The Brightest Star in the Sky

by Marian Keyes

  “And what good’s that?” Katie asked.

  “They make it much more efficient, save loads of money, the usual. Normally, Morehampton Green ply their nasty business in Southeast Asia, but they’re prepared to make an exception for us.”

  “Decent of them.”

  “What’s going to happen to us, Katie?” Tamsin asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  In a strange hierarchical glitch, Katie didn’t really have a boss. Officially, her manager was Howard Cookman, president of European publicity, but he was based in London and had no interest at all in the Irish end of things, which usually suited Katie just fine because he had a tendency to bore on in an atrocious accent, part LA, part EastEnders, about the times he’d met a) Mark Knopfler, b) Simon Le Bon and c) Debbie Gibson.

  Katie had made it a point to protect her little slice of autonomy, but all of a sudden she was sorry. It wasn’t nice being the only grown-up and she yearned for someone with more power than her to come along and promise that everything was going to be okay.

  Alerted by a swishing noise, everyone present (all six of the Public Relations staff and all fourteen of Marketing) turned to the Star Trek-style automatic glass doors. It was Graham from Human Resources. Under normal circumstances he exuded smug confident vibrations but today his life force was much reduced.

  Silently, he gave a memo to everyone in the room: two brief lines that said a Mr. Conall Hathaway would be making contact “shortly.”

  “Who’s he?” Katie asked.

  “The axman sent by our new owners,” Graham said. “He is Morehampton Green.”

  “What do you mean, he is Morehampton Green?” Danno asked, irate that someone knew more than him.

  “I mean Morehampton Green is pretty much a one-man band. He’s bound to have a busload of number-crunchers with him but Conall Hathaway makes all the decisions.”

  “Control freak,” Danno said, with great contempt.

  “Why will he be contacting me?” Tamsin cried.

  Graham bowed his head and said nothing.

  “To let you know whether you still have a job or not,” Katie deduced. “Am I right, Graham?”

  Graham nodded, with resignation.

  “Conall Hathaway? Surely you mean Conall the Barbarian?” said Danno. Danno enjoyed nicknames. (Those on his frequency usually do.)

  For two days nothing happened. Everyone continued working as normal, because until something occurred there was always a chance that it mightn’t. But on the afternoon of the third day, Danno was in possession of such an important tidbit of news to share with his colleagues that the glass doors didn’t swish open quickly enough and Danno crashed into them, catching an unpleasant blow to his right temple. “Open, you useless pieces of—” he yelped, stamping around on the floor, trying to activate whatever needed to be activated. At this point he had the attention of everyone within. Finally, the doors juddered apart and Danno burst into the office, like he’d been spat from a machine.

  “He has the cold dead eyes of a killer!” Danno declared. “He got into the lift with me just now and, I swear, I nearly shat myself.”

  “Who?”

  “Slasher Hathaway. Conall the Barbarian. He’s come to sack us all!”

  “So soon?” Katie was alarmed. “It’s almost indecent.”

  “He’s got several orcs with him, pimply younglings learning his dirty trade, but he’s a hands-on merchant. He’ll be on the prowl,” Danno warned. “Keep an eye out. We’ll be toast before this day is out.”

  Katie eyed him with uncertainty. Danno was a catastrophist; he seemed to thrive on disaster. More than once she’d wondered if he was perhaps addicted to adrenaline, the poor man’s cocaine.

  She summoned Audrey. (A vibration that was so muted it was almost apologetic. Reliable, trustworthy, meticulous. Not as popular with visiting artistes as Tamsin or Danno.) “Go and check on this Conall character. Be discreet.”

  Within minutes, Audrey had reappeared, wearing her hangman’s face. “It’s true. He’s in with Graham. They’re going through personnel contracts.”

  Katie bit her knuckle. “What does he look like?”

  After consideration, Audrey said, “Cruel.”

  “Christ!”

  “Lean and hungry.”

  “That’s not so bad.”

  “Lean and hungry and cruel.” Then she added, “He’s eating chocolate.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a huge bar of Mint Crisp on the desk and he’s eating it while he’s talking to Graham. Entire rows in one go. Not breaking it into squares or anything.”

  “How huge? A hundred grams? Two hundred grams?”

  “One of those massive ones you can only get in the duty-free. Five hundred grams, I think. You know what, Katie? He’s actually really good-looking. I think I fancy him. I always fancy men who have power over me.”

  “Don’t fancy him,” Katie said. “You think that all a cruel-looking man needs is the love of a good woman and then he won’t be cruel any more. But he stays cruel and you eat your heart out.” It made her feel old, giving this sort of advice.

  “You might fancy him too,” Audrey suggested.

  “I won’t fancy him.”

  “Say what you like, but we have no control over these things,” Audrey warned darkly.

  The phone rang: the cars had arrived.

  Katie had a moment, a delicious little pinprick of a moment, when she considered just walking away from it all and sparing herself tonight’s ordeal with Knight Ryders and their grumpiness. If she was going to be made redundant anyway . . .

  But what if she was one of the ones who got to keep her job?

  “Okay,” Katie called. “Danno, Audrey, saddle up, the cars are here.”

  They were off to the Four Seasons to pick up Knight Ryders for tonight’s gig. Knight Ryders were a metal band, a quartet of hoary old rockers who’d survived addiction, divorces, bankruptcy, near-death heart failure, motorbike crashes, internal strife, kiss-n-tells from their adopted children and much, much more. Many of their audience, who paid the high ticket prices, came along not in order to hear their hits from the early seventies, but simply to marvel that all four of them were still alive.

  The boys were on their eighth month of a nine-month world tour and they’d been in Ireland for two very long days. Katie’s greatest worry was Elijah Knight, lead singer, living legend and proud owner of a secondhand liver (one careful previous owner). He’d been clean and sober for almost a year but whispers had reached Katie’s ears that he was wearying of it all. Certainly it was true that every word out of his mouth to Katie was a complaint: the Irish hotel was too chintzy; the Irish press were too fawning; the Irish AA meetings had too little whooping.

  Katie or one of her team made it their business to be with him at all times—Tamsin was over there right now—and a “bodyguard” (i.e., guard) kept watch at night outside his bedroom.

  As Katie slid into the back seat of a blacked-out limo, she got a call from Tamsin. “It’s Elijah.”

  “What’s up?”

  “It’s time for him to start backcombing his hair, but he’s just sitting there with his arms folded, like a child.”

  “I’m on my way.” Katie crossed her fingers and said a silent prayer that tonight would not be the night that Elijah Knight went back on the sauce. Not on her watch. If he could just wait until tomorrow, when he and his three big-haired, craggy-faced, liver-damaged compadres left for Germany, she’d be very grateful.

  The problem, however, was that everything went off fine. With Katie’s kindly inveigling, Elijah obediently backcombed his hair until it stood a full eleven inches above his head; the Knight Ryders played an entire set and none of them had a stroke; they even bowed out of a gratis trip to Dublin’s finest brothel.

  This meant that when Katie got home at the unexpectedly early hour of 2 a.m. there was room in her head for the reality of her job situation to hit her. She was done for, she abruptly realized. She mig
ht as well face it: getting Elijah Knight safely home to bed might have been her last act as Senior PR of Apex Entertainment.

  It made sense to get rid of her—of the six PR staff, she was paid the most. Also, a more painful acknowledgment, she was the oldest, and the music business was a young woman’s game. I’m thirty-nine, she said to herself, in wonder. Thirty-nine! It’s a miracle I’ve survived this long.

  She had to go to sleep now. But how could she? Tomorrow she was going to be sacked and she’d have no money, and in these recessionary days she’d never get another job because she was qualified for nothing except bringing rock stars to nightclubs.

  I’m ruined, she thought.

  She would lose her flat and her car and her highlights and her personal trainer, even though she had only one session a week, but her time with the behemoth that was Florence was vital—without it she mightn’t be able to get herself to do any exercise at all.

  And, oh, her lovely flat. There wasn’t a chance she could keep it. Her mortgage payments were gulp-inducing, even on her current salary. She’d bought at the height of the boom, when cardboard boxes were changing hands for a million euro. She’d paid dearly for every square foot of her home. But how she loved it. It was only small—being an attic conversion, most of her rooms had been short-changed of their corners—but it was cozy and got loads of light and was walking distance from town. Not that she’d ever tested it, not in her shoes.

  The killer was that she’d never meant to work in the music business. Oh why had she, why? Because she’d been wildly flattered when they offered her the job, that was why, so flattered that she’d turned a blind eye to the fact that the money wasn’t as good as you might have thought. All she’d cared about was that they must have thought she was cool if they wanted to employ her. But she should have taken the job in the government press office instead. Old people weren’t mocked in that industry; they were valued, revered for their wisdom. No one cared if you had big thighs. No one cared if you had facial hair (and you were a woman) (not that she had). In fact, they positively liked fat ugly spokes-people in politics because they had more credibility.

  Ruined, she thought. Yes, ruined.

  As the night ticked away, her head buzzed with calibrations and calculations: if she let out her flat would she earn enough to cover her mortgage and hairdressing bills? If she got a job in Blockbuster, how would she manage for food? She’d read a thing in the paper about people on the minimum wage: even if they ate the gone-off half-price things in Tesco, they were still perpetually hungry. Co-existing with her appetite was tricky enough on a healthy salary, when even as she had her first bite of something she was worried about the last. How would she cope with genuine hunger?

  She wouldn’t even be able to afford to kill herself. For the last couple of years, probably since Jason, she’d had a whimsical contingency plan in case life ever became truly unbearable, like the cyanide pills spies used to carry in their teeth in case they were captured. Her cunning notion was that she’d eat herself to death—it happened, people really did it, doctors were forever warning the obese that if they continued with their bad habits they’d snuff it. She’d always thought it be a joyous way to go, gorged to the gills on chocolate cheesecake. But chocolate cheesecake cost money and she’d need an awful lot of it to administer a fatal dose. Gripped by middle-of-the-night terror she saw what a wasteful fool she’d been all these years. She should have started stockpiling baked goods long before now. But she wasn’t a stockpiler. If it was in her flat she ate it. Fact. Nothing lasted more than a day.

  All of a sudden her thoughts veered off in an unexpected direction and she began to blame Jason. (Between the ages of thirty-one and thirty-seven, Jason had been her boyfriend. In their sixth year, just as they’d started trying for a baby, they had the tremendous shock of discovering that they were no longer in love. They faked it for almost a year, hoping to rekindle the flame, but they were kaput. Kiboshed. All washed up.)

  If she and Jason had got married and had a baby, and if Jason wasn’t marrying Donanda the Portuguese stunner instead, she wouldn’t have these worries.

  But oh no! He had to decide to stop loving Katie and then they had to split up and she had to buy a flat on her own. Well, in fairness, she’d stopped loving him too, but that was also Jason’s fault because if only he hadn’t become unlovable everything would be different.

  Her anger filled her stomach, then her chest, until she began having difficulty breathing, and even though it was five past six in the morning and far too late to take a sleeping tablet—Curses! She hadn’t had an ounce of sleep!—she had to sit up and turn on the light and get her de-bittering books off the shelf, to stop herself from drowning in her own bile.

  Gasping, she read a few lines of My Happiness, My Responsibility, but it did nothing. She cast it aside and hungrily scanned The Spiritual Laws of Success: nonsense, rubbish! She was starting to think she’d have to ring for an ambulance when she opened the next book and a line jumped out at her: “The Chinese word for “crisis” also means “opportunity.”

  That’s what did it.

  She felt as if she’d been hacking through dense jungle and suddenly found herself on top of a mountain where the light was clear and the air was thin. A load fell away from her. Yes, her life was over! Yes, she was a goner. Unemployed—indeed, possibly unemployable—but her crisis could become her opportunity. Surely she could do something else with her life? Live in Thailand and learn scuba diving? Or, better still, go to India and become enlightened, and when she came back—if she came back, hoho—she wouldn’t mind being homeless and carless and having to wear terrible shoes and having to do her own motivation to go for a run.

  It would all be okay.

  Day 60

  Sixty-six Star Street remained silent until 5:30 a.m., when Lydia got up. She lurched into the bathroom where she showered—there’s only one word for it—resentfully. She disliked getting wet. She feared the water. (She wasn’t to know this but in a previous life she’d been a meerkat, a creature of the desert and a stranger to moisture. Some traits linger into subsequent lives.)

  She reached behind her for her conditioner and her elbow dislodged Andrei’s shower gel from the shelf. No! There was a slippery scramble as she tried to catch it but it leaped from her sudsy grasp and landed on the floor of the shower with an echoey three-bounce clatter. Irkutsk! She didn’t want to wake Andrei or Jan. They were bad enough when they got a full night’s sleep, the miserable bloody pair; they’d be even more stony-faced and grumpy if they were woken prematurely.

  God, they were hard work. Not once in three weeks had she seen them laugh. And no one could say she hadn’t made an effort, trying to jolly them along with good-humored bad mouthing, the kind she employed with all men. But instead of rising to the challenge and giving as good as they got, they were baffled.

  And she was stuck with them: it was their lease. In fact, she wondered why they didn’t just tell her to hop it, because it was so obvious that they hated her.

  Perhaps it was because her room was laughably small, barely more than a cupboard. (Apparently, it used to be the kitchen—a cramped, walk-in galley—before some mysterious previous owner had decided to convert the second bedroom into a bigger kitchen, spacious enough to house a table. All well and good, but it meant that the remaining space was barely deserving of the title “room.”)

  Lydia suspected—correctly—that the ex-kitchen had been turned down by many viewers before she had shown up. The bed was narrow and short, there was no dressing-table mirror (because there was no dressing table) to drape her string of orange flower-shaped lights around, and there was no wardrobe so most of Lydia’s clothes were kept in boxes under her bed. She also suspected—again correctly; Lydia didn’t get much wrong—that Andrei and Jan had expected she’d bring a woman’s touch to the flat. They were, of course, mistaken. It hadn’t been easy to resist Andrei and his schedules, because he was a determined type, and it had taken every ounce of her consi
derable resolve, but it was important to establish from the get-go who was boss. As soon as she was certain that the lads didn’t expect her to clean, then she would fall into line.

  Perhaps . . .

  In the meantime, the rent was astonishingly reasonable, a massive one hundred euro a week cheaper than her previous billet, and the house was conveniently close to the city center. And when she’d discovered that the lads hailed from Gdansk, she had been alerted—inadvertently on their part—to the excellence of words ending in “sk.” Gdansk! She’d enjoyed saying it so much that she’d hit the net, looking for similar city names. And there were loads of them! Tomsk and Omsk, Minsk and Murmansk. She used them a lot. She couldn’t exactly say why, she just liked them. Gdansk was a positive word, because it sort of sounded like “thanks,” but all the others, especially Minsk and Irkutsk, sounded like swear words, only far hissier and snakier than the ones she usually called upon. Minsk! How pissed-off that sounded! It was great. You could scare the bejayzus out of someone if you said it right. Irkutsk! How riled you could seem if you put a bit of effort into the delivery. These were quality swear words that had cost precisely nothing and, in her current cash-strapped circumstances, she was grateful for free pleasures.

  All the same, despite the gratis gift of new swear words, she badly missed Sissy and the lovely, large airy flat they’d shared. Hard to believe such luxury now, but she and Sissy had had a cleaning lady. In fairness, she’d only come once a week but it had been enough. Even when the kitchen was very bad, filthy enough for mice to be dancing jigs on the draining board, Lydia had been able to literally blind herself to it because she knew it would be fi xed in a day or so.

  And Sissy was exactly the same. Sissy didn’t care. She would never have hit Lydia up with a cleaning schedule. Days off were for staying in your pajamas and huddling under a blanket, watching telly and eating twelve bowls of Coco Pops; they were not for rolling up your sleeves and pulling on rubber gloves and running the hot tap.