Lifesaving for Beginners

by Ciara Geraghty

  Rob is standing at the door of the café, jangling the keys to the van. Faith’s violin case is tucked under his arm. He says, ‘Come on, if you’re coming.’

  Faith nods and they walk outside. I run out of the door and catch Rob before he gets back into the van, and tell him what the speed limit is on the A23, which is the main road to London. I Googled it.

  He says, ‘Don’t worry, Milo. I won’t drive fast. Faith won’t let me, will you?’ He tugs her hair and she punches his arm, which means they’re friends again. Just like me and Damo.

  I ring Ed.

  ‘Whatcha doin’?’

  ‘Whatcha’ doesn’t sound as needy.

  ‘I’m working.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Ed waits for me to say something else.

  ‘Whatcha doin’ after work?’

  ‘I have a date. With Sophie.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘A letter came for you this morning. To our house.’

  ‘Really?’ Sometimes the secretarial college I went to a million years ago sends letters to my parents’ address. Trying to sell me refresher courses and whatnot. Upselling, Minnie calls it. It’s probably from them.

  ‘You working tomorrow?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Wanna do something?’

  ‘Wanna’ is good too. People feel they can say ‘no’ if you use the word ‘wanna’ rather than ‘Do you want to . . . ’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I’ll pick you up,’ and I hang up before he remembers something he needs to do tomorrow instead of coming out with me.

  I ring Minnie.

  ‘Whatcha doin’?’ Whatcha. Casual. Carefree.

  ‘It’s Monday morning. I’m working.’

  ‘It’s Monday?’

  Minnie doesn’t answer. I can hear her furious fingers thumping a keyboard.

  ‘I’m just ringing to make absolutely certain that you’re not planning on organising a surprise birthday party for me.’

  ‘It’s only November.’

  ‘Yes, but if you were organising a surprise party for January, you’d probably start planning in November, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You sure? Because I would hate that. I would really hate that.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So you’re not planning anything.’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Anything else I can help you with?’ Her tone is not as sincere as it could be.

  ‘You busy?’

  She sighs. If there were papers on her desk, there’s a good chance they’re on the floor now.

  Minnie is an accountant. I can’t believe she ended up being an accountant. She could have done any course she wanted. She got eight As in her Leaving Certificate. In those days, the As and Bs weren’t divided up like they are now. But I’d say that if they re-examined her papers, the As would have been A1s. I’m positive. She did her best to mask her smarts, and because she was so good-looking and wild, she mostly got away with it. She joined a small, strictly non-profit theatre troupe and toured with them for a while. It drove her old pair mental, which I think might have been the point. She sometimes acted, sometimes directed, all the while experimenting with the kind of meds you can’t get over the counter, drinking complicated Martinis and judging Battle of the Band competitions up and down the country. I’m not sure how she got that gig. She may have slept with Fiachna Ó Braonáin at one time or other.

  Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that she spent six months doing that. And then she met Maurice, who happened to be an accountant. Just met him in a random sort of a way. In a café, I think. Or a Spar. Somewhere like that. They got to talking, I suppose, and that was it. Accountancy was like an infection that Maurice passed to Minnie. Like German measles. Soon she was covered in it and before you could say tax fecking return, she had herself enrolled in an accountancy course at Trinity College for the following September. It happened so quickly. There was nothing I could do.

  Minnie says some people are born to be accountants. I swear to God, she said that once, and, even though the two of us were most of the way down a bottle of wine, I think she meant every word. She said that if she hadn’t met Maurice and discovered her love of accountancy (and accountants, let’s face it: Maurice is an accountant and she’s cracked about him), then she might have ended up a junkie. Or – knowing her – an A-list actor. She shuddered when she said that, as if she was dead and a junkie, or an A-list actor, was jumping on her grave in heavy boots.

  She couldn’t look at me the morning after she told me that she was cracked about Maurice and had signed up for an accountancy course. Too ashamed, I suppose. We were on holiday together at the time. I told her there were worse things to be but when she asked me to be specific, it took me a while.

  Back then, I was writing the second draft of the first Declan Darker novel and had three publishers interested. That was Minnie’s fault. Read and destroy was the deal. Read the manuscript, destroy the evidence in the bottom of an industrial bin at the industrial estate where her father’s business was. She swore. I should have known better. After she’d read the first draft, she put the whole lot into a brown envelope and used up pretty much an entire week’s cigarette money posting it to Hodder & Stoughton in London. She said Dublin wasn’t big enough for Declan Darker when I asked her why she didn’t send it to an Irish publisher. She also told me that I owed her five pounds and twenty-two pence.

  I kept writing and pretended – to my father and sometimes to my mother, whenever she enquired – that I was attending the private secretarial course that my father had paid a fortune for and which was about all I was fit for, once the Leaving Cert. results came out.

  The publishers found my insistence on a male pseudonym amusing. I know that, because Jeremy said, ‘How amusing.’

  At first, it was just about Mum finding out. Crime fiction was up there with breaking and entering, as far as she was concerned. It was most certainly not an art. It wasn’t even a craft. It was like painting by numbers. She said that once. In a television interview.

  So I told Dad that I’d graduated from my secretarial course with first-class honours – that never happened – and was now gainfully employed as a trainee technical writer for a software company based in Cork. This is a handy job for someone who needs a cover. In fact, be wary of the man you meet on the shady side of a bar on a Thursday night who confesses to being a technical writer. Dodgy as all hell.

  Cork was where I said I was whenever I needed to be somewhere like, for example, London, meeting Brona, or what have you.

  Of course, I always meant to tell them. Someday. Confess, Minnie calls it. But things got out of hand. It really started when Dirty Little Secret featured on Oprah’s Book Club. One word from Oprah (the word happened to be ‘compelling’) and the book started selling like Nicorette patches on New Year’s Day. Then there was the bidding war for the third book. I think there were five publishing houses involved, in the end. Minnie fielded the offers, from a payphone outside the Raheny public library. Then, the media campaign to find out who Killian Kobain was. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff the papers made up about the man. Outrageous. Then Scorsese made the first Declan Darker film and it won a truckload of Oscars and Golden Globes that year. After that, everybody wanted a piece of Killian Kobain. The problem was, he didn’t exist. Brona and Jeremy begged me to ‘come out’, as it were. But by then, it was too late. And in a way it was kind of nice. Being someone else. Someone other than me.

  Minnie finally agrees to meet me for lunch. It’s the only way she can get me off the phone.

  Harry’s Bar on Dawson Street is often full to the brim of snazzy-looking people. Important-looking people. Glamorous-looking people. But when Minnie Driver (the accountant, not the actress) rocks up, obscurity gets a dustsheet and drapes it over everyone else in the room. Minnie is just one of those people. It’s not enough to say she lights up a room. It would be more apt
to announce that she detonates it. She walks in and everybody else – men, women, children, even really small babies – just cash in their chips. Fold like deck chairs after a long, hot summer. Throw in their towels. Raise their hands. Admit defeat. Walk away. Minnie does that to people. She doesn’t mean to. And she’ll deny it if challenged. But that’s what she does all the same. It could be her thinness (we called her Skinny Minnie in school), or her height (which seems greater because of her thinness), or her blonde hair (which is actually, genuinely, blonde and not dyed off her head like that of most women her age). It could be her ice-blue eyes that look enormous in her tiny, heart-shaped face. Or the remarkable clothes she wears, which you will never find in any shop, no matter how much you look. They look like clothes that have been designed especially for her.

  But, to be honest, I don’t think it’s anything to do with the way Minnie looks. Loads of women are gorgeous, but who cares? No, it could be more to do with the way Minnie presents herself in a room. In the world! As if it belongs to her. As if she owns it. There is a certainty about Minnie. A sureness of step. An aura that even sceptical people can see. She looks like one of those people who are familiar with the customs of Benin, speak conversational Russian and can fillet a fish in under a minute. In truth, she couldn’t point to Benin on a map of the world, has no Russian, conversational or otherwise, and can’t walk down the pier in Howth, what with the fishy-guts smell.

  People either love her or hate her. Immediately. They decide the minute they meet her. They can’t help it.

  My first memory of Minnie is my sixth birthday. Mrs Higginbotham had made bucketfuls of her cold shivery jelly, and I was in the back garden, looking for a big bush to scrape the jelly into. Through the thick wall of hedge separating our gardens, I heard Minnie and one of her five sisters.

  Minnie: No, she doesn’t exist. It’s Mam and Dad. Or just Mam, I’d say.

  One-of-five-sisters: Why would Mam want my teeth?

  Minnie: She doesn’t, you big eejit. She throws them away. In the bin. Or out of the window, probably.

  One-of-five-sisters: You’re telling fibs. I’m telling on you.

  Minnie: If Mam hears about this, she won’t put any more money under your pillow and . . . let me have a look . . . open your gob, for God’s sake . . . yeah, you’ve got about two pounds’ worth still in there. I’d wait if I were you. Before you start bleating.

  There is the sound of crying during which Minnie says not a word. Then:

  One-of-five-sisters (in teary, jerky voice): Wha . . . wha . . . what abou . . . about S-S-S-Santa?

  A pause. A long, long pause. I begin to wonder if Minnie has left the garden. Eventually:

  Minnie (sighing): He’s true.

  One-of-five-sisters: Are you sure?

  Minnie: I said so, didn’t I?

  To be honest, I doubt Minnie ever believed in Santa.

  She bangs her stopwatch thingy on the table between us. It’s like one of those contraptions professional chess players use. She presses a button and the thing starts ticking, as loud as a bomb. ‘I have forty-two minutes so make it matter,’ she says, peeling her suit jacket off and hanging it on the back of her chair. She sits down and looks at me, drumming her fingers on the table.

  Ignoring the crowd, who will leave this place with cricks in their necks, trying to get a better view of her, she says, ‘Well?’

  I say, ‘Well what?’ as if I haven’t a clue what she’s on about.

  ‘Why did you want to see me?’

  ‘Why do I need a specific reason to meet you for lunch? I never did before.’

  ‘You never had time to meet for lunch before. You were busy before. Remember? Writing books? Doing strange things with Thomas? And Ed? Any of this ringing a bell?’

  She has a point.

  ‘Well, yes, maybe I do have a little more time on my hands these days. That could be true. But it still doesn’t mean I have to have something to discuss before I’m allowed to meet my best friend for lunch.’

  ‘Just because I’m your only friend does not mean I’m your best friend.’

  ‘You are not my only friend.’

  ‘Name two other friends.’

  I open my mouth.

  ‘And you can’t say Ed. Or Brona.’

  I shut my mouth.

  I say, ‘I got another one of those calls.’

  ‘A dropped call?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you reported them?’

  ‘No. It’s not against the law to ring someone and not say anything, is it?’

  ‘It’s harassment. It could be a stalker.’

  ‘Why would someone be stalking me?’

  ‘Not you, dimwit.’ Minnie leans forward and whispers, ‘Killian Kobain. Maybe somebody’s found out.’

  I look round. Nobody is paying any attention to me although some customers are still gazing at Minnie.

  I shake my head. ‘No. I’ve been so careful. And I checked with Brona. There’ve been the usual enquiries from journalists but nothing out of the ordinary.’

  Minnie says, ‘I can’t believe you’ve managed to keep it a secret for this long.’

  I pick up my napkin. Unfold it. Fold it again. Unfold it.

  ‘Spit it out, Kat.’

  I look at her. ‘You’ve never said anything to Maurice, have you?’ I know I shouldn’t ask. It’s Minnie. I can trust Minnie. But she’s been part of a couple for years now. Some couples tell each other everything. Don’t they?

  Minnie says, ‘I’m not even going to answer that. And I’m going to have to insist that you pay for lunch.’

  ‘I’m sorry . . . the calls . . . they’ve left me a bit . . . paranoid, I suppose.’

  ‘You’ve always been paranoid.’

  ‘I mean more paranoid than usual.’

  ‘Call the cop-shop.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Call the service provider. Change your number. Change your provider.’

  ‘No.’ I never, ever communicate with call centres. That’s non-negotiable. It’s the way they play mind games with you, getting you to press this button, then that button, then hash, then star, then another button until you’re so confused, you can’t even remember why you rang in the first place. Then, when a human finally speaks to you and you go ahead and tell your sad story, they say that, in fact, the person you need to tell your sad story to is in such-and-such a department and they put you on hold for half an hour and make you listen to ‘Greensleeves’ over and over – or, worse, Lyric FM – and then you speak to someone in such-and-such a department who doesn’t even know your name, never mind the gist of your sad story so you have to start all over again.

  ‘Ring the number back. After they hang up.’

  ‘I can’t. It’s a withheld number.’

  ‘Then don’t bother answering the phone.’

  ‘But it could be Ed. He sometimes rings from Sophie’s landline if he wants a lift and he’s run out of credit. Her number is withheld.’

  Minnie throws her hands up in the air. She says, ‘That’s all I’ve got.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You have thirty-four minutes left.’

  The waitress arrives. I’m not hungry. Not that I’m complaining. I’ve been subsisting mostly on coffee and cigarettes and red wine and the weight is tumbling off me. This must be the silver lining. In fact, had I known, I would have broken up with Thomas ages ago. OK, yes, technically, he was the one who broke up with me.

  Minnie takes ages to decide. She and Maurice became foodies during the boom. A lot of people did. They know about things like celeriac and truffles. The old Minnie would have beaten any talk of celeriac and truffles out of anyone, especially an accountant like Maurice. And I mean actually physically beaten it out of him. With the branch of a tree.

  I haven’t looked at the menu yet, so I just ask the waitress what today’s special is and she tells me, but I can’t hear her because Minnie is talking at the top of her voice about some hostile takeover or other she�
��s working on, and the waitress has the low voice of someone who has been told to SHUT UP all her life. So I nod and return the menu to her and take a huge slug of wine out of the carafe I’ve ordered and watch Minnie sip her sparkling water, and I wish that Minnie didn’t have to go back to the office and work on a boring bloody acquisition because then the two of us could go to Lincoln’s and get properly pissed, like we used to. Back when we laughed so hard, sometimes a tiny little drop of piddle would slip out and wet my knickers.

  She says, ‘Twenty-two minutes left.’

  I say, ‘Fuck.’

  She says, ‘What?’ She’s trying her best to sound impatient but I hear a sliver of concern in her voice.

  ‘Everything. It’s . . . everything. Everything is just so . . . flat.’

  ‘You’re just bored.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be. I’ve loads to do.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re not doing any of it. Just start doing the stuff that you’re supposed to be doing and then you won’t be bored and everything won’t seem so flat and I might get this acquisition sorted out and even manage to dodge the latest redundancy cull.’

  ‘They’d never make you redundant. They wouldn’t dare.’

  That’s when I see the blackboard where the specials are written and realise that today’s special is beef and Guinness stew and that if there’s one thing I hate it’s beef and Guinness stew; and that’s when the waitress whooshes out of the swingy door from the kitchen holding two plates, one of which is overflowing with beef and Guinness stew. I pick up my glass of wine. I don’t drain it but I nearly do.

  Minnie says, ‘You could go to your house in Italy. Have sex with your gardener, whatshisface? Pedro? Or Antonio? He’s a grand-looking fella. Strong as an ox. He’d keep you going, take your mind off things.’

  ‘It’s Stefano. And I can’t just rock up and have sex with him. What if it didn’t work out? Where would the garden be then? Those lemon trees aren’t going to prune themselves.’

  Minnie spears a piece of asparagus with the prongs of her fork, even before the waitress has guided the plate to the table. She’s like that, Minnie. Impatient. I look at the timer. I’ve twelve minutes left. With no plans for the afternoon. And beef and Guinness stew overflowing on a plate in front of me. It’s enough to make anyone have a nervous breakdown. God knows, I’ve time for one.