by Claire Allan
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter twenty-three
Chapter twenty-four
Chapter twenty-five
Chapter twenty-six
Chapter twenty-seven
Chapter twenty-eight
Chapter twenty-nine
Chapter thirty
Chapter thirty-one
Chapter thirty-two
Chapter thirty-three
Chapter thirty-four
Chapter thirty-five
Chapter thirty-six
Chapter thirty-seven
Chapter thirty-eight
Chapter 1: If Only You Knew
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names,
characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the
author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Ebook Published 2012
by Poolbeg Press Ltd
123 Grange Hill, Baldoyle
Dublin 13, Ireland
E-mail: [email protected]
www.poolbeg.com
© Claire Allan 2012
Copyright for typesetting, layout, design, ebook
© Poolbeg Press Ltd
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-178199-069-8
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.poolbeg.com
About the author
Claire Allan lives and works in Derry. She is married to Neil and is mammy to two very delightful children, Joseph and Cara. When she is not writing books she works as a reporter and columnist at the Derry Journal. And if she ever finds any spare time, she enjoys singing with Encore Contemporary Choir, reading, watching Grey’s Anatomy and spending time with family and friends. She is permanently fighting her chocolate addiction.
You can read more about Claire at www.claireallan.com, find her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter at @claireallan.
Also by Claire Allan
If Only You Knew
It's Got to be Perfect
Jumping in Puddles
Feels like Maybe
Rainy Days and Tuesdays
Published by Poolbeg
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, and once again, I want to thank my family for supporting me during the writing, editing and emotional meltdowns involved in putting this book together. To my mammy, who read as I wrote, thank you for all your feedback. To my daddy, sisters and brother, thank you. Most of all thanks to Neil, Joseph and Cara who live with my multiple personalities as my characters find their way. I love you all very much.
Thanks to my wider family circle, in particular my granny, Auntie Raine, ‘Mimi’ and Auntie Marie Louise for their faith, support and practical help. (Cupcakes gratefully accepted, choir stress relief much needed, baby-sitting very much appreciated.)
To my lovely colleagues at the Derry Journal and in particular Erin, Bernie, Catherine and Mary for listening on a sometimes daily basis to my writing woes – thank you.
To Vicki – you simply rock.
For those writer friends who know exactly what it is like and who make me laugh – thank you. Special thanks for their words of encouragement go to Fiona Cassidy (aka the Galbally One), Sharon Owens and Anna McPartlin.
To my Twitter friends, especially the #tayswillinweemin – thank you again for your loveliness. #youareamazing
And to my ‘real world’ friends, especially my Encore choir ‘family’, thank you.
Special thanks as always go to all at Poolbeg – especially Paula Campbell for her vision, support and friendship, and Gaye Shortland for her never-ending enthusiasm and keen eye.
Thanks also to my agent Ger Nichol, who is always there when I need her and who should be available on the NHS to neurotic authors everywhere. I could not do this without you, Ger. Much, much love x
Finally to the booksellers and readers who make this possible and worthwhile – thank you, thank you, thank you.
Chapter One
Kitty
The bomb dropped at 4.17p.m. on a Thursday. It had been a fairly ordinary kind of day before then – maybe even a good kind of a day. The shop had been busy and I had made two mammies and two bridesmaids cry with joy. Two brides-to-be had left feeling like the most beautiful girls in the world.
I had been planning on making celebratory lasagne to mark the general loveliness of the day and had developed a craving for a very nice bottle of Merlot thatI knew they sold at the off-licence two doors down from Mark’s office. I had tried to call him to ask him to pop in and get it but, rather unusually for a man whose Blackberry even went to the toilet with him, he hadn’t answered.
So I did something I never, ever do because I didn’t ever want to seem like one of thoseneedy wife types who calls her husband at work. He didn’t have a direct line, you see, and I would have to go through the gatekeeper, aka the harridan of a receptionist, who worked at his building. I chewed on one of my false nails, balking at the slightly plastic taste while I contemplated just picking up a bottle of wine from the supermarket. But no, even though it was only a Thursday, I decided we should treat ourselves. A bottle of wine. A nice feed of lasagne. Maybe an early night? I smiled as I dialled his office number and asked for him.
It was then, in the second between me asking “Hi, can I speak to Mark Shanahan, please?” and the receptionist answering, that something shifted forever in my world.
That’s all it took – the time it took her to breathe in and start to speak – for things to shatter. I kind of wish I’d known. I can’t help, when I look back at it now, but feel like a bit of a stupid bitch for smiling so brightly as I spoke to her. If I had known, my voice would have been more sombre, doom-laden . . . I might even have sobbed.
“Mr Shanahan doesn’t work here anymore,” she cheeped. “Can anyone else help you?”
It was the strangest thing. I heard what she said and it did register – and a weird floating feeling came over me – but I felt kind of calm and maybe even a bit giddy.
“No, no, it’s fine,” I said.
“Okay then. Can I ask who’s calling?” she cheeped back.
I suppose a part of me wanted to just hang up, but another part of me was thinking of the lasagne which probably wasn’t going to get eaten and the bottle of wine that I had really been looking forward to and I knew things had changed – and changed
utterly.
“Kitty Shanahan,” I replied. “His wife.”
There was a pause, and I could hear her sharp intake of breath. I could almost hear her brain ticking over and as she spoke, softly and slowly, all hints of the cheerful but very guarded gate-keeperness gone, I almost felt sorry for her. She must have felt in an utterly awful position, to be honest.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Mr Shanahan left last week. I’m sorry.”
I thought of Mark, doe-eyed and smiling as he fixed his tie that morning and turned to kiss me as I left to open the shop.He had looked at his watch and declared he was running late and wouldn’t be long leaving after me and had rushed downstairs and into the kitchen. He had shouted to me if I knew where his keys were and I had replied that, yes, they were on the worktop.
It had been ordinary, absolutely ordinary, and now it really wasn’t. I put the phone down, resting the old-fashioned cream Bakelite receiver on the hook and I sighed.
Her sense for scandal piqued, my stepmother Rose peeked at me over the rim of her glasses and raised one eyebrow. “Everything okay?”
“Hmmm,” I replied, not quite sure what was going on. I didn’t want to say my husband had been going out to a fictitious job for the last week and I had known nothing about it, so I sat back on the cream-covered stool behind my desk and looked at my hands.
“Hmmm good, or hmmm bad?” Rose asked, putting down the delicate lace she had been hand-stitching in her armchair in the corner of our workroom and looking at me again.
I couldn’t lie to Rose, especially not when she was giving me her full and unadulterated attention.
“Mark’s not at work,” I mumbled, lifting my mobile phone and walking absentmindedly down the spiral staircase to our dressing room and on through the French doors to the garden. I knew Rose would follow me, and I would let her, but now I had to try Mark again even though I knew he already had at least four missed calls from me logged on his phone and that if he wanted to call me then he would have done. I supposed, then, if he had wanted me to know he had – for whatever reason – left his job a week before, he would have told me.
His phone started to ring and I tried to keep my breathing calm even though there was a distinct increase in the volume of adrenalin coursing through my veins.
It went to answer-phone and I listened to his voice jauntily telling me he couldn’t take my call right now but would get back to me if I just left my number. As the message beeped to a halt, heralding my turn to start talking, I heard a strangled squeak spring forth from my lips.
“It’s Kitty! Your wife! Call me!” And for effect I added the number of the shop, even though he knew it or at least had it in his phone and would easily be able to find it. I hung up and turned, nodded to Rose who looked utterly confused – but not as confused as I felt – and dialled his number again. He would answer this time. I felt it in my water. It would be fine. There would be two Mark Shanahans working in his office and the other one would have left – or the gatekeeper had just been feeling extra-vicious and gate-keeper-y and had decided to tell me a big fat lie. No. Everything was fine.
My waters were wrong, as it turned out. He didn’t answer. He didn’t even answer when I rang back a third time and shouted “Answer the shagging phone!” at the handset in my hand. Rose walked towards me and very calmly said, “I think maybe we should close the shop early.”
She had a point. No bride-to-be would want to walk in on this. This was not what anyone needed when they were contemplating their Big Day – a rather pale and shaking wedding-dress salesperson screaming into her iPhone for her husband to talk to her.
I nodded and watched as Rose left the garden to go and lock the door while I stared at my phone and willed it to burst into life. There was still time for this to be okay.
“A cup of tea will do the trick,” Rose said, bustling back through towards me. “I’ll just go upstairs and put the kettle on.”
A cup of tea sounded nice. It sounded soothing, even, so I followed Rose up the stairs and through the office into our kitchen – clutching my phone to me as I went and I sat down and watched as Rose boiled a kettle and put two mugs out, making her tea.
Rose was like that – an oasis of calm. Nothing phased her. She was the kind of person who, if she developed a slight case of spontaneous combustion, would simply douse herself with some cold water and mutter “Ah well, never mind” before getting on with her day.
“Mark wasn’t at work,” I said, as she mixed milk into the china mug and stirred it gently.
“Yes,” she nodded. “Custard cream?” She reached for our biscuit jar and offered it to me.
“He hasn’t been at work in a week,” I said, raising an eyebrow and challenging her to look surprised. “And he hasn’t told me. He hasn’t mentioned it to me at all.”
She looked at me and bit on a custard cream before taking a sip from her mug.
“The receptionist had to tell me,” I said, willing her to agree with me that it was a Very Big Deal Indeed.
She nodded, and polished off her biscuit.
“And he’s not answering his phone. I’ve tried, seven or eight times. He left a week agobut he’s been getting dressed every morning and heading out as usual and coming home his usual grumpy self.”
She nodded again.
I fought the urge to snatch the biscuit from her mouth and give her a good shake. “When I say ‘left’ I don’t mean just, you know, left. I mean he doesn’t work there anymore. I phoned and the receptionist said, very clearly, that Mark Shanahan doesn’t work there anymore.”
Rose sipped from her tea before setting her mug, slowly and carefully, back on the worktop.
“I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” she said. Which was bad. Rose saying she didn’t like the sound of something was akin to us mere mortals running around screaming hysterically that we were all doomed, doomed, I tells ya.
Chapter two
If 4.17p.m. marked the bomb dropping, 5.43p.m. marked a full-on nuclear implosion which made the initial bomb look like the charge from a Christmas Cracker snapping. A very small Christmas cracker with a very, very small charge.
Rose drove me home – she said I couldn’t be trusted to drive safely and she was probably right. My hands were shaking as were my legs, and my arms, and my head slightly. In fact I was one big shaky wreck and that was no good for driving in rush-hour traffic.
Rose drove a Smart car, which was an exceptionally bright pink. The steering wheel had aHello Kitty cover on it, and the seats were covered with lurid pink-nylon seat covers. There was a veritable sweetshop full of treats in the glove compartment which normally would have sent me into raptures but even the smell of the chocolate was making me feel slightly nauseated as Rose drove full pelt back to my house, listening to her Andrew Lloyd Webber collection and warbling along to ‘Could We Start Again Please’.
Mark should have been home. He had been back as usual every night for the last week, pulling into the driveway at 5.35 and walking through the door a minute or so later with a smile on his face as if nothing at all was wrong or different.
But as we pulled up the driveway was strangely empty, and I was smart enough to realise that this was probably not a good thing. Even Rose looked mildly perplexed which sent me rocketing to a whole new level of anxiety – one which I never knew existed.
“Do you want me to come in with you?” Rose asked, sucking on a Werther’s Original and nodding her head towards my house as if it were a crime scene, which I suppose it could well turn into before the day was over.
“Could you? Please?”
“Sure what else have I to do with my time? Go home and cook your dad his tea? He can make himself beans on toast or a tuna sandwich. I bought some of that lovely brown bread in the baker’s this morning.”
She was talking in the way she always did but she reached over and gave my hand a squeeze and I had to swallow hard. It would be fine. Rose would come in and her calming presence would wait with me until he c
ame home and then she might just stop me from killing him which, I figured, was probably a good thing in the long run.
She followed as I pushed the key into the lock and turned it and walked down the hall and looked into the kitchen where I saw the note he had left for me pinned to the fridge. She watched as I took it down, opened it and read it to learn that my husband had not only walked out of his job a week before but he had also walked out on our marriage and he absolutely and completely and totally did not intend on ever coming back.
The swimming, slightly numb sensation eased off a fair whack at that stage, it had to be said. It was as if my brain suddenly switched itself back on and started screaming.
“He’s not coming back,” I stuttered in a half-whisper, the words sounding strange in my throat.
Rose looked at me and there was a momentary hesitation in her reassurance which I didn’t miss.
“Of course he’s coming home,” she said.
“He’s really not,” I said, handing her the letter and walking to the sink and switching the tap on. Shaking, I looked at the water spill into the sink and wondered where the holy hell we kept our glasses? I looked at our cupboards but they all just swam in front of my eyes like they didn’t really exist, like nothing really existed any more.
I could hear Rose’s voice fading in and out as the screaming rose and fell in my head. She was on the phone to my father, calmly telling him there was tuna in the cupboard and that she had bought some Bourbon creams which she had stashed in the biscuit barrel. “You can have two,” I heard her say before telling him that everything was fine and that she would be home soon but she needed to be there for me just now. As I slammed my fourth cupboard door in a row and finally found a glass, I also found myself wishing I had an ounce of my stepmother’s calm in a crisis. I sipped from the glass, hoping it would steady me – it didn’t. I choked and looked at Rose. She was reading the letter again and shaking her head.