by Claire Allan
“No,” I said firmly. “I don’t. I don’t need you, and I don’t want you. I never meant to hurt you and I’m sorry things got so confused. I never should have come to Manna. I never should have gone home with you. It can’t be right between us again.”
“Yes, it can,” he said firmly. “All it will take is some effort.”
“I’m sorry. Genuinely. But I can’t do any more. I’ve done enough, Pearse.”
He still didn’t look shocked. He didn’t look hurt. He didn’t really look anything. He sat, expressionless, his eyes moving slowly around the room until they arrived at the bouquet of flowers on the sideboard.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” he muttered.
“No,” I said, with as much strength as I could. “It’s not him, Pearse. It’s you. It’s us.”
I could have sworn I heard Darcy cheer from the bedroom. Pearse just stood up and fixed me with his gaze.
“You’ll regret this, Annie. You’ll never get better than me. You were punching above your weight as it was – and that’s saying something, considering . . .” And he looked me up and down, taking in every inch of my less than svelte body.
Finally I was able to put a word to all those looks he had given me over the last year: contempt.
If I needed any confirmation that I was doing the right thing, I’d just had it. There wasn’t even a trace of love. There wasn’t a trace of the man who had once spent an hour just lying beside me in bed stroking my hair and telling me he loved my smile.
The man who had promised one day that between us we would take on the world was long gone.
And yet, when he left, slamming the door behind him, I felt myself crumple.
Darcy opened the bedroom door and came out to me, taking me in her arms as I all but fell to the floor.
“It’s okay,” she soothed simply, kissing the top of my head just like our mother used to. “It’s going to be okay.”
16
I was only five minutes early for work the following day but it gave me the chance to compose myself suitably before my colleagues arrived.
I had plastered on my very best make-up and had Darcy help me pile my hair up in a semi-complicated up-do. I had consumed a litre and a half of water on the drive in and had eaten three apples and two bananas for breakfast – all mushed together in some kind of slimy slushy type of concoction.
I still felt wretched however. And I’m sure I looked it too. And you have to believe me when I say arriving into the heady world of PR, where a smile and jaunty attitude counts for everything, feeling deflated (I wouldn’t want to say heartbroken) was not good.
Darcy had held me the night before until I stopped crying. She’d told me that Pearse was an awful bastard and I was to take no notice of him but I wasn’t convinced. His nasty remark about me punching above my weight had stung, every way you took it. In my heart I feared it was true.
But now I had to plaster on a smile. I had to be chipper. I had to pretend it was all okay because I could not have yet another crap day at work.
Bob arrived and smiled in my direction. “Well done, Annie. This is what I like to see. The old you back and giving it your all. Great stuff altogether. Come and see me in an hour. I have a topnotch new project which has your name written all over it.”
He walked on, whistling as he went, and I at least congratulated myself on being in his good books for a change.
When Fionn arrived she gave me a half-smile before sitting down at her desk. This could mean things were resolving themselves between her and Alex and our friendship would be back on track soon. It could also mean that she had hired the assassin/made the voodoo doll/let the air out of my tyres or worked out some other devious form of revenge for my misdemeanour.
I half-smiled back, my cover-up foundation at risk of cracking. A minute or so later an email pinged onto my screen.
“Are you okay?” Fionn asked.
“Yes,” I typed back. “Well, sort of. Pearse and I are over, completely.”
Then, of course, it dawned on me that she didn’t know Pearse and I had been “not over” for a while and that there had been a need for me to break up with him all over again.
“I’ll explain it later, if you’ll let me,” I added.
“FSB?” she replied.
“It will take a bit longer than that. Maybe a drive at lunchtime? I’ll buy you a sandwich.”
Of course there was a very real possibility she would just tell me to go scratch but I thought it was worth a chance anyway. I hoped, if she was willing to go on an FSB with me, there was a chance she would join me for a lunchtime drive down towards the coast complete with wilted salad sandwich from the local garage.
I took a deep breath and pressed Send and I swear I almost cried in relief when she said yes. I didn’t deserve her. I really, really didn’t.
Ten minutes had passed and I found myself knocking on Bob’s door, wondering what on earth he could have in store for me. Ah, the thrills of life in PR! One week dealing with a local wannabe shooting for the stars, the next standing in your smalls outside a sex shop. I always felt a flush of excitement when a new project landed on my desk – sometimes it exceeded expectations, sometimes it made my heart sink and I had to take a deep breath, fake-smoke three cigarettes and promise myself a stiff drink just to get on with it.
Today was one of those days.
“Annie, sit down. You’ll love this. It’s so much fun.” He was almost glowing with excitement.
I believed he might have overdone it on the moisturiser that morning. He perched on the side of his desk in what was a definite invasion of my personal space and started.
“We’re bringing the NorthStar smack bang up to date with funky café culture and relationship co-ordination.”
Relationship co-ordination? I wracked my brains to try and figure out what the feck he was talking about. This was clearly one of those cases where he was thinking outside the box again and I would have to try and decipher his gobbledegook.
“What we want is to bring a new concept in finding love and passion to the people of this city.”
“I thought we did that with ‘Love, Sex and Magic’?” I countered and he gave a weak laugh – as if the sex shop was so, like, fifteen minutes ago.
“No, Annie, this is about more, much more than making sure people have fun in the sack. This is about getting them into the sack in the first place.”
Prostitution? It would certainly be a good PR challenge to try and make that palatable to the masses. I could imagine that wee doll in her twin-set and pearls choking on her false teeth at the very thought.
“Let me explain more,” he continued. “A singles’ night.”
“That sounds a bit cheesy,” I answered and it did.
We had tried it once before – created a great campaign for one of the local supermarkets to have a night where they openly encouraged single people to come along and have a sneaky peak at a stranger’s basket. It hadn’t really taken off – turns out there is only so much conversation half a pound of Doherty’s mince and a bottle of fine wine can generate. Not enough women showed up and the women who did couldn’t be described as very alluring – so we were utterly fecked. Not to mention the fact that the singletons who did turn up were all annoyed that they had to make two trips to the supermarket a week – one to buy their fancy goods which would attract a partner and another to buy their essentials like loo roll, Preparation H and tampons.
“Well, it’s not,” Bob said defensively in response to my “cheesy” accusation.
I sat back, determined to keep my mouth shut, at least until he had finished talking.
“Speed dating!” he shouted and I tried not to swear in fright. “Our client has a very clear idea what they want and we are going to help them make it happen. Picture it: Manna – a week night. Mood lighting – some classy music. Hordes of young, eligible, well-off young people all looking for love. Clear dress code – no trainers. Market it as the place to meet someone who is not a t
otal loser – as somewhere that will take the pain out of dating. Champagne – strawberries – maybe even oysters. Designer beer and designer clothes. Designer relationships.”
Bob had a habit of doing that – brainstorming out loud and coming out with a series of increasingly random short sentences. I nodded attentively throughout as he waffled on but my brain had gone into a complete meltdown at the third word of his vision.
Manna. He wanted me to arrange a night in Manna. Which would mean working with Pearse, and Toni, and trying to be professional when I had clearly pissed Pearse off and he clearly found me lacking in so many ways.
But there was no way I could tell Bob I wouldn’t or couldn’t do it. Not without landing myself a P45 for my trouble anyway. As I sat and listened, taking notes and smiling when he looked particularly excited, all I could think, over and over again on a loop, was that I was well and truly fucked.
Fionn clearly saw my pallor as I walked out of the office just before lunch. She lifted her coat and bag and sauntered over to my desk.
“C’mon then, Annie. You can tell me all about it when we get to the car.”
It took ten minutes of me shaking my head and muttering inaudibly before I was able to talk properly to her – and I did feel horrible that I was off-loading on her. She would be perfectly within her rights to tell me it served me right and I should suck it up and enjoy what the Karma Fairy was throwing at me.
But Fionn isn’t like that. She is much too nice for her own good and even though she was still clearly annoyed with me (she told me as soon as we got in the car that she did not wish to talk about Alex and that, yes, she was still annoyed with me), she said I could offload to my heart’s content.
So I started, where all good stories do, at the beginning. I told her how, after the disastrous meeting with Alex, I had ended up getting it on in the back office of Manna before being whisked back to the big house on the hill for some rather lovely sex. And how that had distracted me from the need to repair the damage done with Alex asap. I told her how, almost immediately, I had realised that sex with Pearse was a huge mistake and how Darcy had arrived to sort it all out.
And of course I told her about the previous night’s meeting with Pearse at the flat (and how Darcy was now calling him Pee-Arse) and how Bob now was wetting himself with excitement at the thought of using Manna for his latest PR coup.
“Oh Annie,” Fionn said as I finally stopped to draw breath, “this is really quite a spectacular mess, even for you.”
I nodded, as we stared out across Lough Swilly eating our salad sandwiches. “I’m trying to make it better but it seems no matter what I do, it just seems to get worse.”
“And Ant? What about him?”
“I haven’t done him since the weekend. In fact I’ve not even spoken with him.”
“Has he been ignoring you?”
“Quite the opposite. He’s texted a few times, but I can’t bring myself to reply to him. Everything I touch turns to crap at the moment and I’m not sure he isn’t just using me so I’m giving him a wide berth.”
“Probably for the best,” Fionn said, nodding as she sipped from a can of Diet Coke. There was a short pause. “I think you need to get yourself sorted first before you concentrate on other people. What are you going to do about work?”
“What can I do? I have to do the godawful speed dating thing,” I sighed.
“Even though it is at Manna? But that will be dreadful.”
“Well, it will be but if I say no I might as well just hand in my notice now. Bob won’t tolerate any more feck-ups from me and I can’t say that I blame him. I’ve not exactly been on my game lately and this has to be perfect – even if it means me prostrating myself on the floor of Manna and letting Pearse humiliate me in whatever way he sees fit.”
Fionn sat her Diet Coke down on the dashboard and opened the car window to draw in a deep breath.
“Maybe it won’t be so bad?” she offered.
Now the Fionn of old would have told me to pull myself together and not to put up with any shit from Pearse. She would have offered to stand (or sit) by my side at the speed dating and she would have made it all fun and a great laugh but it was clear – perfectly clear – from how she was reacting that our friendship was far from repaired.
When I went home that evening I felt even more wretched than I had the night before. In fact I would have thought it impossible that I could have felt more wretched but I surprised myself by feeling utterly pathetic to the point that, when Darcy asked how my day was, I swore, lifted a bottle of wine from the fridge and locked myself in the bathroom for a long soak.
I lay there in the bath, submerging my head under the suds time and time again for as long as I could before gasping for breath. It dawned on me that this was how I always felt: in and out of the water – as if I was on the brink of drowning. My life was one long intake of breath – holding on as long as I could and seeing what happened, pushing myself further and further and achieving nothing from the whole process apart from a sore chest and a growing sense of panic.
I sat up, breathing in as deep as I could, then put my wineglass to my lips, sinking as much of it as I could without choking.
I pulled the plug out with my toes, lying there as the water seeped out and the cold washed over me and then, when I found the energy, I climbed out, roughly dried myself off, slipped on my dressing gown and topped up my wineglass.
There was one thing I had to do before I went to sleep, or tried to go to sleep. I walked into the bedroom. Darcy was lying on the bed with her back to me, reading a glossy magazine. I reached under my chest of drawers and surreptitiously pulled out my Life Plan – my ridiculously stupid and childish Life Plan – and hid it under my dressing gown. Then I left the room and quietly exited the flat.
Just outside there was a fire escape which crawled up to a small roof “garden”. It wasn’t anything to write home about – no nice planters or fancy wicker chairs. It was basically a bit of concrete on a roof with a couple of plastic chairs and a discarded barbecue in the corner. I sat down, swilling the wine in my glass and looking through the pages of my Life Plan, mocking myself for my foolish optimism.
Happy endings didn’t really happen. This was not a fairy tale and I sure as feck wasn’t Cinderella. There was no such man as Price Charming. There were no happy ever afters – the best any of us could ever hope for was just to get through life relatively unscathed.
But at the moment it was looking as if even that wasn’t a remote possibility for me.
I needed to get real and give up on my foolish dreams of a big dress and a big wedding, followed by a big house in the country and a big family of gorgeous children to look after me in my dotage.
I flicked on my lighter and held it to the corner of my Life Plan. It took a while to catch – laminate can be a bugger to burn – but it did catch and I lifted the lid of the rusty barbecue, sat the book down and watched the flames start to lick each page, curling each tacky picture of ivory duchesse satin gowns and designer interiors.
I raised my glass to it, and breathed out for the first time in weeks.
I had just put the glass to my lips when I became aware of Darcy standing behind me, a look of bewilderment on her face.
“Do you want to tell me what the fuck that is all about?” she asked, taking the glass out of my hand and putting it to her own lips, downing the contents in one.
I didn’t answer.
“I can’t believe you still have that tatty old scrapbook.” Darcy was staring at the growing inferno in front of her. “And I can’t believe you are on the roof half-naked drinking wine. Are you having some sort of breakdown?”
“A midlife crisis,” I answered, wrapping my dressing gown tighter around me before warming my hands on the fire.
“You’re only thirty-two.”
“I feel older.”
Darcy sniffed. Or snorted. It was hard to tell which. Either way I could tell she was just a little bit amused.
&
nbsp; “Annie, why do you have to be so dramatic? Why does everything have to be a big deal? I mean, for the love of God, everyone goes through shitty times and this is just a shitty time. It’s a very shitty time admittedly, honey, but no shittier than what any of the rest of us go through.”
I turned on my slippered heel and pushed my way past her and back down the fire escape to my flat.
I heard her footsteps follow me and I knew she had more to say but, feeling very childish and very much reprimanded for my supposed overreaction to having a whole heap of crap poured right on my head, I walked into the bathroom and locked the door behind me.
I heard her rap on the door but I didn’t answer. And I heard her sit down by the door and take a deep breath.
“Annie, I didn’t mean to be dismissive . . .”
Well, feck me, she was doing a good job of it.
“And I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings . . .”
Not so sorry that I couldn’t detect, I thought, a slight sense of humour in her voice.
I wanted to answer – I really wanted to shout (perhaps overdramatically) that she didn’t care one jot about hurting my feelings and that no one ever did. But I sat there, in silence, listening.
“But you need to get yourself out of this slump and out of this mess. I can only help so much. You are thirty-two. You are a grown-up. You can’t keep running to people for help . . .”
She said it softly – all hint of humour gone – but she might as well have been shouting and my desire to keep quiet in the bathroom left me.