Hush Hush

by Mullarkey, Gabrielle

  Conor drained his milk with indecent haste, plonked down the mug. ‘The way things are going, me and Shane will be able to up sticks soon, and let you get back to your life.’

  ‘Not so fast, Mac!’ She wagged a playful finger, using his own nickname from days gone by. ‘We still have things to discuss. Like me coming back to England, as per our original plan.’

  ‘Your original plan, Kattie. Modified by our son to mean living near each other, sure, but not under the same roof.’ He stared at her finger. She didn’t wear her wedding ring any more, but a circlet of pale flesh stood out from the light tan on her fingers.

  ‘Shane’s been a different person, with you and me back together,’ pressed Kate. ‘It certainly gives us both food for thought ‒ I mean, about where our responsibilities truly lie. Teenage boys don’t always know what’s best for them.’ She stood up first, taking him by surprise. ‘That milk has worked. I’m feeling sleepier already. If you’ve any more trouble sleeping … I know that room is cramped, with you and Shane sharing it. My door, as they say, is always open.’

  She laughed softly and twinkled in the doorway like a red-haired Celtic sprite.

  ‘Goodnight, Conor.’

  ‘See ya, Kate.’

  He couldn’t ring Angela now, could he? Not with Kate’s door standing open, a few yards away. He moved silently around the kitchen instead, checking the cupboard under the sink for hidden bottles. He found only a bottle of white spirit, and reflected, with a wry smile, that Kate was a long way off that stage.

  God, it was so easy to pick up all these old habits: the bathroom rota, harmless squabbles over Shane’s contribution to dishwashing, and the eternal vigilance of a spouse with an alcoholic partner. Only now, of course, he could be a lot more forceful and open with his disapproval. Kate’s overdose had catapulted her out of the drinking closet, and she could no longer throw tantrums at being ‘accused’ of a nasty habit. He sometimes thought he was really getting through to her, making a difference.

  Diving into the bathroom en route to bed, he turned on the cold tap, sat on the edge of the bath and pressed Angela’s number on his mobile before he changed his mind. It rang out, and he didn’t leave a voice message. He looked at his watch. With only five hours’ time difference, she should have been getting up about now on a Sunday morning. So where was she? He thought about sending a text. Then weariness and resentment came crowding in, late-night visitors taking up what little space was left between sink and bath. Sod it, he’d had enough for one night. Enough for a lifetime, if anyone asked.

  He batted aside a pink shower curtain and stomped off to bed.

  ‘Welcome to the house of fun!’ Pauline greeted Angela at the door. Angela stumbled inside, sleeping bag under one arm, party-gift wine gripped in her free hand. Pauline lived in a basement flat in a street of terraced houses, too close to Pacelli Road for comfort and too far away from Loxton station to be the five-minute stroll Pauline had claimed. ‘This way!’ sang Pauline, leading her down a dark hallway to a square of light and a babble of voices escaping from under a door. ‘We don’t stand on ceremony, Ange, so plonk yourself down on any surface except the cat. Red or white?’

  ‘Er ‒ white, please,’ smiled Angela. She was pushed through the door and into a throng, while Pauline vanished, complete with wine bottle and sleeping bag.

  The room wasn’t as brightly lit as Angela had first thought. The main light switch was off, a supplementary light issuing pinkly from a lopsided lampshade in one corner. In the grate of the small, neat fireplace, lily-shaped candles floated in cut-glass trifle bowls full of water. Leonard Cohen leaked mournfully from speakers either side of a bookcase. There were plants, framed posters of famous paintings, and a lot of wimmin. Though, as far as Angela could tell, they were really just women. They squatted on cushions, leant on projecting shelves, talked and gesticulated in the manner of all mingling partygoers. And scattered here and there among them, like exotic starfruits in a plain old fruit salad, were men. Pauline returned to her side with a glass of red wine.

  ‘I thought you said there’d be no men,’ Angela hissed, though not accusingly.

  ‘They’re not men in the real, shitty sense of the word,’ explained Pauline.

  ‘You mean gay men? Honorary women.’

  Pauline poked the nearest man with her foot. He looked up from an animated conversation on the floor, good-looking in a hollow-eyed, cadaverous way. ‘You gay, Alan?’

  He bridled. ‘Not so you’d notice.’

  Pauline buried her elbow in Angela’s ribs. ‘Alan lives upstairs and came down to complain about the crappy choice of music on the stereo. Decided to stay when he saw it was wall-to-wall totty and every man for himself. We’d better move away, we’re cramping his style.’

  Pauline found Angela a half-inch of unoccupied scatter cushion by the fireplace. ‘You’ll roast in that jacket, Ange. Aren’t you going to take it off?’

  Angela clutched her black linen jacket ‒ a size too large ‒ around the pink and black dress. Its pockets contained her essentials of keys, purse and contact lens bottle. ‘Fact is, I’ve come overdressed for the occasion, Pauline. When you said party, I automatically thought party dress, as in girly frills and too much pink. I’m afraid I’m out of practice gracing the party scene.’

  ‘Have some more wine,’ urged Pauline, sensibly comfortable in her floaty ethnic skirt and long white blouse, and topped up the unwanted red plonk that Angela had barely sipped. ‘I’ll point out a few wounded souls to you. That’s Sheila. Husband ran off with the au pair, but neglected to do her the favour of taking the kids with him. Monica nursed a live-in lover through a long illness. So when he recovered, naturally, he ran off with the next sentient woman who crossed his path.’ She frowned around the room. ‘A few others I don’t recognise. Friends of friends.’

  ‘And what about you?’ asked Angela hastily, wondering how she’d been prefaced before her arrival. ‘You said you’d give me the lowdown on your latest ‒ um ‒ male shit.’

  Pauline slumped forward, playing with the ends of her hair. ‘A bastard from yesteryear, name of Dominic. You know the press pass I got to the preview of the Monet exhibition at the National?’

  ‘Er ‒ no.’ As the new girl, Angela was bottom of the pecking order for office freebies. She took a deep slug of vinegary wine.

  ‘Well, Dom was there, giving me the come-on. Said his etchings were better than Monet’s daubings any day of the week. We had lunch, then each other. Twice at my place, once back at his the following week. I was in seventh heaven.’ She stared down at a floating candle, reminiscing.

  ‘So, did he ‒ um ‒ dump you?’ Angela risked eventually.

  ‘Of course! That’s twice I’ve let him do it to me. Why do I never see it coming? Why?’

  Because you don’t want to, sighed Angela inwardly, and carried on drinking. It gave her something to do with her hands.

  Pauline’s fawn and white cat appeared from nowhere to jump onto Angela’s lap, sinking its claws into pink silk folds. Pauline nodded approvingly. ‘You must be giving off good vibes for Casper to favour you. Are you fussy about cat hairs?’

  ‘No,’ sighed Angela truthfully. She was quite happy for Casper to rip the dress to shreds. She’d worn it consciously, to banish nostalgic associations. She hadn’t wanted to come across it in her wardrobe in six months’ time and stare at it, rub her face against it, recall it as the dress of her night of passion. It was just a Rachel cast-off. She drank more wine.

  Pauline vanished to circulate with a tray of nibbles and her sob story about Dominic.

  Someone else plonked down beside Angela with a sigh of weariness. ‘Jesus, my feet are killing me. Been on them all day. That’s shop work for you.’

  The woman rubbed plump ankles. Her shoes were high-heeled, backless and toeless, the front of each a mere strip of plum-coloured suede. They were the more obvious source of her tortured feet. ‘You one of Pauline’s walking wounded too?’ she asked Angela.

>   ‘Definitely not,’ replied Angela, affronted. ‘Anyway, Pauline does talk about other things beside the iniquity of the male species. She’s a good laugh.’

  ‘Yeah, but look around you.’ The woman’s plump arm jangled with bracelets as her hand swept the room. ‘Sooner or later, we all end up here from one of Pauline’s therapy groups.’

  Angela started. ‘Pauline’s a therapist?’

  ‘Alternative therapist, love. Get the jargon right. She runs a workshop in the adult education centre every so often, numbers permitting.’ The woman glanced at Angela curiously and with new respect. ‘So you know her from the real world, then? You must have a few more screws in place than the rest of us.’

  ‘I work with her,’ said Angela uneasily. As far as Pauline was concerned, she was one of her walking wounded, as yet unrecruited into a beans-spilling, anger-letting therapy session.

  The woman stood up, swaying uneasily in a crushed purple skirt that reached to her painfully arched ankles. ‘Well, I’m off to get more wine. Drinking to forget is the best reason I know. Trouble is, when I wake up tomorrow with a screaming hangover, I’ll still remember a certain red-haired mick with an unholy brat of a son. Nice meeting you.’

  The woman tottered off. Angela gazed after her in consternation, looking at her properly for the first time. That long red hair, coiled loosely on the back of her head, snaky tendrils escaping over her ears. Jesus, it was Kate! Somehow, she’d done a bunk from New York, materialised at Pauline’s, crept up on Angela, hoping to catch her unawares.

  Angela clutched Pauline as she passed with a tray of cheese-laden crackers. ‘Pauline, who’s the woman in purple with the red hair?’

  Pauline squinted down the room. ‘Never saw her before in my life.’

  ‘But she said she was from ‒ never mind!’ On second thoughts, better not let slip that she’d heard about the therapy group. Pauline might take it as an active recruitment signal.

  Angela spent the next half-hour trying to manoeuvre herself within conversational range of the Kate apparition. She had a drinker’s complexion, all right. In fact, she was a bit ‒ well ‒ fishmonger’s wife to be the love (officially ex-love) of Conor’s life. Her face was plump to the point of gaining a second chin, her blue eyes alive but watery under mascara-encrusted lashes. She worked the room, sharing hearty jokes with several women she obviously knew, but stayed close to Pauline’s dining table, where the sandwiches, nibbles and wine bottles beckoned.

  Angela shadowed her back to the table. The woman whirled round, thrust a plate under Angela’s chin. ‘Prawn sarnie?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Angela took one without thinking. Anyway, she had to line her stomach with something substantial after three glasses of wine.

  ‘You following me or something?’ demanded the Kate lookalike.

  ‘No! Look, the thing is,’ Angela swallowed a mayonnaise-jacketed prawn, ‘I was just wondering if you knew ‒ a bloke called Conor McGinlay.’

  The woman’s eyes snapped open wide, then narrowed. ‘Don’t tell me he’s had you as well? In both senses of the word?’

  Angela’s slack-jawed shock confirmed it. The woman shook her head delightedly. ‘Oh dearie, dearie me! Pauline’s right about one thing. Us women live but we never learn. Were you dismissed for upsetting the unholy brat? Or did you stumble on the shrine to St Kate?’

  ‘The shrine?’ Angela’s confusion conceded the upper hand. Whoever this was, she clearly wasn’t Kate. That meant she had to be the other one ‒ what was her name?

  The woman laid a plump hand on Angela’s arm, steered her into a corner. ‘I can see I’m going to have to fill in the blanks. Upstairs in the dream house, in the one-time boudoir of Conor and Kate McGinlay, he keeps everything on her dressing table exactly as it was on the day she departed. He replaces fresh flowers next to the bed every few days, just as she did. The drawers are full of her lace-lined undies that I bet not even Mrs Turner is allowed to touch. He sleeps with a lock of her hair under his pillow. I’m Rosalind Jennings, by the way.’

  ‘Angela Carbery,’ said Angela automatically. ‘But he told me they didn’t even share a bedroom after Shane!’ It leapt out bitterly before she could bite it back.

  ‘Oh, not when Shane the shithead was a baby. That kid was such a handful, you can’t blame her for not wanting another brat, even by accident. But when Shane got older, and started noticing awkward anomalies, like having a mummy and daddy who didn’t share a bedroom, they shacked up together in the master bedroom again. Now don’t ask me if they had sex!’ Rosie heaved a wayward strap back onto her shoulder. ‘I reckon they must have partaken now and then over the years, for all the problems between them. They’re only flesh and blood. All I know is, he fell in an absolute heap when she took off for New York. They might’ve had a lame marriage, but she was still his first love. For all you and I know, he tried to get her back. The man’s fixated. He’s no business starting out on other relationships he can’t follow through.’

  Through her hurt and misery, a shaft of common sense hit Angela. ‘How do you know all this about Conor and his past?’

  ‘I went out with him for four months,’ shrugged Rosie. ‘If I stayed overnight, we had to do it in the spare bedroom. I accepted that. A bloke’s allowed to have a sentimental attachment to the ex-marital boudoir. He told me the lie of the land, putting his own spin on it, of course. Everything over between him and Kate, never were compatible for the long haul, she’d had an unhappy past and he felt guilty that he couldn’t cope, blah di blah. Then I found the bedroom shrine one morning by accident when I took a wrong turn from the bathroom. I quizzed him about it and he dropped me like a hot brick. When it comes right down to it, he’ll never choose anyone over her, because he’ll never get her out of his system. She’s a virus and he welcomes the attacks ‒ the night sweats, the shivers, the pain-racked guilt.’

  She leant forward to peer at Angela, wafting wine fumes and an under-scent of chocolate over the thin, paling woman in black. ‘Look, I’m sorry if I opened my Mersey tunnel gob prematurely. You still actually involved with him?’

  ‘No,’ shuddered Angela, thinking back to Curracloe, to his kisses and whispers and lies. To his biggest lie ‒ that he’d never articulated his failed marriage in detail to a third party. A tear fell soggily onto her prawn sandwich.

  ‘You were right about Kate. He’s just gone back to her.’

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Wait here,’ Rosie told the taxi driver, and manhandled Angela out of the back seat. ‘Come on, dearie, you might as well see for yourself, in case you think I’m bluffing or bad-mouthing him.’

  Angela felt confused and ill. Her insides were protesting at all that red plonk and indiscriminate consumption of sandwiches. She wasn’t even sure how she’d ended up in the back of a taxi with Rosalind Jennings, former inamorata of Conor McGinlay. As was she, now. They were wimmin bonded by the shattering of trust too easily pledged and love too freely given. Greenhorns or fully ripened saps, take your pick.

  ‘God!’ groaned Angela, stumbling off the pavement and into the dark embrace of dense, soft shrubbery. ‘I’m not well. Where am I?’

  ‘This way!’ Rosie pinched her elbow not too gently and steered her away from the thrubbing taxi engine and the safety of its headlights. Where is she taking me? thought Angela in a mild panic. She stumbled again in the darkness as Rosie’s fingers bit deeply to keep her upright. They tottered round a corner and into the quietness of a garden, a driveway.

  ‘Behold!’ snickered Rosie and thrust Angela against cold, sharp metal. Angela clutched unsteadily at curlicued spears rising from railings, paint flaking onto her hands.

  She knew these railings by sight but not by touch; the palings around one side of 23 PaceIli Road. Above her loomed a post, topped by a board that glimmered whitely in an opalescent night sky. It said ‘For Sale’.

  ‘I told you!’ cackled Rosie. ‘He’s cleared off, upped sticks, headed for the New World with a pocketful of cash from the sale of
this place. You were right. He has gone back to her.’

  Angela grabbed the curlicues so that they hurt her palms. ‘Love many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe, as my mother says,’ she croaked. ‘Or, never trust a man with testicles, as someone else once said to me.’

  ‘Too right!’ Shivering suddenly, Rosie grabbed her arm again. ‘Come on, our carriage awaits.’

  Angela stumbled gratefully alongside her. They were heading back to Pauline’s, back to her sleeping bag and the communion of wronged wimmin. She could get her exploding head down, use that big, soft cat as a pillow.

  She half-fell into the taxi’s back seat. The taxi driver’s face swam into her line of vision, distended by her fuddled senses into something half-animal and half-human, like a creature from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

  ‘Who?’ he asked, turning into Robert. Robert had resented ‘arty-farty stuff’. Angela’s ability to recognise a few famous paintings had infuriated him with its elitism, even though she’d been introduced to most of them by biscuit tin lids.

  ‘Where to?’ repeated the taxi driver, turning to Rosie for enlightenment. ‘And wherever it is, make it fast before your friend here ruins my upholstery.’

  Angela shut her eyes and dozed, lulled by the taxi’s smooth progress through late-night streets. When Rosie’s sharp fingers began to snap at her again, she groaned in protest. ‘Don’t be like this, dearie! I may be a big girl but I didn’t get this way by heaving coal sacks around. Gimme some co-operation here.’

  Angela tried to oblige. The sooner she got out of the taxi, the sooner she’d be sheathed in her sleeping bag. She clambered out, hugging the jacket around her ridiculous pink puffball dress. The taxi sped away. She’d have to settle up with Rosie later.

  ‘Well, here we are.’ Rosie inserted a key, pushed open a door. ‘Later than I planned, thanks to the detour.’

  It was only inside that Angela made a discovery. She wasn’t back at Pauline’s. She was in a small, windowless kitchen heaped with dirty crockery. Flowers sprang from a vase on a small kitchen table. They were long-dead, decomposing headily in the airless room, their musty petals folded over drooping heads like rotting mantillas. Angela shivered and sank into a chair.