Things We Never Say

by Sheila O'Flanagan

  ‘You don’t have to decide right now,’ Ryan said. ‘But in the next day or two.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘He’s not a bad person,’ Ryan told her.

  She said nothing.

  ‘Think about it.’

  ‘I will,’ she said as she stared out across the bay. Alcatraz, silent, unmovable, brooding, looked back silently at her.

  PART 4

  THE MEETING

  Chapter 12

  Suzanne Fitzpatrick was sitting in the boardroom of the bank. Her friend and accountant, Petra Summers, was with her, along with the two other businesswomen, Beatriz and Concha, who made up the consortium interested in buying the Mirador Hotel. The four women were seated on the opposite side of the table from the bank’s representatives, four middle-aged men in navy business suits. Although they were also wearing business clothes, Suzanne’s skirt and jacket were bright red, Concha’s floral dress was teamed with a canary-yellow jacket, Beatriz was striking in emerald green and, while Petra’s trousers were mocha brown, her own jacket was orange. Walking into the boardroom, Suzanne had remarked that they looked like a packet of Starbursts, which gave Petra a fit of the giggles and caused Concha to look sternly at her.

  Perhaps we should’ve consulted about our wardrobes, though, Suzanne said to herself as she listened to the lending manager picking holes in Petra’s financial plan for the purchase, renovation and reopening of the Mirador. Perhaps boring blue is good when it comes to bankers. She continued to allow her mind to wander. She knew the bank wasn’t going to lend them the money, even though the plan was a good one. Picking holes in it was simply an excuse. Ever since the financial crisis more than five years earlier, the banks had become ultra-cautious about lending. A joke, in Suzanne’s view, given that most of the people looking to borrow had already propped up the institutions through taxpayer-funded rescue plans. She wanted to scream this at the boring bankers, but there wasn’t any point. They wouldn’t care. They were going through the motions. And they were wrong to be cautious about the Mirador. Suzanne knew she could make it work. Petra, Concha and Beatriz thought so too. That was why Concha and Beatriz were prepared to put money into the venture. They were expecting a profit. And Suzanne would give it to them. If only they could get the project off the ground.

  Alberto Gonzales, the lending manager, was talking about the decline in the tourist industry and the fact that the Mirador wasn’t in the centre of a town and the hard work it would take to turn it into the sort of hotel Suzanne was proposing. She turned her attention to him, tuned in to his latest objection and then stood up.

  ‘I see we’re wasting our time,’ she told him briskly. ‘We will talk to someone else. Someone who has a better understanding of what we’re trying to do.’

  He looked at her in surprise.

  ‘Yes,’ said Beatriz. ‘There are clearly lots of other banks with more cojones than you.’

  The four women swept out of the boardroom and walked to the elevator.

  ‘Shit,’ said Petra. ‘I was sure they’d be interested. They’ve invested in this sort of thing before.’

  ‘And probably lost money,’ said Concha.

  ‘True,’ agreed Beatriz. ‘But we could’ve made it work.’

  ‘Ladies – wait.’

  They turned to see Alberto, flanked by his colleagues.

  ‘It cannot work for us with the amount of borrowings you need. But if you could come up with additional funding yourselves …’

  ‘If we had additional funding we wouldn’t be here today,’ said Suzanne impatiently.

  ‘You need to be more flexible,’ said the bank manager. ‘We would like to help.’

  ‘You haven’t been very helpful so far,’ she said.

  Petra put her hand on Suzanne’s arm. ‘Make a proposal,’ she told the manager as she pressed the call button on the elevator.

  ‘These times are difficult. But if you could reduce your requirement a little …’

  ‘We’ll discuss it,’ she said. ‘But you need to put something more concrete to us first.’

  Once they were inside the lift, Petra turned to Concha and Beatriz and asked if they could raise additional capital.

  ‘I could increase my investment a little,’ said Concha. ‘But not more than another ten per cent. Not for a hotel project.’

  Beatriz nodded. ‘I could do the same.’

  Suzanne looked regretful. ‘As you know, I’m bringing the expertise, not the money. At least, only the money from the bank. I don’t have enough personal finance to make up the amount we need and I can’t honestly see where I’d get it from.’

  ‘If this is so, then I am sorry,’ said Beatriz. ‘I would like to be involved, but I have to be realistic also.’

  ‘I have to say the same,’ said Concha.

  ‘Let’s not give up just yet,’ said Petra. ‘Let’s see if they come up with anything. Meantime, Suzanne and I will go through the figures again. We could still make it work.’

  ‘If you can, let me know straight away,’ said Beatriz as the lift reached the ground floor. ‘I will keep my interest open for another four weeks. After that, well, I will begin to look at other investments.’

  ‘That seems reasonable,’ said Concha. ‘I also will wait for four weeks.’

  ‘OK.’ Suzanne smiled brightly at them, although she couldn’t help feeling that the opportunity to acquire the Mirador was slipping away. ‘I’ll be in touch with you.’

  As the two investors left the building, Suzanne looked gloomily at Petra.

  ‘It can’t be done,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll try harder,’ said Petra. ‘In the context of what we need, it’s not such a large amount. A few hundred thousand.’

  ‘It might as well be a few million,’ said Suzanne.

  ‘Maybe we can get someone else to join the consortium,’ said Petra. ‘I’ll run through my client list again. We’ll come up with something, I promise.’

  ‘I wish I was as optimistic as you.’ Suzanne pushed open the door of the bank and stepped outside.

  They walked in silence through the narrow streets of the old town until they reached Petra’s office. She said goodbye to Suzanne and went inside. Suzanne, who’d taken a day off work, got into her car and drove out to the Mirador again. It was as beautiful as before, its views over the water unparalleled.

  I know this is a good business, she thought. I know I can make it work. It’s not as risky as the bank thinks. Unbidden, a memory of her father came to her. Talking to her mother about his own business. ‘Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing,’ he had said. ‘I read that somewhere. It’s true. My alarm company is doing well because I know exactly what I’m doing all the time.’

  Suzanne wondered if Fred would think she was a good risk. She felt sure he had the money, but would he be prepared to invest in her project? She inhaled sharply. ‘I must be really desperate if I’m thinking about Dad,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘He’s never supported me in anything before. Why should he start now.’ Besides, she told herself, it would be a disaster. He’d want to control her every step of the way. He had no faith in her whatsoever, and her brief, failed marriage had only hardened his view. Not that he’d known Calvin. They’d married in the States and hadn’t invited anyone from her family to the wedding. She hadn’t seen the point. Afterwards, when it had all gone so horribly wrong, she’d been glad.

  ‘Not relevant,’ she said out loud in order to dislodge those memories. ‘Nothing to do with my current situation. I need to be thinking about real people who can help.’

  Although right now, she couldn’t come up with anybody.

  Zoey was trying on her party dress when she heard Donald’s key in the front door. She immediately pulled it over her head (swearing softly under her breath because she should have unzipped it properly) and stepped out of it. Then she hung it in the wardrobe. She’d told Donald that he couldn’t see it until the day of her birthday.

  Donald wasn’t overly enthusi
astic about the party. When she told him what she’d planned – an evening in their home for fifty guests with canapés being provided by the local delicatessen – he’d looked appalled.

  ‘It’s going to cost a bloody fortune,’ he protested.

  ‘Not at all,’ she assured him, while making a note to keep the deli’s bill (as well as those for the helium balloons and party flowers) out of his sight. ‘I’ve sourced everything locally, nothing is too extravagant.’

  ‘Too late to do anything now that you’ve invited people, I suppose,’ said Donald. ‘Who exactly is coming?’

  Zoey ran through the guest list, an eclectic mix of her family and friends, his colleagues and, of course, Gareth, Lisette and Fred.

  ‘You think my dad will want to come to a birthday party for a thirty-year-old?’ asked Donald.

  ‘And why wouldn’t he?’ Zoey beamed at him. ‘It’ll make him feel young and virile again to see me.’

  ‘I don’t want him feeling virile,’ said Donald in alarm.

  Zoey chuckled. ‘He likes looking at me, Don. Mind you, if he looks for too long, he might have a heart attack and keel over.’

  ‘What a way to go.’ Donald couldn’t help laughing too.

  ‘It’s such a pity our house is so small,’ said Zoey. ‘We could’ve had a really big bash.’

  ‘It’s not that small,’ objected Donald, although he was the one who usually compared it unfavourably with the Clontarf home that his ex-wife lived in. He always felt a band of anger squeeze his chest when he thought of leaving the house he’d loved. A house with way more character than the current one had.

  ‘For a party it is,’ amended Zoey. ‘But never mind, sometime in the future I’m sure we’ll move onwards and upwards.’

  She was so enthusiastic, thought Donald. So full of energy and hope and expectation. That was what he loved about her, even though he sometimes felt that life had squeezed all the hope and expectation out of him already. He was fifty, for God’s sake. There was more behind him than in front of him. Zoey would still be around long after he’d gone. The thought depressed him.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Her voice was full of concern.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all. And the party is a great idea with or without my dad.’ He put his arms around her and drew her close to him, inhaling the apple-scented shampoo from her hair.

  Zoey held him tight. She knew that sometimes he could get depressed and down on himself. It was her job to make sure that he didn’t stay that way. Her job to look after him. And to keep him happy and in love with her.

  Lisette was posting a status update on Facebook when Gareth walked into the room, a glass of red wine in his hand.

  ‘I thought you’d be up there for ever,’ she said.

  ‘Class 3A would try the patience of a saint.’ Gareth sat down beside her and sipped his wine. ‘God, I needed that.’

  ‘I know how you feel,’ said Lisette. She closed her laptop, went into the kitchen, found the wine bottle and poured herself a glass too, before returning to the living room and sitting in the armchair opposite Gareth.

  ‘Honestly,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this. I know everyone says that teachers have a great life, and when you think about the holidays, you can’t blame them, but – BUT – none of them have to sit in front of a group of Neanderthals like 3A. Tony Mitchell seemed to think that farting continuously throughout the lesson was hilariously funny. So did his mates. I found it excruciatingly disgusting and unamusing.’

  ‘As would I,’ agreed Lisette.

  ‘They’re monsters, you know. All of them. Full of delusions about their own brilliance. I blame bloody X Factor and Celebrity Whatever. Everyone has a dream. Everyone thinks they can be somebody. Well, not class 3A, that’s for sure.’ He closed his eyes.

  Lisette reopened her laptop and updated her status again. Other half ranting about school. Can’t honestly blame him. But no point in ranting to me.

  She wasn’t worried about posting it. Gareth wasn’t on Facebook; he called it ‘another step on the slippery slope to social disintegration’. Lisette didn’t care what he thought. It allowed her to keep in touch with her friends and family in France in a way that had been impossible when she’d first come to Ireland twenty-five years earlier.

  When she’d met Gareth back then, he’d been an enthusiastic, involved teacher. It was a combination of things, not all to do with the educational system, that had knocked the enthusiasm out of him. The boom and bust had a lot to do with it. In the time when the economy had been racing ahead, teachers had been regarded as almost incidental in the fabric of society. Because they didn’t set up businesses or employ people or generate money, they’d become unimportant nobodies, their role devalued and their opinions discounted. Respect for teachers had been lost, while pupils and parents were adamant that their own rights should be upheld. Lisette firmly believed that respect had to be earned, and she herself made sure that she did her best to earn it in the classroom, but she knew that parents looked down on her for not being an entrepreneur. Stupid people, she often thought. Stupid people who can’t see what they’re doing to themselves and their families.

  With the subsequent bust, the attitude towards teachers shifted again, but this time the focus was on the fact that they were paid too much for too few hours and that they had safe, secure jobs. Lisette wondered if anyone who had to spend time with Gareth’s 3A class would ever think it was a safe, secure place to be. She would’ve bet any money that a businessman faced with Noel (the Mucker) Kelly and Tiernan (the Truck) Scallon would walk out of the room and drive away in his prestigious car.

  No matter what people thought, the job wasn’t easy. And no matter what they said, it didn’t pay a fortune either. Which was a pity. Because both Gareth and Lisette could’ve done with a fortune to get them out of their property nightmare. A nightmare that had only happened because they’d taken the words of those who’d sneered at them to heart and tried to be entrepreneurs as well as teachers.

  It had seemed like a great idea back in the mid noughties, when everyone was piling into bricks and mortar. The annoying thing was that initially they hadn’t even gone hell-for-leather at it like so many other people.

  With some unexpected help from Fred, they’d put a deposit on their current home, Thorngrove, before selling their three-bedroomed house on the Kilmore Road. It was then that what had seemed like a brilliant stroke of luck led them down the dark path of property investment. While they were waiting to move into Thorngrove, house prices continued to rise. By the time they actually sold their house, they’d made much more money than they’d dreamed possible. The bank manager had suggested that perhaps they might like to use some of that money to invest in more property. Which they’d done, flipping a city centre apartment profitably. And that had led them to buying a four-bedroomed house for rental in Artane, another Dublin apartment and, of course, their house in La Rochelle.

  Lisette had been astonished at how easy it all was. In a few months they’d made more playing the property market than they ever did as teachers. It made her wonder what the point was of the years of studying and the hard graft of the classroom, when you could coin it in by buying and selling an apartment in a matter of weeks. Additionally (and to her secret shame), she’d felt superior to Donald for the first time ever, because he’d had to downsize after his divorce from Deirdre. She clamped down on her smugness but every so often allowed herself to think that for once in his life Gareth had beaten his older brother and his family unit had come out the best.

  Notionally, she and Gareth had made fifty grand on the second apartment when they put it on the market. They’d turned down an offer that would’ve got them out at a profit of twenty-five because they hadn’t believed that prices would go much lower. But of course they had. So dramatically that they’d been left reeling, and in more debt than they knew how to manage. The only way they had kept their heads above water was by giving grinds after school
and at the weekends (it was fortunate that so many students wanted extra tuition), and they also occasionally had foreign students stay with them at Thorngrove. It was the foreign students that had kept them going the previous winter, but Lisette wasn’t sure that she’d have the same number this year.

  Now, even though they’d said no more about it, the knowledge that Gareth had been checking prices of La Rochelle properties was still a barrier between them. No matter how hard things got, she couldn’t bear the idea of selling Papillon.

  A message alert pinged on the laptop and she looked at it.

  Just a reminder about my upcoming birthday party, she read. Hope to see you bright and early.

  She groaned. Going to Zoey’s thirtieth birthday was the last thing she felt like doing, being surrounded by her flighty friends and Donald’s boring colleagues, made to feel ancient and irrelevant by one lot and useless by the others, and forced into being nice to Gareth in public when she was still angry with him.

  Stop it, she said to herself. You’re not useless, you’re not ancient and you’re not irrelevant. And you’re angry with Gareth because he’s looking at every option. The real problem is that you’re broke. And trying to hide it. Which is a difficult place to be in. But hopefully not for ever. Things will change. They always do.

  She thought again about her father-in-law and his will. She wished she hadn’t seen it, because she didn’t like thinking of Fred’s ultimate end. She was fond of him no matter how exasperating he could be, and it was awful to think that she was pinning her hopes on his death to get them out of the hole they were in. Yet the last time Gareth had talked to their bank manager, Bill Hogan had asked him about Fred’s estate and Gareth had assured him that they stood to inherit a substantial amount. Bill had believed him, which was why he was cutting them more slack than they deserved. Lisette wondered if Fred knew exactly how important he was to their future. Knowing him, he probably did. She turned her attention back to the laptop.