It's Got To Be Perfect

by Claire Allan

  “Call it sister’s intuition.”

  “Well, my sister’s intuition had me worried sick about you yesterday! You should have called! How did things go with Gerry?”

  I heard small cough and a bit of a sniff, as if she was hiding something. I interpreted this in one of two ways. Either she had killed Gerry and disposed of his body in the Liffey or she had slept with him. For a moment I thought she sounded too bitter about the whole “guest invitation” thing to have slept with him and I contemplated life visiting my jailbird sister in some maximum-security jail somewhere. Fecking Darcy would probably still look amazing in a prison-issue orange jumpsuit.

  But then I thought of how she had told me I had nothing at all to worry about when I spoke to her in the wee small hours.

  “Oh. My. God!” I almost squealed. “You fecking slept with him!”

  She coughed again. “It’s not what you think!”

  “Well, what I think is that you met for lunch and you were both nervous, so you had a drink, and then maybe another drink and then another and eventually you ended up back at the flat shagging the arses off each other and the last week of heartache is for nothing because now you’ve just gone back to your starting point again.”

  “You are so wrong,” Darcy said.

  “Oh, right, well, why don’t you tell me how it is?”

  “I will then,” she said petulantly but I was sure I sensed a hint of a smile.

  “Oh Darcy,” I couldn’t help but say, “I hope you’ve not done anything silly.”

  “I promise,” she said.

  And then she told me how they had met. She had been beyond nervous and not at all sure how to play things. It had taken her two whole hours to choose what to wear and whether or not to wear any make-up at all. She had settled for skinny jeans, a loose tunic belted at the waist and some gladiator sandals. And she had tied her hair into a loose ponytail. She was going for casual chic, it seemed. She had been tempted to have a glass of wine before she left but she wanted her wits about her. She knew it would be tough. Gerry always had a strange effect on her. She just had to see him to want to be with him, in his arms, as close as she could be. It had been like that since they had first met and to be honest it used to get quite embarrassing when we got together. There would be Pearse and I, sitting like a pair of dead fish while Darcy and Gerry – both respectable grown-ups in their mid-thirties – would be snogging the faces off each other, with tongues and everything.

  So they had met and he had looked wretched, and she had felt wretched. She wanted to reach across the table and soothe him. Every part of her ached. He was her other half, she said.

  They had tried to talk about everyday things but small talk just wasn’t cutting it – not when there was so much said and indeed so much unsaid between them.

  “I miss you,” he said, after they finished their first glass of wine. “I promised myself I wouldn’t say that to you. I promised myself we would just talk about the practicalities of splitting up but there is nothing in my head now – nothing but the fact that I miss you.”

  Darcy had sat back, every fibre of her body telling her that she missed him too – as much and as fiercely as he missed her.

  “I’m broken without you,” he said. “Nothing is right.”

  Darcy didn’t think anyone actually talked like that outside of movies and cheesy American sitcoms, but it seemed even Dublin on a rainy summer’s day could offer a hint of a happy ending.

  “I couldn’t think of what to say to him,” Darcy told me. “All my brain could think was that I felt exactly the same. But where would that have left us? We would still have the same problems we always had.”

  “So what did you say?” I asked, gripped by this unfolding drama.

  It seems that even though she didn’t know what to say, she said what was in her heart. That she missed him too. They had looked at each other, pain etched across their faces and he had reached across the table and taken her hand.

  “Whatever it is,” he said, “whatever it takes, I can do it.”

  She felt the same.

  36

  “So they did it?” Fionn asked, sipping from her bottle of water (the third of the day) as we had our usual Sunday morning stroll around St Columb’s Park.

  I nodded.

  “So is he coming to the wedding then?”

  “She didn’t say, but I’d say it’s a fair bet it’s either him or David Gest from what I could tell.”

  Fionn looked a little confused but walked on. I have to admit I hadn’t been expecting this turn of affairs at all. In some ways I was happy that Darcy and Gerry had decided to see each other again on a strictly “Let’s see how it goes” basis. On another level I was absolutely terrified that three weeks, or three months or three years down the line nothing would have changed and the pair of them would have to go through an even more painful splitting-up-for-the-second-time process.

  They weren’t absolutely and completely back together. He wasn’t moving back in. He was, however, going to contribute towards the rental costs for the foreseeable future just until they had an idea where things were going. They were going to go for couple’s counselling – Gerry had already made an appointment. Yes, they had ended up in bed and had done the dirty – three times – but Gerry had left mid-morning and for now they were simply dating again. It was romantic. And Darcy was shit-scared – perhaps the most scared she had ever been in her life – except, that is, for the week he wasn’t in her life when, she told me, every day had left her paralysed with fear.

  But he had agreed to talk about the baby issue. He had agreed to talk about his relationship with his father and, while he couldn’t make any promises, he would try and she would try and hopefully they would make it work.

  “You don’t think any the less of me because I fell to pieces without him?” she had asked me at the end of our phone call.

  Thinking of how my life had fallen to pieces itself over the last few weeks, I’d shook my head before saying, resolutely, “No, darling. I don’t.”

  “I hope they make it,” Fionn said, with a smile. “I’m sure they will. They deserve to.” I nodded, because they did deserve it.

  Fionn walked on, a little too fast for my liking, but when I begged her to slow down she waggled her rear in my direction.

  “Do you see this? Do you see my ass?”

  “It’s a perfectly acceptable ass,” I said, confused – and more than a little disturbed.

  “Perfectly acceptable is not good enough,” she said. “Not when I’m walking down the aisle in three weeks. I want to have the best ass of all the asses in the church and nothing less will do.”

  She looked as if she might cry as she grabbed her relatively bony rear end and endeavoured to pinch more than inch.

  “Fionn,” I said, walking up to her and linking my arm in hers, “remember when I told you you weren’t even a Bridezuki?”

  She nodded, a little tearfully.

  “Well, things change. I fear you have gone to the Dark Side, my friend. You are in the full throes of Bridezilladom.”

  She gasped, as if my words had caused her actual physical pain. “I’m not that bad!” she protested.

  “No, darling, you are worse. Your ass is fine. I would kill to have an ass like that. If Argos made a catalogue solely of asses, yours would be the one I would choose. J-Lo wants your ass, it’s so gorgeous. There are knickers in this world whose sole ambition in life is to be on your ass. I don’t get how you can’t see that!”

  “But –”

  “Funny you should say that,” I said with a wink. “Seriously, darling, you are obsessing. I know you want it all to be perfect but you are going to make yourself sick with all this running about. Promise me you will take it easier?”

  She nodded, but I wasn’t convinced. I was sure that if I turned my back for all of three seconds she would be off and running like a rabbit out of a trap – gathering pace until there wasn’t an ounce of fat left anywhere on her body. And
where would that leave us? Apart from the obvious fact that I would look like Pat Butcher as I walked up the aisle behind her waif-like figure, it would make her sick. Then the day she had worked so hard for – and fought so damn hard for – would be for nothing. She’d be too weak to join in the Hokey Cokey or raise her arms aloft for an over-enthusiastic singalong to “Sweet Caroline”.

  “Tea and scones, now,” I ordered.

  “But –” she started again.

  “Have you eaten today?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, then, a scone won’t hurt. Go on, have a wee fruit one. It’s healthy.”

  “I am fecking starving,” she conceded. “And if I drink any more water there is a very real chance me and my kidneys will float off down the Foyle.”

  “Good woman yourself,” I said, leading her from the park to my car where we drove off in search of a homely cafe with scones the size of human hands, real butter, and tea served in mugs with full-fat milk.

  We took a seat in the corner and sat in companionable silence as we lifted the Sunday papers and started a deliciously wicked bitchfest about who was wearing what and who was going where. I was delighted to see Zara Dunne – “an up-and-coming name in the acting world” – papped applying her lip gloss (Haven) while stopped at traffic lights. Hurrah!

  I was just buttering the second half of my fruit scone when Fionn made a rather disturbing choking sound. I looked up, alarmed, thoughts racing through my head of the possible tragedy unfolding before my eyes. We would bury her in her wedding dress.

  But she seemed to have composed herself just as quickly as she had started choking and she was hastily and rather unsuccessfully trying to hide a newspaper in her handbag.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said, her face colouring.

  “Come on, it must be pretty damn juicy gossip for you to want to keep it all to yourself? Is it a three-in-a-bed sex romp? Is it a gay love triangle with some bestiality thrown in for good measure? Is it someone wearing really, really unflattering clothes which make them look like a big eejit?” I had a smile on my face and I honestly, truly expected Fionn to show me some big scandalous tabloid scoop or indeed a picture of Zara Dunne with anaphylactic shock from over-application of a certain lip gloss.

  What I hadn’t expected at all was for her to adopt a very stony face and tell me that it really was nothing, in a way which let me know without doubt that she was lying through her teeth.

  “Fionn. Don’t make me hate you. Give me the paper.”

  She shook her head.

  “Fionn, give me the paper, please.”

  “Annie, it’s nothing.”

  “Clearly it is something so please pass me the paper before I do something we both regret.”

  She looked scared. Proper scared, not just obstinate for the sake of it and I realised that, whatever she was hiding from me, it was something pretty damned serious. And by pretty damned serious I meant even more serious than the possibility of Zara Dunne’s throat constricting while her lips ballooned to such a size that she would never even need to consider any kind of lip-filling treatment ever, ever again.

  Fionn shook her head but I simply thrust my hand in her direction. I meant business and she knew it.

  Gingerly she reached into her bag and pulled out the paper, opening it to the appropriate page and glancing at it, before glancing at me and then back to the paper.

  “Are you sure?” she asked and my sense of impending doom threatened to reach fever pitch.

  “Well, to be honest, I’m not sure but what I am pretty sure of is that whatever you are going to show me now is going to get to me at some stage and I’d rather be forewarned.” A slick, cool sweat broke over my body. What on earth else could go wrong? I dreaded to think.

  Fionn passed the paper to me and my jaw dropped when I saw the headline and the accompanying picture splash.

  Oh Manna! – Celeb Chef in Kitchen Bonkfest

  Oh shit. Oh shit, shit and triple shit. Thoughts of my on-the-desk bonk flooded my brain. Had we been caught? I could barely focus as the newsprint swirled before my eyes. This was it. Done. My career over. There was no way Bob would take me back on after this. And what if Owen saw it? Or Ant? Ant would enjoy this – and he would think I was a dirty slut who bonked rings around me.

  Then, looking at it again, I felt air rush into my lungs as I realised the picture wasn’t of me. Grainy and all as it was – the CCTV footage of Pearse mid-hump beside the spuds – was obviously not me. Not least because I at least had certain standards and bonking with the backdrop of a catering-sized sack of Maris Pipers was beyond my comfort zone.

  Looking closely – and suddenly replaying in my head the scene acted out between Pearse and Toni on Friday in Starbucks – it all clicked into place. Pearse was shagging Toni. And he was doing it in the kitchen at Manna. And restaurant kitchens were generally places which were hygienic. And sex, no matter how safe, was generally not an activity to be carried out in an environment which by necessity needed to be hygienic. All this was ignoring the fact that aside from the unhygienic-ness of humping over the spuds, Toni was very much married – to a rather prominent businessman with rather suspect connections.

  I could see now why Pearse had muttered that he was ruined and I now suddenly knew why that reporter had been so keen to get his number.

  Oh dear, this was really a rather huge mess. Once I had breathed my sigh of relief that it was not me pictured with my knickers round my ankles, I actually felt sorry for Pearse and for Toni, even though I had never really liked her.

  No one deserved to be humiliated in such a way – not even Pearse who had been mean to me on more than one occasion – or Toni who always looked at me with a disapproving expression.

  “The poor bastards,” Fionn said.

  I nodded. Even though we both worked in PR, and even though we were both used to dealing with sticky situations with our clients, we knew this would be a tough one to get out of. This needed more than NorthStar.

  “Her husband won’t be happy,” Fionn said, shaking her head.

  “No. I imagine he won’t.”

  “Christ, the shit is really going to hit the fan tomorrow.”

  “But that’s Elise’s problem. Not mine. She is the Manna woman now. I’m just the poor fecker suspended on full pay who gets to read about her ex-boyfriend’s antics in a café on a Sunday morning!” My voice was just half a level below hysterical.

  Fionn looked scared. “Ex-boyfriend,” she said meekly. “This shouldn’t annoy you.”

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t. Well, it does but not in that way. It’s just a shock. I wasn’t expecting to see Pearse’s bare arse this morning.”

  “They’ve censored the pic,” Fionn said, pointing to the page. “You can’t actually see his bum crack or anything.”

  “But I know,” I said. “I know it is there.”

  Fionn nodded.

  The whole episode left me feeling very unsettled. Was I jealous that Pearse and Toni were now at it? Well, yes and no. I was a little well, meh, that he had moved on even though I had clearly moved on. I suppose there was a part of me that, even though we were no longer together and I was perfectly okay with that, sort of felt as if his penis kind of belonged to me and really it shouldn’t ever bob in and out of anyone else ever again. I pushed that thought right out of my head though. I never wanted to think about his penis ever again and Lord knows if I ever would have if I hadn’t just seen that grainy image of him mid-hump in the newspaper.

  Another part of me – the part of me that was no doubt destined for hell – felt jealous. Not jealous of Toni – not jealous of the in-flagrante humiliation. I was jealous of Elise and the fact that come tomorrow morning her phone would be ringing red hot off the hook and everyone would want a chat with Pearse. It would be a tough day at work, but one of those days when you buzzed from start to finish, feeling as if you were actually a part of something huge and important. (Well, huge and i
mportant in the salacious-celebrity-gossip stakes, but admittedly not really important at all in the grand scheme of things.)

  Another part of me just felt heart-sorry for him. He wasn’t a bad person deep down. He would be crushed by this. He would probably be sitting in his house on the hill, burning every Yankee candle he could find, getting off his little head on pretentious wine and wondering what on earth he was going to do next.

  Trudging back to my flat, my head filled with a hundred and one conflicting thoughts, I stomped up the stairs and then slammed the door behind me before throwing myself onto the sofa very ungraciously. In fact, I landed with such a thump that I knew I would have a phone-shaped bruise on my rear end for the next week. Reaching in beneath me, I pulled out the phone to see the light flashing to indicate there were three new messages. It was a fair bet they were all from Darcy who would no doubt have seen Pearse’s pee-arse in the paper and would be dying to chat to me about it and have a giggle at his (and my) expense.

  Dialling through to voicemail I was shocked – properly, totally and utterly shocked – to hear Bob’s voice on the line.

  “We’ve gone to Defcon 1. We need you. The past is the past. Pearse is in meltdown. His phone is ringing off the hook. Manna is surrounded by paparazzi. We can’t lose this contract, Annie. And by us, I mean us. You have your job back. Welcome to the team. Oh and Elise? Seems she has disappeared. Seems she might have got her hands on some contraband CCTV footage. I know you owe us nothing, and you owe Pearse even less – but he needs you. We need you. Call me. Text me. Poke me on Facebook. Just get in touch.”