by Alex Coleman
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Published 2009
by Poolbeg Press Ltd
123 Grange Hill, Baldoyle
Dublin 13, Ireland
E-mail: [email protected]
www.poolbeg.com
© Alex Coleman 2008
Copyright for typesetting, layout, design
© Poolbeg Press Ltd
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-84223-343-6
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold or otherwise circulated without the publisher ’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.poolbeg.com
Note on the Author
Alex Coleman is married and lives in Dublin with the mandatory pair of writer's cats, who have asked not to be named.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to my agent, Faith O’Grady, for all the work she has done on my behalf and for being so consistently, almost supernaturally good-humoured. I’d also like to say thank you to Paula Campbell and all the staff at Poolbeg for their support. Thanks are due to Gaye Shortland too for making sure that the editing process was both painless and useful.
Finally, much love to my family and friends whose guidance and encouragement have been absolutely vital.
Alex Coleman
To my best friend, Sinéad
CHAPTER 1
It was a Friday the 13th, the day I caught Gerry having sex with our next-door neighbour. Not that I ever thought the two things were connected. I’d always hated all that superstitious malarkey. A broken mirror didn’t mean seven years bad luck in my book – it meant a trip to the mirror shop. Still, there was no denying that I’d been having a really brutal 13th, even before I caught the pair of them puffing and panting over the back of my good sofa like a couple of knackered greyhounds. I slept in, for a start, and that always got on my nerves (no matter how often it happened). Skipping breakfast didn’t bother me so much, but I really resented having to rush my shower. A rushed shower, in my opinion, was worse than none at all. You got all the hassle of getting wet but none of the benefits. It wasn’t much different to getting caught in the rain. And this was a real in-and-out job: the first drops of water had barely hit the floor before I was back in the bedroom, swearing under my breath and rooting through my underwear drawer. Gerry was gently snuffling in his sleep, as usual (he was very rarely out of bed before me, even when I wasn’t up on time). When we first got married, I found his snuffling seriously cute. He used to say that I’d soon change my tune about that one. But he was wrong. It always stayed cute to me, even after twenty-one years.
My day didn’t improve a whole pile when I finally made it across to First Premier in Santry. When I’d started working there, about three years previously, I’d foolishly pointed out to my manager, Jenny, that “first” and “premier” meant the same thing. She’d fixed me with one of her non-smile smiles and said, “Do you really think we don’t know that here at First Premier?” I discovered later that Jenny elbowed the phrase “here at First Premier” into approximately 50 per cent of her conversations. My job title was “Data Entry Operative”. I liked the “Operative” part. It made me sound like a glamorous spy. It was the “Data Entry” bit I had trouble with, both as a title and, sadly, as an everyday activity. That morning, as I came through the door of our humongous open-plan office, afraid to look at my watch but knowing it was getting on for ten, I just knew that Jenny was lying in wait for me like a badly permed leopard. Sure enough, I wasn’t even halfway to my desk – my work-station, rather – before she pounced.
Good afternoon, I thought.
“Good afternoon,” said Jenny. This was her standard greeting for latecomers. It was so obvious and childish and unfunny that it always made me want to cry, even when it wasn’t being directed at me.
“Hello, Jenny,” I said, trying my best to smile. “I’m a bit late.”
She gazed back at me with the cold, unblinking eyes of a doll. “I hope everything’s all right at home,” she cooed then, doing a sympathetic head-tilt.
I resumed walking. Jenny followed half a pace behind, like one of those small, annoying dogs that goes Yip instead of Woof.
“Everything’s fine at home,” I said. “Alarm clock let me down, that’s all. Dead battery or something.”
“Hmmm,” Jenny said.
There was something about the way she said it, some vague hint of menace, that made me stop and turn to face her.
“It won’t happen again,” I lied.
Jenny frowned. “The thing is, Jackie, you’ve said that before.”
She had a point there. I’d said it many, many times before, some of them, if memory served, in the past couple of days. There didn’t seem to be any point in adding that being late annoyed me as much as it did her and that I dearly wished it wouldn’t happen so often. I decided instead to try the light- hearted approach. Nothing in my experience of Jenny told me she would appreciate the effort, but I gave it a whirl anyway.
“I know I’ve said that before,” I told her with what I hoped was a loveable grin, “but this time, I really, really mean it.” I held up my right hand with fingers crossed and when Jenny failed to respond, I held the left up too.
Her brow creased and uncreased. “You’re aware, no doubt, of the new tardiness policy we’ve implemented here at First Premier?”
I half-remembered seeing an e-mail with some of those words in it. It had caused a bit of a fuss about a week or two previously. I hadn’t read the thing properly and hadn’t participated in the fuss. “Of course.”
“Well then, you’ll know all about the points system.” I drew a blank at that one. “Points system. Sure.”
“Well, Jackie, I’m afraid that today’s nine-fifty-seven coupled with Wednesday’s nine-oh-eight, Tuesday’s nine- twelve and last Thursday’s nine-twenty-one puts you over the top for this month already. And it’s only –”
“The 13th,” I sighed. “It’s Friday the 13th.”
“Unlucky for some,” Jenny said with what looked, for a change, like a genuine smile. “So you’ll do it?”
I hadn’t a clue what “it” was, but I knew I’d find the answer in the e-mail. “Looks like I’ll have to, doesn’t it?” I said.
Jenny nodded. “It’s policy.”
I turned and left her, hoping to God that I was merely imagining the bright bolts of pain that had started to flash along the right side of my head.
I started getting “my headaches” – I always called them that as they seemed very personal – when the kids were entering their teens. We used to joke, on the days when I felt like joking about it, that it must have had something to do with all the stereos in the house suddenly getting cranked up. But really, I had no idea what the cause might be. I didn’t get them very often – four, maybe five times a year. That was plenty. Nothing seemed to provoke them – nothing that I could identify anyway. They always started the same way, with brief, shooting pains that were gone before I could even wince. S
ome time after that – it could be minutes, it could be hours – the party really got going; the pains returned, and this time they stayed. There were lots of suitable analogies; I usually plumped for something with white-hot six-inch nails.
As soon as I got settled in at my desk, Veronica, who sat directly opposite me, peeped over the partition and gave me an update on her battle with the kids who gathered on her front wall every night to smoke cigarettes. There had been an escalation, by all accounts. One of the kids, a girl of no more than twelve, had called Veronica a “frigid old bitch” (it was the “old” part that really hurt, apparently). Veronica had responded with something about children who dressed like little prostitutes and feared she had gone too far.
I tried to seem interested, but my mind kept wandering back to Jenny. It occurred to me that she’d had my tardiness details on the tip of her tongue. That meant that she’d looked them up in some sort of file, no doubt hoping that I’d be late, as opposed to absent, so she’d able to throw them at me. She’d even memorised them. I grabbed the edges of my desk and tried to think pleasant thoughts. Cute little puppies, gently babbling brooks, the last five minutes of An Officer and a Gentleman… I was still gripping hard and muttering darkly to myself when Eddie Hand appeared by my side.
Eddie sat at the end of our little section, facing Veronica and me. He was a forty-something bachelor who wore the same navy-blue woollen tie quite literally every day, even though he could have showed up in an Iron Maiden T-shirt for all First Premier cared. In summer he wore his tie over a short-sleeved shirt. In winter he wore it under a V-necked jumper. Every couple of days or so, I vowed to ask him why he was devoted to that one item of clothing. I never followed through, partly because I was afraid he would tell me that it had been a present from his childhood sweetheart who had died in a tragic boating accident (or something), and partly because I didn’t want him to think that I was interested in being his friend. Eddie wasn’t exactly the type who set the room on fire when he walked in – not unless he accidentally knocked over a candle while creeping round the edge of the group, looking for a place to hide. I wasn’t proud of the attitude I had towards him. Certainly not. But I rationalised it by telling myself that most people probably had someone like that in their lives, a colleague, a neighbour, a familiar face on the bus. Someone they suspected to be a little bit sad, a little bit lonely. Someone they could possibly cheer up quite a bit, if only they’d take the time. But they didn’t, and I didn’t, for fear that the lonely person might start appearing on the doorstep, suggesting nights out or, worse, weekends away. Best to just smile politely and shimmy past them, that’s what we all told ourselves. I smiled politely at Eddie when he showed up that morning and if I hadn’t been sitting down, I would have shimmied past as well.
“Hello,” he said. “Are you okay?”
I gave him a smile every bit as fake as the one Jenny had worn earlier. “I’m fine, why?”
He shrugged and cast his eyes to the right. “I dunno. You seem a bit … you know …” He pointed with his head. “Your knuckles are all white.”
I loosened my grip on the desk and went into my drawer for headache tablets. “I’m okay, Eddie, really. Just a bit tense, that’s all.”
He nodded. “Is it because of your hair?”
On the Monday of that week I’d shown up in wicked humour on account of a weekend haircut that had gone seriously awry. My usual girl had called in sick at the last minute, but rather than make a new appointment, I’d gone ahead with another stylist. I should have known better. The replacement stank of last night’s booze and seemed to be having trouble forming proper sentences (“Have you been to holiday this year, have you?” she asked me at one point). She was still drunk, I was absolutely sure of it. Long story short, I wound up with a hairstyle like Stephen Fry’s. It had annoyed me for a few days, naturally, but I had more or less forgotten about it until that moment.
“No, Eddie,” I said, “it’s nothing to do with my hair.” I wasn’t at all disturbed by his contribution. He wasn’t trying to be malicious or even amusing. He could see that I was upset and he knew that I’d been unhappy about my hair. He’d put the two together, that was all. He was really asking. “Okay,” Eddie said and smiled for a fraction of a second.
He tore off then, as if frightened by a loud noise.
I watched his back as he made his way to the photocopier, wondering if that was the longest conversation he’d had all morning. Then I told myself that I was inventing a sob story where one didn’t necessarily exist. For all I knew, Eddie spent his evenings sipping champagne in fancy restaurants with a succession of sex-addicted lingerie models. When I turned back to face my computer, Veronica was half-standing again and making kissy faces. It was her firm conviction that Eddie fancied me. She seemed to have based this theory on nothing but the fact that once in a blue moon, the previous incident being a prime example, he spoke to me without my speaking to him first. He didn’t do that with anyone else, not according to Veronica at any rate.
“Eddie and Jackie up a tree!” she chanted. “K-I-S-S-I–”
I threw the cap of a yellow highlighter at her and was pleased to see it bounce off her forehead and land in her coffee.
If I hadn’t found the e-mail straight away, I might have given up and turned to the eight-inch-high pile of data that was teetering by my left elbow, waiting to be entered. My stress level would still have gone up, no doubt, but it wouldn’t have instantly doubled the way it did when I got a look at the e-mail. The gist of the thing was this: tardiness had become a serious problem for First Premier and was affecting its ability to meet targets, going forward (as opposed to backwards or sideways). Management weren’t callous, unfeeling monsters – as if – and could forgive an occasional five-minute slip-up here and there. However! Persistent offenders could no longer expect to get away scot- free. The new system (they called it a system four times) was points-based. If you arrived for work five to ten minutes late, you got a single point. Ten to fifteen minutes late, got you five of them. Fifteen to thirty, you got ten. Half an hour plus, you got twenty. Anyone who scored more than thirty points in a month had to do a forfeit. At that point the e-mail stopped being irritating and started being excruciating. In a breezy, matey I-Can’t-Believe-We-Get-Paid-To-Work-Here! tone, it revealed that transgressors would be obliged to wear a special tardiness hat for one whole working day. Anyone who refused to play along would be excluded from all social club activities until they did what had been asked of them. They would also be named and shamed as a “spoilsport”. There was a photo attached to the e-mail. It showed a dunce’s cap with a letter T where the D should have been. When I finished reading, all I felt was relief. I didn’t give two hoots, one hoot even, about the social club; if I really wanted to go to a pub quiz or karaoke night, I was sure I’d be able to organise it myself. And, I thought, they could name me every day until 2050, I’d still never be shamed. This meant that I could ignore the entire policy, hat and all. The relief didn’t last long though. It was swept away almost immediately by bitter, jagged anger. Why hadn’t they just declared that employees who were consistently late would be chucked out of the social club? Or fired, for that matter? Why bother with all the nonsense in between? Why did it have to be “fun”? It was Fancy Dress Friday all over again. That was a one-off event that had brightened all our lives a few months previously (it wasn’t supposed to be a one-off; it just worked out that way). I didn’t know how it had gone company-wide, but in Data Entry there were precisely three takers, out of a possible thirty-something. Jenny came as Wonder Woman and a bloke called Terry came as a vampire. They looked ridiculous, of course, mooching from their desks to the water cooler and back, but at least they had hired proper costumes. The third participant was Eddie. He came as a Roman gladiator in a bunch of kit he’d made himself out of cardboard, tin-foil and other cardboard. Not once, all day long, did he remove his helmet. It had taken him several hours to perfect, he said, and he was determined to get good we
ar out of it.
“Did you read this rubbish about the tardiness hat?” I called out to Veronica.
She looked up from her keyboard. I could see the top half of her head over the partition. The top half of her head looked surprised.
“Yeah,” she said. “I saw it a fortnight ago with the rest of the company. Did you hear about John Lennon? Shot dead!” I ignored the last part and went back to fuming. It was just about then that the first six-inch nail was driven into my skull. I had no sooner registered the news that my day was going from bad to much, much worse when my mobile phone jangled in my handbag. The caller was Robert, my eldest (by twelve minutes). I couldn’t remember the last time he had called me and said something I wanted to hear. The smart thing to do, I told myself, would be to ignore it and get back to my impending headache. But it’s never easy to ignore your own flesh and blood. And so, like an eejit, I answered the damn thing.
CHAPTER 2
Robert was an actor – a proper one. It wasn’t like he was a waiter who sometimes showed up in the background of TV commercials dressed as a cereal flake or a toilet germ. He played Valentine Reilly in The O’Mahonys, which was a pretty big deal. The first time he told me about the part, he used the term “resident bad-boy” and I said that would be right up his street. I was trying to be encouraging and supportive, I really was. Robert didn’t see it that way. He left me in no doubt that he had much preferred his father’s take on the news, which was “You’ll have to beat them away with a shitty stick”. Gerry was talking about women, of course, and he was right. As soon as Valentine made his first appearance on the show, Robert’s stock, which had always been buoyant, suddenly went through the roof. I didn’t know if he’d ever tried the shitty-stick approach, but he’d certainly failed to beat the women away. His latest girlfriend was a thirty-year-old fashion journalist called (honestly) Jemima. I’d only met her once, and that was by accident; Gerry and I bumped into the pair of them at the bottom of Grafton Street one Sunday afternoon. We wound up going for coffee together, during which time I formed a very clear opinion of her – she was a stone-cold bitch. Rude, aggressive, gossipy, snobby, she ticked every box, some of them twice. I tried my best to be friendly, but she kept saying things like “People who don’t vote shouldn’t be allowed to have children”. Eventually I gave up on the pleasantries and just stared right through her. Robert called me from his apartment that night and told me that he’d been mortified by the way I had “treated” her. The tone of voice he’d used on that occasion wounded, yet high and mighty – was the one that greeted me when I answered my mobile in the office.
