by Marian Keyes
But Hannah was a genius. She was so good at hair that the Ardglass management were prepared to overlook her less-than-sunny manner.
Finally, Hannah ran her fingers through Cara’s waffle-like waves. ‘There you go. Done.’
In the mirror, Cara’s suddenly shiny hair was all messy, on-trend glamour. The rest of her really needed to up its game to be worthy of it. More make-up. Better clothes. ‘You’re amazing, Hannah.’
Hannah regarded her dispassionately. ‘You look good. Breaks my heart that all your great hair is hidden in a bullshit chignon.’
‘Look, I’ve nothing to give you –’
‘Hey! You’re my friend. I don’t –’
‘– right now. But I’ll wine you on Tuesday.’
‘Off you go. Don’t kill any kids. Or do. It’s your weekend.’
She put in her earbuds, found Michael Kiwanuka on her phone, and stepped out into the spring day.
Even though it was only two thirty, the Luas home was crowded, maybe because it was the Thursday of the Easter weekend and people were already knocking off.
She’d finished early because she’d started early. Her usual start time was 10 a.m. but today she’d come in at six to wrangle Billy Fay. They were good employers, the Ardglass, so it was only fair.
When she got home, the boys had to be fed – more fish fingers, more oven chips, more baked beans. Then Baxter needed to be dropped over to her parents before they started the drive to County Kerry. They’d get to the hotel just in time for dinner.
Her feelings about the upcoming weekend were decidedly mixed. On the one hand, four nights in the dreamy Lough Lein hotel: everyone – even people who, unlike Cara, weren’t obsessed with hotels – would kill for less. On the other, Jessie and Johnny paying for all of them made her squirm. But on the third hand, Cara and Ed could never have afforded it and Jessie really did insist and – hey! A man had stood up: a precious seat had become free.
As she dived, so did another woman. Both had their hand on it, both had equal claim. They locked eyes in a silent battle of wills. Cara looked at her skinny-jeaned adversary. I’m as deserving of that seat as you are, she thought. Right now I have the best hair in this entire city. Then she remembered what Billy Fay had called her. Fat bitch …
An upsurge of self-loathing burst its banks and rushed through her every cell. She moved back into the jostling throng, surrendering the seat to the victor.
FOUR
‘Oh!’ Jessie’s tone made Johnny pause.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘That profile in the Independent. It’s already up online. I wasn’t expecting it for a couple of weeks …’
Shite. ‘It’ll be fine. Forward it to me.’
In silence they both read.
Jessie Parnell is late. By three minutes. She sweeps into the PiG Café, on full charm offensive: a finance meeting had overrun, parking had been tricky and she hopes I haven’t been worried.
(A friend of mine has a theory about punctual people – they either have excellent manners or they’re monstrous control freaks. I wonder which Parnell is? Perhaps both?)
Parnell is whippet-lean, tall, easily five nine or ten, and her fitted white coat is pristine. She looks rich. Probably because she is.
The success story of Parnell’s International Grocer is familiar to Irish people. Back in 1996, Jessie Parnell, a fresh-faced 26-year-old from County Galway was just home from a holiday in Vietnam. A passionate cook in her spare time, she decided to recreate gỏi cuốn, a dish she’d fallen in love with there. But it proved impossible to source most of the ingredients in Dublin.
‘These were pre-internet days,’ she reminds me. ‘Ireland wasn’t multi-cultural the way it is now. If they didn’t have the stuff in Super-Valu or Dunnes, you simply couldn’t get it. I saw a gap in the market.’
It’s everyone’s dream: sitting at your kitchen table and coming up with an idea for a killer business. All the best ideas are simple ones, but maybe you need Parnell’s dynamism to act on it.
‘Around then, Irish people were starting to travel to the Far East, places like Thailand and Japan, and sampling what my dad would have called “food with notions”. I felt they’d want to start cooking those cuisines.’
So how did she set up her business?
‘I was working for a food export company, I’d met a few key people, so I knew where to source products.’
At the time, she had two years under her belt as a salesperson with Irish Dairy International.
Parnell getting a job with IDI was no mean feat: back then, their biggest customer was Saudi Arabia, who had a policy of not negotiating with women. In light of this, IDI had been reluctant to interview her.
But, according to Aaron Dillon, head of HR, as soon as Parnell walked through the door, he knew she was special. ‘Full of energy and optimism, very much a team player. Always smiling, always sunny.’
(Photos from the time show a healthy-looking young woman with fair hair, freckles and big teeth. You couldn’t call her beautiful, but she was bursting with vitality.)
‘Not everyone liked her,’ Aaron Dillon admitted. ‘The word “pushy” was used, but I reckoned she’d go a long way.’
Two people who did like her were two men who began working for IDI that same year – Rory Kinsella and Johnny Casey, her first and second husbands respectively.
‘That pair made a great team. Rory was the solid one and Johnny had the charm,’ Aaron Dillon confirms. ‘Both brilliant at their job.’
And both in love with Parnell, if the rumours are to be believed.
Parnell won’t be drawn on that. But, as Johnny Casey has been quoted as saying, ‘I was in love with her for her entire marriage to Rory’, it’s probably safe to say that they are.
Parnell drew up a business plan for her proposed business, which she cheerfully admits was a fiction. ‘I did a five-year projection,’ she laughs, ‘but I had no idea if I’d survive the first month.’
Nevertheless, she must have talked a good game, because she got a bank loan.
‘In fairness, in those particular days,’ she reminds me, ‘banks were very keen to lend.’
In late 1996 in a small shop-front on South Anne Street, Parnell’s International Grocers opened their doors for trading. Much has always been made of the look of the store. Over the lintel, the old-fashioned mirrored sign with curlicued gold-leaf lettering looked simultaneously novel and as though it had always been there. Instantly, it guaranteed confidence.
Inside the store, Parnell featured recipe cards and cooking demos. The staff was knowledgeable about what to cook with those adorable little jars of Saigon cinnamon or Burmese salt-cured anchovies.
Of course, Irish customers paid a hefty premium for the privilege of buying these ingredients, which could have been picked up in the markets of Birmingham or Brick Lane for a tenth of the price.
Parnell is unapologetic. ‘I was paying the carriage, the Customs duty, and I was taking all the risk.’
From the very moment it opened, PiG (as it quickly became known) enjoyed a brisk trade. From today’s vantage point, it seems a no-brainer that Parnell’s International Grocers would be a success – a newly sophisticated population, richer than at any other time in their history.
But Parnell says it was nothing of the sort. ‘I’d given up my job to work full time on getting the business off the ground and my flat was my guarantee for the loan. I could have lost everything. I was petrified. It’s an audacious thing to set up your own business. Plenty of people would have been happy to see me fail.’
When I demur, she’s insistent. ‘Not everyone likes an “ambitious” woman. When it’s said about a man it’s always in a good way. But a woman? Not so much. If I’d failed, the embarrassment would have been as painful as the financial loss.’
But she didn’t fail. She insists – correctly – that a large factor in her success was timing.
In 1997, when she married Kinsella, the Cork branch was up and running.
At this point, Kinsella left Irish Dairy International to work as a salesman for his wife’s company and, less than a year later, Johnny Casey joined them.
By the early days of the new millennium, there were seven stores nationwide, three of them – Dublin, Malahide and Kilkenny – featuring cafés. During this time, barely seeming to break stride, Parnell also had two children: her only son Ferdia in 1998 and her eldest daughter Saoirse in 2002.
When the crash hit in 2008, PiG had sixteen outlets around the country, including a fine-dining restaurant next to the original site on South Anne Street.
In some circles, PiG was known as ‘The Land That Recession Forgot’. But Parnell is quick to disabuse me. ‘The recession hurt us, the way it hurt every business. Eight of our premises shut.’
The recession may have passed but the world has changed beyond all recognition since PiG first opened its doors. How has it remained relevant when the most obscure ingredient can be sourced on the internet and your local Centra stocks Scotch bonnet chillies?
‘Very high-quality exotic fresh produce and diverse cuisines. In the last five months, we’ve showcased Uzbeki, Eritrean and Hawaiian food. We’ve also featured Gujarati cooking, instead of generic Indian, and Shandong instead of Chinese. And every launch is supported by the cookery school.’
Ah, yes, the cookery school, perhaps Parnell’s greatest achievement. It’s a mystery how she continues to woo highly strung, over-scheduled, big-name chefs to little old Dublin, but continue she does. In the last month, Francisco Madarona, the chef-patron of Oro Sucio on the Yucatan peninsula, did two days – immediately sold-out – of demos of his Modern Mayan cuisine. Considering that Oro Sucio is fully booked for the next eighteen months, this is quite an achievement.
So how did she manage to bag Francisco?
‘I asked,’ is her reply.
Hmm. I suspect it’s not as simple as that. However, she has a unique combination of charm and dogged determination. It may not hurt that she’s a very attractive woman. She’s grown into her youthful toothiness, her hair is a sharply cut bob in an expensive-looking golden blonde and, considering she’s forty-nine, her skin is flawless, not a wrinkle in sight.
She’s refreshingly up-front about her forays into cosmetic surgery. ‘No Botox, but I’m a divil for the laser. I got all my freckles lasered off – it hurt like you wouldn’t believe but it was the happiest day of my life. Now and again I get the face zapped off me to stimulate collagen. Excruciating but no pain, no gain.’
Speaking of pain, experts agree that if she’d sold PiG in 2008 – apparently three buyers with deep pockets made overtures mere weeks before the worldwide crash – she’d have made an eye-watering amount. But she turned them all down – too much of a control freak?
Or perhaps she’s not motivated entirely by money. It’s common knowledge that her staff are well taken care of. Which may explain, despite her reputation as ‘a benign dictator’, the almost cult-like loyalty she inspires among her employees.
It seems as if she lives a charmed existence, but we must remember that her first husband died when they were both only thirty-four. They’d been married less than seven years and had two young children.
Rory died of an aneurysm. ‘It was so horribly sudden.’ Her face clouds. ‘I can’t describe the shock.’
Since then, perhaps she finds it hard to trust that happiness will last? It would certainly explain her non-stop drive.
She has never spoken about when her relationship with Johnny Casey started. He was working for Parnell when Kinsella died, and she’s credited Casey with keeping the business going during those months after her bereavement.
It was only when Parnell became pregnant with her third child, less than three years after the death of her first husband, that she went public with Casey. They married that same year, a low-key register office affair, compared to the 120-person extravaganza of her wedding with Kinsella.
According to several sources, Rory’s parents and two sisters, Keeva and Izzy, have never forgiven her. They declined to contribute to this piece.
I ask Parnell what it’s like working so closely with her (current) husband.
‘Handy,’ is her immediate answer. ‘If something crops up about the business, I can address it there and then. I’ve been known to wake him in the middle of the night to ask if he’s remembered to do something.’
Managing a demanding career with five children – how does she do it?
‘With a huge amount of help. I’ve a housekeeper who comes in every weekday. He does the laundry, housework and after-school childcare.’
Hold up. ‘He’?
‘Totally. Why not?’
You have to wonder why. This is the woman whose first husband was her employee, then her second. And she didn’t take either of their names.
So how does she unwind? If ever?
‘My kids and I pile into my bed and watch TV or just catch up. I’m all about family and I’m at my happiest when we’re all squashed in there together. I adore children. I was nearly forty-two when I had Dilly. I’d have loved more but Johnny threatened to go for the snip.’
Without checking her phone, she knows when our allotted hour is up. I’m treated to a warm, fragrant hug, and then she’s gone, click-clacking away in her pristine coat, changing the world.
‘It’s fine,’ Johnny said.
‘It’s mean. Like, going on about my coat. It’s only my North Face cold-weather thing – it’s practical. It’s only white because all the black ones in Large were gone. And I’m not “whippet-lean”, I’m average-sized.’ She flashed a trying-hard smile. ‘And I’m not a control freak.’
Johnny raised an eyebrow. ‘Babes …’
‘Not in that way! He makes me sound like a monster! And I’m only five foot seven. Like, why has he exaggerated my height? And that thing about you being in love with me for my entire marriage!’
‘I know.’ Johnny had said it as a quip, a long time ago. But it was one of those things that was trotted out every time a new interview was done.
‘Now it’s treated as hard fact, like the moon landings. He makes me sound like a man-hating, two-timing, slutty, white-coat-wearing giantess-who-sleeps-with-chefs. And his shite-y attempt at psychoanalysing me, it’s pathetic.’
‘C’mon. Don’t let it get to you. It’s fine.’ In fairness, he thought, it could have been a lot worse.
FIVE
Outside Newcastle West, with less than an hour to go, Ed suddenly said, ‘Did we pack the Easter eggs for Jessie and Johnny? I don’t remember putting them in.’
Cara laughed. ‘Oh, I remember. It was such a relief to get them off the premises.’
For the past four days, seven hand-crafted artisanal Easter eggs had lurked in the garden shed, bought as paltry thanks to Johnny and Jessie for this weekend. None had been purchased for their own two boys, because they’d get so much chocolate over the next four days that it would surprise no one if they collapsed into a diabetic coma.
It was a matter of deep shame that she felt so conflicted about this upcoming weekend. What nobody would understand was that she found Easter nearly as bad as Christmas. So. Much. Food.
Even at home in her own house it was difficult, with all that sugar knocking about. But staying in a hotel, with Jessie at the helm, the next few days would be just one meal after another: giant breakfast buffets with an obscene array of irresistible choices, leisurely lunches featuring wine, then elaborate three-course dinners every night. Sometimes she joked to Ed that she wouldn’t be surprised to be woken at 2 a.m. to be forcibly fed to ward off ‘night starvation’.
She might be able to duck out of a couple of the lunches but Jessie liked big family get-togethers at dinner time. Attendance was borderline mandatory.
In addition to the many meals, sugar would be everywhere.
There was the giant egg hunt on Easter Sunday morning, where overexcited children swarmed through the grounds snatching Creme Eggs from hedgerows and flinging them into small
buckets. (Last year Vinnie had found eleven and Tom got sixteen.) In addition, the hotel distributed full-sized eggs to everyone, adults and children alike.
As daunting as the tsunami of food was this weekend’s compulsory sociability. She didn’t want to see people. Or, rather, she didn’t want people seeing her. She wished she could hide herself away until she was thin again.
‘You’re okay?’ Ed asked, squeezing her knee.
‘Fine.’
‘You’d tell me if you weren’t?’
‘Course!’
He was a good man, the best. But she refused to offload on him because the boys – and Ed – were so happy. For the past month, Vinnie and Tom had talked of little else: the swimming pool, the kids’ movies, hanging out with their cousins. They’d literally been crossing days off the calendar in the kitchen.
Bottom line, the next four days were precious and the least she could do was try to enjoy them.
‘We have our own telly!’ Vinnie yelled from the interconnecting room. ‘Literally our own actual telly!’
‘And our own key!’ Tom raced into Cara and Ed’s bedroom to wave the card at them, then scooted away again. ‘We’re grown-up now.’
You had to hand it to Jessie, Cara acknowledged. This was exactly the right age for the lads to have their own space. Vinnie was ten, Tom was eight: they were thrilled with their independence yet reassured by their proximity to herself and Ed.
‘Nearly time for dinner,’ Ed announced. ‘This is your three-minute warning.’
Bracing herself, Cara stepped before the full-length mirror. This wrap dress was … grim. Even with the sucky-in pants. But at least it fitted. Her jeans had cut into her for the entire drive from Dublin, a pain that was almost pleasant because it felt suitably punitive. She could have eased the discomfort by putting on her ‘fat’ jeans before they’d left, but that would have been like opening the floodgates.
And – her blood froze – what if the ‘fat’ ones were too tight?
