by Marian Keyes
With Katie, he’d Assessed the situation and wasn’t afraid to admit he’d made a mistake—it was what made him so good at his job—and he was man enough, in his opinion, to Acknowledge that being dumped was his fault.
Now it was time to Adapt: he’d have to become more flexible about his devotion to the job. Adapt to survive. He didn’t believe in fate but he believed in maximizing opportunities, so when Lydia appeared and challenged him to take a weekday off work, he moved on it. Give it a go, see if the world ended; and if it did, well, he was always on the BlackBerry.
Even his clothes this morning had been chosen with a view to his survival. Lydia had accused him of being “too old” so he’d had a pair of fashionable jeans biked over from Brown Thomas and—after a lot of deliberation—he’d matched them with a Clash T-shirt, because the Clash were ageless. Weren’t they?
Speaking of the Clash, he stuck in his ear buds and listened to half a verse of “Rock the Casbah” before getting bored and changing to Johnny Cash. He sang along with “Walk the Line” and stared at the door of number 66 and eyed its banana-shaped knocker with irritation. He’d never liked it. Now that he and Katie were kaput he wouldn’t have to look at it ever again. Unless, of course, things worked out with Lydia . . .
He couldn’t explain why but he was extremely taken with her. Her beauty wasn’t the first thing you’d notice because she was so angry but, actually, she was a doll. He liked her angular little face and her scornful eyes. He liked seeing her, small and furious, behind the wheel of her taxi. He liked her “Gdansk!” and “Outttt!” and all that mad stuff. She was a one-of-a-kind.
And she was the right age. Katie was spot-on: a girl in her twenties would suit him. The two girlfriends he’d had before Katie had been in their early thirties, and they’d been . . . how could he put it? Expectant. Yes, expectant and watchful. He’d thought of both those relationships as a straight line; he’d found a level he was happy with, and was comfortable with it continuing like that, unfurling out in front of them without any changes, forever. Well, perhaps not forever. But indefinitely.
Whereas, with the benefit of hindsight, he saw that both Saffron and Kym had visualized the relationship as wedge-shaped, like a piece of Cheddar. Starting from a small point, they expected things to improve exponentially, expanding outward and upward, three-dimensionally, with bonus add-ons every month or so. Add-ons such as: meeting their friends; meeting his friends (the few he had); accompanying them to a charity ball and bidding in a flash fashion at the auction; listening to their suggestions for how he should decorate his house; agreeing to let them do one room; fighting his way through the cluster of beauty stuff that appeared overnight in his bathroom; being persuaded of the wisdom of leaving a couple of ironed shirts in their wardrobe; then the big cheese itself: talk of moving in together.
As for Katie? How had she visualized their relationship? He hadn’t felt the same pressure from her. Some, certainly, but perhaps the angle wasn’t so steep. More like a slice of Brie, than a wedge of Cheddar.
And Lydia? Christ alone knew. She probably had no angle of expectation. Hers might be totally flat, like a packet of Easi-slices. In fact, and he wasn’t sure how comfortable he was with this realization, it mightn’t be cheese at all.
It was coming up to 8:30 and if Conall had read Lydia right, she’d exit the house soon, looking to put many miles of road behind her before he showed up at ten o’clock. But he was already here!
He lifted his coffee and was shocked to discover it was all gone. Maybe there was a can of Coke somewhere. A thorough foraging in the side pocket of his door yielded nothing more exciting than four squares of Honeycrisp and seven green American Hard Gums. He ate them without enthusiasm; green was his least favorite flavor and he’d obviously left these for dead when he’d eaten all the other colors from a full bag. He’d love a full bag now. He was bored and Johnny Cash was no longer doing it for him. He whipped out the ear buds and scrolled down his screen, reading bulletins, checking sites, assessing the financial markets, looking for anomalies in share prices. Who was underperforming? Overperforming? A bulletin popped up with a rumor that H&E Enterprise, a large clothing company, was about to announce quarterly losses. Nothing too catastrophic and they’d turned in profits for the last eleven quarters. But Conall had been watching the rise in the cost of the raw materials they sourced in the Far East and he’d been made aware, discreetly, that their fourth biggest customer was making overtures to someone else. To have one loss-making quarter was no cause for panic but Conall was getting that tingly feeling. Two of H&E’s biggest competitors had been circling at a distance for over a year and if there was to be a takeover or a buyout, he wanted in. Especially because H&E had most of their operations in Southeast Asia, his specialty. He’d do Eastern Europe or Scandinavia if necessary, but the Philippines, Cambodia and Vietnam were where he did his best work.
He looked at his phone, then he looked at the blue front door. Could he make a quick call to one of the shadowy figures to assess H&E’s damage and risk Lydia coming out at the same time?
He made the call. He couldn’t help himself. The coffee was gone, the sweets and chocolate were gone, the music wasn’t working; he needed something, so a quick shot of adrenaline would have to do. Saffron used to say that he should pretend he was allergic to wasps and would go into anaphylactic shock if he got stung, because then he could get adrenaline injections from his doctor, which he could administer himself whenever he got bored. She didn’t say it at the start of their two years together, she was happy back then; she only said it toward the end when she seemed considerably disillusioned with him and his devotion to his work.
He listened to the ringing tone and idly kicked his accelerator. Answer, for the love of Christ! God, he was bored.
Someone picked up. “Hello?”
“Shadowy Figure?”
“Conall?”
“Where are you?”
“Playing golf.”
“Where?” He was in the mood for a chat.
“Syria. What do you want?”
“Story? H&E? Buckling?”
“Could be. I’m waiting to hear. I’ll let you know.”
The shadowy figure hung up and Conall’s ennui dissipated. He was always on the hunt for the next project. It was imperative to have a new job lined up before he finished the current one because the gaps between his projects made him very unhappy. He needed new challenges. And yet whenever a fresh prospect hove into view, his fear was as strong as his excitement.
Every takeover was different. Experience from previous jobs was useful but there always came a point when he had no idea how to proceed, when he had to build the path he had to walk on. People thought it was easy, doing what he did. That he just went in and sacked all around him and made the staff move to a building with much cheaper rent. They assumed he was paid his vast bundle to deal with the guilt of having to ruin people’s lives.
At a dinner party, when he’d still been with Saffron, Conall was asked by another man, “That job you do? How do you sleep?”
Before Conall could defend himself by offering his—sincerely held—belief that if he didn’t sack some of the staff, then, sooner or later, all of them would be out of a job, Saffron jumped in. “We find that a million euro a year helps greatly,” she had replied. Of course, those were the days when she had celebrated his ability to make far-reaching decisions free of emotion.
In the middle of a project when he was trying to visualize a complex enterprise in a three-dimensional way, in order to make the right decisions, Conall sometimes wished he was a postman like his brother. Every single judgment he made had huge financial implications but he never had the time to follow all possible permutations down to ground zero because, more important than anything else, decisions had to be made fast.
With each evaluation he signed off on, he felt the fear. Had he sacked the wrong people? Closed down the wrong office in the wrong country? Sold off the wrong assets? What if this was the o
ne where he removed the vital organs and the whole thing died?
So far it never had. But it felt like playing Ker-Plunk! Every time he removed a stick he held his breath and waited for a massive avalanche, signaling that it had all collapsed on him.
And when everything was completed, the satisfaction of having done the best possible job, of having dismantled a company down to its bare bones and reconfigured it into a new sleek, streamlined entity, lasted only for an evening, before the hunger started up again. Kym had said he was like a shark, always moving, always hunting. (She’d also said he’d stolen the best years of her life.)
Conall didn’t know why he worked like he did. It wasn’t for the money. He probably had enough money now, whatever enough was. He didn’t do it for the respect of his peers because he had all that. He did it because he did it.
He was prepared to admit that his work/life balance wasn’t perfect—he had very few friends. But then most people had very few friends. He had Joe, his brother, of course, but he suspected his success was a barrier. That’s why he needed a girlfriend.
Day 31 . . .
Get up, Katie urged herself. On your feet and face the world.
She’d just emerged from one of the worst night’s sleeps of her life, the genesis of which could be traced back to last night, at a launch, when she’d jettisoned all pretense of professionalism and attached herself to the free bar. She drank grimly and with purpose until the hard edges slipped off life.
She had a fuzzy recollection of standing way too close to Danno and saying, “Really am quite spectacularly drunk. It’ll garntee me good ni’sleep.”
Somehow she’d got home and tumbled way down into a drunk, dreamless coma.
Then, in the dead of night, she’d jerked awake. She’d been having a terrible nightmare in which she had landed on a deserted planet, a lump of barren, gray rock, swept by howling, perishing winds. Alone, all alone, stranded for eternity.
She waited for the terror of the nightmare to disperse, but it didn’t—because, she realized with a terrible thud, it was all true. She was alone, all alone, stranded for eternity. No one would love her ever again.
Every time a romance had ended, she’d been genuinely convinced that she’d never fall in love again. But this time it really was the end. Forget forty being the new eighteen and all that. You could be Botoxed to kingdom come, you could jostle with fifteen-year-olds in Topshop, but forty was forty.
Just when she thought she couldn’t feel any worse, she remembered something appalling: she’d commandeered one of the artistes’ limos to take her home.
She’d lurched out of the nightclub, seen it idling at the curb and hijacked it. The driver hadn’t wanted to take her, he was on-call for Mr. Alpha, he kept repeating, but she’d pulled rank, threw her weight around, threatened him with his job.
Oh no! The memory was so shaming that she whimpered into her pillow. Not only was she stranded on a lump of barren rock for all eternity but she’d stolen a car from a visiting superstar, an international household name.
She got up and puked and crawled back into bed, desperate for sleep to release her from her tormented thoughts, but she was still awake when the birds started singing. She didn’t know the time because she’d been too afraid to look at the clock, but obviously it had to be bad. At some stage she passed into a light anxious doze, and when her alarm started beeping at 7:30, she wanted to slit her own throat.
Makeup wasn’t helping. She painted epic quantities of concealer under her eyes and still she looked like Sylvester Stallone. Eventually, furtive and jumpy, already anticipating pain, she was ready to bolt from the building (she was so frightened of bumping into Conall romancing Lydia that, whenever she had to leave her flat, she sprinted down the three flights of stairs and into the street with her eyes closed and her breath held).
But it had been five days since he’d sent the horrible flowers—they’d come on Friday and now it was Wednesday. She’d seen no sign of him hanging around over the weekend and a tiny bud of hope, like a snow-drop after an unforgiving winter, broke through: maybe it had just been a one-time thing.
She was out the front door, the gallop was over. She could open her eyes, she could inhale. Then she remembered that there was no point jingling her car keys because there was no car. After last night’s stunt with Mr. Alpha’s limo, her ride was still in the parking lot in work. But hey! There was Conall’s car. Right there! Just parked, waiting! Without thinking, she made for it.
“Conall?”
He looked up from his BlackBerry. Jesus Christ, it was Katie! Standing there in the street! He clambered out from the car and reached down to kiss her politely on the cheek.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Ah . . . waiting for someone.” He was very, very embarrassed. He should have known this might happen. Unless, of course, a little voice prompted, unless he had known.
Her face tight and closed, Katie backed away on her high heels. All of a sudden, the door of 66 Star Street opened and a large donkey-like dog bounded out, followed by the old woman who lived on the first floor, and then came this . . . man and it was the man who caught Conall’s attention. Saffron used to accuse Conall of being an emotion-free automaton but, actually, Conall quite prided himself on his intuition. He’d intuitively known the time Arthur Andersens had beaten him in the bid for Jasmine Foods—he’d bumped into their head of acquisitions one Sunday afternoon in the pliers aisle of the Hardware Hut, and although the man had been amiable enough, Conall knew. Now he was alerted by the same sense of threat. This blond-haired, sloppily dressed, idle-looking . . . gobshite was the one who had replaced him in Katie’s affections.
Katie was still backing away from Conall, then she collided with your man. Speedily, she turned round and Conall heard her say, “Sorry,” and your man said, “No, I’m sorry,” then came the sounds of laughter, then more conversation, too low for Conall to hear properly, followed by more laughter, then Goldilocks lifted Katie’s hand and kissed the back of it with fulsome tenderness. Prick. The dog, the old woman and the man piled into a Merc and sped off, Katie walked away into the distance and Conall was left alone.
With great contempt Grudge watched Fionn gaze out through the rear window as they drove away from Katie. “Now,” Fionn asked, “who was she ?”
Jemima rested her head back and closed her eyes. “Fionn, dear heart, truly I find I’m quite wearied by your wayward affections.”
“Ah Jemima!”
Fionn was sparkly-eyed and skittish and Grudge shook his hairy head in disgust. Jemima wasn’t as young as she’d once been and it wasn’t appropriate—appropriate was Grudge’s favorite word; he’d heard it on Dr. Phil—it wasn’t appropriate for Fionn to involve her in such adolescent . . . silliness.
“First poor Maeve, then Rosie . . .”
Grudge attempted to tut but his tongue was too thick. That had been an appalling episode, the little nurse sliding her phone number under the door of the flat and urging Fionn to call her. Jemima had become terribly distressed, beseeching Fionn to stay away from girls who were spoken for. “She and Andrei are a good match.” But Fionn had disregarded Jemima’s distress and rung Rosie anyway. An assignation had been arranged for this very evening, but would Fionn proceed with it now that his attentions had been caught by Katie?
“Katie? Is she married?” Fionn pressed. “Or what?”
Jemima exhaled. “Not married. That dark brooding creature in the Lexus was in attendance for many months, but I sense there has been a sundering recently.”
“So she’s single!” Fionn rubbed his hands together in glee.
“Don’t they have women where you come from?” Ogden eyed Fionn in the rear-view. “I never met such a randy article.”
Yeah, Grudge sneered at Fionn. Randy.
“Ogden makes a good point, Fionn. Perhaps you should consider returning to Pokey. I fear you’re finding city life rather overstimulating.”
Day 31 . . .
&nbs
p; Just as Conall had anticipated! Only five to nine and here was Lydia, leaving earlier than she’d said, just to avoid him.
He stepped out of the car, into her path. “Going somewhere?”
First she looked incredulous, then a thunderous rage appeared on her little dial. “Right, that’s it,” she said. “I’m calling the police.”
He couldn’t stop laughing. “Lydia, I just want to go on a date with you.”
“You’re stalking me!”
“I’m wooing you.”
“What kind of stupid word is that?”
“I mean, I like you, I’m trying to get you to come out with me. Since when was that a crime?”
“Listen to me, if I was the type to get scared, you’d be scaring me.”
“The girlfriend before Katie told me this was her favorite fantasy, me turning up unexpectedly.”
“My condolences to her.” Lydia pressed a couple of buttons on her phone, then nodded, looking satisfied. “It’s ringing.”
“Emergency Services?”
“The Kevin Street cop shop.”
“You’ve the police station on speed dial?”
“I’m a taxi driver. Me and the cops are in regular contact.”
Alarm overtook him. Her phone was pressed to her ear and her head was cocked to one side. “Are you really trying the police?” he asked.
“I really am. Don’t worry, they often take a few minutes to answer.
They’re busy.”
“Hang up, Lydia.” Hang up, hang up, hang up. “Hang up, Lydia.” Their gazes were locked. Fire burned in her eyes but his will would prevail . . .
Hang up, hang up, hang up.
. . . yes, prevail. Except that it was taking a little longer than usual to prevail . . .
Hang up, hang up, hang up.
. . . aaaannnddd . . . prevail it did! Gotcha!
“Love of God!” Lydia snapped her phone closed. “What is it you want?”
