With Poppy.
While I’m still very much on my own.
Now that the initial shock has faded a bit, I’m starting to feel the unfairness of it all. I know that sounds childish and petulant. I know that life isn’t fair and I know that compared with some people I have it very easy. I could be living in the slums of Calcutta, with typhoid and leprosy. I could be sleeping rough. In Zimbabwe. Then I’d know all about pain and suffering. But it doesn’t stop this burning urge I have to smack him across his smug look-at-me-I-just-got-engaged face. It’s not like I don’t want him to be happy, I just want to be happy first.
‘So where did you meet her? In day care? Or maybe you were babysitting her?’
‘Don’t be like that, Amelia. It’s not you.’
‘You can see where I’m coming from, though. You and I were together for three years. Anyone you’re with now is only supposed to be your transitional person, they’re not meant to be The One.’
‘All I want is for you to be happy for me.’
‘And my hypnotherapy begins when?’
‘I’m getting married because I’m in love with her.’
‘Well, I didn’t think you were getting married for all the lovely new kitchen appliances.’
He shook his head sadly. ‘Look, Amelia, I think you’re a fantastic person, I really do. There’s no one who wants you to find happiness more than me. I mean it. But you must know, deep down, that you and I would never have worked out. I never expected to find the love of my life so soon after we split but, as Poppy says, you don’t look for love; love looks for you.’
‘And what are you doing back in Ireland?’ Here to sell his house and then get the hell out of my life for ever?
‘Poppy’s family are throwing us an engagement party next week.’
I was about to beg heaven that he wasn’t here to invite me, when something struck … ‘Poppy’s family came over to Ireland with you?’
‘No. They live here.’
‘So … she’s Irish.’
‘Yeah, from Donnybrook. Just round the corner.’
I’ve never needed a brandy so badly in my life. I swear, if this was a plot on Celtic Tigers, no one would believe it.
‘In fact, that’s why I wanted to give you the news myself.’
‘But you are going back to Stab … I mean Johannesburg with what’s-her-name, aren’t you?’
‘Why would you think I was going back to Jo’burg?’
‘Because that’s where you live. That’s where you’re from. That’s your territory. This is my hemisphere, not yours.’ By now, I’m on the point of calling a taxi for the airport and shoving him on to the first flight back. Anything, just to get him out of my apartment, out of Dublin and out of my life.
‘Well, that’s what I’ve come to tell you.’
‘WHAT exactly? I don’t want to appear rude, but I would have had less of a shock tonight if I’d just gone and stuck two fingers into an electric socket. Surely, for the love of God, you have nothing else to land on me?’
‘Poppy’s family are really wealthy, you see, and her parents naturally want her close by.’
‘So?’
‘So her father gave us an early wedding present.’
‘I’m guessing it wasn’t a set of steak knives.’
‘No. It’s the duplex right across the road from here. I really hope you’re OK about this, Amelia, but you see, the thing is, we’re going to be neighbours.’
Chapter Eleven
I Don’t Sleep, I Vacuum
Seven-thirty a.m. the following morning and, I’m not joking, Jamie and Rachel are already pounding on my door, to see if I’m OK. Before I even open up, I can hear the pair of them in the hallway outside bickering.
‘The best thing I can say about these flowers is that they aren’t dead,’ says Rachel.
‘I know, I know, but what do you expect me to get at this ungodly hour?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, flowers that don’t look like something you’d leave on the grave of an uncle that died and left you nothing in his will?’
The minute I let them in, they both hug me so tightly I almost have to come up for air.
‘Are you OK, sweetie?’ says Jamie, ‘I mean really OK? Not just putting a brave face on for us? You can let it all out, baby, this isn’t a Merchant Ivory movie.’
‘Just so you know,’ says Rachel, ‘I had absolutely nothing to do with the flowers.’
Jamie hands over the sad-looking chrysanthemums apologetically. ‘Sorry. I bought them from this poor homeless alcoholic who was selling them outside a garage. What can I say? I felt sorry for him.’
‘You mean you didn’t know him? I thought that was your agent.’
‘Oh, shut up, Cruella.’
‘I did, however, bring supplies,’ Rachel goes on, holding up a paper bag from the deli down the road. ‘You know, useful stuff. The fags are for me, the bagels are for you and the chocolate croissants are for Fat Boy Slim here.’
‘Thanks,’ I say dully, leading them down the corridor to the living room.
‘Holy God!’ they both exclaim in total shock when they see what I’ve been doing for the last seven hours.
‘After he left, I couldn’t sleep,’ I explain, ‘so I cleaned. Everything. All night long. There isn’t a surface in this room that you couldn’t perform an operation on. I had to stop myself when I ended up scouring the fake coal in the gas fire. I only wish I were joking.’
‘Jesus, the smell of bleach in here,’ says Rachel, waving her hand in front of her face in a futile attempt to dispel the fumes. ‘Remind me not to light a ciggie or we’ll all go up in flames.’
I slump wearily on to the sofa and Jamie hops into the kitchen. In no time, he’s brewed up some incredibly colourless, watery instant coffee and handed me and Rachel a mug each. ‘Drink that up, darling,’ he says to me, really concerned. ‘You look like you’ve just given three pints of blood.’
‘Ughh,’ says Rachel spitting hers back into the mug. ‘Jamie! Will you look at the state of her! Go and make her something so strong she could trot a mouse over it. Irish it up if you have to. If this isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is.’
‘Sorry, Amelia, can’t see straight,’ he says, grabbing the mug from me. ‘I think I’m still a bit drunk from last night. I was only coming in the door when I got your dawn distress call. I know, I know, feel free to call me a big dirty stop-out.’
‘Where were you?’ I ask automatically. Anything to divert the subject away from what we’re inevitably going to have to talk about in minute, forensic detail.
‘In a pub, then a club, then a tub with my sexy Spaniard.’
‘A tub?’ My questions are all lacklustre. Mechanical.
‘He’s staying at the Clarence and it has an outdoor hot tub. And you know how I’m a sucker for freebies. Well, freebies that other people end up paying for. It has a fabulous view.’
‘Of what?’
‘Marks and Spencer’s loading bay.’
‘Jamie,’ I say, ‘I know I’m functioning on very little sleep, but when we last spoke about this guy, all of – what? – ten hours ago, you distinctly said that you hated him.’
‘What can I say? I’m complex.’
‘You’re pulling focus away from Amelia,’ says Rachel threateningly. ‘I hate to have to tell you to shut up, but shut up.’
He skulks back into my tiny galley kitchen to make some proper coffee this time, as my phone beep-beeps.
‘It’s Caroline,’ I say, reading the text. ‘Stuck in traffic on the school run. She’ll be here in a half-hour.’
For about the millionth time in my life, I marvel at the pals I have. I can’t remember who it was that said ‘My glory was I had such friends’, but at this moment I feel like having it engraved on my tombstone.
‘You guys,’ I say to Rachel, squeezing her hand. ‘What would I do without you? I send out the SOS and here you all are.’
‘With poppy-seed bagels,’ Jamie shouts f
rom the kitchen.
‘Did you have to say poppy?’
‘Ooops, sorry, I forgot.’
‘Of course we’re here for you, darling,’ says Rachel, lighting a fag. ‘You’ve done the same for us and will do again. The question is: What are we going to do?’
‘I have something positive to contribute. Well, actually two things,’ says Jamie, coming back in from the kitchen, having switched on my espresso maker.
‘If you’re able to put any kind of positive spin on this,’ I say, ‘then you should be in Downing Street, working for Tony Blair. There is absolutely no hope for any kind of happy outcome in this situation. For God’s sake, I can see the house they’re moving into from my bedroom window. I checked last night. About fifty times.’
‘Just hear me out. Maybe he traded down from you.’
‘What?’
‘Well, here you are, great job, great friends, plenty of cash, lovely apartment, a size-ten figure and beautifully pretty without ever having recourse to botox jabs. How can Poppy possibly compete?’
‘She doesn’t need to compete, Jamie. She’s twenty-three. She’ll spend the rest of her life married to the man I thought destiny had intended for me and having lunch with the rest of her twenty-three-year-old friends, talking about twenty-three-year-old things, like, I dunno, boy bands and Jessica Simpson and all the Hollywood gossip that’s in Heat magazine. The only thing I have on her is a job.’
‘Yeah, but who gets married at twenty-three?’ Jamie replies. ‘Promised brides and cousins, that’s who.’
‘To him, she’s probably just a brood mare, that’s all,’ says Rachel.
‘Oh, come on guys, I may have hit the snooze button on my biological clock, but I can still have kids, can’t I?’
‘Of course you can, sweetie,’ says Jamie, soothingly. ‘You’re only a spring chicken, fertility-wise. I read an article the other day about a woman in China who’s pregnant with twins and she’s sixty. Plus you could always have your eggs frozen. Loads of celebs are doing that now, you know. Career women just like you who want to put it off till later in life. Fertility slackers, they’re calling them.’
‘Thanks, Jamie. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about.’
Rachel, thankfully, gets back to the more immediate matter in hand. ‘Can I also point out that He-whose-name-shall-forever-remain-unspoken is moving into a house that her father bought?’ she says, taking a bagel out of the bag and plonking it down in front of me. I know she means to be kind, but right now, even the smell of it is making my tummy churn. ‘Is that how he’s planning to spend the rest of his marriage?’ she goes on. ‘Under her daddy’s thumb?’
‘That’s some men’s fantasy,’ I say. ‘To have a partner who’ll bankroll them for life.’
Jamie nods in agreement. ‘It’s certainly mine.’
‘You could sell up and move,’ Rachel goes on. ‘You’d make a fortune on this place. And you’re always saying you’d love to live in a house one day, as opposed to an apartment. Come on, it’s not as if there’re any nice single guys hanging around the car park outside, is it? Besides, doesn’t the smell of microwaved dinners for one in the hallway outside drive you mental?’
‘No,’ I say firmly. ‘I can’t move. You know why? Because then he’ll have won. I’m not going to be driven out of my home just to avoid them. I don’t mean to sound stubborn and … oh, I dunno … like a squatter, but I was here first.’
‘It mightn’t be so bad,’ says Jamie, the eternal optimist.
‘Explain to me how.’
‘Well, if you think about it, all it really means is that you won’t be able to slip out on a Sunday morning to buy your papers in a slobby tracksuit any more. You’re just going to have to wear make-up at all times. Now what’s so awful about that?’
‘Oh, Jamie,’ I sigh, feeling a fresh bout of tears coming on. ‘What’s awful about this is that he’s marrying her. Not living with her or even buying the bloody house with her, he’s actually getting married. He was with me for years and the closest I ever got to a commitment from him was the time he bought me a goldfish. Which he then subsequently forgot to feed so it starved to death when I was away. I need you both to tell me honestly, as my best friends: is there something so fundamentally unmarriable about me?’
They soothe my battered self-esteem with a lot of ‘Don’t be so daft’ and ‘It’s his loss, not yours’ and ‘What will he ever have in common with her?’ And (my personal favourite) ‘Just think, Amelia, when she’s thirty, he’ll be almost fifty. To her, he won’t be just old, he’ll be a hologram.’
But the thought still won’t go away.
‘I have some other news,’ says Jamie, and from the foul look Rachel throws him, I correctly guess that they’ve been chatting about whatever it is in the car on their way here.
‘Anything to distract me from the thought that I will probably die an old maid. With my ex-boyfriend and his lovely young wife for neighbours.’
‘You know your find-a-husband course?’
‘Yeah, what about it?’
‘Well, stick a fake handlebar moustache on me and call me Hercule Poirot. You won’t believe who I met in Café en Seine last night.’
‘Give in.’
‘Matt Coveney.’
‘Who?’
‘Matt? Oh, you remember him from college. Hunky and chunky type. Looks a bit like Simon Cowell?’
‘Your point being?’
‘He has no point,’ says Rachel, shooting him a filthy look. ‘He often has no point. Some say it’s part of his charm.’
‘I’m telling her this because I mean well,’ he snaps back.
‘Oppenheimer meant well. Pol Pot meant well.’
‘Guys, I’m too tired to referee. Tell me whatever it is or I’ll make both of you sit through a full episode of Celtic Tigers.’
‘Well,’ says Jamie, ignoring the bilious glares from Rachel, ‘you know how Matt and I used to do loads of shows together in the drama society, back in the UCD days?’
‘Oh, yeah, now I know who you mean. I think.’
‘Well, he used to be really friendly with your old flame Pete Mooney way back then. So I asked him if he knew where he was now and, get this, they’re still in touch with each other. So, Pete’s in Belfast now, apparently, working as, oh God, you’re going to love this, an accountant!’
‘What’s so funny about him being an accountant?’
‘Nothing, just that when he so cruelly disbanded Emergency Exit, he told me that I had no talent and that he was going to be a megastar. And now I’m the one in showbiz while he’s a humble bean-counter. It’s not very often in this life that I get to say HA HA!’
‘So he’s up in Belfast now?’
‘Yes, but here’s the surprise, honey. Look what Papa has for you …’ he says theatrically, producing a tatty bit of paper out of his pocket with the air of a conjurer.
‘What’s this?’ I say, automatically taking it.
‘Only Pete’s home phone number. So you can do your homework for class next week and it’ll hopefully distract you from He-whose-name-shall-forever-remain-unspoken. Aren’t I just a national treasure?’
‘If this Matt whatever-he’s-called is still so friendly with Pete,’ I ask, puzzled, ‘didn’t he wonder why you wanted his phone number? You and Pete haven’t spoken in decades. Even the Beatles had a more amicable break-up than you pair.’
‘Oh no, I explained to him that it was for you.’
‘You what?’
‘Well, I was telling Matt that you were doing this course where you hunt down all your exes which he thought was just hilarious. So then I said that you’d probably want to speak to Pete at some point—’
‘Jamie! You told someone I barely know and that I haven’t seen in twenty years that I’m trying to track down someone else I haven’t seen in twenty years so that I can find a husband?’
‘Well, I didn’t think it was classified.’
‘Do me a favour and kill him for me
,’ I say to Rachel icily. ‘I’m jumping in the shower now, so if you could avoid bloodstains on the freshly vacuumed carpet, I’d be very grateful.’
‘Why are you having a shower?’ Rachel asks, surprised. ‘You can’t seriously be thinking of going into work?’
‘I’ve a meeting with the senior script adviser at ten, which I scheduled, so welcome to the wonderful world of got no choice.’
‘Amelia, you cannot go into work. Not today. I’m not letting you. Throw a sickie.’
‘Well, if I do, then I’ll just stay home all day and start disinfecting the furniture. Being busy is good. Having a focus is good. And anything that prevents me from physically hurling Jamie out the window right at this point in time can only be a good thing. Let Caroline in when she gets here, will you?’
I head for the bathroom but even as I close the door behind me I can hear Rachel tear strips off Jamie. Loud and clear. ‘You fecking idiot! I warned you not to tell her,’ she rants at him. ‘Why doesn’t Rupert Murdoch just employ you and your big mouth? Save himself a fortune on Sky News.’
‘There’s one simple, basic tenet to being my friend,’ Jamie answers defensively, ‘and it’s not my fault if you all keep forgetting. Tell me nothing. I talk.’
Oh dear. I’m no sooner in the shower than I feel another flashback coming on …
THE TIME: 31 December 1986.
THE PLACE: Mike’s student flat in Rathmines (or Rat mines, as we call it, mainly due to the low/non-existent standards of hygiene).
THE OCCASION: A fancy dress, New Year’s Eve party.
I wouldn’t mind, but we went to loads of trouble over our costumes. Myself and the other Lovely Girls have gone as Charlie’s Angels. Caroline is Jill Monroe (except she looks even better in a jumpsuit), Rachel is Sabrina, I’m Kelly and Jamie is Charlie (any excuse for him to get into a dress suit).
Remind Me Again Why I Need a Man Page 10