by Paddy Kelly
“Robert,” his mother said, switching to her rarely-used but brutally effective matriarch voice. “If your sister wants to come over then I think you should be happy about it. I mean, it can't be easy over there, having no family.”
He sighed. “When?” he said.
“In a month or two. She's already talked to some companies in Stockholm. I think she has a few interviews fixed.”
“What, in a month or two? But—”
“I'll get her to call you, Robert. And I want you to take care of her. She is your little sister, after all. And I'll be checking up on you to make sure you do.”
“Right then,” Rob said through gritted teeth. “Fine.”
His mother rounded off the conversation and Rob, with a sigh of relief, put down the receiver. He scratched his head as he allowed the news to soak in.
Karen? Looking for a job in another country? And she had already fixed interviews? He just couldn't grasp it.
Could this be the same sister who regularly lost her shoes at the swimming pool? Who'd managed to drop her library books in the fire on two separate occasions? And who could never manage to be less than thirty minutes late for anything, including weddings, funerals and her own eighteenth birthday party?
Rob realised he had very little room for manoeuvre. His mother still swung the heavy fists in the family and although she didn't put her foot down very often, when she did they made a deep and resounding boom and there was nothing at all that could be done about it.
Having Karen in his place also meant that there would be even more washing—vastly more if his experience of living with women had been anything to go by. He glared at his washing pile and tried to imagine it twice as large. No, three times as large, with the added complexity of things that were pink, and things that needed hand-washing, and things that could not be tumble dried, and things that required gentle scrubbing in unicorn spit in a forest glade at midnight.
Well, there was nothing for it except to start planning. He needed to work out the quickest way to find a flat—or a room, or a cupboard, anything at all really—for an over-enthusiastic nineteen-year-old fresh from the dales of Ireland before she informed his whole family that he was the Swedish King of the Slackers.
He glared at the washing pile once more and decided that there was nothing else for it. He would have to give the whole thing a miss and head into town early. That was the only feasible solution. Maybe then, after a bracing stroll, a cappuccino, a platter of spare ribs, and a refreshing Guinness at Malone’s, he would decide what the hell he was going to do about the whole bloody unnecessary mess.
Although it might take more than one Guinness.
Chapter 5
Eoin was early for The Big Date, and he was a crackling ball of nerves. There were forty minutes to go until he was supposed to meet Rebecka and he was already in town, slouching around shops and trying to keep his hands busy so they didn't keep on sliding up his sleeve and feeling for his watch.
This Rebecka was obviously interested. She'd chatted enthusiastically for a week before asking him out, so he had no reason to be nervous. That didn't matter though, as finding reasons to be nervous was what Eoin was best at.
He checked his watch and decided it was probably time to head for the Old Town, and made some frenzied calculations about how fast he should be moving and what route he should be taking in order to make it to the pub on time, or at least not appallingly early.
After a long and complex stroll he reached Malone's, only four minutes early. That was fine surely, somewhere between eager and nonchalant. He straightened his shoulders, arranged his hair as Alice had suggested and pushed the doors open.
He was enveloped by the warm babble of the crowd as he slipped inside and allowed the doors to swing closed behind him. Squeezing by a large man in a denim jacket, he positioned himself at the end of the bar. He looked hopefully around and saw that the few tables were all fully occupied, and that there were no women sitting by themselves.
Oh well, he was early, so not to worry. He ordered a Guinness and started flicking through a newspaper, trying so hard to look relaxed that his jaw hurt.
“Eoin?”
He spun around with a yelp of surprise and saw that his date had managed to sneak up on him. Brown hair framed her smiling face, a face that was a little meatier than he had expected. But the eyes on display were bright and all of her limbs seemed to be accounted for (or at least were very good fakes).
So far so good then.
He decided he'd better stand up, then thought better of it and sat back down on the barstool again. Desperately in need of a hint about what to do next, he stuck out his hand with a hopeful grin.
“Eoin,” he said.
She took his hand, looking surprised. “Yes, I know that. Rebecka. Hej.”
He swallowed. “So you made it then, I see. That’s nice.”
She nodded. Eoin gripped his knee painfully with his free hand, appalled that he could say something so inane. If he wasn’t careful he would soon find himself going on about the merits of different kinds of content management systems and end up boring the lady to death.
She jerked her thumb towards the back of the bar.
“We go downstairs, the others are there now. The music is starting soon.”
Eoin gave a start. What had she just said? He leaned closer, tilting an ear in her direction. “The others? I don't really understand.”
“My friends, you know, for to see the band.”
Eoin hoisted a smile into position. His Guinness arrived and he turned to the barman in relief and extracted his wallet, glad for something to distract him while his mind spun. Band? What band? He had obviously missed something vital here. Was this a date at all? It sure felt like a date, or at least like his idea of what a date should feel like. But then why had she brought friends along? For moral support? Or just to protect her from the suspected lunatic Irishman?
Eoin was out of his depth here. This was a major and wholly unexpected deviation from the script. He needed to call Alice and ask her what to do. This situation, he was sure, would be perfectly clear to a woman but to him it was about as transparent as your average brick wall.
However he couldn’t make any calls now, not with his (apparent) date standing in front of him and giving him a quizzical look complete with raised eyebrows. He realised he simply had to go along with it until he could slip away later to do his whole call-a-friend routine.
He picked up his pint and followed Rebecka to the back of the bar and down the steps into the chilly stone basement. Now that he could see her from the back he confirmed his suspicion that she was slightly larger than expected. Her rear end pushed out her jacket to a worrying extent, and the small stretch of leg on display was disconcertingly chubby.
He started to wonder if the photograph she'd posted had been current, or possibly of somebody else entirely. Either way the full damage would be revealed soon enough when she peeled off that jacket and placed her unexpectedly voluminous arse on a seat of some kind. Then he'd know for sure.
The basement was packed and in one corner was a tiny stage where a band were tuning up their instruments. Eoin felt a shiver of irritation. He hated music in pubs, especially in small cosy pubs, and he realised he may have given Rebecka the false impression while chatting to her that it was something he enjoyed. Not a lie exactly, just a little accidental polishing of reality.
And anyway Rebecka had attempted to magic away at least ten kilos from her Internet persona. In light of that, his own embellishments were only minor.
She wriggled onto a bench by a table where two women and a man already sat. As Eoin squeezed into the remaining space beside her he was introduced to the others. Monika, Lotta and Filip nodded at him with a forced politeness that gave him the unpleasant feeling of having stumbled into somebody else’s job interview. He felt the hard gaze of her female friends sweep across him like some deeply critical radar.
“Well I'm glad you made it,” he said, tur
ning to Rebecka. “Maybe I didn't understand you, but I thought—”
“So Eoin,” interrupted Lotta, a powerful looking lady perched behind a pair of wide oval glasses. “What do you do?”
Eoin turned to her and smiled hopelessly. There it was, the classic Swedish “what do you do” thrown out only thirty seconds into the conversation. It was a sure sign the night was doomed and any attempts to rescue it would be futile. It should be put down immediately like a lame horse, or else quickly drowned in alcohol.
Eoin drained his Guinness to the halfway point. “Um, well, I'm a project leader for a business systems supplier. A small company, you probably don’t know it.”
Lotta nodded, looking less than satisfied with that answer. Eoin's gaze flicked desperately around, looking for an exit sign, or a fireman's pole, or a rope ladder dangling from a helicopter, anything at all to get him away from this place. But the only escape he could think of was beer and, despite his resolution to not under any circumstances become too drunk, he plugged the pint glass to his face and sucked at it like he imagined a deep-sea diver sucked at an oxygen tube.
Luckily, before things could deteriorate further and Lotta started to enquire about his mortgage and what kind of oven he preferred, the band suddenly kicked off and everybody turned around to watch them.
Eoin did his best to hide his distaste at the blues-funk dirge on offer. Meanwhile, his so-called date sat beside him with her thigh shoved maddeningly up against his, close enough that her scent (white musk, Eoin reckoned) penetrated the odour of sweat and stale beer like a thin flowery knife.
Eoin, despite his best efforts to remain calm, found himself becoming excited by her. He tried to get in a few words but found them swamped by noise every time. Her friends tossed the occasional scrap of conversation his way, but it was clear they saw him in the same way as he saw them—as an impediment to a good time.
After twenty excruciating minutes, he couldn't bear it any longer. He held up his empty pint, mumbled something incoherent and excuse-me'd his way through the packed crowd. The stone stairs opened up before him and he mounted the steps two at a time with immense relief.
He fumbled with his mobile, shaking his head. This whole thing was a disaster. It felt like meeting a woman with children, except that the children were all critical little bastards in their thirties who followed mommy on all of her dates just to make sure they were really boring.
He slid into an alcove by the emergency exit and called Alice.
“Oh you just probably misunderstood her,” Alice said, after listening to his rapid summary. She sounded distracted, and he could picture her doing a couple of other things at the same time, like chopping a salad, or ironing clothes, or retrieving a small child from the foamy depths of a bath.
“But I don't even think this is a date to her!”
“She showed up, didn't she? How much more proof do you need that it's a date? It's not that unusual to bring a few friends along as emotional muscle. Strange, I admit, but not unheard of. Just go with it, Eoin, see what happens.”
“Go with it? If I stay at the table another second I’ll…”
There he paused, with a half-formed objection tingling on his tongue, because at that moment Rebecka passed him. She was probably on her way to the bar, and she hadn’t seen him.
“You will what?” Alice prompted.
“Wait, she just walked by. She must be going to order.” He peered around the corner and saw her settle onto a stool at the bar, the cleft of her slightly-larger-than-expected bosom glistening with a few drops of musk-scented sweat.
He swallowed. Okay, sure, she was bigger than expected, but damn it she was cute enough, and she was actually quite funny when he chatted to her on the dating site. Plus she seemed to know a lot about eighties music, which he loved. Not much to base a relationship on, but there you go.
Unless of course she'd been chatting with a Google page on the ready so she could appear to be knowledgeable about things she actually knew nothing about. Not entirely out of the question, as Eoin had, on several occasions, done the same thing himself in his short dating career.
“Yes, that's the spirit!” Alice said. “You run along after the lady. Good luck, and make her a nice breakfast!”
“Well I'll let you know.” Eoin shoved the mobile into his pocket. He peered into the old Guinness mirror on the wall, smoothed down his shirt, pushed his hair around and examined his teeth for foreign matter. Then he took a deep breath and stepped around the corner, striding as casually as he could towards the bar. Where he froze.
A man was standing beside Rebecka. A man with an open-necked orange shirt who was grinning in that cheeky and arrogant way used by all lads everywhere since the original lad—the proto-lad if you will—had crawled with a swagger from the primordial slime.
Eoin did a quick side-step, hid behind the bar and started to fret. Okay, so maybe this guy knew Rebecka. She'd suggested this bar so she probably was a regular and knew lots of people here. He peered at her and quickly realised this was rubbish. This was a pick-up attempt, pure and simple.
Worse than that, Rebecka—his date!—was simply letting it happen and even seemed to be enjoying it.
That was it. Whatever his intentions on this woman, and whatever chance he may or may not have, it had now become a matter of honour. If anybody was going to be chatting up Rebecka, it was Eoin, and not some bright-shirt wearing side-burned lad.
Eoin gathered himself. He strode around the bar, squeezed between a pair of fat Englishmen who had their faces aimed at the football, and slipped in on the other side of Rebecka. She looked up, and her smile slid a little.
“Oh hi Eoin. I hope you are enjoying it.”
Eoin kept his voice flat. “Hi Rebecka. So is this another one of your friends? Quite a lot of them here tonight.”
Rebecka stared at him and blinked. The man in the orange shirt looked from Eoin to Rebecka and back again, and decided it was now up to him to fill the sudden space in the conversation.
“Oh I'm sorry, is this yer wife?”
Eoin glared at the man, annoyed that his adversary was also Irish. His thick accent suggested he came from the depths of the countryside, from some tiny bog town with cow-shit all over the streets, inhabited by people who spat a lot and said “howru” to each other.
But Irish or no Irish, Eoin was not about to be outdone. In fact he was itching for an argument after the mess the evening had become.
“No, actually, she's my date. My. Date.”
The man's face betrayed a glimmer of concern and Eoin cheered up, sensing that he might indeed get the upper hand. And perhaps a handful of Rebecka's charms later on. But then Rebecka turned and slapped a hand on his arm.
“Your date, Eoin? So you already own me, do you?”
Eoin was thrown off balance, as the hand, like the rest of her, was quite a bit heavier than expected.
“No, sorry, I meant … well I did chat to you for a few weeks. I put in a lot of effort, you know.”
“Oh, I see. So I was effort is what you're saying? This talking to me was hard work for you?”
Eoin felt it happening, like a landslide heading in slow-motion for some poor ramshackle village. He knew he was about to enter an argument engineered by a woman with the single intention of trapping him and making a point. He had braved these convoluted arguments on many an occasion and knew by now there was no way he could ever win one. No, from an argument like this there was only one way out, and that was in tiny bleeding chunks.
But still he couldn't stop himself from trying.
“No, no, I didn't mean it like that. I meant that, you know, I could have been talking to other girls. I wasn't, but I could have, and I…”
The orange-shirted man was watching all this with interest. He caught Eoin's eye, gave his head a quick shake and drew a finger across his throat. Eoin took the hint and clamped his mouth shut to prevent more drivel from leaking out, but it was too late for that now.
Rebecka st
epped back from the bar. “You wait here.” She stomped off and returned a very short time later with Eoin's jacket, rolled into a ball. She thrust it at him.
“My friends were right, you were too boring.”
She turned on her heel with a sniff and stalked off for good.
Eoin raised his voice to what he hoped was a shout, but was in reality more of a petulant whine.
“Well at least I wasn't a half-tonne heavier than I said I was!”
She was already out of range and Eoin's parting shot flew wide, raising only a few glances from the people sitting at the bar and a tiny shake of the head from the barman.
“Look,” the man in the orange shirt said. “Sorry if I screwed that up for ye. But she looked like bad news anyway. Arse like a builder. Rotten temper too. Reminded me of a sheepdog we had back on the farm, old Jessie. Shot him in the end, the poor mad bastard, and for the best too. Anyway.” He slapped his wallet on the bar. “The name's Rob, and I'm guessing I owe ye one, for stickin' my nose in there. Or maybe more than one. So what're ye having?”
Eoin fixed the man with a withering glare, in no doubt that he'd never hated anybody as much in his entire life. But he was trying to make up for it, so…
“Oh alright then, a Guinness. But definitely just the one.”
Chapter 6
Rob peered through his letterbox and watched in dismay as people moved up and down the hall outside, carrying mops and buckets and other implements of domestic torture.
Damn it, how could he have forgotten—today was the twice-yearly cleaning day! It was that most forced of occasions when every apartment owner in the building was supposed to head out in a grand show of camaraderie and then proceed to scrub, paint, patch or fanatically arrange something.
Rob had managed to avoid the five previous cleaning occasions since he'd moved in, but now it seemed his luck had ran out. He would have to leave his flat soon to make it on time for his indoor hockey game, but he knew the instant he poked his nose out he'd be snared by neighbours and put to work at some horrible task involving gardening gloves, noxious chemicals and idle banter.
