by Paddy Kelly
He drained his punch and plucked out and ate the little chunks of pineapple. Maybe Rob had the right idea—just get flaming drunk and get it all over with as quickly as possible.
“It really looks like a big dick,” Rob said. “With balls and all. Ye see it, right?”
They were sitting on a picnic blanket, nibbling at Annika's cakes and biscuits as they drank coffee from plastic cups. The ground was covered in speckled shadows from a row of trees behind them, and it fell away in a gentle slope to the energetic midsummer festivities below. The party was definitely in full swing.
“It does,” Eoin said. It was hard to miss it really. The midsummer pole stood six metres high, a construction like a cross wreathed in flowers and greenery. Two big circles made from entwined branches and flowers hung from each end of the crossbar. These were apparently the testicles and, if the pole were squinted at with the correct amount of drink taken, it did indeed look very phallic.
Rob forged on. “But isn't it stupid having the thing looking like a big dick? I mean, it can't just be me what sees it. The whole country dancing round a dick. Maybe I should tell them.”
Eoin turned to Rob, not sure if he was being ironic or not. “It's supposed to look like a big dick, that's the whole point. It's a fertility festival. The dick is the symbol of plenty and growth, that's why we're all out here.”
Rob looked at him in amazement. “Really? It's supposed to be a dick? I thought it was just an accident. Ah well then it's not even funny any more. Gimme some coffee.”
Eoin handed over the thermos. Down the slope people were dancing around the pole, and he idly wondered if Damien and his mother were dancing somewhere right now. Or maybe they were right here in front of him, separated from him by a wide stretch of grass as well as an unbridgeable gulf of guilt and blame.
“So,” he said, eager to switch his head from the Damien-and-Jenny channel. “Tell me about your Internet idea.”
Rob's eyes lit up at that. Talking about his ideas was clearly something he enjoyed. He finished one of Annika's home-made muffins, brushed the crumbs away and shuffled closer on the grass.
“Okay, ye've asked for it. Guinness, right? Where is the best Guinness in Stockholm?” He stabbed at the ground. “Here? Or maybe here? Is there any independent authority? Who do ye trust? Come on now Eoin, have a stab at it!”
Eoin shook his head. “I suppose, Guinness drinkers?”
“Exactly! So let them decide! I just make a website where people can go in and vote for the Guinness in every bar in every city in the world. I give ‘em the forum and the tools and let them run wild, making content for me!”
“Fair enough. But how do you make money on it?”
Rob emptied his can of beer. “From Guinness! We're advertising the arse off them, I'm sure they'll give us some money to do it.”
“Okay, fine, but you'll be telling people all over the world where the good Guinness is, which means the places with bad Guinness will lose sales. And does Guinness want some of their outlets selling less, maybe cutting it out entirely? And then if it affects sales, the bars will find out about your website, and they’ll send in people to vote for them and it won't be impartial any more, will it?”
Rob sighed. “Way to smash a man's dreams, Eoin.”
“Well, sorry, but if you're going to do a website, you need to do one that actually works—”
“Oh right,” Rob said, “and you know what works?”
“Well I should,” Eoin said. “I've studied marketing and business, and I am a technical project leader. Not projects like this, much bigger ones, but it's the same basic idea. Plus they also have me as the unofficial web editor at work, when the old ladies can't paste something or open a ZIP file.”
“So ye have any better ideas then?”
Eoin shrugged. “Not really.”
Rob popped two cans of beer and thrust one at Eoin. “Oh come on, I'm sure there's something bouncing around in there. Tell you what, let's get together and have a proper chat about it. A meeting. Throw some ideas around, yeah?”
Eoin nodded, quite sure that nothing would come of it. He was about to say more when his reply was cut short by the out-of-breath arrival of Annika. She stood in front of them with her hands on her hips, her ample breasts rising and falling a few centimetres with each breath.
“So you are here!” she said. “And eating all the cakes to yourself!”
A song started up from the accordion band below, causing Annika to clap her hands like an excited six-year old. “Oh I love this one!” She turned to Eoin. “We have to dance! At my party everybody dances!”
“Well,” Eoin began but then realised that any arguments he might come up with were not about to get him out of dancing with Annika today. So he took her outstretched hand and allowed her to pull him to his feet.
“Go on there!” Rob shouted as Eoin was dragged away down the slope. “Make the lady sweat for Ireland!” Eoin pretended not to hear him.
But it turned out that a dance wasn't such a terrible idea after all.
Chapter 8
“So Eoin,” Rob said with a slur. “Ye'll have to learn to look at all these women with the eye of a predator, right? Forget about being a nice guy, because, well, we're all nice guys, right?”
Eoin nodded, only dimly aware of what he was nodding to. A glorious day had turned into a glorious evening and the park was now full of people. Tables and picnic blankets were arranged on every free space and savoury streams of smoke drifted up from a dozen barbecues. Pretty women were everywhere and Eoin, in his lecherous state, couldn't keep his gaze off them.
He realised that Rob was still talking and turned back to him.
“So just use my system, right,” Rob was saying. “For example, let's see, that one there—”
Rob waved his fork towards a random female who was turning a few vegetable kebabs on a nearby barbecue. “Now, ye might look at her, and ye might think, well, she's yeah, you know? Are ye with me?”
Eoin grunted in agreement as he took a tiny sip of his beer. “And this has something to do with the system?”
“Oh yeah, right, the system! Sure. Now ye need to have about four on the go at the same time. Okay, not on the go, exactly, but four main ones. Other ones will pop up, sure, and can be judged on their merits—”
Eoin suddenly saw something that caused Rob's voice to fade out to a mildly irritating buzz. Sitting on the grass not thirty metres to his right was none other than the woman he'd seen in the park a few weeks earlier. It was Middle Mum, in all her black-bobbed, lean-muscled glory.
He stared until he realised that his jaw was hanging open and then pulled his gaze away. Then, slowly and secretly, he peeked back in her direction and performed a desperation analysis.
She didn’t have her kids with her, but there was no man in sight either, which suggested that both man and kids were at home. It might also have suggested many other combinations, such as the kids being with their dad this week. This was not an unusual arrangement in Stockholm, where there were so many kinds of family structures that it required a whole slew of words that didn't really exist in English to describe them.
With her were five other people, two couples and a single friend, and around their heels bounced a small dog. Eoin kept staring at her, aware that he should do something but completely unable to decide what that something might be.
“Eoin, aren't ye listening?”
“No,” Eoin said distractedly.
Rob was quick off the mark and followed Eoin's gaze to its target. “Who, that one there? Behind the grill with the dog? So who is it, an old squeeze?”
“No, just someone I met in the playground. Forget it.”
Rob's face lit up. “Listen Eoin, 'sno problem, I'll fix it, I will. I'll just toss over a frisbee, right—”
“What? No! And we don't have a frisbee!”
“It's a feckin' park,” Rob said. “Can't be hard to find a frisbee, can it? Or just a paper plate then. Anything instead of just
drooling!”
“Forget it, I'm sure I'll see her some other time—”
Rob struggled to his feet. “Look, let me take care of this, I'm a professional. Ye'd call a plumber for your toilet, and ye'd call me for romantic, umm, repairs. With a money-back guarantee and all. So that leggy one there, with the dog, yeah?”
“Right,” Eoin said. His heart was pounding, and his mouth was dry. It couldn't be as easy as that, could it? Just send over a cheerful friend and have him sort everything out? It felt like a cheap and simplistic way to meet somebody, but maybe that's what people did? Maybe they just got to the point as efficiently as possible and didn't waste energy in fretting?
Either way, it was now too late for second-guessing as Rob was moving in their direction, nosing out the trail. Now all Eoin could do was watch.
Rob walked by the group and changed direction when he caught sight of their dog. Then he petted the dog and started chatting to them as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Eoin watched as Rob was offered something on a paper plate, which he accepted, still chatting away as if he had known them forever. And he watched as Rob took the woman a few steps to the side, got her to look over in Eoin’s direction, and pointed.
Eoin's heart clenched. Oh no. Was it possible? Could he have, the blithering idiot?
He had. He so had. It was the wrong woman. The wrong one entirely.
Eoin could see it happening in slow motion, like a slab of glacial ice crashing gracefully into the ocean, but he could do absolutely nothing to stop it. He waved to catch his attention but Rob was unstoppable, a force of nature, as he plied this woman with bullshit and poured praise on Eoin. She was looking over, peering at him with her hand shading her eyes, obviously taking all of it seriously.
Middle Mum glanced over too, with an expression Eoin couldn't read. He felt an urge to charge over there and clear things up, maybe have a little chuckle with them about the whole silly misunderstanding. Maybe he could sip some wine with Middle Mum and watch the sun slide down (with his hand squeezing her knee). But the situation was now so complicated it would require nothing less than a full UN peacekeeping force to sort it out, and Eoin would have preferred to stab himself with his own plastic fork than venture anywhere near it.
Luckily he didn't have to, because the situation was now coming to him. Rob was heading back in Eoin's direction, roaring with laughter, and the woman was walking along beside him. Eoin felt close to fainting. He climbed unsteadily to his feet and hoisted his mouth into a smile as he observed his approaching doom.
She may have been one of the women from the park, one of the other mothers, but he wasn’t quite sure. She was short and thin, with very short blonde hair. She wore brilliant red lipstick, far too bright for her pale face, and her nose had a strange turn-up at the end. All in all she wasn't bad looking and, from what he could hear, she had a nice honest laugh.
But that wasn't the point at all—she was simply the wrong one.
She came to a halt in front of Eoin. “Hello,” she said politely. “Rob tells me you know me from a park, but it's against your religion to come over. I am anyway Anja.”
Rod stood behind her, beaming as if he'd just plucked a golden egg from beneath the goose's arse. He gave Eoin an enthusiastic nod, completely unaware of the carnage he had just wrecked in his emotional universe.
Eoin stuck out his hand, even though it was probably as cold and clammy as a slice of yesterday's pizza. And as the midsummer sun crawled its leisurely way towards the horizon he was sure that this day would turn out to be the longest, and most embarrassing, of his entire life.
Chapter 9
"Hi there Eoin, wait up!"
Eoin, with his hand on the lobby door, turned to see Alice emerging from the elevator. She waved, he waved back, and in a few loping strides she was standing in front of him. She gave him a stern look.
"You're leaving work early, mister. Hot date with Park Girl perhaps?"
Eoin stepped through the door and Alice fell into step beside him. “No, I haven't. I'm off to pick up Damien. There's nobody in work anyway, they're all away on their boats or playing golf or whatever."
"It's the same upstairs. I've been the only human in human resources since lunch. But Eoin, why not Park Girl? You did call her, right?"
They paused at a pedestrian crossing, waiting with some other people for the green man to appear even though the road was empty.
“Look,” Eoin said. “I can't call her, because I'm into her friend. And I also can't not call her, because then she'll think I'm a bastard and so will her friend, you see?”
“Oh just call her! Work the rest out later.” Alice reached out and patted him on the shoulder. “Everything you do doesn’t have to be so deep, you know!”
The green man appeared and they crossed the street, heading for the subway station just up the hill.
“Anyway, I meant to ask you something,” Alice said. “I have my mother's summer house on Gotland for a few weeks in July. You should come along! We'll get some people together, made dinners, play kubb, go fishing. It'll be great!”
Eoin frowned. People? What people? Was she trying to set him up with somebody? Was this some new trick of hers?
“I suppose,” he said carefully. “It's be away with Damien in Ireland for one week, then I'll have one week where I'll be off and he'll be with his mother—”
“So that's when we'll do it! Week twenty-nine would be good for me, but twenty-eight is also—”
“Alice, come on, nobody really understands those week numbers. You don't either, you have to look a calendar yourself just to work them out. Just tell me the dates.”
“Middle or end of July. Ask that Rob guy to come along, he sounds fun. There's a big house, and a little guest house, so there's lots of room.”
They came to a halt outside the subway station.
“Rob?” Eoin said. “I don't know, he'll probably have plans.”
Alice raised a finger and pointed it at him, in school-mistress style. “Bring him, Eoin. That's an order. And call that woman, okay?”
Eoin didn't answer and watched as Alice unlocked her bicycle and dropped her bag into the basket. “See you tomorrow then,” she said, and winked. “And you'll have lots of gossip for me, I'm sure!”
Eoin watched as she cycled away up the hill, her long legs moving her effortlessly along. It didn't sound too bad actually—a week on Gotland with sun, food and Alice. But also Rob.
He shook his head. Rob would never be interested in that, he was just too … too Rob. He fished out his wallet and headed for the subway, wondering if it finally was time to do what he'd avoided doing his entire adult life. That one thing that would turn him Swedish for good.
And that was to buy a sensible pair of sandals.
Damien went to one of the few English-speaking nurseries in the city. They taught the kids to say please and thank-you, and armed them with all of the important nursery rhymes. They even took them out to a park every November to celebrate Guy Fawkes and it was always entertaining to watch the Swedes hurrying by and pretending not to notice the mob of foreign children who were cheerfully burning a large voodoo doll while stuffing themselves silly with hotdogs.
Eoin was a minute away but already he could hear the kids charging about in the yard outside the day-care. The sun was warm on his face, his jacket was slung over one shoulder and he felt especially sharp in his new sunglasses. If his luck was in he might even spot one of the attractive single mums. There were quite a few of them, most of them around thirty and clearly on the lookout for a stylish Irishman to while away the summer months with. Or if not with, then maybe under.
As he pondered these tingly thoughts, he slipped through the gate, hooked it closed behind him and turned to watch the kids. They were, as always, sparkling with energy and good cheer. It always improved his mood, watching them racing about, throwing sand and encouraging each other to eat ants. Although he suspected that actually working here would quickly reduce him to a gi
bbering wreck.
There was no sign of Damien and his gaze drifted to the moms, two of whom were in the yard. As hot as they were, Eoin knew that that dating a single or half-time mother would be complicated by several factors, the main one being the issue of child weeks. In fact, there was probably no point in even making the effort if their child-free weeks didn't match up, and that cut out fifty percent immediately.
It was, of course, always possible for one of them to swap their child-free week with their kid's other parent, but that would be complicated by all the other parents in this system and their interlocking cycles of child weeks. In fact, a small change by one person would ripple throughout the whole fabric of Stockholm's single parents, disturbing lives and dinner plans and copulation schedules far and wide. It was a heavy responsibility, and one that Eoin didn't really want.
He was deep in thought, watching the kids chase each other around the old birch tree, when a voice he recognised snapped him back to reality. Coming through the door from the nursery, babbling ten to a million, was Damien, in his brown cord pants and his Spider-man rucksack on his back. With him was Jenny, the one person Eoin really didn't need to see right now. His jaw dropped and panic gripped his chest as he tried to work out what his ex was doing here.
Jenny saw him standing by the gate, and her face hardened. Eoin locked eyes with her and wondered how those eyes, which had brought him across half of Europe, were now just something he wished to avoid.
“Pappa!” yelped Damien and gave an enormous wave. Eoin waved back, forcing a smile. He knew he should do something, like walk over there and say some words, but if Damien was with Jenny then maybe he shouldn't interrupt.
But hang on a second! She was the one who shouldn't be here! What gave her the right to show up on the wrong day? Well he'd find out soon enough, because she was on her way over, being dragged by an enthusiastic Damien.
“Eoin,” she said in a painfully neutral voice. “What are you doing here?”
