by Marian Keyes
Liam’s phone rang and he looked at it, almost in outrage. ‘It’s work.’ He pressed Accept. ‘Chelsea?’
Nell listened to him getting an earful from his manager. ‘Busy. Never got the chance.’ Then, ‘Hey. You do the rosters. Put more of us on. Responsibility? Call me “acting manager” all you like, but I’m not getting paid what you’re getting.’ More listening. ‘I’ll do it tomorrow.’ A sigh. ‘Monday, then.’ He ended the call.
‘She’s raging I didn’t bank yesterday’s takings. But if she only has three of us on, what does she expect?’
‘Mmm. Totally.’ Actually, Nell worried that Liam’s attitude to the woman who managed the six PlanetCycle shops was too belligerent.
‘Maybe it’s time I moved on. I’m getting all the grief of a manager without any of the money.’
‘Liam, don’t do anything mad.’
‘No. But. The sports-massage thing. I’ve been thinking about it long enough. Maybe I should just go for it.’
‘Could you work and study at the same time?’ They were lucky that Paige let them live rent-free, but they still needed money for food, a phone, the essentials.
‘Ah, yeah, I’ll be grand.’
‘All okay?’ Jessie was suddenly at their side. ‘Dilly went for it?’
‘Yes! Thank you!’ Nell was jubilant.
‘Soooo.’ There was a sly little twinkle in Jessie’s eye. ‘Wanted to run something by the pair of you. Tuscany, all of us, August? You know about it, Nell?’
‘Mmm, sort of.’ A villa had been booked and everyone was invited.
‘I was thinking,’ Jessie said, ‘about Violet and Lenore.’ She raised a hand. ‘Liam! Hear me out!’ Speaking quickly, she said, ‘There’s room for them, they’ve been before, they loved it, their cousins miss them, I miss them, we all miss them, I bet they miss us, Paige can come if she likes –’
‘No,’ Liam said. ‘Not Paige.’
‘Okay. But let’s invite the girls. How would you feel about it, Nell?’
‘Oh, my God, I’d totally love it.’ A relaxed week in the sunshine would be a great way to get to know the girls. Unlike that one grim, tense dinner in an air-conditioned bunker in Atlanta where the only sound was of expensive cutlery clinking off expensive plates mixed with Lenore’s quiet sobs.
‘Liam?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Maybe. We’d have to do something with flights. Would they fly from Atlanta to Ireland first? Or would they go straight to Rome? But we can work it out. I’ll talk to Paige.’
‘Or I can talk to Paige?’
‘Jessie,’ Liam said gently, ‘she’s my ex-wife. Let me talk to her.’
‘Okay! You’ll do it? Thanks!’ Delighted, Jessie swung away.
‘That would be amazing!’ Nell sparkled at Liam.
‘Whatever makes my angel happy.’
From across the garden, Johnny studied Liam. There was a gleam about him that snagged the eye, as if he’d been dipped in a glossy topcoat. He looked way too glamorous for this suburban garden. Nell, by the same token, didn’t. But she was endearing, immensely likeable, taking such joy in living. All the kids were besotted – just look at her there, twirling in a circle with Tom, her pink hair flying. Would Nell let him have a quiet life? he wondered.
She was certainly a lot more easy-going than Jessie could ever be. And from one or two things he’d gathered, herself and Liam were a great pair for the alfresco riding – beaches and forests and whatnot.
But you couldn’t be thinking like that about your brother’s wife.
Johnny’s smartwatch beeped, triggering his heart to pound pure adrenalin for a half-second. It was as if Jessie had seen into his thoughts and was on to him. But it was just a new email. Listlessly, he scanned it. If he’d had any energy, he’d have felt despair, but all he could produce was dull acceptance: at least the decision had been taken out of his hands.
Jessie’s fiftieth birthday was coming up in July. She didn’t want a big party, like she’d had for her fortieth. After that night, she’d admitted tearfully to Johnny, ‘I wasn’t sure if anyone there even liked me. I felt like I used to as a teenager.’ She wanted to spend this milestone birthday with close friends and family, maybe twelve or fourteen people. Hefty hints had been dropped about a murder-mystery weekend. Jessie loved period crime dramas – the clothes, the backstories, the scandal in people’s pasts.
Johnny had contacted a world-renowned hotel in Scotland, legendary for these events, but the prices were horrifying, almost a thousand pounds a head. Another strike against it was the logistics of flying a dozen people to another country. But a three-hour drive away in County Antrim, a much smaller country house offered something similar. It looked okay, nice even – a Regency-style building. The only worry was the price: disconcertingly reasonable.
ShitAdvisor was no help: the thirty-seven reviews were either five-star or one-star, almost nothing in between. And, of course, the five-star raves, which enthused about the delicious food, the warm hospitality and the great costumes, could be fake. Even though the birthday was hurtling towards Johnny at increasing speed, he’d been umming and aahing between the two places. It was only yesterday that he’d enquired about availability in the Scottish hotel – and now they were telling him they were fully booked. However, reasonably priced Gulban Manor in County Antrim had plenty of room. So, Gulban Manor it was!
Liam grabbed Jessie as she scooted past. ‘I messaged Paige. She likes the idea. The girls are already booked into summer camps but she’s gonna see about moving stuff around.’ He smiled. ‘You know Paige. She’ll make it happen.’
‘Thank you, Liam, thank you.’ Jessie was almost more grateful than Nell, which was saying something. ‘If you need help with the flights …’
‘Jessie, you’re way too generous.’ There was a warning note in his voice. ‘But my stuff with Paige and the girls is my stuff. Let me do this. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
THIRTY
By 7 p.m., the neighbours had drifted home. All who remained were the Casey brothers and their families: the adults gathered around the table in the garden, the younger kids watching YouTube in the living room.
For the thousandth time that day Cara touched her broken tooth with her tongue. Immediately all the conversation around her receded.
A tooth – a big one, a molar – had simply snapped in two. Could it really be connected to her throwing up? Worrying about her weight had been a constant, nearly all her life. As a skinny, knock-kneed eight-year-old, she knew that too much bread and butter would make her fat – and fat was the worst thing any girl could be.
Where had she even got the idea from?
Not from her mum and dad: they weren’t like that.
The girls at school? Well, everyone was always saying they were too fat and wanted to be much skinnier, but had anyone taken it to the extremes that she had? During her final two years at school, her first thought on awakening was always, Today I won’t eat. Despite her poor mum begging her to have breakfast, she often survived on water until late afternoon, when she’d cave, and speedily shove food into herself, consuming far more calories than if she’d stuck to regular meals. Her self-loathing was monumental, and although she understood in her head that anorexics lived lives of misery, in her heart she envied their discipline.
Through her college years in Dublin, she’d always felt too big, but the life she was living – little money, eating cheap carbs, drinking pints – gave her no choice.
Things only really went to hell when, aged twenty-two, she went to Manchester to do her hotel training – homesickness, combined with constant access to food, sent her weight soaring. Desperate, she ordered pills to speed up her metabolism, but they made her so jittery she had to stop. A brief spell with laxatives followed, but what they did to her body scared her. And then she’d found vomiting.
After she’d gone back to Dublin, she’d moved on to other, healthier types of weight control. Bootcamp workouts had featured for a while.
> When she was twenty-nine she’d done a liquid diet for ten weeks and was the thinnest she’d ever been as an adult. She’d felt amazing. But it hadn’t lasted: as soon as she’d resumed normal food, the weight piled back on. The shame had been intense, she’d felt a type of grief to have lost that skinny self. Ever since, she’d been trying to find her way home to that paradise size.
Apart from a short relapse after each of her pregnancies, she’d thought she had the vomiting under control.
Why couldn’t she eat normally? Why did she have to know the calorific value in literally everything? Why was she always either on the way up or the way down, desperately clawing for control?
Or she could try looking at it another way: why couldn’t she accept herself, whatever her size?
There were lots of overweight people who were fine with what they were. Why couldn’t she be one of them?
Cara tuned back into the conversation around the table. Johnny was saying, ‘This fiftieth-wedding-anniversary thing, how much are we dreading it?’
Next month, the senior Caseys, Canice and Rose, were holding a weekend of festivities to mark their golden wedding. They lived on the other side of the country in the small County Mayo town of Beltibbet. Attendance at the celebration was obligatory.
‘Is their present sorted?’ Liam asked. ‘Jessie, you’re doing it, right?’
‘Not that it matters,’ Johnny said. ‘We could give them actual Fort Knox and they still wouldn’t be impressed.’
‘Fuck them,’ Liam said.
‘Ah, Liam!’
‘Seriously, though, why did they even bother having kids? All they ever cared about was each other.’ Liam had made a good point.
In Beltibbet, Canice was the town solicitor, a justice of the peace and a local bigshot. Every one of his children was a bitter disappointment to him, something he liked to hold forth on: ‘Three sons and all I wanted was for just one to follow me into the family business. Keep the name alive. But Johnny is too thick, Ed is in love with a shrub, and Liam was a dead loss from day one, thinking he’d be Roger Bannister when it was clear to all and sundry that he was Forrest Gump. “That boy sure is a running fool”!’
It was always dressed up in laughter and ha-ha-has, but Cara knew that Canice’s sons didn’t find it remotely amusing.
And Rose was as bad as Canice. She was a ‘beauty’ – certainly she was where the three Casey men had got their good looks. She was also ‘fragile’ and very ‘proper’. The Casey family home, a detached two-storey with a half-acre of garden, standing apart from the rest of the great unwashed, was a haven of gracious living, with bone-china milk jugs and Waterford crystal sherry glasses. At eighty-one, Rose still got her nails and hair done twice a week. She’d never worked outside the home – or ever really worked inside it either, from what Ed had told Cara. Throughout his childhood there had been a succession of flustered, overstretched women from the town, Mrs Dooley and Mrs Gibbons and Mrs Loftus, who did the laundry, the cooking and the polishing of the silver.
No one knew where Rose had got her notions – she was from the nearby town of Ballina.
‘They weren’t great parents.’ Ed was matter-of-fact.
‘But was it our fault?’ Johnny asked Ed, like he always did. ‘Didn’t it bother you?’
‘It would have been better if they’d been kinder. But when I was about thirteen, I got it. I’d never be good enough for them. So it just stopped … mattering.’
‘Liam?’ Johnny asked.
‘Like I said, fuck them.’ Liam swigged from his beer bottle, then gave a short laugh. ‘Look, they were never physically cruel –’
‘You’re setting the bar pretty low there, Liam!’
‘Seriously, Johnny, calm the head,’ Liam said. ‘We all turned out okay.’
The varying reactions from the three brothers were interesting, Cara decided. Liam behaved as if he didn’t care. Maybe he got enough love and validation from the other parts of his life … But she sensed anger low down in him.
Ed was genuinely at peace about it. ‘They did the best they could.’ He seemed such a mild, unremarkable man, but underneath was a steady self-belief.
Johnny was the one who kept coming back to pick over the pieces. He still held out hope that this could be fixed. Still bound to Canice and Rose by strong, complicated ties.
THIRTY-ONE
Around 8 p.m., Ferdia finished a game of Fortnite and slunk up to the house. The fridge, rammed with beer, rattled as he opened it. He shouldn’t have a drink, he should really be studying, but he was so fucking low. Sammie had got a year’s placement in MIT. In six weeks, she was leaving Ireland. They’d talked it out, their most mature discussion ever. No shouting, no accusations, just a sad admission that they would never survive a year apart.
If he could just hold her for five minutes, he’d feel better, but that was off the cards this weekend. Since her move to the States had been confirmed, she’d become far more serious about her work.
Ferdia, though, was struggling. Too much of his time was spent wondering if his degree would be worth anything.
If only the exams were over. Living under their impending shadow was a killer – all he wanted was to get drunk and switch his head off for a while. Surreptitiously, he slid two more bottles from the fridge. He’d slope off quietly to the bottom of the garden, lie on his bed and smoke some weed …
‘Hey!’
Fuck. His mother had spotted him.
‘You can drink whatever you want in company, like a civilized person. But you’re not sneaking off to get scuttered on your own. Come over here and join us.’
Ferdia hesitated – then gave in. At least that guaranteed a steady supply of alcohol.
Ed, Liam and Nell budged up to make room on the bench.
He swigged steadily from his beer, tuning out their boring bullshit talk. God, how had his life come to this? A Saturday night, trapped with this bunch …
‘And they came from Syria?’ Johnny was quizzing Nell. ‘Just the mother and daughter? What happened to the dad?’
‘He was killed.’
They must be talking about Dilly’s asylum-seeker.
‘Honestly?’ Jessie said. ‘Christ, that’s horrific. We don’t know how lucky we are. We should organize a play-date with Dilly and the little girl – is it Kassandra? And what’s the mother like? Can she … you know, speak English?’
‘Perfect English,’ Nell said. ‘But she’s very quiet. Understandably. She’s been through an awful lot.’
‘… Has she?’
Scornfully, Ferdia watched his mother wrestle with her desire to know the gory details against the need to be respectful.
‘Maybe she’d like to come over for dinner, some night.’
Ferdia snorted.
‘What?’ Jessie asked.
‘You’re so … bougie. Inviting people for dinner, so you can show off and say you’re “friends” with an asylum-seeker.’
‘Ferdia,’ Johnny growled. ‘Shut it.’
The scuffle was interrupted by a buzzing noise from Johnny’s wrist. His smartwatch. Jesus, he was tragic.
An expression flickered across his face that made Jessie ask, ‘What now?’
‘Marek and Natusia have given notice. They’re going back to Poland.’
‘That’s a shame. They were lovely. No trouble.’
‘What’s up?’ Cara asked.
‘Ah, nothing,’ Johnny said. ‘Just my flat in Baggot Street, the one I lived in before me and Jessie, the tenants are leaving.’
‘You’ll have no trouble letting it again,’ Nell said. ‘People are desperate.’
‘I should redecorate it. Now’s a good time.’
Nell jumped in. ‘I’ll do it.’
‘Absolutely not. You’re a set designer. Not a decorator.’
But Nell wasn’t letting this go. ‘A lot of the time, painting and decorating is exactly what I do.’
‘We’ll pay you, then.’
She coloured. ‘Plea
se, no. It’s on me. You and Jessie give Liam and me so much. It’s the least I can do.’
Jessie said, ‘The only way you’re doing it is if you let us pay you.’
Nell fixed Jessie with a bold stare. ‘We’ll see,’ she said, and gave a small smile.
‘You know, you should Airbnb it,’ Liam said.
It had been only a matter of time before someone suggested this, but it was no surprise to Ferdia that the person was Mr Arsey McArse of Arse Town, Liam.
‘You’d make much more money that way,’ Mr Arsey McArse of Arse Town continued. ‘Perfect location. City centre, you’d be full seven nights a week.’
Nell looked stricken.
‘Ah, no.’ Johnny shrugged off the suggestion. ‘It’d take loads of micro-managing. Organizing cleaning and keys, and if a pipe burst or something …’
‘I can take care of all that,’ Cara said.
Surprised, everyone turned to her. ‘In work, I’ve access to great housekeepers, Dublin’s finest plumbers, electricians. The Ardglass is five minutes’ walk from your flat. If anything went wrong, they’d be there in no time.’
‘But you’ve a job and two kids.’
‘I wouldn’t have to do anything, except delegate. They’d have to be paid, though, the cleaners and such.’
She looked at Johnny, who nodded vigorously, ‘Course! Of course they would.’
‘But me?’ Cara said. ‘All I’d need is a key.’
‘What about the host malarkey?’ Johnny asked. ‘Airbnb reviews are always going on about great hosts who leave them freshly baked apple tarts and baskets of logs for the fire.’
‘No way,’ Ed said. ‘I stay in Airbnbs all summer long, and I’ve never been handed an apple tart.’
‘No to apple tarts,’ Cara said. ‘But let me talk to a couple of the housekeepers about running it between them. I’m sure it’ll work.’
