Locked Out of Heaven

by Shirley Benton

  Sammy was easy to find. She was taking over the dance floor, throwing shapes with the guy she was with and the group of girls I’d met earlier. Damo rolled his eyes when he saw her, but it was obvious that he was very fond of his wild younger sister, too. We left them alone and tried to find Cliff. The disco was now rammed and I thought we hadn’t a hope, but then we spotted him at the bar.

  “Hey! Where did you two get to?”

  “Oh, we were just around,” I said.

  Cliff looked from me to Damo then raised his eyebrows. I shook my head. Bloody hell, surely Cliff didn’t think I’d been snogging Damo on the sly! I knew he didn’t like Terry, but the look of hope on his face was just ridiculous.

  “This is Heather.”

  The pale girl said hi to me. She already knew Damo as she only lived a few miles down the road from him.

  The lights flashed, signalling the closure of the bar. It was as if a fire had been announced and everyone rushed to the exit doors as a stampede of people came towards us and swarmed the bar. Someone accidentally pushed against me and I fell right into Damo, landing in his waist region. He grabbed me and pulled me up, while also pulling me closer to him. He stared at me for a long time as if we were the only two people in the room.

  Something passed between us. I didn’t know what it was. I just know that I felt something. I drew back, both from Damo and from this unfamiliar feeling that I couldn’t even put into words in my head. He held my gaze as I retreated. It was . . . terrible, Diary. Terrible because I realised afterwards that whatever this thing was, it hadn’t ever happened between Terry and me.

  “I’ll . . . get us all some drinks before the bar closes,” I said.

  I needed to escape. As I asked Heather what she wanted to drink, I could tell Cliff was trying to make eye contact with me. I pushed myself into the glut of people at the bar and waited my turn, trying to calm my breathing.

  Cliff appeared beside me.

  “Damo’s mad about you. I saw the way he looked at you when you fell against him. He thought all his Christmases had come at once.”

  “Don’t be daft, Cliff! What about Terry?”

  “What about him? You two are only together a wet weekend and no offence, but there’s zero chemistry between you. I’ve thought for ages that there was a spark between you and Damo, but now I know it for a fact.”

  “Oh, lay off! I thought guys didn’t talk about all this kind of stuff?”

  “They do when it’s their sister involved. You could do a lot worse – Damo’s a good guy. How many people do we know who you can say that about? He’d treat you right.”

  “Look, don’t try to force this, Cliff. I’m with Terry!”

  “Not right now, you’re not. You chose to come here instead of spending the weekend with him.”

  “So? Just because I have a boyfriend doesn’t mean I can’t spend time with my friends, too!”

  I stormed off. As I said, Diary, I could really kick Cliff sometimes – that was definitely one of those times. I sat beside Sammy on the bus home. She was thrilled that she’d “chalked Tommy down” and was only too keen to talk about him all the way home, which suited me fine. Cliff was snogging Heather somewhere down the back and Damo was sitting beside a guy he’d gone to school with, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. I nodded and smiled in all the right places as Sammy talked on, but my thoughts kept drifting to what Cliff had said at the bar.

  Cyril collected us in the village at half two. Bizarrely, he was as chirpy as a bird at sunrise. He didn’t even object when Sammy put an Oasis tape into the car’s tape deck and sang at the top of her voice – in fact, he joined in! I went straight to my bed in the spare room when we got home, still feeling awkward around Damo after my conversation with Cliff.

  The next day, after a fry-up that would have fed forty people, Sammy threw me a pair of hiking boots.

  “Come on,” she said. “I go mountain hiking every Sunday to burn off the calories I drank the night before.”

  “A mountain? Don’t you need, like, harnesses and stuff for that in case you fall?”

  Everyone laughed, but I was only half-joking.

  “We should go too, to knock off last night’s cobwebs, Cliff,” Damo said. “What do you reckon?”

  “God, yeah! If you have spare boots, I’m definitely up for it.”

  “Sure, how could a guy called Cliff not like mountain climbing?” Sallyanne tittered, pleased with her little joke.

  Next thing, it’d be jokes about what you called a guy with a seagull on his head.

  Thankfully, the mountain was the perfect solution for not having to spend too much time with Damo. Then when we came back down and had yet more to eat, Damo’s parents took us to a sale of work in the local parish hall. Sammy, Damo, Cliff and I only had about fifty pence between us to spend after the previous night, but we spent hours rooting through jewel-less jewellery that you knew would leave rust marks on your skin, and board games with pieces missing and some even lacking the boards.

  It was a glorified car boot sale, the only difference to my mind being that it was indoors and you had the wheel of fortune to add a touch of glamour, but it was great fun. I’d never been to one, but I’m not sure if that’s because they didn’t take place in Blackbeg, or because we had enough junk around the place as it was.

  After that it was time to catch the bus back to Dublin – and this time, Sammy came up with us. She was planning on staying at Damo’s for a few days. She and I chatted non-stop all the way up, so I only saw Damo really when I was saying goodbye to the lads.

  I went home straight away to give myself a chance to think. When I got in, Terry was sitting on the couch, chatting to Willie about football. (I still find calling him Willie hard, but I’m doing my best.) Before I knew it, the pair of us were down in the local pub, with him asking me all about the weekend and telling me how much he missed me. I felt sooo bad, I can tell you. And it’s weird, feeling bad when nothing has happened as such, and yet something had happened that made everything change.

  Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it all ever since, Diary, and I’ve decided I need to cop on and sort my head out. Terry’s so good to me. I’d be downright stupid to mess everything up with him because of a fleeting feeling.

  I think it’s probably best if I stay away from Damo for a while, though, and let things settle down . . .

  Chapter 26

  Damo’s place was a duplex penthouse in a trendy new Dublin Docklands development. Trendy and uber expensive. After a quick tour of the living area, basically consisting of Damo saying, “Sitting room’s here, kitchen’s in there, bathroom’s the first door on the right when you go out into the hall,” he took us out onto his large balcony overlooking the Grand Canal Dock.

  Sammy oohed and aahed over the views of the Dublin mountains and picked out city landmarks while I wandered back inside and admired the accessories and wall art that had clearly come with the rental property. The furniture was the obligatory fare that would accompany a place like this: bright, cool and contemporary. I could just imagine the rental ad for this place: it’d be all “flooded with natural light” here and “top-of-the-range fittings” there. While I was surprised it was Damo’s thing, I could see how someone would want to live here. It was super impressive and most importantly from my perspective, pristine. My mind instantly decluttered just from being there.

  Damo and Sammy followed me inside.

  “So, what do you think?” Damo asked me.

  “Not a patch on your old place, Damo.”

  “Aren’t you going to show Holly your bedroom?” Sammy piped up.

  Sammy! I willed myself not to become a human beetroot.

  “The bedroom is a state – best to skip that bit of the tour. I was looking for running shorts this morning and had to empty out my wardrobe to find them.”

  “Another time,” Sammy said innocently.

  I kept wandering around the sitting room as if I hadn’t heard a word.

 
; “Lovely place, isn’t it?” I said to Sammy when Damo went into the kitchen to get us drinks.

  “Mmm.”

  “Mmm meaning what?”

  “Well, it’s lovely, of course – wouldn’t you just sell an organ to live here all by yourself with nobody nagging you, just for one day? – but it’s not Damien. He’s a slob and this is the kind of place you need to keep tidy or it defeats the purpose of living here.”

  “Maybe he just wanted a change.”

  We’d barely taken a sip from our drinks, when Sammy suggested having lunch in some nearby cafe she’d read about in a Sunday newspaper. I hesitated, worrying about the cost, but then remembered I wasn’t supposed to be eating anything much, anyway.

  Sammy enjoyed something that she said was a ham hock terrine followed by lamb shank shepherd’s pie, while Damo had vegetable soup and an organic beef burger. My side dish of fennel and orange salad was delicious but left me feeling hungrier than I’d been to begin with.

  Damo ordered a cheese board and pushed it towards me after he’d helped himself.

  “I can’t.” I told him about the magazine’s diet.

  “Do you know what would help immensely with what you’re doing and accelerate your weight loss big time?”

  “Lipo? Can’t afford it.”

  “Running. It’s the reason why I’m a bag of bones now – it literally melts the fat off.”

  “Sure, I couldn’t run from here to the door if there was a fire.”

  “Course you could.”

  “Maybe, but I’d crack the ground on my way and the whole lot of us would end up down under in a bigger fire. If we’re all going to hell, we might as well earn our way there, eh?”

  “Ah, some of us are dead certs for that journey anyway.”

  “Not you, though. I’d be surprised if you ever even used the squad car siren to get through rush hour traffic just to get your lunch quicker.”

  “You would be surprised, trust me. Anyway, back to running.”

  “What are you two talking about?”

  “Running.”

  “Oh.” Sammy’s face fell.

  “I’m trying to convince Holly of the benefits.”

  “Well, good luck. You haven’t managed to convince me yet in all the months you’ve been trying.” She glanced around the pub. “Although I have to say, I wish now that you had. Looking at all these pretty young things here tonight is making me feel really bad about myself.”

  “They’re not all young,” I said. I nodded discreetly towards the next table. “That group of women over there are the same age as us, surely?”

  “Yes, and they’re all way thinner than us.”

  “Maybe they haven’t had children.”

  “And maybe they have and they’re just not as lazy as us.” She shook her head.

  “Why don’t the three of us train together?” Damo said. “You might find it easier to get started if both of you start at the same time.”

  “Hmm. Maybe you’re right,” Sammy said, putting down her drink. “I mightn’t duck out of it as easily if I had a running buddy.”

  “You actually want to do this?”

  “No, of course not. It’s the last thing in the world that I actually want to do, but I need to do something. I’m going to have a heart attack one of these days from all this extra blubber and I’m in enough danger of that as it is from the stress of keeping the kids alive. Max has started this new thing of trying to climb into the oven whenever he’s cold. And of course, one or the other of them broke the baby gate to the kitchen a few days ago and it has to be replaced. I bought an oven door lock and my husband somehow managed to break that. Every time Max goes out of my sight for more than three seconds and I have something cooking in the oven, I panic. I’m telling you, I won’t live to see forty with that lot to mind day in, day out.”

  “But I’m already in the gym . . . I don’t want to overtrain. I haven’t done more than walk to the shop in years, remember. Actually, I didn’t even do that, I always drove!”

  “We can take this as slowly as you like,” Damo said. “Even five minutes of running a few times a week would be a great start.”

  “But you’re not going to get any sort of a workout with a blubberball like me slowing you down,” I said.

  “Not a problem. I’ll get up earlier and have my daily run done by the time I meet up with you guys.”

  “Won’t that be very time-consuming for you?”

  “I have loads of free time. Too much.”

  “Okay, that’s settled, then!” Sammy put down her drink resolutely. “When do we start?”

  Chapter 27

  25 July 1994

  Not long after my trip to Offaly, Diary, Terry and I had a conversation that changed the course of our entire future, even though I had no idea at the time that it would. I’d called round to Terry’s house unexpectedly after spending an hour with Sammy. He was pleased to see me, as he always was when I popped in, even if we hadn’t arranged anything, but he looked more distracted than usual. He led me into the kitchen. The kitchen table was covered with paperwork and folders.

  “Hey, John.”

  One of Terry’s flatmates, John, was cooking something rancid-smelling at the hob. The pong was a mixture of something gone off and burning. He said hi and returned his attention to his food – a bit too late to be concentrating on it now, it seemed.

  “Tidying up the books?” I said.

  “Yeah, just trying to work out how I’m going to make ends meet for another month,” he said.

  He rolled his eyes backwards to John, which I interpreted as a warning for me not to comment any further while John was around.

  “We all have to do it, I suppose,” I said for the sake of something to say.

  Eventually, John walked past with a plate piled high of something that looked like it was meant to be shepherd’s pie about three weeks ago.

  “Hang on a second and I’ll clear this off so that you can eat here,” Terry said.

  John shook his head. “No, stay where you are. I want to watch something on TV anyway.”

  He smiled benignly and went to the sitting room, closing the kitchen door behind him.

  “OK, looks like we can stay here, so,” he said. “Stroke of luck that John’s such a TV addict really.”

  I just smiled. Terry was one of those people who had a particular effect on others. With the exception of Cliff, people just seemed to want to please him without even consciously realising they were doing it. He always got his way without having to try.

  “I’m sure you don’t want to talk me through your paperwork though, fascinating and all as that sounds,” I said.

  “Well actually, I do.” He lowered his voice. “I’m glad you happened to call, because there’s something I was going to run by you after I cooked the books tonight. I obviously don’t want the guys here to know, but I have a bit of money now and was thinking of doing something with it.” His voice was almost a whisper now.

  “Oh?” My mind raced. The thing is, Diary, it could be anything when it comes to Terry, and it was bound to be something wacky and weird.

  “I was thinking about buying a pub.”

  “Oh!” Or not.

  “That’s not quite the reaction I was looking for, Holly.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just . . . shocked, I suppose.”

  I had no idea that Terry had that kind of money you’d need to do something like that.

  “Look at this.”

  He handed me an estate agent’s brochure and pointed to a city centre pub. It looked a bit decrepit to me.

  “I know what you’re thinking – the place is a state, but it’s in a prime city centre location!”

  I looked at the address. The pub was situated on a street just off the poshest shopping district in the city and was also a main tourist location.

  “If you think about that area, there isn’t so much as one trendy city centre spot. All the pubs around there are either old men’s pubs or smelly
, cheap hang-out areas for students who really deserve better. If you wanted to bring a friend somewhere smart around there, where would you go?”

  I shrugged. He seemed to have forgotten who he was talking to, Diary – I mean, as if I’d have the first clue about that kind of thing!

  “The bar in the government buildings, maybe.”

  “Exactly. You can’t think of a single place. But this time next year, you’ll know exactly where to go if I go ahead with my plan.” He reached for another document. “Here are some pictures of the interior of the pub. Grotty as hell. You wouldn’t sit down in one of those booths in case your arse got fleas.”

  I shuddered. It was the kind of place an old dog would crawl into to find a table to die under.

  “But here’s how it would look if I got my hands on it.” He handed me a stapled set of sheets of paper. “These are pictures of some bars in New York. Look at all the light features and the snazzy décor. Where would you find something like this in Dublin right now?

  “And I’d also serve a much wider variety of drinks than what you get in the pubs here. I’ve been looking into what I could get and the list is endless. There’s a whole range of international beers that can be stocked.”

  “But wouldn’t they be more expensive?”

  “Yes, but I’d do some promotions on them at first to get the punters in. And we would get them in, for two reasons: the novelty value of people being able to get something that they can’t get elsewhere and the tourists. Of course, the tourists want to drink Guinness and Irish whiskey, but they’d also like to have the option of going somewhere where they can get the same things as they can at home that they can’t get anywhere else in downtown Dublin. I should know – I get asked about that all the time.

  “And then there’s wine and champagne. I want this place to be the kind of spot people go to if they want to celebrate something big. There’s a smaller area out back that you can’t see in the photos. It’s in such a state that they left it out of the brochure, but you could have small functions there. And, of course, we’d provide a full lunch menu for the bar.”