2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie

by Brian Gallagher

  She passes me, as if painfully aware of my presence but too ashamed to look into the eye of a stranger.

  Where is she going?

  I approach her front gate and stop. My eye is caught by something bright on the ground. It’s an earring. A silver oval ring about two inches in diameter. I pick it up. It’s somehow familiar.

  Nicole has stopped at a yellow Fiat Cinquecento not far from my own car. She is fumbling in her bag for her keys. Now she’s piling out the contents of her bag on top of the short sloping bonnet. Make-up, small bottles, notebooks, pieces of paper, coins.

  I go towards her. I don’t care. I quicken my pace.

  “Excuse me…” I shout, holding up the earring for her to see. “Is this yours?”

  She flashes a quick look towards me but then looks back down and continues to fumble for her key, only more desperately now. She finally takes out a bunch of keys, chooses the correct one and sticks it into the lock.

  I go up to her, holding out her earring.

  She opens the door.

  With one hand on the rim of the door, her eyes meet mine. She is totally different from before, crushed-looking. Her good eye is wide open and pained, and streaked with mascara. Visible through strands of stuck-together hair is a bare pierced earlobe.

  When she takes the earring from me I notice that her hands are trembling.

  “They’re lovely earrings,” I tell her.

  I must be having a positive effect on her because she’s starting to sob now – despite the fact that in her book I am a total alien.

  My hand moves, as if by itself, on to her arm. “You can’t drive in that state.”

  “I can’t stay here. I’m going to a friend’s.”

  “A friend?”

  She nods.

  “Who is this friend?”

  “Oh, he’s just a friend.”

  “Just a friend.”

  She nods.

  “Give me your keys, please.”

  She stares at me.

  I pick her things up from the bonnet and start stuffing them into her bag. Again I order her to hand me her keys.

  She’s perplexed, the poor thing. Weakened by my insistence, I coax the keys from her hand, hop into the driver’s seat and start up the car. She’s gaping down at me, her face frozen like there is not one slip of a doubt in her mind that I am a person who is at this very minute in the process of thieving her car. You do get a bit disorientated when you’re bashed up.

  “Get in. I’m taking you to hospital.”

  “But I don’t need to go to hospital.”

  “Get in.”

  “But I hate hospitals.”

  I lean over and flick open the passenger door. She’s still standing on the pavement, aghast, and her mouth is open like she’s about to protest, but there’s nothing coming out.

  I insist and in no time at all she is sitting quietly in the seat beside me.

  “I don’t know what to say…” she mumbles.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “Are you from around here?”

  I hand her a packet of posies.

  “Around.”

  “It’s very good of you.” She sobs, just in time for a posie. “But I don’t want to go to hospital.”

  Ignoring her, I pull out of Cherbury Court in this tiny box contraption. Could she not have got herself a decent-sized car? Oh, I forgot – she can’t afford it: she’s a travel agent.

  “What’s your name?” she whimpers.

  I hesitate.

  My name. She has a point. I must have a name.

  “Blasted gears!” I curse, fiddling manically with the gearbox. “They’re a bit stiff.”

  “There’s no hurry,” she says, voice still shaking. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not that fine.”

  I am beginning to ask myself what in the name of God I am doing driving her car.

  A name. Janice? I don’t know.

  “Where’s the nearest hospital?” I ask her.

  She gives me some vague tearful directions to St Vincent’s Hospital.

  I pull out on to the coast road.

  Mary? Too ordinary.

  Florence? As in Florence Nightingale? No. Too charity-orientated. This is not about charity. It’s about reckless improvisation. It’s about opportunism. It’s about sheer cricket-bat-headed craziness.

  “Are you sure I take a right at the school?”

  “No, it’s a left, you’re right.”

  “You’re confusing me now.”

  “It’s a left.” She nods earnestly. “At the school.”

  “Because a right turn and we’ll get stuck in the middle of a beach.”

  “What’s your name?” she tentatively repeats, like I didn’t hear her the first time.

  Does she have to be so hung up on names? You’d think she’d have more important things to be thinking about while her face is falling apart. It’s like she can’t tune in to me unless I yield her a word – paralytic behaviour, if you want my honest opinion – but I suppose I must respect that.

  “You can call me Julianne.”

  She’ll be after my address next.

  She touches my arm. “I’m Nicole.”

  No shit.

  “We’ll be there soon,” I assure her.

  “Thanks, Julianne.”

  “So,” I begin, “tell me more about your friend.”

  “I’d better give him a call,” she moans.

  She takes her mobile from her bag, presses a button and waits, head lowered.

  “It’s me.”

  I steal a closer look at her. She is white-faced, quiet, simpering, uncertain. Her eyes are getting wet now and she’s beginning to sob once more.

  “He found out,” she whispers shakily. “He tried to…to…drown me. No, no…in the bath…with…with the fish.”

  Pause.

  “He held my head down.”

  The poor fish.

  “Of course I didn’t tell him,” she whimpers. “No, I didn’t…but he said that someone phoned him and said we were seen together by the canal. I don’t remember us going to the canal. What are we going to do?”

  She falls silent for a while, then resumes by telling him that a neighbour of hers is driving her specially to St Vincent’s Hospital and that Harry is unaware of this fact. And could he possibly meet her there?

  The friend seems to be hesitating. He appears to be tied up.

  Now her voice starts squeaking and simpering, and she throws in a few loud sniffs for good measure. The woman is behaving like she’s been knocked down by a truck.

  “Please, Ronan.”

  At the mention of Ronan’s name I can’t help the car going into a swerve. Nicole screams. We hit the kerb and are dragged along as if by a giant magnet for several seconds before I manage to pull back out towards the middle of the road into the path of an oncoming lorry. Nicole wails again. I scream at her to shut up, that everything’s under control, although we’re still heading straight for the lorry. It hoots, flashes, twists and veers up on to the pavement, and boots a Dublin City Millennium litter bin clean out of the way.

  Everyone everywhere is beeping me and I’m just cursing back at the whole wide world, mouth as filthy as your local building site. I jam on the brakes and we end up in the middle of the road.

  The beeping hasn’t stopped, though. The fat-jowled, ugly driver of that truck is spitting saliva into the side window three inches from my face. Two words from him are enough to make my blood curdle; he has just mentioned something about a driving test. At this, I turn and shove him the middle finger where light bulbs do not fit. And accelerate, leaving him standing in the middle of the road shaking his fist, poor idiot.

  Now I turn to face Nicole: “WHAT A BLOODY AWFUL PIECE OF JUNK!”

  “It’s only just new,” she stammers.

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  I twist down the window until the car is filled with a hurricane.

  “I’m sorry,” she mutters.

&nb
sp; I raise my eyes to heaven.

  It takes quite some time for me to cool down. It’s not easy, because the truth of this whole goddamn thing is gradually dawning on me, the painful inexorable truth.

  When I feel ready to converse civilly I turn to her: “So. Who is this ‘friend’ that you keep on automatic redial?”

  “His name is Ronan.”

  “I see.”

  “Unfortunately he can’t make it to the hospital before five.”

  “Other commitments? Just when you need them, they go crap on you.”

  “He’s very good to me in other ways.”

  “Oh Jesus, get me out of here,” I moan, pulling into the entrance of the hospital. “Is this Ronan guy the one who gave you the earrings?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “It’s written all over your face,” I reply, suddenly desolate.

  “He got them in Paris,” she whispers, fingering her newly hung earring. “In the Rue de Rivoli.”

  I knew it. I knew I recognized them. I was with him in that jeweller’s when he bought those earrings: it must have been when my back was turned. He’d offered me a first option on them and I told him they were beautiful but slightly too dangly for my liking. That was the last I saw of those earrings. Now I find they end up on Nicole’s ears.

  It’s almost poetic.

  There’s no doubt, now.

  Nicole is not a three-night stand.

  I don’t like to go on about it, but it feels as though my heart is about to break.

  19

  Why do I do things like this?

  I’ve just parked the car in the hospital car park and, with my arm round her back, I have walked the shivering wreck into Casualty. A nurse takes one look at her and tells me she’s not bad enough for in here. I reply that I think Nicole’s wrist may be broken. Even if it is, she coldly informs us, it’s not bad enough for in here.

  I want to tell the cow I think she has a damaged liver and a ruptured spleen, and has swallowed a gobful of weedkiller out of a milkshake carton but I know what she’d say. Not bad enough for in here.

  So I coax my new friend down a series of corridors to the outpatient department, reassuring her we’re not good enough for Casualty, which brings the hint of a smile to her bruised lips.

  Luckily the secretary can fit her in, although she might be in for a long wait. We take a seat on a plastic chair row in a waiting room with other casualties who look to me as if they’ve had a lot worse happen to them than a damaged liver and a ruptured spleen, and poisoned insides from a gobful of weedkiller.

  There’s broken ankles, legs, collarbones and wrists, burns, bruising, bandages and moanings, and an air of utter defeat about the place. And a wailing wall of children from one family who look as though they’ve been collectively food-poisoned.

  Misery is hard to stare in the face, so after two minutes, I’m giddy already. I stand up and tell Nicole that I’m going in search of a coffee machine. I locate one at the end of a maze of corridors. I press the number four programme – white with double sugar – and a straight line of dark-grey liquid spurts down into the cup. At a guess, this is going to taste like something in the liquid-detergent line.

  Still, it could hardly make me feel worse.

  Carrying two cupfuls, I manage to get slightly lost on the return. But since I have left a continuous trail of coffee blobs on the floor – like Gretel without Hansel or bread – I don’t have too much difficulty retracing my steps to the coffee machine, from where I take an alternative route.

  I rejoin her a minute later. “This is all I could get.”

  “It’s okay,” she replies. “I like coffee.”

  “I meant, I lost most of it on the way.”

  But she is a profusing mess of gratitude.

  We sit here in silent communion, sipping microchip Nescafe from our white plastic cups. I wonder if she’s thinking what I’m thinking? Like, what the hell I am doing here?

  The whole thing is so droll it’s not funny. She and my husband are in love. It’s almost hilarious. I should be finishing the job Harry began. I should be battering her to death with my fists.

  Maybe then they’d admit her to Casualty.

  She opens her swollen gob: “It’s really good of you to be staying here with me like this.”

  “Not at all. I enjoy seeing people suffer.”

  She laughs at this, a sudden spontaneous yelp, which makes her groan and crouch forward, and grab her midriff. I have discovered a weapon of pain infliction: humour.

  “I wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world,” I add.

  While my buddy is groaning and chortling with the agony of laughter and generally getting a whole lot of shit off her chest plus a few fierce looks from some of the injured people in this band-aid purgatory, I raise my eyes to the tubular lighting. Wait till I tell Sylvana.

  “Why did this have to happen?” she moans.

  She starts rocking gently to and fro, head inclined downwards.

  “Why did it happen?” I inquire suddenly.

  She can’t look at me. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Yes, I do. Is it to do with the guy who gave you the earrings?”

  Pause.

  “Maybe…”

  I can understand her point: who wants to admit their adultery to a person like me who gives the impression of being a decent and responsible member of civilized society? Answer: no one with any self-respect. That’s principle for you: only ever admit your mortal failings to the equivalent of a scruffy hooligan.

  “It’s okay, Nicole, I won’t judge you.” (From me, a simply amazing piece of reassurance.)

  “Harry found out,” she mumbles, lowering her head. “That’s the man I’ve been living with.”

  “Found out what?”

  “You’re going to think I’m awful…” She lowers her eyes.

  “Try me.”

  “I’ve been seeing a married man.”

  “Heyl We have a marriage wrecker. Congratulations!”

  “I feel awful about it.”

  “Quite.”

  “Are you married, Julianne?”

  “No – I mean, yes.”

  Hell, Julie, get a grip. Your wedding ring.

  “I love my husband,” says I. “He’s irresistible. Do you find him irresistible?”

  “Who?”

  “The husband.”

  “Yes, I do.” She nods helplessly.

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Since January. He came into the travel agency where I work, to book a holiday in Amsterdam for himself and his…”

  “His wife?”

  She nods. “His wife – technically.”

  “Oh, I see: technically.”

  “He returned the following day to see me. He didn’t even mention Amsterdam.”

  I remember that weekend in Amsterdam. I remember that peculiar dreamy mood that fell over Ronan that weekend. Was I born naive and trusting? I really believed it was because we were having a lovely romantic weekend together – walking the canal cobblestones, boating and dining on the Grachten, strolling the Rijksmuseum, venerating the memorial of Anne Frank’s house, nauseating at the thumb crushers and person sawers in the Torture Museum, sipping Tia Maria in Maxim’s late-night piano bar and smoking dope in the tearooms.

  I really believed that these things made him happy not just because he found them enjoyable in themselves, but because the two of us were enjoying them together. Now I understand his dreaminess: in fact, he spent the whole weekend fantasizing about this woman presently slurping acid coffee beside me.

  “Then he rang me up and he just asked me out. I probably shouldn’t have accepted.”

  “Then why did you?”

  She exhales deeply. “I don’t know. Harry was good to me, but I was going through a bad time when I met him. I don’t love him any more. It was a mistake moving in with him. Ronan is different.”

  The way she says ‘Ronan’, it’s like she’s imbuing him wit
h this mystical hue.

  “How is he so different?”

  “He just is,” she says simply.

  Romance: that’s what it does to the brain. A couple of weeks in Ronan’s company, believe me, and he turns into a fantasy-free zone.

  “Explain.”

  “He’s a great communicator,” she says, almost nostalgically.

  “You’re joking!”

  She eyes me, baffled.

  “What man can communicate?” I say airily.

  “He loves me,” she replies, turning away. “That’s all that matters.”

  I’m sitting here, nodding away to myself. He loves himself. The poor woman. If she only knew.

  “He loves your body, Nicole. Don’t look at me like that. You do have a gorgeous body, you know.”

  She shakes her head.

  “With us it’s not just sex.”

  The way she pronounces the word, it’s like sex is something subterranean and dirty. It’s as if what goes on between her and Ronan transcends the commonality of carnal greed. It’s as if stripping naked in my kitchen and sleeping with my husband in my bed has something indefinably noble about it.

  “So what is it – if it’s not just sex? Spiritual communion?”

  “I just know he loves me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He told me.”

  This makes me immediately suspicious. “Did you ask him?”

  “I didn’t have to.”

  “What if he thought you were asking him and he said it to avoid complications?”

  “Look, you’ve been really kind bringing me here like this.”

  “Where were you when he told you?” I press.

  “Why all the questions?” she moans.

  “I’m just trying to find out if he’s deceiving you too…I mean, as well as his wife.”

  Sighs. “He told me again yesterday.”

  Pause.

  “Where were you when he told you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Nicole, all I’m asking you is: were you wearing any clothes when he told you he loved you?”