by Cathy Kelly
Gillian nodded slowly. ‘Fine, start tonight. But it’s no picnic, I can tell you.’
Phoebe had grinned. ‘Neither is cleaning out the duck shed,’ she said, ‘but I can do that too!’
Gillian laughed.
Within two weeks, Gillian looked calmer and more rested. Phoebe was on proper wages and made decent money from tips too.
‘You’ve a gift with the difficult customers,’ Gillian said admiringly.
‘It’s the farming background,’ Phoebe explained. ‘They like someone who can talk the talk with them but they know I won’t stand any messing about at closing time.’
She got used to being a waitress too at the weekends when the pub served food, swinging in and out of the kitchen with plates of fat fries, chicken in a basket, brown bread and chowder, or a giant slice of apple tart. You needed to be able to swoop and slide among tables like a dancer. You also needed good flat shoes, a pocket on your bar apron for tips, the order pad, your phone, and a sense of humour for the customers who wouldn’t have been satisfied if a winning lottery ticket had been served to them with a free meal and a bottle of fine wine.
The beauty handed Phoebe her change.
‘See ya again,’ she said, and Phoebe nodded.
There was a space for her, she was sure of it. The same way she’d been sure that Gillian needed her. Whatever family emergency was keeping the owner out of the shop, one day she’d be here and Phoebe would come in.
Meanwhile, she had to find another source of income. Package in hand, she left the shop with a regretful glance and headed up the road to see where the pubs were. She’d prefer Twentieth Century to a pub, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
Yesterday evening she’d gone into Doherty’s pub to leave her CV in there. She’d a great letter of reference from the pub at home and she had to admit that she loved the look of Doherty’s. It was what people might call unusual. Barking mad, maybe. It was as if whoever owned the pub had been given a job lot of Pepto-Bismol-coloured pink paint and had decided: What the heck, let’s make this place bright.
Phoebe thought there was a good possibility the pub could be seen from space. There were a few premises like that back home, too. It was the bar owner’s version of: If you build it, they will come.
The man in Doherty’s, who said he was the owner, had looked her up and down admiringly.
‘A fine hoult of a girl, you are,’ he said, looking at her with pleasure. ‘You’re just the sort of young wan we want in here but I’ve plenty of staff at the moment. Still, leave me your number and if anything comes up, trust me, I’ll give you a ring.’
This last part of the sentence he said with what was either a friendly smile, or a leer – Phoebe couldn’t be entirely sure which. But either way, she knew she’d be able to handle him. She hadn’t worked a full year in The Anvil and dealt with all manner of men without being able to handle a frisky bar owner who saw himself as a bit of a Lothario.
Today, she was going to hit the last side of the road and just drop her CVs in the small shops she didn’t think would have room for another member of staff. She’d also been into the supermarket the day before, where the manageress had looked at her as if she was stark raving mad.
‘I have three hundred names on file,’ she said scathingly, looking Phoebe up and down. ‘People who are prepared to work for next to nothing,’ the woman added.
‘Oh well,’ Phoebe said cheerfully, ‘prostitution it is, then,’ before she headed off with a wave, leaving the woman behind her with her mouth agape.
I know I shouldn’t have said that, Mam, Phoebe said to herself, but I couldn’t help it. That woman was delighted to have three hundred poor eejits all applying to get one badly paid job in her scabby supermarket. I bet she’s mean to the people who do work there.
Today she dropped her CV in politely to the little newsagent’s that, on weekdays, had a tiny post office at the back. She went into the garage on the main road and dropped it in. And finally – and longingly – she went into the pet store, which was clearly a family-run business because there were loads of staff in red Dunnes Pet Shop sweatshirts in there and they all looked exactly the same. Phoebe would have killed to have worked with the animals. After she’d dropped off her CV, she wandered around the cages poking her fingers in to stroke rabbits’ heads and talk to canaries.
‘You like animals then?’ said a teenage girl, watching Phoebe.
‘Oh, I love them,’ Phoebe said simply. ‘I was reared on a farm and I miss the animals so much. But I’m up here for college and I need a job and—’
‘And you thought this would be the right place for you.’ The girl smiled. ‘Sorry, Dad has enough trouble keeping the place going and that’s paying all of us buttons, to be honest. But we’ll keep your name on file. Phoebe, wasn’t it?’
Phoebe nodded. ‘Thanks a million,’ she said, as she headed for the door.
Twelve
Red O’Neill walked through the airport, ignoring the stares of a few of the savvy business people who’d been on his flight.
What’s he doing on a commercial flight? he imagined them thinking.
‘You don’t make money by flying private,’ he wanted to tell the rubberneckers. He’d hated all that ‘wheels up’ and ‘I have the Gulfstream this weekend and was thinking of flying to Hawaii’ rubbish. It annoyed the hell out of him. If it was easier to fly commercial, he did it.
Anything else was all ego; nothing to do with business at all. Red had never bought into such vanity, which was one of the reasons why his venture capital business had done so well in the past few years. So well, in fact, that the Financial Times had featured an interview with him three weeks ago. An interview that would have once had him clapping his hands with glee. The Financial Times was the paper for men in his line of work. Them wanting to interview you was like saying: You’ve arrived. You’re an international businessman of note, not just some young fella from Dublin.
Less of the young, he thought ruefully. He was nearly forty and there had only been one question with the FT interviewer that had left him slightly stumped.
‘What’s next?’ the reporter had asked. ‘What does Red O’Neill really want now?’
Red had a great reputation in the business for thinking on his feet: it was how he got out of the San Diego deal just in time, just before everyone else had lost their shirts. But he couldn’t think on his feet for this question.
It would have sounded completely ridiculous to say that after working his butt off for so long, he now wanted to actually have a life – and to somehow get over a woman he’d broken up with four years previously. That would have made him sound gauche and foolish, things Red never wanted to appear.
So he’d smiled his enigmatic smile, which normally worked very well – on women.
Sadly, this was a male journalist, so the enigmatic smile on the large, well-sculpted face with the brooding eyes – a smile that turned women’s heads, and not just because he was wealthy – didn’t have quite the same effect.
‘To be even more successful next year,’ he’d said lightly, hoping he appeared neither bigheaded nor stupid.
It was so difficult figuring out the right thing to say without sounding like a moron. He hated reading interviews with himself in newspapers because no matter how he meant to sound, it so often came out differently.
There was only one person who’d ever told him the truth about stuff like that, told him how he appeared in interviews, and she was the one who’d left him. It was why he almost never did business in Ireland. He didn’t want to bump into her; he didn’t want to even be in the same city as her.
It wasn’t that the great Red O’Neill hated failure and that Dublin had been the scene of that great failure. It was that he still felt the hurt.
He hadn’t told his mother he was coming today. Myra O’Neill would have rolled out the red carpet, de
lighted to see the return of the prodigal son, but Red always felt that big family reunions were for his brothers, the two O’Neill brothers who’d done it all properly. Who’d got married, who’d had children and reared them within a few streets of where they’d all been brought up in Silver Bay – not far from Delaney Gardens, but the less he thought about that, the better.
Red was high on every ‘most eligible bachelor’ list in Ireland since the year dot, and now, since the FT piece, possibly wait-listed for some other eligible bachelor lists around the world. Yet he wanted what his brothers had.
He’d sound like some 1950s housewife if he said it, but he genuinely wanted the whole enchilada: wife, kids, weekends where he didn’t think about the office but just enjoyed the sheer pleasure of being with his wife and children. The same way his brothers did with their families. The way he’d been brought up.
He didn’t want seven houses in different places; he wanted a beautiful house in his home city where he was close to his family, because Google and Facebook had shown that you could run any multi-national from Ireland.
He wanted it all. Both his parents’ marriage and his brothers’ marriages had shown him how family life could be, and he wanted that. But big, successful businessmen weren’t supposed to think in such a way. They were supposed to be superglued to their four phones, screaming at harried assistants, and wearing headsets to murmur their secret deals as they marched around galleries with their art collectors picking out investment/kudos-gaining paintings for their kudos-gaining big houses in the right spots in the right countries around the world. They were supposed to want super-thin, Pilates-honed wives who had Birkin handbags in every colour and every animal skin to hang off skinny arms, with an array of shoes that needed their own closet. These men wanted entrée to Davos, not tickets to kid movies with their small children.
But Red – who’d met plenty of Birkin wives, eyes anxiously swivelling as they watched their mega-rich husbands in case someone younger or prettier came along – didn’t want that life. He wanted the cinema tickets to Despicable Me 3. He wanted a short, curvy woman who’d never tried Pilates in her life and who would probably only see a Birkin bag if such an unlikely gem passed through her vintage shop.
Nobody knew this of course. They all thought Red was the ultimate alpha male, when in fact he was an alpha-beta, which was a new type of man, apparently, explained to him by an old pal’s wife.
Michael and Barbara Doorly had been friends of his forever, and Barbara, who was a journalist, said the metrosexual was old hat and the alpha-beta – ‘still macho but also caring and wants a family’ – was where it was at.
‘This is the sort of man who wants to understand his woman, wants to be with her, wants to nurture her and take care of her and take care of their children,’ explained Barbara, who was writing a feature about it.
Michael, who’d got a better fix on Red than any journalist ever would, had looked his friend in the eye and said: ‘I think you’re right, Babs. Our boy is an alpha-beta. That’s where all those high-flying girlfriends have been going wrong.’
Red had pretend-punched Michael, who’d pretend-punched him back.
‘The furniture, guys,’ said Barbara, who was used to this sort of male bonding and had a broken vase to prove it.
‘Mr O’Neill?’ A driver stood in front of him now, wearing a dark suit, dangling keys in his hand.
‘Hello,’ said Red politely. He was always polite. Maybe he wasn’t so alpha-beta after all. ‘You know where I’m staying?’
The driver said: ‘Of course, sir.’
‘We’ll drop by my mother’s first. Twenty-one Longford Terrace, Silver Bay.’
‘Whatever you want, sir.’
The driver tried to take Red’s carry-on bag but Red refused. ‘I’ll take it myself,’ he said.
No point going to the gym and doing a 90 kilo push press if you couldn’t carry your own damn case to the car. They climbed into the car, which was parked in the special VIP drivers’ parking area close to the airport. No more parking miles away like the plebs did, the way he and Coco had done for that amazing holiday in Greece once. He sat in the back seat and closed his eyes. Just because he was in the same country as her, he would not think about her. She was the past.
He’d gone out with plenty of women after Coco: fabulous, amazing women. City women, fit, gym-going, smart, clever girls that any man would have been delighted to be seen with. But there was always something wrong, something that ended the relationship abruptly.
‘You’re just not with me – mentally, I mean. You’re here but your head is a thousand miles away,’ complained Lara, a brunette lawyer who had a fleet of men after her.
‘I don’t think you’re a player but are you ever going to settle down?’ demanded Karen, a no-nonsense girl from New Zealand who didn’t believe in hanging around waiting for the man to ask the serious questions.
If Karen was going to be with a man, she wanted to know if there was a future in it. And Red had had to admit that there was no future in it. He didn’t know why. He wished he did.
‘I’m sorry,’ he’d said, and it had been very hard not to say, ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ – a statement which might have got him a knee somewhere painful.
Michael, who appeared to know everything about women thanks to Barbara, said that the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ thing had come to be a handy way for guys to dump women by pretending they were saying sorry, when in fact, it really meant: ‘It is you but I can’t handle the argument if I say so.’
‘How do you know all this stuff?’ Red asked Michael, bewildered.
‘Barbara. She writes an article a week on men and how weird we are. She knows more about us than we do.’
‘Isn’t that hard to live with?’ said Red.
‘Nah. I love her so I just roll with it. It’s the secret to marital happiness,’ Michael added with a grin. ‘Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?’ The grin widened. ‘I like being happy.’
In Red’s darker moments, he wondered if happiness simply eluded some people. Perhaps he simply wasn’t meant to be happily married like his two younger brothers, Mike and Dan, who had loving wives, small children and their mother’s adoration. The way to Myra O’Neill’s heart was not to be a successful businessman who got write-ups in the Financial Times, but to get married and present her with grandchildren to boast about endlessly at bingo and book club.
Or maybe he was just picky, as a couple of his friends had said.
‘Are you waiting for a supermodel? Someone from the Victoria’s Secret line-up? Is that it?’ Sandy, an old pal from the US college where he’d done his MBA, had asked this question when they were having a night out in London, eating the special blackened fish at Nobu before heading on to a few clubs, whereupon they decided they were far too old for this type of carry-on and went back to Red’s apartment with its giant windows overlooking the Thames to drink a few beers and talk.
‘Of course I’m not waiting for a Victoria’s Secret model,’ said Red irritably.
A vision of an entirely different sort of woman had come into his head – a woman who was very much the opposite of a leggy Victoria’s Secret angel. A woman who was short, curved and would never walk any runway with wings attached to her. Coco Keneally.
‘I saw her, that Coco, at the supermarket and, do you know what, I nearly went over and gave her a piece of my mind,’ his mother had told him on the phone only the previous month.
Although his mother gave him a hard time about not being married yet, she was his most fearless defender. Far more fearless than Edwards, O’Brien and Edelstein, his lawyers – so tough that the mere arrival of a missive bearing their stationery caused even the most ruthless business people to blanch.
If Red had allowed it, his mother would have gone round to Coco’s house and thrown eggs at the windows or paraded outside her vintage sho
p with placards saying: This woman ruined my son’s life.
It was a mistake to mess with any of Myra O’Neill’s sons. They might be grown men but they were still her babies and she would never, ever forgive Coco Keneally.
Red himself hadn’t seen Coco since that horrible day four years ago and he sincerely hoped he wouldn’t see her now. That was the problem with coming back to Dublin: there was always the fear that he’d bump into her somewhere.
Yes, the big, strong Red O’Neill was scared of the thought of seeing his former fiancée. He still had the ring he’d bought her, although he’d never told anyone that. He’d picked it up from the street where Coco had thrown it. He kept it in the safe in the London apartment and sometimes, when he was feeling lonely, he took it out and thought that even then he could have afforded something more expensive, but that Coco, being Coco, had wanted something delicate, old and not ridiculously pricey.
He’d never meet her in Dublin, he told himself as the car flew through the Dublin streets. Nowadays, unless he was in the pub with his brothers and his father, he went to such different sorts of places from the sorts of places they’d frequented when they were a couple, before he’d made it really big. Cheap places, interesting places – no troupe of waiters standing behind all the chairs and lifting silver domes from their dinner plates in a choreographed manoeuver, that was for sure.
And yet sometimes, when he was sitting sleepily on a red-eye somewhere, a bit low, the way flying around the world often made him feel, he thought it might be nice to bump into Coco just one more time. As a sort of test, to see if she still held the same power over him. Because if she didn’t, then he’d be free.
The big black Mercedes looked faintly ridiculous outside Longford Terrace, so Red sent it away.
‘Thanks, sir,’ said the driver gratefully. Both he and Red knew that large, expensive, brand-new Mercedes were not normally seen outside Longford Terrace, and there was a definite possibility that, despite the presence of the driver sitting in the car, the hubcaps might mysteriously vanish.