[2014] Looking for Leon

by Shirley Benton

  Then, something very strange jumped out at me. So strange that I pushed my seat back from the computer . . . but when I’d recovered from the shock, I pressed my nose up against the screen to make sure I didn’t miss a single word.

  Christ. This was just too good not to share. I wished someone from the office was here, but in their absence, Colm would have to do.

  He was in the middle of barking orders down a phone at someone in the Éire TV office. “Make sure you get that done before COB today . . . we need to hit that milestone . . . well, you’ll just have to re-prioritise your other tasks, so. This is on the critical path . . .”

  I yawned loudly as I waited for him to shut up. I had a feeling that the person on the other end of the phone was hoping he’d can it pretty soon too. Eventually, he hung up, cursing under his breath as he threw the phone back in its cradle.

  “Colm!” I beckoned him over.

  He gave me a disinterested look, but eventually sloped over, grabbing a biscuit off his desk before he made his move. Today’s packet of choice were orange-flavoured custard creams. How they hadn’t all been broken to bits in his suitcase on the way over was beyond me.

  “Look at this.”

  He pulled up a chair, and started to read off my screen.

  Isolde: You all set for tonight?

  Martin: I suppose so. I just hope nobody sees me.

  Isolde: Don’t be such a friggin’ wimp. I’ve been doing this for years. Once you get into it, you’ll never want to stop.

  Martin: I know. I really want to do it, but I feel so bad about lying to Valerie.

  Isolde: Look, if you can’t talk to your wife, that’s your problem. It’s not something I’m prepared to listen to you moaning about. You came to me and told me straight out what you wanted. I’m willing to give it to you.

  Martin: I know, but it’s not too late to put a halt to this. I haven’t done anything yet. I shouldn’t be lying to Valerie – she’s a good woman, even if we haven’t seen eye-to-eye about all this kind of stuff in the past.

  Isolde: Stop pussyfooting about. You only get one chance with me. Do you want to do this, or don’t you?

  Martin: You know that I do. It’s just going to be tricky, on so many levels.

  Isolde: It’ll become part of your life after a while, and it’ll be as normal as breathing. I’ll meet you at 7 outside Days Hotel. Of course, you do know that if you breathe a word to a soul about this, I’ll grind every bone in your body to powder, yes? My private life stays private.

  Martin: Well, I hardly want this coming out either. I feel so weak to need to do this in the first place. I wish I could control myself, but I can’t.

  Isolde:Never think you’re weak because you need me. That’s rule number one. So many people struggle with their needs, but they do nothing about it, and end up very unhappy because of it. At least you’re doing something to help yourself. Now, go away and leave me alone so that I can get a bit of work done. I’m on someone else’s computer while mine is getting an upgrade, and she’ll need it back soon. She can be a right wagon when she’s in a snit, which is a lot of the time, and I’m not in the mood for her today – so, good luck, see you later. And don’t be late.

  Martin: Okay. I’m getting a bit excited about it now, actually. It’s the first step towards release.

  Isolde: No need to be so melodramatic. Now go. Plenty of time for talking later.

  I hovered over the email address associated with Martin’s username, only to notice that it was an Éire TV address. “Do you know this Martin?” I squealed.

  Colm looked at the email address. “Yes, I know him very well actually,” he said. “What’s this about?”

  “Read the IM string and tell me what you think it’s about.”

  I looked expectantly at Colm when he finished reading. He leaned back in his seat. “I’m not going to jump to any conclusions.”

  “Oh, neither am I.”

  “Good.”

  “I don’t need to. It’s obvious what’s going on! Isolde’s launching into an affair with a married man, and she’s not even showing the slightest bit of remorse about it! The woman is heartless –”

  “You don’t know that for sure –”

  “Oh, wake up! And the walking bitch called me a wagon! Me! She’s the station-wagon of wagons! Well, if I am one, it’s from hanging out with her for too long.”

  “Just forget you read that. Don’t interfere in something that isn’t your business –”

  “So, you think it’s okay that Martin is lying to his wife, then? You’re going to condone it by keeping schtum about it all?”

  “What do you want me to do? That IM conversation doesn’t prove anything.”

  “This is exactly why people get away with things – people like you just can’t be bothered disrupting their own lives to help someone else. Tell me, if you were being cheated on, wouldn’t you want someone to tell you?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been in that situation.”

  “Well then, you’re very lucky. I have, and I wished afterwards that people who knew about it had had the decency to tell me, and stopped me looking like a total fool. But no, nobody wants to get involved, so they just let you go on being the only person who doesn’t know about it.”

  “What good do you think it would do if I rang Valerie, and this guy she’s only met a few times socially tells her that her husband is cheating on her?”

  “Ah. So you agree that he’s cheating on her, then? So much for not jumping to conclusions!”

  He sighed deeply. “If he is, then I’m not the right person to tell her.”

  “So talk to Martin, then. Tell him that if he doesn’t fess up, you’ll tell his wife. That might make him see sense.”

  He shook his head. “I have enough to do trying to manage about ten different projects across an ocean and a timezone. I’m staying out of this, and you should too. It’ll only do more harm than good to stick our noses in this, I’m telling you. It’s probably nothing.”

  “You know it’s not, but that’s fine. You go away and pretend you know nothing.”

  I shook my head as he walked back to his desk. Mr High and Mighty I’ve-never-been-cheated-on. Wasn’t it bloody well for some?

  Just to fuel my fire, Lindy did an extra-long shake of her hair. My mood lifted slightly though when I saw the look of horror on her face as Colm remained oblivious to all of her efforts. Next thing, she’d be stripping in a bid to get his attention – although she was wearing so little as it was that he’d probably barely notice the difference.

  That night, the dream changed.

  She takes the shortcut. When he grabs her, her initial shock gives way to her survival instinct. She kicks and flails until she manages to get away from him for a few seconds. In those precious seconds, she screams at the top of her lungs, no longer constrained by the monster’s grubby hand over her mouth. He gains ground on her attempt to escape, and soon she’s knitted into his grip once more – but her time of freedom was long enough for someone to hear her plea for rescue. She doesn’t see the man approach – but, more importantly, neither does her captor. The man hits the monster from behind with an object she can’t see, but which makes a ferocious noise as it crushes her captor’s skull. His hold on her instantly loosens, and she wriggles away just before he falls to the ground. She doesn’t know if he is unconscious or dead, but she doesn’t care. After what he’s just tried to do to her, she hopes it’s the latter.

  “Are you alright?” the man says. “I called the police as soon as I heard you scream – they’re on their way.”

  “Yeah, I’m okay now,” she says. “Thank you so much for saving my life, em . . . ?”

  “Leon,” he says. “My name is Leon.”

  I woke up in a pool of sweat. This one had been far, far worse in its own way than the one where I lived through Elaine’s death in every last gory detail. At least I was used to the pain of that one. This dream gave me hope, made me wake up feeling for just a nanos
econd that everything was alright, then sent me crashing back to the reality of Elaine being dead.

  Not to mention the fact that I’d now be haunted by Leon for the entire day.

  I got up and threw myself into the shower, dressed in about two minutes flat and got to the office an hour earlier than usual. Isolde was still sending me loads of other work, so I had three articles to write this morning for the weekend editions of the paper. I kept my head down and worked solidly until lunchtime, then swallowed a sandwich in one bite and got back to work again. Lindy was out of the office in the morning, and Colm never spoke to me unless I spoke to him, so I had a gloriously quiet time until Lindy stormed in shortly after half one in a full-length black and white dress.

  “Why are you still here?” This was aimed at me. Colm was privileged enough to get a nod from her.

  “Where else would I be? We’re not leaving for the launch party until three.”

  Lindy had wangled an invitation for us to attend the launch of a brand-new people-search website – a website for stalkers, to you and me. She’d been jumping out of her skin since she’d found out yesterday that we’d been put on the list – we probably had a cancellation slot and they just wanted to make up numbers, but she was acting as if Elvis was coming back from the dead just to meet us. The angle she was taking was that there were bound to be journalists there who wanted to talk to the hottest people-searcher of the moment (that’s me, in case you’re confused, but Lindy went to great pains to explain to me that it was my story that was hot, and not myself, not that I’d been in any doubt about that in the first place). My situation was so relevant and captured the zeitgeist of all the lonely people in the world . . . she didn’t tell me straight out to use these words in an interview situation, but she didn’t need to – after the first twenty stressed references to all things zeitgeisty, I kinda got the hint. Sure, why wouldn’t they be lining up to interview someone like me at such an event? So she’d warned me to be prepared – but I hadn’t taken that to mean that I’d have to make my departure for the damn thing the night before.

  “Exactly! We’re leaving at three, and it’s now one forty!”

  “Which isn’t three – what’s the problem here?”

  “Oh. My. Gawd. What is wrong with you?” She turned to Colm. “Are all Irish women this slovenly? No wonder you choose to be single.” She took three seconds out of her rant to send a megawatt beam in Colm’s direction, then she made her way over to me and slammed the lid down on my laptop.

  “Taxi back to the hotel, quick. You too, Colm. Oh, and can you bring your camera to this event? We should probably film Andie at the launch talking about how lucky she is that a service like this exists – something like that. I’ll make it up as I go along.”

  Colm shrugged. He always looked like he was lost without his camera anyway, so he was probably delighted to have an excuse to bring it.

  An hour later, I was clad in a silk dress that I’d bought just before I came to Vegas. Lindy had pounced upon it midway through a fierce and uninvited rifle through my sparse wardrobe after she’d accompanied us back to the hotel. The bodice of the dress was silver and ruched, with delicate silver roses decorating the straps, but the knee-length skirt was a deep shade of amethyst. I’d bought it for a tenner in a closing-down sale in a boutique at home, but it was one of those gems that looked a million dollars when teamed up with a bit of jewellery. I’d matched it with silver pearl earrings, a chunky pearl bracelet and a silver pendant, and tied the look together with a pale mauve wrap and silver peep-toe shoes. I wondered idly if Leon would like it (or rather, if he’d like me in it. He’d given me no reason to believe that he was into wearing women’s clothes).

  Lindy hovered around me, nodding her head in approval and muttering randomly about how people should really stop being so lazy about making an effort. She seized upon the sparse contents of my make-up bag – a battered wand of supermarket-brand mascara, a stubby lipstick and some other basics, and got to work. Her twiggy fingers hovered in front of my eyes and my cheeks as she applied my make-up in vigorous strokes, her entire face a scowl of intense concentration. She then whipped out a hairbrush and a mini-can of hairspray from a handbag that looked compact but appeared to hold the contents of an entire department store, did some weird flicky thing with the layers of my hair, and within a few minutes, I suddenly looked quite sophisticated. This led to another rant about people who have great potential but don’t use it – apparently there was nothing worse. Starving children and earthquake victims didn’t seem to register in Lindy’s universe, and I had enough sense to realise that right then wasn’t a good time to fill her in on some of the other things that were going on in the world.

  “Okay. You’re ready.”

  I frowned at my reflection. “Aren’t I a little overdressed for a website launch? I look like I’m going to a wedding!”

  “No. Look at me. Am I overdressed?”

  “Yes, but you overdress every day of the week, so that’s normal. Me, well, even though this dress only cost a tenner, this is as dressed-up as it gets for me – and I just brought this over from Ireland because I shrank all my other ones in a dodgy tumble-drying cycle incident a few days before I came over here.” An incident that I strongly suspected my mother had something to do with. She’d coincidentally been complaining that my lovely comfy black shift dress was too loose and baggy and did me no favours only hours before it came out of the tumble-dryer looking like something Barbie would struggle to get into.

  “Thank the good Lord above for dodgy tumble-dryers, then, because this dress is amazing on you. But, whatever you do, do not tell anyone what it cost. You got it in a designer store in New York, okay?”

  She shoved me out the door of my room and resumed her mutterings all the way downstairs, her specialist subject this time being the disgrace that was people who didn’t buy matching handbags for beautiful dresses (her face had crumpled in disgust when she’d realised that the only handbag I had was the battered black one I always carried around with me). I was spared from having to go on a whistle-stop tour of the MGM shops in search of something silver and handbaggy by the sight of Colm with his camera waiting in Reception, dressed in a fresh set of clothes. He had the whole smart casual look going on in a light pair of brown chinos and a tan short-sleeved shirt. His presence had the effect of melting Lindy’s face as effectively as ice-cream in a microwave. On paper, I suppose it wasn’t such a hard thing to imagine happening. That whole big brown puppy-dog-eyed thing he had going on, teamed with an air of distance and a hint of unattainability that some women found quite a challenge, probably made him attractive to some. But, as Lindy practically purred as we walked towards Colm, it just felt really strange.

  If Colm was aware of the vibes bursting out of Lindy, he didn’t show it as she sidled up to him and gave him a coy “Hi, you.” I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d wrapped her body around his like a snake right there and then in the middle of Reception.

  “So, whaddya think of the finery?” she said.

  Colm turned to me. “You look . . . really different,” he said, drinking me in with a look on his face that was akin to shock.

  Good God, surely I wasn’t that much of a slob normally!

  “I was talking about mine!” She gestured at her dress, then played with a coil of her hair and replaced her frown with a smile and a giggle.

  “Oh – well, I saw yours already when you came into the office, remember? But yeah, you look great too.”

  Lindy looked distinctly unimpressed at Colm’s half-hearted compliment, particularly as he had turned his attention from her to an elderly lady who was struggling to make it to the elevator under the weight of the bags she’d accumulated on a shopping trip, most likely to an outlet store.

  “One second – I’ll give this lady a hand.”

  He bounded off towards her, while Lindy stared in awe as if Colm had just rescued a newborn baby from the jaws of a shark.

  Lindy exhaled a long,
ragged breath, and closed her eyes. “Thank you, God. Thank you.”

  “Lindy, are you alright?” She seemed to have forgotten I was there.

  “Oh, yes. Never better. Just giving thanks to the Lord that he’s single. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but I’m so happy he is.”

  “Why shouldn’t he be single?”

  “Why?” She looked at me as if I was a village idiot that she was afraid to talk to in case she would be contaminated by my stupidity. “Are you totally blind? Have you seen his pecs? And what about those eyes of his? Wow!” She took another deep, shivery breath. “It’s a miracle. I thought there were no single guys like him left.”

  “Well, just because he’s single doesn’t mean you two are going to get together.” I didn’t know why I was arguing with her – it’s not as if I cared whether they got together or not – but her certainty that she could have something just because she wanted it was not only astounding, but mildly infuriating.

  “Oh, please. Why wouldn’t we? We’d make a gorgeous couple.”

  Colm strode back to us. He was met with an immediate smile from Lindy and what doubtless looked like a scrutinising look from me, as I tried to see him through Lindy’s eyes.

  “Philippe needs to start sharing his wage packet with me,” he said, more to me than to Lindy.

  As far as she was concerned, though, I was invisible, so she fluttered her eyelashes and laughed dutifully at Colm’s quip.

  We made our way outside. I had assumed we were getting a taxi to the launch, but Lindy steered us away from the queue of waiting taxis and led us to an area on the left-hand side of the hotel, where a shiny black limousine awaited us. I don’t know if my face betrayed my concern that my expenses for the week would be eaten up by my share in paying for the thing, but Lindy muttered “Don’t worry, it’s on LVTV” in my direction before we filed into its gigantic interior. Once I was ensconced on my very own leather sofa, Lindy having plopped down beside Colm, I looked around and took in every detail. Its array of services was dazzling – and completely unnecessary for such a short journey. DVD players (yes, plural), a wet bar (which I probably would use before the end of the short journey just to take my attention away from the sickening sight of Lindy trying to cuddle up to Colm – she obviously had limo fantasies, but I really didn’t want to see them acted out in front of me), ice buckets flanking a gigantic champagne bucket which held an unopened bottle of very expensive-looking bubbly, and a selection of finger food that wouldn’t look out of place at a wedding buffet. The launch party was on in a brand-new hotel at the opposite end of the Strip. It surely wouldn’t take us longer than fifteen minutes to get there. LVTV were obviously doing well this year.