One Hundred Names

by Cecelia Ahern

  She abandoned her work-from-home strategy and returned to the office at lunchtime. It was busy with everyone working flat out to meet their new deadline for Constance’s tribute section as well as researching and writing stories for future issues.

  Rebecca, the art director, came out of Pete’s office pulling a face. ‘He’s in a mood today. Good luck.’

  An unfamiliar woman was sitting in Kitty’s usual desk, which wasn’t all that rare as they had many freelance writers in the editorial section who came and went from the office. Kitty stood in the centre of the room looking for a free desk and when that proved fruitless she looked for a free phone. Pete opened the door and called her into his office.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Looking for a desk. I have a mountain of calls to make, do you think you could get somebody’s phone for me for the day? And who is that lady at my desk?’

  ‘You on to something?’

  ‘I’m going to contact the names directly to see if Constance was speaking to them. Who is that lady at my desk?’

  ‘How can you contact them?’

  ‘From the phone directory,’ she said, trying not to show that she was well aware it was a stupid idea.

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how many people are on the list?’

  ‘One hundred. Who is the lady at my desk?’

  ‘One hundred? Jesus, Kitty, that will take for ever.’

  ‘I’ve already worked my way through most of the first name.’

  ‘And? Any luck?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  He stared at her angrily.

  ‘Her name is “McGowan”; it might as well be “Smith” in this country. I’ve made about one hundred calls already. Pete, what do you expect me to do? There’s no other way. I started by googling them all and Archie Hamilton is either a clown available for kids’ parties, he works at Davy’s stockbrokers, he died ten years ago or he went to prison five years ago for assault. Which one do you think I should just guess it is?’

  He sighed. ‘Look, you can’t work here.’

  ‘Why not?’ She looked out the window, then pointedly back at her desk.

  ‘That’s Bernie Mulligan. I’ve asked her to write a story in your place in this month’s issue. The Cox Brothers called, along with a few other of our major advertisers. They’ve come under severe pressure to pull this month’s advertising.’

  ‘Why?’

  Silence.

  ‘Oh. Because of me.’

  ‘They’ve been put under pressure for months but after the court case now they feel that they can’t support the magazine without it been seen to at least reprimand you in some way.’

  ‘But the television network have already suspended me. It has nothing to do with Etcetera.’

  ‘Somebody is stirring trouble for them.’

  ‘Colin Maguire’s crowd,’ she said. ‘They’re doing whatever they can to destroy me.’

  ‘We don’t know it’s them,’ he said, but with very little energy and belief behind it. He ran his hand through his hair. It was so glossy and perfect it fell straight back into place and reminded Kitty of a Head & Shoulders commercial. For the first time, she noticed he was actually quite handsome.

  ‘So you’re suspending me.’

  ‘No … I’m asking you not to work in the office for the next three weeks while I try to convince them.’

  ‘But what about Constance’s story?’

  He rubbed his eyes tiredly.

  ‘That’s why you didn’t want me to write it, isn’t it? That’s why you asked Cheryl.’

  ‘My hands are tied, Kitty. They’re our biggest advertisers. We lose them, it’s suicide and I can’t afford to let that happen.’

  ‘Does Bob know?’

  ‘No, and you’re not to tell him either. He doesn’t need this on his plate. That’s why Cheryl and I are here.’

  ‘I want to work on the story,’ Kitty said. She suddenly very much needed to do this story. It was all she had.

  ‘If they do as they say then we can’t publish your name,’ he said, appearing tired. ‘I don’t see a way round it.’

  Kitty suddenly liked this side of him. He seemed human, not like his usual bulldog self. ‘I was thinking of writing under Kitty Logan from now on. You know, drop Katherine. Nobody but my mother calls me it anyway …’ She swallowed. Katherine Logan carried such weight, she felt embarrassed saying it aloud, self-conscious when she phoned up the names on the list, paranoid about their reaction and what they must be thinking but not saying. She was ashamed of her own name. Kitty could be her fresh start.

  Pete looked at her rather pityingly.

  ‘Or even better,’ she fought off his pity and brightened as a new idea sprung to her mind, ‘we put Constance’s name to it. It’s her final story.’

  ‘We can’t do that, Kitty, not if it’s your story.’ He seemed surprised, but in a good way, impressed that she was suggesting not putting her name to her own hard work. He softened. ‘We’ll work something out. Just keep on working on it. Can’t you work from home?’

  ‘I can’t … I can’t afford to make that many calls.’

  He sighed and leaned over his desk, hands flat on the surface like in the boardroom. He had a muscular back and, to her very great surprise, Kitty felt a crush developing. She just wanted to reach out and help massage the tension from his shoulders.

  ‘Okay,’ he said gently. ‘Use your home phone and bill the office.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘But, Kitty, you’ll have to figure out another way to do this than working your way through the phone directory.’

  ‘Yeah. I know.’

  As Kitty was making her way downstairs, she noticed that the bird house in the front garden had a ‘Junk Mail’ sign and was overflowing with leaflets. She thought about Glen, hiding his watch in her underwear drawer. Bob and Constance hid things in bizarre places; surely the key to Constance’s story lay somewhere inside that flat. She knocked on the door.

  Teresa answered. ‘He’s having a lie-down, love.’

  ‘I need to use Constance’s desk. I need your help. I need to find the telephone directory.’

  Teresa laughed. ‘Well, good luck with that. You know I found the phone in the laundry basket the other day? Bob said it was ringing too loudly.’

  They looked around the flat.

  ‘Money in the teapot, passports in the toaster, junk mail in the bird house – where on earth would Constance put a directory?’ Kitty asked.

  ‘It’s probably in the loo, she probably used it to wipe her bum,’ Teresa said, shuffling off back to the kitchen where Kitty could hear the washing machine in action. Kitty was pleased to see that at least Teresa had upped her duties from light dusting and was looking after Bob now.

  Left to her own devices, Kitty began looking around the flat for the phonebook, checking in the most obvious places and then straining her mind to think of the bizarre. She kneeled on the floor in Bob and Constance’s office, on a sheepskin shagpile rug that was out of place next to its Persian neighbour, and examined the low coffee table on which sat the phone. She didn’t know why but she felt compelled to look underneath the table, and there they were. Instead of on four table legs, the wooden surface stood on four pillars of phonebooks and Golden Pages, each five books thick, and going back over the last ten years. Kitty laughed and Teresa appeared at the door to see what she’d discovered. Seeing Kitty lift the wooden slab off the directories, Teresa rolled her eyes, but couldn’t hide her amusement before she wandered back down the corridor to the kitchen. Kitty flicked through the latest directory but there was nothing new. Then she studied last year’s. She went straight to McGowan, and as soon as she reached the page she almost leaped for joy. It was highlighted in pink. She flicked to the second name on the list, Ambrose Nolan, and to her delight found that it too had been highlighted. Pulling out the list from her folder, she went through every single name and squealed happily
to find each appeared highlighted in the directory. A lucky break at last. She punched the air in celebration and accidentally toppled a lamp. It wobbled dangerously and a small red leather address book came falling to the floor, the one Bob had been searching for. Kitty laughed, hugged the directory to her and lifted her head to the sky.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered.

  CHAPTER SIX

  So now Kitty had all the names, the addresses and the phone numbers. Everyone lived in Ireland, and her wild-goose chase was limited to one country. She was so close to Constance’s story she could practically smell the ink on the freshly published magazine. With a deadline of only a week and a half to go, and with one hundred people to meet, Kitty was surprised at her lack of eagerness to begin contacting them immediately. As she looked at the phone directory, her eyes kept being pulled to search for one name, and that wasn’t even on Constance’s list.

  Kitty took the 123 bus to O’Connell Street and then the 140 to Finglas. One hour after setting out on her journey, and constantly going over her words in her head, she arrived at her destination and she still didn’t even know what to say. She stood across the green from Colin Maguire’s house while kids raced around her on their bikes, almost knocking her over as if she wasn’t even there. She suddenly wished she wasn’t. At that hour the streets were busy with mothers and their children coming and going, but none seemed to take any notice of a stranger’s presence. Not yet. She was sure it would be only a matter a time before one of the children alerted its mother to a strange woman lurking at the green. The green was a one-hundred-metre stretch of grass with a diagonal pathway going through it from one exit to another, surrounded by a small knee-high wall. She wasn’t protected by anything, she was completely exposed, and all that stood between her and Colin’s house was distance and her own terror.

  As she looked around at the neighbours, she took in their faces, wondering if they had been at the courthouse, if they had been the ones shouting at her, if they were the people who came to her door with spray paint and toilet paper while she slept inside or while she slipped out to work. Were they watching her all the time as she was watching them now? With a hat pulled low over her face, she watched Colin Maguire’s house and tried to decide whether to approach and, if so, what to say.

  Sorry. Sorry for ruining your life. Sorry you were suspended from your job, sorry you were rejected from your community. Sorry that, for whatever reason, I’m sure related in some way to the story, you’ve had to put your house on the market. Sorry your marriage has suffered as a consequence. Sorry for putting your job in jeopardy. Sorry for embarrassing your family and destroying personal relationships. I know you mustn’t think that I understand, that I’m a heartless bitch who couldn’t possibly understand, but I do. Believe me, I do. I understand because I’m going through it too. That’s what she wanted to say but she knew it was an apology that was full of self-sympathy and she needed to be selfless. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to be so because she felt she was suffering so much. It was her fault, yes it was, but they were both suffering, and whoever loved him and was trying to protect him was causing her misery to continue.

  She studied the house, which had a ‘For Sale’ notice in the garden. There was no sign of his children, no bikes in the garden, no toys on the windowsill, the car was still in the drive. It was Colin’s car. She remembered chasing him to it after school with a camera in his face, his look bewildered and confused. She had thought he was a criminal then. She had been so sure he was, but to think of the things she’d said to him made her ashamed now. She wondered if the car in the driveway meant that he hadn’t gone back to work yet. She assumed his job was still open to him now that his name was well and truly cleared. Or perhaps the stigma was too great for him to return.

  Sorry.

  Colin was thirty-eight years old. He started working in the Finglas Community Secondary School, for twelve- to eighteen-year-olds, as soon as he finished college at the age of twenty-four. He was popular with the students, to his detriment, often a regular at the end-of-year debutante balls, a supportive young teacher they didn’t consider a proper teacher as he failed to dish out homework, and punishments other than press-ups while forced to sing the latest songs in the charts. He was the teacher whom students felt they could go to when in need, and as a reward for his popularity was made class tutor on many occasions, unusual for a physical education teacher in that particular school. When he turned down the advances of sixteen-year-old Tanya O’Brien, he suffered the consequences ten years later. For whatever reasons, choosing to direct her personal unhappiness at him, Tanya talked her old school friend Tracey O’Neill into becoming her accomplice. Tracey had truly believed that Tanya was abused and that her ten-year-old son was in fact Colin’s son. Apart from wanting to support her friend, having been convinced that two people with identical stories would strengthen her case, Tracey also believed there would be a monetary reward for Tanya’s trauma, with magazines keen to tell her story and possibly even television appearances to talk about the abuse she’d suffered. Tanya had shown her friend examples of previous abuse cases in which the victims were paid by the media. One evil young woman and the other bored and twisted had come together to target an overambitious one. Kitty was young and coming up the ranks. They’d known she would be hungry. And she was. She gobbled up their lies and came at them for seconds, talking the editor and producer of Thirty Minutes into allowing her to follow the story up, convincing herself that exposing this pervert was all for the greater good of society.

  The front door of Colin’s house opened and he appeared. Head still down as she had last seen him in the courthouse, his chin on his chest. Kitty’s heart hammered wildly and she realised she couldn’t do it. She turned and walked away quickly, hat low over her face, feeling once again an interloper in Colin’s life.

  Not one of her voicemails was returned. Those she had called hadn’t answered, or weren’t home, messages were to be passed on but she couldn’t be sure if they would be. Besides, increasingly people screened their calls and refused to answer if they didn’t recognise a number or it was withheld. Kitty decided that the best way to approach this story was not to contact all one hundred names via the telephone but to try a face-to-face approach.

  On day one of her personal visits she went to Sarah McGowan’s address in Lucan, a ground-floor red-brick block of flats built in the seventies, which looked like it belonged in a retirement community. The balcony door opened beside her at the front door to the flats and a woman in her twenties in a nurse’s uniform stepped out.

  ‘Are you Sarah McGowan?’

  The girl looked her up and down. Made a decision. ‘She moved out six months ago.’

  Kitty couldn’t hide her disappointment.

  ‘No jobs for her here,’ the nurse shrugged, ‘which I understand, but she was supposed to give me three months’ notice. Which she didn’t.’

  ‘Where did she move to?’ Kitty asked hopefully.

  ‘Australia.’

  ‘Australia!’

  ‘Victoria, I think. Or at least that’s where she went first. She had friends out there working on a watermelon farm. They got her a job picking watermelons.’ The nurse rolled her eyes.

  ‘I don’t know, that sounds kind of fun,’ Kitty said, thinking picking watermelons on the other side of the world would be quite the remedy for her situation right now.

  ‘For a qualified accountant?’

  Kitty took her point. ‘Do you have her new number?’

  The nurse shook her head. ‘We weren’t exactly friends. She set up a forwarding address with the Post Office and I sold her crap on eBay. The least she could do for me.’

  ‘Do you know her friends or family?’

  The girl gave Kitty a look that answered everything.

  ‘Thanks for your help.’ Kitty backed away, knowing there was nothing more she’d get from this girl.

  ‘Hey, are you that woman?’

  Kitty stopped. ‘Depends which
woman you mean.’

  ‘The TV woman. From Thirty Minutes.’

  Kitty paused. ‘Yes, that’s me.’

  ‘You left a message on my phone.’

  It didn’t warrant a response.

  ‘I’ve never seen your show. I just know you from the court case.’

  Kitty’s smile faded.

  The girl seemed to think about it. ‘She’s a good girl, you know. Sarah. Despite what I’ve said about her. Don’t do anything horrible on her.’

  ‘I won’t.’ Kitty swallowed and made her way out of the quiet apartment complex. Perhaps she would use the name Kitty in future after all.

  On the bus to her next destination, Kitty tried to ignore the parting words of the previous exchange by making notes in her notepad.

  Story Theory: People who’ve had to move abroad.

  Recession story?

  Kitty hoped that wasn’t the case. She’d had enough of those stories – the media was inundated with the subject – and unless the situation was unique, she knew Constance had believed the same.

  She stared out of the bus window. She had hoped to follow the list in the exact order Constance had catalogued the names, but as Kitty was cold calling door to door, and hadn’t use of a car, she had decided to start with the Dublin addresses first. Sixth on the list, but second on Kitty’s, was Bridget Murphy.