by Amy Huberman
‘What did he do, Izzy?’ Susie’s eyes were filled with concern.
‘He got up to make breakfast, and just as I was lying there trying to make sense of it all, his mobile rang. I couldn’t resist looking.’
‘Oh, no…’
‘It was her. It was Edna. It was fucking déjà vu all over again.’ I had to catch my breath. ‘She left a voicemail and I listened to it. She’d done the dirt on him. She was on the phone, pleading with him to call her back so they could sort it out. He’s not still in love with me,’ I said, looking at them. ‘He was only using me to get back at her.’
Keelin fell back against the sofa, which prompted me to curl up into a ball and sob into the sheepskin rug.
‘I don’t know what to say, Iz,’ Susie said. I sat up and pulled the fluff out of my eyes. My lungs were tired, my head was heavy and my heart broken.
For the second time.
He’d done it again.
This time round, though, the pain was compounded with shame because I’d gone back for more.
‘He used me. Totally and completely used me.’ My voice sounded far away, as if I was in another room.
That night I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to convince myself that I was asleep. It wasn’t working. I looked at my alarm clock: 03:5 5. I shut my eyes tightly and prayed for the night to be over. This insufferable, never-ending stretch of sleepless agony. I wished there was someone I could talk to – anyone – just to distract me for five minutes. But there was no one I could call at this hour of the night. Did I know anyone in Australia? Only Kylie Minogue. But she didn’t know me. So that was a non-runner.
Anyone in America, perhaps? I could ring Abercrombie and Fitch and get them to talk me through their autumn collection.
I threw off the duvet and slung on my dressing-gown. A chat with Dermot was probably my best option, given that I didn’t really know anyone outside my time zone.
As I stared blankly at the Discovery Channel, I told him I reckoned Cian could be used in a case study for bi-polar. All you’d have to do was get someone happy and bubbly, persuade them to sleep with him and watch them sink into manic depression. I wiped the tears off my cheeks with my sleeves. Jesus, I was like a camel – where was all this water coming from after the endless crying I’d done today?
‘I’m so fed up thinking about you.’ I sighed into the empty living room. ‘Not you, Dermot,’ I said, stroking his soft warm ears as he looked up at me. ‘The Bi-polar Inflictor.’
And now here was a fresh stock of new thoughts to torment me. I was haunted by the extent of his cruelty. How could he do this?
So there it was. All the I-still-love-yous, the I’ve-made-a-terrible-mistakes, the pleas, the humility… utter and complete lies. They didn’t even involve me. It had all been about him, a way to make himself feel better, to get back at her. He was just playing with me. Like a cat that’s caught a mouse but will neither kill it nor let it go, tormenting it for its own amusement.
The way his expression had changed when he walked back into the room this morning. It had been as stark as flicking a light switch. As soon as he saw me hunched on the floor, in utter shock, his mobile phone lying shattered beside me, he’d known he’d been caught out.
Worst of all, he hadn’t even tried to fight it. He’d shrugged. ‘She slept with someone else.’
‘I never, ever thought you could stoop this low,’ I said, hanging my head. ‘Cian, you broke my heart.’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘Shut up. You broke my heart, and then when I felt like I was just about getting over it, you came back into my life and made me believe you still loved me! How could you do that? How?’ I shouted.
‘Izzy, you have it all wrong,’ he protested. ‘Initially, yes, I’ll admit it, I wanted to hurt her. She’d gone off and shagged this nightclub owner, and then I saw her in the papers kissing some guy and I wanted to get my own back and I knew being with you would do that. She was always so insecure about you, which is a huge compliment to you, really.’
‘I’m sorry?’ I didn’t understand how that could be remotely positive for me.
‘No, no, hear me out. What can I say, Izzy? I’m a fucking idiot. But I think I got slowly brainwashed by Saffron’s scene. It’s just so vacuous and insincere. Everybody’s out for themselves. They’re all your best mates to your face, but not one of them would help you out if you were in trouble. Not one.’
‘So, not all it was cracked up to be?’ I asked sarcastically.
‘No. But, Iz, listen to me – when I saw you again I realized I still loved you and wanted you back. She’s had nothing to do with it since then.’
‘I can’t believe you’d use me to get at her. What did I ever do to you to deserve that? Especially when it involved her? Cian, did you know that she put that clip up on Facebook? Do you know the humiliation I’ve been through – and how long it’s taken me to get back on my feet again? It nearly destroyed me.’
‘Izzy, I swear to you, I only found out a few weeks ago that she did it. You have to know I would never have allowed that. You see? That’s what I mean! They’re all so two-faced and insincere, cruel for their own gain without so much as a thought for anyone who might be affected by it.’
‘Hurts, doesn’t it?’ I said, looking straight at him.
‘Izzy, fuck her! I’ve realized how much I love you – that’s what’s important. I love you so, so much.’
I shut my eyes tight and listened to the words I’d prayed for him to come back and say to me over the last ten months. He approached me slowly and sat down on the floor beside me, wrapping me in his arms. ‘I’ve missed you so much, my sweet, sweet Izzy. The kindest, most down-to-earth, most beautiful girl I know.’
I sat there numbly, letting him rock me.
‘You’d never do that to me,’ he whispered, stroking my hair.
‘You fucking scumbag,’ I said quietly.
‘What?’
‘I said, you fucking scumbag.’
I pushed him off me and got to my feet. I reached for my jeans and climbed into them.
‘Izzy? What did I say?’
‘You said that I’d never do that to you.’ I stopped what I was doing and turned to face him. ‘You’ve only come back to me because you got hurt and your ego’s been kicked and you’ve had the fright of your life because you thought you were untouchable. You’ve realized that if you play with fire you get burnt. And now you want me to nurse it all better for you. You’ve scuttled back to your safe place, like the coward you are, so you can lick your wounds before you go back out there and do it all over again.’ My whole body was trembling. ‘Well, you can go to hell,’ I exploded, taking myself, as much as Cian, by surprise.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he huffed, rolling his eyes. ‘Izzy, please.’
I looked back at him. ‘All this time I’ve been fantasizing about someone else. It wasn’t you, just a better version of you, with the same name and the same face.’
His eyes misted over. And for the first time in my life, I thought I was going to see Cian Matthews cry. But I couldn’t feel sorry for him. He looked too pathetic. Had I really been in love with this man?
‘I never want to see you or hear from you again for the rest of my life. Ever. Do you understand?’ I said, looking at him one last time.
I left his apartment. He didn’t try to stop me. Why would he? The game was up.
I woke up on Monday morning with Keelin’s nose pressed to mine.
‘What are you doing, Keelin?’
‘Checking you’re still breathing. There’s a packet of paracetamol on the kitchen counter and I thought you might have knocked them back with a flask of whiskey during the night. I’m glad you’re still alive.’
‘Christ, I’m not suicidal. I had a headache.’
She dragged me out of bed, pulled me into the bathroom, turned on the shower and instructed me to wash.
Monday morning. It was here. And it brought with it as much di
sappointment as it did relief. On the positive side I had work to distract me, but on the negative, I had the burden of pretending life was grand. Skipping around the set doing a million and one odd jobs and carrying on like life was a big bowl of cherries. The big bad world didn’t allow you let on that over the weekend someone had come along and pissed all over you. I practised my fake smile in the bathroom mirror, but my eyes still held a blankness I couldn’t dispel, no matter how hard I tried.
The day passed – it was like watching a movie with the sound turned off. I said hello to people when they nodded at me, answered questions when anyone asked me anything and fulfilled the menial tasks assigned to me. But no matter what anyone said to me, all I could hear was, ‘Cian only had sex with you to get back at Edna McClodmutton.’
I came back after lunch and plonked myself down in my chair in a huff. I couldn’t believe the lady behind the sandwich counter had told me I’d never have sex with anyone else like I’d had with Cian and that any lover from now on would be like your man from Ryan’s Daughter, roll-on-in-out-grunt-roll-off-fall-asleep. She’d really asked did I want butter or mayonnaise, but that wasn’t what I’d heard at the time.
The only time I was marginally cheered was when a few of the actors came over to the production office to look for the script editor. It was like watching the Battle of the Egos. I should have placed a bet. I knew the lad from Cork was going to win.
‘Bullshit!’ he snapped, at the bloke from Dublin. ‘Seventeen words was all you had – I counted dem, boiy! Twenty-four was what I had!’
‘I told ya before, ya bleedin’ muppet, the nods don’t count.’
‘They do, they mean “yes”.’
‘Yeah, but you’re not actually saying the word so it doesn’t count.’
‘You haven’t got a clue what you’re on about, boiy!’
Ruth, one of the trainees, got up from behind her desk in a bid to hush them, which I thought was a pity: watching two actors fight about which one of them had had more words to say in their last job was far more entertaining than folding pieces of paper and putting them into envelopes.
‘I want to speak to the script editor. Now!’ God, sometimes the Cork accent really did sound like an injured dog crying to be put out of its misery.
‘Isobel? A word?’
Snared by Margaret again, the seventh time today, for doing no work. This was getting embarrassing. I headed into her office and she closed the door behind me. She sat at her desk and looked at me earnestly.
Oh, Lord! She wasn’t going to fire me, was she? I held up my little finger pitifully in the hope she’d notice my paper cut and see that I’d done at least some work!
‘Isobel, I’ve put a lot of thought into this, and I’ve decided…’
Here it comes! This was officially the worst few days of my entire life. What next? My entire family had been wiped out by a freak hurricane that’d only hit our house in Blackrock? All my friends hated me? Doctors had found a Fisher Price farm animal in my stomach – I’d swallowed it when I was a child – it had travelled up to my heart and I was going to die?
‘We need someone to go to London for us in ten days’ time. And, well, I figured you’d be the best person. They’d love you over there.’ She told me what I’d have to do.
‘Oh.’
‘Isobel?’
‘Yes!’ It had taken me a moment to grasp that I hadn’t just been fired.
Wow. I’d been chosen to go to London, to BCM, on a mini business trip. How fantastic! Although it was entirely unnecessary, I was thinking of buying myself a briefcase. And a calculator. And a diary. All proper business people had them. I only had to hand deliver the film rushes to the BCM office – they couldn’t risk losing them in transit with a courier – but so what? I felt like a pretty important business person. I’d stop off in that office-supplies place on my way home. I might even grab myself a Financial Times and see how the Footsie was doing.
First things first, though, I had to get my suitcase from Gavin’s house. I whipped out my mobile to see if he was about tonight so I could call over.
29
Gavin pulled the suitcase out from under the bed in the spare room. ‘I’ve hidden a few grams of cocaine in the front zip pocket for when you go through Security at the airport. Thought you might like a bit of class-A-drug drama. It’s been a while now since your last bust, hasn’t it?’
‘Yeah. And I miss that buzz. Did I tell you what one of my neighbours said to me when we moved back in?’
‘No,’ he said, already laughing.
‘I was on my way back from Odds and Sods when I got ambushed by Mrs Gibney from number eleven. You know her? The one with the headscarf that’s constantly out polishing her brass doorknob and screaming at all the children?’
‘Intimately.’
‘Shut up, you – anyway, she pegs it over to me, waving me down with her brass polisher. “Come here, young one!” she yells. “Did yous lot all get arrested for hiding illegal immigrants in your house?” And I said no, that it had been a mix-up with the guards. Then she says to me that she saw a girl a while back with short dark hair, of “foreign descent”, scuttling shiftily from our house one day. I told her that had been Keelin, that she’d had a fake-tan disaster and was trying to run back to the salon without anyone seeing her.’
‘Did that really happen?’
‘Yeah! Sure my dad thought she was Indian when he popped round the next day. Started speaking to her the way parents do to foreigners – shouting slowly like the person has a severe mental disability.’
‘What did she do?’ he asked, agog.
‘The salon said there was nothing they could do, that their tanning technician was only learning and that’s why Keelin had got it so cheap.’
‘They’re called tanning technicians?’
I nodded. ‘They have nail technicians too.’
‘Well, that’s news to me. I didn’t even know that UCD had added Beauty Engineering to the basic engineering degree.’
We headed downstairs to tuck into the pot roast Gavin had made us for dinner. I really was going to have to learn how to cook one of these fine days. Everyone was putting me to shame. I mean, even Keelin, who’d lived on pepperami and processed cheese for the entirety of her third-level education, could cook now. When had they all learnt how to do it? Where had I been when all this culinary expertise was being absorbed? Trawling through Tiffany replicas on eBay?
We sat down on the couch and Gavin told me about the shite that Aidan, the drug lord himself, had been spouting at the party. He’d told Gavin he wanted to get a new tattoo that said ‘Life is Pain’ over the Nike tick he already had on his back to mark his life’s struggles. Poor Aidan. I’m sure a life of opulence and summer holidays in Cannes had been torture. I could just see him now, spreading his caviar on his doorstep-wedge of pan, watching The Snapper over and over, trying desperately to perfect the accent. He should be a contestant on the lifestyle equivalent of Stars In Their Eyes. He could come out in his private-school uniform, his hair parted and combed, saying, ‘Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be… a complete scumbag!’ The audience would cheer and he’d pop backstage to complete the transformation into the little shit we knew and didn’t love today.
Wasn’t it lovely to be able to sit, chat, laugh and take my mind off the fact that the world had ceremoniously shat on me over the weekend? It was the first time since Saturday morning that I’d laughed properly, and the first time I knew it would all be okay. I’d get over it. Really, I would. And if any good had come out of what had happened, it was a massive slice of closure. There was no going back now. I could finally let Cian go. Because now I had to.
Just being in Gavin’s apartment lifted my spirits. Maybe it was the smell of the pot roast. Or that he always had my favourite white wine in the fridge. Or that his couch was one of those cool L-shaped ones that you can sprawl out on. Or perhaps it was just Gavin.
‘Izzy, I wanted to give you something as a thank-you.’
‘Gavin, you did me the favour. You reminded me how much I love this and how much I’ve missed it.’
‘I’m so happy you’ve said that because, Izzy, you really are so, so good. You’ve no idea.’ We looked at the storyboards as they stood against the shelving unit in front of us. I was so pleased he was happy with them, and it was great that I had them finished so I could bring them over with me this evening to show him.
‘Your present is beside you.’
‘Where?’ I said, looking around me.
‘Try beside the cushion.’ I pushed my hand down and, sure enough, it came across something. I tugged it out. A little velvet pouch.
‘Open it,’ he encouraged me.
I untied the knot and felt inside. There was a box and I pulled it out. I inhaled sharply when I saw the colour. The signature turquoise blue. The Tiffany colour. So many of my daydreams were made up of these little blue boxes. And now I had one of my own! Maybe there was something inside it! I’d have been happy enough with just the box… I shook it. It rattled. Oooh! I lifted the lid slowly – and melted.
‘I’d heard you mention Tiffany and I thought it was either that singer from the eighties or this one. I went for this one, although you very nearly ended up with a best-of album from Tesco.’ He scooted down the couch, lifted the bracelet from its little blue nest and fastened it around my wrist. ‘It’s a charm bracelet. And I hope you don’t mind but I took the initiative in getting you started.’ A little silver paintbrush and palette hung from one of the links. It twinkled as it swung around and caught the light.
I was speechless. I stared at him and finally found my voice. ‘Thank you so much.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, smiling.
Somehow I was unable to tell him how wonderful he was for hearing what I’d said and acting on it. No one had done that before.
‘So, did you see them?’ he said.
‘Huh?’ I said, rejoining Planet Earth. ‘Did I see who?’