Locked Out of Heaven

by Shirley Benton

  I would have refuted the status of my concern as being that of shite if Damo hadn’t come bounding up the driveway out of nowhere. Well, out of Sammy’s parked car, presumably, but I was so busy staring at my cankles that I hadn’t noticed him arriving.

  “Hi, Holly. Are you ready to go?”

  “Yes, she is. Come on, Holly.” Sammy grabbed my arm.

  “Wait! I . . . em . . . have to do something before I go.”

  “No, don’t go back in.” Sammy increased the pressure on my arm. “Because . . . if one of the kids see you, they might be upset.”

  “No, I really have to fix something before I leave.”

  “Listen, I’m in a bit of a hurry here,” Damo said. “I have to be somewhere in an hour, so we’ll need to get moving if I’m to have time to drop you back.”

  “An hour! You’re seriously expecting me to run for a whole hour?”

  “We’ll be with you in a second, Damien,” Sammy said. “Head back out there and start up the car.”

  Damo left, frowning.

  “He’s seen you now!” Sammy pushed me into the house. “Just stick on a pair of shades and nobody else will recognise you. We’re going to a park because it’s too built up around here to run – no offence.”

  “Shades? In this overcast weather?”

  “What’s your point? Stop thinking, grab your shades and let’s just go. I’ll have no energy left to run if I have to keep on pulling and dragging you like this.”

  I reluctantly went into the kitchen to look for a pair of shades. All I could find in the end was a heart-shaped pair with pink rims, which wasn’t going to do much for the fear of what I looked like, and was soon dragged out of the house by Sammy.

  “Damien’s parked down the road where it’s a bit wider. He doesn’t want to risk someone driving past his new car fast and scraping it while he’s parked up.”

  “Wow. It’s a far cry from Sandra,” I said when I saw Damo’s import Mercedes-Benz CLS Coupé.

  Sandra was Damo’s old car back in the day, a Nissan Sunny that always smelled of dogs.

  “Too much money, that’s this fella’s problem,” Sammy said as she climbed into the front seat beside Damo.

  You’d know he didn’t have kids, and not just because it was entirely impractical as a family car. It was immaculate, inside and out. I could have lived in it quite happily.

  Damo took off and drove to a park with a running track that was about ten minutes from Blackbeg. As soon as he parked, Sammy jumped out of the car and did a few jumping jacks on the spot.

  “Come on!” She knocked at the car window a few seconds later as Damo put a lock on the steering wheel – nice enough area or not, he was taking no chances. “Hurry up and let’s get this thing started!”

  “Pace yourself,” Damo said as he got out and threw his car keys into his pocket before zipping it up.

  “I want to start burning this crap off my body right now,” Sammy said, doing a few air punches and jumping up and down as she spoke.

  “You need to do a warm-up first. Okay, we’re going to walk briskly on the track for five minutes to loosen up our muscles. Let’s go.”

  Sammy tried to strike up a conversation with me about something she’d seen on TV the previous night, but Damo cut her off immediately.

  “No chatting. You’ll end up slowing down without even realising it.”

  “Ah, give over, Dam—”

  “No. If you’re serious about getting fit, do as I say.”

  “Sir, yessir,” Sammy muttered.

  The brisk walk was enough for me, but thankfully the first workout wasn’t as intense as I’d feared. We did a twenty-minute programme that alternated between sixty seconds of walking and ninety seconds of jogging, followed by a five-minute walking cool-down. I counted the seconds down in my head while we were jogging and found it just about bearable. The feel of fat jiggling on my body as I worked out helped to keep me motivated. How had I let myself get like this?

  “Are you all right, Holly? You looked very focused there during the workout,” Damo asked during the cool-down walk.

  “Yeah, I was, em . . . just doing that game in my head where you think of a song, then think of another song that begins with the last letter of the first song. Remember that?”

  “Course I do. You were pretty good at it. Probably still are. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.”

  “‘You Raise Me Up’.”

  “Awful choice.” Damo shook his head. “‘Pennyroyal Tea’.”

  “Ooh, Nirvana. Good choice, I must say. Okay, a song beginning with A . . . ‘American Pie’.”

  “Ah, this is too easy. Let’s pick a band. I’ll name a song by them and you give me the name of another one of their songs beginning with the last letter of the name of the first song. Let’s do Pulp. I’ll start with ‘Babies’.”

  “‘Something Changed’.”

  “‘Disco 2000’.”

  “Ah, here, that’s cheating! You can’t pick a song that ends with a number!”

  “I’ll let you get away with a song beginning with O, so.”

  “This game isn’t really much fun for someone who doesn’t like Pulp,” Sammy said in a sulky voice.

  Damo looked at her as if he was surprised to see her there. To my shame, I’d kind of forgotten she was there myself.

  We included Sammy in a game of general songs until we got back to the car, but she really wasn’t into it.

  “Hey, shall we go for a coffee?” she said when it was her turn to pick a song beginning with Z. “Come on. I want to let Rory spend as much time as possible with the kids so he’ll see just how hard I work every day.”

  “I have to be somewhere, remember?” Damo said, pulling the car out.

  “Where?”

  “Town.”

  “Why?”

  “To buy something.”

  “But sure, you can buy something any time. Can’t you go later? Come on, when’s the last time the three of us met up?”

  “Not so long ago in the pub.”

  “Ah, that already seems like years ago. Right, that’s settled, let’s go to—”

  “No, Sammy. I said I have to be somewhere. End of conversation.”

  “Oookay. Right. Fine. Fuck’s sake, you’re a right snappy arse.”

  “We need showers after that, anyway,” I said when Damo didn’t reply to Sammy’s allegation.

  “I’d be surprised if Sammy does seeing as she barely made an effort at all,” Damo said.

  I couldn’t help laughing. “God, some things never change. You two could be in your nineties and you’d still be squabbling.”

  For once in my life, I’d said the right thing at the right time. Damo and Sammy glanced at each other and smiled, and the tension dissipated. All the same, Damo was quiet enough for the rest of the journey.

  “I’ll go back to yours for a while, Hol, if you don’t mind?” Sammy said. “I’m not ready to check back in my madhouse again for another hour or so. I’ll just get a taxi back when I’m ready.”

  “Which will probably be sometime around midnight,” Damo said. “Poor Rory.”

  “Poor Rory, my arse. They’re his kids, too, and they’re on this earth because of him repeatedly jumping and impregnating me.”

  Damo shook his head. “Thank you for leaving me with that mental image. Right, I’m not kicking you out or anything, but I really have to go.”

  “Oh, sorry, you should have mentioned you were in a hurry.”

  “Thanks for the lift, Damo,” I said as I opened the car door.

  “Don’t miss us too much,” Sammy said before doing the same.

  Damo hooted the horn as he drove away.

  “Or should I say, don’t miss Holly too much.”

  “Sammy, feck off.” I fumbled in my pocket for my key and gave Sammy my best annoyed look.

  “What? I just mean he’s probably glad to see the back of me. He seemed to be enjoying your company a lot more. ‘Oh, let’s do a Pulp album . . . ’”
>
  “Are we not a little old for this?”

  “I’m only having a laugh. It’ll do you no harm anyway to remember that there are other men in the world besides your prick of an ex.”

  “Look, Sammy, I’m enjoying having Damo back in my life again, but I don’t want you scaring him away, okay? Plus, I don’t want you making him think that I’m interested in him and messing with his head, either! Not that he cares about whether or not I am. I’m just saying, don’t be messing around with us, all right?”

  “I’m not! I’m just making the point that you two seemed to get on well today. It seemed like the connection was still there.”

  “Just because two people have a fluid conversation, it doesn’t mean there’s something going on between them or that something should be going on if there isn’t.”

  “No, no. Of course not. But just out of interest, would you? If there were no strings attached, would you go there?”

  “Oh, give over!”

  “Come on, it’s just an imaginary scenario. You’re out some night, you’re drunk and it’d be just sex with no repercussions. Would you go for it?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “It’s just a yes or no answer. A simple yes or no, that’s all I want.”

  “Stop it, Sammy. I’m not answering that question.”

  “That’s a yes. Interesting. I bet if I wasn’t around there’d be loads of Austin Powers-style sexual innuendos going on, all leading up to wanton fornication.”

  “You’re unreal, do you know that?”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  And this was her stone-cold sober. God help me on my next night out with her. And the scariest thing was that in the back of my mind, I had a suspicion that she might be right. In the cold light of day, I looked at my situation and thought to myself that I’d never be interested in so much as looking at another man after what Terry had done to me. And yet if drink was involved . . . who knows, anything could happen. Especially given the history between Damo and me. And then things would be very complicated.

  Note to self: stay off the booze. It was a good thing – I couldn’t afford it anyway.

  Chapter 31

  14 September 1994

  I’ve been away for quite a while, but I think you’ll forgive me when I tell you why, Diary. I’ve been putting time into my relationship with Terry. Stop laughing. I’m doing the right thing. We’ve been going on loads of weekends away around the country and stuff and we’re getting on great. Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to distance myself from Damo. I think it’s for the best, but I really miss his friendship. Cliff keeps asking me why I’m not going over to Princes’ Palace any more and I keep fobbing him off with excuses. What else can I do?

  I also have some good news. I got seven honours in the Leaving Cert, five of them As! Susie and Willie nearly burst with pride, although the celebrations were tinged with the unspoken knowledge that Ricky was the one who should have blazed the trail for academic achievement.

  It was all very unreal. People from my school just weren’t expected to get results like mine. The teachers didn’t know whether to hug me or report me as someone who must have cheated. Although I always had my homework done, I’d always been quiet in class and was too shy to answer questions, and since Ricky’s death I’d become so introverted that I don’t think the teachers really had any idea just how committed I was to getting a good Leaving.

  My mock results had been good, but my actual results had blown those out of the water. So, thanks to the college grant, I started at Trinity College Dublin last week! I’m hoping Addiction Studies will help me to make sense of what happened to Ricky and hopefully, I’ll be able to help other people with addictions.

  And now on to Sammy. This is where things are starting to get tricky, Diary.

  “Sammy just rang looking for you,” Susie said a few days ago when I got in from college. “She said she had big news and it was urgent and life-threatening and couldn’t wait another second. She sounded absolutely fine, though. She left a number for you to call her back.”

  The number was a Dublin one. Presumably, she got the course she was looking for at Trinity College Dublin. I hesitated before ringing her back. I’d be swimming in dangerous waters by becoming friendly with the sister of the guy I was trying to forget, but I couldn’t bring myself to snub someone I liked so much, either.

  It was all very well having lunch and a few jars with a crowd of people I’d just met in Trinity College Dublin, but I had a feeling that with Sammy, our friendship could potentially be the real deal. She was cheeky and way more outgoing than yours truly, but she was decent and solid, too. The type of friend I’ve never had but always wanted. Plus, she had damn good taste in borrowable clothes . . .

  For a split second, I wondered if she’d received more than a snog from Tommy the night I’d been in Offaly and was in Dublin because she’d run away from home – that would certainly be big news! But I wouldn’t know unless I rang her, so I got on with it.

  “Hello?”

  “Sammy? It’s me, Holly.”

  “About bloody time! We have a party to go to.”

  “What? Where?”

  She rattled off a location as if she’d lived in Dublin all of her life.

  “A new friend of mine from my arts course is having a house-warming there tonight. I live a few streets away from her. Can you meet me at my place in about an hour’s time?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were moving up?”

  “Didn’t Damo tell you? I told him to tell you I’d get in contact when I had a place to live and all that.”

  “No, em . . . oh, it’s a long story. Just a second,” I said, putting down the phone. “Daaad?”

  Dad dropped me off at Sammy’s. She walked out to the car and dragged me out, hugging me as if we’d been separated at birth.

  “You must be Holly’s dad,” she said through the passenger window, sticking her arm through it to shake his hand. “Thanks for dropping her over.”

  Dad grunted and drove off.

  “Don’t wait up!” I shouted after the car as he drove away.

  “Tell me everything that’s going on with you!” Sammy said as she linked my arm and we walked back to the house. “Stunning make-up, by the way. I taught you well.”

  And with that, a beautiful friendship was reborn. And I’m thrilled. But of course, it’s inevitable that Damo and I will cross paths again soon now. Maybe it’ll all be okay, though. Terry and I are getting on so well.

  Yes, it’ll all be grand. It takes me so long to get round to writing diary entries that no doubt by my next entry, I’ll have a new problem to worry about!

  Chapter 32

  The last thing in the world I wanted to do was date a stranger. But nonetheless, there I was on a dating show.

  The Whole Package, it was called. Those with a dirty bent of mind can make of that what you will. I should have been grateful, because Get Out of My Dreams, Get Into My Car was the mooted original fictional name – obviously a Billy Ocean fan was behind that one. Although the payment for appearing on the show was a pittance, I accepted the gig.

  It would only take a few hours in the morning to record, during which time Sarah would be at school and Susie would mind Debbie and Oran. Then there’d be a tortuous dinner date in the evening. I’d told them I couldn’t make the dinner date until half nine in the evening to make sure it was as short as possible.

  “Here’s how it works,” Luke said, who knew how it worked because he was also producing this show. It seemed like he produced pretty much all of the home-grown shows, really. “You’ll be the person looking for a date and you’ll choose from one of four men. Your first task will be to go to the men’s workplaces and inspect the area they work in – their office desks if they’re an office worker, for example. You won’t be told what they do for a living, but you’ll obviously glean something about their working lives from your visit.

  “At the end of visiting the four workplace
s, you’ll put one of the four men out of the running based on what you’ve seen of their workplaces – of course, you won’t know which man from the headshots did which job. Next up, you get five minutes to check out each of the remaining three men’s cars. Same story – you eliminate one based on what you’ve seen. The last step will be to visit the men’s homes and pick one of them to date based on what you see there.”

  “Sounds . . . interesting.”

  “Interesting meaning?”

  I took a deep breath. “Well, it could be interpreted as snobbery to disqualify someone based on their career, you know. It’s something that would have to be handled sensitively. As for the cars, what happens if an applicant doesn’t have a car?”

  “Then they’re not on the show.”

  “Hmm. You know, you could be losing lots of potentially good candidates with such strict criteria. Loads of people are turning to cycling as a means of transportation now, with the cost of fuel being so high.”

  “Well, we’re getting plenty of applicants and loads of other TV companies abroad bought the concept of this show off us. It seems to be working.”

  “Maybe the concept needs to be updated somewhat to reflect current lifestyles.”

  “Holly, maybe it’s best not to worry about the whys and the wherefores behind this. It’s only a TV show.”

  “Sorry, sorry. I’m just trying to help you.”

  He laughed. “Thank God you’re not trying to hinder me. I’d really hate to see what you’d come up with for that.”

  I really was awful for overanalysing.

  “Ah, you work too hard, Luke. I’m just trying to keep you on the phone for as long as possible to help you to relax a bit,” I lied.

  “Holly, can you get off that phone soon?” Susie said as she passed through the hall. “I’m expecting a call.”

  Muted laughter came down the line.

  “It’s not funny, Luke,” I said when Susie had gone into the sitting room. “This is the reality of life as a bloody boomeranger.”

  Luke’s laughter escalated. “Oh, if only we’d got that on camera, Holly. I thought I’d gone back in time and was listening to my own mother talking there for a second.”