2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie

by Brian Gallagher

  I begin uncorking a bottle of brandy from the drinks cabinet.

  Still in the hall, she points out that the spiral staircase leading upwards from the bedroom passageway is a lovely design, but in Feng Shui terms it is ‘counterindicated because of the way it chokes and represses the energies of a house’.

  It’s not that I particularly disagree with this fascinating piece of information, it’s just that I’m really not in the mood. I pour a triple brandy to calm myself down.

  “There’s very little clutter,” she continues from the hall. “That’s good. Clutter makes you feel all blocked; it stops the flow.”

  “Aha.”

  “Some chrysanthemums would be lovely,” she says, walking in. “They bring laughter and peace to a house.”

  I start sipping. Why did I have to mention that thing about a Feng Shui consultation? I should have just told her Max was making these odd choking noises and left it at that. Let’s hope she doesn’t accidentally wander into my bedroom. If she catches sight of that magnolia plant I’ll never shut her up.

  “Do you intend to keep the walls white, Julianne?”

  I don’t bother answering. I can’t get it out of my mind that Ronan has, for the last several months, been laying Nicole like a dual carriageway.

  She explains that colour is an important cure: different colour combinations can affect your health as well as your mood – as we all know from the colour of the clothes we wear.

  “White is the colour of innocence and openness,” she infinitely ad-nauseates. “It can make it hard for you to have definite opinions because it opens up too many possibilities.”

  “I have no problem having opinions, Nicole. The only problem is when other people disagree with them. What can I get you? Cointreau? I got in a new bottle; some person drained the last one on me.”

  She wonders if I have any fruit juice, saying that she’s into the ‘healthy option’.

  “I’m afraid we don’t carry healthy options here.” I stick my hand inside the cabinet and grab the Cointreau. “We only stock stuff that seriously damages your health.”

  I know I shouldn’t be drinking brandy. But I’m wary of resolutions to give up alcohol, or anything else (sex, drugs, glue, et cetera) that has the obvious capacity to keep you alive.

  I pour her the drink and hand it to her. She accepts it without a word.

  “Could I ask you a favour, Nicole?”

  Nicole raises her eyebrows and sits forward in her seat, fixing on me a serious gaze.

  “I want you to keep my address to yourself. There are certain people I don’t want knowing about this place. Relations. Friends. The parish priest, even. I’m keeping my husband in hiding, you see.”

  At once she appears to see my dilemma.

  “Can you promise me you won’t tell a soul?”

  “I promise,” she says with an almost ridiculous sincerity that reads I would never dream of betraying a secret uttered to me in confidence.

  Still, I don’t trust her. So I go on to clarify what I mean. I do this because I am seriously worried about what ‘I promise I won’t tell a soul’ is generally taken to mean: “I promise I won’t tell a soul, except my partner, Orla, Hugh, Mixer, Freddie, Sandra, Bernice, Donal, my sisters, my mother, my grand-aunt, my colleagues, the women at the gym, John the gardener who is very discreet, let’s see…Mabel who works as secretary at the chiropractors, not forgetting the librarian at Deansgrange who reads literature and therefore is hostile to idle gossip, and finally the new curate from Nigeria who wouldn’t have anyone to gossip to anyway – all of whose soulful discretion is beyond reproach.”

  I now explain to her in broad outline what I personally mean by ‘I promise I won’t tell a soul’.

  I get across to her the general idea that betrayal of the location of this secret residence of mine will result in me taking personal charge of her flaying, but only after her tongue is ripped from its roots and dropped gently into the tropical waters of the zoo aquarium, to be used as nutrition for its rare somnambular fish.

  She seems a bit taken aback.

  “The point is, Nicole, can I trust you? Not even to tell Ronan, for example?”

  “Of course you can.” She frowns severely. “I won’t tell a soul.”

  I sip my brandy.

  Concerned, she asks if everything is okay with me.

  “Well…I do happen to have one or two marital problems.”

  “I know you do,” she says kindly. “I don’t suppose you want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “I never even asked his name.”

  “Helmut.”

  Silence.

  “Oh, that’s…”

  “Please don’t say it’s a nice name, Nicole.”

  “It’s…foreign, is it?”

  “Yes. Anyway, we’re just having an ongoing…”

  She nods reverentially. “It can’t be easy.”

  “…an ongoing difference of opinion: Helmut wants to buy an aquarium. I don’t. I don’t think I’d make a great carer of fish.”

  “Of course you would, Julianne,” she strenuously objects. “Goldfish are no trouble at all. They stimulate really healthy chi. Did you know that whatever is happening in your life is reflected in your fish tank? For instance, if your fish go all slow and dopey it means that in your own life you are becoming lethargic or…”

  The woman is unstoppable.

  “…and if they start eating each other,” she adds with laughable earnestness, “it’s a sign that there’s too much stress in your life.”

  Hold on a second.

  “Surely if they start eating each other, Nicole, it’s a sign that there’s too much stress in their life? Or even that they’re, like, hungry?”

  She laughs, in a nice, innocent way, almost as if nothing I say can put her off. “Fish also represent money and marital happiness,” she confidently asserts. “A fish tank would do the world of good for your relationship with your husband. I’m serious.”

  “That I doubt.”

  “It’s true. Really.”

  “Ronan has a fish tank, hasn’t he?”

  She nods, puzzled.

  “Well, if a fish tank is so good for marriages, how come he says his marriage is over?”

  But she blindly continues, as if inoculated against common sense: “It’s not just marital happiness; an aquarium can also improve your finances.”

  “Nicole, can we perhaps change the subject?”

  But she insists.

  If you place a fish tank in the career area, she harps on, it can have an incredibly positive effect on the amount of money in your bank account. She explains what the ‘career area’ is. The floor plan of any dwelling is divided up into nine traditional areas, for instance, career, wealth, fame, relationship, health, knowledge…

  “And children,” she adds with a vulnerable look.

  “Children.”

  She nods, moist-eyed for some reason, then goes back out into the hall, saying she’ll show me the ‘career area’. I follow her out.

  “Most of the energy in the house comes through the front door so the career area is always found here. It represents your vocation, your life path.”

  “That’s something I wasn’t aware of.”

  “Your life path is like a river. Water is a strong element. All this means that you should have fish near the entrance – over here, for example…”

  She puts her hand on the low bookcase, but I return to the lounge, tired already. She follows me back inside.

  “Seriously, Julianne, you should get an aquarium. It would be really good for your marriage. Even if it were just one fish.”

  “Are you suggesting a threesome?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Me, Helmut and a clownfish.”

  She grins. “It could be your new seabed.”

  I actually burst out laughing at this.

  I exit through the french windows, mentally noting that the key is in the handle. She follow
s me out to the balcony.

  She erupts.

  She is enraptured by the view of the park. Enchanted by the colours, the flowers, the trees, the bright water with the white swans and their slender S-shaped necks, the lemon-lime grass, the red-brick wall bordering the park to the right, the red roofs, the large blue basin of the sky…

  “I have to paint this.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Julianne,” she says, almost out of breath, “I have to paint this. It’s like paradise.”

  “You want to paint my park?”

  “Would it be okay? My canvas and easel are down in my car.”

  “You want to make a pirate copy of my beautiful park?”

  “Julianne.” She turns to me again.

  “What?”

  “I have an even better idea.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t have to agree to this if you don’t want to – you’ll probably think it’s crazy.”

  She gives me this timid gazelle look first.

  “Go on.”

  “What would you say if I began my painting of Chi up here? For the inspiration?”

  I avert my eyes to the park, chewing my cheek. She thinks I will be happy to stand here and watch her as she masterstrokes a Chi replica on to her canvas, and uses it as a basis for getting rich quick and laid by Ronan even quicker.

  “You’re asking me if you can paint Chi. Is that right? Here on my balcony?”

  “Pleasel” she pleads.

  “But what about your hair?”

  “It can wait,” she says, begging.

  “But a copy will never be the same as the original.”

  “I could always try.”

  I extract a packet of John Player Blue from the inside pocket of my new black jacket – to give me something to do as insurance against going crazy. I pull out a cigarette and poke it into my mouth, locate a box of matches and light up, one hundred per cent certain that Feng Shui flip-outs like her ought to be lecturing me right at this moment about how bad nicotine is for world harmony.

  Thinking about her request, though, does it really matter what she paints on my damn balcony as long as I get to lock her out and set up a rendezvous in the next hour or so with her principal kick?

  “Well, I can see you’re serious,” I tell her, waving out the match and flicking it over the balcony.

  “Would your husband mind terribly?”

  “He’d be amused.”

  48

  Nicole is a woman of great charms, as we’ve seen.

  She’s managed to persuade me to stand here like some unemployed waster holding aloft a large colour photo of Chi for her to paint.

  The…artist herself is in white overalls. Her eyes are darting constantly from the photo to the canvas, which she has pinned to a tall wooden easel. On a small table next to the window are a line of brushes and paint canisters, and pegs and paper, and a bottle of white spirit. Her new painting is beginning to reveal the shadowy forms of eight fish in a pattern analogous to the original Chi. She says it won’t be perfect, but adds that since her French contacts appear to be more interested in her ‘impressionistic style’, the fact that it will be only an approximation to the original should not be catastrophic.

  So there she is, jabbing her brush into the palette in her left hand like she’s on speed, making countless deft marks on the canvas, though you’d imagine she’d take greater care, considering she’s having a go at fooling the whole Parisian art world into believing that Chi number one never actually ended its days inside a grill.

  Two details: Nicole has this permanent frown stuck on her brow and she’s constantly chewing her lip.

  But a more interesting aspect of her work mode is this: as she paints she is unable to keep her mouth shut. Her conversation, as usual, is like the contents of a Christmas stocking: varied, colourful and full of surprises.

  After a while, though, as you might expect, she touches down once again in Feng-Shui fantasyland, so I’ve started giving off these please-stop-boring-me smoke signals.

  Nicole heaves this big sigh.

  “What?” I say.

  “Oh, nothing…it’s just that the sun has moved.”

  She dabs the brush into the blue paint and – following the photo carefully – she starts to paint grass clumps in the background. In blue. I feel like pointing out to her, naive twit that she is, that grass does not generally come in blue. But I have a real horror that she’ll start quoting Ronan’s expressionist theories at me.

  Again, she dabs her brush into the blue.

  Angrily this time.

  “There is something the matter, Nicole.”

  “You won’t believe this, Julianne.”

  “Try me.”

  “Guess what Ronan’s wife did.”

  “What?”

  “Painting these fish reminded me just now.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She killed half the fish in their aquarium.”

  “He told you that, did he?”

  “Yes.”

  Filthy liar. They were already dead. More or less.

  “And you’ll never guess how she killed them.”

  “How?”

  “She put them in the electric mixer and switched on the power.”

  “I hope she remembered to put on the lid.”

  “She turned the lovely fish into sauce,” she says bitterly.

  “It must have made lovely sauce, so,” I cheekily reply, taking a puff of my fag (I will use outmoded eighties language if I want to).

  She returns to her painting. “She has no respect for wildlife.”

  “Fish aren’t wildlife,” I reply, taking another drag of my fag.

  She jabs her brush aggressively into the palette and starts humming, as if to rise above my tiresomely flippant commentary. Her brush is flicking across the canvas, making scraping, scratching noises. Now she stops and stares at it. She doesn’t look too pleased with what she sees.

  “Ronan was at dinner with his wife and her mother and a friend last Monday night. Do you know what the mother did?”

  “What?”

  “She poured the fish sauce on to his spaghetti.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Well, I’d imagine that was bad Feng Shui.”

  Her mouth has turned hard and obstinate all of a sudden.

  “And did he actually go ahead and eat it?” I ask her, suppressing a grin.

  “He wasn’t to know. The wife and her mother disguised the taste with lots of herbs and spices.”

  “Cuisine is all about disguise.”

  She stares at me with a look of puzzled vexation, her brush pointing towards the sky. She’s clearly upset that anyone could do that to her darling Ronan.

  “So what do you think of that?” she says.

  I take a drag and look away. “Hilarious.”

  “They could have poisoned him, Julianne!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous: fish is fish. Don’t be distracted by the outer design.”

  From the corner of my eye I can see that she’s still got her brush stuck upwards in the air, which probably means she’s still staring hard at me. I’m clearly not giving this issue the seriousness it deserves.

  “Your paintbrush is going dry, Nicole.”

  She returns to her painting.

  “I mean, to do that,” she declares. “Her mother must be a madwoman. Ronan thinks it runs in the family.”

  I laugh uproariously. “Is that what he said?”

  “Yes. Ronan says her mother is a real…”

  I turn my head and stare at her now. “A real what?”

  “She interferes a lot.”

  “A real what? A real bitch? Is that what he said?”

  “A real old bag. I’m only quoting him.”

  “What a nice way to talk about your own mother-in-law.”

  “She’s vindictive,” Nicole protests.

  “I suppose that’s where her da
ughter gets it from.”

  “That’s what he says.”

  “Yes, well, as we already know,” says I with resignation, “the wife is off her rocker.”

  “But she is,” she protests.

  It’s beginning to aggravate me, watching her indulge her favourite pastime as she stands there calmly laying into me.

  “And of course.” She sulks. “That’s not all she did.”

  “What now?” I sigh.

  “Ronan has come to the conclusion that it was her who destroyed Chi. He was in a terrible state when he rang me from his surgery, over an hour ago, and told me. I pretended not to know anything about it. He said she also destroyed his surgery with a sledge hammer.”

  “A small finishing touch.”

  “So what do you think of that?”

  “Tragic.”

  “She ate cheese on toast, which proves it was her.”

  “Have you any idea how idiotic that sounds?”

  “Ronan said she was spying on us in the apartment; that’s how she found out.”

  “It’s her apartment, Nicole.”

  “It’s despicable. Also she is the one who smashed his brand-new Porsche to bits last week. And now she’s stolen it.”

  I can feel her annoyance peeling away on the surface of my skin. I should really call Sylvana at work; it’s not right that she should have to miss this. So I draw out my cellphone from my pocket, careful not to burn my jacket with my cigarette. I am about to dial her number when Nicole interrupts.

  “Julianne, I can’t believe anyone would do all those things.”

  “No, but then you don’t know her.”

  “I certainly don’t.”

  “I mean, you don’t even know her name.”

  Pause.

  “Her name’s Julie, but Ronan never talks about her.”

  “Unless it’s to criticize her.”

  “She’s deranged.”

  She pokes her brush hard into the palette, raises it, flicks her hair back and daubs it (the brush, that is) on to the canvas.

  I take a drag.

  I’m deranged now – important qualitative difference here. We’re on to a totally different level.

  “I put a lot of work into Chi,” she explains in a hurt voice. “It had great potential. It’s really upsetting that I have to do this. I thought it was going well, but now I’m not so sure.”