by Marina Ford
So, struggling to stay optimistic, I head out and ring the gallery. Orla’s assistant, Aiden, picks up, and tells me that Orla isn’t in at the moment.
“Just tell her to call me back when she’s available,” I say. “As soon as possible. It’s kind of urgent.”
He takes down the message and promises to deliver it. With this done, I go to a store, buy a pair of scissors to deal with all the tags on my newly purchased outfit, and then, while passing the cosmetics counter, decide to buy an exfoliator and a bunch of other beauty products. God knows I need them now.
I decide to go back to the hotel and calm myself by taking a bubble bath and preparing my suit before showtime. When I reach the hotel doors, I see my reflection again. “Ah!”
I make the doorman jump. “Sir! Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” I say. “Sorry. Sorry.”
I apologise to the pair of old women who were just passing out of the hotel, and then rush to the lifts. Once in the room, I feel calmer. I see the shirt Harry had prepared this morning to wear this evening. He ironed it while I watched TV, because he’s good at this and I am, er, less so. But no matter, I can still catch up. After all, I’ve given myself plenty of time for a reason—I’m a novice at this.
I unpack the suit, cut off all the tags, and lay it out on the bed. The suit itself, I realise after reading the tag, shouldn’t be ironed. One learns new things every day. This cuts my workload in half, which is another win for me. So, once the clothes are laid out, I undress and draw myself a bath. I’m a little hungry, so I order room service. I know better now than to go to a fancy restaurant hungry. I check my phone, but there’s no news from Orla yet. But it’s not even three, so there’s plenty of time still, and no need for me to panic. I put on the TV, draw on the dressing gown, and then let the waiter in with my lunch.
I wonder if all men in the history of the world went to this much trouble when preparing to propose. Something tells me that if they did, the human race would be long extinct.
I watch Horrible Histories while eating my lunch and that helps me relax. It’s going to be fine. It’s going to be great. The whole hair incident—an anecdote we can tell our friends for years afterwards.
I throw the dressing gown off and climb into the bath, now a pleasant warm temperature. I examine the different products I bought today. I’m not into beauty products, and neither is Harry, but maybe I should be. The first one is a lotion that promises radiant skin. Sign me up! Hopefully it’s so fucking radiant it blinds everyone at least until some of my hair grows back.
There’s an exfoliating gel, which I rub all over my face and which makes my skin sting. Once out of the tub, I pat myself dry and put the radiant lotion on. Then I remember the face mask I purchased, and dab blobs of it onto my face, before realising it’s four, and I still haven’t got a table booked for tonight.
While the mask dries on my face, I wash my hands and get on with ironing the shirt. I haven’t ever done this before, but I’ve seen Harry do it a million times, and he makes it look easy-peasy. I can’t find the iron, though there is an ironing board. A quick call to reception and I put on the dressing gown again, though now that I’ve had my bath the whole bathroom and room is steamed up and humid, and when the iron arrives I wait for the guy who brought it to leave so I can slip out of the robe again.
I know that it’s imperative to heat up the iron first. Harry always puts it on, and then leaves it to stand on the little holder at the side of the board while he arranges his shirt in portions. First the sleeves, then the front, then the back. Not forgetting the collar. As I said, easy-peasy.
At least, on paper it seems as though it should be, but actually, even though I let the iron stand for a bit, and even though I portion the shit out of that bloody shirt, and even though I glide through its snowy whites with the bloody iron, it seems to do absolutely nothing. Harry’s shirt, the one he somehow ironed this very morning, is hanging off the wardrobe door, mocking me. Where the hell did he get the iron from? Or, perhaps more pertinently, where the fuck did he hide it afterwards? Did he know I was going to need it? Did he try to tell me, in this subtle way, to keep away from the iron because I wouldn’t know the magic spell to make that tool of the devil do anything useful?
Frustrated with my negligible results, I start to press down onto the shirt really hard, grinding my teeth, thinking warm thoughts of the suffragette movement, which worked tirelessly to liberate womankind from this slave work, when I notice that I haven’t plugged the iron into the socket. I touch the underside of it, and it’s stone-cold.
The door to my room bursts open. My heart jumps as seven enormous men spill in, freezing mid-chatter in the entry way as they see me, naked, teeth grinding, wielding an iron, face covered in mud-green goo. They stare at me. I stare at them.
“Yes, can I help you?” I ask, holding the iron up to show that I am armed. The expression on their faces informs me, however, that they’re more scared of me than I’m of them.
“Oh, sorry, mate,” says the ringleader, a round-faced, round-eyed, pudgy fellow, with short cropped ginger hair and watery blue eyes. “We thought this was Harry’s room.”
“Wh— You mean Harry Byrne?” I lower the iron.
“Yes,” says another of the lot. This one is slightly taller, slightly less pudgy, and younger looking. “He said to come here. He said to drop this off.” He raises a heavy jar of something.
A third, dark-haired lad pipes up, “Are you Harry’s boyfriend, or is this, er, something else?” He eyes me up and down with a dubious expression on his face.
“What?”
I remember now that I am in fact naked. The thing is, I am naked a lot. I grab the dressing gown and wrap it around me.
“Who are you?” I ask. “Where is Harry?”
“We’re Harry’s cousins,” says the pudgy one, waving his thumb at himself and at the blokes that crowd behind him. “We just came to drop this off for him.” Again the jar is shown to me.
“It’s Grandma’s coddle,” he says, setting it on the table, reluctant to come farther into the room than this, and retreating to the entryway as soon as the jar is firmly placed. I don’t know what to say. This is all very unnerving.
“Where is Harry?” I ask again.
“He’s been trying to get hold of you,” says the pudgy one.
I remember my phone—it’s discharged. I curse. Harry’s cousins watch me as I hunt for a charger, stumble, nearly pull a lamp down, straighten in a very dignified way and plug my phone in. It powers on leisurely, as if unaware of its own importance. My temples are throbbing.
Ten missed calls. Six from Harry. Four from Orla.
Great, I think. The restaurant. I can’t forget about the restaurant.
I go to my contacts, my favourites, look for Harry’s number at the top. The phone flashes up, vibrates in my hand. It’s Orla. Shit.
My finger is a little shaky as I try to pick up. “Hello?”
It’s her assistant, Aiden. “Er, Joe?”
“Yes?”
“Er, small matter, nothing alarming, but, er, well, ah, this lunatic came in, claiming to be your boyfriend, and is kicking up a stink. Thought you might know something about it.”
My stomach drops.
“My— Do you mean— What does he look like?”
“Er, tall, well-dressed, he’s giving Orla the dressing down of her life? Do you know him, by any chance? He seems to think that your exhibition was meant to be today, and—and he seems to think that, since it isn’t, we’ve scammed you?”
“I’ll be right there. Sorry about that. I’ll sort it out, just give me a few minutes, okay?”
Bugger, bugger, bugger!
I hang up, slip off my dressing gown, and reach for the new suit trousers to put them on, before I realise that the room door is still wide open and that seven grown men are standing there, staring at me.
“Well?” I ask, impatiently. “Do you want to come in to have a better look?”
They all vigorously shake their heads and retreat. One of them meekly says, “Nice to meet you,” as though he can’t help his own politeness, as he leaves. I ignore them, throw on the crumpled shirt and the suit, leaving the tie and belt behind.
Then I run out of the hotel. I have a feeling that everybody is staring at me. Cars slow down. Children plaster their faces to the car windows to look at me. People stop and stare in the street. A woman turns the corner and then cries out and drops her shopping.
What’s with everybody?
The gallery is two blocks away, which is not a comfortable distance to run, especially in new clothes I swore I wasn’t going to get dirty. I find myself praying, as I haven’t done in years, that this business Aiden spoke of isn’t about Harry after all, that it’s an actual lunatic who just randomly decided to ruin my life.
But when I reach the gallery, I find that prayers, as usual, go unanswered. There is a small crowd gathered around the reception desk to the left of the main gallery room. I can see Harry, with his fists on his hips and a stern expression in his face.
Orla is saying, “But it isn’t our fault!”
“What kind of organisation is this? Do you call yourself the manager of this place or do you not?” Harry demands. “Because if you do, then you have a duty not just to your customers but also to the artists who sacrifice precious hours of hard work to—”
He spots me, and the words die in his mouth. Everybody spots me. They all look horrified. Harry most of all. First his eyes widen, then he frowns, and then, narrowing his eyes, as though barely recognizing me, he says, “Joe?”
“Harry.”
I don’t know what else to say. I can see my reflection in the enormous mirror that hangs behind the reception desk. I forgot to wipe off the facial before leaving the hotel. I look like the actual Mask from the movie The Mask.
“What happened to your hair?” Harry asks. “And your face . . . what are you wearing?”
Orla, indignant, says, “Oh good, you’ve come. Maybe you can explain to me what the meaning of all this is?”
“I—” I begin, but there’s too much and, frankly, I’m a little in awe of how much can go wrong in one day.
The door to the gallery opens, and a man walks in.
“Harry? I found a parking space . . .” he says, before pausing and realising that something isn’t as it should be. “What’s the matter?”
It’s Kieran.
Five Years Before the Big Day
I sat in our wicker chair and stared at my phone. Chloe eyed me suspiciously from above her reading glasses. The silver beehive on her head was particularly frizzy this day, little bits of wiry hair limned by the light of the lamp next to her head. She was carving a tiny wooden figurine for her goddaughter.
“Should’ve thrown that phone in the loo when I last had the chance,” she muttered.
I sighed and leaned back. Harry hadn’t called. It had been two weeks. Two weeks since we’d been on an uneven but ultimately amazing date. The following day he’d had to leave for a business trip to Berlin. That trip had ended two days ago. I knew this, because four days ago I’d submitted my final portfolio to Maya, and Malcolm had come in, irate, demanding to know when Harry was landing at Heathrow. Maya had told, and I’d been like a wasp in a jar ever since. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. Honestly, I’d looked up my symptoms online, and the things I found there were not cheering.
“I think I’ve got cancer,” I told Chloe.
“You’ll have my slipper up your bum if you don’t calm down soon,” she grumbled.
I looked at my phone again. It was definitely on and charged. I’d texted Frank to see if it was receiving. Judging by the lengthy phone call from him, in which he went into incredible detail about how he and Gabriella had had sex on her boss’s desk at her Christmas party, my phone was working just fine. My memory needed wiping, but that was another problem.
Chloe rolled her eyes. “You do realise this isn’t Victorian times, right? Your mother and his mother are not going to come to an arrangement over you two.”
My cheeks heated. “I know.”
“What are you waiting for, then? Text him already.”
Perhaps this would have been slightly less difficult for a man of nearly thirty if he’d had a less religious and restrictive upbringing and normal romantic experiences. I’d never asked a man out before—it was easy enough to wink at someone and suggest hanky-panky. How did one wink and suggest a relationship?
I looked up at Chloe and wanted to ask, but I knew what she’d say. Relationships were bogus, unnecessary, and she avoided them at all cost. Asking Frank would have been equally useless. He didn’t choose his relationships. He tumbled into them, heart first.
I went to the kitchen, took out a bottle of wine, and hid in my room. It took several swigs before I had the courage to even pick up my phone.
With a feeling of doom in my heart and tightness in my stomach, I stared at the last text message I got from Harry: Make sure you retain all the receipts. Maya will know what to do with them. H.
Not sexy, but okay. We could change that.
Dear Harry, I typed.
I remembered that I wasn’t writing a letter. Delete.
Hi there, did you know
Okay, no, awkward. Delete. Delete. Delete.
Hi there, Joe here.
Hi there, Joe here, Harry there, awkward here. Delete.
Hi, this is Joe, your
Christ, what was wrong with me?
Hi, this is Joseph. In the words of the immortal
I took a big swig of wine because there was a desperate lack of chill involved in what was meant to be first contact. Or was it? We’d done this before. This wouldn’t be our first anything, surely.
I put the phone down and then, with a jump of my heart, I realised that I’d pressed Send! Fuck!
I stared at the text message for five minutes and, as no response came, wondered if, since I had no bathtub, I could drown myself in the shower instead.
And then, just as I was googling how to live off the grid as a hermit in a forest, my phone buzzed in my hand.
Hi :)
I stared at the word and the smiley and wondered if he’d mistaken me for somebody else.
It’s Joe, I wrote.
Oh I know. Do you go by Joseph in the Words of the Immortal now or do I still get to call you Joe?
Joe for short is fine, I responded, slapping my forehead hard enough to smart five minutes later.
How are you? he wrote.
Well, at least he was still talking to me. Somehow, by some cosmic luck, I managed to text him like a normal human being hereafter, enough so, at least, to get him to invite me to a party he was hosting that weekend.
I’ll send you the link, he wrote.
Moments later he sent the link to a website. While I imagined the party was something along the lines of the parties I usually hosted (namely, “everybody back to my place, bring your own drink”), it was, in fact, a large event at a hired venue for which one had to buy a ticket. It wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for, but the tickets weren’t expensive, and the money was going to a mental health charity of which he was one of the trustees.
A sensible man might have felt discouraged by an invitation so unlike an actual date. All I could think was, I’m going to see Harry again.
In a case like this, there was only one way to impress a man, and that was to bring friends. Dutifully, then, I gathered my friends, forced them to purchase a ticket, and promised them a good time in return.
This was the first time I met Gabriella. Since Frank had spoken of her so often and in tones of exalted horniness, the image I’d had of her in my mind was that of a blonde, skimpily dressed sex-vixen. So when the two of them arrived at my flat and she was standing, diffidently, at his side, I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw.
Gabriella looked . . . normal. She was in her midtwenties, a big girl, with a pretty, round face and dimples in her shiny cheek
s when she smiled. She had small, twinkly dark eyes, a chestnut fringe to attractively frame her face, and she wore a flowery dress and black leggings. She greeted me with every sign of being overjoyed.
“Joe? Oh dear, Frank talks about you so much!” she said, beaming. She was much more the vicar’s daughter than I’d imagined.
Chloe said, “Okay, so champagne-wise, how are we standing? Anybody? Joe, you have a cement mixer for a stomach, so you will be my test subject. Give me your glass.”
“Oh shet,” Frank said, when he realised what was happening, “are you going to be opening that bottle? Everybody hide!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Last time you nearly had my eye out, woman. Give me that.”
“Typical man,” Chloe cried, pulling the bottle away from him, like it was her baby about to be confiscated by some evil military force.
“It’s not a man thing,” Frank said, irritably. “It’s you who is cack-handed!”
On the quarrel went. Even after we did, safely, open the bottle and had some preparty drinks, they continued to bicker, and so in the cab I sat next to Gabriella, in an effort to get to know her better and, frankly, get my thoughts off Harry and the fact that I would be seeing him soon.
“Where’d you study?” I asked her.
“Sheffield,” she said with a voice of ceremony, as if announcing something very special and important. “I read English literature and did some philosophy modules. I know what you’re thinking: boring, right? But actually, I was really into it. Honestly, if you’d known me then, you’d have thought I was possessed or something!” She giggled.
“What did you study?” she asked then, staring right into my eyes, as if to say, I want to know you, Joseph Kaminski. I want to know you.