The Secrets of Primrose Square

by Claudia Carroll

  ‘Love you too, Mum,’ Melissa replied automatically, as she turned on her heel and made her way slowly upstairs.

  Shit, shit, shit, Susan thought, as a dark cloud fell over her day. The poor child had seemed so happy and upbeat all day, so glad to have her mother back home again.

  But now, somehow, the old worried look was back on that pale little twelve-year-old face. And it was all Susan’s own doing, just for being honest.

  I’ve made progress, she thought sadly. But it’s scary how much work I still have to do.

  Jason

  O’DONOGHUE’S PUB

  Jason had always liked O’Donoghue’s. It was a real, proper Irish pub, with a decent pint of Guinness on tap and none of your fancy ‘alcopops’ or any of that gastropub shit that drove him up the walls. Jaysus, he thought, making his way inside, if you were gobshite enough to ask for a smashed avocado on toast here, you’d be laughed out of the place. Besides, he figured, if that eejit Eric insisted on meeting him, it might as well be somewhere Jason was comfortable in.

  To his surprise, Eric was already there ahead of him, sitting at a quiet little table in the snug.

  ‘There you are, now,’ Jason said, tossing his keys and phone down onto the table in greeting.

  ‘Hey, Jason, my man.’ Eric smiled, standing up to greet him like a long-lost friend. ‘Thanks for meeting with me at short notice. Say, what’s with the sunglasses?’

  ‘Oh, them?’ Jason stammered, patting the side of the wraparound black shades he had on. ‘Ehh . . . nothing. Bit of . . . retina damage, that’s all.’

  Mind your own fucking business, he’d wanted to say, but didn’t. Part of him was too intrigued to know why Eric had wanted to meet him in the first place. What was going on, anyway? All gobshite Eric had said on the phone was that it was important they have a face-to-face, ‘sooner rather than later’.

  ‘What can I get for you?’ Eric asked, waving over one of the bar staff.

  ‘Pint of Guinness,’ said Jason. ‘And you could order me a cheese and ham toastie, while you’re at it. I’m bleeding starving.’

  Fuck this, he thought. If I have to spend my afternoon listening to this eejit, then I might as well cash in. He’s paying for it, not me.

  Eric ordered from one of the lounge staff, almost making Jason laugh in his face when he added, ‘And for me? A cup of your finest peppermint tea, if you’d be so kind.’

  Peppermint tea, he thought furiously. In a Dublin pub. Jaysus, they’ll think he’s gay and I’m his boyfriend.

  ‘So,’ Eric said, as soon as they had the table to themselves again. ‘You’re probably thinking I wanted to talk to you about Jayne. I mean . . . about your mom. But that’s not the case at all.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Jason said suspiciously.

  ‘The thing is, Jayne and I both realise how tough this has been on you,’ Eric went on. ‘After all, the relationship between any mother and her son is a special one, something to be cherished. And change is always frightening for any of us. We fear change and yet, like we say back at the Healing House at home, it really is the only constant in life.’

  Oh here we fecking go, Jason thought. Yet more of this twathead and his bollockology. He glanced down at his phone, while Eric droned on and on and on about how we shouldn’t be afraid of change because, as he put it, ‘we may lose something we cherish, but you know what? We may gain something even better.’

  Another bloody text message, Jason thought, completely tuning Eric out. This one, even more threatening than the last.

  At our last calculation, you now owe €4500, not including interest. You pay by the end of next week, or else we’ll be round to your house to sort this out once and for all.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck, he thought, worry starting to put him off his pint. Where was he going to get that kind of money by the end of the week? This crowd didn’t make idle threats either. If they called to his front door, it would be game over as far as Irene was concerned.

  A silence fell, and even through the sunglasses, Jason could feel Eric scanning his face up and down.

  ‘So I do have something I wanted to talk to you about,’ Eric eventually said.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ said Jason, not sure where this weirdo was going. Just then his phone pinged as another text came through. Bleeding loan sharks. Again. Christ Almighty, he thought crossly. He’d already told them that he didn’t have the money yet, but that as soon as he got it, he’d pay them back everything he owed. This crowd had already robbed him of his peace of mind, so what more did they want from him? Blood?

  You’d be well advised not to ignore us, Jason. Remember, we know where you live.

  Jason twiddled distractedly with his phone, but as bad luck would have it, Eric copped it.

  ‘You keep looking down at your phone,’ he said, calmly folding his arms. ‘So you wanna tell me what’s up?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Jason said sullenly.

  ‘Sure doesn’t look like nothing to me,’ Eric said, glancing down at the phone in Jason’s pudgy hands. The text message was still on the screen, though, and before Jason had a chance to delete it, Eric had a chance to read it.

  ‘Something you maybe want to talk about?’ Eric said slowly.

  ‘It’s a personal matter, all right?’ Jason snapped. Fecking nosey bastard, he thought. Why can’t he just mind his own business?

  There was a long pause, as the telly in the background blared out some match between Juventus and Arsenal.

  ‘You can take off the sunglasses,’ Eric eventually said, as the rest of the bar cheered when Arsenal equalised. ‘You’re not fooling anyone. So tell me this: how much do you owe?’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Jason spluttered into his pint. ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘Oh, you heard me,’ came the cool reply. ‘Clearly you owe money to some people who aren’t afraid to use violence against you, and my question is, how much? You don’t need to worry,’ he added. ‘I’m unshockable when it comes to money. And whatever you have to tell me will stay between us. I give you my solemn word, I won’t mention this to your mom.’

  Jason shuffled around uncomfortably on his bar stool. The game was well and truly up, there was no question about it. Eric had guessed, so feck it anyway, he might as well know everything. If nothing else, he figured, it was a kind of a relief finally getting if off his chest after so long. Slowly, he took off the sunglasses to reveal a swollen black eye that still stung.

  ‘Oh jeez, that’s a howler,’ Eric said. ‘How did you explain that beauty to Irene?’

  ‘Told her I walked into a door,’ Jason muttered, mortified.

  ‘So how much?’

  ‘So far,’ Jason sighed, ‘well over eighteen grand on credit cards. And if I don’t have four and a half in cash by the end of the week, chances are I’ll lose me kneecaps.’

  ‘Oh jeez,’ Eric said again, smacking his hand off his head in frustration. ‘Don’t tell me you went to money lenders?’

  A curt nod from Jason, half angry and half embarrassed.

  ‘You know the interest rates those guys charge, right?’ Eric said. ‘You know it’s tantamount to daylight robbery?’

  Another sullen nod from Jason.

  ‘Some kind of payday loan that got out of control is my guess,’ Eric said, scanning Jason’s face up and down again.

  Jason looked sharply back at him. ‘How the feck did you know that?’

  ‘There are only three possible reasons why anyone would go to a money lender, in my experience: alcoholism, drug addiction or else to pay off other debts that just spiralled. Now clearly you’re neither a chronic booze hound nor a drug addict, ergo . . . ’

  ‘If you ever breathe a single word of this to either my ma or Irene . . . ’ Jason said warningly, to a dismissive hand wave from Eric.

  ‘My word,’ he said, ‘is my bond. But the question now is, how do you propose getting out of the mess you’re in?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know,’ Jason sighed into his pint. ‘I’m
trying to build up my little business, but those bastards at the bank turned me down, didn’t they?’

  ‘Okay,’ Eric said thoughtfully, taking a sip of the herbal tea in front of him. ‘So what’s your business model, if I may be so bold?’

  ‘My business model?’ Jason said, sounding surprised. ‘Why do you want to know about that?’ What was this moron droning on about now? Jason had just told him he had to come up with thousands by the end of the week or he’d be hospitalised, and now the eejit wanted to talk about business models?

  ‘Well, as you may or may not know,’ Eric went on to explain with a modest shrug, ‘growing a business is something I’m pretty familiar with, as it happens. Short-term, you’re in a financial mess, so what I’d like to know is how you plan to get out of it in the long-term?’

  Jason didn’t answer, though, just looked the other man up and down suspiciously as a distant bell rang at the back of his head. The last time the twins stayed with their granny at Primrose Square, they’d come home mouthing on about how Eric was in the property game and how he was really loaded.

  ‘He knows the restaurant business really well too,’ Holly had said, ‘and he’s even going to help granny to write a cookbook . . . Can you believe that?’

  But then she and Molly had started squabbling about whose turn it was to clean the bathroom next and Jason had written it off.

  Besides, the thought of someone like Eric rolling in it had to be a bleeding joke. For feck’s sake, you only had to look at the state of him. He was dressed in white linen from head to toe, with open-toed sandals. He looked like one of those gobshites who was about to shave his head and start banging a tambourine up and down Grafton Street in a minute.

  ‘You worked in business, then, did you?’ Jason asked.

  ‘Since the age of sixteen,’ Eric replied. ‘Tell me something. Are you familiar with the TV show you get here in Europe, Dragon’s Den?’

  ‘Course I am,’ Jason said, before adding snottily, ‘I’m an entrepreneur, aren’t I? It’s a show every entrepreneur knows all about.’

  ‘Because you know I’ve been a part of that show in the United States,’ Eric said. ‘Or didn’t your mom mention it?’

  She could have done, for all Jason knew. But he couldn’t swear to it. Mainly because whenever his ma started droning on about how wonderful Eric was, Jason generally told her he was mad busy with his 99s and got off the phone.

  So he settled for just grunting back by way of a response.

  ‘I was involved with the US version of that show for a grand total of five series,’ Eric went on, ‘and I’m real proud to say that I think we – and by that I mean my fellow Dragons and myself – did do a lot of good. We got some really great businesses started up, which otherwise might not have had the ghost of a chance.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ said Jason, putting his pint down and looking completely bewildered, like this conversation was five steps ahead of him. ‘I thought you meant you were a contestant on the show. You know, on the scrounge for money, same as you would with a bank.’

  ‘Oh, didn’t I say?’ said Eric, looking back at him with a twinkle in his eye. ‘No, I was one of the Dragons on the original US show. Except, of course, over there it’s got a different name. In the US, we call it Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell. Not the catchiest of names, granted, but like I say, we did give a lot of would-be entrepreneurs a leg up in life. People who’d had doors slammed in their faces by the banks, yet who believed in their dreams and who weren’t prepared to give up. Those are the type of folk,’ he added, with a knowing little nod in Jason’s direction, ‘that I see it as my life’s goal to help. The forgotten. The underdog.’

  ‘Is that a fact now?’ said Jason suspiciously.

  ‘Sure is,’ came the cool response.

  ‘Oh really?’ Jason went on. ‘Because, you know, me and Irene googled you when you first landed in on us and there was absolutely no mention of an Eric Butler who’d been linked to some big TV show in the States. None whatsoever. So what do have to say to that now, mate?’

  You bleeding fantasist, he wanted to add. Having a senior moment, are we? Did you accidently doze off in front of Dragon’s Den and now you have it in your head that you were once a part of it? Instead, though, he decided to take a sip of his pint and quietly savour the victory.

  ‘That’s because I did the show under my family name, which is Shapiro,’ Eric explained. ‘I reverted back to Butler when I set up the Healing House, because it felt like a whole new direction for me – a better direction, a true calling. And I sure as heck didn’t want to put people off if they thought a place of peace and tranquility like the Healing House was run by a tough judge from a TV show where more people get turned away then actually get funding. There was absolutely no duplicity involved in this,’ he went on, ‘I hope you understand. The name I had on the TV show was, for me, a little like a stage name – you know? Like an actor might have.’

  He’d lost his audience, though, because Jason was already on his phone, googling away. And sure enough, to his utter astonishment, the story rang true. There it was, one YouTube clip after another of Eric Shapiro, looking years younger, but sitting on a panel of Dragons, with the power of life or death over whatever gobshite happened to be pitching to them.

  Fuck me, Jason thought. He’s telling the truth. He’s actually telling the bleeding truth.

  ‘So now you believe me, huh?’ Eric asked calmly.

  ‘Jaysus,’ was all Jason could mutter by way of a reply.

  ‘Which is a lot of the reason why I wanted to meet you today,’ Eric went on. ‘Your mom tells me that you got a great little business going – you’re in ice cream, right?’

  ‘Mobile confectionary, yeah,’ Jason managed to say, still trying to process this new information.

  ‘So why don’t you give me some details about your plans to grow your business? The more detailed you are,’ he added, ‘the better.’

  ‘Well,’ said Jason, softening a bit and trying his best to backpedal on his earlier rudeness, ‘I’m looking to break into . . . ’ He broke off here, trying to claw back the phrase that Irene had drummed into him to use when he was dealing with bank managers. ‘I want to move into the more savoury end of the market,’ he said, as Eric listened intently. ‘To capitalise on the growing trend for late-night snacks at sporting fixtures and big concerts,’ he rattled off, like he was reading it from a brochure.

  ‘Great,’ Eric said, ‘I like it. You mean burgers and fries after football matches and pizza slices at rock concerts, that kind of thing, yeah?’

  ‘Well . . . yeah,’ Jason said hesitantly.

  ‘And you’re looking for how much exactly? To finance how many mobile catering units? At what rate of interest? And what percentage of the business would you be willing to offer me, in return for a cash investment? I’d be looking for a minimum of twenty-five per cent, though, I gotta warn you.’

  Eric’s questions came thick and fast, like a true professional, as Jason madly tried to keep up.

  ‘Ehh . . . ’ he said, totally taken off-guard. ‘I’d have to come back to you on all the nitty gritty. But only if that’s okay with you?’ he added placatingly.

  ‘You take all the time you need,’ Eric said calmly. ‘So here’s the deal. Short term, I’d pay off your debts for you, so that’s one less thing you gotta stress about. Then long term, I suggest you and me talk business with my legal team, so we can agree a percentage of your company for me, in return for a cash injection. I’d really like to move forward on this sooner rather than later.’

  ‘Well . . . yeah. Me too. Great,’ said Jason, utterly stunned. ‘And . . . thank you, I suppose. Thanks very much.’

  ‘So you’re interested?’ Eric twinkled warmly.

  ‘Yeah.’ Jason nodded. ‘Jesus, yeah! Big time!’

  ‘Good. Because I got one condition.’

  ‘Name it,’ Jason said, suddenly terrified Eric might change his mind.

 
‘From this day on, I want to start seeing you being nicer to your mom. A whole lot nicer. And that, my friend, is non-negotiable.’

  Melissa

  18 PRIMROSE SQUARE

  Nancy had moved into their house and it was absolutely the best thing ever, Melissa thought happily. Everyone mucked in to help her move house: Jayne, Eric, and astonishingly Jason, who nobody liked, came to lend a hand and had even given Melissa a free 99 afterwards.

  Melissa had almost fallen over in shock when he’d handed it to her, with a flake in it and everything, but for some reason Jason seemed different that day. Kinder, nicer and certainly a lot more polite to Jayne and even Eric too. Before this, Jason had bitten the face off Eric every chance he could get – he’d been so rude, it was horrible to listen to. But that sunny, warm day, he was like a totally different Jason.

  Between everyone, they had the house Nancy had been renting cleared of all her stuff and empty as the day she found it in next to no time.

  ‘So another new neighbour will soon join us on the square,’ Jayne sighed, as they closed the front door of number twenty-four behind them for the very last time, taking care to put the keys back in through the letterbox. ‘Let’s just hope whoever moves in next turns out to be a sweetheart like you, Nancy,’ she added, and Melissa could only agree.

  Then everyone formed a sort of line between them and passed every single bag, backpack and suitcase belonging to Nancy from her old digs to her new one.

  ‘You know, this is just like my grandpappy used to do.’ Eric smiled, ‘when he worked on a factory production line back in Idaho.’

  ‘Idaho? Really? That’s very interesting,’ Jason had remarked, to raised eyebrows from Jayne and a quiet smirk from everyone else at his sudden about-turn in attitude towards Eric.

  Soon after, Nancy was well and truly ensconced at number eighteen and Melissa couldn’t have been happier. She’d been a bit worried at first, particularly when she had to help her mum clear a bit of wardrobe and shelf space in Ella’s old bedroom for Nancy. Melissa’s heart had fallen when she’d seen just how much of Ella’s stuff was still there, and both she and her mum knew that throwing anything away . . . well, that was just never going to happen.