Then finally, the utter humiliation of a removal van pulling up outside their home – her home – and having to load up every single thing she and Andrew had ever owned. In full view of the neighbours, some of whom where kind enough to come over and sympathize, but most of whom just kept a polite distance. Like repossession was something contagious.
But one kind neighbour, an elderly widow who lived alone, came striding up the path to hug her and say goodbye.
‘Never you mind, love,’ she’d told Lucy. ‘You and Andrew still have each other. And that’s what really matters, isn’t it? Sure, this is only bricks and mortar at the end of the day!’
Lucy had smiled and hugged her fondly back. Kind-hearted old Mrs Walsh. Bless her, she only meant well.
Even if she didn’t know the half of it.
*
Still sleep wouldn’t come and then thirst got the better of Lucy. Horrible, rasping thirst, like her mouth was lined with carpet underlay. Suddenly she became aware of a dull throbbing at her temples and realized the hangover to end all hangovers had already set in.
Oh God, she wondered, had the whole evening been just some kind of a rotten hallucination? She hauled herself out of bed and checked the time on the alarm clock beside her bed. Early-ish. Well, for her, anyway. Just coming up to eleven. She padded across to the minibar and helped herself to the largest, coldest bottle of water she could find. Then she rooted out two paracetamol from the bottom of her handbag, gulped them back and lay back down on the bed, while she waited on them to work their magic.
Bits of the evening started to float back to her, in horrible, fragmented shards. She remembered sitting up on a barstool downstairs and hammering loudly – probably that bit too loudly for a posh place like this – for Tommy the barman to keep the champers coming. Fuck it, she figured. If she couldn’t get a few drinks into her at a time like this, then when could she?
Something else came back to her too. There’d been a guy with her, chunky, thick-set, late thirties. Dave something or other. They’d fallen into one of those easy, drunken chats about the misery of their respective love lives and what exactly had brought them both to this pass.
And although Lucy mightn’t have exactly been anyone’s idea of an agony aunt, she thought she’d done a pretty good job of convincing this Dave bloke that his situation wasn’t quite as bleak as hers. He had told her all about his wife and all the problems she’d been having trying to get pregnant. All the expensive fertility clinics they’d been going to, not to mention the countless cocktails of hormones and steroids they’d been pumping through her body. The gruelling rounds of treatment and the horrible effect they’d had on his wife, both emotional as well as physical.
With a jolt, yet another memory shattered through her fuzzy, unfocused mind. His wife striding into the bar and in one single, sharp glance taking in herself and Dave cosily drinking together, as they had been all night. Jo, was that her name? A slim, petite woman in a Reiss suit and neat, dark, bobbed hair that Lucy could tell at first glance was at the winding down stage of a three-week blow dry. Scarily white skin, absolutely no make-up at all, arms folded, coldly furious.
She could remember this Jo hissing at Dave to get out of there, something about a divorce lawyer who was standing waiting on both of them.
Oh Jesus, Lucy thought with a sudden jolt back into reality. Had the next five minutes really happened? Had she really been cheeky and invasive enough to tell Jo all about her sister-in-law who’d been through IVF too?
Lucy was sweating now, palpitating to think back on what else she might have said to that poor woman. She couldn’t remember exactly, but it must have been bad, because no sooner had she opened her big mouth than Dave had rightly abandoned her. And would you blame the guy? She must have made a holy mortifying show of herself! For God’s sake, why did she have to go and interfere in the first place? Even if all she’d been trying to do was cheer Jo up a bit.
Still more memories started to flood back. An American couple, the Fergusons, they might have been called, joining her after Dave disappeared. Sixty-somethings, Jayne and Larry. Great fun, so much so that Lucy remembered thumping the bar and demanding to know why the hell they felt the need to bother getting divorced in the first place. ‘Look at the two of you, you get on like a house on fire!’ she’d drunkenly told them.
Then someone – and she’d a horrible feeling it might have been her – decided it would be a great idea to start a sing-song. ‘Because you both need to start learning a few Irish come-all-yas while you’re here!’ she’d bossily told Jayne and Larry, who seemed all on for it. At least, at first.
There was definitely singing but the evening started to blur a bit from then on in. ‘If you’re Irish, come into the parlour!’ Lucy remembered trying to teach them. And then – oh dear God no – had she really got up in her too-high heels and started trying to teach the pair of them a few steps of Riverdance?
She remembered falling. Then laying face down sprawled out on the floor, with a crowd gathered around her. Concerned voices.
‘Who’s she with?’
‘Someone get Chloe.’
‘Someone get the husband, whoever the poor eejit is.’
Then Jayne’s worried voice in her ear.
‘Honey, I think you’ve had enough for one night. Don’t you think you’d feel a whole lot better if you came outside for some nice fresh air?’
Then Tommy, that lovely barman, physically lifting her back onto her feet, half carrying her out to the garden and then a woman’s voice. Hers. Yelling all sorts of unprintable obscenities, just because he wouldn’t go back to get her another drink. Followed by several kindly, well-intentioned voices saying that maybe she’d feel so much better after a little lie down. Tommy trying to steer her back inside and towards the lift.
Then seeing Chloe come over to her and insist on escorting her all the way to her room, ‘just so you can rest up a bit. It’s been a long day for you.’ Tactfully brushing over the fact that Lucy had just made a roaring disgrace of herself.
And then the worst memory of all. The one she’d gladly have herself lobotomized just to suppress, were it only possible.
The lift door gracefully gliding shut, just in time for her to see Andrew looking back at her, having taken in the whole scene. And the pained expression on that worried, handsome face was somehow worse than anything.
Chapter Twenty
At about the same time as Lucy suffered out her hangover, Kirk realized that absolutely zilch was working for him. He thought his usual nighttime transcendental meditation session might help, but no, nothing doing. Neither did listening to his beloved ‘Homage to Mother Earth’ CD. Not even when he tried to realign his chakras using rose quartz – which he’d always found so effective when it came to healing. And even the smell of incense that he’d been burning in his hotel room wasn’t having its usual effect.
There were two things on this mortal plane that Kirk didn’t believe in: the first was lies and second was deceit. And yet, with Dawn, his beloved girl, his best friend, he’d practised both. And now, trapped in this ridiculously extravagant hotel room, he had nothing to do for the whole night ahead but to dwell on it. Learn to live with it, if that were even remotely possible.
But try as he might, he couldn’t. Kirk just wasn’t hardwired like that, none of his family were. They were freethinking and free loving and took life just as they found it. And after all, the last thing Kirk had ever gone looking for was love. Not after Dawn came along. His princess, his goddess; he’d been with countless other women before he met her, but never felt for any of the others what he’d felt for her and surely never would.
He could still remember the look on Dawn’s worried, pale little face, when she’d first started to suspect all wasn’t well. But I’m here, he’d told her at the time, constantly trying to reassure her. There never was any other woman for me and there never will be, he said. And I’m never going to leave. Why would I? Why would anyone who had a cherished s
oul like you in their life, ever want to walk away from that? How insane would you have to be?
Those had been his exact words.
The thing was, Kirk meant it as sincerely then as he did now. He wasn’t going anywhere and it cut him to the quick to think that Dawn had dragged him to this awful place, this hotel he’d hated and felt so uncomfortable in from the word go, just so she could ‘perform a Kirk-ectomy on her life’, as his Dad, Dessie had so succinctly put it.
Times like this, Kirk envied his Dad and Gaia, his stepmother. They’d never had to deal with anything like this. Kirk had lost count of the number of lovers his father had taken over the years and Gaia seemed to have absolutely no problem with a single one of them.
Ditto when Gaia herself had fallen in love, and subsequently had a seven-month-long fling with a bloke who installed water features at her local garden centre. And what had Dessie done when she first confessed all to him? Laughed and wished her well and immediately invited Mr Water Features round to hang out and smoke some weed. In Kirk’s world, this was how civilized, evolved beings behaved.
Had either of them reacted with hate and negativity? Had they insisted on dragging one another to a ridiculous divorce hotel like this? The kind of place that ordinarily, Kirk and his friends at the Yoga Rooms would have shaken their heads at and wondered how bitter and unloving a soul you’d have to be to cross the threshold of in the first place? Of course not. Dessie and Gaia had worked it out between them so everyone was happy, everyone was sexually fulfilled in every way and no one was left out. That was what you did when you had a life partner. You made it work, no matter what.
Which was why Kirk was genuinely at a complete loss right now. He’d thought he and Dawn were able to read each other like pages from a book. He thought she’d understand, as he himself would have, if the shoe had been on the other foot. He thought she knew exactly what she was signing up for, that far distant day when they’d had their commitment ceremony in Mount Druid at Midsummer, what seemed like another lifetime ago now.
And yet there it was, the telltale guilt, that no matter how hard he tried, Kirk just somehow couldn’t seem to shift. Fact was, for all his deep love for Dawn, he’d betrayed her. He’d duped her and under the pathetically thin veneer of ‘anything goes’, and then even had the barefaced cheek to try to defend the indefensible. And now someone like him, who’d lived his whole life battling lies and deceit, had to somehow try to come to terms with it.
He’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor, but at that uncomfortable thought, suddenly got up and started to pace round a bit. Anything to try and shift the negative ions rattling through him. Yet he couldn’t, try as he might.
So his frustration quickly shifted to this ridiculous hotel room instead. It was irritating him now and Kirk was rarely irritated, unless you were talking about the plight of the Tibetan people or something along those lines. Seriously though, he thought. All the unnecessary waste and expense that a hotel like this incurred, not to mention the toll it took on the environment? And still they never even bothered to have the place feng-shuied?
In fact, Kirk thought, maybe a bit of feng-shui might just help. Maybe he’d have some outside chance of easing his mind if he just rearranged the furniture a bit. So with considerable effort, he managed to haul the heavy oak bed over to the southwest corner (so it ended up exactly blocking the bathroom door, as it happened), and tried that out.
But no. Sleep still wouldn’t come. And now all Kirk could do was lie there and listen to the air conditioning thingy hum away in the background. He’d been trying to switch the thing off ever since he arrived, and couldn’t. Air conditioning! Didn’t Ferndale Hotels realize the strain that even one air-conditioner put on the earth’s resources?
That was when he sat bolt upright on the bed, with its ludicrously soft mattress, that a whole family of geese had probably sacrificed feathers for. He had a wedge of grass here with him somewhere, he was sure of it. Dessie had given it to him a while back, ‘to help ease the pain of the journey you and Dawn have to face’. It was stuffed in the pocket of the backpack that went everywhere with him. Three ounces of his Dad’s best homegrown. Who could ask for more?
Just what he needed right now. Perfect antidote to all the negativity hovering in the ethos round here. Nothing else would tune out Dawn’s voice earlier, harsh and bitter, her accusations, tears, anger and the unavoidable fact that he was the root cause of it.
In one fluid move, Kirk was out of bed and rummaging round the bottom of his bag.
Two minutes later, he’d blazed up and suddenly started to feel a whole lot better for it.
Chapter Twenty-One
At about the same time, Andrew had finished up his cigar and was just about to leave the garden and head back inside, when a tiny, muffled noise suddenly distracted him. Strange, he thought. He could almost have sworn it sounded like sobbing. A woman’s voice too. The light from the hotel bar spilled out onto the garden as he got up and strolled deeper into the garden.
Turned out he’d been right. Not far from where he’d been sitting all this time, he suddenly saw a young girl, mid-twenties at most and dressed head to toe in white, curled up on a bench, twisting a Kleenex nervously round and round her finger.
She jumped when she sensed someone approaching and immediately sat up straight.
‘I’m so sorry if I startled you,’ Andrew said politely, ‘but I just wondered … are you alright?’
‘Fine, just fine,’ she said in a tiny, strangulated little voice, but one look at the girl told you she was far from it.
A waif, Andrew thought, looking down at her and almost feeling fatherly and protective towards her. Tiny and slim with long, straggly red hair and big soulful eyes that somehow only made her face look even smaller still. Someone who worked here maybe? Or a fellow guest? Surely not. She looked far too young, not only to have got married in the first place, but for that marriage to have subsequently ground to a halt.
‘Andrew Lowe,’ he said, reaching down to shake her hand. ‘I don’t think we were introduced earlier.’
‘I’m Dawn,’ she sniffed, dabbing at her nose with the Kleenex.
‘May I sit down for a moment?’ He didn’t like to intrude, but it just didn’t seem right to turn his heel on her and walk away. This slip of a thing seemed upset and maybe talking would help a little.
‘Sure,’ she said, sliding over on the bench to make room for him. He stubbed out the dregs of his cigar and joined her.
A silence fell as she shifted uncomfortably beside him.
‘And, may I ask,’ Andrew eventually said, ‘if you’re staying here too?’
‘Unfortunately, yes.’
‘Have to say,’ he added, ‘I never thought I’d end up here.’
‘Well, that certainly makes two of us,’ Dawn replied, with a weak little smile.
‘And might I have met your husband earlier?’
‘I’m not sure. Kirk is – well, he’s tall and has long hair down well past his shoulders. White shirt and jeans? You’d know him if you saw him.’
Bingo, Andrew thought. Yes, he’d walked past someone who fitted that description on one of the upstairs corridors. Rather a strange looking individual, he’d thought. The sort of man just two steps away from shaving his head, and banging on a tambourine on Grafton Street.
‘I needn’t ask you who you’re here with,’ Dawn said. ‘You were married to Lucy Belter, the model, weren’t you?’
‘Technically, I’m still married to her,’ Andrew gently corrected her. ‘And it’s Belton, actually.’
‘Sorry. It’s just the papers always –’
‘Never believe a word you read in the papers, my dear,’ Andrew smiled. ‘They have a habit of stereotyping, particularly when it comes to women like my wife, sadly.’
Another silence, but somehow, now that they’d broken the ice a bit, it was that bit less tense and awkward now.
‘Of course it’s absolutely none of my business,’ he ventured
tentatively, ‘but you seemed a little upset just now. May I ask if everything’s alright?’
Dawn looked across at him, with big watery eyes.
‘What do you think? I’m twenty-five years old and I’m sitting in the garden of a posh hotel about to wind up the last three years of my life. Other girls my age are out on the town tonight, enjoying themselves, having a laugh, young, free and without a care in the world. And look where I ended up. No, everything is not okay. Everything is so far from okay, I can’t tell you.’
‘And nor does it get any easier with age, let me tell you,’ he said wryly. ‘Just try being at my hour of life and about to be divorced for the second time.’
‘Can I ask you something?’ Dawn said, looking directly at him now.
‘Fire away.’
‘Well … how did you know Lucy was the one? I mean, the one for you? If it’s not too personal, that is.’
‘I’ve a feeling I’ll be asked questions a lot more personal than that over the course of the next few days, my dear.’
‘So how did you know for certain?’
Andrew sat back, remembering. And it was funny, but in a weird way, given everything he’d been so overloaded with of late, it was almost soothing to think back to happier times.
‘It was – close to four years ago,’ he smiled. ‘The bank I work for was sponsoring an awards do. In the Four Seasons hotel,’ he added. ‘Although it’s hard to imagine that we’d shell out for anything so lavish in the present economic climate.’
‘And she was there?’
‘Presenting an award. She bounced out onto the stage and in a matter of moments, had the whole room guffawing with laughter. It had been quite a formal night up until then and Lucy just broke the ice completely.’
‘Thank Christ I get this over with now,’ was what she’d actually said into the microphone. ‘I’ve been hanging round backstage for the last two hours waiting to do this and my shoes are only killing me. Besides, the quicker the awards bit of the night is over with, the quicker the dancing starts!’
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