by Marian Keyes
‘I don’t mind,’ she said softly.
‘Just because I’m on the streets doesn’t mean I have a problem with booze,’ he explained, relenting slightly. ‘I’m just a social drinker.’
She gave him a pound and went inside, where despair threatened to overwhelm her. Homelessness was like a many-headed monster – cut off one head and two more appear in its place. Boo was sorted, with a job, a flat and even a girlfriend, but he’d been one of the few lucky ones: intelligent, presentable-looking and still young enough to have the capacity to adapt to a mainstream life. There were so many others who had nothing, and who never would – beaten by the life which had catapulted them on to the streets in the first place and further beaten by hunger, despair, fear, boredom and other people’s hatred.
Her doorbell rang. It was Ted, proudly sporting a small, tidy girl. ‘You’re back,’ he announced, then turned to encompass the girl by his side. ‘This is Sinead.’
Sinead extended a neat little hand. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said, with prim self-confidence.
‘Come in.’ Ashling was surprised. Sinead didn’t look like your usual comedy groupie.
In Ted swaggered, then smoothed the couch cushions before solicitously inviting Sinead to sit down.
She placed herself daintily on the couch, her knees and ankles aligned, and graciously accepted Ashling’s offer of a glass of wine. All the while Ted watched her like a soppy hawk.
‘You, um, met Ted at a gig?’ Ashling tried to make conversation, as she scouted on the floor for the corkscrew. She was sure that’s where she’d left it the night before she went to Cork…
‘A gig?’ Sinead sounded as though she’d never heard the word before.
‘A comedy gig.’
‘Oh no!’ Sinead tinkled.
‘She’s never seen my act, says she never wants to.’ Ted gazed at her with isn’t-she-great? fondness.
It transpired that Sinead and Ted worked together, toiling shoulder to shoulder in the department of agriculture. At their Christmas party, as they had drunkenly jived to ‘Rock Around the Clock’, their eyes had met and that was it – love.
Ashling entertained a strange suspicion that Sinead’s advent signalled the beginning of the end of Ted’s stand-up career. But as he’d only ever become a comedian to get a girl, perhaps he wouldn’t mind. He certainly didn’t seem upset.
‘Tonight? You want to go out again?’ Clodagh asked. ‘But you were out last night and the night before and Wednesday night.’
Patiently Marcus explained, ‘I’ve got to keep an eye on the new comics out there. This is my career, I have to go.’
‘Which is more important to you? Me or your career?’
‘You’re both important.’
Wrong answer.
‘Well, I won’t be able to get a babysitter, it’s too short notice.’
‘OK.’
And that, Clodagh thought, was that. Until at nine o’clock Marcus stood up and said, ‘I’ll be off. It’ll be a late one, so I’ll go home instead of coming back here.’
Clodagh was astonished. ‘You’re going?’
‘I said I was.’
‘No. You said it was OK that I couldn’t get a babysitter. I thought you meant you weren’t going to go without me.’
‘No, I meant I was going to go without you.’
‘Ashling, I’ve something to tell you,’ Ted said.
‘What?’ It was a freezing January evening and Ted and Joy had showed up deputation-like, with sleet on their collars.
‘You’d better sit down,’ Joy advised.
‘I am sitting down.’ Ashling thumped the couch she was on.
‘That’s good. I don’t know if you’re going to be upset,’ Ted said.
‘What?’
‘I’ve worried about whether or not you should be told.’
‘Tell me!’
‘You know Marcus Valentine.’
‘I might have heard of him. Duh, Ted, please.’
‘Yes, sorry. Well, I saw him. In a pub. With a girl. Who wasn’t Clodagh.’
All was still, then Ashling said, ‘So what? He’s allowed to be seen in the company of another woman.’
‘I take your point. I take your point. But is he allowed to stick his tongue down her throat?’
A strange expression lit Ashling’s face. Shock – and something else. Joy glanced at her anxiously.
‘You’ve met the girl,’ Ted elaborated. ‘Suzie. I was talking to her at a party in Rathmines one night and I left with you. Remember?’
Ashling nodded. She remembered a neat, pretty little redhead. Ted had called her a comedy groupie.
‘So I, er, asked around,’ Ted went on.
‘And?’
‘And he’s sticking more than his tongue into her, if you take my meaning.’
‘Oh, my good God.’
‘For a freckly bastard he sure is a big hit with the goils,’ Joy observed drily.
‘Oh my good God,’ Ashling repeated.
‘Don’t go all compassionate and start to feel sorry for Clodagh,’ Joy begged. ‘Please don’t go rushing round there to hold her hand.’
‘Don’t be so stupid,’ Ashling said. ‘I’m fucking delighted.’
‘I’m coming over to get my stuff,’ Marcus said.
‘It’ll be ready,’ Clodagh confirmed heatedly.
Fuming, she banged around the house, shoving his personal effects into a black bin-liner. She couldn’t believe how quickly it had all splintered. They’d gone from mutual obsession to near-hatred in a matter of weeks, eddying in a downward spiral from the moment it had stopped being just about sex and started being about real life.
She’d thought she loved him, but she didn’t. He was a boring bastard. The boringest of boring bastards. All he wanted to talk about was his act and about how none of the other comedians were as good as him.
And he needed so much attention. She found it distasteful the way he resented it whenever she focused on Craig and Molly. Sometimes it was just like having three children.
Not to mention that bloody novel he’d started. Garbage! Unbelievably depressing. He took criticism so badly, even constructive suggestions. All she’d said was that maybe the woman in it could set up her own business, baking cakes or making pottery, and he’d gone mad.
And lately he wanted to be out every night. Simply refused to understand that she couldn’t keep leaving her two children. It was hard to get babysitters. It was even harder to afford babysitters on what Dylan was giving her. But more than that, she didn’t want to be out every night. She missed Craig and Molly when she was away from them.
Staying in at home was nice. There was no shame in watching Coronation Street and having a glass of wine.
And the sex. She no longer wanted to do it three times a night. She shouldn’t be expected to. No one did after the first crazy passion had passed. But he was still on for it, and it was exhausting.
But all that was small potatoes compared to the bombshell he’d just hit her with – that he’d ‘met someone else’.
She was boiling with anger and deeply humiliated. Especially because in some remote corner at the back of her head she’d always entertained a suspicion that she was doing him a favour, that it was the luckiest day of his life when she’d fallen out of a stultifying marriage and into his arms. She minded desperately that she’d been dumped. It hadn’t happened since Greg the American jock had lost interest in her a month before he went back to the States.
She was shoving the last pair of underpants into the bag when the doorbell rang. She marched out, opened the door and thrust the bin-liner at Marcus. ‘Here.’
‘Is my novel in there?’
‘Oh yes, Black Dog, the masterpiece, is in there all right. Bin-liner’s the right place for it,’ she said in an undertone, which wasn’t really an undertone at all.
His thundery face indicated he’d heard and he prepared to retaliate.
‘Oh, by the way,’ he threw over his shoulder as
he turned to go, ‘she’s twenty-two and she’s had no children.’ He accompanied this piece of information with a wink. He knew Clodagh had a thing about her stretch marks.
Scalded, she thumped back in. Eventually the first rush of bilious rage passed, and she tried to talk herself into something positive. At least she was rid of Marcus and his jokes and his novel and his moods – that had to count for something.
And it was then that she realized she was in a bit of a bind. No husband, no boyfriend.
Oh fuck.
The Jack Devine fanclub were in full flow. Robbie, the Honey Monster and Mrs Morley were clustered together outdoing each other in their bid to wax lyrical.
Jack had recently passed through the office, looking better turned out than usual. Which, as Trix said, wouldn’t be hard.
‘I wonder,’ she often mused, ‘if anyone has ever come up to him in the street, given him ten pence and told him to buy himself a cup of tea?’
But this morning he was spruce and glossy, his dark suit pressed, his cotton shirt snowy. Even his tumbled hair wasn’t too bad – he sometimes came to work with only the sides of his hair combed and the back still a complete bedhead.
He scrubbed up well, no doubt about it. But when he stopped to pick up his messages from Mrs Morley, his shirt gaped where a button was missing midway down his chest.
This inflamed the fanclub further.
‘A tormented man who can save the world but who needs a good woman to take care of him,’ Honey Monster Shauna declared. She’d been at the Mills & Boons again.
‘Yeah, like he’s got that boho chic thing going on,’ Robbie concluded.
‘He does to be sure,’ agreed Mrs Morley, who wouldn’t have known boho chic from a bar of soap.
‘Wouldn’t you ride him as soon as look at him?’ Robbie asked. ‘Ashling?’
A frantic mouthing session of Don’t ask her began.
But it was too late. Obedient Ashling was already imagining riding Jack Devine, and several emotions galloped across her face, none of which served to reassure her anxious colleagues.
‘She was badly let down,’ Mrs Morley hissed. ‘I’d say she’s off men.’
‘I shouldn’t have gone there!’ Robbie exclaimed. ‘I feel a valium moment coming on.’ Any excuse. He was always popping valium, librium and beta-blockers, for his ‘nerves’.
‘D’you want one?’ he asked Mrs Morley. ‘I’ve had three already today.’
Her eyes gleamed. ‘I suppose it couldn’t do any harm.’
Then she spent the rest of the day lurching around like a zombie, banging into desks, catching her fingers in the keyboard, while Robbie had built up such a tolerance he was blithely unaffected.
Meanwhile, Ashling was nearly as stunned as Mrs Morley. Robbie’s question had knocked her for six and she couldn’t stop thinking about Jack Devine. Her heart swelled up like a balloon as she thought about his narkiness and his kindness, his crumpled suits and his sharp mind, his hard bargains and his soft heart, his high-powered job and his missing button.
He’d washed her hair when he didn’t have time. He’d treated Boo, a piece of human detritus, as the person he actually was. He’d refused to sack Honey Monster Shauna after she’d mistakenly included an extra zero in Gaelic Knitting and people ended up knitting christening shawls that were seventeen feet long instead of three.
Robbie’s right, she realized. I would ride Jack Devine as soon as look at him.
‘Ashling!’ Lisa cut in irritably. ‘For the fifth time, this intro is too naffing long! What is wrong with you? Have you been dipping into the valium too?’
They both automatically looked at Mrs Morley, who was slumped on a chair, dreamily painting her thumb-nail with Tippex.
‘No.’
Lisa sighed. She should be kinder. Ashling hadn’t been like this for ages, not since the first few weeks after Marcus had left her. Perhaps she’d just found out something new and unpleasant – like Clodagh being up the duff. ‘Has something happened with Marcus and your mate?’
Ashling made herself focus on something other than Jack Devine. ‘Actually, yes. Marcus is knobbing someone else.’
‘That comes as no surprise,’ Lisa said scornfully. ‘You know that type of man.’
Lisa had the ability to make Ashling feel very gauche.
‘What kind of man?’
‘You know – not a bad bloke but insecure. Addicted to being loved, but only reasonably good-looking.’ Blimey, she was being polite. ‘Suddenly women like him because he’s famous and he’s like a child let loose in a candy-store.’
But these words of wisdom did little to snap Ashling back to alertness. If anything, they had the opposite effect. She seemed to slide further away from the world and mumbled, ‘Oh, my good God,’ in a startled kind of way. Then her face cleared.
‘Revelations are like buses, aren’t they?’ she asked in wonder. ‘None for ages, then several come at once.’
Lisa gave a smothered scream, and swung away.
Meanwhile, Ashling fidgeted wildly until it was time to leave work and meet Joy. She wanted to share her mind-blowing insights. Well, one of them anyway. The other would have to wait until she’d made sense of it herself.
The minute Joy arrived at the bar in the Morrison, she was subjected to a hail of words from Ashling.
‘… Even if Marcus hadn’t met Clodagh he would still have done a legger sooner or later, he’s too insecure and needy and I should have seen the signs.’
‘Oh. And they were?’ Joy was tugging off her coat and doing her best to rally.
‘I knew he’d given a Bellez-moi note to another girl. Tell me, what kind of man goes around handing out his phone number? If he’s interested in you, he asks for your number, right? Instead of trawling for… for… what’s the word? A positive reaction, I suppose, by giving out his number and seeing who’ll bite.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Yes, I gave him my number twice and he didn’t ring the first time. It’s clear now he was playing some sort of game. Seeing if I liked him enough to give him the number. He wasn’t really interested in me – he was interested in what I thought of him. It was only when I went to his gig that he deigned to ring me.
‘And when I wouldn’t sleep with him the first night. Sulky or what! Such a baby. And all that “Am I the best?… Who’s the funniest of them all?” And you know something else, Joy? I wasn’t exactly without sin, either. Part of the reason I went out with him was because he was famous. So if it backfired, I’ve only got myself to blame.’
‘But you’re making it sound like a total disaster,’ Joy objected. ‘You both got on really well. I know you liked him and you could see how much he liked you.’
‘He liked me,’ Ashling admitted. ‘I know he did, but he liked himself more. And I liked him but for partly the wrong reasons.’ Quietly she admitted, ‘Clodagh said I was a victim.’
‘Bitch!’
‘No, I am. Or rather, was,’ she corrected. ‘Not any more.’
‘But just because it’s all down to Marcus being insecure doesn’t mean you’re going to be friends with Clodagh again?’ Joy asked anxiously. ‘You still hate her, don’t you?’
A short, sharp throb of loss had to peak and disperse before Ashling was able to shrug, ‘Of course.’
63
On Valentine’s Day a big, impressive envelope skittered from the letter-box into Lisa’s hall. A card? Who from? Her blood racing with excitement she ripped open the envelope, then faltered… Oh.
It was notification of her decree nisi.
She wanted to laugh, but couldn’t quite pull it off. The speed with which it had been dispatched by the courts to her solicitor had caught her right out. It had taken just over two months and in her subconscious she’d been sure it would be at least three.
With panicky clarity she realized that she and Oliver were on the home stretch. The way was free and, straight down the track, she saw the end of her marriage rushing towards her.
<
br /> Only six short weeks to go before the final decree was issued.
Then she’d feel better. Closure and all that.
That night she went out with Dylan. He’d been asking her out for the last couple of months – every time he came into the office to see Ashling – and she thought it might cheer her up. Especially as she’d heard not a syllable from Oliver.
Dylan collected her after work and drove her to a pub in the Dublin Mountains, where the lights of the city were arrayed below them, twinkling like jewels. She awarded him top marks for location. He also scored seven out of ten for nice hair and eight out of ten for good looks. And technically, he was very charming and full of observant compliments, so he got seven or eight for that. But she couldn’t warm to him, she found him smooth and hard and beneath his gallant conversation she detected a jaundiced cynicism that would put hers to shame.
Or maybe the problem stemmed from her. She couldn’t shake off the residue of loss that had shrouded her all day.
She drank a lot, but couldn’t get drunk, and the encounter, far from lifting her spirits, only served to depress her. And when Dylan made it very clear how much he wanted to sleep with her, it depressed her even further.
She mumbled something about not being ‘that kind of girl’.
‘Oh, really?’ Dylan quirked his mouth in a manner that conveyed both regret and contempt, and all of a sudden, she wanted to be at home.
In silence, Dylan drove her back to the city, screeching too quickly along narrow mountain roads.
Outside her house she managed to politely thank him, but couldn’t get out of his car fast enough. Once in the sanctuary of her kitchen she ate a walnut whip (she was on a ‘W’ diet and had found a loophole) and wondered, what was the world coming to when even one-night-stands no longer held appeal?
Sitting down, Clodagh crossed her legs and agitatedly bounced up and down on the ball of her foot. Dylan had taken the kids out for the afternoon and was due back any minute, and though he didn’t know it yet, they were going to talk.
Every time they met, things were civil but unpleasant. He was bitter and she was defensive, but all that was about to change.
