If This is Paradise, I Want My Money Back

by Claudia Carroll

  ‘You’re beautiful just as you are,’ I say gently. ‘Any man’s fantasy.’

  ‘I’m old, haggard and looking down the barrel at a lonely middle age,’ she half-whispers under her breath.

  ‘You’re twenty-eight, for Jaysus’ sake.’

  Then she whips out her Mac bronzer and lashes on even more of it, concentrating on her boobs particularly, I can’t help noticing. Next thing, and I’m not making this up, she starts giving herself a kind of pre-blind-date pep talk. Honest to God, it’s a bit like watching an actor doing a warm-up before a show.

  ‘Hi, it’s so great to meet you,’ she practises, flinging the make-up back into her bag and putting on a miles more seductive and breathier voice than her usual ‘quiet at the back!’ classroom strict-teacher tones. ‘I’m Lexie, I’m twenty-three . . .’ Then she breaks off and double-checks herself in the mirror again, tilting her eyes to the light to inspect the crow’s feet under the fluorescent light. ‘Shite. No, make that, I’m twenty-five and yes, I work in Westwood as a fitness instructor. My favourite aerobics class is bums, tums and thighs . . .’

  I know she can’t hear me, so what the hell, I might as well take advantage and say what I bloody well like.

  ‘Honey, no rudeness intended, but is this really how you want to start off a potential relationship? By lying through your teeth?’

  She’s ahead of me, though.

  ‘. . . I do teach in a regular school, too. Only part-time, though.’

  Right, then. Clearly, not the first time she’s done this, then.

  ‘My name is Lexie, Lexie, Lexie, Lexie, Lexie,’ she repeats over and over like a mantra, hopping out of the car and slamming the door behind her. This must be it, then, the transformation from Fiona Wilson, Higher Level schoolteacher, to Lexie Hart, expert on bums, tums and thighs. Kind of like watching Clark Kent twirl around the phone box a few times until he transforms himself into Superman. Then, only a few steps away, she smacks her hand off her forehead in frustration, does a twirl in her high heels that’s worthy of Baryshnikov, and dives back into the car. Forgotten something, obviously. Next thing, she whips a Listerine mouth spray out of the glove compartment and squirts so much of it into her mouth that my larynx nearly shuts down from the triple-X strength of the minty fumes alone. Another furtive rummage around the back seat, crammed high with textbooks and a pile of essays about Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and she produces a chemist’s bag from under her laptop, lying on the floor. Then she whips out a packet of condoms, looks at them, pauses, thinks for a second . . . and shoves them into her handbag.

  Oh dear God. My plan was not to leave her side tonight, not for a moment, but if she’s planning on hopping into bed with Mr Loves German Shepherds, I am so outta here. Honestly, you’d think they’d issue us angels with blindfolds or something to censor some of the more X-rated stuff we’re expected to watch over. Then Fiona clutches her chest, does a burp that would do a breakfast-roll-eating builder proud, pulls a wedgie out of the bum of her jeans and jumps out, banging the door behind her.

  The things people do when they think there’s no one watching. In fact, I’m only waiting on someone to start picking their nose.

  I’ll never get used to it.

  7.55 p.m.

  Typical Fi, always a few minutes early for everything. Must come from years of handing out detention, and being the poor gobshite that’s for ever in charge of ringing the nine o’clock school bell every morning. Anyway, she walks into Dunne & Crescenzi, a gorgeous Italian restaurant with the best wine list in town, and does a lightning quick scan of the place. For a horrible second her eyes light on an elderly man, sitting all alone in the corner. Nothing wrong with him, except he’s about sixty-five, with a beard so long it’s actually streeling into the bowl of spaghetti Bolognese that’s in front of him. Eughhh. But just then, the restaurant door opens from behind us and a silver-haired woman with a sprightly walk and a reusable Marks & Spencer’s bag hanging off each arm heads over to join him, giving out to him for starting without her, and asking him to order her a large glass of the house red.

  Phew.

  8.00 p.m.

  OK. Fiona’s now sitting at a table for two, strategically positioned so she can see all the comings and goings through the door, and yet still be unobtrusive and discreet. I’m sat right opposite her, and although my disapproval of her picking up fellas online has been well documented, now I’m actually wishing, hoping and praying that Mr Loves German Shepherds will turn up on time, and be handsome and gorgeous and wealthy and kind to his mum, and not any kind of mentalist weirdo who rips heads off chickens or dances naked at the full moon at all.

  8.05 p.m.

  Fiona’s studying the menu, but every time the door opens, she nearly gives herself whiplash looking over, the eyes dart up and the look of hope in them would nearly break your heart.

  Please, please, please let him sweep her off her feet. And be kind, caring and considerate. And not into weird internet stuff like threesomes or swingers’ parties, or have a basement in his house stuffed full of iron maidens and whips and bondage gear.

  And that last one is no idle worry, by the way. May I be struck down this minute if this is a word of a lie, but one time Fiona struck up a relationship with a guy she met online, who turned out to be a university professor of history at Trinity College. That bit older, divorced with grown-up kids, and a dead ringer for Michael Palin, according to her. Match made in heaven, you might think. Except that life isn’t like that, is it? They’d a few perfectly civilized dates, dinner, the theatre, long walks in Powerscourt Gardens, all very respectable and above board, and all Fiona could think was, when the hell is this fella going to make a move on me? After a month, he still had yet to lay a finger on her, not even a chaste peck, nothing.

  Until one fateful night, he invited her over to his bachelor pad for supper. It was exactly how she imagined a history professor lived: in a crumbling old early Victorian townhouse, most likely held up by the wallpaper, with dusty first-edition books lying around the place in piles everywhere. ‘Would you like a tour?’ he politely asked.

  ‘Love one,’ she simpered, wondering was this just a clumsy ruse to snog her once they got to his bedroom? Which would have been absolutely fine by her, I mean, after four weeks of being courted like a Brontë heroine, her hormones were hopping all over the place. So far so good, until they got to his basement. Which was one huge, big open-plan space covered in trellis tables, wait for it, with hundreds upon thousands of tiny toy soldiers all re-enacting scenes on an hour-by-hour basis from the Battle of Waterloo. Stunned, Fiona then made the fatal error of shoving her handbag down on top of a cluster of tin soldiers, and knocking the ‘eight a.m. till eight-thirty, Mont-Saint-Jean’, tableau all to the ground, which made history professor guy so apoplectic with fury she actually thought he was having an anxiety stroke.

  Needless to say, she never heard a word from him again, but I did have great crack slagging her about what his intentions were. The two of them dressing up as Napoleon and Josephine, maybe; him chasing her round his basement with one arm shoved into his breast pocket shouting, ‘I’m coming for you, do not wash,’ and her squealing, ‘No, not tonight!’

  8.10 p.m.

  You know what, God? I changed my prayer. Please let this German Shepherd guy just turn up. I’ll settle for that.

  8.15 p.m.

  Still no sign and now poor Fiona’s starting to get antsy. I know by the way she keeps flicking the menu over and over again. She orders a cappuccino, then whips out her BlackBerry and starts clicking away at it, pretending to be checking it for messages, I’d guess.

  ‘God bless the mobile,’ I say to her, ‘the ultimate sitting-alone armour’. Then I look over her shoulder and I realize.

  She’s emailing me.

  8.20 p.m.

  From: fiwilson@hotmail.com

  To: charlottegrey@gmail.com

  Dearest Charlotte

  Me. Yet again. I know, I know, I know you c
an’t read this. Of course I know, and please don’t think I’m going mental by emailing you all the time and forwarding you on all those YouTube links. I suppose half of me thinks that someday, somewhere you’ll eventually get to read these, and who knows? Maybe even end up having a laugh over them. Plus, it’s just about keeping me sane; this way, I feel that in spite of what’s happened, at least I can keep in contact with you. Although I do stress that I only sent you the Rick Astley link of him singing ‘Never Going To Give You Up’ for the sheer post-modern irony of it.

  Sometimes Fiona’s that bit too clever for me and I’m left scratching my head and going ‘huh?’.

  But I read on, right over her shoulder.

  . . . I’m missing you so much, it hurts. And what’s weird is that I keep forgetting you’re not at the other end of the phone. If you only knew the number of times something funny happens in work and I’ve thought, oh I must tell Charlotte . . . and then I remember. The other day, for instance. The Junior Certs are allowed to bring calculators into their maths exams, and one of them forgot hers. So Mary Bell, their year head, called the kid’s mother and said find the calculator and get it back to the school asap. But, in her mad dash, the poor frazzled mother brought the remote control for the DVD instead. We were all falling around the staff room laughing, and I thought, wait till Charlotte hears, she’ll howl, and then I remembered. Anyway, keeping in touch with you is just making all of this bearable. That and going to see you as often as I can.

  She looks at her watch for about the two hundredth time.

  8.25 p.m.

  On she types, and on I read.

  . . . OK, the thing is, there could be a perfectly valid explanation why he’s late.

  Come on, Fi, like what? Some German Shepherd-related emergency? His dog bit a small child that had to be rushed to the A & E? The dog ran away with no muzzle on, and this guy is now combing the greater Dublin area with the ISPCA trying to find the mutt before it starts snarling and taking lumps out of innocent strangers?

  . . . lots of reasons why he’s delayed. Traffic for one. Or maybe he got the date wrong. Or maybe he was in a car accident on his way here. Or, better yet, got mugged in town this afternoon and they took his mobile, which is why he hasn’t called to say that he’s delayed. Then when he went to report it to the police, they somehow got it all wrong and arrested him by accident, and now he’s sitting in a police station somewhere, protesting his innocence and saying, ‘But I can’t possibly take part in a police lineup, I have a date, a date, I tell you!’ This to be accompanied by much banging and thumping of his fists on the table, like in all those miscarriage-of-justice movies.

  Poor old Fi. She was always great at spinning yarns; with her love of fiction, she really is a natural English teacher. I think, though, she must be reading my thoughts and slowly starting to face up to the unfaceupable. The poor girl has just been stood up, in public, without him even having the manners to call, text, or email and cancel.

  Bastard. Unimaginable, rude, bloody bastard.

  Inwardly she admits defeat. And although she must feel like overturning a table, she manages to ask for the bill in a slightly-too-bright voice, leaves a way-too-generous tip, and is still able to leave with her head held high, bless her brave little soul. I walk her back to the car and she clambers in, looking numb and disappointed and silently mortified all at the same time. It’s only when I spot the pile of essays on A Christmas Carol lying on the back seat, waiting to be corrected, that the brainwave comes to me.

  Suddenly, with astonishing clarity, a lightning bolt of inspiration strikes. And in a split second, I know exactly how to help Fiona. There’s just something else I need to check out first. Something important. Something so obvious, I can’t believe I never thought of it before.

  It doesn’t even take me all that long. That’s how confident and secure I’m getting here in the angelic realm. In fact, I’m so completely and utterly blown away by what I’ve just discovered, and also what I’m about to do for her, that, to be honest, I’ll be very surprised if I don’t get promoted to, like . . . archangel or something after this, I think, smug as you like. Best part is, all I have to do is wait till Fiona’s asleep, so I can get to work.

  She goes back to her gorgeous little house, kicks off her shoes, switches on the telly and pours herself a large glass of Pinot Grigio, her tipple of choice. By now, she seems . . . actually quite OK after what’s just happened, but then, as I say, Fiona’s not a high/low type person like me or Kate. She’s not given to whingeing or sniffling or flinging stuff around the place in a temper, as we are. She tends to deal with knocks quietly, silently, inwardly, too proud to let any chinks in the armour show. Anyway, she slumps back on the sofa, looks wearily around her and takes a big, lovely, nerve-calming gulp of wine.

  Then she picks up a pile of essays she’s lugged in from the car, and after correcting only two of them, with much flourishing of her red biro and mutterings of ‘that is NOT an answer’, she’s just about done draining off the glass of wine. It does the trick. In no time at all, she stretches her feet out on the sofa and starts to doze off, knackered from a long day’s work and a night’s being stood up, God love her.

  Right then. That’d be my cue.

  Don’t get me wrong, what I’m about to do is extremely tricky, this is my first go at attempting it, and I really have to concentrate. Every little detail has to be right or I’ll blow it. I remember back to everything I learned on my angelic crash course, really focus hard on what I’m trying to achieve, then, with a snore from Fiona that you’d nearly confuse with a Zeppelin passing overhead . . . I’m on.

  Next thing I know, her eyes are wide open and she sees me. And what’s completely weird is that I know she’s fast asleep because the cushion she was lying on is now looking a bit like the Shroud of Turin, there’s that much make-up mashed into it. She sits up, looks right at me, blinks her eyes exaggeratedly, shakes her head, then slowly, in total and utter disbelief, she gingerly reaches out to touch me, patting me up and down my arms and shoulders.

  Honest to God, it’s like something out of a cartoon.

  ‘Sweet Baby Jesus and the orphans,’ she eventually says, with her jaw somewhere around her collarbone. ‘Am I seeing things?’

  ‘No, babe, and apologies in advance if I gave you a heart attack. You’re not hallucinating, it’s me. Really.’

  ‘OK,’ Fiona says slowly, propping herself up on one elbow then rubbing her eyes incredulously. ‘The part of my brain that’s still functioning is telling me that this is a dream. I know it’s only a dream, I know right well this isn’t happening, but I’ll say this for my subconscious mind: bloody hell, it’s certainly done its revision. You look . . . well, just like you. You sound like you. You even smell like you. Clinique Happy, your favourite.’

  ‘Oh, Fi, do you know how good it is to be able to talk to you? I’ve so much to tell you, but we don’t have much time . . .’

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ is all she keeps saying, over and over. ‘This is so incredible! I just can’t take it in . . .’

  ‘Now, don’t get alarmed, hon, but there’s somewhere I need to take you, and we really need to go right now . . .’

  She’s too dying for a catch-up chat though. ‘No, no, no, you’re not dragging me off anywhere till I talk to you. What the hell, if this is a dream it’s certainly the nicest one I’ve had in a long time, and it certainly replaces the horse’s head at the foot of the bed I’d probably be hallucinating about otherwise, given the nightmare of an evening I’ve just had.’

  ‘I know, babe. I was with you the whole time. And I hate to say “I told you so” about all those nutters you meet online, but wait for it, here it comes, no one can download love . . .’

  OK, now she and I are doing this thing we do, whenever we haven’t had a chat for a good while (more than twelve hours, usually), of talking over each other excitedly, both of us tripping over ourselves to get our stories out. Honestly, you should see the pair of us in act
ion, we’re capable of keeping three or four totally separate conversations on the go simultaneously, and still keeping perfect track of exactly what the other one is saying.

  ‘That’s so weird, I was thinking about you in the restaurant, God, I even emailed you . . .’

  ‘I know. Sure, I was standing reading it right over your shoulder . . .’

  ‘I do that a lot, you know. Email you, I mean, and sometimes I even phone your mobile, just to hear your voicemail message, it makes me feel like you’re OK . . .’

  ‘I am OK, I really am . . .’

  ‘Then I got back here, and I was just so stunned at being stood up like that. Was tonight boring? My God, I nearly spiked my own drink with Rohypnol. Then I got back here and kept thinking, I was just on a date; I should have a tongue stuck in my ear right now. Thing is, he sounded nice online, he really came across like one of the good ones, and you know me, Charlotte, I’ve pretty low expectations of men in general, but I just couldn’t believe that he’d go and do that . . .’

  ‘Mr Loves German Shepherds is clearly a rude bastard, and you’d a lucky escape if you ask me. He’s probably into threesomes and bondage, and all sorts of kinky shite.’

  Then something strikes me.

  ‘Fi, can I ask you something?’

  ‘Anything you like. God, it’s just so good to see you.’

  ‘Do you go out on your own to meet fellas you pick up online a lot?’

  ‘Go on, love, rub it in, why don’t you? Yes, is the answer. You know me: if he’s straight, single and not in prison, then hey! He passes the Fiona Wilson test.’

  ‘But . . . what about all those times that I badgered you to come out with me and James, and you’d cry off? There was I thinking you were home alone, face stuck in the computer, and all the time you were out dating.’