by Adrian White
“There is no trouble,” said Mike.
“What?”
“There is no trouble. There’s no FBI letter or a subpoena or an investigation. I just made that up to get you to meet me.”
“What?”
“Because I knew you wouldn’t – ”
“You fucking bastard, Mike! You fucking bastard.”
“Katie, I – ”
“No, fuck off, Mike!” said Katie, and stood up. “That’s too much – you can’t do that. What the fuck are you looking at?” she snapped at the couple on the next table. “Is your own life so boring, you have to listen in on mine?”
The couple looked away again, not wanting to get involved.
“Katie,” said Mike.
“You’ve no right doing that, Mike, no right at all.”
“But you wouldn’t have seen me otherwise.”
“And now I’m leaving,” said Katie. “What difference does it make?”
“Please,” said Mike. “I need to talk to you.”
“Tough!” said Katie. “I’ve got absolutely no interest in anything you have to say – it’ll all be lies, anyway.” She picked up her bag from the table. “Don’t contact me again, do you hear?”
“Katie,” said Mike again, but Katie was already walking away, putting on her coat as she made her way to the door. Mike stood up and went after her.
“Katie, please listen,” he said. “I really do need your help – I don’t know how else to put it, but I need your help.” He had to raise his voice to be heard across the foyer. “Please.”
Katie stopped and turned around. There were more than just a couple of people watching and listening now but she didn’t care. You don’t choose the time or the place when your life becomes an entertainment for others; it was here and now in the foyer of the Gresham for Katie.
“You’re a fucking bastard, Mike. You have no idea – ”
“Yes I do,” said Mike. “I do have an idea and I’m sorry, but I needed to see you and I need your help.”
“How can you need my help?” asked Katie. “And don’t spin me another line – in fact, how can I believe a single word you say?”
“Please don’t go, Katie,” said Mike. “Please – and I’m sorry I had to do it this way – but please . . . just don’t go until you hear what I’ve got to say.”
“You’ll lie to me.”
“I won’t, I promise. That was a stupid thing to tell you this morning, but I was desperate and I didn’t know how else to make sure you’d come.”
“You could have told me the truth.”
“I could,” said Mike, “but you wouldn’t have come. I promise I’ll be straight with you now; I have to be because I need – ”
“Because you need my help – you said that already.”
Katie looked at Mike. She breathed deeply, but it wasn’t a controlled breathing – more an attempt to cover her feelings.
“You’ve hurt me,” she said.
“I know, and I’m sorry.”
Nobody got close to Katie McGuire – so what was happening here?
Katie looked away to her left, towards the reception desk, and then back to her right, towards the bar. She looked back at Mike.
“If what we had means anything to you – ” he began.
“Don’t you dare!” said Katie, “Don’t you fucking dare try to use what happened back then as a bargaining tool. You know I owe you everything; I owe my life to you and there’s not a day goes by when I don’t think of that so don’t you dare try to tell me how much I’m in your debt.”
“Then listen to me now,” said Mike, “because I need you.”
“How can you need me?” asked Katie.
“I need you and I’m begging you, please, not to go.”
The life of the foyer had begun to move on; they weren’t quite the spectacle they had been a moment ago.
“Please, Katie.”
“You’ve hurt me,” said Katie again.
“I know,” said Mike, “but that’s not why I’m here. I don’t want to upset you, but I do need to see you.”
“You hurt me just by being here.”
Katie felt herself unravelling – she felt the years being stripped away – and she didn’t want to do this in public. She either walked or she stayed, but she had to decide quickly what to do.
Mike stepped towards her, but Katie stepped back.
“Don’t!” she said, and Mike stopped. “You’re a fucking bastard, Mike.”
“Yes, you said.”
“A fucking bastard.”
“Got it,” said Mike.
“A fucking, fucking, bastard.”
“But you love me, right?”
“I owe you,” said Katie. “I owe you enough to listen to you, that’s all.”
They chose another table, in the bar and away from the open foyer.
“I’m going to have to eat something,” said Mike.
“I’ll have a pot of tea,” said Katie. “If you order some sandwiches then I’ll share them with you.”
Katie left Mike alone while she went to freshen up and to recover some of her lost composure. She studied herself in the mirror. Her clothes and her look said successful businesswoman. She wondered if anyone in the foyer had recognised her – had she become the stuff of gossip columns out there? She realised she’d been crying. She cursed Mike again for doing this to her. But there was nothing here Katie didn’t already know – the front she put on to the world could collapse at any moment; it was hardly surprising if it had almost happened today. She splashed her face with cold water, dried her hands, and walked back out to the bar.
“I need to tell you about my home and family,” said Mike, “and then I think you’ll see why I’m here.”
“No bullshit, then,” said Katie.
“No bullshit, I promise.”
“Because I can tell when you’re lying.”
“No lying, and no bullshit – I promise,” said Mike again.
Their food and drinks arrived; Mike had a Guinness this time, as though it was he now that needed the drink to help calm him down. Katie was happy with her tea and helped herself to a sandwich.
Mike looked up at Katie. It was an unguarded moment, and Katie saw something. His still young face reminded her of the summer days when they used to drive out to the hills above Manchester; when Mike would be trying but failing to figure Katie out. He’d looked lost then, and he looked lost now.
“What is it?” she asked.
But then the look was gone, and Nice Guy Mike was back.
“You were right about my wife,” he said. “I knew her all the time you and I were together at college – though, of course, I wasn’t married to her at the time. We weren’t even seeing each other – not in that way, anyway – so it wasn’t as though I was cheating on her. And you and I weren’t exactly what you’d call going out together, were we?”
“When did you meet your – how long had you known Margaret?”
“We used to meet in the library after school,” said Mike. “That was where we first saw each other, and I can’t imagine we’d ever have met otherwise.”
“It’s a good place to meet girls – a library,” said Katie. “You can fool them into thinking you’re intelligent, and they like that.”
“Well, the similarity did occur to me a year or so later when you came over to talk to me in the Law Library that time. But anyway, getting back to Margaret . . . it took a couple of months of staring across the tops of desks and then looking quickly away before either one of us had the nerve to speak to each other. And when it did happen, it was only because her friends egged Margaret on; I would never have had the courage to say hello. I used the library because to get to school I had to travel the whole way across town, so it was easier to stop off on the way home and get my work done there. I’d be knackered by the time I got home otherwise, and this way I was still in a studying frame of mind – in my uniform and everything.”
Katie smiled.
> “What?” asked Mike.
“The thought of you in your school uniform – did you have a little cap on you head?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“What age were you?”
“I was just seventeen; Margaret was almost sixteen and studying for her O’ levels. I was about to take my A’s. And the uniform is relevant, because it told Margaret where I went to school. There were always two or three of her friends with her, giggling at Margaret for daring to talk to me. She used the library because there was no space to work at home, she said.”
“Now that I can understand,” said Katie.
“Well, yeah, I guess nobody loved their library as much as you did.”
“It was private,” said Katie, “your own space even though you’re in a very public place. I could never have studied for my exams otherwise – certainly not at Margaret’s age – so I know what she was doing.”
“She said if I couldn’t handle a couple of girls giggling,” said Mike, “there wasn’t much hope for me. What she meant was, I was going to come up against greater resistance than that if I wanted to carry on seeing her. Because it was Belfast, the easy way of looking at it was that she was a Catholic and I was a Protestant and sure, that was there – I’m not denying it. But when you got right down to it – when it was just the two of us – it was the fact that I had money and she didn’t. Or rather, that my family had money and her family didn’t.”
“There’s nothing like a rich person for not knowing the value of money,” said Katie.
“But it’s not as though we were rich,” said Mike. “We weren’t poor, but we weren’t so well off either. I was just a middle-class school kid, and even that wasn’t the real me; it was my family that weren’t poor, my family that were middle class. I was just a schoolboy and this was the first time I’d come across how money can affect how one person might look at another.”
“I’m with Margaret on this one,” said Katie. “I can imagine you were unbearable.”
“But that’s just it,” said Mike, “If I’d ever thought about it at all, I was just some kid who was studying to go to college. And then suddenly I was being looked at like I was some freak from landed gentry or something.”
“You’d have to be where Margaret was from to understand.”
“I know, I know,” said Mike, “but this was a real lesson to me, the difference money makes to people’s attitudes. And I don’t mean the difference money makes to your life – I’m not that stupid, and I wasn’t even that stupid back then. But Margaret looked at me differently because I wasn’t poor. Not necessarily that I was any better or any worse than her – just different.”
“Again, I’m with Margaret here.”
“But it was just me,” insisted Mike.
“Just you, about to take your exams a year before anyone else, hoping to go to college to study law and definitely not hanging around Belfast for the rest of your life. What was Margaret hoping to do?”
“She’s a nurse; she always knew she was going to be a nurse and that’s what she did.”
“That’s good, then,” said Katie.
“Yes, but the way she went about it shows what I mean. She was as desperate to leave Belfast as I was – or, at least, she claimed to be – and she could quite easily have gone away to college, even to Manchester, to study nursing and qualify over there.”
“But she left school at sixteen, went straight on to the ward, and stayed at home?”
“Exactly,” said Mike. “And then for the rest of her life she has this hang-up about me having been to college and she never did and she wants it for our kids and can’t understand when they don’t want it too and it all goes back to money and how it makes you see yourself and the rest of the world.”
“You say you were only seventeen,” said Katie. “Well, cut her some slack. She was only sixteen at the time; maybe it was very difficult for her then. She moved over to Manchester eventually, didn’t she?”
“Yes, yes, I guess so. I just hate that determination in some people to stay who they are, even when it doesn’t do them any good.”
“You can’t have hated it that much if you ended up marrying her,” said Katie.
“No,” said Mike, “you’re right. I’m just trying to give you as full a picture as possible, that’s all.”
“From your point of view, you mean – I imagine Margaret’s recollection differs slightly to yours.”
“I guess it does, but I can’t speak for her so you’re going to have to take me on trust. Jesus,” said Mike, “you’re a hard listener.”
Katie knew that Mike would have deliberated long and hard over the best approach to take in saying what he’d come to say – the best approach to get whatever it was he hoped to get out of Katie. The lost look she’d seen on Mike’s face a few minutes earlier was the temptation to simply blurt it all out. Katie decided to give Mike the time and the space to tell it in his own way.
“Go on,” she said.
“After college,” said Mike, “after Vegas – I went home. And yes, I know that was a luxury some people don’t have; I was able to take my time to figure out what I wanted to do next. I had my parents – a family and a home – where I could hang around, and do nothing much. Of course, I got some grief about giving up on the banking scholarship, and why had I studied law if I wasn’t going to be a solicitor? But generally, they were very understanding; I was taking my time before making my big decision.”
“The Graduate?” said Katie.
“Yeah, like that,” agreed Mike, “only more so because, although both my parents are Irish, they’ve never lost that American drawl way of speaking. And they picked up that hard-nosed attitude to the professions while they were over there – hence their joy when I’d gone to study law.”
“But now you were turning into a waster?”
“Well, I was still only twenty one, as I kept reminding them, and they did allow me the space and time – and I know that’s incredibly privileged, and not many people would have that kind of family set-up, but that was me and that was how it was, so I can’t help that.”
“I didn’t say a word,” said Katie.
“No,” said Mike, “you don’t need to.”
“So what conclusions did you come to?”
“Well, there were no great startling revelations,” said Mike, “if that’s what you mean. I thought about what I’d been up to over the previous four years, and realised that a lot of it was bordering on illegal – ”
“More than bordering on, I’d say.”
“Yes, yes – whatever; but I wondered where it had all come from, all this money thing. You know, this obsession with proving how easy it was to amass money, even if a lot of it was through dodgy deals and fraud and suchlike? But I had done some remarkable things. That listings magazine, for example, is still going strong – maybe not in the same recognisable form, but it started out in life as my magazine, none the less.”
Katie nodded in agreement, and Mike continued.
“I knew how to read and play the stock market,” he said, “and I know we didn’t earn a fortune playing cards, but we did have a lot of fun and probably ended up even over the years, if you take away the trip to Vegas.”
There it was, thought Katie. Mike was about to come on to Vegas.
“I thought about that whole Halibro thing,” said Mike, “and I just thought – what the hell have I been doing? Where did all this stuff come from? What was I trying to prove or achieve?”
“And did you find out?” asked Katie.
Mike laughed.
“No, not really,” he said, “only that I’d gradually been building up to it – getting to college at an early age, being a high achiever, that sort of thing – and I felt now that part of my life was over.”
“Mike Maguire finally grows up,” said Katie.
“And you were a part of what I was going through,” said Mike. “I’d spent four years trying to figure you out, trying to get close to you – tryin
g to get you to fall in love with me, even – and now that was over too. And the money thing – I realised it was a poor substitute for what I really wanted, and that it didn’t really do it for me or for you and so, what was the point?”
“The point was,” said Katie, “was that I did appreciate the money, and I still do. I’ll never lose sight of what it allowed me to do.”
“But I think I was looking to save you, or something,” said Mike, “and the money wasn’t going to do that. And I still don’t even know what I was trying to save you from.”
“You saved me from a life of poverty,” said Katie, “that’s what you saved me from.”
“Not really – you’d already come away with first class honours in a law degree; I think you’d have worked things out just fine. You know I don’t mean that.”
“So what do you mean?” asked Katie.
“That I’d got the money, but I hadn’t got the girl,” said Mike.
“You had Margaret,” Katie pointed out.
“I know, and I know this isn’t doing her any favours – making it look like she was second best to you, because that’s not how it was. I loved her all the way through this; I just couldn’t see how we could both be together. We were realistic about the distance thing – I was in Manchester and she was back in Belfast – and we knew it might not work out. There was every possibility that I would meet someone and she said that if I did, then that was okay.”
“And you believed she meant that?”
“At the time, yes, because I was so young, but I can see in hindsight that she may just have been saying it. And I did meet someone, didn’t I? And whatever you may think of yourself, Katie, I knew how I felt about you and yes, I wanted to save you and be the one to make your life okay.”
“But then you realised I was a hopeless case – am a hopeless case?”
“Yes, basically,” said Mike, “but I never thought of you exactly in those terms. I could see that you couldn’t be with me and that nothing I could do or say, or no amount of money I could throw at the problem, was ever going to make any difference; so I had to just walk away.”
“That’s what I told you at the time,” said Katie, “only, unlike Margaret, I meant what I said.”