Spin the Bottle

by Monica McInerney

  ‘The whole glorious mess.’ Lainey counted the items off on her fingers. ‘Eggs – fried, scrambled or poached, or more likely just burnt. Bacon – probably underdone or burnt. Tomato – cut up or whole, rolling around the plate. Sausage – small and pink or burnt. Black pudding – delivered to their table by me either gagging or wearing a surgical mask.’

  ‘It’s actually delicious, you know.’

  ‘Delicious? A sausage made out of congealed blood? If you’re a vampire, maybe. So are you hungry at the moment? I could cook you bacon and eggs now for dinner, if you like, get into practice. It’d save me time in the morning, actually, if we got it over and done with now.’

  Joseph stood up. ‘No way. I want to visit that pub with the thatched roof we passed on the way here.’

  ‘Okay, a drink first and then dinner’s on me. Or on Aunt May, if the truth be told. Come on, you two. Let’s go celebrate.’

  ‘What are we celebrating?’

  ‘The start of my renovations. You’ve both confirmed everything I thought myself. Aunt May left me a nice big renovation fund and I’m going to ring Mr Fogarty first thing on Monday and get the whole thing started.’

  ‘Renovation?’ Eva said, trying to keep up with Lainey’s bionic thought processes. ‘You’re going to paint the whole place, you mean? Redecorate it? All on your own?’

  Lainey gave her friend a warm, friendly smile. ‘On my own? Oh no, not necessarily.’

  Eva went still.

  Lainey turned the smile up a notch. ‘What do you think, Evie? How do you feel about a nice break in the country? A chance to get out of that Dublin smog? A chance to give your assistant manager a taste of responsibility? Not to mention all the exercise you would get. Did you know that painting is apparently the equivalent of a complete body work-out in a gym? So it wouldn’t be renovating so much as a lovely stay in a health farm, with me as company, your oldest friend. Think of all that catching up we could do. We could reminisce about the past, share our hopes and dreams for the future…’

  Eva put her hands over her ears, shut her eyes and groaned.

  Lainey called Mr Fogarty’s office early Monday morning. He listened patiently as she explained the situation, then kept her waiting for a few moments as he padded across the floor on his little feet to get a copy of the will.

  ‘Yes, Lainey, your aunt has earmarked a sizeable sum, presumably with the intention that you might like to use it in an aggregate way but certainly there is no codicil disallowing you from spending it all in one hit, as it were. And you may as well spend it. Any money left over from that fund at the end of the twelve months is to be divided between her other beneficiaries.’

  ‘And how much is it, Mr Fogarty?’

  In a low voice, he named a high figure.

  Lainey whistled. ‘I could do a fair bit with that, couldn’t I?’

  ‘You could go for your life, as you Aussies say.’

  ‘Mr Fogarty, how do you know an Australian phrase like that?’

  ‘Lainey, I must confess I watch Home and Away every single day.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THREE DAYS LATER EVA arrived after breakfast, dressed in the strangest pair of overalls Lainey had ever seen. They were a faded green, patchworked in dozens of scraps of material, tied at the back with a piece of rope. She’d even tied a green ribbon in her long plait.

  ‘You drove down in that?’ Lainey said, pretending to be horrified. ‘What if you’d got a flat tyre and someone had seen you?’

  Eva was very proud of her overalls, cast-offs from her Uncle Ambrose. ‘You’re just jealous, glamour puss. Remember Joe and I spent months last year renovating our flat. I know how to strip wallpaper and paint walls in my sleep, and let me tell you your glamorous clothes won’t last ten minutes.’

  Lainey looked down at her low-slung jeans and cashmere jumper. ‘Glamorous? These?’

  ‘Yes. It seems you can take the girl out of Melbourne but –’

  ‘You can’t keep her sane. Okay, okay, hold on, I’ll go and change.’ Minutes later she was back wearing her pyjamas, with a bright scarf tied jauntily around her short dark hair. ‘They’re the oldest things I’ve got. Don’t laugh. Better I ruin these than my other clothes.’

  Eva eyed them. They looked like they were made from silk, beautifully cut, like an elegant pantsuit except for the fact they were a bright, gaudy pink. ‘They’re designer label, aren’t they?’

  ‘Well, everything in the world is designed in some way, isn’t it? Sorry about the colour. They were samples from a client and for some reason no one else wanted this pair.’

  ‘I can’t imagine why.’

  They tackled the front bedroom first, steaming off the first layer of wallpaper, only to find several other layers underneath.

  ‘This must go back decades,’ Lainey said as she dug away at the damp paper, pulling off a big wet wad. ‘My father probably used to look at this stuff.’

  They scraped away as music from the radio filled the room. Eva leaned down and turned it off. ‘I’ve realised I have you trapped now, so you have to answer my questions. Will you tell me about Adam, Lainey? All about him?’

  Lainey paused mid-scrape, a long strand of orange wallpaper dangling near her face. ‘There’s nothing to tell. Not any more.’

  ‘But I’d still like to hear about him, what he was like, so I can understand how you’re feeling. I never got to meet him while I was in Melbourne. I feel like I need to get a picture of him in some way.’

  ‘Didn’t I send you photos?’ An image leapt into Lainey’s mind of the photos she had sent Eva – she and Adam on a trip to the Great Ocean Road, arms around each other at the Twelve Apostles. A smiley Japanese man had taken the photo, she remembered. Afterwards, they’d driven back to Apollo Bay and had lunch in a pub there, then decided on the spur of the moment that they’d stay the night. They’d imagined a big, airy room overlooking the water, a queen-sized bed, French windows open to the air, muslin curtains drifting and swaying in the air currents. ‘This is all we’ve got left,’ the hotel manager had said, pushing a key across to them. It hadn’t been a room so much as a converted broom cupboard. Harry Potter would have felt at home. There was a narrow single bed, a battered-looking trundle bed pushed underneath it, a small cupboard and that was all. Not even a TV. ‘Well, we shall have to make do,’ Adam had announced in a fake British accent. He had lain down, a third of his legs dangling over the end, as he must have known they would. Lainey had laughed at the sight, taking Adam’s outstretched hand, falling forward as he wanted, lying stretched on top of him. He had traced her cheek with a long finger, then cupped the side of her face in his hand. ‘I’ve often read in books about enchanting young women throwing their heads back in laughter. You do exactly that. It’s lovely.’ She remembered thinking what an oddly formal speech that had been and remarking on it. ‘I find it best to be polite,’ he’d said then, speaking in the British accent once more. ‘Miss Byrne, may I have permission to remove your outer garments, to first kiss your shapely body through your exceedingly sexy undergarments and then remove them swiftly so that I may –’ She’d been laughing and saying yes all at the same time as he did that and a bit more. She blinked and erased the image.

  ‘Lainey, are you listening? I did see the photos but what was he like as a person?’

  Kind, funny, sexy. Lainey blinked again. It wouldn’t get her anywhere thinking of those things. ‘He’s hardworking. Really motivated.’

  ‘That sounds more like a job reference. What’s he actually like?’

  ‘Friendly. Good-mannered.’

  ‘Now he sounds like a labrador.’

  Lainey wasn’t finding this easy or funny. ‘Eva, no offence, but do you really need to know? I mean, it’s over between Adam and me, why do you need to find out what he was like?’

  ‘I suppose I’m trying to work out why you were so sure that it had to be over. Please don’t get defensive. I just want you to be happy, you know that.’

  La
iney started scraping again. ‘Why is it that as soon as anyone gets married they immediately assume all their single friends want to be wed as well? I’ve been single for years before this, you know, and I didn’t curl up in a dried-up old ball of dust and die.’

  ‘I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being single or anything about you getting married. I’ve just been doing a lot of thinking about you being here and I’m wondering if there’s a reason for it.’

  ‘We’re currently standing in the reason, remember? This B&B? And the money my father needs to get better?’ To her embarrassment, her voice faltered.

  Eva stopped working and went over to her immediately. ‘Oh, Lainey, I’m so sorry. There’s me interrogating you about Adam. Your dad will be fine again, you wait and see.’

  Lainey put down the scraper. ‘I’m sorry, too, for being snappy, especially when you’ve been so fantastic about coming down to help me, I’m so grateful to you. It just gets at me sometimes. Ever since he had that accident, it’s like I’m on edge, waiting for something else bad to happen in my family.’

  Eva hugged her. ‘That’s not surprising. It was an awful few weeks for you all, wasn’t it, when you didn’t know if he was going to pull through or not.’

  ‘It’s been an awful year. It’s like it had a ripple effect. Everything else is shaky since that happened.’

  ‘Everything? Like what?’

  ‘Ma said she’d been thinking about leaving him.’

  ‘But she’s been saying that for years, hasn’t she? She left him once before and came back, remember?’

  Lainey remembered it very well. It had happened the year before they left for Australia. Hugh had been a baby, Lainey about thirteen, fourteen. She’d known for weeks that something was wrong, coming in and finding her mother crying, hearing voices raised long after she’d gone to bed, her mother lying in bed all day, unhappy, while Hugh wailed in his cot in the nursery. Then one day Lainey had come home from school and her mother wasn’t there. Her father and a neighbour had been at the kitchen table. ‘Your ma’s gone away for a little while. With Hugh.’ The mother of one of Lainey’s schoolfriends had died and she had been told her mammy had gone away to God. ‘Is Ma dead, is that what you mean?’ she’d asked matter-of-factly. Her father had actually smiled. ‘No, she’s not dead. She needed to go away.’ ‘Where?’ ‘She’s gone to England.’ ‘Why?’ ‘No more questions, Lainey. Off to bed now. You’re going to have to be good now and help look after Brendan and Declan, all right?’ ‘When’s she coming back?’ There’d been an exchange of glances between her father and the neighbour. Lainey had clearly seen it. ‘I don’t know for sure,’ her father had said.

  One afternoon, two months later, she’d come home from school and her mother had been sitting at the kitchen table, Hugh on her lap, as though she’d never been away. ‘You’re back,’ she’d run into her arms. ‘I’m back, Lainey.’ And that had been that – no further explanation, then or later. Less than a year later the family had moved to Australia.

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ Lainey said now.

  ‘So they got through that hiccup, whatever it was about. Besides, haven’t they always had a fiery sort of relationship?’

  ‘This is different. She used to enjoy their fights, I know she did. They both did. This is different, as though she’s really fed up with him.’

  ‘But it must be hard for her, looking after him all day.’

  ‘But she married him for better or worse. She has to stick with him.’

  ‘Has to? Lainey, I don’t remember you being this conservative.’

  ‘What’s conservative about wanting your parents to stay married? Are your parents happy together, Evie?’

  ‘I suppose they are. I mean, they go away together and they talk a lot, so I suppose they are.’

  ‘Did they ever fight in front of you?’

  Eva frowned as she tried to remember. ‘Fight? Um, I don’t know really.’

  ‘Then they didn’t, or you’d be able to remember straight away. I thought it was only when you’re a kid that you’re supposed to hate hearing your parents fight, but I think it’s worse as an adult.’

  ‘Lainey, please, can’t you try and relax a bit? Things will work out.’

  ‘I guess I’m just worried what will happen if I’m not there to help if Ma gets worn out.’

  ‘Your brothers are going to have to step in, then. They’re not babies any more, Lainey. Ring up and ask them to help. Maybe they haven’t even noticed how hard it’s been for your ma.’

  ‘Of course they haven’t noticed. Brendan’s too wrapped up in his work and the kids, Declan looks after Declan, and Hugh… well, you know what Hughie’s like.’

  ‘Then you can’t do anything more about it, except what you’re doing now, living here for a year so they can get more money. And that will ease all the tensions, won’t it, once your da can sort out all the bills?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Lainey said, hoping it was true.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  BY THE NEXT AFTERNOON two rooms were completely scraped back to bare walls. The old wallpaper was piling up in a damp heap in the middle of the hallway, beside the large tins of paint waiting to be applied. In the paint shop the day before, armed with a fat cheque from May’s estate, Lainey had made a decision about the colours. No pale walls, no more dull cream paint anywhere – with that grey sky outside, she needed some colour in her life and paint was the closest thing to hand. The living room would be a bright apricot, the hall a warm red, each of the bedrooms a different colour, shades in some way reflecting Tara, Eva had suggested. They’d settled on different autumn shades of green, orange, red and even a purple. It wasn’t exactly traditional, but it was certainly welcoming. They had worked right through until midnight the night before, stopping to eat fish and chips fetched by Lainey in Dunshaughlin, then falling into bed, exhausted.

  They finished scraping the other two guest bedrooms and the downstairs living room by the end of the day. While Eva washed and changed, Lainey set up her computer and collected her emails for the first time in some days. She watched with pleasure as six messages poured into her inbox.

  There were three from work, including the weekly circular updating all the employees on the week’s events. Lainey had asked to be kept in touch. She skim-read it, fighting a flicker of jealousy as she read Celia’s report. Talk about gush-o-rama, she thought. Everything had been wonderful, top-drawer, smooth and slick, seamlessly organised. Surely something had gone wrong? The microphone squealing feedback in the middle of a speech? The backdrop falling off the wall right at the crucial moment? All the guests contracting food poisoning caused by Celia booking a dodgy caterer?

  There were two jokes from Hugh, neither of them funny. Best of all, there was a long, newsy one from her friend Christine, berating her for not writing properly yet: ‘you call that one-line email keeping in touch??? I want more news than weather reports and scenery descriptions, madam!’ There were several paragraphs of work gossip: ‘That witch of a boss of mine said no to a payrise, so I now have my nose severely out of joint and will jump ship at a moment’s notice’. There was also a scathing review of a film Christine had seen: ‘Not that you’ll get to see it. I don’t suppose you have films in rural Ireland, darling, do you?’ As Lainey read to the bottom her heart gave an odd flip. ‘PS A gang of us went to Adam’s restaurant for Kim’s birthday last Saturday, wanted to make sure he isn’t pining to death without you. The place was packed so we only got to wave at him in the kitchen. He was wearing this great hat, rriit reel (that was the sound of a wolf-whistle). You must have been MAD to leave him behind!!! His manager was telling us he’s started opening lunchtimes as well as seven nights a week now, obviously trying to fill those long empty hours in his life without you…’

  Lainey read the final paragraph three times. He was opening lunchtimes now? He wouldn’t have a minute to himself if he was doing that, between all the shopping and the preparation he’d need to do, let alone the c
ooking. ‘Obviously trying to fill those long empty hours in his life without you…’ She wanted to ring him suddenly, ask him if he was all right, whether he should really be working those long hours. Then she remembered the last time they’d seen each other, and the cold look he’d had in his eyes. She didn’t think he’d particularly want to hear from her, somehow.

  She started a reply message to Christine, fingers over the keyboard, trying to find the words to tell her she and Adam had broken up. Then she realised she didn’t want to tell Christine yet and she wasn’t exactly sure why not. At that same moment she also realised that she didn’t like the idea of them going to the restaurant for Kim’s birthday. As she re-read Christine’s email, there was a quick battle in her head:

  Mature Lainey: ‘Of course it was all right for Kim to go to Adam’s restaurant. She can go to any restaurant in Melbourne that she likes.’

  Immature Lainey: ‘How dare Kim go to Adam’s restaurant! I’m barely out of the country before she’s moving in on him.’

  Mature Lainey: ‘That is great that my friends are supporting Adam’s restaurant like that. I’ll have to email them back and tell them. And I should probably tell them that Adam and I have broken up, in case there are any awkward moments in the future.’

  Immature Lainey: ‘No way am I letting Kim know that Adam is free. The last thing I want is to come back home and find he and Kim are a couple.’

  She stared at the screen, thinking hard. Was that the last thing she wanted? And why was that the last thing she wanted? Because she wanted Adam for herself still?

  She couldn’t stop herself. Her fingers seemed to find the keys of their own volition, not replying to Christine, but opening a new message, keying in the email address she knew off by heart. The blank white square invited her to pour out her thoughts, to say sorry, to admit she’d made a terrible mistake.

  To: adambaxter@ozmail.com.au Re: us

  Dear Adam