[2014] Looking for Leon

by Shirley Benton

  “Hmm. What makes you think that?”

  “She never makes arrangements to see you any more, never even mentions your name . . .”

  My sarcasm had gone over his head. “Yes, we’ve fallen out, Eoghan. There was nothing official, no big bust-up or anything like that, but we’re definitely not on good terms.”

  “Is it something to do with me?”

  I hadn’t expected him to be so direct. I wasn’t ready for it. “You give yourself a lot of credit, don’t you?”

  “I’m not saying it is, I’m just asking. I’m trying to work a lot of things out in my head at the moment. Elaine is a different person now to the girl I first met.”

  I said nothing.

  “Something happened to change things shortly after I met you. Do you know what that might be?”

  Jesus, he was really getting into the swing of the whole being-direct thing.

  “No.” That was true. I didn’t know what it might be – I knew what it was. Pedantic, but a difference existed, so I wasn’t lying. I wondered how long this school of thought would be able to get me through the conversation . . .

  “Do you think she’s afraid that there’s something between us? Us as in you and me?”

  I was no longer wondering. My tactic clearly wasn’t working in the face of such directness.

  “Why don’t you ask her all of this, instead of asking me?”

  “I’ve tried. You’ve no idea how many times I’ve asked her.”

  “And?” I knew what the ‘and’ was, but I didn’t know what else to say.

  “She went absolutely mental the first time I asked her if she wasn’t talking to you any more. Then, when we talked about her going so mental, she said that you’d just grown apart – which really didn’t justify her reaction. So I asked her straight out if she thought I fancied you, or that you fancied me. And if I thought she went mental the first time, you should have seen her reaction to this – which told me everything I needed to know, really.”

  “Which is what? That she thinks you fancy me, or that I fancy you?”

  “One or the other.”

  “So you don’t know which?”

  “No . . .”

  “So her reaction really didn’t tell you everything you needed to know, then.” I knew I was splitting hairs, but I had to swerve this conversation off course before I blurted out things that shouldn’t ever go further than the back of my head. His physical proximity was wearing down my resolve to stay tight-lipped.

  “It told me that she has a problem with you and me being around each other. She’s afraid of what might happen.”

  “That’s just silly.”

  “Is it?”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Andie, I’m not being presumptuous here. There’s a spark between us. Believe me, I’d prefer if there wasn’t. It’d make my life a lot easier. I meet this girl I like, start seeing her and all is well, then I meet her friend, and . . . I can’t stop thinking about her. About you, Andie.”

  “I preferred when you were talking about me as if I was someone else. It made this easier to listen to.” I was lying. A part of me that was deeply ashamed of itself was loving every minute of hearing this.

  “I don’t want to feel like this about you, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “Here’s one thing you can do, Eoghan. Forget about it.” I was choking on the words, but they had to be said. “What do you think is going to happen – that you’ll break up with Elaine, and then we’ll just get together? Get real.”

  “It’s over between Elaine and me – and it’s nothing to do with you. I just can’t be with the person I’ve discovered she really is.”

  “She’s not that bad!”

  “If you heard some of the things she’s said about you, you might feel differently. She’s full of venom and hatred, and I can’t help her with that. She can’t be happy with anyone until she’s happy in her own skin.”

  My, someone was in a deep mood tonight.

  “I know it’s not fair to make comparisons, but I look at you and see someone who is happy and at ease with herself, and think ‘That’s the type of person I want to be with.’”

  “Stop right there, Eoghan. I don’t want to hear this.”

  “Well, tough, because I want to say it. We’ve been circling around each other since we first met. Whether it’s terrible or not, the truth is that I’m crazy about you.”

  I shook my head, but he continued anyway.

  “You know, when I asked Elaine if she thought I had feelings for you, I was going to admit to her that I did find you attractive, but it was her that I was in love with – and that much was true at the time. I did feel I loved her until she changed so much. You – well, I found you attractive, but in a vague way that I was never going to do anything about while I was with Elaine. I just wanted to be open with her, to have no secrets between us. But when she clammed up on me and closed herself off, I couldn’t stop the thoughts of you creeping into my head.”

  “You don’t even know me to be crazy about me. You’ve just built me up in your head, and now you have yourself convinced you’re mad about me. Maybe you just want someone to be mad about, and now that it hasn’t worked out with Elaine, you’re turning to me –”

  “All I know is I want to be with you. Give me a chance, Andie. I know there’s something between us. Can you tell me I’m imagining it?”

  “No, Eoghan, you’re not imagining it. It’s a very tangible thing. It’s called ‘Elaine’. How can you possibly think she’s going to be okay with you and me being together?”

  “Ah. You said that like it was a future probability. That’s good.”

  I laughed. Just a little laugh, but it was enough encouragement for him. He covered my hands with his. I didn’t shake them off. He stared into my eyes. I didn’t look away. He inched his head forward towards mine, not close enough to kiss me, but close enough to test the waters and see if I would pull back. I didn’t.

  That was all that happened, but it was enough. The damage was done. We’d been too busy gawking at each other to notice Elaine approaching. We heard her before we saw her – a ferociously expletive-ridden wail was coming from the direction of the patio. I looked up and saw Elaine staggering out the kitchen door, sending people’s drinks flying as she hopped off shoulders in her journey towards us.

  “I knew it! You dirty whore! You ugly, selfish cow!” She lunged at me, caught me by the throat and shook me with a strength that only a mixture of alcohol and anger can provide.

  I grasped her fingers and tried to pull them away from my neck, but they were buried in my skin. Just as I began to panic, Eoghan pulled Elaine backwards and deposited her on her arse on the grass.

  “You’re crazy, do you know that?” He looked at her with such contempt that I actually felt a little bit sorry for her. Only a little bit though, considering that she’d tried to strangle me.

  “Don’t you dare try to wangle out of this by turning things on me! I know what I saw!” She tried to stand, but she only got halfway up before she flopped down again.

  “You’re disturbed, Elaine,” he said. “Do you have any idea how low you’ve let yourself go? You’re eaten up inside by bitterness and hate. Look at you, making a show of yourself in front of everyone. And we know why, don’t we? It’s because you’re so jealous of Andie that it’s destroying you.”

  “Shut up! This is all her fault!” She tried to get up again, and this time she succeeded. She turned on me. “You can’t let me have anything to myself!”

  “She isn’t trying to take me. I’m the one who’s trying to talk her into giving me a chance. It’s her I want, not you.”

  Elaine’s face crumpled.

  Pity for her, for the sadness inside her, unexpectedly filled me. “Eoghan, stop – she’s not able to hear this right now . . .”

  “If she’s able to dish it out, she’s able to eat it too.”

  The girl who owned the house marched towards us. I br
aced myself to be kicked out of the party – she’d obviously had enough of us.

  “Hey! That taxi you ordered for her is here.” She pointed at Elaine. “Get her out of here now.”

  “I can hear, you know. Don’t talk about me like I’m not here. I’ll only be too glad to leave this poxy party.”

  “I preferred you when you were unconscious.”

  “I still would be, only your boyfriend came in and tried it on with me,” said Elaine. “Don’t worry, I didn’t touch him. I have standards. Although you wouldn’t think it to look at this creep.” She matched Eoghan’s earlier contemptuous look with one of her own as she stumbled to her feet.

  “Get out of here, you cow!”

  One of the girl’s male friends came over to her and led her away, cajoling her with promises of a cocktail if she came inside.

  “Go, Elaine,” said Eoghan. “Your taxi is waiting. I’ll walk you out.”

  When Eoghan moved towards her, she bristled and positively snarled. I was sure I was about to see foam dripping from her mouth.

  “Touch me and I’ll have you up for assault.”

  I touched my sure-to-be-bruised neck, and wondered if she was trying to be ironic in the midst of all this madness.

  She flailed her arms. “Get the fuck away from me!”

  Eoghan complied without putting up any more of a fight.

  Before she left, she turned to me. “I’ll never speak to you again, you bitch. You’ve ruined my whole life. It stops tonight. Our friendship is over.”

  “And good riddance to it! I don’t care if I never see you again.”

  She gave me the benefit of her snarl too before she wobbled to the kitchen door.

  I slumped onto the ground and sat cross-legged because my knees were shaking so much that I’d fall otherwise. And after Elaine’s whole attempt-on-my-life fit, I was in a bad enough state for one night.

  After Elaine left, people seemed to come out of the woodwork from everywhere to ask us what had just happened. Eoghan and I fobbed them all off, but there had been enough witnesses to Elaine’s attack for the story to spread like shingles anyway. Eoghan went into the kitchen, and returned with two blatantly stolen glasses of whiskey with only a dribble of lemonade mixed through them. I hated whiskey, but now wasn’t the time to be choosy.

  When we eventually got some peace and quiet, Eoghan put an arm around my shoulders. “I think I should take you home.” When he realised what he’d just said, he pulled his arm away again. “No, not like that . . . I just mean that you’ve had a shock, and it’d be best for you to get out of here. I can walk you home if you like.”

  “No. I can take myself home.” I got up and smoothed down the creases in my skirt, wishing I could wipe out the night’s events as easily. “I’ll call a taxi.”

  Eoghan made some wishy-washy attempts at insisting that he come with me, but I brushed them away easily enough. I suddenly didn’t want to be in his company. I had a feeling mine was no longer so appealing either.

  I found my cousin, and she decided to come home too, having declared the party shite. I made small talk with various people until the taxi arrived.

  As soon as I got home, I tried to ring Elaine, as guilt over our fight had started to set in. She didn’t answer. I texted her, asking her to give me a call the next day, then fell into a drunken sleep. When I checked my phone the next morning, she hadn’t texted.

  I got a call from her flatmate, Sorcha, at about three that afternoon, asking me if I knew where Elaine was. She hadn’t come home. I told Sorcha that I didn’t, and that Elaine had taken a taxi home at around one o’clock. Sorcha suggested that she might have gone to her parents’ house, so she would ring them to see if she was there. I asked her to text me and let me know. Ten minutes later, my phone buzzed.

  “Elaine’s parents haven’t seen or heard from her . . .”

  Elaine’s body was found in a shallow grave in the Wicklow Mountains two weeks later. She had been raped, beaten and suffocated to death. It transpired that she had asked the taxi driver to drop her off in Temple Bar in the city centre. The taxi driver, realising that she was drunk, had told her she’d be better off to go home, but she had insisted that she lived in an apartment in Temple Bar. She’d given the address of a set of apartments that a friend of ours had lived in a year previously. As soon as the taxi driver was out of sight, CCTV footage had shown her entering a nightclub, and leaving an hour later with a man. Elaine had been barely able to walk, and the man was half-carrying, half-dragging her out of the club. The same man was eventually found guilty of her murder, and was sentenced to life.

  He wasn’t the only one. It was eight years now since Elaine had been murdered, and although the rawness of the guilt I lived with had dulled, it never, ever went away. It filled my mind every morning, and was relentless in its ability to punish me, to colour every day with grey. I hadn’t betrayed Elaine with Eoghan, but this was about more than him. Her death had come about as a result of our years and years of competition. If only I’d had the maturity to handle things better . . . if only I’d confronted her and never let things get as far as they did . . . with every year that passed after her death, I found new things to add to the ‘if only’ list. Eoghan blamed himself too, but he really had no idea of how insignificant his role was. No, the only person to blame for Elaine finding herself in the situation that she did was me.

  I couldn’t explain my guilt to anyone. Of course, lots of people noticed a change in me, but they put it down to me feeling guilty about fighting with Elaine before she left the party. I heard from a friend that some people, while supportive at the time of Elaine’s funeral, were saying behind my back that her death was my fault because I shouldn’t have let her leave the party on her own, taxi or no taxi. What they didn’t understand was that it had started being my fault long before that. But the nature of my messed-up relationship with Elaine was one that was hard to put into words and explain logically, so I hugged the guilt to myself and let it fester. Somewhere along the line, it became a part of me.

  So how do people deal with this kind of guilt? I only know what I did to cope. I kept myself busy. For the past eight years, I’d thrown myself into things so fast and so hard that I hadn’t had time to stop and see the bruises they caused. I didn’t consider whether what I was doing was right for me or not – I just did them, and worried about the consequences later. Which was probably how I ended up in situations like being in Vegas looking for a man who everyone was starting to think was a figment of my imagination.

  And yet, that man was the only person I’d truly confided in over the last eight years. And that was exactly why I was on this search.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It’s funny. It’s just one of those universal truths that no matter where you go in the world and hide, the Monday blues will always find you. I’d always thought there would only be shades of sunshine yellow in Vegas, but it seemed that Monday was Monday as long as you were working. Thankfully, it was almost time to go home – I’d had enough of LVTV in general, and Lindy in particular, for one day. Colm and I had been assigned temporary desks in the LVTV studios for the duration of Operation Arizona (as Dave had dubbed my attempt to locate Leon), where we had a wonderful view of the back of Lindy’s head. She’d taken to raising her arms slowly to her head and shaking her mane nonchalantly yet furiously in a bid to gain Colm’s attention, then slyly swivelling in her chair to see if he’d been looking at her. Invariably, he hadn’t. Instead, she always caught me with what was no doubt an incredulous look on my face, while Colm remained blissfully unaware of her bids to catch his eye as he stared at something painfully interesting like a lens for a new camera or something equally trainspottingy. Her skirts and tops were getting skimpier each day, and her hair was so sleek that you could have ice-skated in it, but she still couldn’t compete with the lure of nerdy stuff on the Internet.

  I felt pretty lethargic after a weekend of pimping myself to the media. Lindy was in fifth gear with the
publicity drive, and in fairness she was doing an amazing job of it. Of course, it was entirely for her own benefit. She’d plonked down beside Colm as he sat on his own having lunch in the LVTV canteen the previous day, and had bent his ear about her career ambitions. Apparently, she was ultimately working towards securing a position as a news anchor, and wanted to make a huge success of promoting my story to get her name out there, and show she had what it took to move things on to the next level. It sounded like she was trying to sell herself to him as an attractive proposition, but he hadn’t given a toss. He’d been so annoyed at having his lunch interrupted by an unwelcome guest that he’d taken a huge dislike to her. And the reason I knew all of this was because his dislike of her was so huge that he, in turn, had bent my ear about how annoying Lindy was over dinner the previous night when we were supposed to be planning our next show for Éire TV. I can’t say I blamed him – in fact, it was the first time we’d ever agreed about something – but she was certainly helping my cause, so I couldn’t complain about her too much. Well, no, actually, I could. I could always complain. But she was doing a good job, even if the hectic schedule she was putting me through was making me feel like I’d just spent seventy-two hours straight cutting turf on the bog.

  It didn’t help either that my flipping laptop was operating so slowly this morning. Although, come to think of it, it’d been like this for quite a while now . . . I sighed. It was really that time of year again to delete all the unnecessary stuff on the hard drive. I decided to take a positive, effective approach and fly through the work. I quickly deleted a folder full of work files, bypassed my music folder and left its contents untouched, then deleted a few more work files for good measure. I went to all my temporary and local folders too, taking a quick look to see if there was anything I needed in them before purging them.

  Ah. So that was where my instant messenger conversations saved to – the local folder. I took a quick through them, laughing at some old conversations that had been on the computer for yonks that I’d forgotten about.