Something You Should Know

by Melissa Hill

  “Can we go now?” she asked Roan, eager to get away from the odious Lydia.

  Roan nodded and quickly finished his drink. He took her hand as they walked out of the pub. “I’m sorry you had to find out like that, Jenny,” he said. “I was going to tell you – it’s just, I didn’t know how you’d take it. These things can be a big deal to some people and I suppose … I suppose I was afraid I might lose you.”

  Jenny’s heart went out to him. Up until recently, she too had been in a long-term relationship, and she hadn’t exactly been bending the ear off him about Paul, had she? Didn’t everyone have some kind of a past? Anyway, she thought, with looks like his, it’d be a lot weirder if Roan didn’t have a series of equally gorgeous exes.

  “Forget it,” she soothed, “it’s not important. Don’t feel as though you have to explain anything to me. Your past is entirely your own business.”

  Jenny held his hand tightly in hers, as they walked to the taxi rank across the road. She would be staying in his flat tonight. Karen could believe what she wanted, but as far as Jenny was concerned, Roan was telling the truth. Her friend just didn’t know him as well as she did, that was all.

  Chapter 8

  Karen closed the file in front of her and sat back in her chair.

  “So Courtney, I’ve been asking the questions for the last half hour or so – do you have any questions for me about Acorn Fidelity?”

  She hoped for the sake of her growing migraine, that Courtney O’Connor, the pretty and seemingly mild-mannered school-leaver Karen was interviewing for a position at the Acorn Fidelity call centre, wouldn’t be one of those overly keen teenagers who rattled on and on, hoping to sound like they knew what they were talking about. But by the looks of this one, she’d probably just trot out the standard ‘How long has the company been in business?’ and ‘What opportunities are there for promotion here?’

  But instead the girl shrugged, and asked, “Well, what are the men like?”

  “Pardon?” Karen was so taken aback by the unexpectedness of the question, that, for a second, she forgot all about her migraine.

  “Well, me and my friend – Lisa, she has an interview here tomorrow – we heard that there are supposed to be a load of fine things working in the call centre. Is it true?”

  Karen had her out the door faster than an alcoholic’s weekend.

  Though she smiled as she returned to her desk. Courtney was probably right – there were lots of attractive young guys working in the call centre, but she was certain that the manager there wouldn’t appreciate Karen employing a Britney Spears lookalike, whose sole intention was to chat up her co-workers. She checked her diary and found that little Miss Flirty was her last appointment this morning, and she had nothing pencilled in for the afternoon. It was just as well, she thought, because she didn’t think she could bear it here much longer. She buzzed reception. “Pamela, I won’t be coming back after lunch. Can you hold any messages you have for me until tomorrow please?”

  She hoped that it sounded to Pamela as though she would be away somewhere work-related, and not at home nursing her migraine.

  She stepped out into the cool, crisp, afternoon. It was heading towards the middle of November, which meant that soon she and Catherine Mitchell would need to start organising the Acorn Fidelity Christmas party. Karen would also need to cut down on the amount of junk food she had been eating lately if she was going to fit into any of her remotely partyish clothes. Bias-cut backless dresses and love handles did not work well together. Shane was addicted to chocolate, and they were always pigging out in front of the television lately.

  Karen sighed. She didn’t see too much of Jenny these days. Her friend spent most of her time out with Roan, usually in the pub or at his flat. She frowned at the thought of it. She just wasn’t at all sure about Roan Williams. The thing about him being engaged was a bit of a shock, but he and Jenny seemed happy enough.

  He was strange though. Whenever he called for Jenny, Karen found it difficult to have a conversation with him. It was always small-talk and he seemed uncomfortable, and anxious to get away. She shrugged. Maybe some people were just like that.

  As she crossed Portobello Bridge towards Rathmines, Karen worried about her friend and the changes that had come over her lately. She and Roan rarely joined the others on nights out any more. She had even missed the show that she had planned so eagerly with Tessa, before getting involved with him. Karen wished now that she hadn’t said anything to Jenny about Roan that night in the pub. Shane had warned her not to get involved, but she wouldn’t listen.

  “I think he’s a nice enough guy,” he had told her afterwards. “There’s no reason to believe that he’s lying or messing Jenny around.”

  “You don’t have the benefit of female intuition though, do you?” Karen had grunted. “And the fact that he is happy to sit for hours on end, arguing about football with you, is enough to make him a great man as far as you’re concerned.”

  “Just give him a chance. If you start shooting your mouth off, you could end up losing Jenny as a friend. And, perish the thought, you might actually be wrong about him.”

  Karen shrugged. Maybe Shane was right. And of course, she sometimes tended to be a little over-protective of Jenny, as she always had been.

  Feeling a bit peckish, she decided to pop into the Swan Centre to get something to eat before going home – maybe a salad roll, or at least something healthy. She tried her very best to ignore the mouth-watering smells coming from the chip-shop nearby.

  As she approached the deli counter in the grocery store, Karen heard familiar male laughter coming from one of aisles behind her.

  “Look, whipped cream. You can have great fun with that.”

  Karen looked around in surprise. What were Roan and Jenny doing here at this hour of the day? They should both be at work.

  But catching sight of the couple behind her, Karen soon realised that Roan’s companion wasn’t Jenny. Tall and willowy, the girl was pretty and reminded Karen a little of the singer Alanis Morrisette, with her long, dark, glossy hair. Roan stood beside her as the girl picked up items from the dairy cabinet. Then he looked up. “Karen, hello there,” he smiled.

  Karen didn’t smile. What was he playing at, she thought frowning as they approached her.

  Roan introduced his companion. “This is Alison – a friend from college. Alison, meet Karen – a friend from Rathmines."

  Karen watched the way this girl behaved with Roan, trying to establish how good a ‘friend’ she might be.

  “I thought you’d be at work at this time of day, Roan,” she said coolly.

  “Nah, I have a few annual leave days left to take. I could say the same for yourself, though,” he teased, playfully. “Dossing, are we?”

  Karen looked at him. Why was he being so friendly all of a sudden? Normally, she couldn’t get two words out of him. She picked up her basket and began to walk away. “I’m sure Jenny would like to meet you, Alison,” she said, addressing the other girl, but looking Roan directly in the eye. “She’s a good friend of Roan’s too.”

  As she turned and walked down the aisle towards the checkout, Karen’s face flushed with anger, unable to believe what she had just seen. The guy didn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed at being caught. It was obvious what was going on – he was carrying on behind Jenny’s back with that girl. Her suspicions from the beginning had been correct. Roan wasn’t to be at all trusted.

  How on earth was she going to tell Jenny?

  Chapter 9

  “So what do you think?” Barry Ferguson asked, “Jenny, do you think you could handle it?”

  Jenny sat up. “Sorry, I wasn’t concentrating – what?”

  “I wondered if I could put you on the foreign exchange counter this week. I know you haven’t been here long, but with Frankie leaving us, I’ll need someone to take her place.”

  “OK, no problem,” Jenny said, smiling at the Branch Manager. “I worked for a little while on foreig
n cash in Sydney. I might be slow for the first few days, but I’m sure I’ll get better as I go along.”

  It was a lot busier at the Alliance Trust branch than Jenny had expected. It seemed as though most, if not all, the local businesses had their accounts here. And many carried on as though they were the only ones, each one more self-important than the next.

  Jenny had been a little taken aback by the rudeness of some of the customers. At home in Kilkenny, she knew most of the customers personally, so there was little need for formality. But Jenny couldn’t believe the way some of the Dublin customers barked down the phone at her, demanding to speak to this person or that person immediately and unwilling to be left on hold for longer than a few seconds.

  Her work colleague Olivia had been highly amused when Jenny had told her this.

  “Jenny, you’ll soon find out that the shower of them can be like a pack of wolves –particularly on payday,” she laughed. “Wait until you work downstairs, you’ll think the ones you don’t see face-to-face are absolute angels.”

  It it looked as though she’d find out sooner than expected. She was enjoying working here so far. From the very first day in the staff canteen, everyone had gone out of their way to make her feel welcome, and to help her fit in.

  She heard Barry talking to her. “You’ll be fine, I have every faith in you. You know we’ve all been very impressed with the way you’ve settled in here so far. I heard you on the telephone with Violet Madigan the other day, and she can be a tough cookie at the best of times. I don’t know how many times I’ve been ‘cut off’ while talking to her myself.” He winked and Jenny hid a smile. “I think you’ll be well able to manage downstairs. We’ll put you beside Brendan and if you run into any trouble, he’ll sort you out.”

  Olivia popped her head around the door of Barry’s office to announce his ten o’clock appointment, and Jenny took this as her cue to leave.

  “Thanks, Barry, I hope I won’t let you down,” she said, as she left the room.

  “Not at all, no better woman for it.” The manager instantly turned his attentions towards his next appointment, the owner of a large recruitment agency. “Kevin, how are you. Come in, come in.” Barry boomed, putting an arm around his customer and leading him into his office. “I haven’t seen you since you made that birdie at the twelfth in Druid’s Glen. You thrashed me that day - we’ll have to organise a rematch.”

  As Barry’s office door closed, Olivia saw Jenny’s amused expression and rolled her eyes.

  “I know,” she said, closing a filing-cabinet drawer. “He can be so full of it sometimes, especially with the customers. He’s a good manager though, one of best I’ve ever worked with.”

  “I just hope that I live up to his expectations then. He wants me to start on the foreign exchange counter next week.”

  “I wondered when they’d lay that one on you,” Olivia said, sitting down in front of her computer, and putting on her headphones. “They’ll be down a FX cashier when Frankie goes, and Christmas is on the way. You’ll be fine though – it’s not difficult at all once you get used to it.”

  The telephone rang and Olivia answered it briskly. “ATB Dun Laoghaire, can I help you?”

  Jenny returned to her desk. Olivia was so easy to work with; hopefully the others downstairs would be too. She’d miss the peace and quiet upstairs in the accounts section; the main floor was manic at the best of times. Although her little stint here would stand to her. She now knew of most of the bank’s biggest customers, and was aware that she would need to take extra care when dealing with some of them.

  Additionally, she had got to know the Dun Laoghaire management team quite well. Barry Ferguson had told her that his door was always open, and that she should come to him if she had any problems. It was a nice change from Jenny’s previous manager at Alliance Trust in Kilkenny who had been an absolute ogre, and treated his staff little better than slaves.

  She looked at her watch. It was nearly lunch-time. She wondered what Roan was doing now. Probably tweaking a line of java code or something equally mind-boggling. Jenny barely knew how to use half of the features on her computer let alone program one of the things, but Roan seemed to love his work. She felt a small shiver of pleasure as she thought about him. It was hard to believe that she had only met him a few weeks ago, because it felt as though they had known one another forever.

  If only Karen would stop acting so strangely, she thought frowning. Jenny had explained the situation with Roan’s ex-girlfriend to her a thousand times, but Karen was still suspicious of him.

  “Why didn’t he tell you about her from the start then? Surely he knew it would come out eventually,” Karen had said, shortly afterwards.

  “He told me that he wasn’t sure how our relationship would progress, and if anything would come of it. He didn’t want to lay anything heavy on me so quickly.”

  “You slept together after your first date – what do you mean he didn’t know whether or not anything would come of it?”

  “Karen I’m an adult. I like Roan and I’m pretty certain that he likes me. Why do you have such a problem with that?”

  “I just don’t want you to get hurt, that’s all.”

  “He makes me happy. Why can’t you see that?”

  And he did make Jenny happy. She could understand why he and his ex-girlfriend had broken up. If Roan thought that he and Siobhan were too young to be getting married, it was brave of him to have realised it before it was too late. He had told her that after the engagement, Siobhan had talked about little else but wedding dresses, flowers, and church readings. It had all become too much for Roan, and he realised that he wasn’t yet ready to settle down. He had wanted to put the wedding off for a couple of years, but Siobhan didn’t agree and they had argued.

  “We just didn’t want the same things,” he had said. “It hurt a lot, because we had been together for so long. She wanted me to give up my life in Dublin, and get a job in Kildare, and a house and a mortgage – she couldn’t understand that I love my work. We were on two completely different wavelengths.”

  Jenny had decided there and then that she would never be like Siobhan, she would never ask Roan to give up anything for her. She wouldn’t be that selfish.

  Karen and the others just didn’t understand. It was a pity, because it meant that she and Roan didn’t spend as much time with the gang anymore.

  Still, as long as she and Roan had one another that was all that mattered. Jenny picked up her typing file, switched on her dictaphone and began to type.

  Later that evening, Karen chopped peppers and onions in preparation for dinner. “I met Roan earlier today,” she said airily.

  “I know,” Jenny replied, looking up from the magazine she was reading. “He told me on the phone that you were acting really weird towards him too. What’s going on, Karen? It’s obvious you don’t like him, but could you not just be civil to him – for my sake?”

  Karen was taken aback. The smart git was obviously covering his tracks.

  “I was acting weird for a reason. He was with this girl and they –”

  “For goodness sake, it was a friend of his from college. Is he not allowed have friends now – is that it? I’m really getting sick of this.”

  She threw down the magazine and stood up to face Karen at eye level. “Why the constant innuendo about him? It’s not fair. I don’t go on like that with you about Shane.”

  Karen felt the annoyance rise up from within. Why couldn’t Jenny see what a chancer Roan was?

  “You don’t see Shane gallivanting around Rathmines with other girls, do you?” “Look, Karen, I’ve really had enough of this. Roan has done nothing wrong, yet you’re carrying on as though he’s some kind of criminal.”

  “You didn’t see what I saw. They were joking and laughing and -”

  “So, because he’s joking and laughing with another girl, he’s automatically cheating on me? That’s what you’re trying to say, isn’t it?”

  “Well …n
ot exactly but – ”

  “But what?”

  “I just don’t want you to get hurt by him. He has a history and … ” Karen trailed off.

  “A history? For goodness sake we’ve been over this time and time again. OK, he was engaged and it didn’t work out. Is he not allowed to move on now? I have a history too. I can’t understand what the big deal is.”

  Karen was silent.

  “Well, have you nothing else to say?” Jenny urged angrily.

  Karen took a deep breath. “Jen, do you truly believe that it’s all over between Roan and this Siobhan – his girlfriend of eight years?”

  “Naturally, I believe him. If Shane told you something, you’d believe him too, wouldn’t you?”

  “But Shane is different and –”

  “Oh, for goodness sake ....” Jenny reached to where her coat was hanging on the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out. Where I can get some peace, and I don’t have to listen to you going on and on about Roan as if he’s some kind of weasel.” She stood in the doorway, cheeks red and eyes flashing.

  Karen chopped a pepper furiously. “Fine, suit yourself. But Jenny, you’ve changed a lot in the last couple of weeks. You have no interest in anything but Roan, Roan, Roan. You don’t ask about anything that’s happening in my life, and you tell me nothing about yours. You don’t even go out with us any more and –”

  “Why would I want to – when all I hear is ‘Be careful, Jenny, he has a history, Jenny." She marched out the door, slamming it loudly behind her.

  Karen stood transfixed in shock. The two of them hardly ever fought; it was a longstanding joke throughout their friendship that it was impossible to argue with Jenny. She went over to the window, and saw her friend walking purposely down the street.

  Shane had warned her not to get involved but how could she sit back and let her get hurt? Jenny hardly knew the guy but she had convinced herself that he was The One, just because of some stupid fortune-teller’s ‘prophecy’.