This Charming Man

by Marian Keyes

  ‘How nice,’ I said briskly. ‘So does he.’

  ‘Is Jacinta around?’ He lounged in front of my desk.

  I made a big show of looking up from my notes. ‘No.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘You busy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He laughed. Mocking my diligence? ‘Good woman.’

  In leisurely fashion he went off and I refocused, trying to remember people I had spoken to at parties, met at functions. Had anyone mentioned they were an oncology nurse, or that their sister had breast cancer? But, despite having contacts in the oddest of places, I drew a blank in the breast cancer world. Bitterly I blamed the absence of nicotine in my system. I bet if I had a smoke I’d gear up enough to remember something.

  As a last-ditch resort I could use the testimonials on the internet site, but it wouldn’t really work. I needed ‘colour’ – descriptions of stuff like the sufferer’s home (‘pretty floralcurtains, the mantelpiece crammed with family photographs taken in happier times’).

  I bounced a pen up and down against my desk. I wanted to do this well. I wanted to do all my stories well, but the slapdash, penny-pinching approach to women’s health sometimes made me want to cry with frustration. If such a high number of false negatives had happened with testicular cancer – man cancer – there would be pandemonium.

  ‘Stop clicking that pen!’ TC yelped.

  I could simply show up at a hospice, and prowl the corridors, asking among the dying untilI found a woman to interview, but I had some scruples.

  The only thing to do, I decided, was to go into the belly of the beast and contact one of the specialist hospital units which had been the subject of the report. There was little point ringing them, they were bound to be on the defensive. I’d keep my powder dry and go in person.

  I switched my mobile back on and tensed for the double beep. But it didn’t happen. He hadn’t left a message.

  ‘I’m out on a story.’ Very quickly I clicked my pen nine or ten times into TC’s ear, then swung out of the office.

  ‘Biopsies?’ I murmured to the receptionist.

  ‘Left, left again at the double doors, right at the crucifix.’

  I emerged into a waiting area, took a seat and flicked through surprisingly up-to-date magazines. I wondered how to play this. I needed access to the patients’ computerized records, which I couldn’t do without the help of someone who worked here. Preferably someone who hated their job.

  The girl behind the Welcome desk was clicking away at a keyboard in a swotty fashion. A jobsworth. No use to me.

  A good journalist is a blend of patience and pushiness. Right now, I just needed to be patient. I watched and waited and watched and waited, drumming my fingers on my knee.

  It was a busy place. People arrived and gave their details to the swotty girl and sat down and eventually got called by nurses. On the pretext of going to the loo, I took a little wander and discreetly stuck my head around severaldoors but apart from startling a man having an analexamination, I saw nothing of interest. I came back and sat down. My stomach started to hurt as the truth trickled through me. This wasn’t going to happen, I’d have to go back empty-handed.

  I hated to fail, it made me feel so shit about myself, and there was no creature so pitiful as the journalist who came back without the story. A wild thought struck me. I could make it up! I could base it on Auntie Bid! And the internet stuff!

  As quickly as it arrived, the idea dissolved. They’d find out and I’d get sacked and no one would employ me ever again.

  I’d have to suck it up. It wasn’t often that I didn’t get my story. Then I remembered – the sand in my oyster, the stone in my shoe – that bloody Lola Daly. How everyone had laughed at me. A sappy fashion stylist with purple hair and I hadn’t been able to get her to talk about her ex-boyfriend.

  But unlike Lola Daly, this story mattered. All those poor women who’d been told they were in the clear and were sent away to let their disease march unimpeded throughout their body, they deserved to have their say. Not to mention the small possibility of shaming the Department of Health into ensuring it didn’t happen again.

  I was so sunk into gloom that I almost missed the woman huffing and puffing past me. She was talking to herself like the White Rabbit and she radiated resentment.

  She barged into the office beside the desk and banged the door, but not before I heard her voice raised querulously. ‘How many times…’

  Thank you, God!

  She emerged some minutes later and huffed and puffed back down the corridor, me following her. When she stopped outside a door and opened it, I made my move. I’d been patient long enough; time to be pushy.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said.

  She turned around, her face hostile. ‘What?’

  Definitely not a people-person.

  I smiled as wide as I could. ‘Hi! My name is Grace Gildee. Could we have a quick chat about biopsy results?’

  ‘I’m nothing to do with biopsies. Go down that corridor. Ask at the desk.’ She’d turned away and was halfway into the room when I said, ‘Actually, it’s probably better that you’ve nothing to do with biopsies.’

  ‘Why?’ She turned around. Now she was interested.

  ‘Because I’m wondering if you can help me.’ I smiled my head off.

  Emotions moved behind her eyes. Confusion. Curiosity. Cunning. Understanding. It was like a slide show. ‘Are you a journalist? Is it about the report?’

  ‘Exactly!’ Another enormous smile. I’ve discovered that when you’re trying to persuade people to do something underhand, if you keep smiling, it confuses them into thinking that they’re not doing anything wrong.

  This was the moment. She’d either call security or agree to help me. She seemed frozen with indecision.

  ‘I just need a couple of names and addresses,’ I cajoled. ‘No one will ever know it’s you.’

  Still she hesitated. She’d like her employers to be shafted, but clearly it just wasn’t in her nature to help anyone.

  ‘Will the unit get into trouble?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said pleasantly. ‘They will. All I need is a couple of names and addresses from you. Three at the most. Definitely no more than four. And if they could live in Dublin.’

  ‘You’re not asking for much.’

  I ignored the surge of irritation and fag-longing that rushed up through me and forced another beam. ‘Just the names and addresses of five women in Dublin who were given false negatives. You’d be doing me a massive favour.’

  She bit her lip and thought about it. ‘It’s not my area, but I’ll try. Wait in the car park. There’s a big white statue. Jesus on the cross with his grieving mother. If I get anything I’ll meet you there.’

  I wanted to ask how long she’d be, but sensed it would be a bad idea. This one could turn quicker than a very quick thing.

  I sat myself down on the other side of the grieving mother, then I waited. And waited. And waited. And wished I could have a cigarette. A journalist really needs to smoke. There’s so much hanging around, how else are you meant to pass the time? And once you’ve got your story, there’s the mad rush to write it up against the clock; you need cigarettes to aid that also.

  But in a perverse way the self-denial appealed: atonement.

  More time elapsed and the burning pain in my stomach started up again. Had the White Rabbit lost her nerve? Had she been toying with me all along? You never know with her type. I hunted in my handbag for a Zotan (tablets for stomachs that are thinking about getting an ulcer) and swallowed one down.

  I started thinking again about having to go back without my story. I was visualizing it in some detail – the scornful laughter, Jacinta’s fury, Big Daddy’s outrage at the great big hole in the paper – when the woman darted in front of me. She shoved a page into my hand, said, ‘You didn’t get this from me,’ and disappeared.

  ‘Thanks a million!’ Six names and addresses. Fair play t
o her. I figured out the nearest one, hailed a taxi and rang the picture desk, looking for a photographer.

  I pulled up outside the house. (‘A neat semi with an obviously well-loved garden.’) A teenage girlanswered the door. (‘Fresh paintwork, gleaming brass.’) I cranked up my smile muscles. This is where the respectable suit and string of pearls would have come in handy. ‘Hello. Can I speak to your mother?’

  ‘She’s in bed.’

  ‘My name is Grace. I’m from the Spokesman. I know your mum is very sick, but I was wondering if I could have a quick word with her. I’ll only keep her a few minutes.’

  Her face didn’t alter. ‘I’ll ask her.’ She pounded up the stairs, then back down again. ‘She says, what’s it about?’

  Gently I said, ‘About her biopsy results. The ones that said she was okay.’

  The girl’s face spasmed, a movement so small you’d hardly have noticed it. She pounded up the stairs again and when she reappeared she said, ‘She says come in.’

  Up the narrow stairs (‘beige carpet, Jack Vettriano prints’) into a back bedroom. The curtains were drawn and there was a horrible smell of sickness. The creature in the bed looked exhausted and jaundiced. This woman was dying.

  ‘Mrs Singer.’ I advanced slowly towards her. ‘I’m so sorry to descend on you like this.’ I explained about the report. ‘I was wondering if you would like to tell your story?’

  She didn’t react, then wheezed, ‘Okay.’

  Christ alive, it was tragic. She’d found a lump in her breast – a bombshell for any woman – and when the biopsy came back negative for cancer, they were so relieved that the whole family had gone on holiday. But about six weeks later she was laid low by bone-tired exhaustion and began having night sweats that drenched the bed. She went for a multitude of tests, but breast cancer had been ruled out because of her biopsy results. She asked for another biopsy, because she suspected, with the intuition that people have about their own bodies, that that was where the trouble lay, but she was overruled. By the time she found a second lump, it had invaded her lymph nodes. They blasted her with chemo – like they were doing with Bid at the moment – but it was too late. Game over. The tips of my fingers tingled with fear. What if it was too late for Bid too?

  Mrs Singer’s voice was so wheezy from the chemo that the tape recorder couldn’t pick it up. I was scribbling into my notebook, trying to get everything down, when there was a thundering up the stairs. The girlwho’d opened the door to me burst into the room and complained, ‘Mu-um, Susan won’t peelthe potatoes.’

  ‘Would you mind doing them, then, Nicola, love?’

  ‘But I’ve to stick my hand up the chicken’s bum. That’s worse!’

  Nicola stomped back down the stairs and raised voices reached us from the room below.

  ‘I worry about the girls,’ Mrs Singer said. ‘They’re only fourteen and fifteen. It’s a bad age to leave them.’

  I nodded. I never cried on a job, over the years I’d trained myself not to. But sometimes I got a forward-pushing sensation in my sinuses, a crowding and gathering beneath the bridge of my nose, accompanied by a wash of extreme sadness. I got that now.

  Nicola was back. ‘There’s a man at the door. He says he’s a photographer.’

  ‘Mrs Singer – ’ Christ, this was pushing it – ‘I should have mentioned he’d be coming.’

  ‘I look too awful to have my picture taken.’

  Alas, that was the whole point.

  ‘Susan and I could put some make-up on you!’ Nicola said. ‘And could we be in it too?’

  We waited twenty minutes while Nicola and Susan piled on bronzer and bucketloads of sticky pink lipgloss and the picture – two young, healthy girls, one on either side of their dying mother – would have broken your heart.

  Keith Christie, the snapper, had his car. He drove us to the next nearest address on the list, where the woman’s husband told us to piss off. ‘Fucking vultures,’ he yelled after us as Keith reversed out of the cul-de-sac.

  ‘Where now?’ Keith asked.

  ‘Booterstown.’

  My mobile rang. Dad, in a terrible fluster. ‘Bingo’s got free. Postman. Front door open. Saw his opportunity. Made a break for it. Indomitable spirit. He’s been spotted in Killiney. We need you to come.’

  ‘Dad, I’m on a story.’

  ‘But Ma doesn’t know how to focus the binoculars.’

  ‘Then let her drive.’

  ‘Her responses are too slow. If I say “left”, I mean “left, right now!” Not “left in ten minutes’ time”.’

  ‘Dad, I’m at work.’ I couldn’t spend the rest of the afternoon driving around the countryside, binoculars clamped to my face, scouring the landscape for Bingo. ‘Good luck, I hope you find him.’

  I snapped my phone closed.

  ‘Is it the dog?’ Keith asked. ‘He’s at large again?’

  I nodded.

  ‘If he wants to escape that badly,’ Keith said, ‘maybe they should just let him go.’

  ‘Maybe.’ I sighed.

  ‘Okay, we’re here. You go and do the talking, I’ll keep the engine running in case they turn nasty.’

  This time, we were let in and although the woman was in her fifties, about ten years older than Mrs Singer, her story was just as grim.

  In silence, Keith and I returned to the office, me to write up my story and him to develop the photos. Even though I’d been hardened by years of exposure to the most heartbreaking stories you can imagine, being in such close proximity to death had brought my mood low. I was thinking of Bid. She’d better not die.

  Christ, I’d love a cigarette.

  Coming up the stairs to the newsroom, I heard bellows of laughter, then one or two shrieks. I pushed open the door. Loads of people were gathered around reading from a sheet of paper. Someone would read out a sentence then another roar of laughter would rise towards the rafters.

  ‘Grace, Grace, c’mere, take a look at this,’ a mirthful voice said.

  ‘What is it?’ I came closer, bursting with curiosity. Then I stopped. I’d guessed what it was. ‘Hahaha,’ I said.

  It was a copy of the police report of my stolen car. Dickie McGuinness had hacked into the police database and emailed it to the entire staff. For extra enjoyment, certain sentences had been highlighted. ‘… car four months old…’‘… doused in petroland set alight…’‘… nothing remaining but the metalframework…’

  Just tell me this, why do dithery swimmers go in the middle lane when there’s a nice, slow lane for them to dawdle around in like Sunday drivers? And why do aggressive, choppy, water-slapping types come into the middle lane and intimidate us all when they can be among their own in the fast lane?

  It’s hard enough to gear myself up to go near the pool, it’d be nice to feelafterwards that it was worth it.

  I’d finished up late at work. Most days I didn’t get the chance to make the world a better place and the breast cancer story needed the right balance. It had to be crusading but not ranty, and moving but not so maudlin that people wouldn’t read it. It was a challenge, and as soon as I’d filed it I wanted alcohol, but because it was Monday no one was going to Dinnegans. Instead – bloody reluctantly, I can tell you – I went for a health-giving, stress-busting swim, but there were so many people in the lane, swimming at all the wrong speeds, that I was far narkier after I got out than before I went in.

  And I don’t know what it is about swimming-poolchanging rooms but I can never get myself properly dry afterwards. The backs of my thighs stay defiantly damp and if I’m wearing tights (to be fair, almost never) it’s a realstruggle to tug them up as far as my waist.

  Outside, with the wind blowing through my trousers and chilling my damp legs, the thought of the bus was too much. All that stopping and starting, too reminiscent of my disappointing swim. So I walked, formulating an ambitious plan to do it every day until my car was sorted out. It might combat the inevitable weight gain from giving up the fags.

  On the w
ay I listened to my messages. There was one from Dad. Bingo had been run to ground and returned to custody. ‘No thanks to you,’ he added snippily.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said to the message. ‘I was at work.’

  Then I rang Damien and told him about Mrs Singer. ‘I felt so sad.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Damien said. ‘You’re not so jaded that you don’t care.’

  ‘Thanks for that. Enjoy your me-time.’

  Monday night was Damien’s night with ‘the boys’. He drank whiskey and played poker and generally indulged his oft-repeated need for his ‘own space’.

  ‘I’ll be late,’ he said.

  ‘Be as late as you like.’

  ‘Sarcasm, Grace? Why do you begrudge me this one night?’

  He liked to behave as if I resented every second he spent with his pals, and I was happy to indulge him. A man needs his struggles.

  I let myself into the empty house – I liked having it to myself – and rummaged around in the kitchen looking for food. I’d been eating all day, I should stop now, but I knew I wouldn’t. Out of habit, I put the news on in the living room and when I heard ‘… Paddy de Courcy…’ I darted from the kitchen and stood in the doorway, watching the television. Paddy was striding through a corridor wearing an expensive-looking, dark blue suit. An efficient-type woman carrying a clipboard scurried along in his wake, and a reporter lolloped alongside him in an undignified crouching lope, holding a microphone to his beautiful mouth, to catch whatever gem of wisdom he was about to impart. Paddy was smiling. Paddy was always smiling. Except when some tragedy had happened, when he was appropriately grim.

  He was being asked about Dee Rossini. ‘Dee is as honest as the day is long,’ he said. ‘She has my full support and the backing of the entire party.’

  The phone rang and I jumped guiltily.

  It might be Damien. Sometimes, between his fourth and fifth drinks, he came over all sentimental.

  ‘Grace?’

  ‘Marnie!’

  ‘Quick!’ she said. ‘Turn on Sky.’

  I grabbed the remote and found myself watching a segment about a man who’d taught his pet monkey to knit. It was amazing really. The monkey – whose name was Ginger – held the needles in his paws and awkwardly added a couple of stitches to a little red monkey-sized scarf. The man said that when the scarf was finished, the plan was for Ginger to knit bootees. I watched in Dublin and Marnie watched in London, both of us howling with laughter.