by Alex Coleman
Dan grazed her thigh with the tips of his fingers. “Just as well,” he said. “I have things to do around the house at the weekend. I’m free next weekend, though.”
Holly almost crashed into a skip.
Only once before in her entire life had she found herself going out with someone on Valentine’s Day. It was at university. His name was Paul. He didn’t bother calling around (or ringing or texting) on the fourteenth but showed up the next day with a card, inside which he had written his name in block capitals with a red pen. There was no message. It didn’t even say, “From PAUL”, much less “Love, PAUL”. It just said, “PAUL”. She hadn’t minded particularly, because she hated the concept of Valentine’s Day. It was so tacky, so unspeakably vulgar. She had said as much to Dan and he’d agreed, just as she’d expected he would. When the day dawned and she saw that her only post was a gas bill, she genuinely didn’t mind. She left for work feeling free and easy. Her colleagues knew she had a boyfriend, of course; she could barely get through a sentence without mentioning him. They were also aware that she was almost always single and that her six weeks with Dan constituted her longest ever relationship.
She wasn’t surprised, then, when the questions started as soon as she arrived at school. What, no card, no flowers? Surely Superboyfriend couldn’t forget, could he? Holly flapped them away.
“I’ve discussed this with Dan,” she said, “and we are of one mind on the subject. Valentine’s Day is for suckers, and tasteless ones at that.”
By the time she arrived home again, however, she was beginning to wonder; it was a little odd that Dan hadn’t called at all, if only to join her in laughing at the idiots who at that very moment were jammed shoulder-to-shoulder into terrible Tex-Mex restaurants, faking smiles as they exchanged cards on which fluffy teddy bears proclaimed their wuv. Then again, she hadn’t just casually pooh-poohed the idea of Valentine’s Day, she had torn it apart and set fire to the pieces. The phrase she’d used to describe those who found it amusing, or worse romantic, was “emotionally retarded”. Why on earth would Dan so much as dip his toe in it after hearing that sort of thing? He’d have to be nuts. She was being silly. Shaking her head and sighing, she got a bottle of wine from the kitchen and poured herself a half-glass. Claude appeared just as she finished it, and presented himself for petting. He’d been out and about, judging by the coldness of his paws. Holly hoped he hadn’t brought home any little presents. She got the impression that he wasn’t much of a hunter – he had trouble cornering cotton balls on the bedroom floor – but once in a while she went into the kitchen and found a dead mouse by the catflap. That, she could do without. The phone rang at about half past ten.
“Listen,” Dan said. “We have to talk. I’ve met someone else. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t go looking for her. But now that I’ve got to know her a bit, I can see that you’re . . . well, you’re all wrong for me. I need someone a bit more . . . I don’t know, bubbly. Someone not quite as prickly. It’s over with us. I’m sorry. I hope there’ll be no hard feelings.”
The whole thing took about three minutes. For more than an hour after she hung up, Holly just sat there, frowning and blinking, blinking and frowning. The only sound was Claude’s purring and the occasional hum of a passing car. Eventually, she managed to move but only as much as was necessary to pour a fresh glass of wine, a full one this time – full to the point of overflowing. She called in sick the next day and the day after that. When she did return to work, she was determined that she would not shirk the issue. If someone mentioned Dan, she would tell them the truth. She’d been dumped again. Turned out he’d been steadily going off her and she hadn’t noticed. No big deal. Someone did mention Dan. It was Eleanor Duffy. She mentioned him as soon as Holly walked into the staff room.
“Well,” she cooed, “did he come up with the goods for Valentine’s Day? Or did he take you at your word and avoid the whole thing?”
Holly hadn’t even taken her coat off yet. She cleared her throat and started to explain the situation. But she didn’t get very far. The tears began to flow almost immediately. Eleanor stepped forward and took Holly’s hand in both of hers. She wore a peculiar expression on her face. There was sympathy in there – lots of it – but there was something else too. And just like that, Holly knew. It would be a while before it was confirmed, but she knew right there and then. She had her label: the thing about Holly Christmas was she had terrible trouble with men.
Chapter 4
On Saturday afternoon while she was on her hands and knees tidying up under the kitchen sink, Holly received a phone call. It was Orla.
“Is this a good time?” she asked. “I don’t want to be getting in the way if you’re still upset. Are you? Are you still upset?”
Orla had one of those husky Kathleen Turner-esque voices. It didn’t lend itself easily to sympathy, but she was doing her best. She knew about Kevin, of course. Holly had texted her and Aisling that morning but had added (melodramatically, in retrospect) that she wanted to be left alone for a while. She wasn’t surprised to find that her instruction had been ignored.
“No,” Holly whimpered. “I can barely function. I don’t what I’m going to do.”
There was a long pause. “Are you taking the piss?”
“I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I’m a wreck. What’s to become of me? Help me, Orla! Help me! Pluck me from this sea of pain!”
“Right. So you’re fine. I get it.”
In truth, Holly was far from fine, but she was determined not to show it. “You wouldn’t believe how many different Stain Devils I have.”
“What?”
“Sorry, I’m tidying under the sink. I have about twenty different Stain Devils. I’m just looking at them here. Every couple of weeks I get a stain on something and I buy one and I find it doesn’t work and I throw it under the sink. And Mr Muscles. I have one, two, three, four different Mr Muscles. Two jumbo bottles of bleach. Jumbo, mark you.”
“Holly, are you bored?”
“I’m distracting myself, that’s all.”
“From what?”
“School, for one thing. Back on Monday.”
“Jesus. You sound more like a pupil than a teacher.”
“It’s going to be terrible. They’ll drive me nuts inside an hour. Eleanor Duffy will make sure of it. ‘Still single, are you? Aw!’.”
“It’ll be grand.”
“It’ll be terrible.”
“Grand.”
“Terrible.”
“Grand.”
“Terrible.”
“Are we going out tonight or what?”
Holly and Orla had an unspoken agreement that, whenever possible, it should always be one of them who organised social forays. Aisling simply couldn’t be trusted on that score. On those occasions when she was first on the phone making suggestions, the three of them invariably found themselves in a restaurant where you had to cook your own food or a pub that served only blue drinks. Aisling was a slave to fashion not just in the strictly sartorial sense – although she was certainly that – but in all things. If a venue was even vaguely trendy, that was good enough for her. No concept was too ridiculous, no cover charge too exorbitant. A single mention in a weekend supplement was enough to get her squealing, pleading and using phrases like “anybody who’s anybody”. The best approach, Orla had once explained to Holly, was to speak to her as if she’d been saying all week that she didn’t want to go out, but you weren’t going to take no for an answer. You’d chosen a venue and that was that. No ifs, no buts, none of her nonsense. Wouldn’t be the same without her, and so on. If you did it just right, she went all gooey and said she wouldn’t miss it for the world. On this occasion, Orla had told Aisling that the night, nay, the whole weekend would be ruined for herself and Holly if she didn’t join them in Outer Mongolia on Dawson Street at eight. Aisling had agreed immediately and promised that she would do her very best to be on time. She wasn’t, of course, but she was only fifteen minutes late, which was
good going by her standards. Holly and Orla had shared a taxi and, because they knew that Aisling’s promises weren’t worth a damn, had been in no particular rush themselves. In the end, they met at the doorway right under the bouncer’s nose. Aisling and Orla claimed that this was “a good sign” that augured well for the night ahead. Holly was quick to pour cold water on this idiocy – signs, indeed – and got two dirty looks for her trouble.
Without exception, all of Holly’s previous visits to Outer Mongolia had involved a great deal of standing around. It was one of those places that had space for three hundred people and seating for thirty-five. It was more of a shock than a surprise when, within seconds of their arrival, a booth emptied right in front of them.
“Lookit!” Orla screamed, elbowing Holly so hard that the wind was forced out of her. “They’re leaving! They’re leaving!”
“I can see that,” Holly replied. “Unfortunately, I have to go to the hospital now because I’ve got three cracked ribs.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
They maneuvered themselves into position so aggressively that they more or less limbo-danced underneath the people who were getting up to go. There was competition for the seats from several sources but none of their rivals had enjoyed their positional head start.
“I don’t believe it,” Aisling said when they had established territorial dominance. “This is a first. I’ve never seen the place from this angle.”
“Right,” Holly said. “Who’s going to the bar? And what are we drinking?”
“I’ll go,” Orla replied. “And vodka.”
“Vodka,” Aisling agreed. “But I’m not really drinking tonight.”
Holly experienced a brief rush, somewhere between excitement and fear. It was going to be a vodka night. She made a mental note to drink two pints of water as soon as she got home, knowing full well that she would forget. The Stoli went down surprisingly well and before long they were on the far side of giddy, laughing too loud, all jabbering at once, covering at least two subjects at any given moment. Although the music, as usual, was playing at a volume that made you think they didn’t want you there, Holly was surprised to find that she not only recognised but actually liked quite a lot of it.
They did their usual catching up. Aisling reported that she had made good on her long-standing threat to take up yoga. Every time she’d mentioned it in the past, and that had been almost weekly, she’d spoken loftily about her desire to improve her muscle tone or, if she was feeling especially pretentious, get in touch with her body. It now emerged that a large part of her motivation, somewhere in the region of ninety-five per cent, had been of a more social nature. But it seemed that she had been sold a pup. Over and over again, she had read that yoga was seriously popular among men. Well, not the class she’d joined. There was precisely one man, and he was a dead ringer for Christopher Biggins. He’d approached her after their first session and informed her, as he wiped the sweat from his face, that she had a really nice arse on her. In his opinion, it was the second best in the whole class.
Orla had troubles of her own. Her parents had been on bad terms for almost a fortnight and the past couple of days had seen a dramatic escalation in hostilities; now, in their thirty-fifth year of marriage, they were sleeping in separate bedrooms. Holly and Aisling found this hard to believe and pressed for details. At heart, the dispute was financial in nature, although Orla’s mother believed that money was only part of it. What had really upset her was the deception, the betrayal of marital trust. The bottom line was that a husband who would secretly spend two thousand euros on a fancy new computer just so he could pretend to be a fighter pilot might be capable of almost anything.
Holly limited herself to bitching about the horrors that awaited her in the school, or rather in the staff room. Aisling and Orla did their best to be sympathetic at first but soon lost patience. They had heard these complaints after every school break for the past several years and they were all out of things to say.
As ever, there was plenty of work talk. Aisling worked as a PA to the Creative Director of an advertising agency on Fitzwilliam Square. Orla was the deputy financial controller of a small haulage company in Clondalkin. Each of them seemed to think she had the worst job in Ireland and regularly tried to outdo the other with tales of office horror. Although she would never have said as much, Holly was firmly of the opinion that Orla had more to complain about than Aisling. They were some monsters in Aisling’s company by all accounts, but at least they were young and trendy monsters. On top of the everyday trials of working life, Orla had to put up with a boss who owned three cassette tapes – two Roger Whittakers and a Nana Mouskouri – which she had been playing one after the other in their shared office every day for four years. This time they got into a discussion about which one of them did the most overtime. At first, it was competitive but friendly. Points were conceded. Jokes were cracked. After a few minutes, however, the tone abruptly changed. Orla was the one who changed it. For no apparent reason, her comments and glances suddenly acquired an edge. Aisling didn’t seem to notice at first, but she cottoned on eventually and immediately hardened her own responses. Twice, Holly felt the need to step in with a gag before one of them said something she would regret. Just when she was beginning to worry that they were headed for a real argument, the subject changed (to the Eurovision Song Contest, admittedly, but that was still an improvement as far as Holly was concerned).
And then it was Aisling’s turn to go to the bar. She’d been gone for about twenty minutes when Holly and Orla started to wonder. She wasn’t in the loo, they were sure, because she’d just been. And there was no way it could have taken her this long to get served; they knew from their own rounds that the bartenders were all male. Aisling could stand around all night waiting for female staff to notice her, but when there were men involved, even at the most crowded of bars, her waiting time could usually be measured in seconds.
Orla had a vivid imagination when it came to potential trouble. Before long she was gripping Holly’s forearm and painting a luridly bloodstained picture. Holly didn’t get quite as carried away. They probably shouldn’t have started talking about abduction and murder, she pointed out, until they’d at least got up off their arses and looked around a bit. Then again, that would mean giving up their seats, almost certainly for nothing. This part didn’t go down well. For all they knew, Orla sniffed, Aisling was currently waking up in the boot of some lunatic’s car and all Holly cared about was their seats? Holly started to argue, then paused. Suppose Aisling did end the night in more than one piece? Bad enough to be left with a solitary best friend instead of two but to have that best friend saying, “I told you so” for the rest of your life . . . She gave in. No sooner had she done so than Aisling appeared, bearing drinks and looking entirely unharmed. Orla looked relieved for all of two seconds. Then she looked angry.
“Where the hell where you?” she asked, shouting even more loudly than was necessary to make herself heard.
Aisling shrugged. “Nowhere.”
“Did it ever occur to you that we might be sitting here worrying?”
“No. Not really.”
Orla stared at her, nostrils flaring. “Brilliant. Just brilliant. Won’t bother wondering next time, so. You can go and get yourself killed, if that’s what you want.”
“She’s been running The Silence of the Lambs in her head,” Holly explained, hoping to lighten the tone. It didn’t work.
There was something of a Mexican stand-off for a couple of seconds. Then Aisling retook her seat and distributed the drinks. Holly could tell by the expression on her face that she had been chatted up. She could easily picture the scene – the hair-flips, the giggles, the back-arches, the sly smiles.
“I got talking to these two boys,” she said. They were always “boys”, Holly had often noticed, whether they nineteen or thirty-seven. “I just couldn’t get away from them, honestly.”
“Yeah, I bet you tried really hard,”
Orla said. “We all know how you hate that kind of thing. Oh no! Boys! Run!”
Holly froze, once again surprised not so much by the words but by the viciousness with which they were delivered. What was wrong with her? Was she trying to start a row? Aisling’s latest drink was halfway to her lips. She left it there and turned to check if Orla was joking. Orla glanced away immediately. Then Aisling turned to Holly and raised both eyebrows.
Holly did her best to mouth the words “She was worried” but wasn’t at all sure that she got the message across. “Were they lookers?” she asked in an attempt to move things on quickly.
“Actually, yes. One more than the other, granted. But even number two wasn’t bad. Anyway, they’re not hanging around for long. They’re going on to a party. Wanted to know if we’re interested.”
“Oh yeah? What kind of a party?”
“Birthday,” Aisling replied. “Johnny’s sister. He’s the better-looking one.”
“Is it somewhere out of the way?”
“Not really. Ballsbridge.”
“Ooh,” Holly said. “Sounds all right to me. And it’s a girl’s party so it shouldn’t be too disgusting.” She had no interest whatsoever in attending the event in question. But she was afraid that if they stayed put, things would fizzle out, or worse, go on fire. A change of venue might be just the ticket. She leaned across Aisling and tried to involve Orla, who’d been making a point of staring straight ahead, pretending not to be listening any more. “What do you think, Orla? Party in Ballsbridge? There’ll be at least two men, one of whom is good-looking and one of whom isn’t bad, which is probably code for Herman Munster, but still?”
Orla responded with a one-shoulder shrug.
Undeterred, Holly tried again. “Come on! A party! Who doesn’t like a good party?”
“You don’t, for one,” Orla pointed out. “You hate them. I’ve never been to a party with you where you didn’t end up standing in the corner with your arms folded, giving out shite about the music or the people or the carpet or the –”