by Marian Keyes
Pauline sighed unhappily. Lisa’s big brother Nigel had got divorced five years previously. She’d had her children late in life, and she didn’t understand the ways of their world.
‘They say that two in three marriages end in divorce,’ Pauline acknowledged, and abruptly Lisa wanted to yell that she wouldn’t be getting divorced and that her mum was a horrible old trout to even suggest it.
Pauline’s worry for her daughter wrestled with fear of her. ‘Was it because you were… different?’
‘Different, Mum?’ Lisa was tart.
‘Well, with him being… coloured?’
‘Coloured!’
‘That’s the wrong word,’ Pauline amended hastily, then tentatively tried, ‘Black?’
Lisa clicked her tongue and sighed hard.
‘African-American?’
‘For crying out loud, Mum, he’s English!’ Lisa knew she was being cruel, but it was hard to change the habits of a lifetime.
‘English African-American, then?’ Pauline said desperately. ‘Whatever he is, he’s very nice-looking.’
Pauline said this often to show she wasn’t prejudiced. Though her heart had nearly stopped with fright the first time she’d met Oliver. If only she’d been warned that her daughter’s boyfriend was a hard, gleaming, six-foot-tall black man. Coloured man, African-American man, whatever the correct phrase was. She had nothing against them, it was just the unexpectedness of it.
And once she’d got used to him, she was able to get beyond his colour and see that he really was a nice-looking boy. To put it mildly.
A huge ebony prince, with smooth, lustrous skin pulled tight over slanting cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes and thin, swingy dreadlocks that ended at his jaw-line. He walked as if he was dancing and he smelt of sunshine. Pauline also suspected – though she would never have been able to consciously formulate it – that he was hung like a donkey.
‘Did he meet someone else?’
‘No.’
‘But he might, Lisa love. A nice-looking boy like him.’
‘Fine by me.’ If she said it often enough, it would eventually become true.
‘Won’t you be lonely, love?’
‘I won’t have time to be lonely,’ Lisa snapped. ‘I have a career to think of.’
‘I don’t know why you need a career. I didn’t have one and it didn’t do me any harm.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Lisa said fiercely. ‘You could have done with one after Dad hurt his back and we had to live on his disability.’
‘But money isn’t everything. We were ever so happy.’
‘I wasn’t.’
Pauline lapsed into silence. Lisa could hear her breathing over the phone.
‘I’d best go,’ Pauline eventually said. ‘This must be costing you.’
‘Sorry, Mum,’ Lisa sighed. ‘I didn’t mean it. Did you get that parcel I sent you?’
‘Oh yes,’ Pauline said nervously. ‘The face creams and lipsticks. Very nice, thanks.’
‘Have you used them?’
‘Weeeell –’ Pauline began.
‘You haven’t,’ Lisa accused.
Lisa showered Pauline with expensive perfumes and cosmetics that she got in the course of her job. Desperate for her to have a bit of luxury. But Pauline refused to relinquish her Pond’s and Rimmel products. Once she’d even said, ‘Oh, your things are too good for me, love.’
‘They’re not too good for you,’ Lisa had exploded.
Pauline couldn’t understand Lisa’s rage. All she knew was that she dreaded the days when the postman knocked on her door and said cheerfully, ‘Another parcel from your girl up in London.’ Sooner or later Pauline was always called upon to deliver a progress report.
Unless it was a parcel of books. Lisa used to send her mum review copies of Catherine Cookson and Josephine Cox, in the mistaken belief that she’d love all that rags-to-riches romantic stuff. Until the day Pauline said, ‘That was a terrific book you sent me, love, about that East End villain who used to nail his victims to a pool table.’ It transpired that Lisa’s assistant had mistakenly parcelled up the wrong book, and it marked a new departure in Pauline Edwards’ reading. Now she thrived on gangster biographies and hard-boiled American thrillers, the more torture scenes the better, and someone else’s mum got sent the Catherine Cooksons.
‘I wish you’d come and see us, love. It’s been ages.’
‘Um, yeah,’ Lisa said vaguely. ‘I’ll come soon.’
No fear! With every visit the house she’d grown up in seemed smaller and more shockingly dreary. In the poky little rooms crammed with dirt-cheap furniture, she felt shiny and foreign, with her false nails and glossy leather shoes, uncomfortably aware that her handbag probably cost more than the Dralon couch she was sitting on. But though her mum and dad oohed and aawed respectfully over her fabulousness, they were fluttery-nervous around her.
She should have dressed down on her visits, to try to narrow the gap. But she needed as much stuff as possible, to wear like a suit of armour, so that she couldn’t be sucked back in, subsumed by her past.
She hated it all, then hated herself.
‘Why don’t you come and see me?’ Lisa asked. If they wouldn’t make the half-hour train journey from Hemel Hempstead to London they were hardly likely to fly to Dublin.
‘But with your Dad not being well and…’
When Clodagh woke on Sunday morning she was mildly hung-over, but in great form. Briefly at liberty to snuggle up to Dylan and ignore his erection with a clean conscience.
When Molly and Craig appeared, Dylan urged them sleepily, ‘Go downstairs and break things, and let Mummy and me have a snooze.’
Amazingly they left, and Clodagh and Dylan drifted in and out of sleep.
‘You smell lovely,’ Dylan mumbled into Clodagh’s hair. ‘Like biscuits. All sweet and… sweet
Some time later she whispered to him, ‘I’ll give you a million pounds if you get me some breakfast.’
‘What would you like?’
‘Coffee and fruit.’
Dylan left and Clodagh stretched like a contented starfish across the bed until he reappeared with a mug in one hand and a banana in the other. He placed the banana on his groin facing downwards, then when Clodagh looked, he faked a gasp and swung the banana upwards, like a quivering erection. ‘Why Mrs Kelly,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re beautiful!’
Clodagh laughed, but felt the familiar guilt begin its relentless creep.
Later they went out for lunch, to one of those places that didn’t make you feel like outcasts for bringing along two young children. Dylan went to procure a cushion for Molly to sit on, and as Clodagh wrestled a knife out of Molly’s hand she caught a glimpse of Dylan chatting persuasively with a waitress – a Bambi-limbed teenager – who flushed at her proximity to such a good-looking man.
That good-looking man was her husband, Clodagh realized, and suddenly, oddly, she barely recognized him. Assailed by that weird see-saw feeling of knowing someone so well that out of nowhere she didn’t know him at all. Familiarity generally dulled the impact of his sunny blond hair, the smile that rippled his skin into layers of parentheses around his mouth, the hazel eyes which were nearly always full of fun. She was surprised and unsettled by his beauty.
What was it Ashling had said yesterday? Recapture the magic.
Her mind produced an image: she was panting with desire, her groin swollen with want, being laid back in the sand… Sand? No, hold on a minute, that wasn’t Dylan, that was Jean-Pierre, the knee-tremblingly seductive Frenchman whom she’d lost her virginity to. God, she sighed, that had been brilliant. Eighteen, hostelling along the French Riviera, he’d been the sexiest man she’d ever clapped eyes on. And she had very high standards, she’d never so much as kissed any of the boys she hung around with at home. But the minute she’d seen Jean-Pierre’s intense moody stare, beautiful sulky mouth and loose Gallic body-language she’d decided that he was the one who’d receive the highly prized gift of her virginity.
Of course she’d felt like that about Dylan too. She rummaged in her past for specific memories and dusted off her favourite. The first time she’d ever seen him. Their eyes had – literally – met across a crowded room and before she’d learnt the first thing about him, she’d known everything she needed to know.
Five years older than Clodagh, he made all the other boys look like spotty, wet-behind-the-ears youths. There was a sureness and an urbane confidence about him that rendered him utterly charismatic. He smiled, he charmed, his very presence was warming, uplifting – and reassuring: even though his business was only starting up she had cast-iron faith that Dylan would always make everything all right. And he was so yummy!
She was twenty years of age, dazzled by his blond good looks and giddy with her good fortune. He was so right for her that there was no doubt but that he was the one she was going to marry. Even when her parents had insisted that she was too young to know her own mind, she’d scorned their advice. Dylan was the one for her, she was the one for Dylan.
‘There you go, Molly!’ He was back with the cushion that three teenage girls had fought over giving to him. It was only then that Clodagh noticed that Molly had poured half the salt into the sugar bowl.
After lunch they drove to the beach. It was a bright, blustery day, just warm enough to take off their shoes and paddle in the waves. Dylan got a man walking his dog to take a photo of the four of them clustered together against the clean, empty sand, smiling as the wind whipped their flaxen hair across their faces, Clodagh clasping one side of her skirt to keep it from sticking to her wet legs.
8
Lisa showed up for work at eight o’clock on Monday morning. Start as you mean to go on. But to her disgust the building was locked. She hung around in the damp air for a while and eventually went to get a cup of coffee. Even that took some doing. It wasn’t like London where coffee emporia had their doors open at the break of day.
At nine o’lock, when she left the coffee shop, it had started to rain. Her arm over her hair, she hurried along, her four-inch heels skidding on the slick pavement. Suddenly she halted and heard herself screeching at a passing young man in an anorak, ‘Does it always rain in this naffing country?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, nervously. ‘I’m only twenty-six.’
At the front-door Lisa was greeted by a girl called Trix. She was a rash of goosepimples in a little see-through slip-dress and was jigging from high clumpy foot to high clumpy foot to keep warm. When she saw Lisa, her face lit with admiration and she hastily ground her cigarette out.
‘Howya,’ she growled, exhaling her last plume of smoke. ‘Killer shoes! I’m Trix, your PA. Before you ask, my name is Patricia, but there’s no point calling me that because I won’t answer to it. I was Trixie until the people two doors up got a poodle by the same name, so now I’m Trix. I used to be the receptionist and general dogsbody but I’ve been promoted, thanks to you. Mind you, they haven’t replaced me… Over here, the lift is this way.
‘I’d be the first to admit my typing isn’t the best,’ Trix confided, as they went up. ‘But my lying is fantastic, easily sixty words a minute. I can say you’re in a meeting to anyone you don’t want to talk to and they’ll never suspect. Unless you want them to suspect. I can do intimidation too, see?’
Lisa believed her.
Though she was twenty-one and peachy-pretty, Trix had a toughness that Lisa recognized. From her own younger days.
The first shock of the day was that Randolph Media Ireland only took up one floor – the London offices filled an entire twelve-storey tower.
‘I’ve to bring you to see Jack Devine,’ Trix said.
‘He’s the Irish MD, isn’t he?’ Lisa said.
‘Is he?’ Trix sounded surprised. ‘I suppose he is. He’s the boss anyway, or so he thinks. I take no nonsense from him.
‘You’d want to have seen him last week.’ She lowered her voice dramatically. ‘Like a bear with a sore arse. But he’s in good humour today, this means he’s back with his girl. The carry-on of the pair of them – they make Pamela and Tommy look like the Waltons of Waltons’ Mountain.’
Further shocks were in store for Lisa – Trix led Lisa into an open-plan office with about fifteen desks. Fifteen! How could a magazine empire be run from fifteen desks, a boardroom and a small kitchen?
A horrible thought struck her. ‘But… where’s the fashion department?’
‘There.’ Trix nodded at a rail shunted into a corner on which was hanging a dreadful peach jumper that obviously had something to do with Gaelic Knitting, a bridesmaid’s dress, a wedding meringue and some men’s clothing.
Jesus Christ! The fashion department at Femme had taken up an entire room. Crammed with samples from all the high-street shops, it meant that Lisa hadn’t had to buy new clothes for several years. Something would have to be done! Already her head was buzzing with plans to get on to her contacts in fashion-land but Trix was introducing her to the two members of staff who were already in. ‘This is Dervla and Kelvin, they work on other magazines, so they’re not your staff. Not like me,’ she said proudly.
‘Dervla O’Donnell, pleased to meet you.’ A large, forty-something woman in an elegant smock shook Lisa’s hand and smiled. ‘I’m Hibernian Bride, Celtic Health and Gaelic Interiors.’ Lisa could tell at a glance that this woman was an ex-hippy.
‘And I’m Kelvin Creedon.’ A painfully fashionable, peroxide-haired man in black-framed Joe Ninety spectacles grabbed Lisa’s hand. She knew immediately that the specs were only for show and the glass in them was clear. Early-twenties, she reckoned he was. He radiated cool, youthful energy. ‘I’m The Hip Hib, Celtic Car, DIY Irish-style and Keol, our music magazine.’ His many silver rings hurt Lisa’s hand.
‘What do you mean?’ Lisa asked in confusion. ‘You edit all of these magazines?’
‘And research and write them.’
‘All by yourself.’ Lisa couldn’t stop herself. She looked from Kelvin to Dervla.
‘With the help of the odd freelance,’ Dervla said. ‘Sure all we have to do is regurgitate press releases.
‘It hasn’t been so bad since The Catholic Judger went to the wall.’ Dervla misjudged Lisa’s shock for concern. ‘That gives me Thursday afternoons to work on something else.’
‘Are they weekly or monthly publications?’
Dervla and Kelvin turned to each other, their mouths open but silent in a synchronization of uncontrollable laughter to come. They’d never heard anything so funny in their lives.
‘Monthly!’ Dervla heaved, in disbelief.
‘Weekly!’ Kelvin went one better.
Then Dervla noticed Lisa’s frown and hurriedly calmed down. ‘No. Twice a year, mostly. The Catholic Judger was weekly, but everything else comes out in Spring and Autumn. Unless there’s some sort of disaster.
‘Remember Autumn 1999?’ She turned to Kelvin. Kelvin obviously did because the laughter started anew.
‘Computer virus,’ Kelvin explained. ‘Wiped everything.’
‘It wasn’t funny at the time…’
But, clearly, it was now.
‘Look.’ Dervla steered Lisa towards a rack on which various glossies were displayed. She handed her a slender volume that declared itself to be Hibernian Bride, Spring 2000.
That’s not a magazine, Lisa thought. That’s a pamphlet. A leaflet, in fact. Nothing more than a memo. Hell, it’s barely a Post-it.
‘And this is Spud, our food magazine.’
Dervla handed another pamphlet to Lisa. ‘Shauna Griffin edits that as well as Gaelic Knitting and Irish Gardening.’
Another member of staff had just arrived. Too boring to qualify as even nondescript, Lisa thought in disgust – medium height, balding and wearing a wedding ring. Human wallpaper. She could hardly be bothered to say hello to him.
‘This is Gerry Godson, the art director. He doesn’t talk much,’ Trix said loudly. ‘Sure you don’t, Gerry? Blink once for yes, twice for fuck off and leave me alone.’
Gerry blinked twice, and maintained a stony face. Then he smiled widely, shook Lisa’s hand and said, ‘Welcome to Colleen. I’e been working on the other magazines here, but now I’m going to be working exclusively for you.’
‘And me,’ Trix reminded him. ‘I’m her PA, you know, I’l be giving the orders.’
‘Jayzus,’ Gerry muttered good-naturedly.
Lisa tried hard to smile.
Trix rapped lightly on Jack’s door, then opened it. Jack looked up. In repose, his face was slightly mournful and hang-dog and his sloe-black eyes held secrets. Then he saw Lisa and smiled in recognition, even though they’d never met. Everything lifted.
‘Lisa?’ The way her name sounded when uttered by him stirred something warm in her. ‘Come in, sit down.’ He skirted around his desk and came to shake her hand.
Lisa’s lead-heavy foreboding gave her some breathing space. She liked the look of this Jack. Tall? Tick! Dark? Tick! Well-paid? Tick! He was a managing director, even if it was only of an Irish company.
And there was something slightly unorthodox about him that excited her. Though he wore a suit, she sensed it was under duress, and his hair was longer than would have been considered acceptable in London.
So what if he had a girlfriend? When had that ever been an impediment?
‘We’re all very excited about Colleen,’ Jack insisted. But Lisa heard a nugget of weariness at the heart of his statement. His smile had disappeared and he was once more serious and broody.