Anybody Out There? (Walsh Family)

by Marian Keyes

  “Scrabble with the Real Men? I’d rather set myself on fire, but thanks for asking.”

  Apart from Luke, Jacqui had no time for the Real Men.

  Luke let me in. Although his rocker-type hair was a lot shorter now than when he’d first met Rachel, he still wore his jeans just that smidgen too tight. My eyes were always drawn inexorably to his crotch. I had no control over it. It was a bit like the way everyone had started addressing all conversation to my scar instead of to me.

  “Come on in,” he invited my scar. “Rachel’s just having a quick shower.”

  “Grand,” I said, to his crotch.

  Rachel and Luke’s apartment was a rent-controlled place in the East Village. It was massive by New York standards, which meant you could stand in the middle of the living room and not be able to touch all four walls. They’d lived there for a long time, nearly five years, and it was very cozy and comfortable and full of stuff with meaning: patchwork quilts and cushions which had been embroidered by addicts Rachel had helped, shells Luke had brought back from the the picnic celebrating Rachel’s fourth clean-and-sober birthday—that sort of thing. Lamps cast pools of soft light, and the air smelled of the cut flowers in a bowl on the coffee table.

  “Beer, wine, water?” Luke asked.

  “Water,” I told his crotch. I was afraid that if I started drinking I would never stop.

  The buzzer went. “It’s Joey,” Luke said. Joey was his best friend. “You sure you’ll be okay around him?”

  I tried to tell Luke’s face, I really did, but my eyes just slid down his chest and fastened onto his bulge. “No problem.”

  Seconds later, Joey strode in, closed the door behind him with some fancy foot rotation, grabbed a straight-backed chair, twirled it round, pulled it to him, and planted himself in it, facing into the chair back, all without splitting his jeans or squashing his goolies. Very gracefully done.

  “Hey, Anna, sorry about your…you know…it’s rough.” He was one person who wouldn’t be killing me with kindness. Suited me.

  He gave my scar a long, brazen stare, then produced a packet of cigarettes and hit the box in some fashion, and a cigarette somersaulted upward and into his mouth. In a fluid arc, he scratched a match along the red-brick wall, and just as he was about to light the cigarette, Rachel’s disembodied voice, from another room, said, “Joey, put it out.”

  He froze in surprise, the lit match in his hand, and mumbled through the cigarette in his mouth, “I didn’t know she was home yet.”

  “Oh, I’m home all right. Out, Joey. Now.”

  “Fuck,” he said, shaking the match out as it started burning his fingers. Slowly he returned the cigarette to its box, then sat—there’s no other word for it—brooding.

  But it was nothing to do with Rachel not letting him smoke. Joey was always like that.

  His habitual humor was one of dissatisfaction with the world. Lots of people, after meeting him for the first time, would say, with sudden venom, “What the fuck was up with that Joey bloke?”

  He could be actively and gratuitously obnoxious. Like, if someone got a radical new haircut and everyone else would be oohing and aahing, Joey would be more likely to say, “Sue. You’d get millions.”

  Other times he said nothing at all. Just sat in a group of people watching everyone with narrowed eyes, his mouth set in a grim line, while something—a muscle? a vein?—jumped in his jaw. As a result of this, a lot of women found him attractive. I always knew that they had crossed the line from thinking he was a grumpy fucker to fancying him when they said, “I’ve never noticed it before, but Joey looks a bit like Jon Bon Jovi, doesn’t he?”

  He had never, to my knowledge, had a long-term relationship, but he had slept with thousands of people, some of them related to me. My sister Helen, for example, as part of her “tag and release” program. She said he “wasn’t bad in the scratcher,” which was high praise indeed.

  Rachel said he “has anger issues.” Other people who didn’t know about things like anger issues said, “That Joey chap would want to learn some manners.”

  A few minutes later saw the arrival of Gaz and Shake, the air-guitar champ. They did their best not to stare at my scar. This they achieved by looking at some point about eighteen inches above my head when they were talking to me. But they both meant well. Gaz, a beer-bellied, balding sweetie—not the brightest, but never mind—pulled me to his squashy tummy in a tight hug. “It’s a bad scene, Anna, man.”

  “Yeah,” Shake said, shaking back the shaggy head of hair of which he is justifiably proud and which gave him his name. “It sucks.” Then he, too, embraced me while not actually looking at me.

  I stood and endured it. It had to be done. Now that I was back, sooner or later I would meet everyone I knew and the first encounter would always be like this.

  “Hey, you know, Anna, thanks, man, for that Candy Grrrl big hair mousse,” Shake said. “It’s the gear. Volumetastic.”

  “Oh, it worked, did it?” I’d given it to him a few months back. He’d been obsessed with making his hair as big as possible for the air-guitar finals.

  “And that spray, man. We’re talking rock hard.”

  “Well, good. Just tell me when you need more.”

  “’Preciate it.”

  Rachel emerged from the bathroom in a steamy cloud of lavender. She smiled sweetly at Joey as she passed; he glowered back at her. As the lads got stuck in to their Scrabble and beer, we curled on the couch in a softly lit corner and Rachel gave me a hand massage on my nongammy hand.

  I was just starting to doze off when the buzzer went again. To my surprise it was Jacqui. She burst into the apartment, full of shine and sparkle and chat: she’d had her gold-plated teeth restored to normality, someone had given her a Louis Vuitton something, and she was on her way to a private view.

  “Hi.” She waved at the Real Men at the table. “I can’t stay long. But as the private view is only two blocks down I thought I’d drop in and say hi. See how the Scrabble is going.”

  “How honored are we?” Joey drawled. He was doing something with a matchstick in his teeth.

  Jacqui rolled her eyes. “Joey, you brighten every room you leave.”

  She came over to me and Rachel. “Why is he always so horrible?”

  “He doesn’t like himself very much,” Rachel said.

  “Don’t fucking blame him,” said Jacqui.

  “And he turns that dislike outward,” Rachel continued.

  “I don’t get it. Why can’t he just be normal? Well, fuck it, I’m off. I’m sorry I came. Have a good night,” she called over to the table. “Everyone except Joey.”

  She left and the Scrabble kicked off again, but about half an hour later, I was seized by a strange panic: suddenly I couldn’t be with these people any longer.

  “I think I’ll be off now,” I said, trying to keep the urgency from my voice.

  Luke and Rachel watched me anxiously. “I’ll come down and put you in a cab,” Rachel said.

  “No, you’re not dressed, I’ll do it,” Luke said.

  “No, please, I’m fine.” I looked longingly at the door. If I didn’t leave soon, I’d burst.

  “If you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “What are you doing tomorrow?” Rachel asked.

  “Going shopping with Jacqui in the afternoon.” I raced through the words.

  “Want to go to a movie in the evening?”

  “Yeah,” Luke enthused. “There’s a digitally remastered version of North by Northwest showing in the Angelika.”

  “Fine, yes, fine,” I said, my breath constricted. “See you tomorrow, then.”

  “’Night.”

  “’Night.”

  And then the door was being opened and I was free. My pulse rate slowed down, my breathing became easier. I stood on the sidewalk and felt the panic abate. Then it built back up again as I thought: God, how bad is it that I can’t even be with my own sister? And now I have to go back to my e
mpty apartment.

  What a pisser: I couldn’t be with people and I didn’t want to be alone. Suddenly my perspective whooshed and I was far out in space, watching the world. I could see millions and millions of people, all slotted into their lives; then I could see me—I’d lost my place in the universe. It had closed up and there was nowhere for me to be.

  I was more lost than I had known it was possible for any human being to be.

  And then I was back on the sidewalk again. What was I to do?

  I started walking. I hobbled a wandering, circuitous route, but eventually I reached my building, because there was no place else for me to go. At the bottom of the steps, as I wasted a few more seconds hunting in my bag for my keys, someone yelled, “Baby cakes. Wait up.”

  It was Ornesto, our upstairs neighbor, coming down the street in a bright red pimpy suit. Shite.

  He caught me up and said accusingly, “I’ve been calling you. I have left you, like, eight trillion messages.”

  “I know, Ornesto, I’m sorry, I’m just a little weird—”

  “Whoa! Would you look at that face! Whoo-ee, baby cakes, that is bad.” He practically ran his nose along my scar, like he was hoovering up a line of coke, then pulled me to him in a painful embrace. Luckily Ornesto was very self-obsessed and it didn’t take long for his attention to snap back to him.

  “I’m home for a New York minute, then I’m going right back out to look for”—he paused to yell—“HOT MEN. Come and talk to me while I get changed into my party frock.”

  “Okay.”

  In Ornesto’s Thai-themed apartment, right beside a gold Buddha, there was a photo stuck to the wall with a kitchen knife. It was of a man’s face and the knife went right through his open laughing mouth.

  Ornesto noticed me looking. “Ohmigod, you totally missed it all. His name is Bradley. I thought it was the real thing, but you would not believe what that man did to me.”

  Ornesto had very bad luck with men. They were always cheating on him or stealing his expensive heavy-bottomed saucepans or going back to their wives. What had happened this time?

  “He beat me up.”

  “He did?”

  “Can’t you see my black eye?”

  He displayed it proudly. All I could see was slight purplish bruising beside his eyebrow, but he was so pleased with it that I sucked in my breath sympathetically. “That’s terrible.”

  “But the good news is that I’ve started taking singing lessons! My therapist says I need a creative outlet.” Ornesto—unexpectedly, perhaps—was a veterinary nurse. “My voice coach says I have a real gift. Says he never saw anyone get the breathing right so fast!”

  “Lovely,” I said vaguely. No point acting too interested: Ornesto was a great man for new passions. He’d have had a row with his teacher and completely turned against the singing by next week.

  I looked around; I could smell something…Then I noticed it on his table. A big bunch of flowers. Lilies.

  “You have lilies?” I said.

  “Yeah, trying to be good to myself, you know? So many guys in line to treat me bad. Only one I can depend on is me, myself, and I.”

  “When did you get them?”

  He thought about it. “Right about yesterday. Something wrong?”

  “No.” But I was wondering if it had been Ornesto’s lilies I had smelled last night. The smell could have come through the air vent into my kitchen. Was that what had happened? Had it been nothing at all to do with Aidan?

  25

  I used to dream of a white wedding.

  The kind of dream where you jerk awake in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, your heart pounding. A dream in the worst nightmare kind of way.

  I could see it all. The months of bickering with my mother over broccoli. On the day itself, trying to fight a path through my sisters—all of them my bridesmaids—to get space in a mirror to put my makeup on, and having to talk Helen out of wearing my dress. Then Dad walking me up the aisle muttering, “I feel a right gom in this waistcoat.”

  But there’s nothing like a near-death experience to bring things into focus.

  After I’d recovered from my scuba-diving ascent—I had to spend a short time in a decompression thing, then a much longer time accepting Codependent’s abject apologies; clearly the whole incident had set him back terribly, I’d never met anyone so needy—I rang my mother to thank her for giving birth to me and she said, “What choice had I? You were in there, how else were you going to get out?”

  Then I told her I was getting married.

  “Sure you are.”

  “No, Mum, I really am. Wait, I’m going to put him on the line.”

  I handed Aidan the phone and he looked terrified. “What do I say?”

  “Tell her you want to marry me.”

  “Okay. Hello, Mrs. Walsh. Can I marry your daughter?” He listened for a moment then gave me back the phone. “She wants to talk to you.”

  “Well, Mum?”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing obvious, you mean. Has he a job?”

  “Yes.”

  “A chemical dependency?”

  “No.”

  “Cripes, this is a break from tradition. What’s his name?”

  “Aidan Maddox.”

  “Irish?”

  “No, Irish-American. He’s from Boston.”

  “Like JFK?”

  “Like JFK,” I agreed. Her lot loved JFK, he was up there with the pope.

  “Well, look what happened to him.”

  Petulantly I said to Aidan, “My mother won’t let me marry you in case you get your head blown off in an open-top car in a Dallas motorcade.”

  “Hold your horses,” Mum said. “I never said that. But this is very sudden. And your history of…ah…impulsive carry-on is a long one. And how come you never mentioned him at Christmas?”

  “I did. I said I had a boyfriend who kept asking to marry me, but Helen was doing her impersonation of Stephen Hawking eating a cone and no one was listening to me. As usual. Look, ring Rachel. She’s met him. She’ll vouch for him.”

  A pause. A sneaky pause. “Has Luke met him?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll ask Luke about him.”

  “Do that.”

  Any excuse to speak to Luke.

  “Are we really getting married?” I asked Aidan.

  “Sure.”

  “Then let’s do it soon,” I said. “Three months’ time. Start of April?”

  “Okay.”

  In the New York dating rules, after a relationship “goes exclusive,” the next step is to get engaged. This is meant to happen after three months. Basically, the minute the period of exclusivity starts, the women set a stopwatch for ninety days, and as soon as it brrrrings, they shout, “Right! Time’s up! Where’s my ring?”

  But Aidan and I broke all records. A two-month period between going exclusive and getting engaged and three months between getting engaged and getting married. And I wasn’t even pregnant.

  But after my brush with death beneath the waves, I was full of vim and vigor and there seemed no point in waiting for anything. My urgent need to do everything right now passed after a couple of weeks, but at the time I was going round seizing the day left, right, and center.

  “Where will we do it?” Aidan asked. “New York? Dublin? Boston?”

  “None of the above,” I said. “Let’s go to County Clare. West coast of Ireland,” I explained. “We went there for our holidays every summer. My dad’s from there. It’s lovely.”

  “Okay. Is there a hotel? Give them a call.”

  So I rang the local hotel in Knockavoy and my stomach flipped alarmingly when they said they could fit us in. I hung up the phone and backed away.

  “Christ,” I said to Aidan. “I’ve just booked our wedding. I might have to varmint.”

  Then everything happened very fast. I decided to leave the menu to Mum because of the great broccoli wars o
f Claire’s wedding. (A bitter standoff that lasted almost a week with Mum saying that broccoli was “pretentious” and nothing more than “jumped-up cauliflower” and Claire shrieking that if she couldn’t have her favorite vegetable at her wedding, when could she have it?) The way I saw it, the food at weddings is always revolting, so why argue over whether your guests should have disgusting broccoli or inedible cauliflower? “Work away, Mum,” I said magnanimously. “The catering is your area.” But minefields lay in the most innocent-looking of landscapes—I made the mistake of suggesting that we should have a vegetarian option and that set her off: she didn’t believe in vegetarianism. She insisted it was a whim and that people were only doing it to be deliberately awkward.

  “Grand, grand, whatever,” I said. “They can eat the bread rolls.”

  I was far, far more worried about the bridesmaid issue. I really felt I couldn’t cope with all four of my sisters arguing over color and style and shoes. But in a fantastic stroke of luck, Helen refused to be one because of the superstition that if you’re a bridesmaid more than twice, you’ll never be a bride. “Not that I’m planning anything,” she said, “but I want to keep my options open.”

  Once Mum heard that, she forbade Rachel from being a bridesmaid because that would put the kibosh on her ever marrying Luke, then after a big summit, it was decreed that I would have no bridemaids but that Claire’s three children would be flower girls. Even Luka, her son.

  Then there was the dress. I had a vision in my head of what I wanted—a bias-cut satin sheath—but couldn’t find it anywhere. In the end it was designed and made by a contact of Dana’s, a woman who ordinarily made curtains.

  “I can see the headlines now,” Aidan said. “‘New York Bride in non–Vera Wang dress shocker.’”

  And, of course, there was the invitation list.

  “Okay with you if I invite Janie?” Aidan asked.

  It was a tricky one. Naturally I didn’t want her there if her heart was broken and if, at the “Does anyone object?” bit, she was going to jump to her feet and screech, “IT SHOULDA BEEN ME!”

  But it would be nice if we could meet and be civilized.