by Marian Keyes
A carton of vegan yoghurt caught his attention. This was good stuff, right? After skimming the ingredients list, he tossed the carton into his basket: he was willing to be convinced. A bottle of green juice, featuring spirulina, also made the cut. Maybe he could clean-eat his way to contentment. Briefly, hope spiked, then plummeted back to scratchy, bad-tempered yearning.
Nothing else on the shelves seemed promising so, more out of habit than anything else, he threw a six-pack of beer into his basket. Could it be the relentless humidity that was getting to him? Not very likely, but maybe if he took a shower, his second of the day, the restlessness would wash away. Better buy shower gel, in that case.
There was that feeling again, of freefalling.
It sucked, this single-life shit. For the last ten years Paige had taken care of all of his day-to-day stuff and now, whenever he bumped up against her absence, it was as if he’d stumbled. Maybe he could … Cycle down the coast? Text someone? Go home and sleep? Either way, being here wasn’t fixing anything. He might as well just pay up and leave. Then he saw the girl.
She was tall, with a tumble of thick fair hair. Even before she took the strange step of opening one of the big glass freezers, moving forward, practically inside it, then simply standing there, letting the door bounce gently off her back, he was drawn to her. Leaning into the chilled air, she gathered her heavy fair hair onto the top of her head, revealing a neck that startled him with its perfection. He felt like he was the first person ever to have seen that part of her.
He stared and stared. Then, galvanized into action, he stepped over to the freezer, grabbed the door handle and pulled, sending a bloom of chilly air towards him. ‘Excuse me,’ he said.
She turned around. Her hair tumbled from the crown of her head to frame a face that was unexpectedly innocent. ‘Oh!’ Then she laughed. ‘Just escaping the killer heat there for a few happy seconds.’
Oh, yeah. The heat. The whole country was buckling because it was twenty-five degrees. It was cute but a bit … pathetic? They should try cycling from Dublin to Istanbul at the height of summer.
And what was with her laughing? He could have wanted to buy whatever was in this freezer. Now that he looked, it was frozen chicken and, no, he wouldn’t touch that processed crap, but she wasn’t to know.
‘Chicken nuggets and cold,’ she said. ‘A new spin on Netflix and chill.’
Her blithe good humour surprised him.
‘Sorry.’ She finally moved out of his way. ‘You need to get in here?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No …’ Well, who knew? This was what he’d been jonesing for. But even then, he was wondering how quickly he’d get bored of her. ‘This might sound weird. But will you have a drink with me?’
‘When?’ She sounded startled.
‘Now. Right now.’
‘Right now, no. I’ve no money.’
‘But I’ll pay. I’ve money.’ In his eagerness, he tripped over his words. Actually, strictly speaking, he didn’t have much money. He kept forgetting.
She frowned. ‘I could pay you back. When I get paid. But that mightn’t be for a while.’
‘You don’t have to do that. I don’t care.’
‘But I do.’
Unsettled by her vehemence, he said, ‘Okay. Grand. You can pay me back.’
Throngs were gathered outside the nearest pub, enjoying the freakishly hot May sunshine. The girl – Nell – asked to sit in the shade. ‘I’ll get burnt to a crisp without sunblock.’
‘Put some on?’
‘No, like, I don’t own any. I’ll get some when I’m paid.’
‘Wow. Lot of stuff is going to happen when you’re paid.’
‘It’ll be quite a day.’ Her eyes sparkled.
‘So? To drink?’
‘Pint of Kopparbergs.’
‘Ah.’ He’d no problem with women drinking pints. He just wasn’t used to it. ‘Grand.’ When he returned with the drinks, he asked, ‘How come you’re so skint?’
‘Sticky income. High rent. The usual.’ She flashed him a grin. Her two front teeth overlapped each other slightly. It gave her an odd pout that he found vulnerable and sexy.
‘But don’t you have cards?’ he asked. ‘While you’re waiting to be paid?’
‘I only use cash. Keeps me accountable.’
What did that even mean? ‘What about the Bank of Mum and Dad?’
She laughed. ‘My dad’s a painter and decorator. My mum is a cook in a nursing home. They’re nearly as skint as I am.’
‘So this job of yours …?’
‘Set designer. For theatre, movies sometimes, TV, you know?’ She paused. ‘It’s what I studied in college, but it’s hard to get a … so I – I guess I intern.’
‘They don’t pay you?’
‘Not always, not for – no, not for when I’m learning. But this is what I want to do with my life, my career. I love it, so I’m okay with taking the financial hit. At least for now. I was meant to have made it by thirty and I’ll be thirty in November, you know …’
He nodded. Oh, he knew.
‘But it’s okay, I have my side-hustle!’ She was upbeat again. ‘I do house-painting and decorating. Except a lot of people don’t trust a woman to do a good job.’
‘That’s crazy!’ He threw a lot of outraged energy into his words. Hey, he could talk the woke talk, when required.
‘But when they beat me down on price, they suddenly find they’re good with a woman doing their decor.’ Another of those crooked grins.
‘So you hang wallpaper and go up ladders and hammer stuff?’
‘Nails? Yep. And I’m handy with a staple-gun. Love me a chainsaw.’
Should he be impressed? Like, he was. But would saying so sound patronizing?
‘My dad’s been doing it for forty years,’ she said. ‘I learnt from the best.’ Then, ‘What about you? You look … You’re someone, aren’t you?’
‘Hey, everyone’s someone.’ That was what he always said. Humble Liam.
‘You’re a bit famous?’
‘Well …’ He let the moment linger so the facts could assemble in her head.
She stared at him with narrowed eyes, until the silence became embarrassing. It shouldn’t hurt. She was more than a decade younger than him, a different generation.
‘I was a professional runner for a long time. Competed mostly in the States. Then I ran an ultra-marathon in the Sahara.’ He really needed her to remember him.
‘Oh, yeaaaah.’ He watched as the memories dropped into place. ‘You gave all your sponsorship cash to the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. You’re that guy, right? Wow. Hey, I’m sorry. For not recognizing you straight away.’
She was so sweet. The anxiety that had kept his chest in a chokehold for the longest time loosened.
‘That was such a cool thing,’ she said. ‘Three years ago?’
‘Five.’ It was actually seven, but he needed to hold on to it, to keep him relevant.
‘And you still run?’
‘My knees blew out. The Sahara was my last big run. I went for broke, tried to make it count.’
‘And you did! Raising all the money for such a good cause! But it must have hurt, your body stopping you doing what you love?’
‘Mm.’ Everything had been easy for him until then. He’d trained hard, met the right sponsors, enjoyed moderate success. ‘In the early days, everything just got better and better. Then it sort of … plateaued, and it all started to fall away. I stopped winning, a sponsor dropped me, then another, until I was left with nothing. Being part of a slow ending is so fucking … painful.’ It was a well-rehearsed speech. ‘You know, it would have been easier if someone had just come in and said, “That’s it, Liam. This is as good as it gets. You can stop right now or you can live through the next three and a half years of ever-decreasing returns and destroy your soul in the process.”’
‘But we don’t get those choices, right? Things end,’ she said. ‘It always hurts. And now? You have a new passion?�
��
‘I cycle. It’s an obsession, almost. I’m part of a club. Last summer I cycled to Istanbul.’
‘Class! And how do you, like, fund yourself? Did you have cash left from running?’
‘Long gone. To be honest, there was never that much in the first place. No, I – I, ah, around the time I stopped winning races, I got married. She, Paige, has a – like, she gets paid a ton of money.’ He managed a small smile. ‘We’ve two kids. I wasn’t qualified to do anything else, so I accidentally became a house-husband.’
‘Re-spect!’ She high-fived him.
He decided not to mention the nanny and the housekeeper who’d done all of the actual work. ‘Not respect. Everyone judges me, my brothers, my parents. They say I stick at nothing.’
‘You stuck at your running career for, what, eleven, twelve years? That’s staying power. Now you cycle. Sounds like you’re committed to that. You’re married, you’re sticking at –’
He shook his head. ‘We split up last year. We’re divorced. She’s gone back to the States with the kids. So here I am at forty, all washed up, managing a bike shop. I’ve sustained nothing.’
‘Not how it works.’ She seemed very surprised. ‘You lived one life for a while, another life before that. Now you’re living out your passion for cycling. And at some stage you’ll evolve to the next thing.’
This little speech had the effect of an epiphany. He and his brothers had had it drummed into them by their blowhard dad that they needed to dig into a straight-arrow career path. According to Canice Casey, you picked your gig early, you got onto the bottom rung of the ladder and gradually you climbed. Anything that deviated from that model counted as a failure.
Although Liam quietly despised that sort of thinking, it was difficult to shake off.
But this girl – woman, whatever she was – was offering a different way of looking at the world. A way that endorsed his choices.
‘Another drink?’ he asked. ‘Please?’
‘Seriously, no. I’m late on this month’s rent. And I need to keep money for food.’
How could things be that bad? It sounded … Dickensian.
She saw his astonishment and laughed. ‘That’s twenty-first-century capitalism for you. People with degrees in the most developed countries on earth wish they could get work stacking shelves. But you’re forty, a different generation, you’re not going to get it.’
No, no, no, he couldn’t have her thinking that. Quickly, he said, ‘No, totally, I get it. Life is tough for twenty- and thirty-somethings. Like having to move back in with their parents?’ Well, in theory iniquities happened, but he didn’t believe in it on a big scale. Most people were grand. ‘So what can be done?’
‘I don’t want to lecture you.’
‘I’m interested.’ Sort of.
‘Okay, one of the things that perpetuates capitalism is built-in obsolescence.’ She paused and asked solemnly, ‘You know what that is?’
That tiny little twist of earnestness did for him.
‘Everything we buy is built to break. So we buy new stuff. Or fashion changes and we think we have to buy the new thing even though the old thing still works. So if stuff breaks, I fix it.’
He’d never met a woman like her. He’d never met anyone like her. Was it his age? Or his circumstances, which, he admitted, weren’t typical?
What pleased him profoundly was how different she was from Paige. They were literal opposites: Paige was the ultimate capitalist. Her sole purpose in life was to get people to spend more money, something she was so good at they’d made her CFO of a corporation.
‘I don’t buy new clothes –’
‘Wait – what, you don’t buy clothes?’
She giggled at his shock. ‘I do buy clothes, just not new ones.’
‘So you go where? To charity shops? Even for underwear?’
She coloured.
‘Sorry.’ He’d been inappropriate. ‘I shouldn’t have …’
He’d expected a smile to say he was forgiven. Even – maybe – a flirty remark along the lines that it was too soon for him to be talking about her knickers. But she had kept her head down and her mouth closed.
EIGHT
Nell, trailed by a clamour of kids, burst into the group of couches.
‘We’re just talking about you!’ Saoirse said. ‘About the night you and Liam met.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ Nell flashed a quick grin. ‘That was so not what I’d been expecting.’
Saoirse focused on Ed, as if she’d only just considered that her uncle had once been young and single. ‘What about you? How did you meet Cara? Tell us.’
‘Yeah!’ Liam insisted loudly. ‘I told my stuff.’
‘Do it!’
Cara and Ed shared a look: they’d go with the comedy version.
‘I’ll tell it,’ Cara said. ‘I met him in a bar.’ Pause. ‘I was drunk.’ Longer pause. ‘I slept with him on the first night.’
Solemnly, Ed said, ‘Everything that girls are told not to do.’
‘Double standards,’ Saoirse stuttered. ‘Girls get slut-shamed but no one judges men.’
‘But, hey, I married her.’ Ed was laughing now. ‘Slutty though she was.’
‘Still together thirteen years later.’
Even now Cara’s blood ran cold at the possibility that they might have missed each other.
She wasn’t meant to go out that night. ‘I’m too fat,’ she’d called, as her flatmate Gabby fluttered around, getting ready.
‘You’re not fat. You’re just not as thin as you were.’
‘Can I wear your denim dress?’ Erin, her other flatmate, asked.
‘Wear what you like.’ Cara was stretched along the couch, her feet comfortably up on the arm-rest. ‘I’m going nowhere.’
But Gabby and Erin had kept at her. ‘Life is for living! You’ll never meet someone if you stay at home eating crisps.’
‘Who says I want to meet someone?’
‘We all want to meet someone. Just stop picking bad boys.’
‘I don’t do it on purpose.’ The bad boys she dated came in so many different guises that it had taken her years to identify that she actually had a type. Even when she tried going out with guys who seemed nice, sooner or later they always revealed their true nature.
‘Oh, all right, I’ll come. I’ll be the sensible fat friend.’
In retrospect, she’d been far from fat. But until shortly before that night she’d been a lot thinner. It had been glorious but she’d slipped and slid, had a succession of breakouts and now her weight was on the increase again.
Until she was thin once more she deserved nothing, and this gave her a certain freedom. No one would take her seriously – certainly not a man – so the pressure was off. She was cool with being the chubby sidekick.
Their destination was a super-bar in the centre of Dublin. It was thronged with people, the roof lifting with pulsing music. I’m getting too old for this. The trio were swept and jostled by the constantly moving crowds until – hallelujah – a small, high table freed up and Cara pounced.
‘Good job,’ Gabby said. ‘We’ve a base now. We’ll be grand. Jesus, look at your man! Over there.’ She flicked her eyes towards a huddle of four or five lads. ‘Him.’ One was conspicuously hot. ‘How do I get to meet him?’
‘Just go over and say hello,’ Cara said.
‘I’m not drunk enough. And by the time I am, he might be gone.’
‘Hold my beer.’ Cara was suddenly energized.
‘Wait! What – what are you …’
Cara pushed her way through the people, scanned the five men and identified the one who looked least likely to mock her. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘My friend likes your friend.’
‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ The man nodded at the hot one. ‘Kyle. It’s always Kyle.’
‘Yep. My friend is over there. We’ve a table.’
‘A table? Right! We’re in.’
Quickly, the five of them up-sticked over to Gabby
and Erin. Introductions were made, drinks were bought. Kyle eventually wandered off, but Gabby didn’t seem to mind. A couple of hours passed, and the next thing Cara knew, they were all leaving together, en route to a house party in Stoneybatter.
The small two-storey was crammed with people. Cara had just got a drink when a girl rushed into the kitchen and said, ‘Is there someone here called Cara? You’re needed upstairs.’
A girl had locked herself in the only bathroom, then passed out. A throng of desperate people were outside on the landing, banging on the door.
‘Cara, thank God! This is tonight’s designated sensible friend,’ Gabby announced to the gathered crowd. ‘Help us – she can’t stay in there! We’re all bursting.’
‘And we need to know she’s okay,’ a male voice said.
It was the nice man who hadn’t mocked her – Ed.
‘What about the people who live here?’ he asked.
But no one seemed to know who or where they were.
Cara said, ‘I wonder if the bathroom window’s big enough for someone to climb through?’
‘We could see …’
The two of them went down the stairs and around to the back of the house. The small frosted bathroom window was illuminated – and slightly ajar.
‘You’d fit through that,’ Nice Ed said.
‘I wouldn’t – I’ve been on the pies. But you’d fit, skinny boy.’
‘So? You want me to shin up a drainpipe?’
‘We’re not in an Enid Blyton book. Maybe there’s a ladder.’
There was a ladder, in a miniature shed in the miniature garden. Together they carried it and leant it against the wall. ‘Look.’ Ed paused. ‘I’m afraid of heights.’
‘And I’m so hefty I’ll break the rungs.’
‘No, you’re not.’ Then, ‘But, it’s okay. I’ll do it.’
He climbed up while she held the ladder steady. ‘I’ve got you,’ she called. ‘You’re safe.’
There were an anxious few moments as he knelt on the windowsill and clambered into the bathroom. The door was opened and the unconscious occupant was helped out. Then came the sound of sirens. Blue lights flashed in the night air and Cara exclaimed, ‘Oh, my God, Nice Ed, it’s the police!’
