[2014] Looking for Leon

by Shirley Benton

  So it looked like the time had come for payback. And as Mel Gibson said once, payback’s a bitch.

  But who the hell could it be from? Was it malicious bullshit or was it true? Had Leon started seeing someone since the night we’d met? Or maybe he’d been seeing someone before that . . . he certainly hadn’t seemed like the type of guy who’d be flirting with other women if he was already taken, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. Maybe it was his pyscho ex . . .

  Leon and I had covered a lot of ground in the few hours we’d spent together, and it had transpired that he’d broken up with a woman called Germaine about a month before he came to Vegas. Her name alone would be enough reason for most men to hightail it, but Leon had stuck with her for two years. Apart from the incident where she’d spray-painted the front of his parents’ house with the words ‘Bastard within these walls!’ when Leon had been on a weekly visit home, and a drunken email where she’d warned him to expect trouble if he dared to start seeing someone else, it seemed that she’d taken it quite well. Or so Leon had thought, but the piece of paper that was fluttering in my clammy hand could suggest otherwise.

  This was all Leon’s mother’s fault. I hadn’t even met the woman, but already she was making my life a misery. From what Leon had told me, his mother, Bridget, was a bit of a livewire, and a sharp one to boot – so when she’d spotted Germaline (her pet name for the prospective daughter-in-law who she’d never liked) dousing her walls in red paint, she saw red herself. When she came outside and discovered that said prospective daughter-in-law was apparently calling her a bastard, she had her garden hose hooked up and ready for use within five seconds. Leon said she was like something from Braveheart, charging out into the front garden to launch herself and her hose on Germaline, who had moved on to spraying Leon’s car with a ‘Bastard within this car!’ message to keep in line with her theme. In another world, I think Germaline and I could have been friends – I quite liked her mad-yoke tendencies. Anyway, out came Leon’s mother with her hose and, unfortunately for Germaline, Bridget had just had a new pump installed. The power of the hose had sent Germaline flying backwards out the driveway, right into the path of a group of kids on skateboards. They’d all ended up in a scrum on the pavement, and Germaline’s leg was broken in two places.

  Bridget had ignored Germaline’s screams of pain as she turned her attention to trying – unsuccessfully, as it happened – to hose the graffiti off her house and Leon’s car before it dried in.

  Leon hadn’t heard a thing from Germaline since his family had issued her with a bill for damages caused during the incident . . . but maybe she was now back on the scene and taking her anger out on me, thanks to Bridget? (Typical Irish mammy-in-law.) But then again, if she and Leon were no longer in contact, would she even know that he’d been to Vegas and make any connection between him and the Leon I was looking for? Unless, of course, it wasn’t as over as he’d led me to believe . . .

  As I inserted my last coin into the slot machine, I briefly considered asking Reception if they had CCTV footage that they could check out, before I dismissed the idea. It was a hotel, not Scotland Yard, and it wasn’t as if anybody had just been murdered. I’d noticed that Nicole’s in-tray was marked with a gigantic ‘IN’ sticker on the side, so maybe someone had just come up to the left-hand side of the reception desk and dropped it into her tray while her back was turned. As for who that someone was – well, in truth, it could be anyone. There were a lot of crazy people out there (some might say I was one of them, but that was beside the point). It could be as simple as a random person staying in this hotel taking a dislike to the look of me or what I was doing and dropping a letter into Reception, just to try and mess with my head. Or any member of the public in fact – it was no secret that I was staying in the place where I’d met Leon, after all. The best way to handle the whole thing was to try to put it out of my mind.

  I got up and left the slot machine for some other poor sucker to take on. As I walked to the elevator, I tried to shake off the bad feeling the letter had left me with, but it was difficult to get rid of it. The last few years had been filled with nothing but negative vibes, and it was galling that no sooner had I left them all behind me in Ireland than more came my way over here.

  That night, I had the dream again. And this time, it was a million times more graphic, more powerful and more upsetting than ever before.

  Chapter Twelve

  Elaine and I had been friends since before we were born, as our mothers had been best friends who were pregnant at the same time. My mother had been three weeks ahead of Elaine’s mother Susan in her pregnancy, but Elaine couldn’t wait to get out, and made her appearance at thirty-seven weeks. My mother thought she had been hallucinating with the pain when she’d seen Susan being carted into the pre-labour ward and plonked into a bed beside her. A few hours after I was born, Elaine joined the world. I often wondered if we had met for the first time at college or something, would we have decided we liked each other enough to become friends, but there was never a choice in the matter – we were pushed together for toddler play-dates, birthday parties, the whole shebang. Having sat beside each other throughout our entire schooling, we then plumped for the same college course in the same university. I had loads of people I considered good friends, but there was nobody quite like Elaine.

  Having said all that, she could be a right cantankerous bitch at times. She loved the limelight, and couldn’t handle it at all if she had to share it with anyone else – particularly me. The first time we got drunk together as teenagers, she told me that she felt like she’d spent her whole life catching up with me – I was born first, I walked first, I had a boyfriend before she did, etc etc. It was all maudlin, drunken talk that she dismissed and denied vehemently when I tried to speak to her about it when we were sober again but, as time went on, I could see that it was an issue for her. Once, when my mother had a massive bust-up with Susan after a neighbour reported back to her that Susan had called my brother Adam a bad influence on her son (she was 100% right, he was, but there was no telling Mum that), she spat out some venom about how Susan couldn’t even let her have the limelight on the day of the birth of her child. Of course, it was never mentioned again after Mum and Susan made up over a bottle of Blue Nun and home-made scones, but her words had planted a seed in my head. How symbolic it was that Elaine had stolen my thunder on that day, seeing as she tried to make it a lifetime habit after that.

  Our relationship during our entire college course was like a tennis match. Even though we would have dropped everything in the world for each other if either of us had been in trouble, there was still an undercurrent of points-scoring in our relationship. I often wondered if ours was one of those toxic friendships that you read about, and yet I was reluctant to discuss it with her. The whole thing was so deep-rooted that it would have been hugely traumatic to pull it up from where it lay. A symbiotic relationship like ours would have been too great a loss if we found ourselves unable to resolve our issues, so it was best all round to just keep things buried, right?

  This theory worked well for me until Elaine snogged a guy I was seeing called Jay. When I look back on it, he was a tosser. His name wasn’t even Jason, in which case I could have sort of condoned the pretentious Jay as an acceptable abbreviation – it was John. His name, and his pretentious nature, didn’t bother me in the slightest for the first few weeks while I was still in the first flush of new love, but it didn’t take long for his mannerisms to bug me. If someone was watching a repeat of an old sitcom, he’d have to say the lines along with the show, guffawing after every joke. If there was a big match on TV, he’d talk about transfer windows, goal history and upcoming fixtures all through the game until the person watching it was forced to tell him to shut up. I had a sneaking suspicion it was going nowhere by the time we hit week three, but I never got the chance to dump him. I had great aspirations to do so at a party we went to in one of the other student’s houses, but when I slipped away to neck a bo
ttle of beer before delivering the blow, I came back to find Elaine necking him.

  The resulting hissy fit was a culmination of a decade’s worth of repressed rage – I opened a can of cider belonging to God knows who and poured it all over her, I fired a platter of stale sandwiches in their direction, I yanked a canvas picture of the Pope down from the wall and crashed it over Jay’s head, etc etc. All I needed was a cream pie to stick in her face to complete the effect, but there’s never a spare cream pie just lying around when you need one. Of course, the party was the talk of the college, and photos of Jay with his head sticking out of the picture-frame kept popping up on the college notice boards for weeks (ah, the innocence of the pre-Internet days!), but his disgrace only made me feel marginally better – especially as most of the photos clearly showed me in the background with my arms flailing like a lunatic, and Elaine wearing a shocked expression as if she had been the innocent party in the whole thing.

  Some of our mutual friends had separated us that night to prevent further fighting, but the next day we tore into the arguing when we met in the kitchen, both hungover. I swear to God, that fight went on longer than if all the episodes of Countdown ever made were broadcast back to back. Misdemeanours and perceived slights from eight years back were served over the net. Justifications were volleyed back. I felt it was Advantage Miss Appleton after what had happened the previous night, but Elaine was defending her behaviour to the end – I was making the matter worse by making such a big deal of it, that kind of thing. In the end, the net was torn down, and we advanced towards each other spouting the most unforgivable insults we could possibly muster. Elaine moved out the next day.

  Eventually, after three months of a stalemate, we decided we had to put it behind us. Both of us did it grudgingly, and more because we were sick of avoiding each other when in the same group of friends or family than anything else. It was easier to go back to pretending again. But I never truly forgave her betrayal, and she never forgot some of the harsh words I had thrown at her during our argument. She’d given me a mouthful of them as well though and I felt we’d cancelled each other out on that score, which brought us back to her being the guilty party.

  When Elaine met Eoghan, she became a different person. Although she’d gone out with plenty of guys in the past, none of them had ever made her blossom the way she did when she was with Eoghan. She was herself, but a happier, more colourful version – a better Elaine. Everything about her seemed to be illuminated. Eoghan was a new friend of her sister, Katy, and Elaine couldn’t believe her luck when he asked her out – she fell hopelessly for him the second she laid eyes on him.

  Problem was, so did I. As soon as they had established their couple status, Elaine couldn’t wait to show him off to all of her friends. She had been quite secretive up to that and not even I had met the guy. She chose a twenty-first party of a friend of ours to do the unveiling. Perhaps it was my imagination, but it seemed that we had been invited to more parties than ever in the wake of our row – I couldn’t help wondering if people were hoping for a repeat of the fireworks but, being a student at the time, I was more concerned about getting out there and having fun than motives.

  The second I met him, I was bowled over. He had exactly the look I liked in a guy – tall, trendy, longish hair, but not too long – he was just my type. But he was exactly the opposite of Elaine’s usual guy. She had always gone for the more sporty jocks (she’d made an exception for Jay, of course). I had a moment where I had to fight down one of those illogical rising resentments you get when you’re well on the way to becoming plastered. This one was on the lines of ‘There are enough jocks out there to choose from – why couldn’t she leave someone like him for me?’ My resentment rose even further as the night went on, and escalated into ‘Well, if she was any sort of a friend at all, wouldn’t she have kept me in mind and introduced him to me!’ as I fell into full-blown drunkenness. I got through that night without causing any scenes, and I just hoped that the next time I saw him I wouldn’t fancy him at all. But no, the fecker was still as gorgeous the next time Elaine paraded him around with her like a new handbag. As time went on and I got to know him, things got worse. It turned out that we had similar taste in pretty much everything. It was like he had been purpose-built to be my perfect partner. But he could never be that, so I just tried to stay out of his and Elaine’s way as much as possible. If she noticed that I was doing that, she never mentioned it.

  Whenever I did meet them, I noticed that Eoghan had started to act very strangely around me. It took me a while to work it out, and when I did, I wasn’t sure if I was excited or horrified. He was behaving suspiciously as if he fancied me. There were blushes, there were stuttered words, there were awkward silences – and there were plenty of hard looks from Elaine whenever she came across this scene.

  All of a sudden, she pretty much disappeared off my radar. Even though I’d been phasing her out since I developed feelings for Eoghan, it still felt very strange not to have her in my life at all. A part of me was angry at her. Another part not only understood, but was grateful.

  We eventually all came face-to-face five weeks after Elaine had disappeared from my life, at a party I wish to God I’d never gone to. It’s hard to think that something as innocuous and trivial as a party can change the outcome of your entire life. It’s even harder to think that if I had behaved differently that night, it wouldn’t have. Elaine hadn’t expected me to be there, of course – if she had, she certainly wouldn’t have been there herself. I’d gone along to the party with my cousin, but I had no idea how Elaine and Eoghan were connected to anyone or why they were there. Elaine did a dramatic, and pathetic, U-turn the second she clapped eyes on me across a crowded room, dragging Eoghan along with her. She was wasting her time. The house was too small to avoid anyone for more than thirty seconds. We passed each other at least five times, with Elaine all grim-faced and Eoghan all apologetic and confused nods, in the space of an hour. I resolved to stay away from her, no matter how drunk I got – I could see by the puss on her that she was in a mood.

  If only she had been thinking along the same lines. She stumbled over to me halfway through the night, eyes glistening, face contorted in disdain.

  “You’re like my fucking shadow!”

  A paradoxical statement on many levels, but now wasn’t the time to point that out.

  “Go away, Elaine. You’re drunk. Go back and be your boyfriend’s bodyguard.” I couldn’t help it. Even as I was trying to get rid of her, I was reeling her back in.

  “Dyuh actshully think I don’t know what you’re playing at? You’re interested in him!” She was spitting all over my face, her own face and probably everyone else’s in the room as she attempted to speak. “The minute my back’s turned, you’re gonna go for it, aren’tcha? Aren’tcha?”

  “Elaine, you know I could tear you apart when it comes to answering this question. You haven’t a leg to stand on if we get into this argument. Do yourself a favour and get the hell out of my face before I start to lose my patience with you.” In truth, I’d lost it several seconds ago, and was struggling hugely to keep my temper in check.

  “Oh, I can just see it now. I go off to the bathroom, and I come back to find you on top of him.”

  It was as if I hadn’t spoken.

  I knew that saying anything else was pointless, not just because she wouldn’t listen, but more so because her legs had given way under her as soon as she’d delivered her sentence, and she was now in a heap on the floor. When I tried to help her up, she suddenly regained the use of her legs as she kicked a foot back into my shin. Then she collapsed again, and seemed to go into a coma.

  Eoghan came into the room just in time to see the kick and then the coma. He didn’t seem too surprised to witness either event.

  “She’s been doing nothing but drinking over the past few weeks,” he said.

  “Call a taxi and get her home,” I said to somewhere around his torso. I wouldn’t, couldn’t, look at him. This
situation was bad enough as it was.

  He got out his phone and made the requisite call. “Twenty minutes, they said.”

  “She can’t stay lying on this floor for twenty minutes. Wait here with her. I’ll sort something out.”

  I found the owner of the house, explained the situation, and once a bucket had been located was grudgingly allowed to carry/drag Elaine into a room rather than having her lying on the kitchen floor. Eoghan lifted her up under the arms and I picked up her feet. We laid her down on the bed, placed the bucket strategically in front of the locker and hoped for the best. I always thought buckets were a waste of time for drunk people – alcohol-induced pukes were usually of the projectile kind, so if you got one drop of the darned thing in the actual bucket, you’d be lucky. It was just one more thing to clean up afterwards, really.

  When we had her settled on the bed, the inevitable awkward looks started between Eoghan and me.

  “Come on, let’s go back out to the party,” I said. “We’re no use to her standing here watching her.”

  I tried to lose him as I joined the crowd in the kitchen, but he seemed determined not to be shaken off.

  “Did you and Elaine fall out over something?” he asked after about three aimless circuits of the kitchen.

  I walked out into the garden and he followed.

  “Well?” he said. “Did you? Did you fall out?”