The Cinderella Reflex

by Buchanan, Johanna

  She sighed, trying to figure out when Richard had become a problem. She had met him five years before, when he’d interviewed her for the job in Atlantic I FM, which he was just setting up at the time. He was ten years older than her, and definitely, she had thought at the time, not her type. She had been seeing someone else back then, Derek, a nice looking dentist who had wanted to settle down with her. And yet, within weeks, she and Richard had become lovers. She had never really worked out how it had happened. He was certainly wealthy and generous but then so was Derek. But Richard had listened attentively when Helene talked about her hopes and her dreams, and in hindsight, if she was honest with herself, she had thought he might be a conduit to making those hopes and dreams come true for her. Richard had a knack of making life seem easy and for Helene, who was used to fighting tooth and nail for everything, it was a powerful attraction.

  She rose effortlessly from her original position as administration clerk to her current job as an executive editor. But as her salary and status had increased so had her responsibility and stress levels and now her life didn’t begin to resemble what it had been like at the beginning. Back then, work had seemed like one long, glorious holiday. Richard invited her to attend glamorous work dinners and product launch parties and Helene had been enthralled by it all – by the feigned but fawning adoration of the glamorous PR people who pressed goody bags of beauty and fashion items on her and invited her on weekends to promote whatever product they were plugging at the time. And always there was Richard in the background, flattering her, telling her she was fantastic, telling her that one day she would have her own show. Of course, that hadn’t worked out either. She was too busy working on other people’s shows to get a moment to herself, never mind figuring out how she could get herself on-air.

  Back then everything had seemed so easy. Richard told his wife he was working late so they could get together, and because Helene lived alone and didn’t have the sort of friends who called unannounced, they had both the time and the opportunity to be together. Of course, she had known he was married from the beginning. She had noticed the photograph on his desk at their very first meeting, the day he’d interviewed her for the job. There was Richard, looking younger and more hopeful somehow than he did today, with his arm draped around a dark-haired voluptuous beauty – who, Helene later learned, was his wife, Louisa – and his eyes resting fondly on the two gawky teenagers who turned out to be his children.

  Why hadn’t she paid more attention to them, she asked herself ruefully now, stirring a spoon aimlessly around her coffee. Because Richard’s offspring had turned out to be the most demanding teenagers in the history of adolescence. A collage of memories flooded through Helene’s mind.

  There had been the driving lessons Richard had to personally provide himself, because “Anna wants her daddy to teach her”, even though it must have taken a hundred lessons before his idiot daughter was finally able to put away her L plate. There were the teenage discos Anna and David had to be escorted to and collected from every Saturday night for what seemed like years. There had even been David’s “little drug problem” which had only involved the youngster smoking a bit of hash but which had been blown into a full-scale crisis by Louisa and ended up with the entire family strong-armed into co-dependency counselling. Oh, and what about the hysterics when Anna didn’t get enough points in her exams to study psychology? And the drama when David was caught driving over the limit?

  On and on it had gone – was still going on, actually – taking up Richard’s valuable time, time he was supposed to be spending with her, the only time they had together until the time was finally right for him to leave Louisa. So far Helene’s goal of becoming the new Mrs Armstrong – which Richard had agreed was a logical, if long-range one – had been continuously postponed because the time never seemed right for Richard to leave the ‘children’.

  The fact that the children were now of an age when most people were out busy building their own lives seemed to be lost on Richard, who was as endlessly besotted with Anna and David as ever. What surprised Helene most was that she had allowed all this to happen.

  She doodled idly now on her notebook, trying to figure it out. She liked to think of herself as possessing a sharp and analytical mind. She would not have survived the cutthroat nature of the business she was in otherwise. She thrived on competition and frankly, the contest between herself and Louisa should have been over ages ago. And would have been, she reminded herself, if it hadn’t have been for Anna and David.

  Through the years whenever she’d had a horrible day – like today for instance when Ollie Andrews was being his usual despicable self, and Andrea McAdams was preoccupied with one of her interminable domestic crises, and Tess Morgan was at her most irritating – Helene had always soothed herself with the thought that it wasn’t going to be forever. Richard would eventually make good on his promise, leave Louisa and marry her.

  There had been a few scary moments along the way, mind you, when Helene had been forced to question her beliefs. Like the time Louisa had gone in for a boob job, for instance. What had all that been about? Helene had lain awake at nights at the time, worrying about it. But Louisa’s boobs, Richard had been quick to convince her, were irrelevant in a relationship that had been on the rocks for years.

  “She’s feeling her age because the kids are growing up and away,” he had explained fondly, as if he really liked his wife! “Louisa doesn’t have a career like you and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She says the surgery makes her feel better about herself but I think it’s a distraction because she’s dreading the time when David and Anna leave home and she will be left facing an empty nest.”

  Like that was going to happen any time soon, Helene thought crossly. And Louisa could have her career, if she wanted one so badly. See how she felt about it after a week in charge of Ollie Andrews.

  Helene would quite like to be able to pick and choose whether she worked or not. She’d like to ramble along to a quiet gym at eleven in the morning instead of having to squeeze into the overcrowded, sweaty after-work classes. She’d like to indulge in leisurely lunches that didn’t involve endless brainstorming for ideas and ... and ... Helene searched her mind for what else she would like to do as a lady of leisure. She would go to art galleries or those lunchtime plays she was always seeing being advertised – something like that, anyway.

  But when was that ever going to happen? Normally Helene ignored this small voice inside her. But today it was more persistent, grabbing at the sides of her mind, forcing her to pay attention to her own intuition. And the fact was that Helene had begun to have a distinctly bad feeling where Richard was concerned. For one thing, he had started to hint recently about the possibility of being taken to the cleaners if he left Louisa. If he left Louisa!

  Now he fucking tells me! Helene had thought in a rage when he’d come out with that one night at her apartment after an evening working late together. Now, when the crow’s feet are crawling all over my face, and I’m worn to a thread between work, and sweating it out at the gym three times a week, trying to keep my figure. And do I have the money for new boobs, if I needed them? No!

  But Helene had forced all those feelings to the back of her mind, and lay down and invited Richard to inspect her new Brazilian wax. Afterwards she’d convinced herself they were back on track again. Richard was feeling edgy, that was all. But sooner or later, he was going to leave Louisa for her.

  He had better, Helene thought now, a feeling of fury sweeping over her suddenly. She banged her coffee mug down on the table, vaguely alarmed at both the force of her feelings and the way the coffee splattered all over everything: the table, her handbag, her shoes, the flagstones on the floor. It was the thought that somehow, after everything, she might actually have to continue to make her living in this job for the next two and a half decades that made her want to break something. Or else curl up and cry with exhaustion.

  “Are you okay?” Helene looked up to see the
cafe owner hovering over her, concern in his eyes. She came back to the present with some difficulty. What had he said his name was again? Matt ... yes, that was it.

  “I’m fine ...” Helene’s hands fluttered vaguely in the direction of the upended mug.

  “Your coffee – you’ve spilt most of it.” Matt wiped a cloth over the table, mopping up the liquid. “Here, let me get you a refill.” He reached over to take her mug.

  “No. No more coffee. I have to be going anyway,” Helene protested, but Matt had crossed the room and was back in an instant with a fresh cappuccino and a pile of white napkins for her to dry off her bag and shoes. Helene was surprised to see her hand was shaking slightly as she shoved her notebook and biro back into her bag.

  “Thanks,” she said and meant it. She felt slightly guilty now for snubbing him earlier. She looked around the cafe. “It looks as if you have a lot of work to do here still?”

  “I have ... but it will be worth it.” Matt’s face lit up as he started to tell her about his ambitions for the cafe. “I’m going to call it the Travel Cafe and I’m hoping backpackers and gap-year people – travellers of all sorts, really – will use this place when they are planning or living their big adventure. They can have breakfast or lunch, drink coffee, use the internet, buy their maps and guidebooks and travel journals all under one roof. I’ve just come back from travelling myself and so I can offer first-hand advice.” His enthusiasm was catching, and Helene found herself looking around the dusty, run-down room through Matt’s eyes.

  She saw now that he had pinned an enormous map of the world onto one wall, with yellow pins stuck on various locations from South America to Africa to Australia. He followed her gaze.

  “They’re all the places I’ve been,” he said a bit wistfully.

  “Really?” Helene was impressed. She’d only ever been abroad on holidays and never further than Europe. “So what on earth brought you to Killty?”

  If she’d gone to the bother of travelling to the four corners of the earth it would be an anti-climax of quite stunning dimensions to end up in Killty.

  “Ah, you can’t keep moving forever. And my folks live around here,” he said easily.

  Helene stared at the map, trying to picture Matt arriving at all those places, and then, just like that, leaving them again in a few weeks or months or whenever the fancy took him. And just for a moment, sitting there in the dilapidated cafe, she felt her own world expand. To somewhere beyond Atlantic 1 FM and the constant worry about Ollie Andrews and his flop radio show and Richard and his complicated family setup and his two children with the Peter Pan Syndrome. The small yellow pins seemed to be shining at her, offering her a way out, whispering that her life might hold possibilities she had never thought of before.

  And then her eyes strayed past the map towards the clock on the wall and she gave a gasp of disbelief. She hadn’t realised how long she had been out of the office. Scrambling to her feet, she grabbed her bag and made for the door. It was all very nice and dandy fantasising about travelling the world but the journey she needed to be making right now was the one back to work. Pronto.

  “Best of luck with your new venture,” she called from the door.

  “Thanks.” Matt was already back at his paperwork. “Don’t forget to tell all your friends about the cafe!”

  Helene smiled ruefully. Matt would never have guessed it, but her cast of friends would barely fill one table in this cafe. She needed to add that to her list of problems as soon as she was back at her desk. It would be something else for Tess Morgan to work on when Helene made her Agony Aunt of the Airwaves.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Tess sat at her desk, twirling a strand of hair around her finger. She was working her way diligently through the stack of magazines on her desk, desperate for new ideas. But by the time she finished the last magazine, she still hadn’t come up with any new angles. She logged on to her computer, hoping an email might throw up something she could use. She flicked her eyes down the list of mail, ignoring the predictable clutch of correspondence from PR people. If she could just find something a little bit offbeat ... and then her eyes widened as she saw a name from her past.

  Her heart beat a little faster. Chris Conroy. Now why would he be getting in touch with her, after all this time? Their relationship had ended badly ten years ago. By text, actually. Chris Conroy was a big part of the reason she had left Ireland in the first place. They had been together for less than a year and she hadn’t seen the break-up coming at all. At the time she’d been busy studying for her finals, so maybe she’d missed the signs but she had never really been able to figure it out. All she knew was she could still remember the gut-wrenching devastation she’d felt in the months after they’d split up.

  She hadn’t heard from him since. But she had sure heard a lot about him. Firstly, because she had kept tabs on him through social media and secondly, because since she’d come home it was hard to avoid him, with his picture byline peering out at her every other day from the pages of national newspapers and even international magazines. He was always turning up on television and radio talk shows too, commentating on the affairs of the day. Politics, business, wars – there appeared to be no end to what Chris Conroy could talk about.

  Tess felt faintly depressed as she compared his glittering career to her decidedly non-glittering one. While he was now a household name, she was just starting out in local radio. She clicked open the email and scanned his message. As her eyes darted down the screen, her mood darkened even further. Despite the fact that he’d typed “Something you’ll be interested in” in the subject line the email was actually a round robin, addressed to all of her old college year and it was about a reunion he was organising.

  “Hi. I can’t believe how the years have flown since we were all at college together. I seem to have lost touch with everybody! I’ve travelled a lot – US elections, embedded in Iraq, covered Afghanistan. I felt privileged to be there. It made all the hard work at college worthwhile. But I’m back for the foreseeable future and I thought it would be a good opportunity to meet up ten years on, to see how we’re all doing.”

  How we’re all doing indeed, Tess thought, as she scrolled down to where Chris suggested they all link up via a special reunion Facebook page. The difference between how she was doing and how Chris Conroy was doing was extreme. They had both travelled the world – separately of course – but Chris had come back with an amazing CV while Tess was going to have to explain to every prospective employer forever why her one-year career break had morphed into almost a decade-long one. The first year had turned into two and then, when she had come home, she couldn’t settle. So after a few temping jobs she was off on her travels again. It was only when she had started receiving news of her friends getting bling rings and having gigantic wedding and babies, for God’s sake, that she’d panicked and come home.

  She hit the reply button now and was mentally composing a note of regret when she became aware of Helene who was hovering again.

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Er ... I was making a few notes for the show.” Tess swiftly minimised her email.

  “Great!” Helene sat on the edge of her desk. “We’ll all have to do better, Tess. That’s what I’ve come to talk to you about, actually.”

  “You have?” Tess asked cautiously.

  “Yes, I’ve been thinking. I think it’s time you went on-air.”

  “What?” Tess swung around to face her boss, astonished.

  “It would only be part-time,” Helene warned, “and it would be on top of your work producing This Morning of course. But it’s a good opportunity for you and ...”

  “What would I be doing?” Tess was acutely aware that Andrea was at the next desk, pretending to be concentrating on something on her computer but listening closely to the conversation. She didn’t want Andrea to feel threatened, particularly as she was the one who’d got her the job here in the first place.

  “You’re our new Agony
Aunt!” Helene beamed. She shoved a jotter in front of Tess. “See? I’m going to call you Agony Aunt of the Airwaves. It has a good ring to it, hasn’t it?”

  “What?” Tess repeated. She stared at Helene, mystified.

  “What?” Andrea’s head whipped away from the computer screen.

  “Will you all stop saying ‘what’?” Helene said testily. “I am telling you what right now. What I want is an agony-aunt slot, Tess, once a week. And I want you to make it really hot and sexy.”

  “You want me to be a SEX agony aunt?” Tess felt a flicker of anger. That would be just perfect, if she did ever bump into Chris Conroy again, explaining how she had ended up as a sex advisor.

  “Not talking about actual sex,” Helene said impatiently. “Well, not necessarily. But just make the slot sexy. You know ... career women climbing the corporate ladder who are too busy to meet Mr Right. Or,” she glanced sideways towards Andrea, “women who are trying to juggle work and family and finding it all too much of a struggle. Or,” Helene tapped her biro on Tess’s desk, “women who are in relationships with commitment-phobic men. There’s a lot of that about I can tell you. Or men whose bitter ex-wives won’t let them see their kids. That sort of thing.”

  “But I wouldn’t know how to do that!” Tess blurted.

  “What’s there to know?” Helene demanded.

  “Where will I get the problems? Or, more to the point, the answers?”

  “How the hell do I know?” Helene snapped. “Make up the problems. And the answers while you’re at it. Make ‘em short, make ‘em snappy, and make ‘em up! That can be your motto.” She smiled as if she’d solved Tess’s problem.

  “It doesn’t sound very ethical,” Tess pointed out, “and even if it was ... well, I don’t think being an agony aunt is exactly my forte, Helene.”

  “Really?” Helene asked coolly. “And what do you think your forte is, exactly? Yesterday you finished your programme with an item about pooper scoopers, which Ollie is still wrecking my head over. So maybe you should start thinking about what exactly your forte is before you go dissing my ideas!”