The Brightest Star in the Sky

by Marian Keyes

  “I’ll miss you too,” said Fionn, treating her to a second go of the twinkly smile. Flirty, very, very flirty.

  For a breathless moment Jill wondered if Fionn ever would . . .

  But he wouldn’t.

  Fionn flirted with everyone—even his photograph flirted—but he didn’t get involved with married women. It wasn’t right. Or worth it. He didn’t want irate husbands showing up at his house and making shite of his garden. (It had happened once, a misunderstanding. Francy Higgins’s wife had been enjoying afternoon trysts with Carmine Butcher but Francy decided that Fionn must be the lover—on the basis that Fionn was movie-star handsome and Carmine a bit of a horror-show. Fionn managed to defuse Francy but not before Francy had put his boot through the glass of the tomato house and thrown several of Fionn’s potatoes at Fionn’s car. No real harm had been done, but the incident had distressed the plants and Fionn couldn’t be doing with that. A potato had never asked to be a potato; it had never asked to be wrenched prematurely from the ground and bounced off a car windshield.)

  No wonder I was having such difficulty getting a read on Fionn: he was a man of great contradictions. He wanted the whole world to love him—but he was not a womanizer, at least not in the strict sense of the word. He believed in monogamy. Even if he couldn’t always manage it.

  Girls seemed to pitch up in Fionn’s life and express an interest in being his significant other and, if they were pleasant and attractive enough, he was happy to oblige. However, there were times when a pleasant and attractive girl pitched up and expressed an interest in being his significant other but, on examination of the facts, it would transpire that Fionn already had a significant other. In those cases, he found it best to let the girls sort it out themselves. Sometimes they tried to involve him with tearful showdowns, ordering him to choose one of them, but he kept well out of it. If he picked one over the other, the rejected one would be angry with him and he didn’t enjoy people being angry with him. The truth was that he felt that no matter what way the whole thing shook down, he’d be happy enough—the new girl, the old one, whatever the outcome was, whoever he ended up with, it was all fine.

  But sometimes the winning girl took a notion that she and Fionn would get married and leave the polyester-sheeted bachelor pad and move into a cul-de-sac in Pokey where the couches had bounce and the houses had central heating. Invariably, the girl had a vision of turning Fionn into a proper, money-making enterprise with official invoices and a clean new van with his mobile number painted on the side. It was usually around then that they made the discovery that Fionn was easy-going only up to a point. When something mattered enough to him, Fionn would resist.

  Day 60 . . .

  Up in the top-floor flat of 66 Star Street, I’ve noticed that Potent Conall never came this morning to hang Katie’s mirror before he went to Helsinki. It’s still sitting on the floor. This makes me unaccountably nervous. Trouble will ensue—of this I am confident—if the mirror is not smiling down from the wall when Katie comes home.

  Oh God, and here she comes . . .

  She dumped her bag and shucked off her boots, one landing safely on the floor but the other bouncing off the skirting board, then she went straight to the living room, looking for her mirror.

  First—perhaps naively?—she looked on the wall, and when she couldn’t see it there she turned her gaze to the floor. There it was, exactly as it had been the last time she’d seen it, propped against the cupboards looking, if this could be possible, apologetic for its layabout status.

  She stared at it for a long, long time, her mouth in a thin line as if she was sucking something unpleasant.

  Katie didn’t get angry often but she was angry now.

  I didn’t want a platinum watch, she was thinking. It had made everyone else’s presents look like jokes (her mother had given her a bread-box). She hadn’t wanted Conall to pay for last night’s dinner for all ten of them, because every male member of her family had a chip on his shoulder about Conall being rich. (She’d heard her dad muttering about “flashy bastards,” no matter how much he denied it.) All she’d wanted for her birthday present was for Conall to make good on his seventeen days of promises and put a thing in the wall so she could hang up her new mirror. She’d shown him where she wanted it, she’d marked the spot with a biro and he’d said with great believability that he’d nip over in the morning before he left for Helsinki and do the job. Five minutes, it would take, he promised her.

  He’d made it sound so simple that she’d wondered if she should try it herself, but she didn’t have a drill and she didn’t want a drill and she wasn’t going down that road with pink toolboxes and sparkly Rawlplugs and suchlike.

  Conall could have organized a man to do it, a carpenter or a handyman of some sort—when she’d bought the mirror, that’s what he’d offered—but she stuck to her guns. Her mirror was to be hoisted on to her wall by the efforts of Conall and Conall alone. She wanted a gesture from him, a gift of his time and energy, something that money couldn’t buy.

  She lunged at her phone and clicked off a rapid-fire text.

  Mirror, mirror on the wall. Whoops, no. Mirror, mirror, still on the floor.

  She was very incensed, oh very incensed indeed. Conall is a selfish liar, she was thinking, Conall is an unreliable bastard. Only she was thinking these thoughts a lot faster and hotter and with more color. All the promises Conall had broken were whizzing around like multicolored flying saucers and it was herself she was most angry with. She should never have agreed to go out with him in the first place.

  Eight working days after Conall first arrived at Apex, he requested a meeting with Katie. She’d known what was going to happen and had plenty of time to prepare a refusal. But she hadn’t.

  He kicked things off by talking about work. “I have news,” he said.

  “You’re going to sell me on eBay?”

  “No. I have reports from the artists. They’re fond of you. They say you mother them. You get to keep your job.”

  “How about my team?”

  “They get to keep their jobs too.”

  “All of them?”

  “All of them.”

  “Same salary packages?”

  “Same salary packages.”

  She watched him suspiciously.

  “There’s no catch,” he said. “It’s all above board. New employment contacts are being drawn up and will be with you within the hour. Now, will you go out with me?”

  She lowered her eyes and said nothing. This was the moment when her self-interest clashed with her loyalty to those of her colleagues he had sacked.

  “Can I take you to the ballet?” she heard him ask.

  She jerked her head up. “God, no. I find it so tedious I want to cry, and when they go up on their pointes I get an excruciating pain in my big toes in sympathy.”

  A smile touched his face, perhaps the first ever smile she’d seen from him. “Pains in your big toes?” He gazed at her as if she was both rare and fascinating. “I see. How about the opera? Would you like that?”

  “No, no, no. I can’t stand it. I have to listen to too much music for my job. I hate it all.”

  “All of it?” He seemed astounded. “Even Leonard Cohen?”

  “Even Leonard Cohen.”

  “Christ, that’s a shame. Like, for you . . . I love music.”

  “Because you’re a man.”

  That made him laugh. Silently, but it was still a laugh.

  “So what sort of music do you like?” she asked.

  “Opera, obviously, but anything really. Except maybe power ballads.”

  “Well, I like silence.”

  “Silence?” He shook his head with wonder. She was in the highly unusual position where every word that came out of her mouth was being received as enthralling. Savor this, she told herself. The memory will keep you company in your old age.

  “You don’t like the ballet, you don’t like the opera, you don’t like music. What do you like?”


  She thought about it. “Eating. Sleeping. Drinking wine with my friends and discussing celebrity meltdowns.” The days of lying to a man to make herself sound fascinating were far in the past.

  “Eating . . .?” he asked. “Sleeping . . .?” Again his face was radiant with admiration.

  She’d had no idea that she was so interesting.

  “Especially eating,” she said.

  “You don’t look like you love to eat.”

  If only he knew the battle she fought with her appetite. The bloody thing was like a Rottweiler, pulling and straining, trying to escape her hold and eat all in sight.

  “I have a personal trainer,” she admitted.

  “So do I,” he said.

  “Mine’s called Florence. She takes me out running in the rain and makes me do jumping jacks in Tesco’s parking lot. I only see her once a week but she trusts me to do stuff on my own and I feel guilty if I don’t.”

  “Mine’s called Igor. We go to the gym.”

  “I never wanted to be the kind of person who had a personal trainer,” she confided.

  But she’d never wanted to be the kind of person who wore size 18 jeans either and, left to her own devices, that’s exactly what she’d be.

  “How about next Saturday?” he asked.

  “Why do you want to go out with me? I can’t be your usual type.”

  “You’re not. But I’m . . .” He shook his head. “I’m, ah, you know, can’t stop thinking about you.”

  She looked at him beseechingly. This was very difficult.

  “Just one date,” he said.

  One date. It wasn’t as if he was asking her to marry him. Not that Katie wanted to get married. Yes, once upon a time she’d wanted the ring and the dress and the babies—so shoot her. There were lots of things she had wanted once upon a time: to be size 8; to be fluent in Italian; to hear that Brad had got back with Jennifer. None of those things had come to pass but she’d survived.

  Even if she wanted to get married, it was obvious it wouldn’t happen with Conall. It was highly unusual for a man to reach the age of forty-two (as Conall had) without having accidentally got married. Even a commitment-dodger as nimble as George Clooney had a failed marriage lurking somewhere in his past.

  “What were you doing in the stationery shop?” she asked, with sudden urgency. “Remember one day, I met you—”

  “I remember. I was just . . . looking at stuff . . .”

  “You mean, you didn’t go in to buy something specific? You were just . . . browsing?”

  “Browsing?” He tried out the word. “I suppose you could say that. I guess I . . . like . . . stationery shops.”

  Her heartbeat quickened: they had a common interest. “How do you feel about drugstores? Do you ever just browse in them?”

  “I like them,” he said cautiously.

  “I love them. They’re such a force for good. They can help you sleep better, take away indigestion, tan your skin . . .”

  “I agree. But what I really enjoy is a good hardware shop. You?”

  “Well, they’re useful,” she acknowledged with the same caution he had employed. She couldn’t abide hardware stores, they were always so cold. But she was prepared to show willing.

  “Saturday?” he said, sensing that she’d softened.

  What about the people he had sacked? Then again, you only got one life and one shot at happiness . . .

  “Do you have any chocolate?” she asked.

  He looked surprised. “Yes.”

  “I mean on you, right now?”

  He patted a pocket. “Yes.”

  “Do you always have chocolate with you?”

  “Um . . . yeah.”

  A man who always had chocolate on him? It would mean the kiss of death for her battle with food. But how could she not be charmed—even a little—by a man who loved what she loved?

  “Okay,” she said. “Saturday.”

  He sighed. “Bless you.”

  It caused consternation among Katie’s friends and family. Everyone had an opinion.

  Her friend Sinead was ecstatic. “Hope for us all!” Sinead and Katie had soldiered together in the single-girl trenches. “Promise me, Katie, that you’ll have sex all the time. Do it for me, for the rest of us deprived singletons.”

  Her friend MaryRose, however, was more cautious. “Ride rings around yourself, by all means, but don’t think that just because you’re ancient you can’t get up the pole.” MaryRose, aged forty and a half, had recently become a first-time—and single—mother. “Let your mantra be: Precautions, precautions, precautions!”

  Katie’s mum, Penny, said, “I don’t know why you’re wasting your time with him. If he’s forty-two and never been married, he’s hardly likely to get married now.”

  And Katie’s sister Naomi had the darkest prediction. “He’ll make mincemeat of you.”

  “He won’t,” Katie protested. “I’m not going to fall for him.”

  “So why are you bothering at all?”

  “Just killing time until I die.”

  Day 59

  Things Lydia hates (in no particular order):

  Buskers

  Cyclists

  Cabbage

  People who say, “I know how you feel,” when they don’t

  Her brother Murdy

  People who say “Supper” when they mean “Dinner”

  Bus drivers

  Student drivers

  Van drivers

  Cavan accents

  Valentine’s Day

  Her brother Ronnie

  The aging process

  Please note: this is not a complete list.

  Day 59 . . .

  Maeve had barely sat down at her desk when Matt rang her. “I’ve already done today’s act of kindness!”

  “It’s not really about how fast you do it, Matt.” But she was smiling.

  “It is for me. Do you want to hear?”

  “Course.”

  “I let someone out of a side turning on the way to work.”

  “Matt! They’re always traffic-related!”

  “But Maeve, it was hard! I had to hold up a queue of cars behind me! They went mad beeping me! I thought I was going to be lynched.”

  She had to laugh. He was so cute.

  Four and a bit years ago . . .

  David and Maeve were in bed reading the Observer when, in the middle of an article on aid to Africa, Maeve suddenly thought of something. “Hey, David, wasn’t it funny Matt coming to the gig last night?”

  “Matt Geary,” David said thoughtfully. “A Young Man Going Places.” He made it sound like a really shameful thing to be.

  “Oh! I think he’s really decent,” Maeve said. “He’s an outstanding boss.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He keeps morale high. He’s excellent at giving you confidence.”

  “So he can get more work out of you.”

  “He buys the pints on Friday nights, he never forgets a birthday . . .” He was always the first to lead the telling off of a difficult client, and if Maeve had had to sum Matt up in one word it would be yummy. Not that she and the rest of the team sat around giggling about Matt’s yumminess. They were serious about their jobs; it wouldn’t be cool.

  And she certainly wasn’t going to tell David.

  “He’s always laughing and joking,” David said, contemptuously.

  What’s wrong with that, Maeve wondered.

  “Anyway,” David said. “I want to talk to you. Next Friday, you’ve got Mahmoud’s leaving party. But Marta and Holly are going away for the weekend.” Marta and Holly were his flatmates. “We’ve the place to ourselves. So how about you skip the drinks?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “No, I mean I can’t do either thing. I’ve to go down home for the weekend. I’ve got my driving test tomorrow week and I can’t afford any more lessons and I need some sort of vehicle to practice on.”

  �
��Right.”

  There was a funny pause, then David spoke. “Can I come?” he asked. “Down home with you?”

  “’Course you can.” She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it. “It’d be nice.” Maybe. “It’s just that Mam and Dad are, like, you know, farmers. Country people. Not a smarty, like you. You won’t laugh at them?”

  “Laugh at them?” He was indignant. “Why would I laugh at them?”

  How could she explain? David was so erudite and knew so much about everything, and Mam and Dad . . . well, their world was small and uncomplicated. Cows’ udders played a large part in their day-to-day life and they’d probably never heard of Darfur so they wouldn’t know what to say if David started going on about it.

  “It’s about time I met your mum and dad,” David said. “I’ve been thinking . . .”

  “Mmmm?”

  “Why don’t we move in together?” He fixed her with that intense look of his and she was lost for words.

  “. . . Ah . . . you mean, like, the two of us? Just the two of us?”

  It wouldn’t be the first time Maeve had lived with someone. Four years ago, when she’d gone to Australia with Harry, her boyfriend at the time, naturally they’d shared a flat. But that had been more for practical reasons than for romantic ones—they’d traveled there together from Galway, they were eking out their funds, they were slightly adrift in a strange new place and they needed each other for emotional back-up. More importantly, it wasn’t real life. Their visas were for two years and Maeve knew that when they had to leave Australia, everything would change. The whole business had a limited life span built into it and sure enough, by the end of their time there, she and Harry were well and truly done with each other. Friends still, in a way—if they ever saw each other, which they didn’t—but no hint of a romance remaining.

  This, what David was suggesting, felt very different. Serious. Almost scary.

  “Well?” He was still gazing at her, waiting for her answer, his pupils pinpricks of concentration.