by Sarah Harte
‘You need to get over yourself,’ she had said. And she was right.
I could hear a door clunk.
‘Jimmy going to the bathroom,’ Shannon said. ‘The only place he goes, these days.’ She made a mournful face. ‘My mom would have tanned my ass if she heard me saying something like that about a shop like Lidl. She raised a large family on the income my dad brought home from the auto-parts shop he worked in and here am I whining. I shouldn’t whine,’ she said. ‘At least I’m not poor Tracey Thornley, right? At least I’m not married to the friend-to-the-stars “fugitive” accountant.’
Tracey’s husband Dermot had absconded under cover of darkness. Nobody knew where he was, although Dublin was awash with speculation. He was believed to be moving around Europe. Someone said they’d seen him, ‘bold as brass’, in London. It was reported that a warrant had been issued for his arrest and that international police agencies might be used to track him down. The telephone wires of Dublin and, in particular, our small patch were burning up. Stuff like that was pure gold in terms of gossip.
‘Poor Tracey,’ I said sadly. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about.’ The girl had been nervy at the best of times.
‘She’s gone down the country to stay with her parents,’ Shannon said. ‘I spoke to her. The media made it impossible for her to stay in the house. I even heard that there were non-media people outside it taking pictures.’
‘Weird,’ I said.
‘I suspect friends are melting away like snow,’ Shannon said.
She was being discussed constantly in hushed tones. I knew the drill. She would be stared at when she came into a room. Then they would look away quickly, while stealing sidelong glances, like people slowing down to stare at a car crash and driving reluctantly away for fear of being seen to be ghoulish. I’d been there. But for Tracey it was much worse. The coverage of Dermot and Tracey’s fall from grace had been extensive.
‘We should meet up with her when she comes back,’ I said, ‘invite her to do something.’
Shannon fixed her gaze on the middle distance. When she looked back at me she was a little wild-eyed. ‘Why did I ever let my career go?’
‘You had three boys,’ I told her. ‘You worked crazy hours.’
She shook her head. ‘You never think your life will turn out like this.’ She rubbed her fist over her mouth. ‘If only I had a goddam job.’
It was a bright, cold afternoon. The sky was devoid of clouds. Everything had glistened but now the afternoon light was beginning to fade. Girls had been playing basketball outside in the grim yard so that high-pitched girlish shrieks of delight and calls of ‘defence’ floated up to the window. I’d been over and back to the window a couple of times, watching them, their thighs pink and white in the cold. Now the teams were roaring down the corridors, whirling and eddying, laughing and calling after each other, joyful and giddy.
Lauren and I were doing battle with algebra. Specifically we were attempting to solve quadratic equations. ‘The thing is, Lauren, just in the same way as with linear equations, the solutions to quadratic equations may be verified by plugging them back into the original equation and making sure they actually work.’
Lauren nibbled the end of her pen in frustration. She heaved a heavy sigh, her heart-shaped gold earrings swaying. ‘It’s so hard, miss.’
‘Satisfying, though, when you work it out,’ I said.
She made a little face. Lauren was a different proposition from Janice. She was a stouter girl with ironed hair and a touch of acne, whose optimism and eagerness could suddenly give way to dark sardonic looks. She swerved from one to the other, shadows flitting across her sunny face if she didn’t succeed at the rate she wanted to. She was very clever but highly strung.
‘What would you like to do?’ I had asked her, the first time we had met.
‘Get the fuck out of here,’ she had said, flashing me a smile that was part naïveté, part worldly-wise and knowing cynic, ‘if you’ll excuse the language, miss.’
She lived alone with her father, who worked for the corporation collecting refuse. Her mother was dead. Animal didn’t know how.
Lauren fidgeted in her chair, restlessly shifting position. Even now while she was frowning at the page, her head propped in her palm, she was adjusting herself so that she was considering the problem from another direction.
‘She’s very bright,’ Animal had said, ‘but her concentration isn’t the best.’
I moved to the door. Peering out the small window I saw that the basketball players were mingling with the school band, who had been released from another classroom. Although they bled into a big swarm you could tell the children in the band from the basketball players not only because of their clothes but because the musicians were paler and less robust.
I meandered back to the main window, darting a glance at my watch. There were papers and leaves blowing across the empty yard. It was a depressing place. I stared at it, not really focusing until I sensed Lauren’s eyes examining me. ‘You’re very spaced today, miss, if you don’t mind me saying.’
‘I’m sorry, Lauren,’ I said, flashing her an apologetic smile.
I’d found it hard to concentrate all day. When the headmaster had waylaid me earlier next to the graffiti-covered wall to invite me to the Christmas staff party I’d found myself twitching as I waited for him to finish.
Now my phone vibrated on the desk. Lauren’s dark gaze was on me as I dived for it. Frank’s number was flashing up. ‘I’ll have to take this,’ I breathed.
Frank hadn’t got the planning. An Bord Pleanála had rejected the scheme in its entirety. The decision of the board was unanimous. Frank’s development would have ‘destroyed the coherence’ of the area, they said. It represented ‘gross over-development’ of a site of scenic rural beauty.
The evening edition of the paper, which I bought on the way home, screamed, ‘Lawlor Vision in Ruins’. There was a shot of Frank on the nine o’clock news walking down the street in a three-piece suit and a camel coat. Eamon was scurrying alongside him, looking sepulchral in his shiny shoes.
Ella and Dylan and I watched the footage of Frank coming out of his offices. I tried to watch closely the effect it would have on my children, to see if it might change their attitude to him. Would they swallow their anger with him? They’d both refused to ring him after Fiona Keane lost the baby. Nor would they ring him that morning, as I’d suggested, to wish him luck in advance of the board’s decision.
‘Down but not out’ was the soundbite Frank called out, as he barged through the phalanx of waiting reporters, snapping shut his phone. He followed this up with a magisterial wave.
An androgynous reporter yelled at him, pointing a mic in his face, ‘Is this curtains for you, Mr Lawlor?’
Frank scoffed at the suggestion, absorbing it without a flinch, theatrical in his unconcern. ‘Not a bit of it,’ he deadpanned, all cavalier bonhomie. ‘These are broad shoulders,’ he said, tapping his collar bone so that we got a flash of his Irish Celtic harp cufflinks sticking out from under his jacket.
Mam used to talk a lot about ‘the broad Lawlor shoulders’ and ‘the Lawlor steel’.
Frank paused. ‘We have a new plan in the works already,’ he said, clasping his hands behind his back. He was sucking in his stomach, I was fairly certain. He tilted his head, his eyes meeting the camera’s lens squarely. ‘It will be on a smaller scale with less capital expenditure and a shorter building time.’
Frank’s face looked a little doughy. The lighting bleached some colour from it. But he remained buoyant throughout and the smile stayed fixed.
‘Poor Dad,’ I said, stealing glances at my children.
They made no acknowledgement of what I’d said. Ella’s head fell back against the cushions, her face tense. Dylan was hunkered down by the edge of the sofa, making a sucking sound between his teeth. The idea, I decided, was to project casualness, as if to say, ‘Wh
at do I care?’
‘Never say die,’ was Frank’s parting shot before a lugubrious Eamon ushered him into a waiting car.
‘Your dad’s a fighter,’ I said lightly, my eyes fixed on the screen. ‘The winners in life are the ones who pick themselves up after failures and disappointments and get back on the horse.’
Dylan threw me a sidelong glance that I pretended not to see. His suspicions were founded: this lecture was directed at him.
‘Dylan needs a good root up the arse,’ Karen had said one day. And she was right.
I didn’t go too hard on him. He was more vulnerable than Ella, who had processed Frank’s betrayal of us and seemed to be getting on with her life. The very vehemence of Dylan’s reaction – jeering at Frank behind his back, wanting to scissor him out of family photos – pointed to a greater hurt.
Ella plucked a cushion from the sofa and hugged it to her chest. ‘It’s the end of Dad’s dream,’ she said. ‘That’s basically it.’
‘What happens now?’ Dylan was staring at the television.
‘I’m not sure,’ I told them. ‘It’s all a bit up in the air.’
We’d had a short conversation on the phone earlier, Frank and I. He’d sounded a lot flatter than he had on the TV. ‘I’m sorry, Frank.’
‘I’m sorry too, Anita girl,’ he’d said.
‘Will the banks foreclose?’
Frank had offered a bone-dry laugh. ‘Who would buy the site from them now? I’m not sure there’s much appetite for big projects at the moment.’ He had sighed heavily. ‘My guess is the bank will get me to run the site for them, to develop it or sell it off or what-have-you. They took equity in it a year ago. The decision is as much a slap in the face for them as for us.’ There was the sound of a match flaring and extinguishing.
‘It must be a big shock.’ I could hear him gulping a drink and then exhaling.
‘You could say that.’
Another gulp.
‘Sure fuck it, the site was probably non-viable with full planning permission anyway. The bank wouldn’t have given me the money to finish it in this climate. You were dead fucking right what you said, Anita. I went to the bank with a set of costings and revenue projections that turned out to be halfway up my arse. And Paul Hogan was a bigger feckin’ eejit to go along with it. There was a pair of us in it and a few more besides,’ he said.
I could hear him blowing smoke out through his nose.
‘It wasn’t the only way I was reckless. Anita …’ He was faltering.
‘Don’t, Frank,’ I had said, pre-empting him.
He had ignored me. ‘Anita, I got swept along.’
‘Frank!’ I said, to cut him off.
But he had continued: ‘I tried to break it off but the fecking thing kept rekindling …’
I heard a woman’s voice in the background then. She sounded shrill.
‘Christ, am I allowed have a fag after the day I’ve had? What? I’m on the phone to – listen …’
The reception had become muffled then, as Frank put his hand over the phone. Little Miss Big Knockers and he were arguing, that much was clear.
‘I’m wanted here,’ he had said, turning back to the phone.
‘You’d better go so,’ I’d said, unable to resist the dig.
Now I said to the kids, ‘The Lawlors are from tough stock, and your dad will be all right. You’ve good Offaly genes,’ I added, teasing them.
‘And Dublin ones,’ Dylan said, with a sly smile, ‘what with Uncle Billy robbing off the boats.’
Ella and I laughed. Dylan hunched his shoulders and looked pleased with himself.
A short fat man in a pin-striped suit with springy curly hair, half-moon glasses and a presidential air succeeded Frank on the news.
‘Who’s this arsehole?’ Dylan said, frowning.
‘He’s a barrister who represented a group of objectors to Dad’s scheme,’ I told them. ‘Dad hates him.’
‘Yes, yes,’ the barrister was saying, in a stentorian voice, looking like the cat that got the cream. ‘One hopes that this decision marks a watershed, if you will. That it signals the end of developer-led development in this country and that so-called’ – his short pug nose lifted as if he’d smelt something particularly odious – ‘iconic signature buildings are at an end. Proper sustainable development is what we need in this country …’
Ella lifted her eyes from the screen. ‘Screw him,’ she said, setting down the cushion. She inched her bum to the edge of the sofa and folded her slender arms across her body. ‘Dad has cojones,’ she said, fixing eyes with a glum Dylan. It was a Frank word, and I watched the set lines of her mouth soften a little. ‘I’m going to ring him,’ she said, her eyes sliding away to the other side of the room.
15
I’d kept it simple. We’d had spiced beef and potato salad, with cheese to follow. Maureen was casting around for crackers. She looked chunky in a peach dress with a shot of silver, her hair puffed out like a golden mushroom. ‘Would you mind?’ she murmured to me, dabbing her mouth with a spattered linen napkin. ‘It’s silly but I need crackers for cheese.’
Maureen was a little rattled, I thought, by the untidiness. Her house was always pristine. Mine was certainly not as clean as it used to be. Lena, our cleaner, had gone home to Poland. Her husband had lost his job in construction. They wouldn’t be coming back. And I wouldn’t be replacing her. I couldn’t afford to. Not really. And while I was a demon cleaner, I found I had less time, or maybe inclination.
We were four. Me, Maeve, Maureen and Tracey Thornley. The get-together was ostensibly to revive our defunct book club. Brideshead Revisited was the book. Really, I’d wanted to host something small for Tracey without letting her know. I did not want to make a cause célèbre of her, collecting her to my bosom as some people did with newly anointed victims, hoping to gain a ringside seat for the drama. I had equivocated about ringing her, unsure what to do, when she didn’t reply to my text. But then Shannon had told me she had ‘died a social death – it’s like she’s toxic.’
So I had rung her. The poor girl had jumped at the invitation. ‘But Dermot was Frank’s accountant,’ she had said, her voice tired and broken.
‘Means nothing, Tracey,’ I told her. ‘You’re a different person.’ I had debated then about saying anything else for fear of implying anything or seeming like I was sitting in judgement. But I had added, ‘And just for your information, Dermot didn’t invest on behalf of Frank.’
The court of public opinion had condemned her to social limbo. She might be a curiosity but that would fade and then she would be left to rot. Dermot was a pariah who had stolen from his own and she had become one by extension. Unless she broke with him totally she would not be rehabilitated. And it was said that they were still in contact. Despite everything, she seemed to love him.
Now that she was here she wasn’t saying much. Her hair looked like it had been professionally blow-dried, which wouldn’t have suited those who expected her to look repentant. She was extremely subdued, though, which might quell their ire, a ghostly shadow in the corner with the book propped listlessly in her lap, the manic chat silenced.
It was as Shannon had suggested to me: Tracey seemed to be doped up to the gills, speaking as if she was coming out of an anaesthetic. I had wanted Shannon to come as she got on best with Tracey, but she had pulled out at the last minute, leaving a brief message: ‘I just can’t, hon, I’m really sorry.’
It was hard to strike the balance with Tracey, to welcome her but without marking her out with undue fuss. And it was difficult to know what to say. There weren’t all that many conventional utterances to take refuge in. Sorry your husband’s a crook who defrauded all and sundry, left you and your offspring and didn’t even have the balls to face the music.
Maureen had taken Tracey under her wing, thrilled at the prospect of having somebody to sympathize with. Not that Maureen was short of cand
idates. Currently she had an embarrassment of riches in that department. She was positively chipper. There were lame dogs everywhere ready – or not – for kind words.
There was me, of course, with my husband who had not only left me but was in a precarious financial position. Maureen had also made a perky little comment about lovely refreshing non-alcoholic drinks, which let me know that my giving up the hooch had not slipped under her radar. Maeve persistently told me I was mad to have quit.
‘You like a drink – big deal. I hope to God this restraint isn’t part of the new national mood for self-flagellation.’
In general people said nothing, which led me to the conclusion that they had thought me a complete pisshead and were fearful of embarrassing me by drawing attention to my new sobriety.
The news had gone around about Jimmy’s losing his job and his marbles. Maureen had come back from a visit to Shannon – a visit that had not been solicited and I knew hadn’t been well received – saying ‘The poor girl looked a wreck,’ and ‘in time’ would ‘hopefully accept’ that ‘nobody forced Jimmy to borrow the money for the shares’. If she had been put out at Shannon’s slightly ferocious acceptance of her good wishes she hadn’t said anything except that she seemed ‘very down and a little tense’.
‘I wanted to strangle her,’ Shannon had seethed. ‘She went on about her blimp of a son losing his job in London. She said how hard it had been on him walking out of his firm with a cardboard box of his belongings. He’s not even thirty. He has no family. They have so much money. For Christ’s sake.’
With Shannon’s permission, I had asked Frank to put out feelers discreetly among his contacts and see if there were any jobs going for a person of her talents. And I had asked Maeve to consult Ultan. Maeve would have set about it quietly and without talk. For all her retailing of gossip and her love of the salacious, she was not a real bitch.
‘Anything at all,’ Shannon had said.
Ciara had talked a lot about inviting Shannon out, about ‘doing something for her’, but that had come to nothing, which was why I hadn’t bothered inviting Ciara to the soirée. I was done with her.