by Marian Keyes
He picked his way through the cables and headed for the door, still holding out a slender hope that Joe would say, ‘OK, all right, come back, you’ve learnt your lesson.’ But nothing doing. Pausing only to shout over his shoulder, ‘You’ll never work in this town again,’ Lorcan found himself on the street, wandering. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He was so shocked, he couldn’t even get properly angry.
The butter commercial would have paid thousands. Thousands. Apart from the initial fee, there would have been residuals every time it was shown. And Joe Roth had denied them to him. Joe Roth had as good as stolen the money. Lorcan vowed revenge – Joe Roth’s ass is grass and I am the lawnmower – but in a dazed, demoralized kind of way.
How could this happen to him? How could he have misread the situation so badly? Granted, he’d behaved atrociously, but people had always indulged him before. In Ireland in 1992 he’d done a commercial for washing-powder where he made them do sixty-nine takes before he decided to do it right. Not once had there been a hint of a suggestion that he be replaced. That’s the way they expected a star to carry on. Hey, they loved him for it!
He’d thought the whole star machine was about to crank up for him again, that this was just the start of another phase in his career. So sure was he that his days in the doldrums were over that he’d already gone back to behaving like a star in anticipation of it. But this wasn’t Dublin at the start of the nineties, it was London at the dawn of a new millennium. Another world, with different rules, but no one had warned him until it was too late.
That all the kudos and acclaim had been snatched from his grasp before he’d even tasted it was unthinkable. That he was the one responsible was unbearable. He had no choice but to go home and duck calls from his furious agent. When he got there, he was unable to do anything except take off his make-up and sit on his futon in a fug of depression. The long, dark afternoon of the soul.
He was thirty-eight. Of course, he looked far younger and his resumé didn’t have him as a day over thirty-three, but he knew the truth. I’m nearly forty, he realized, and I’ve nothing to show for my life. A failed marriage. No money, no friends, no fame outside Ireland. No British or American glory. Not even a proper bed to my name. You’d think at my age I wouldn’t have to sleep on a lousy futon.
Most of all, he had no money. He couldn’t let himself think about all the loot he’d let slip through his hands today. Adrift and frightened, he racked his brain for an assertion of some kind, a reminder that he still mattered.
But he drew a blank. Time hung heavy on his hands. He’d nothing to do and no one to play with. When, out of nowhere, he thought of Amy. Alarmed, he realized that she hadn’t rung him in – he counted back – four days. Four days without a cheery, sombre or drunken message from her on the answering-machine. He hadn’t even noticed at the time. Bigger fish to fry. A career to worry about. But now that he had nothing else, it suddenly seemed extremely important.
God forbid that she’d given up on him, or started to get over him. That made him panic.
It was time to get her back.
Then be mean to her again.
He looked at his watch. If he left now he could be in Hammersmith to meet her as she left work. Adrenalined-up with purpose, he checked his hair – still gorgeous, some nice gloss ‘n’ shine for it later if it continued to behave itself – and hurried from his flat. On the way to the tube, he smiled at a woman and watched her pale. But was it his imagination? Did it not feel as good as it used to? Was it becoming harder and harder to get the rush?
It was eleven days since Amy had sent the police around to Lorcan’s flat. Eleven of the longest days of her life. Utter hell. She’d gone completely crazy, and she knew her life was over. But amid the agony of separation was a consolation prize – a strange nugget of relief. Lorcan was just too high-maintenance. His game-playing had turned her into an unrecognizable, shrewish lunatic and at least now she could reclaim her soul.
Nevertheless, she had to make her sister, Cindy, come and stay with her to guard the phone. ‘Promise me,’ Amy begged Cindy, ‘that even if I tell you my leg has fallen off and it’s an emergency, do not, I repeat, do not let me have access to the phone!’ And although they’d had a couple of late-night wrestling matches, Cindy had managed to keep her promise.
Amy was leaving work, gearing up for another action-packed evening of not ringing Lorcan, when she saw something in the lobby that made her stumble. Lorcan. Big and bold, using his elbow to lean against a wall, his arm over his head, his jacket swinging open to reveal his flat stomach, his big chest. Oh, the sweet rush of joy as she realized that all wasn’t lost.
Lorcan held the pose for a count of five as, in his head, the camera panned in on him. Then, with perfect timing, while his face filled the imaginary screen, he smiled, and Amy was blinded. Jump to camera two, showing Amy’s willowy back, following her dazed, hypnotized progress towards him. No doubt but that she was powerless to resist. Cut to Lorcan’s eyes, full of love, as he looked at Amy’s upturned face. Nearly time for his line – but, wait for it, wait for it, the non-existent director cautioned. And… now!
‘Baby, did you miss me?’ Lorcan asked, with precisely the correct degree of gentle amusement. Cue, mute expression from Amy, followed by an affectionate little chuckle from him. Pan back out again to see Lorcan roughly clasp her head with his big hands, and pull her to his chest. A shot of Amy’s face, her eyes closed, her expression transported, as she smelt the suede of his jacket, felt the hardness of his thigh manoeuvring between her legs.
Next, Lorcan pulled back, to trace Amy’s mouth with his finger, slowly, almost in wonderment. Beautiful, he thought. A beautiful gesture, that is. Then once more he bundled her tightly in his arms, as, in his head, a joyous, tear-jerking soundtrack began, and the credits started to roll.
Tara, hurrying past on her way to the hospital, was both touched and envious. It was one of the most exquisite scenes she’d ever witnessed. The huge, handsome man holding the fragile beauty in a pose of aching tenderness.
Later on, she exclaimed to the throng around Fintan’s bed, ‘It was just like something out of a film!’
35
Fintan was due to get the results of the bone-marrow biopsy, chest X-rays and CT scan on Friday afternoon. Until then, Tara, Katherine, Sandro, Liv and the O’Gradys were condemned to live in limbo, unable to think any further. As far as they were concerned, the world stopped on Friday afternoon. Nothing of importance would ever happen thereafter.
They’d somehow managed to convince themselves that the cancer in his lymph nodes was very little to worry about. That if the disease didn’t show up in his chest, bone-marrow or internal organs, Fintan was as good as cured.
All their energy was poured into enduring the wait to find out exactly how ill he was. While angst and hope played tug-of-war back and forth, havoc was wreaked on sleep patterns, appetites, concentration facilities, patience levels and the ability to decide between cheese or chicken sandwiches. Meanwhile, they read whatever they could find on the subject of Hodgkin’s disease and bought every book on alternative healing they could get their hands on.
So many of Fintan’s colleagues and friends were showing up at visiting time that he was moved to say in a sour, low moment, They’ve only come to see if I’ve got Aids.’ But even after it was clear that he didn’t have Aids, a swarm of good-humoured visitors descended on him every evening. And the inner circle of Tara, Katherine, Liv, his family and boyfriend practically did a non-stop vigil at his bedside, JaneAnn and Sandro graciously letting each other take turns to hold Fintan’s hand.
On Wednesday, the O’Gradys’ first morning in London, Tara drove them and Katherine to the hospital where they met Sandro and Liv.
‘Good morning,’ Tara carolled to Fintan, determinedly cheerful.
‘What’s good about it?’ Fintan asked sullenly, thrown resentfully in the bed.
The collective mood nose-dived, and everyone tiptoed nervousl
y around Fintan, asking the standard hospital-visitor questions.
‘Did you sleep well?’ Katherine tentatively inquired.
‘Was your breakfast nice?’ Tara wanted to know.
‘Would you like a grape?’ Sandro offered.
‘What’s wrong with your man in the bed over there?’ Milo asked.
Fintan answered bitterly, ‘I didn’t fucking sleep well, my breakfast made me puke, you can stick your grapes up your arse, and if you want to know what’s wrong with your man, why don’t you go and ask him yourself?’
Wobbly fake smiles all round, and a series of stilted questions to each other – how was Sandro today, did JaneAnn sleep well in the strange bed, wouldn’t they mind Tara and Katherine not being in work, how early would Milo and Timothy get up at home, did they have cows in Sweden?
‘Oh, here we go again,’ Fintan complained loudly, as he saw a nurse approaching to take his first blood sample of the day. ‘I’m like a fucking pincushion. Someone comes along and sticks a needle in me every five minutes.’ He stuck his arm out for the syringe, and all present recoiled when they saw the elbow crook with its black, purple, green and yellow colouring. Bruises upon bruises, with another about to follow.
Tara’s heart bled as she yearned to endure the pain for him, yet simultaneously she found herself thanking God with passionate, violent relief that it wasn’t she who lay in the bed, a human pincushion. Almost before the thought was fully formed, she was awash with sickening shame. What was wrong with her?
‘Let’s see if we can find the vein in the first ten attempts, shall we?’ Fintan said sarcastically to the nurse.
‘Have manners!’ JaneAnn hissed. It was forgivable for him to be rude to her, his poor aged mother, who had spent eighteen hours in labour with him back in the days when epidurals weren’t even a twinkle in a scientist’s eye, but this nurse was a stranger. Worse again, an English stranger.
‘We’re very sunny today,’ the nurse sang cheerfully.
‘Speak for yourself!’
‘Is your hip giving you grief?’
‘No. But the diagnosis of the sample that they took out of it is,’ Fintan replied.
Tara leant over and squeezed his hand. No wonder he was waspish.
His humours throughout the day were unpredictable and fast-changing. Less than an hour after his surly, ungracious greeting, his mood had noticeably lightened, and so, by association, had everyone else’s. To the point where the atmosphere around his bed became unexpectedly party-like. At one stage their chat and laughter was so loud that the nurse had to ask them to keep the noise down, that they were cheering the other patients up.
Regularly and separately the visitors realized how inappropriate their merriment was. Then they were seized with guilt for not being sorrowful. Until, bizarrely, in no time, the jollity started up again. But while individuals got momentary relief, the dread never left them as a unit. Katherine watched as horror circulated like a Mexican wave. All the while the animated talk was going on, one person would be sitting stock-still, with an expression that was almost perplexed. What am I doing here? Because Fintan is sick? Because Fintan might die? But that’s ridiculous!
Then they were washed with the balm of hope – everything will be fine – and the terror moved smoothly on to the next person.
At eleven o’clock Fintan turned to the little television beside his bed. ‘It’s nearly time for the reruns of Supermarket Sweep. Does anyone mind?’
‘Of course not,’ they murmured, prepared to humour him. But within moments, with the weird way that reality kept mutating, it was just like sitting around in someone’s front room, watching telly.
JaneAnn, in particular, managed to lose herself. ‘’Tis there, ‘tis there,’ she shouted, in clenched-fist frustration, as the lucky contestant ran past the Lenor for the third time. ‘Are you blind? Look, it’s there!’ She was on her feet, prodding at the television before she suddenly remembered where she was and sheepishly sat down again. ‘We don’t get Sweepermarket Supe where I come from,’ she muttered to the nurse, who was looking at her askance.
By lunchtime everyone had drifted off to work, Milo and Timothy went out for a smoke and JaneAnn was alone with the sleeping Fintan. She sat gazing at him, her youngest child, her baby, tears leaking down her tissue-paper cheeks. She ran her rosary beads through her hands and silently mouthed prayers and wondered what God’s reason was for striking down a young man in his prime.
When Milo and Timothy returned, they tried to eat a ham sandwich from the stockpile JaneAnn had got up at six that morning to make, but no one had an appetite. ‘Let’s go out into the air for a while,’ Milo suggested. ‘Maybe there’s some grass somewhere.’ But it was cold and they couldn’t find a park, so they traipsed up and down the Fulham Road and appalled the keepers of the chichi little shops they called into.
‘Look,’ JaneAnn exclaimed, holding up a tiny, intricately patterned enamel box. ‘Fifteen pounds for a small yoke like this.’
‘I think you’ll find that’s fifteen hundred pounds,’ the saleswoman said contemptuously, smoothly retrieving the box from JaneAnn’s hand.
But her disdain didn’t have the required effect: Milo, Timothy and JaneAnn snorted with laughter. ‘Fifteen hundred! For that little thing. You could nearly buy an acre of land for that!’
‘This was a good idea,’ JaneAnn said, when they were back out on the street. ‘My heart isn’t so heavy now.’
But the next bijou antique emporium they visited had its door locked, and even when they rang the bell and smiled ingratiatingly through the glass, it remained shut.
‘Maybe the shop’s closed,’ Timothy suggested.
‘No, there’s someone in there,’ JaneAnn said, then knocked on the glass and waved at the chic woman sitting behind a gold rococo desk within. ‘Hello,’ JaneAnn called. ‘We’d like to come in.’
Yasmin Al-Shari stared in horror at the two huge wild-haired men and the tiny grey-haired woman who were trying to gain admittance into her lovely shop. ‘Shoo!’ she shouted, waving her arm ineffectually.
‘God bless you,’ Milo, Timothy and JaneAnn called automatically.
Yasmin looked distastefully at them, and suddenly Milo saw himself, his brother and mother through Yasmin’s eyes. They weren’t wanted. An instant of depression, of diminishment. They didn’t belong in this city, but they needed to be here. ‘I think she thinks we’re undesirables.’ Milo took care to sound cheerful.
‘Us?’ JaneAnn was appalled. She was one of the most respectable people she knew!
‘We’re eccentric millionaires,’ Milo cupped his hands around his mouth and called through the glass. ‘But you’ve insulted us, so we’re taking our custom elsewhere.’ Forcing a wide grin, he turned to the others. ‘Off we go,’ he said. ‘Let’s go over here and look at the flowers in the flower shop and pretend we’re at home.’
Yasmin Al-Shari anxiously watched them shamble off. The old lady did look very like the grandmother in The Beverly Hillbillies. Had she just lost an enormous sale?
‘Could we take Fintan home?’ JaneAnn voiced what they were all thinking. ‘Back to Clare?’
Late afternoon, when Tara and Katherine reappeared at the hospital, Fintan was once more in disagreeable humour. Desperately, Tara launched into her anecdote about Amy being reunited with her gorgeous-looking boyfriend in the reception area of work. ‘It was beautiful,’ she exclaimed, one eye on Fintan to gauge whether or not he was enjoying it. ‘Like something out of a film.’
Katherine and Liv quickly weighed in with light-hearted stories of their own. They’d stored anything even remotely interesting or entertaining that had happened to them that day, in the event of Fintan being sour or depressed. But the only time Fintan perked up was when Sandro came in, waving a pile of holiday brochures. ‘Long-haul,’ Sandro announced. ‘Just out. Fourteen new destinations in Asia and the Caribbean.’
That evening, when they all had to leave the hospital to give Fintan some space for his pos
se of new visitors, they were reluctant to part so everyone went back to Katherine’s where they ordered pizzas and reassured themselves repeatedly, incessantly, that everything would be fine.
‘How did he seem to you today?’ JaneAnn inquired anxiously. ‘You see, if we could escape with him just having it in his lymph glands, we’d be on the pig’s back. I read that it’s easy to treat and there’s a great recovery rate. So how did you think he was?’
‘A bit tired,’ Sandro offered.
‘A bit tired? Yes, he seemed tired to me, but we all get tired. It doesn’t mean anything terrible. In fact, isn’t it great that he keeps falling asleep? Sleep is very healing.’
‘And he ate his lunch,’ Timothy chipped out.
‘And what harm that he didn’t eat his dinner?’ Milo said.
‘Don’t we all have days where we couldn’t be bothered eating our dinner?’ JaneAnn agreed.
‘Besides, he’d had a Smartie at about six o’clock,’ Liv valiantly offered.
‘Two,’ Sandro said triumphantly. ‘A blue one and an orange one.’
‘And he was in great form nearly all day,’ Tara said.
‘Apart from that time he was cross and told us to go away, using the F-word.’ JaneAnn looked sorrowful.
‘And he was cranky with that social worker,’ Timothy said. ‘Small wonder. She was asking highly inquisitive questions and she’d only just met him. How was he feeling? Was he angry? Was he frightened? If he hadn’t told her to be on her way, I would have.’
This was the longest speech Timothy had ever made.
‘It’s good for Fintan to be bad-tempered,’ Milo soothed. ‘Wouldn’t you worry if he was as sweet as sugar all the time? Sure, that isn’t normal.’
‘And maybe his other visitors will sweeten his humour.’ JaneAnn had been moved to tears, as Frederick, Geraint, Javier, Butch, Harry, Didier, Neville and Geoff had shown up in dribs and drabs around seven o’clock, bearing four pounds of grapes, three books, twelve magazines, two Barbie lollipops, two bags of Hula Hoops, four little apricot tarts from Maison Bertaux, five litres of mineral water, a bottle of Marks and Spencer’s Buck’s fizz and one Kinder Surprise between them.
