‘Hmm?’
‘Marcia,’ she said, rubbing her tired eyes. ‘We’re talking about Marcia, but you’re busy so …’ She began making her way to the kitchen.
‘Oh, that. I’m taking the party off her hands. Alison’s going to organise it.’
Ruth stopped. ‘Alison?’
‘Yes, my secretary. She’s new. Have you met her?’
‘Not yet.’ She slowly made her way towards him. ‘Honey, Marcia was really excited about organising the party.’
‘And now Alison is,’ he smiled. ‘Not.’ Then he laughed.
She smiled patiently at the in-house joke, wanting to strangle him for taking the party out of Marcia’s hands and putting it into those of a woman who knew nothing of the man who was celebrating seventy years in this life, with the people he loved and who loved him.
She took a deep breath, her shoulders relaxing as she exhaled. Started again. ‘Your dinner’s ready.’ She began to move towards the kitchen again. ‘It’ll just take a minute to heat up. And I bought that apple pie you like.’
‘I’ve eaten,’ he said, folding the letter and ripping it into pieces. A few pieces of paper fluttered to the ground. It was either the sound of the paper hitting the marble or his words that stopped her on her way, but either way she froze.
‘I’ll pick the bloody things up,’ he said with irritation.
She slowly turned around and asked in a quiet voice, ‘Where did you eat?’
‘Shanahans. Rib-eye steak. I’m stuffed.’ He absent-mindedly rubbed his stomach.
‘With who?’
‘Work people.’
‘Who?’
‘What’s this, the Spanish inquisition?’
‘No, just a wife asking a husband who he had dinner with.’
‘A few guys from the office. You don’t know them.’
‘I wish you would have told me.’
‘It wasn’t a social thing. Nobody else’s wives were there.’
‘I didn’t mean – I’d like to have known so I wouldn’t have bothered cooking for you.’
‘Christ, Ruth, I’m sorry you cooked and bought a bloody pie,’ he exploded.
‘Sssh,’ she said closing her eyes and hoping his raised voice wouldn’t wake the baby.
‘No! I won’t sssh!’ he boomed. ‘Okay?’ He made his way into the parlour, leaving his shoes in the middle of the hallway and his papers and envelopes strewn across the hall table.
Ruth took another deep breath, turned away from his mess and made her way to the opposite side of the house.
When Lou rejoined his wife, she was sitting at the kitchen table eating lasagne and salad, the pie next in line to be eaten, watching women in spandex jump around on the large plasma in the attached informal living room.
‘I thought you’d eaten with the kids,’ he remarked, after watching her for a while.
‘I did,’ she said, through a full mouth.
‘So why are you eating again?’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s almost eleven. A bit late to eat, don’t you think?’
‘You eat at this hour,’ she frowned.
‘Yes, but I’m not the one who complains that I’m fat and then eats two dinners and a pie,’ he laughed.
She swallowed the food, feeling like a rock was going down her throat. He hadn’t noticed his words, hadn’t intended to hurt her. He never intended to hurt her; he just did. After a long silence in which Ruth had lost the anger and built up the appetite to eat again, Lou joined her at the kitchen table, in the conservatory. On the other side of the window the blackness clung to the cold pane, eager to get inside. Beyond it were the millions of lights of the city across the bay, like Christmas lights dangling from the blackness.
‘It’s been a weird day today,’ Lou finally said.
‘How?’
‘I don’t know,’ he sighed. ‘It just felt funny. I felt funny.’
‘I feel like that most days,’ Ruth smiled.
‘I must be coming down with something. I just feel … out of sorts.’
She felt his forehead. ‘You’re not hot.’
‘I’m not?’ He looked at her in surprise and then felt it himself. ‘I feel hot. It’s this guy at work.’ He shook his head. ‘So odd.’
Ruth frowned and studied him, not used to seeing him so inarticulate.
‘It started out well.’ He swirled his wine around his glass. ‘I met a man called Gabe outside the office. A homeless guy – well, I don’t know if he was homeless, he says he has a place to stay, but he was begging on the streets anyway.’
At that stage the baby monitor began crackling as Pud started to cry softly. Just a gentle sleepy moaning at first. Knife and fork down and with the unfinished plate pushed away, Ruth prayed for him to stop.
‘Anyway,’ Lou continued, not even noticing, ‘I bought him a coffee and we got talking.’
‘That was nice of you,’ Ruth said. Her maternal instincts were kicking in and the only voice she could now hear was that of her child, as his sleepy moans turned to full-blown cries.
‘He reminded me of me,’ Lou said, confused now. ‘He was exactly like me and we had the funniest conversation about shoes.’ He laughed, thinking back over it. ‘He could remember every single pair of shoes that walked into the building, so I hired him. Well, I didn’t, I called Harry –’
‘Lou, honey,’ she cut in, ‘do you not hear that?’
He looked at her blankly, irritated at first that she’d butted in, and then cocked his head to listen. Finally, the cries penetrated his thoughts.
‘Fine, go on,’ he sighed, massaging the bridge of his nose. ‘But as long as you remember that I was telling you about my day, because you’re always giving out that I don’t,’ he mumbled.
‘What is that supposed to mean?’ She raised her voice. ‘Your son is crying. Do I have to sit here all night while he wails for help until you’ve finished your story about a homeless man who likes shoes, or would you ever go and check on him of your own accord, do you think?’
‘I’ll do it,’ he said angrily, though not making a move from his chair.
‘No, I’ll do it.’ She stood up from the table. ‘I want you to do it without being reminded. You don’t do it for brownie points, Lou, you’re supposed to want to do it.’
‘You don’t seem too eager to do it yourself now,’ he grumbled, fiddling with his cufflinks.
Halfway from the table to the kitchen door, she stopped. ‘You know you haven’t taken Ross for one single day by yourself?’
‘You must be serious, you’re actually using his real name. Where has all that come from?’
It was all coming out of her now that she was frustrated. ‘You haven’t changed his nappy, you haven’t fed him.’
‘I’ve fed him,’ he protested.
The wails got louder.
‘You haven’t prepared one bottle, made him one meal, dressed him, played with him. You haven’t spent any time with him alone, without me being here to run in every five minutes to take him from you while you send an email or answer a phone call. The child has been living in the world for over a year now, Lou. It’s been over a year.’
‘Hold on.’ He ran his hand through his hair and held it there, clenching a handful of hair with a tight fist, a sign of his anger. ‘How have we gotten from talking about my day, which you always want to know so much about – second for second – to this attack?’
‘You were so busy talking about you that you didn’t hear your child,’ she said tiredly, knowing this conversation was going the same place as every other similar argument they’d had. Nowhere.
Lou looked around the room and held out his hands dramatically, emphasising the house. ‘Do you think I sit at my desk all day twiddling my thumbs? No, I work my hardest trying to juggle everything so that you and the kids can have all this, so that I can feed Ross, so excuse me if I don’t fill his mouth every morning with mashed banana.’
‘You don’t juggle anything, Lou. You choose one thing over another. There’s a diffe
rence.’
‘I can’t be in two places at once, Ruth! If you need help around here, I’ve already told you, just say the word and we could have a nanny here any day you want.’
He knew he’d walked himself into a bigger argument, and as Pud’s wails grew louder on the baby monitor, he prepared for the inevitable onslaught. Just to avoid the same dreaded argument, he almost added, ‘And I promise not to sleep with this one.’
But the argument never came. Instead, her shoulders shrank, her entire demeanour altered, as she gave up the fight and instead went to tend to her son.
Lou reached for the remote control and held it towards the TV like a gun. He pressed the trigger angrily and powered off the TV. The sweating spandexed women diminished into a small circle of light in the centre of the screen before disappearing completely.
He reached for the plate of apple pie on the table and began picking at it, wondering how on earth this had all started from the second he walked in the door. It would end as it did so many other nights: he would go to bed and she would be asleep, or at least pretend to be. A few hours later he would wake up, work out, get showered and go to work.
He sighed, then on hearing his exhale only then noticed that the baby monitor had become silent of Pud’s cries, but it still crackled. As he walked towards it to turn it off, he heard other noises that made him reach for the volume dial. Turning it up, his heart broke as the sounds of Ruth’s quiet sobs filled the kitchen.
9.
The Turkey Boy 2
‘So you let him get away?’ A young voice broke into Raphie’s thoughts.
‘What’s that?’ Raphie snapped out of his trance and turned his attention back to the young teen who was sitting across the desk from him.
‘I said, you let him get away.’
‘Who?’
‘The rich guy in the flash Porsche. He was speeding and you let him get away.’
‘No, I didn’t let him get away.’
‘Yeah you did, you didn’t give him any points or a ticket or anything. You just let him off. That’s the problem with you lot, you’re always on the rich people’s sides. If that was me, I’d be locked up for life. I only threw a bloody turkey and I’m stuck here all day. And it’s Christmas Day, and all.’
‘Shut your whining, we’re waiting for your mother, you know that, and I wouldn’t blame her if she does decide to leave you here all day.’
The Turkey Boy sulked for a while at that.
‘So you’re new to the area. You and your mother moved here recently?’ Raphie asked.
The boy nodded.
‘Where from?’
‘The Republic of Your Arse.’
‘Very clever,’ Raphie said sarcastically.
‘So why did you leave the Porsche guy so quickly?’ he finally asked, curiosity getting the better of him. ‘Did you chicken out or something?’
‘Don’t be daft, son, I gave him a warning,’ Raphie said, straightening up defensively in his chair.
‘But that’s illegal, you should have given him a ticket. He could kill someone speeding around like that.’
Raphie’s eyes darkened and the Turkey Boy knew to stop his goading.
‘Are you going to listen to the rest of the story or what?’
‘Yeah, I am. Go on.’ The boy leaned forward on the table and rested his hand under his chin. ‘I’ve got all day,’ he smiled cheekily.
10.
The Morning After
At 5.59 a.m., Lou awoke. The previous evening had gone exactly as predicted: by the time he had made it to bed, Ruth’s back had been firmly turned with the bedclothes tightly tucked around her, leaving her as accessible as a fig in a roll. The message was loud and clear.
Lou couldn’t find it within himself to comfort her, to cross over that line that separated them in bed, and in life, to make things okay. Even as students, broke and staying in the worst accommodations he had ever experienced, with the temperamental heating and bathrooms they had had to share with dozens of others, things had never been like this. They’d shared a single bed in a box-bedroom so small that they had to walk outside for a change of mind, but they didn’t mind, in fact they loved being so close to each other. Now they had a giant six-foot-six bed, so big that even when they both lay on their backs their fingers just about brushed when they stretched out. A monstrosity of space and cold spots covered the sheets that couldn’t be reached to be warmed.
Lou thought back to the beginning, when he and Ruth had first met – two young nineteen-year-olds, carefree and drunk, celebrating the end of first-year university Christmas exams. With a few weeks’ break ahead of them and concerns about results far from their minds, they had met on comedy night in the International Bar on Wicklow Street. After that night, Lou had thought about her every day while back home with his parents for the holidays. With every slice of turkey, every sweet wrapper he unravelled, every family fight over Monopoly, she was in his mind. Because of her he’d even lost his title in the Count the Stuffing competition he’d had with Marcia and Quentin. Lou stared at the ceiling and smiled, remembering how each year he and his siblings – paper crowns on their heads and tongues dangling from their mouths – would get down to counting every crumb of stuffing on their plate, long after his parents had left the table. Every year, Marcia and Quentin would join together to beat him, but they couldn’t sustain the desire, and his dedication – some would say obsession – could never be matched. But it was matched that year, and then beaten by Quentin, because the phone had rung and it had been her, and that had been it for Lou. Childish ways were put behind. Or that was supposed to be the theory of when he became a man. Perhaps he wasn’t one yet.
The nineteen-year-old of that Christmas would have longed for this moment right now. He would have grabbed the opportunity with both hands, to be transported to the future just to have her right beside him in a fine bed, in a fine house, with two beautiful children sleeping in the next rooms. He looked at Ruth beside him in bed. She had rolled onto her back, her mouth slightly parted, her hair like a haystack on top of her head. He smiled.
She’d done better than him in those Christmas exams, which was no hard task, but she had repeated that performance the following three years too. Study had always come so easily to her, while he, on the other hand, seemed to have to burn the candle at both ends in order just to scrape by. He didn’t know where she ever found the time to think, let alone study, she was so busy leading the way through their adventurous nights on the town. They’d crashed parties on a weekly basis, then been thrown out, slept on fire escapes, and Ruth still made it into college for the first lecture with her assignments completed. She could do it all at once. Ruth had led the way for everybody, always bored with sitting around. She’d needed adventure, she’d needed outrageous situations and anything that wasn’t ordinary. He was the life and she had been the soul of every party and every day.
Any time he’d failed an exam and had been forced to repeat, she’d been there, writing out essays for him to learn. She’d spend the summers turning study into quiz-show games, introducing prizes and buzzers, quick-fire rounds and punishments. She’d dress up in her finery, acting as quiz-show host, assistant, model, displaying all the fine things he could win if he answered all the questions correctly. She made score cards, wrote out questions, included tacky music and fake applause into every quiz they had. Food shopping was a game; with her controlling the list of treats like a game-show host. For a box of popcorn answer her this.
‘Pass,’ he’d say, frustrated, trying to grab the box anyway.
‘No passing, Lou, you know this one,’ she’d say firmly, blocking the shelves.
He wouldn’t know the answer but she’d make him know it. Somehow she’d push him until he reached deep into a part of his brain that he didn’t know existed and he’d find the answer he never knew that he knew. Just before making love, she’d stall and pull away from him.
‘Answer me this.’
Despite his protests and w
restling to get what he wanted, she’d hold back. ‘Come on, Lou, you know this one.’
If he didn’t know it, he’d make himself know it.
They planned to go to Australia together after university. A year’s adventure away from Ireland before life started. Determined to succeed and follow friends over there, they spent the year saving for the flights; him working behind a bar in Temple Bar while she tended tables. They saved for the dream together, but he failed his final exams and Ruth didn’t. He would have packed it all in there and then, but she wouldn’t let him, influencing his decision and convincing him he could do it, as she did everything. So while he began the first few months of the same year again, Ruth celebrated passing with flying colours, receiving an honours degree at a graduation ceremony that Lou couldn’t bring himself to attend. He’d attended the afters, though, had a few too many drinks and made the night miserable for her. He could at least do that for her.
In the year waiting for him to finish, Ruth completed a Business Masters Degree. Just for something to do. She never once pushed it in his face, never made him feel a failure, never celebrated any wonderful achievement of her own in order not to make him feel any less. She was always the friend, the girlfriend, the life and soul of every party, the A student and achiever.
Was that when he started resenting her? All the way back then? He didn’t know if it was because he never felt good enough, whether it was a way of punishing her, or whether there was no psychology behind it and he was just too weak and too selfish to say no when an attractive woman so much as looked his way – never mind when they’d grab their handbags, their coats and then his hand. Because when that happened, he forgot all sense of himself. He knew right from wrong, of course he did, but on those occasions he didn’t particularly care. He was invincible, there would be no consequences and no repercussions.
Ruth had caught him with the nanny six months previously. There had only been a few incidences with her in particular, but he knew that if there were levels of fairness for having affairs, which in his opinion there were, sex with the nanny was somewhere close to the bottom. There had been nobody since then, apart from a fumble with Alison, which had been a mistake. If there were levels of acceptable excuses for having affairs, and there were for Lou, then that would have been at the top. He’d been drunk, she was attractive, and it had happened but he regretted it deeply. It didn’t count.
Cecelia Ahern 2-book Bundle Page 7