by Liz Nugent
Straight after dinner that Friday, I was pleased to meet up with Natalia Agnieszka and she seemed happy to see me again. We spent most of the evening chatting on the balcony of the Majestic, right by the Palais, overlooking the Croisette while the Mediterranean lapped the shores on the other side of the promenade. I had decided I was going to play it cool with Natalia, keep it businesslike, talk about her, her career, her childhood in Warsaw, her concert-pianist father, and then maybe I’d drop a name into the conversation and mention a script we were looking at that might suit someone with Natalia’s innate ability. The trick, I think, is never to mention women’s appearance. It makes them needy because, as much as modern women protest about wanting to be noticed for their brains, they definitely want to be admired for their looks too. It’s just more PC bullshit. I know women.
Shortly before midnight, I had made the classic move of lighting two cigarettes in my mouth and was passing one to Natalia when Mary tottered over to us, wobbling slightly and hopped up on some chemical.
‘Will, what are you doing? You don’t even smoke!’ she said as she swiped the cigarette out of my mouth.
Christ. She was right, I don’t smoke. But I knew that Natalia did, so I’d made sure to buy some long, thin, elegant-looking tipped cigarettes, in case they came in handy. And sure enough, they had, until Mary’s intervention.
‘Mary, if you don’t mind, we’re just having a conversation here –’
But Mary wasn’t listening and instead dragged one of the ornate, heavy wrought-iron chairs to our private corner of the balcony, screeching it across the paving stones. ‘You hate the smell of smoke. I remember you giving out about Ronald, the DP on Backwash. You said he smelled disgusting!’ And then she fixed her eyes on Natalia, who inhaled deeply and then exhaled a long plume of smoke directly into Mary’s face.
‘Mary, can you go and find Gerald? I’m actually having a meeting with Natalia about the new script –’
‘About Ginger Wine? But there’s no role for Natalia in that, unless she’s going to play the dog-sitter …’
‘No,’ said Natalia, ‘is not that title. Is called Beautiful Liar. With Martin Scorsese.’
Mary laughed out loud. ‘Jesus, Will, is that what you told her? He is so taking the piss with you!’
I stood up, grabbed Mary by the arm and pulled her aside. ‘What are you doing, Mary? Are you being a jealous little bitch, is that it? Because you know I have no room in my company for jealous little bitches, right?’
Her eyes widened, and Natalia walked past us. ‘Goodnight, William, I must leave now.’
‘No, wait! She’s just drunk. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.’
Natalia continued to descend the staircase behind us without looking back.
Mary laughed. ‘Oh my God, you told her you were making a film with Martin Scorsese and she believed you? How stupid is she, exactly?’
It wasn’t a punch or a dig, and it didn’t leave a mark. It was a slap though, across the face. Not like the playful slap on the arse that had got her promoted before. The sound of it attracted attention and people at the far end of the balcony turned in response to the noise. I realized quickly that I needed to limit the damage immediately. I pulled Mary into my arms and hugged her to my chest. She struggled to get away from me.
‘Mary! I’m sorry.’
A small Englishman, wanting to be the hero of the hour, appeared at our side.
‘Are you all right, love? Is this man bothering you?’
‘We’re absolutely fine, thank you,’ I said.
‘I wasn’t asking you, mate, was I?’ he said aggressively. ‘All right, darling?’ he said to Mary again. She turned towards him and I let my fingers brush her hand as she twisted her body.
‘I’m fine,’ she said stiffly.
‘That’s not what it looked like from down there.’ He gave her his business card. ‘Just in case you need a witness, love.’
I spent the next hour apologizing to Mary. We drank two bottles of champagne as I ‘explained’ that I’d been trying to get Natalia for a feature I hadn’t told Mary about yet because it was top secret, for a script she hadn’t read (because it didn’t exist). She drunkenly complained that as Development Executive, no scripts should be kept secret from her and that if I was doing something for Martin Scorsese, then she had every right to know about it. She raked up every single grievance about how I had treated her over the past year.
She used to be the secretary. The new title had gone to her head. Why, she demanded to know, had I never replaced her as admin manager? Because now she was doing two jobs for the price of one. I made my excuses personal. I wanted to have her around, I said. I was struggling to keep things professional between us. She fell for my bullshit straight away. She wrapped her arms around me and told me she’d never realized how much pressure I’d been under. She wanted what I wanted. She suggested we taxi back to the villa. The night was ruined for me anyway. I just wanted to go to bed.
In our atrium, as I was trying to get my briefcase together for the next day, Mary brought out another bottle of wine and two glasses. I told her I’d had enough. Her drunken messiness was unattractive and I was bored by her. When she tried to kiss me, I recoiled.
‘Mary, what are you doing? I’m your boss!’
She pulled away and then started to cry. ‘You hit me! I have witnesses.’ She pulled the man’s business card out of her pocket and I snatched it out of her hands and ripped it to shreds. I pushed her away and she fell backwards on to the sofa. Perhaps I’d been rougher with her than intended.
That’s when I saw my daughter standing in the doorway of her bedroom on the landing above.
‘Dad? Dad! Stop!’
What had she seen? What had she heard? She burst into tears, retreated back into her bedroom and slammed the door.
Brian’s bedroom door opened. ‘What the hell is going on?’
Mary and I said nothing and the house was silent except for the sound of Daisy’s sobs. ‘For Christ’s sake, Will!’ He went into Daisy’s room and closed the door behind him.
‘I’m going to bed,’ I told Mary. ‘Get your act together, you stupid tramp.’
The next morning, I woke late. The horror of what had happened – and how it might have looked to Daisy – hit me.
Mary was eating croissants and drinking black coffee on the terrace.
‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ I was still furious with her.
‘I’m not your fucking alarm clock on top of everything else.’ She went back inside.
Brian was looking out of the window. ‘Daisy’s down by the pool, crying her eyes out. What did you do last night?’ I could see that my little girl was curled up in a ball on one of the sun loungers and her shoulders were heaving and shuddering.
Susan and I had been separated for two years at this point. There was a lot wrong with our marriage and we had grown apart. My infidelity was the nail in the coffin, but Susan had changed a lot. She had become more demanding and dissatisfied. When she went back to college to do her MA, she started mixing with a gang of strident feminists, and they made her even worse. She started going on about the fact that I was sexist and that my mother was sexist, which was ridiculous – how could a woman be sexist? Everything suddenly became about gender and my inadequate contribution to our parenting of Daisy. She did all the necessary stuff, the parent–teacher meetings, buying schoolbooks, taking Daisy to the doctor and treating her eczema, doing her homework with her, blah blah blah, and I apparently got the ‘fun’ stuff, like attending her school concerts, bringing her to film premieres, to the library and the playground at weekends.
I did not leave my family. My wife rejected and evicted me, so she wasn’t the victim or the martyr she pretended to be. She was still a very attractive woman. We had, in fact, ended up in the sack six months earlier, ‘a mistake’ we both agreed, though I don’t think either of us regretted it.
Over the two years of our separation, Susan and I had negotiate
d a kind of peace. The only rule, however, was that we would not upset Daisy. Our marriage break-up had badly affected her. In three years, she had gone from a happy-go-lucky kid to a sulky and demanding one. Now she had seen me fighting with a woman. I just hoped she’d seen me reject Mary’s advances first.
Brian had gone to find Daisy to comfort her while I showered and changed and poured myself a fresh mug of coffee. Mary came downstairs then with her face clean and pinched.
‘About last night … Daisy’s very upset. I have to concentrate on her. She’s my daughter.’
Mary put her hand on mine. ‘I understand,’ she said.
I flung her hand away angrily. ‘I don’t think you do.’ I told her she should find another place to stay until we went home.
Daisy wouldn’t talk to me. Brian did his best to broker a truce, in fairness to him, but she point-blank refused to engage with me and stayed down by the pool. He offered to take her away for the day. Monaco was a train ride away. He would take her to the aquarium there and they could see a real palace and have lunch and swim in the harbour pool, if he could persuade her into a swimsuit. I was glad. At least Daisy would have a nice time, and she’d be safe with Brian. I gave him €500 and told him to get her anything she wanted.
I went to our screening with Gerald and Mary. Gerald made several snide comments about all the drama and the tension off-screen. Mary was terse and polite, but we all did our jobs professionally, welcoming the punters and buyers. The auditorium held 400 and I guess it was about two-thirds full, which for an indie feature from Ireland at the Market was pretty good going. Natalia didn’t show up and didn’t respond to my texts. I had a couple of meetings that evening. I rang Brian and he told me he was on his way back from Monaco with Daisy. I asked if they’d join us for dinner at Le Maschou in the old town, but he said he and Daisy planned to grab McDonald’s on the way home. He was keeping it casual and breezy on the phone. I wanted to speak to Daisy, but he said she was tired and would probably talk to me tomorrow.
Jesus, I was dreading the conversation with my own daughter like I dreaded a conversation with my headmaster when I was a kid. ‘Thanks, Brian,’ I said.
‘Yeah, whatever.’ He was angry with me too, but he wasn’t going to let it out in front of Daisy.
We went to dinner. Mary, as usual, had too much wine and tried to talk to me, but I was busy schmoozing the marketing guys and a French financier who I knew had a yacht. At the back of my mind, I was thinking that if I could get Daisy and me invited to a yacht party, she might just forget all about last night. Wouldn’t it be a cool thing to tell her friends in school next week? No invite was forthcoming, however, despite my heavy hints. At the end of the evening, Monsieur let me know that he was ‘not in a position’ to offer further finance but thanked me for my hospitality and left. Mary moved into his seat smoothly and I turned to the guys on my left with the twitching noses and went to the restroom to do a couple of lines with them. I didn’t enjoy the lift it gave me but lingered until I became more aware of just how tired I was. I made my excuses and went back to the villa.
Brian and Daisy were already in bed. I grabbed a beer and tried to watch TV for a while, my mind wired and wandering. Mary came home within half an hour. Gerald had hooked up with the guy from Frankfurt and would see us tomorrow. Mary told me she would be handing in her notice when we got back to Dublin.
‘Why wait?’ I said.
I got up, went to my room and closed the door. From the other side of the door, I heard her say, ‘I won’t forget that you slapped me last night, and there were witnesses.’ I took a couple of Valium to contain my rising rage and went to sleep.
We were to go home on Sunday evening. Daisy stayed down by the pool. Brian had managed to buy her a new T-shirt with a picture of Princess Grace on it. She’d told him that she’d seen me fighting with Mary.
‘I wasn’t fighting with her. I pushed her away when she tried to kiss me. I’m the good guy in this story.’
I knew he didn’t believe me. He had explained to Daisy that grown-ups were complicated and it would be best if she just forgot what she’d seen. He told me Daisy wanted to know if I had ever fought with Susan. She wondered if I’d been violent towards her. My heart broke for the kid.
I did my meetings and got back to the villa to pack. Mary had left for the airport earlier with Gerald and had sent me a snotty text. Daisy was in the kitchen on her own.
‘Daisy, honey, I’m sorry –’
‘I don’t want to talk about it, Dad.’
‘You know, sometimes, adults do the stupidest things and we don’t mean them. Mary was trying to kiss –’
‘Dad, please –’
‘It was a really awkward situation – you know that I never laid a finger on your mum –’
‘Fuck off, Dad!’
‘Daisy!’ I was shocked at her language and her tone.
‘I said I don’t want to talk about it. Ever. And you needn’t worry about me telling Mum, because I know she’d be upset.’
‘Daisy, I’m … sorry.’
She wandered out to join Brian at the gate with her tiny suitcase.
On the flight home, she took the window seat beside Brian and I sat across the aisle. In the taxi back to Susan’s on the way from the airport, she eventually piped up and looked me in the eye. ‘Dad, you need to get a puppy that I can play with when I come visit.’ It was an instruction rather than a request.
10
1984
We got tickets to the Bob Dylan concert in Slane Castle through the promoter and I was officially the coolest boy in my class, though I didn’t tell the other boys I was going to the concert with my mum and dad. The sixth-year boys in school had Bob Dylan posters on their common-room wall, and while I didn’t know much about his music, the guys who were into Bob Dylan were way edgier than the boys in my class who liked trendy bands like Depeche Mode and Duran Duran. My classmates wore big, flouncy shirts and ridiculous angular haircuts. The hippy older lads had long hair and wore grandad shirts. My friend Steve’s brother had some Bob Dylan albums and Steve ‘borrowed’ them from him to give to me.
‘What in God’s name is that?’ said Dad the first time I played Desire.
I heaved a heavy sigh. ‘It’s Bob Dylan, Dad, the guy we’re going to see next month?’
‘God almighty, does he have sinus issues?’
Mum chimed in. ‘Martin, don’t be such a philistine. I’m really starting to feel our age difference.’ Mum would jump on whatever was popular. I’d never heard her mention Bob Dylan before we got invited to the concert.
Dad was fifteen years older than Mum. Mum was twenty-two when she had me, but I hated the way she brought up the age difference so often, particularly among their friends, and how she would jokingly threaten to run off with a younger man. I feared that one day she probably would. When I grew up, I was going to marry a woman my own age so that my kids wouldn’t think I was an old man, so that my wife wouldn’t think I was an old man.
I was not yet sixteen and the idea of going to an actual rock concert filled me with excitement. Mum was reluctant to bring us but Dad insisted. He’d been to the library to read up on Bob Dylan and learned that he was a born-again Christian, and he thought it would be good for us to hear him perform.
Luke was deemed too young and too sensitive to cope with the crowds. We still weren’t over the trauma of his freak-out when Mum sang at the Pope’s Mass five years earlier.
There were going to be an estimated 60,000 people in Slane to see Dylan in a field right beside an actual castle. Mum knew the guy who owned the castle. He was a lord. There was a photo of them together on the mantelpiece.
Dad was trying to treat this event like the Pope’s Mass, talking about picnics and car parking. Mum told him not to be ridiculous. We had backstage access and would be fed and watered in the castle with the other famous people. I’d probably meet Bob.
‘Will they all be hippies?’ asked Dad nervously.
The look
she gave him could have cut through diamonds.
I was tall for my age and could definitely now pass for eighteen. Apart from boasting rights, there would be lots of drunk girls at the concert and that was my primary interest in attending. I knew I was good-looking. Mum often said she wished my brothers were as handsome as me.
The night before, I filled a small lemonade bottle with gin from my parents’ drinks cabinet and topped up the gin bottle with water. I didn’t particularly want to hang out in the VIP area with my parents’ boring-old-fart friends. Mum had warned us we were not to bring autograph books, so even though UB40 and Santana were also playing, I was not allowed to bother them.
We had to stop twice on the way to the gig to let Brian out of the car to pee. The first time, he couldn’t go ‘because there was a cow watching’.
After an hour of queuing for the car park and another hour of walking through roped-off pathways, we arrived at the castle. It was magnificent. We could see a massive stage to the left of it, and in front of the stage the field was a natural amphitheatre, already beginning to fill with people. The fast-moving River Boyne ran behind the castle. We displayed our VIP passes to the hostile security men at the castle entrance and gained Access All Areas.
The first embarrassing thing that happened was Mum shouting across the vast hallway at Bono. So much for us bothering the stars. Mum had never met Bono but because she was famous, she expected him to know her. Mum was nearly old enough to be Bono’s mother. He was closer in age to me than to her. He nodded politely in our direction and Mum pushed me forward.
‘Oh, Bono, hi! William here is a huge fan. He even has a U2 mug at home, don’t you, darling?’
Oh God, this is not how I wanted to meet my hero. I wanted to be having a beer with him and some good-looking girls. Brian’s hand flew up to cover his nose and he said, ‘Can I have your autograph?’ in contravention of our rules. Bono tousled his hair and said, ‘Sure, buddy! Do you want to come and hang out with the other cool kids in the billiards room?’ Brian produced his forbidden autograph book from his pocket. Mum had floated away to talk to some government minister who was trying to be trendy by wearing a suit without a tie. Bono signed his name with a flourish and Brian ran off in the direction of the billiards room.
