal perfume bottles, which she picked up at junk sales. She liked her big posters of Georgia O’Keeffe flowers without any man staring at them in horror and saying: ‘Is that … er … a … you know, woman’s …?’
She liked lots of cushions and throws, which were man arsenic; she liked soft rugs on the floor and walking round in her slippers all the time. Most of all, she liked her bedroom which was a shrine to white lace, also purchased for next to nothing at antique fairs and sewn onto white linen cushions. Men hated that type of thing, thought it was all girlie, and since men never got to set foot in Cari’s house, which was about a mile along the main Silver Bay road from Jojo and Hugh’s rather more modern, Scandi-themed townhouse, no man ever had to look at it and wonder how Cari Brannigan, tough cookie extraordinaire, should live in such a romantic bower.
Minuses of living alone included talking to yourself to the point that you forgot and kept it up when you were out in public, and the fact that when there was a scrabbling in the kitchen cupboards, you could either phone the pest control people or peer, gingerly, into said cupboards early on a Saturday morning, when you should be sinking into bed with coffee and a book you didn’t have to read for work.
‘Damn torch.’ Her torch had passed away without her knowing and Cari shook it to rattle the batteries a bit as she tried to stare in at the back of the under the sink cupboard past the bleach, industrial-strength cleaner and packets of kitchen wipes, looking for mousy evidence.
Her mother went for the environmentally friendly approach to kitchen cleaning – Nora reckoned you could clean anything with either vinegar, washing-up liquid, lemon juice or a paste made of bread soda.
‘It’s better for the planet,’ Nora said with the pride of a woman whose family home gleamed with wood polished with actual beeswax and was scented with home-made candles, aromatherapy oils and dried lavender from her own garden.
‘What has the planet done for me lately?’ Cari liked to tease.
‘Helped you breathe in oxygen instead of carbon dioxide,’ her mother would chide, unable to help herself. ‘For every two breaths you take, one comes from the ocean, which is being slowly poisoned because we don’t think enough about it – consider that next time you use toxic chemicals that you then wash down the drain.’
‘Hippie,’ Cari would reply, grinning.
‘How have I raised such a pair of philistines? You and Maggie are just the same,’ her mother would say, throwing her arms up. ‘Go on, wreck the planet, don’t come running to me when it breaks.’
Her mother would no doubt have some plan to relocate the mice to another, more mouse-friendly home or free them into the countryside to have happy, fulfilled mousy lives, Cari thought grimly as she searched amid all her wildly toxic cleaning products for mice poo.
‘What do I do with mice?’ she asked her mother on the phone, when the evidence had been found.
It was only eight but Nora rose early all the time.
‘Sauté or oven cook with root veg,’ Nora suggested. ‘Have you found droppings?’
‘Little tiny black bits?’ Cari said, squashing the phone into the curve of her neck and washing her hands again.
‘Yes, they’re droppings. I’ll send your father over with mouse traps.’
‘No,’ wailed Cari. ‘I don’t want mouse corpses in my kitchen – I want them to eat something poisonous and die horribly a long, long way from me.’
There was a pause. Cari could imagine her mother at her usual Saturday routine: up early to walk the dogs, detour to pick up the papers, freshly made bread for breakfast with the last of the apple jelly from the previous autumn’s crop of their own apples.
Nora and Mick Brannigan’s 1950s semi-detached house with its long back garden might have sat just two miles from the city centre, but it could have been in the countryside from the bounty Nora coaxed out of it. She’d grown fruit and vegetables all her life, and Cari could remember wishing her mother was more like other modern mums in school instead of a throwback to a country farmer’s wife with short, unfashionably cut hair and weird felted skirts which she wore with handknitted sweaters. Then, Cari had thought the vegetable-growing and unchanging and unfashionable clothes were a choice: now, she knew it had been necessity. Mick Brannigan worked in a garage as chief mechanic. He could have worked for his brother, a fact Maggie, in particular, brought up again and again.
‘Then we’d be rich!’ Maggie said.
‘Then we’d be spongers,’ her father would say, chucking his younger daughter under the chin. Her father didn’t approve of family working for family, having seen how badly it had worked out for his brother, Kit.
At Aunt Helen’s insistence, Uncle Kit had tried to work with Uncle Edward but it had not gone well. Kit wasn’t mechanically minded and he was laid-back, too laid-back for Edward. Kit had got out while they were still friends. Helen still wasn’t over it, Nora could tell, and was jealous of how Edward and Lottie had become rich while the Kit Brannigan side of the family were not.
Nora had managed to keep Edward’s involvement in Maggie’s career from her husband on the grounds that Maggie was different and without some help she’d be living in her own childhood bedroom until she was ninety, still coming downstairs sheepishly looking for a loan to tide her over till payday.
‘Cari,’ Nora informed her daughter now, ‘mice do not helpfully clamber onto buses to go miles away and die: they die behind your cupboards or under your floorboards and stink for ages.’ There was a pause. ‘Visitors won’t like it.’
Cari knew her mother had been about to say ‘boyfriends won’t like it’ but had controlled the urge.
Among her mother’s fondness for all things environmental was a fondness for the pairing up of the species, a bit like Noah but without the flood.
‘I’m avoiding those sort of visitors until I get my gun licence back,’ Cari said.
On the other end of the phone, Nora sighed. ‘I thank the Lord daily that this country has such tough laws on weapons, Cari.’
‘I have my baseball bat,’ Cari replied cheerfully.
‘I would suggest anger management classes but I know you are joking. You are joking, right?’ Nora ploughed on. ‘So you got the invitation to Eddie’s party, then? I thought you’d ring me when you saw the card.’
It was Cari’s turn to pause. ‘Yeah, I got it. Opened it by mistake when I was on my way to the airport in London yesterday. I nearly puked. Do you think he’ll be there?’
‘I don’t know. Traci’s sure to be asked. Eddie will want everyone there and Bess doesn’t really know the hist
ory. If Lottie was still around, she’d insist they weren’t there so as not to hurt you but with Bess …’
‘Yeah, I know. Doesn’t know, doesn’t care.’
‘She doesn’t understand our family yet,’ Nora said diplomatically. ‘I could talk to her—’
‘No! The invitations will have gone out already. That would be even more embarrassing. I just won’t go, simple,’ said Cari.
‘Did you get the invitation?’ Mick said, lying down on Cari’s kitchen floor and beginning to do something that sounded as if he was pulling the back of the cupboard out.
‘Yes. What are you doing, Dad?’ demanded Cari, trying to look but not wanting to get too close in case a battalion of mice made a dash for freedom. ‘If you take the back of the cupboard off, they just have a bigger door to climb through. Should I get a neon sign too, saying: “Hey, mice: free food – this way! Run around my bedroom while you’re at it and climb on me when I’m asleep!”’
‘I’m putting the traps back here,’ her father said mildly. ‘In these old houses, fitted kitchens don’t really fit. There’s often a gap and mice love a gap. You’ve no idea how tiny a hole they can fit through.’
‘I don’t want to know,’ wailed Cari, tough in the boardroom, a wimp when it came to rodents.
‘I’ll put the back of the cupboard on and come during the week to check them,’ continued her father. ‘Now, we have to set some in other places.’
‘Yeuch.’
‘You should get a cat.’
‘I would then become a cat woman,’ said Cari.
‘What’s a cat woman? Like Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman?’
Mick stood up, pleased with his work. There was something very satisfying about helping his daughter out. But it shouldn’t be him doing this. It should be a husband, no matter how much Cari banged on about how she was independent, thank you very much.
Cari gave him a patient look. ‘No, being a cat woman almost never implies black PVC catsuits. It means I have no life except Tiddles, he will be the only creature to sleep on my bed, ever, the place will be knee-deep in scratching boards and cat toys, and I will sign all cards “With love Cari and Tiddles”.’
Mick Brannigan looked at her calmly. ‘As your mother has been teaching me in the language of texting, that stuff about PVC catsuits and people in your bed is TMI, Too Much Information, thank you very much,’ he said.
‘You. Are. Amazing.’ Clive slithered over her until his breath was tickling the back of Amy’s neck and his hands were curved around her full breasts.
Amy burrowed into her sheets – freshly changed for this precise reason – and sighed with pleasure. There was nothing on the planet to compare with having a man in your bed, holding you, saying nice things, murmuring words of love. Even if it was all wrong.
But she was lonely and when Clive had texted her, saying he had a few free hours on Saturday afternoon, she’d rushed into action and changed the sheets. This was wrong, she’d told herself, even as she sprayed a burst of perfume onto the sheets.
And then he’d called at her door, carrying flowers, wine and fresh fruit, and she simply hadn’t the heart to turn him away. The weekends were the loneliest of all, two days stretching ahead of her and nobody to share them with. And now here Clive was, making time for her.
Clive was like none of the few boyfriends Amy had had over the years. He was dark-haired, really good-looking, with all his own hair and a good job. He seemed to like her body, which Amy adored but couldn’t quite understand because he could have had anyone and couldn’t he see her flaws?
He was also her boss, which made it wrong on many levels.
And, worst of all, he was married, which made it wrong on so many other moral levels that, once he was gone, Amy always finished off the rest of the bottle of wine he’d brought in a state of desperate guilt and got down on her knees and prayed with a fervour that Tiana’s mother would have approved of.
‘I am sorry, I won’t do it again, please help me not to do it again. Please let him and Suzanne work it out so that they have properly separate lives and do not have to live together while waiting for the separation decree.’ If only divorce proceedings were quicker in Ireland.
Amy never asked Clive to come to her little apartment, she never said anything to him in work apart from discussing actual work issues, and she had never so much as touched him fleetingly in a teasing way.
She was not that sort of girl, she told herself. But when he turned up at her door – always randomly, always after a discreet text some five minutes before – she could never bear to turn him away.
He was a light in her world and all the guilt couldn’t make her say, ‘No, Clive, it’s wrong, go home. You and Suzanne have to be properly living apart.’
‘But we are, darling – it’s only finances keeping us in the same house. I can’t move out for a few more months, not until I get a raise, and then, it’s you and me and you will love the children, I know you will.’
‘Of course I will: they’re your children,’ she’d say earnestly. She loved children, wanted her own, wanted her own full life with Clive and his little ones in it, and their little ones and no more sneaking around because Clive said it was tricky until the legal things were finalised …
His touch upon her skin felt like the only kindness in the world and lonely Amy couldn’t turn her back on it. Her mother was so loved up with Edward that it felt impossible to be with them because she felt like an interloper: they were always touching. Edward would brush his lips against her mother’s forehead as he handed her a cup of coffee, Bess would stroke her husband’s shoulder lovingly as he read the paper and she reached over him for the business supplement.
‘Come up to us, have dinner with us at the weekend. It’s just me and Edward,’ her mother sometimes said on Fridays, which was her mother’s way of both including Amy – and finding out if her was daughter seeing anyone, did she have friends, was there a date planned for either Friday or Saturday night?
Amy could see through this spying rigmarole. Imagine if Bess found out about Clive? She’d probably go round to the office and lacerate him with words, accuse him of taking advantage of an employee, which he honestly wasn’t. Or she’d find his address and she and Edward – they went everywhere as a team now – would march round and confront him, wife and all. There would be no way to explain that the Clive-and-his-wife marriage was complicated to explain. Older people didn’t understand that sort of thing.
‘Myself and the pottery girls are going out,’ Amy would say when her mother asked her to dinner now. The pottery class had lasted eight weeks and Amy had loved it but she hadn’t really stayed in touch with the other people.
Her grandmother had always told her she was ‘too shy. You want to come out of yourself, girl, or nobody will talk to you at all!’ Unlike lessons about flood plains, cloud formations and the cosine rule in school, those words had stuck in Amy’s mind like glue. She was shy, not good with people. She’d really liked the girls at the pottery class but she was sure they hadn’t liked her. She’d only done the course because she’d realised that apart from work, Clive’s always unexpected visits, and the time she spent on her laptop, she never really did anything.
So to cover up both her lack of friends apart from Nola, who lived in the UK, and Tiana, who lived on the other side of the world, and the reality of who her lover was, she said things like, ‘The gang in the store and myself are all going to the cinema.’
All lies, of course. Bess would kill her daughter if she knew that Amy was waiting for that rare Saturday text when Clive was supposed to be out doing grocery shopping or dropping into the office or whatever else it was that husbands did at weekends, when he rolled up at her place for an hour, sometimes less. They would get into bed almost immediately, and Amy, who knew of foreplay only from books because her two previous boyfriends had not been gifted in that department, would be so overcome with desire and gratefulness that she didn’t mind this ripping off of clothes, and her lon
eliness helped her overlook this sense that her bedroom was a hotel that charged by the hour.
Her mother would never have let a man treat her like that.
Amy wasn’t stupid – she was always scared that Clive was coming to her simply for sex but she kept hoping that it was more, because how could a man say those things if it was just sex? He wouldn’t, she knew it.
It had started nearly a year before when Amy had begun working for Met-Ro, a German company whose cut-price stores were growing around Europe at high speed. Amy had been hired as part of the window dressing team, which her mother had told her was a ridiculous job with no prospects.
‘Edward will give you a job in his company. It’s not charity, you’re family now. Well, almost. A few more months to the wedding—’
Her mother had smiled in that distant way she did now, a way that made Amy think she was dreaming of Edward and their life together. Mother had never smiled like that about Dad, Amy thought sadly. Dad had not fitted the bill for perfect husband material.
Amy’s new job was the same – too flash-in-the-pan, not career-woman enough.
Yet the job had given her Clive, boss of the whole Irish operation, so high up that she was astonished he’d even noticed her.
He’d brushed against her hand that first day.
‘Welcome to the club,’ he’d said, the hideous overhead lights glinting on his mahogany hair and making him look like a knight from the Arthurian legends, complete with startlingly blue eyes. He was tall and large, not overweight large, but strong large like those heroes in her novels. The ones who were dukes and rescued feisty ladies and took them to bed where people fractured into orgasm, which was something Amy was fascinated by. How could you fracture into orgasm? Or splinter? Amy desperately wanted to know, to feel it. She was truly hopeless, missing out on one of life’s great joys, if she couldn’t achieve this.
