Grown Ups

by Marian Keyes

  Océane had twenty thousand followers – she might not even see Jessie’s post. Or she might think Jessie was a foot-fetishist and block her.

  But almost immediately, Océane replied, ‘I wish lol. I’m thirty-nine.’

  What a result! Immediately Jessie jumped on Net-a-Porter and set about matching Océane’s taste with the shoes on offer. Océane liked mainstream luxury brands – Manolo, Jimmy Choo or Louboutin. Nothing too edgy. This season’s must-have was the Balenciaga ‘Knife’ – slides with exquisitely pointy toes. They were available in blue or white, and even though Jessie personally preferred the blue, the white seemed more … Swiss. Well, if Océane didn’t like them, she could always exchange them. Buying these beautiful shoes for another woman was excruciating. But it had to be done.

  Now, the letter. Though it was always personalized, she had a template: a warm, chatty acknowledgement that the chef was very, very busy.

  But a weekend in Ireland wouldn’t be all work.

  Basically, her letter could be distilled down to ‘Come to Dublin. Lash out your greatest hits at a couple of classes, then Johnny and his mates will take you on a never-ending pub crawl. You’ll return to Geneva with at least twenty almost unbelievable anecdotes. Yes, you really were stopped by the police, in a car going the wrong way up a one-way street. When one of them recognized you as the Korean/Swiss chef from the telly, they cancelled the ticket and asked for your kimchi recipe. All expenses will be covered, and you will be remunerated handsomely for your time.’

  Most restaurants, even the world-renowned, struggled to break even, so chefs tended to find a lump sum of five thousand euro, for two days’ easy work, a very attractive prospect.

  Once the contract was signed, Jessie gradually layered up the work. Pinging off emails saying, ‘Turns out you’re a bit of a rock star here in Ireland! Our most popular TV chat show is desperate to have you. More fun than it sounds, the green-room antics are the stuff of legend!’

  The more publicity generated by the visit, the more PiG benefited. Long after the chef had departed, PiG’s cookery school would be offering courses ‘inspired’ by the chef’s unique cuisine and –

  Johnny hurtled into the bedroom, clearly agitated. ‘Jessie, what are you at? Our PayPal is going mental!’

  ‘Luring Jin Woo Park.’

  ‘Using Net-a-Porter?’

  ‘Shoes for his wife.’

  ‘Five hundred euros’ worth?’

  ‘That’s what she likes.’ Jessie said what she always said. ‘You have to spend money to make money.’

  Some of Jessie’s fishing expeditions came to nothing. They dropped like pebbles into the bottom of a still, dark lake. But she didn’t give up easily, treading the fine line between charming persistence and harassment.

  ‘Can I come to bed?’ Johnny asked.

  ‘I’m writing to Jin.’

  ‘Saying what?’

  ‘The usual … Understand how busy your schedule is, but you’d love Ireland, people so friendly –’

  ‘– hardly racist at all. What are you sending him?’

  ‘Bottle of Midleton, Seavite products for his wife. He collects Soviet memorabilia, so a load of mad stuff is making its way here from Ukraine. Go on, yes, come to bed.’

  ‘Thank Christ,’ he said. He tore off his T-shirt, stepped out of his sweatpants, then his jocks.

  She looked at him over the top of her reading glasses, realizing that here was a chance to accomplish another thing on her to-do list. ‘Jooooohnny?’

  ‘Yeah?’ He looked up sharply.

  She removed her glasses and moved her iPad to the floor. ‘If you were quick about it …’

  ‘I can be quick!’

  ‘No foreplay. Just the main event. Don’t worry about me, I’m grand.’

  ‘Is this one of those maintenance rides?’

  ‘It’s a ride, Johnny. Don’t over-think it.’

  Eagerly, he disappeared into the bathroom, looking for a condom. At nearly fifty she was unlikely to get pregnant, but Johnny was taking no chances.

  ‘Johnny,’ she called, ‘what about a photo of the entire family, all of us holding little Swiss and Korean flags?’

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll order them anyway.’

  ‘You’re way too click-happy.’

  Sometimes, Jessie thought, his cautious bean-counting was very dispiriting.

  Honestly, though, when she’d first met Johnny, back in the days when he’d been one half of the Rory–Johnny double act, he’d seemed like a lunatic risk-taker. But that was a long time ago – an entire lifetime – and now that he was no longer defined in opposition to his best friend, he seemed almost too careful.

  Mind you, Rory had been even more cautious.

  She’d been seeing Rory when the idea for PiG came to her. They were serious about each other, and she’d sensed they would probably get married. Even so, she’d been nervous about sharing her big, wonderful vision: if he jumped all over it and urged her to include him as partner, would she think less of him for coat-tailing? Instead, he gave careful, measured encouragement. There was no breathless plea to become part of her venture, no reckless offer to put up his flat as extra collateral.

  She’d had a bit of a tearful rant at him – she couldn’t help it, she’d wanted more support.

  Gently he’d said, ‘It’s your idea. It’s brilliant. You deserve any reward. I’ll help in every way I can. And if it doesn’t work out, I’ll take care of you.’

  ‘And if it does work out?’ She’d been suddenly uplifted by confidence. ‘I’ll take care of you!’

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘Too low,’ Nell called, from the aisle of the empty theatre. ‘If the actor misses her mark by a few centimetres, she’ll be brained by a giant clock landing on her head. Take it up a bit.’

  High above, on the ceiling walkway, Lorelei shouted down, ‘How much?’

  ‘I’ll know when I see it. Wind it back up, go on, wind – right, stop! There, yeah! Shout me down the measurements.’

  Nell stepped back to check that all thirteen of the MDF clocks still hung in aesthetically pleasing proportion to each other. Moving one had a knock-on effect on everything else.

  ‘Is it okay?’ Lorelei sounded impatient, which made Nell glance at her phone.

  ‘Jesus, is that really the time?’

  ‘Ten past twelve? Yeah.’

  They’d been working since eight that morning, which made it – Nell counted – sixteen hours. But she’d been totally immersed. This was a small project with a tiny budget but it was hers. Okay, she was doing all the literal construction but she was the actual designer. And she was getting paid – if she didn’t blow the entire budget on the props, that was.

  Even after all these years, this work still seemed magical.

  Neither of her parents had known the first thing about art, but as a kid she’d been the only pupil in her class of twelve-year-olds who hadn’t sniggered her way through a visit to the museum of modern art.

  Off her own bat, she’d begun taking out library books about Damien Hirst, Picasso and Frida Kahlo. Articles about architecture, couture or furniture design caught her interest – and all of this caused ripples at home.

  Petey and Angie were proud but slightly baffled.

  At the age of fourteen, Nell had found her true calling. Her mum had got a part in the Raheny Players’ production of Tenko. Nell’s dad, a joiner, was enlisted to build the set with Nell’s brother, Brendan.

  One Saturday morning when Brendan was too ‘sick’ to get out of bed, Nell was roped in to paint the jungle setting. She was vocally indignant – she had better things to be doing on the weekend.

  But she was immediately intrigued by how the panels of ‘bamboo’ and ‘palms’ slid on and off stage on silent castors, how the scene could be changed in seconds from a forest to a concentration camp. ‘Did you invent this?’ she quizzed her dad.

  ‘We built it. Stephanie designed it.’

&nb
sp; ‘Right. I want to be a Stephanie.’

  ‘Grand so.’ Petey had a twinkle in his eye. ‘You can be a Stephanie.’

  They’d always encouraged her to be her own person. ‘We might as well give you confidence,’ was her dad’s good-humoured refrain. ‘We’ve nothing else to give you.’

  Once again, Liam checked the time. Twelve thirty. She’d been at work for a very long time. He wasn’t worried: he just really wanted to see her. Today was their six-month wedding anniversary. Barely a year ago, they hadn’t even met.

  That very first night, Liam had said, ‘Come home with me.’ He still wasn’t sure about her, but he was curious.

  ‘No.’

  That wasn’t the answer he was used to getting.

  ‘Haukart,’ she said.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Couple of years ago I was in Iceland. They have a dish called Hákarl, pronounced “Haukart”. It’s shark pickled in urine. Tastes disgusting. I knew it wouldn’t be for me, but I still wanted to know what it was like …’

  Her voice trailed off and he felt shame rise in his face. ‘I’m a person,’ she said. ‘Not some novelty.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Don’t.’ She put a warning hand on his arm.

  He was confused. He’d thought millennials were down with hook-up culture. ‘Have you a boyfriend?’

  She seemed amused. ‘No.’

  ‘Bad break-up?’

  ‘Please. Stop.’

  ‘There was a bad break-up!’

  ‘There was a guy …’ She shrugged. ‘I got breadcrumbed for months. He’d give me a little attention, just enough to seem like he cared. Then … nothing. Then a booty call. So I blocked him.’

  ‘Harsh.’

  ‘I’m gonna be thirty this year. Time to get serious about life. I’ve given up on Tinder.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ Because he found it very handy.

  ‘It turns people into disposable collateral.’ Her earnestness was touching. ‘Something about meeting a person on screen makes them too easy to ghost. It’s like your phone conjured them up, so your phone can vanish them too.’

  ‘Have you ever had a real boyfriend?’

  ‘Totally.’ She looked offended. ‘For seven years, from age nineteen to twenty-six. We outgrew each other. Was still hard, though. Seven years is a long time. Even though the final year or two were kind of shitty. I was afraid I’d never meet anyone else,’ she said. ‘And I haven’t.’

  ‘Apart from Breadcrumb Guy.’

  ‘Oh, him!’ She made a dismissive flutter. ‘He was an asshole. And I was a bigger one for pretending he wasn’t. There’ve been lots of assholes! So, I’m going now.’ She stood up.

  ‘Can I have your number?’ Hurriedly he got to his feet. ‘I promise I’m not an asshole.’

  She looked him in the eye. ‘You’re hot, you’re rich, you’re bored, you’re totally an asshole.’ But she laughed and gave him her number anyway.

  He went home and slept for eleven hours, the first time in two years he’d managed more than five uninterrupted hours. When he woke, he wondered what had changed. Then he remembered. Haukart. Fermented shark, whatever she was.

  That same morning, Nell woke up in her small, overheated room in Shankill, a suburb perched on the edge of Dublin. The room got unbearably stuffy in warm weather but remained Baltic during the winter. She’d been woken by the ping of a text: Morning ☺ You busy today? Come to the coast with me? Friends. You are NOT fermented shark.

  Deep in thought, Nell opened her window to let in some air. Last night, her assessment of Liam had been ‘interesting but not for me’. He was too clueless about her life. But he was … stimulating. She’d quizzed him about the end of his running career and he’d been unexpectedly articulate. ‘After I stopped winning,’ he’d said, ‘disappearing into a marriage was a great place to hide from my failure. Paige had status and money. I wanted someone to take care of me.’

  His honesty was intriguing. Attractive.

  ‘We had Violet, and that was a distraction. Then we had Lenore. Same. We were moving around a lot, a year in Vancouver, two in Auckland. Took a few years to notice how worthless I felt.’

  ‘Oh, yeah – performative masculinity. Men are told they must be hunter-gatherers. If you’re not one, you feel like a failure.’

  ‘It has a name? Wow. Okay! When we lived in Chicago I went to drama school. But Paige’s job moved us again, this time to Dublin, so I never graduated. Moving back to Ireland as a house-husband, that was the death knell. The shame was too much. I could do that shit in another country, but not here. The last two years of our marriage were …’

  She waited, reluctant to provide the words.

  ‘I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,’ he eventually said. ‘In the end I just wanted it to be over. Paige despised me and I resented her. We went to counselling, which made it worse. Found out we’d got each other wrong from the get-go. She thought I was dynamic. I thought she was strong. We were both wrong.’

  ‘It sounds painful. Really.’

  After a silence, he said, ‘I was shitty to her.’

  ‘What way shitty? Cheating?’

  ‘Hey, cheating isn’t the worst thing you can do.’ At Nell’s sceptical look, he said, ‘I sneered at her job, her dedication, her money. She believed in me for years and in return I was a tool. She hates me now. She’s right to.’

  Nell looked again at her phone. No, she shouldn’t meet this guy. She typed a reply, then clicked back, deleting it all. Bad idea to commit to anything until she’d had coffee.

  In the kitchen, used saucepans were piled along the worktops and the bin was overflowing. Six people lived in this three-bedroomed house and it was too small for them.

  Molly Ringwald was mewing angrily, obviously hungry. ‘Sorry, Mol.’ She poured kibble into a bowl, then filled the kettle.

  Wondering where to start with the clean-up operation, she thought, for the first time ever, How much longer do I have to live like this?

  In wandered Garr, who lived in the adjoining sitting room. Frosted-glass doors were all that separated his space from the kitchen.

  ‘Morning,’ he said sleepily.

  ‘Sorry, did I wake you?’

  ‘You’re okay. Kettle on?’

  ‘Yep. But help me clean this pit. Garr, I met this guy last night … Not Tinder. Real life. But it’s not that sort of thing.’

  ‘What sort of thing is it?’

  ‘He’s … a babe. I guess. There might be something, but I’ve wasted enough time on mexperiments.’

  ‘Whats?’

  ‘You know, “men experiments”. Sleeping with guys just because maybe. Also, he’s forty, divorced, kids, baggage. I think he might be a terrible person, but he’s honest about it, so maybe that means he isn’t.’

  ‘When someone tells you who they are, believe them.’

  She smiled. ‘Not what I want to hear. So he wants to hang out today. And I think I want to.’

  ‘So do it. Life’s all about adventures.’

  ‘Let’s put it out to the universe. If someone in this house can loan me thirty euro, I’ll go.’

  ‘Wanda got paid yesterday. The universe says yes.’

  Nell cycled home through the busy city. Thursday was always a big party night and tonight was even livelier than usual because of the Spice Girls’ gig.

  In their underground car park, she slung her bike on the rack. When she’d seen Liam’s fancy gaff for the first time, she couldn’t have imagined that within weeks she’d be living there. It seemed like an absolute palace – still did: electronic keys, fancy lighting systems and three bedrooms, Liam’s and one each for Violet and Lenore whenever they came to stay. Which seemed to be never.

  That first day they’d gone to the beach as ‘just friends’ but things had changed quickly.

  It wasn’t just his sly, sexy face or his ripped body, it was his optimism that dazzled her. People her own age had no hope in the future, but Liam came from a different world –
or maybe a different time – where positive expectations were still allowed.

  He, likewise, was charmed by her frugal lifestyle, her devotion to her job and the childlike joy she gleaned from small things. Her principles fascinated him – how she felt guilty about ‘stealing the chilled air from Tesco’, or her refusal to use Airbnb because ‘Nobody can afford to rent a flat any longer and Airbnb is a big reason why.’

  By the end of the first week, he was saying stuff like ‘I wasn’t expecting this. But you’ve really … affected me.’

  She was more cautious: on paper, they made an unlikely couple. She couldn’t shake the suspicion that she was simply a novelty of which he’d eventually tire.

  When he asked her to move in with him, she laughed uncomfortably. ‘Molly Ringwald would have to come too.’ Molly Ringwald was her big, furry, ginger cat.

  ‘Molly Ringwald is welcome. Look, you’re spending nearly every night with me anyway.’

  But she caved only when a friend of Garr’s was evicted and in urgent need of a room. ‘Okay. But don’t corrupt me and Molly! It’ll be very hard to go back to a single bed in an overcrowded house.’

  But what finally convinced her they were for real was how he adapted to her life. Last summer they’d spent two weeks travelling the Wild Atlantic Way on Ireland’s rickety bus service, staying in hostels or bed-and-breakfasts – never Airbnbs.

  Sometimes they camped on the soft dunes by the sea.

  One evening, sitting on a sandy beach, as the setting sun flooded the sky with radiant peach light, he said, ‘I feel so alive. Every cell of me. Like I’ve been asleep my whole life and you’ve woken me up.’

  Still, she hadn’t expected what had happened in October, less than five months after their first meeting.

  It was a Saturday morning, in bed. She’d opened her eyes, to find him propped on his elbow, looking down on her. ‘What’s our deal?’ he asked, as if they were continuing a conversation they’d already been having. ‘You and me? Where is this going?’