[2014] Looking for Leon

by Shirley Benton

  “For some bizarre reason that I can’t fathom, you don’t seem to think that. But you’re different, and that’s why we got this far. If I hadn’t met you, I’d probably have been alone forever – and possibly thinking that I was reasonably happy to be that way. But now . . .”

  “Now?”

  “Now that I’ve had a taste of what it’s like to be with someone like you, I finally understand what all the fuss is about.”

  We indulged in a few seconds of goofy smiles before he continued.

  “I’ve also managed to come to the realisation that I’m punishing myself – which might seem very obvious to you but, believe me, it took me a long time to realise that myself, simple and all as it is to grasp. Can you understand that?”

  I nodded. I could, more than he knew.

  “I know I couldn’t have avoided hitting the old man that night, no matter what. But when you kill a person, you carry that with you for the rest of your life – a life that, in my case, was put on hold the day of the accident. The problem was that when I recognised what I was doing to myself, I was too entrenched in it to find my way back out. But then, you came bursting into my life, and – well, here we are.”

  “But what’s so different about me?”

  “What’s so different?” Colm looked directly into my eyes. “Do you have any idea how amazing you are? I’ve never met anyone as full of life as you. You’re vibrant, you’re wild, you’re – you’re special.”

  I shook my head.

  “You are. In the last ten years, you’re the only person who’s ever worked out that I’ve been carrying something around with me. You’re the only one who’s ever cared enough to even ask.”

  “But that’s because you’ve never let anyone else in enough to see that something was up – and I only had the opportunity to get close to you because you were forced to hang out with me over here. That doesn’t make me special.”

  “That’s not true. I would have continued to push you away like I did at the beginning if I hadn’t seen you for the caring person you are.”

  “You give me far too much credit.”

  “No. The problem is that you don’t give yourself half enough. We’ll have to work on that confidence of yours, Missy Appleton. Amongst other things. We’ve got a busy night ahead of us . . .”

  He smothered me in kisses, and that was the end of that conversation.

  It’s always when things are going well that you need to watch out. Whenever I got one aspect of my life sorted, something else always got mucked up, just to keep me on my toes . . .

  Colm and I had secured a new office for ourselves – the Internet café in the hotel. We had wireless Internet access in our hotel rooms, of course, but we both knew that we’d end up fooling around if we went to either of our rooms, and we’d make no progress whatsoever in planning the next episode of Looking for Leon. Philippe had pulled strings for us, and got us a daily Internet access rate for a dollar each. It was nine in the morning, and both of us were already ensconced in the café, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and ready for a day’s work. My inbox brought all of my good intentions to an abrupt end.

  From: Adam.Appleton@gmail.com

  To: Andie.Appleton@hotmail.com

  Uh oh. I think every second mail I send you is bad news. That should give you a clue about what’s to come.

  Soooo . . . Jane seems pretty happy that we’re back together – so happy, in fact, that she’s been telling a few people – okay, the entire office – about how we got back together. It’s a great story, you have to admit. Anyway, it’s a big office, and you know how it is – you don’t know who knows who. Long story short, tempted as I am to make it long and postpone the bad news, it turns out one of the people she told knows Isolde. Jane hadn’t mentioned the name of the person I was spying on, but she described Isolde as “the mad one in the office upstairs that wears the tents” and everyone knew who she was from that.

  This is where it gets scary. So, Jane was leaving work yesterday when she was accosted by Isolde, who demanded to know the full details of my stalking attempt. Isolde knew from the office bigmouth that I was watching what she was doing because I suspected her of having an affair, but what she really wanted to know was who I was and why I gave a shit about her life. So Jane had no option but to tell her my name, and that I was doing a job for my sister, Andie. She had no choice, Andie – she was terrified. She said Isolde was ranting and raving and threatening police involvement if she didn’t find out what was going on. Plus, Jane has just bought a new car, and Isolde threatened to scrape a new word into the side of her car every day until Jane told her what was the story was. You have a crazy boss – you mustn’t know that, or you wouldn’t have been messing with her in the first place.

  I suppose you’re wondering how Isolde reacted to hearing you were involved in this. Apparently, it was about as pretty as I’d imagine she is first thing in the morning. Or any time, really. Jane had been terrified before, but when Isolde started ranting about you, she actually thought Isolde was going to reach out and strangle her just to channel her anger somewhere. I wish I had some words of consolation for you, but . . . basically, you’re fucked. Get the CV together.

  Oh. My. God! Fear flooded through me. My face filled with blood. I would have left the country if I already wasn’t in it. It didn’t matter where I was or where I would go, though. Isolde would find me. She was probably on a plane to Vegas right now to strangle me with the hem of one of her curtains. I was sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo dead.

  Oh no! A box popped up on the bottom right of my PC screen.

  Isolde has just signed in.

  Why, why, why had I set up Instant Messenger to log me in automatically?

  I thought about signing out immediately, but no. I wasn’t that much of a coward. I held my breath and waited for the onslaught to begin.

  Ten seconds later, I had to exhale. Still no sign of her rant beginning. I was dead anyway, so there was no point in giving myself brain damage from lack of oxygen while waiting to be killed.

  I spent a full half an hour staring at the screen, waiting for my bollixing to pop up. Eventually, I realised that she wasn’t going to IM me. She was going to make me sweat. I had to try to do some work, so I went back to my inbox to deal with the messages that had come in while I’d been staring at the bottom right of my screen. Just as I did so, a new email came through from Isolde.

  Oh God. I took a deep breath and opened it.

  From: Isolde.Huntingdon@vicious.ie

  To: Andie.Appleton@vicious.ie

  Subject: I think you know what this is about . . .

  . . . although your stupidity knows no bounds, it seems, so maybe you don’t. So let me clarify. It’s time for you and me to talk about you setting someone on me to stalk me. I haven’t IM’d you because I don’t want to hear your pathetic excuses. I’m the one doing the talking here, you understand?

  You, Andie, seem to be determined to commit career suicide. Just when I think you can’t surprise me any more with the lengths you will go to fuck up, you open my eyes once more to how self-destructive you are.

  Let me tell you a little story. I’ll tell you this as simply as possible, because it seems to be the only way to get things through to your thick skull. Once upon a time, there was a girl called Maud. She wasn’t a little girl. She was fat. In fact, her entire family was fat. Her mother was fat, her father was fat, her brother was fat. Even the family dog had cholesterol problems. This was because they all ate too much. You with me so far?

  Maud, the fat girl, grew up to be a fat adult. Maud’s brother ballooned too. Maud and her brother were the best of friends in their fat bubble. This was because the fatties needed to stick together to deal with the world. Time went on, and fat brother met a fat woman and got married. Maud never met anyone, though. And eventually, she got sick of being fat. She decided to do something about it. She stopped eating badly and started doing lots of exercise. After a few years, Maud managed to become a thin p
erson. She changed her name – her surname too – to suit this new person she had become.

  Her brother stayed in the fat world, as did his wife. Maud suspected that her brother could be dragged out of that world, but his wife was putting up resistance. Maud had a feeling that the wife didn’t have the motivation or the willpower to lose weight, and she was holding Maud’s brother back. As time went on, Maud could see that her brother was growing more and more dissatisfied with accepting that he was a fatty when he knew he could do something about it, especially since his sister had done it and kept the weight off. But whenever he suggested to his wife that they should lose weight, she went ballistic. He told her he wanted to join a weight-loss group by himself, and that he wasn’t trying to drag her into something she wasn’t interested in, but she didn’t want him doing it if she wasn’t doing it herself. Things went on like this for years and years.

  Eventually, the brother couldn’t take any more. His health was suffering, and his wife had closed her eyes to the difficulties they both faced because of their weight. He went to Maud and begged her to help him before he became seriously ill. Maud was thrilled that he was finally willing to do something about his weight problems, and she vowed that if he tried to backtrack at any stage, as she knew he was likely to do through fear of his wife, she wouldn’t let him off the hook.

  Maud brought her brother to a weight-management support group and made him join up. Each week, they went to a meeting together where they attended a weigh-in. You see, Maud had been attending this very meeting for years, ever since she first lost the weight. As far as she was concerned, her addiction to food was like an alcoholic’s addiction to the sauce. It was something she lived with every day, and managed through the support of her meetings and her group. She knew that if her brother gave the support group a chance, he would lose weight and learn to keep it off.

  This is exactly what happened. And as for her brother’s wife, Maud called around to her and explained to her that if her husband hadn’t done something about his weight, his health issues would have killed him – and if she wasn’t willing to do something about her own weight, she was the one who should start thinking about the kind of coffin she’d like. Maud was very scary when she wanted to be. Eventually, her brother’s wife saw a bit of sense. Now, both Maud’s brother and his wife go to the meeting with Maud every week.

  All Maud is waiting for now is for the rumours of threesomes to hit the street.

  Kind regards,

  Isolde

  Oh no. No. No. No. No! I was no longer frightened. I was deeply ashamed of myself, which felt even worse than fear. Colm and I had got it so, so wrong.

  “Colm, Martin is Isolde’s sister.”

  “What? That can’t be – he told me once he only has one sister, and her name isn’t Isolde, it’s –”

  “Maud.” I finished his sentence.

  “Yes, Maud . . .”

  “Check your email.” I forwarded on Isolde’s email to Colm, then logged off, got up and walked out of the Internet café. There was no point in staying around to do any work when my career was officially over.

  Chapter Thirty

  I knew that being nosy would come back to bite me on the ass some day. Adam always said I would be a curtain-twitcher when I was an old lady – which is ironic, when you consider Isolde’s choice of clothing. I was prepared for trouble, but what I wasn’t prepared for was the embarrassment that haunted me for meddling in other people’s lives. The only thing I could do was apologise. With my heart in my mouth, I went back to my hotel room and picked up the phone to ring Isolde. It rang out. I felt heartily relieved – then ashamed of myself all over again for being relieved. I decided to email her to apologise. It would mean very little to her, I assumed, but I had to address the issue in some way.

  I wrote at least ten drafts of my email to Isolde, and discarded each and every one. Some journalist I was. Eventually, I decided to keep it simple and speak the truth.

  From: Andie.Appleton@vicious.ie

  To: Isolde.Huntingdon@vicious.ie

  Isolde,

  I know that no words can validate my behaviour. I was completely unfair to you, and I’m so sorry. I’ll obviously understand if you’re firing me – you would be completely justified in doing so.

  Again, I am truly sorry.

  Andie

  It was only after I typed my name that I realised Isolde had called me Andie in her email, and not Andey. Nothing could have conveyed the gravity of the situation more than that.

  The next few hours were unbelievably tense, as I perched on the edge of my seat in my room waiting to jump off it when Isolde inevitably rang me back. I also couldn’t tear myself away from my laptop in case she was in a meeting and decided to email me instead – Isolde was one of those annoying people who typed noisily on her laptop all the way through a meeting, regardless of who it was with or what it was about. She’d been known to clear her entire inbox while talking non-stop for an hour in a meeting. She could type without looking at the keyboard, so she always managed to maintain her killer eye contact with everyone in the room. Still, nothing came.

  Colm knocked on the door. I was so on edge that the sound frightened the life out of me. I briefly filled Colm in on what I’d been doing.

  “Sitting here waiting for her to contact you won’t make it happen any faster.” He walked behind me and massaged my shoulders. “How about we do something to take your mind off things?”

  He leaned down and kissed the back of my neck, just behind my ear. I didn’t take much convincing after that to take up his suggestion.

  An hour later, I got out of bed and checked my email again, as Isolde still hadn’t phoned. My heart thumped when I saw a new email from Isolde sitting in my inbox. I double-clicked it straight away before my nerves got the better of me.

  From: Isolde.Huntingdon@vicious.ie

  To: Andie.Appleton@vicious.ie

  Re: Looking for Leon

  We need to wrap up the Leon story. It’s run its course. If he was going to show up, he would have done so by now. What we need to do now is to work out how we can gain maximum exposure from ending the search. I want you to start working on how you’re going to portray this to the media in Vegas. My advice is to take the sob-story approach as much as possible – you’re heartbroken, this isn’t how you saw things ending, your life will never be the same again, blah blah blah. I’ll start working on a press release for the Irish newspapers. Organise your flight home for the beginning of next week – that gives you time to make the most out of this. Make sure that publicist gets you as many TV, radio and newspaper interviews as possible, because when the word gets out that you’re giving up on the search, there might be someone out there who knows something and will now come forward. We’d get a lot more out of all of this if we found him, you know, but if that’s not going to happen, then there’s no more for us to gain from this. I want you to email me tomorrow with a schedule of the interviews you’ve arranged to spread the word about this. Get off your email the second you’ve finished reading this and start organising things now. As for Éire TV, they’ve been humming and hawing about whether or not they want to extend the contract. I suggest you make sure everything you do is filmed between now and coming home so that your arse is covered either way.

  As for the other issue, we’ll talk about that when you get home. All you need to know is that Martin doesn’t know about all of this. This is for his sake, not yours. Martin would be mortified if he thought anyone knew about his weight-loss efforts. Make sure he doesn’t find out that Colm Cannon knows (as I have no doubt he does), or there will be serious trouble.

  Isolde

  PS If you tell anyone at work that my real name is Maud, then you really are fired.

  I must have OD’d on the coffee earlier. Surely I hadn’t read what I thought I’d just read. I skimmed the mail again, and to my disbelief it looked like I wasn’t hallucinating. There were quite a few shocking things about those few paragraphs.

/>   1) The Leon adventure was over. I’d been sure Isolde would have dragged it out a bit more.

  2) Isolde wanted me to make a show of myself again. For heaven’s sake! Could we not just finish this with a bit of dignity?

  3) Where was my bollixing?

  Then, I cottoned on to what she was up to. It was the making-me-sweat approach again. The bollixing I would get when she saw me face-to-face was going to be far, far worse than it would have been if she had poured out her frustration with me into an email. The whole thing of me having to do the boo-hoos on national TV again wasn’t part of the punishment – she would have made me do that anyway – but God help me when I was in front of her. Her email was far, far worse in its own way than I had anticipated. Good thing she didn’t know how I’d parted company with Lindy. That surely wouldn’t help her mood. She didn’t trust me to be able to give away water in the desert, never mind organise all of the Leon activities on my own.

  “Colm, we’re going home.” I beckoned him over.

  Colm came up behind me and read Isolde’s email. “Hmm, you got away lightly!”

  “No. This isn’t all there is to it. I know Isolde.”

  “Maybe she’ll surprise you. I see you haven’t told her you’re no longer working with Lindy though.”

  “Do you blame me? It looks like I have a bit of PR work ahead of me for the next few days if I’m to make it look like I took what she said seriously. Let’s just hope she’s not right and that me saying I’m ending the search won’t make someone come forward with information about Leon. I don’t know what the hell I’d do if that happened, now that . . .” I pointed to Colm, then back at myself, unable to say the words. It was really starting to hit me that it must have been so difficult for Colm to watch me try to move heaven and earth to find another man while he was developing feelings for me. I know that if I had been in his position, I wouldn’t have handled it as well as he had.