What Happened to Us?

by Faith Hogan

  ‘Didn’t you hear?’ Jim shook his head, as though he was talking to a child. ‘Carrie’s only got a date for Ben’s wedding.’

  ‘She can’t have,’ Kevin had a feeling Jim was having him on. How could Carrie have a date? For heaven’s sake, she never went anywhere to meet people. And anyway, it was Carrie – who would Carrie have a date with? ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘Oh, Sandra was full of it. Carrie told Melissa about you two breaking up. She said if she wanted she could choose someone else as maid of honour, that’s so typical Carrie, isn’t it?’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Well, putting other people first,’ Jim looked across at Kevin for a moment, he sighed, as though there was no point explaining. ‘Well, never mind. Anyway, she said that it didn’t much matter. She could still do it, but would it be all right if she brought along a friend.’

  ‘She probably means Anna,’ Kevin felt better at that, as though the world was where he expected it to be.

  ‘No, mate. It’s not Anna.’ Jim smiled now; a patronising flicker of his lips. ‘She’ll be having the room she booked for both of you, double bed and all. His name is…’ Jim scratched his head for a minute. ‘Oh, I can’t remember what his name is now. Sandra never said a word to me, of course. Then Melissa lets it all spill. Never could hold her water, that one. Women, eh?’ He shook his head, perplexed.

  ‘So?’ Kevin gulped down his pint. This was a lot to take in. It was the last thing he’d expected. What did she mean, going off and meeting someone like this? Someone he didn’t even know? At least with him, well, it wasn’t as though they didn’t know Valentina. In many ways, Carrie had vetted her for him. If she was good enough to work in the restaurant after Carrie interviewed her, she had to have at least a brain in her head and something about her. No. Kevin knew Carrie better than anyone. There was some mistake. There was no way she had met up with some bloke in the space of a couple of weeks. But then, he thought about her clearing out all his stuff. Was she making way for someone else? No. He sipped his pint thoughtfully. He managed to ignore the superior twitch about Jim’s lips. No, it was all some mistake. Carrie hadn’t met anyone, it was just absurd. Carrie would be at home now, stuffing herself with Belgian chocolate and guzzling her way through a bottle of pinot noir. He knew her so well. The very idea was preposterous.

  Still, an uneasy feeling settled in Kevin’s lower gut. It mingled with the Guinness making him feel a little nauseous. He made his way back to The Sea Pear. It was strangely liberating having both Andrew and Carrie gone for the evening. It turned out Andrew had booked the evening off weeks earlier. Valentina was well able to manage the front of house. It wasn’t as if they were going to be madly busy. Kevin walked through the restaurant. He felt taller, more in command of his little empire without Carrie there to correct him or shunt him back into the kitchen out of her way. He had thought often in the last few days, what would happen to the restaurant? More so than the house, The Sea Pear was the most important thing they shared. Carrie couldn’t keep working here. She wouldn’t want to keep facing him and Valentina every day, would she? He should make her an offer, he thought, leaning against the old dresser that Carrie had picked up in a salvage yard when they were starting out.

  Outside, he spotted a tall man, loitering for a second, then crossing over towards the old pub on the other side. He watched the man for a minute, he had taken his phone out and was talking while he crossed the street. Obviously, worked out, he decided. The man had broad shoulders and was well proportioned; he looked like one of those men who thought climbing a mountain might be a fun activity. Truthfully, he was the kind of man who made Kevin feel even smaller than he should. Funny, but up against someone who seemed so utterly normal, Kevin shrank into the sulking teenager he’d been years ago. The man turned then, caught his eye and raised his hand, as if there was some connection between them that Kevin didn’t understand. Those lively green eyes seemed to take him in and assess him in one look. Kevin had a feeling the man instantly got his measure and it fell somewhere below what he had expected.

  Across the road then, Kevin spotted Valentina. She was sashaying towards the man with a sense of purpose to her steps. Kevin loved watching the effect she had on other men, but the reaction of this man deflated him, he hardly noticed the Colombian beauty. Instead, he walked towards the kerb when a familiar BMW pulled up. He bent down and opened the driver’s door with a gallantry that irritated Kevin. Somehow, it was all wrong, standing here, in the restaurant watching Carrie with this stranger, as though he was watching a giant screen in the movies, with familiar actors taking on unexpected roles.

  Kevin stepped closer, he couldn’t quite believe what he saw next. Carrie reached into her pocket and drew out the keys of The Marchant Inn, letting both herself and the stranger through the front door without a backward glance at the open-mouthed Valentina. Kevin felt a swell of something close to jealousy as he heard door close firmly behind them.

  ‘Who is he?’ Kevin asked Valentina when she arrived in the door, bringing a blast of cold Dublin air with her.

  ‘Heem, he eez…’ she cast her eyes about trying to find the right word, ‘oh, I don’t know, he eez a nobody,’ she said then, peeling off her new expensive coat.

  ‘Hmph.’ Kevin had long since developed the capacity to communicate a variety of negative emotions with a single sound and a shrug of his shoulders. Valentina didn’t yet understand them. Her automatic embrace curbed his words before they were spent between them.

  *

  Jane hadn’t forgotten that last night, or so many nights beforehand when she’d spent hours sitting on her own, listening to the sounds of the night and nursing her worst fears so even if they were realised, it would probably be a relief in the end. She knew that she couldn’t expect Carrie or Luke to call on her every day. For one thing, she wasn’t even sure if Luke planned to stay in Dublin. It seemed to Jane he had a restless soul and Carrie admitted late one evening that she actually knew very little about him. Rather, it seemed they had been drawn together by the little dog she talked of with such affection. Over the last few days, Luke had taken to calling in to visit her on his own and each of these visits brightened up her days no end. It was on these quiet visits, when the woman beside her either mercifully slept or was surrounded by too many relations to eavesdrop, that he managed to get the real reason she didn’t want to go back to the pub out of her.

  ‘It was fifteen years ago now,’ she’d said softly and reached automatically to the side of her head, still she remembered the stitches and the searing pain that seemed to linger on far longer than it was reasonable to believe was medically possible. ‘It was my fault, completely,’ she drew in her breath, but each time she thought about that night, it became ragged and uneven.

  ‘I don’t believe that we can be absolutely sure that anything is ever our fault…’ he’d said gently.

  ‘Manus had gone to a tournament and I was closing up the bar for the night. I must have forgotten to lock the door. He came home after midnight, through the bar, he stumbled across a robbery – it wasn’t even as if there was that much worth taking, to be honest.’ She shook her head, ‘When the police came, I couldn’t tell them what was missing, that’s how unimportant it was, but Manus was a boxer, he’d fought all his life and trained the best and, well… you can imagine…’ She shuddered when she remembered the injuries they’d inflicted on him. ‘You see, he would have fought fair, but they had a crowbar, they’d come prepared, probably to open a safe or locks or whatever…’

  ‘It must have been terrible, I can see why you’d feel nervous.’

  ‘It’s nerves now, but then… really, I didn’t feel anything at all. It was grief, of course, the worst kind.’ She’d wiped a tear from her eye, roughly, as though it had no right to sit there anymore, she’d cried enough already. ‘We were…’ she stopped for a moment, then whispered, ‘soul mates.’ She’d smiled then, a brave watery smile, ‘Now, I know, I was just lucky to have him
for as long as I did. The trouble is, when you lose someone like that, no matter what the circumstances, you’re never quite the same again.’

  ‘You were brave to stay on, by yourself,’ he said gently.

  ‘There was nothing brave about it, I just did what I did. Leaving The Marchant Inn would have been like closing a door on the life we had together and I could never do that. I was probably in shock for years, to be honest, but you don’t think like that at the time.’ She shook her head, it felt good to tell Luke this, perhaps because she hadn’t spoken about it in so long, only replayed it all over and over in her memory, so it felt like now she was sharing the load. ‘Do you know what the worst part was, when I thought about it later?’

  ‘No,’ he said and again she saw something of Manus in him, as if he was here, right beside her at that moment. ‘Tell me, if it makes you feel better.’

  ‘He never made a sound, they beat and battered him and he took it all in silence so I wouldn’t come downstairs. He died on the bar floor and I didn’t know when he took his last breath – I think that’s been one of the worst things to live with. To think, that maybe, if he’d called out, I could have been there with him at the end.’ She wiped away a gentle tear from her cheek.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he breathed at last. ‘And that’s why you’re not looking forward to going back, I can understand it now.’

  ‘No, that’s not it. No, that sadness will always be with me, it wouldn’t matter if I was living in The Marchant Inn or set myself up in a condo in Malibu.’ She laughed at the very idea of it. ‘No, the reason I don’t want to go back is because I’m afraid. I’ve been scared in my own home for years. I dread when Finch Street empties out at the end of each day and I check the locks about fifty times after I close up.’

  ‘You could always move?’

  ‘I suppose I could,’ she said then, looking across the ward. She sat in silence for a little while, contemplating all the reasons why she couldn’t move and she wondered if there were really all that many. ‘The thing is, I’m not so sure why I can’t move, but I think the only thing that’s kept me there is that I felt Manus wanted me to stay for just a little while longer.’

  ‘Well, you know, mad and all as it seems, perhaps he was right, maybe you did need to stay for a little while longer.’ Luke Gibson smiled at her then and it suddenly felt as if something she couldn’t put a finger on had slipped into place. A warm feeling enveloped her and she just about recognised it as assurance, things might just come right at this late stage.

  Six

  What was she thinking? Melissa’s plane had hardly taken off the runway when she realised the enormity of her words to reassure her friend. How was she going to meet a mysterious man before Melissa’s wedding and manage to be all loved up with him enough to get him to come down to the back end of the country with her? Carrie wasn’t even sure she wanted to meet someone new – certainly, if she did, she couldn’t imagine drumming up the kind of intimacy that being surrounded by her friends would involve. For now, Teddy was as much as she wanted, he had all the perks of Kevin, she could mother and smother him, without having to launder the smelly socks. She tried to calm herself down, thought about the various scenarios. Relationships finish, this she knew better than anyone now. She could just as easily unknot herself from this imaginary face-saver before Melissa’s big day as she had entangled herself.

  Carrie was racing up O’Connell Street. She was late, thanks to missing her bus because she was gabbing to her mother. It was not as though they had anything new to say to each other. That was unkind, once more the guilt of her mother, getting older and not seeing enough of her, stabbed at her. She was just concerned. Pamela Nolan was an active woman and, in many ways, Carrie knew she had no right to feel guilty about not seeing her more often. Her mother was far too busy to be entertaining Carrie or anyone else on a daily basis. That didn’t mean she wouldn’t give Kevin a piece of her mind if she got her hands on him. The first thing she’d offered was a place for Carrie to stay. They both knew Carrie wouldn’t take her up on the offer. It would have annoyed Pamela if her daughter just walked away from everything she’d worked so hard for.

  Carrie stopped at the top of O’Connell Street. She waited for her opportunity to cross once the heavy traffic obeyed the red light that seemed far too slow to show. Just as the lights began to change, her attention snapped towards the exuberant cheering of a group of visiting rugby enthusiasts that stopped on the kerb beside her. She smiled at one of the women tagging along behind them, knowing in some way that feeling that they were alike. The woman was decked out in team colours, but wearing full makeup and neat shoes. She looked bored out of her mind and as if she’d much prefer to be hitting Grafton Street that milling about listening to stories about passes, tries and throws. Carrie didn’t envy the woman one bit and actually smiled, thinking of the imaginary boyfriend that she’d invented in a hot flush of nervousness – what had she been thinking?

  For a short time, telling Melissa that she had met someone else salvaged some of her self-respect. Yes, it was rash, but it had felt good. It was immature; she admonished herself now. Since when did she need a man to make her feel good about herself? It had got her out of a spot. If only Melissa hadn’t brought the dress. In the end, that was what tipped things over. Carrie was a size sixteen, with short arms and legs and she believed she had a back that had more rings than a mature oak – she was not built for silk or any kind of shiny fabric normally associated with weddings. Melissa would want everything perfect and that would be Carrie’s get-out-of-jail clause. She had imagined the scenario perfectly in her mind beforehand. Hours spent trying on dress after dress and nothing within a donkey’s roar of looking passable, never mind elegant.

  And then, Melissa had produced the most divine chiffon and velvet creation in a midnight blue. It was, Carrie had to admit, perfect.

  ‘It found me,’ Melissa had said, delighted with it. ‘Don’t tell, but I picked it up in the market.’

  ‘Second-hand?’

  ‘Well, sort of. It’s made by a local Pakistani woman, she makes a lot more traditional stuff, usually, but she made this for her daughter’s graduation. It’s quite demure, but compared to what her father wanted her to wear, well, I suppose it’s the meeting of two worlds.’ Melissa held up the hem. ‘The stitching is amazing, look.’

  ‘It’s really beautiful,’ Carrie had said and it was, she only sounded doubtful because of Kevin and Valentina.

  ‘Well, come on, try it on. I’m taking a chance, but I’ve met the daughter and your shapes are really similar, so…’ It fitted as if it was made for Carrie. There wasn’t a seam snagging or an unsightly stretch across her round torso, even the length was perfect. What could she say, it was a fait accompli, meant to be. And then she started to think, maybe it was up to Kevin to back out? After all, she had done nothing wrong. Valentina wouldn’t want to meet a busload of their shared friends, Carrie could see her being bored out of her tree within five minutes of arriving. Did he really think he was taking Valentina to share her four-poster bed in the lovely room she had booked months ago? No, he probably didn’t, because Kevin, it seemed to her, hadn’t thought about a lot of things lately.

  Carrie was almost out of breath by the time she reached the restaurant. Andrew was waiting for her, looking at his watch. He was used to her being a fashionable five minutes late.

  ‘Come on, they’ll have given away our table,’ He said, but he was smiling at her. Andrew, truly was a friend. He’d invited her here weeks ago; before the Valentina debacle, and she’d completely forgotten about it until he rang her the previous evening. It was impossible to get a table at Clair’s Kitchen, or at least that was what they’d heard. Andrew had managed to get an invite from the manager. It turned out they were in the same book club and he’d rescued her cat from the jaws of a particularly nasty Labradoodle one evening. He had told her it was nothing, but it had taken three stitches and tetanus shots to put him right. The cat was fine, apart
from a residual nervousness that meant he no longer left her apartment for more than a three-minute toilet break.

  ‘Hi Clair,’ Andrew greeted his friend with a kiss on either cheek and, for a moment, Carrie wondered how much he had to patrol himself while working at the restaurant. In his normal working day, he seemed almost gender-neutral, while here –Carrie took in everything about him – he was a very typical gay man. Everything about his appearance and his gestures, and he seemed right within himself.

  When they were sitting comfortably, in the oversized kitchen chairs she said it to him.

  ‘Ah, you know how Kevin is?’ He smiled and batted away her interest, and the unsaid words between them meant more than they might have a few weeks earlier. ‘Clair is delighted you’re here by the way, she loves The Sea Pear.’

  ‘I don’t remember meeting her before,’ Carrie said, although Clair was the kind of woman who could easily blend into so many other customers.

  ‘Well, she remembers you. She said that the way you looked after customers was an inspiration to her when she started this place.’

  ‘Stop it, she did not say that.’ Carrie looked at him, it was embarrassing, but he raised his eyebrows and she knew he was telling the truth.

  The meal was superb, every morsel cooked to perfection and Carrie enjoyed being out with Andrew. He was good company. She realised, that for as long as they knew each other, they’d never actually spent time like this together before. They shared a mutual respect and friendship based on their working relationship. When it came to The Sea Pear, Carrie knew she could walk away and that all would be well so long as Andrew was there.

  ‘How’s the blog going these days?’ he asked her as they tucked into dessert.