“You think I suffocated the cat on purpose.”
I can feel tears coming on.
“Julie, you’re not yourself. We should meet.”
“I’m not myself,” I wail. “I feel like I’m going nuts! Why are you laughing?”
“Of course you’re not going nuts. You’re one of the most balanced people I know.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I mean it.”
She’s behaving like I’m some kind of saint who missed her vocation. Yes, a saint who smashes and steals and ends wildlives, but a saint none the less.
Problem is, she never smashed a living-room in her life. She never ice-picked a Porsche, tore up an art book, liquidized a squadron of tropical fish, stole a car or induced heat suffocation in a cat.
QED: she’s in no position to grasp depravity.
So I end the call, with the footnote that she’s not to worry about me, or feel responsible for me, or imagine that she has to come to me and hold my hand.
I replace my phone in my pocket and start walking, hunched, along the exhaust-choked quay, towards the statue of the Great Liberator. As I walk, I press my phone for messages. There are six. Everybody wants me, it seems.
I’m a crazo and I’m in demand.
My solicitor with another brief; a colleague from work; the estate agent with a highly reassuring titbit about the heating system in my new apartment being banjaxed but not to worry because ‘it’s not a problem’.
Mother. She’s commanding me to call her back at once because she’s worried about me. And I should try to consider the feelings of a frail old lady for a change. To quote.
Ronan, with a grouchy message informing me that he’s just arrived home from the airport and is wondering where his famous Porsche is.
And finally – guess who?
With the following message, spoken, I must admit, in a voice that has a lovely, cheery, hesitant, humorous lilt to it: “Julianne…em…you’re not there so I’m just leaving a message, if that’s okay, em, did you get cut off yesterday when you called me in Paris? You seemed a bit upset…anyway, just to say I’m back in Dublin now and, if you want to give me a call some time, that’d be great, em, we could even meet up or something…anyway, I’ll sign off now, Julianne. See you soon. Bye!”
41
Why do I put myself through this?
Nicole just picks up the phone and tells me she wants to meet me and what do I do? I come buzzing after her like a dragonfly after a turd.
As I wait for her, I’m sitting here on Dun Laoghaire pier on a hot bench drenched in sunlight, facing into the blue bay bend of Sandycove, a gentle breeze tugging at my earlobes, the sun a warm facecloth on my countenance.
Of course, she’s late as usual. Half an hour late. It makes the agony worse. It makes it feel like I’m dying for Ronan, thirsting for him. Pining and yearning for him. Craving him like I haven’t savaged a bar of Bournville in months. Spluttering and gasping for him.
And of course I am. It’s so woefully pathetic it’s undignified.
I mean, I still haven’t reduced my wedding ring to a sprangle under a lump hammer. What does that say?
This is what I should have done instead: I should have sent Max’s remains by overnight parcel delivery to Nicole’s B & B (there’s nothing in the rule book about keeping dead cats in B & Bs). With a short regret note attached. And had my mobile number changed.
(Besides, a balcony is no place for a cat. The stink is already beginning to escape despite the old tarpaulin I hauled over it. I can only hope and pray Mother does not go out to the veranda to test her fear of heights.)
Here she is at last.
She’s in a light-blue sweater and white trousers. She’s wearing shades and her trademark fragile smile. Her hair seems even more golden than before. She looks relaxed and well.
She sits down beside me and crosses her legs over her conjoined hands so that they are squeezed in between. She apologizes for being so late. Then she smiles warmly and thanks me for seeing her at such short notice. After we get over the unnecessary formalities I go straight for the jugular.
“Actually,” she replies, staring out to sea as if there’s something on her mind, “it started on a bad note.”
“Don’t stop there.”
“We were invited to dinner by Lucien Morel yesterday evening in his apartment near the Jardin du Luxembourg. He’s that art dealer who lectured Ronan in aesthetics at the Sorbonne. It’s his former university in the centre of Paris…”
Yes yes yes I know. It’s where Ronan went for two years. It gave him an appreciation for art, and posing, and bullshitting, and generally damaged his personality.
“He was flirting with Lucien Morel’s girlfriend behind my back – she’s an art critic with the Parisien newapaper.”
“How awful.”
“It really was. I was in the main room with Lucien who was telling me about opportunities in the Parisian art world – of course I didn’t have the guts to tell him about what happened to Chi – when suddenly his phone went off and I went out into the kitchen, and I saw them together. I can’t even remember her name…”
“I’m sure he can’t either.”
“…they were in the kitchen by the window and he had his fingers inside the bra-strap on her shoulder.”
“Maybe it was hurting her?”
Nicole is staring wildly at me, as if I should be somehow horrified by her recent predicament. “I went straight back into the living-room, Julianne. It was so humiliating.”
“Dump him.”
“As it turns out, we made up.”
She tells me that from eleven o’clock on Tuesday night to ten o’clock the following morning they made ‘love’ three times.
I can just see it. The two of them doing sixty-niners on a pair of cheap French flannel sheets in an expensive hotel room in central Paris at two in the morning, experimenting with options from a variegated oriental menu of positions from which my husband finally chooses one, highly compatible with the survival of the species.
“Nicole, I don’t want to be rude but I’d rather not hear about your sexual exploits with Ronan. Talk about something else. Tell me what Morel thought about your other paintings.”
“Well…I don’t want to boast…” she says.
“Oh, boast away.”
“Well’ – she hesitates – ’he said he personally loved them.”
“He was being polite.”
“Julianne…”
“Either that or he was trying to get into your knickers.”
Noticeable gap in the conversation here. I ask her what the art critic of the Parisien thought of her other work.
“She’s just a hack.” She sulks. “She knows nothing about art.”
“Jesus, would you listen to the modesty.”
It’s Ronan’s fault, of course, putting these pretentious ideas into her squashy head.
“I wasn’t going to say this, but Lucien told me he thinks he may have found a buyer for the painting entitled Foetus.”
This whacks me on the head. “You’re joking me.”
“I’m serious.”
“How did you manage to pull off that freak occurrence?”
Nicole frowns uncomprehendingly. “Julianne, did I say something to annoy you?”
I shut up now and let her whine. She tells me she wishes I wouldn’t imply she wasn’t capable of it, because it’s bad for her self-confidence.
She’s being assertive for once in her life. That’s a positive development, even if it’s over painting endeavours that would make a three-year-old doodler look like Picasso. I saw that stuff up in her attic. I saw it all. ‘Art’! Are we on the same planet here or what? I mean, are we even talking about the same planet?
“Anyway,” she adds after a short pause, “I don’t really believe I’m as good as everyone says.”
Oh Jesus get me out of here.
I stand up abruptly and we start walking in silence along the pier, the harbour water to our left shim
mering in the reflected light of the sky. Yachts loll about in the wide basin, the same ones you can see and hear from our apartment, gathered like variously flavoured triangular lollipops, tinkling notes in the light wind blow.
After a while she tells me that she made three resolutions while she was in Paris. The first, she says, is that she wants to live in that fabulous city. Ronan says he’s also tempted to live there. He said that going back was a reminder.
“Of what?”
“The first time he fell in love.”
“With his wife?” I shoot back.
“No.” She sighs. “A Frenchwoman.”
I am a hopeless romantic idiot. I really believed I was the first person Ronan fell in love with. And why did I believe this? Because Ronan told me I was.
I have to get home. Where I can crawl on all fours to my private waste-paper basket and chuck myself in.
But she doesn’t give me a minute.
“My second resolution is that I’ve decided to become a Feng Shui consultant.”
I turn my head away land look at the colourful boats.
“I mean,” she clarifies, “in my spare time.”
“And that’s supposed to make it okay?”
“It’s very big in Paris,” she says.
“Yes, well with a population of up to eight million…”
This seems to confuse her. “No. I mean Feng Shui is big in Paris.”
“Oh, I see what you mean.”
“We were in a bookshop in Boul Mich, as Ronan calls it. It had loads of books on Feng Shui. Ronan translated from some of the introductions, because my French isn’t perfect. I bought one book called Feng Shui et le Bonheur. That means – ”
“I know what it means.”
“His French is fantastic.”
“It’s not bad.”
“Sorry?”
“French is an interesting language.”
“He said that Feng Shui could be seen as an aesthetic moment in the course of the great Hegelian Dialectic towards the Absolute.”
I’m staring at her now, searching for bye-bye-brain signs.
But suddenly she bursts out laughing at the ridiculousness of it. “He can be so silly!” she shrieks, unable to stop giggling.
“He’s an absolute jerk,” I reply.
“But he thought my Feng Shui idea was a good one. He said I could advertise my services in the papers and magazines. I already have a mobile phone so I’m set up. The idea is that you go into other people’s houses and for a small fee you give them – ”
“What’s your third resolution?” I rudely interrupt.
Recovering her dislocated centre of gravity, Nicole tells me she’s come up with this plan. She says she has decided to repaint Chi.
I look away.
Then I look back.
“What the hell do you mean?”
“I mean – ”
“I thought Chi was over? Finito? How can you repaint something that’s dead?”
“I was thinking of repainting Chi from the professional photograph I had taken of it. It’s the perfect solution. I know Ronan will agree when he finds out.”
“You mean, you’re going to pass off a copy as the original.”
She doesn’t approve of my choice of words. “I’m going to paint another original.”
“Another original? Nicole, it’s a bit late in the day to be laying into the Law of Non-Contradiction, considering it’s been around since the ancient Greeks.”
“It was your idea,” she’s urging me.
“What?”
“Don’t you remember what you told me in the B & B, after we both returned from Ronan’s surgery that time?”
“What did I tell you?”
“You said I could always repaint Chi! ”
“I did not! ”
“Those were your exact words.”
I swallow hard, inwardly punching myself.
I say nothing. Just stare ahead and keep on walking in silence until we reach the main road. I tell her I have to go home now and that I will call her some time, which theoretically means never.
“Are you sure…?” she says uncertainly.
“About what part?”
“Are you sure you don’t want a coffee or anything?”
I look out towards the picturesque bay of Sandycove. What is it about her when she speaks in that dejected voice and pulls that unhappy, lamenting face? It’s so annoying. Each time she does it makes me want to stop hating her. “Why? Do you want a coffee?”
“Oh, it was just an idea…”
I make a show of consulting my watch.
“You have your own things to do, Julianne. It’s fine…”
I hate this. I hate being undecided. I like to have things straight down the line. How can I stand here and feel sorry for this woman?
But that mournful, lost, irretrievable expression on her mug is eating my heart out: she really does want me to accompany her somewhere for a coffee and chat, and yet the last thing she wants to do is pressure me. This happens to be something I like about her. She doesn’t insist. She leaves you free. She doesn’t try to manipulate.
This makes it far harder to refuse.
“I don’t know,” says I, weakened. “Where would you suggest?”
“We could try Renaldo’s.”
“Full marks for originality.”
She laughs, and I’m almost ashamed to admit it but when she laughs in that gay and childlike way she has about her, my heart lightens up as if a leaden plate has just been lifted off.
“I’ll walk you to your car, Nicole, and decide on the way.”
As we walk, Nicole places her hand momentarily on my shoulder. I throw her a glance, with her long, golden-blonde hair and her pale, slightly freckled skin and the soft eyes behind her shades, and it’s very strange, but the familiarity of her hand on my shoulder just now felt oddly natural.
“I went home to my father this morning just after breakfast,” she says suddenly. “It was the first time I’ve been home in four years.”
“So long?”
She nods appreciatively. “My father and my stepmother were both in the kitchen. I told him I was sorry for barging in like this but that I needed to come home for a few days because Harry and I had split up and I had nowhere else to go apart from an old B & B.
“My stepmother said what’s wrong with the B & B – isn’t the standard of B & Bs very high these days? I said it was very expensive and I didn’t have a lot of money. My father started shouting at me then, accusing me of looking for money. I could smell the drink on his breath. My stepmother said I was just like my mother, that I had a nerve barging in looking for money and accommodation after everything that happened…”
We’re walking along the coast road, the sun momentarily hidden behind a cloud, the air brushing warm against my skin. Nicole is effortlessly exposing her private life to me. Am I missing something here?
“What happened?”
“I was caught with Harry sleeping in my bedroom, several years previously. I put him on the floor in my room only because I knew my stepmother would have had a fit if I put him on the couch downstairs. And I couldn’t let him walk home in the dark after the rave, with all the drink he’d taken. Anyway, she just walked into the bedroom at seven o’clock the following morning. She must have seen his jacket downstairs, I mean, it wasn’t as if I was trying to hide him. She went and woke Father up and when they both came back Harry was just putting on his shoes and she told Father that she found the two of us sleeping together. I told him that wasn’t true. He threw us out. He told me never to come back. It’s just what she wanted.”
As an afterthought, Nicole adds that it didn’t help that Harry referred to her father (to his face) as a ‘drunken old fart’ mere seconds after the latter had called her a ‘little whore’.
“It’s so obvious he thought I was a slut.” She laughs weakly.
She just leaves this hanging, like I’m supposed to object.
I don�
��t.
“I think he’d been drinking again,” she says. “I don’t know, I think he must have been very unhappy.”
“Nicole,” I point out, “some people are simply evil.”
“I suppose my mother’s death must have affected him.”
“Nicole, he was a bad father. Can you say that? On a count to three…one…”
“Okay, he was a bad father, I suppose.”
“What do you mean, you suppose? He made your life a misery. He was a creep. Why can’t you say it?”
Feebly, she laughs.
“Go on, say it!”
“He was a creep, is that better?”
“Nicole are you totally incapable of being angry?”
After a few minutes she resumes her story: “Harry was marvellous, to give him his due. He really helped me through that time. We both moved into a flat and soon after that I got a job as a travel agent. I know it wasn’t exactly the best job in the world. I was just doing basic secretarial stuff…”
She gives me a vulnerable look. “You don’t exactly have to be a genius to do that.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
We’ve just arrived at her yellow Fiat Cinquecento in the car park overlooking the old Dun Laoghaire baths. She invites me to sit in.
Since I have nothing better to do, I sit in.
“Guess how I bought this Fiat?”
“How?”
She removes the steering-wheel lock.
“By giving piano lessons,” she replies.
“You play piano?” says I, reddening.
“I love the piano. It’s one of the things I missed most when I left home. But when Harry and I moved into Cherbury Court we bought an upright, so I could play to my heart’s content. Harry didn’t like it, though. He gave it away to charity a fortnight ago because he said it got on his nerves.”
I thought he told me he sold it?
“He said he hated all the noise. Imagine! He thought Chopin was noise. He was really good in so many ways, but when it came to things like refinement and culture and art he was completely…”
“Sorry, Nicole, did you just say you played Chopin?”
“I try. I only started on Chopin recently.”
Of course she did: she only met Ronan recently.
“Chopin drives me round the bend,” I tell her.
2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie Page 25
