The Brightest Star in the Sky

by Marian Keyes

  He dropped to one knee.

  “Get up,” she said. “You’ve been doing well, but it’s turning into a pantomime.”

  “. . . I’d convert an entire room into shoe storage—remember the one Big made for Carrie? No? I’ll describe it so . . .”

  “. . . Jemima bought me a jacket—remember Harrington jackets? Just an ordinary jacket, but I tried to convince myself that when I wore it, I had magical powers. That I could make my dad come home from sea . . .”

  Somehow they had ended up lying on Katie’s bed, fully clothed, whispering into each other’s face, revealing their secrets.

  “. . . my own little van and I’d go to festivals and injured people would come to me and I’d wash out their wound and I’d have all the different sizes of bandages because you need a tiny one to wrap it around your finger but if you cut your knee you need a big one, four inches long . . .”

  He held her face tightly and kissed her again. Good job she was lying down, she thought, because otherwise she might swoon. She’d never been kissed like this, so slowly, so endlessly, as if kissing was their reason for existing.

  “What happened to your hand?” she asked. “You cut yourself ?”

  “Jemima’s dog bit me last night. He pretended it was an accident. He’s not right in the head.”

  They kissed again, and some immeasurable time later, Fionn spoke. “Didn’t you feel it too?” he murmured. “As soon as I saw you, I knew. That you were the most important person I would ever meet.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you won’t die.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “But I will die. We all will.”

  “But you won’t for a long time. You’ve got through the tricky part. Your thirties. That’s when women die.”

  “Your wife?”

  “No.”

  “Your mum?”

  He nodded. “That’s what I tried for the most when I wore my Jacket of Power. To bring her back.”

  Katie had to let a few moments elapse, otherwise she would have seemed unsympathetic. Then she asked, “So do I look forty?” She’d thought she was doing quite well, actually. Always wearing sunblock, drinking plenty of water, the usual.

  “I’m not saying that. I never have a clue how old anyone is. But you felt safe.”

  “What sort of safe?”

  “Safe for me. Safe from harm. Every kind of safe.”

  Day 29

  When Katie woke, her bedroom was flooded with early morning sunlight. She was still dressed, but her shoes had been removed. She felt as if she was lightly draped in cloths woven by fairies from gossamer. Who knew her trusty old duvet could feel so delightful?

  “I’ve got to go now,” Fionn said. “Work.”

  “Okay.”

  “Tonight?”

  She nodded her assent.

  “I have a present for you.” He produced a green sprig.

  “More rue?” She yawned. “Didn’t I say I forgive you?”

  “This is sage. I planted it months ago and didn’t know why, but I can see now I was growing it for you. Sage is for wisdom.”

  “Thanks.” She let him put it in her hand but she didn’t want wisdom. Fionn was her adventure, her gift to herself; she was ready to embrace willful stupidity.

  “Well! Someone’s getting some!” Danno exclaimed, as Katie walked toward her desk.

  “Got a glow on, girlfriend,” George said.

  “Are you . . . thinner?” Lila-May narrowed her eyes in assessment. “Like, since yesterday?”

  “Slasher’s back?” Danno asked.

  Katie almost stumbled. “No.”

  “So who? The celebrity gardener?”

  Katie nodded.

  “I thought you said he was a fool!”

  “Yeah, well . . .”

  Day 29 . . .

  Matt and Maeve were lying on their couch, miserably watching strangers fitting a new bathroom. Neither of them had spoken in twenty-six minutes, when Matt opened his mouth and said, “You’d think people would be suspicious if a man bought an ax.”

  “A what?”

  “An ax. Wouldn’t it send up signals that a person was planning to be an ax murderer if he came home with a nice shiny new ax? What else are they used for?”

  “Chopping wood?”

  “Who chops wood these days? We’re not in Little Red Riding Hood.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There was this woman at the bus stop—”

  “Are you thinking of killing me?”

  “Maeve!”

  “Your subconscious must be trying to tell you something.”

  “I haven’t got a subconscious! Dr. bloody Shrigley. Putting these ideas in your head. All I’m saying is there was this woman at the bus stop a few weeks ago and—”

  “What would you do if I died?”

  With visible effort, he calmed himself. “My life would be unbearable, as good as over.”

  “You’d meet another me.”

  “I wouldn’t. How could I? There will never be another you.”

  “There are millions of girls like me, girls far better than me. You’d be happier with one of them.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  She laughed softly, almost contemptuously. “You used to say that you’d kill yourself if I died.”

  “. . . I would. I would kill myself. That’s what I meant.”

  “It’s not what you said.”

  “It’s what I meant.”

  A bristly silence ensued.

  “Anyway,” Matt said shortly. “You’re not going to die.”

  I wouldn’t be so sure about that, my cuddly amigo . . .

  I’ve finally understood that Maeve isn’t taking risks in the traffic just to counteract the tedium of her home life. I’ve been watching her, really watching her for the last few days. Despite the wall between us, one or two of her thoughts have been so intense and shocking that they’ve reached me.

  If that truck skidded and plowed into me, it wouldn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter at all.

  If I break this red light and I’m hit by a car, all I ask is that I die instantly.

  She’s not willing to take pills or cut her wrists—not yet, in any case. But if she cycles her bike long enough and recklessly enough, something will happen.

  Day 27

  Two and a half days of foreplay. The entire weekend. They’d taken days to get undressed. It wasn’t until late, late, late on Sunday night that Fionn finally unwrapped Katie, as if he were doing something holy.

  Lean and long-limbed, he was naked before her. He kissed her everywhere, on her toes, behind her knees, at the base of her spine, parts of her body that she had never encountered before. When she’d reached combustion point, she rolled on top of him, but he stopped her. “Please,” he said. “It’s our first time and I don’t want it to end.”

  She groaned. “No, it’s got to be now.”

  She slid on to him and she was so drugged with pleasure, it felt as if his entire being had merged with hers. She’d never experienced sex like this, it was almost mystical.

  When it came to an end it started again immediately, one continuous fluid act, and she was so blissed out, so deeply loose and free and adrift that she fell asleep with him still inside her. The sun had already risen.

  Now, their heartbeats . . . I can’t feel Fionn’s at all. It’s as if he has surrendered himself entirely to Katie. They have become as one.

  Day 26

  Top of the day to you. I am after enduring a mighty trial and I reach out to you, my Irish brother, for your help.

  Spam from some scam artist. Conall was reading his BlackBerry and had to admire how they’d localized their pitch for the Irish market. Idly, he scrolled down through the sorry tale of woe and assets tied up in foreign banks . . . then something made him look up. A young woman was being led to his booth. It took a moment for him to recognize Lydia. In her short skirt, h
igh heels and heavy eye makeup, she was a totally different person. Sexier than he could have imagined.

  He abandoned his screen and sat up.

  Lydia was trailing three other girls, all of them shiny and fragrant and giggly, but none as sexy as her. Behind them were a couple of drab men, who barely registered.

  “Mr. Hathaway. Your guests.” The hostess smiled and withdrew.

  Conall leaned forward to kiss Lydia on the cheek but she had twisted her head round, deep in an assessment of how their booth measured up compared to every other one in the club. He watched her scanning the room, noticing their lofty vantage point above the dance floor and their proximity to the stairs for the pool.

  “This is a good table,” she concluded.

  “The best in the place,” he said. Because he’d requested it. And paid for it. No point leaving that sort of thing to chance.

  Then she seemed to remember the other people she was with. “Oh yeah, Poppy, Shoane, Sissy, Conall.”

  They were sweet but showed little interest in him—very different from any other occasion when he’d met a girl’s circle of friends for the first time. Those events were always characterized by excitement most tense and dreadful. He’d be presented and paraded like a prize bullock, his girlfriend so proud of him and so desperate for him to like her friends. Invariably, conversation would be too quick and in too high-pitched a voice; terrible bouts of near-hysterical laughter would erupt for almost no reason; jokey remarks would be misunderstood and any attempt to elucidate would only make things more excruciating.

  This couldn’t be more different. Meeting Lydia’s friends had nothing to do with wedges of cheese and bonus add-ons. He was just a handy fool who happened to be a member of Float.

  Lydia summoned the two lads forward from where they’d been lurking behind the girls.

  They were cautious, even nervous. “This is Steady Bryan.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Steady Bryan.”

  Steady Bryan looked pained at being thus addressed.

  “And this is BusAras Jesse.”

  “Good to meet you, man.” Jesse was bright-eyed and eager. He sounded South African. No, slightly different accent. Probably Zimbabwean.

  “Get in there,” Lydia said, and there was an eager stampede into the booth. It was only thanks to some nimble footwork by Conall that he managed to insert himself in front of Shoane and thereby next to Lydia.

  A hovering waitress, a tall blond girl with a yard of tanned leg on display, murmured, “Should I open the champagne now, Mr. Hathaway?”

  He smiled his assent.

  In silence, they watched the ritual of the champagne being removed from the ice bucket and opened and poured.

  “Pink,” Poppy remarked.

  “Told you,” Lydia said.

  When all seven glasses were filled, the bottle was almost empty. The waitress eyeballed Conall: Should I . . .? Did he want another?

  He nodded discreetly, but obviously not discreetly enough because he saw Poppy grip Sissy’s forearm and Sissy grip Poppy’s and they gave each other a hard, can-you-believe-this? squeeze.

  Glasses were seized and much clinking ensued. “A toast,” someone cried.

  “To Lydia for getting us in here!”

  “No, what’s your man’s name?” Conall heard Steady Bryan ask.

  “Conall Hathaway,” Lydia said, as though she wasn’t sitting right beside him.

  “To Conall Hathaway!”

  “Okay! To Conall Hathaway!”

  Conall permitted himself a small smile. He knew when he was being mocked.

  “When are we going swimming?” Sissy asked, a few bottles later.

  “I’m not drunk enough yet,” Shoane said.

  “Funny,” Sissy said. “I think I’m too drunk. I might drown. God, I can’t believe I’m here.”

  “I’m not going swimming.” Lydia hated swimming. She hated getting wet. Her hair would go frizzy and her body bronzer would wash off. Nice to be in a place with a swimming pool but no need to actually use it.

  “Your man Conall isn’t as bad as you said,” Shoane said, quietly. “The wheels haven’t come off altogether.”

  “Stop.”

  “He’s only forty-two,” Poppy said. “Are you going to sleep with him?”

  “Nooooaah!” Lydia guffawed. “. . . Ah sure, I probably will.”

  “Only fair.”

  “Only decent.”

  “After all that champagne he’s bought us.”

  “Be nice to him.”

  “Make an old man happy.”

  “Why not? But for God’s sake—” Lydia summoned the four heads together in a tight cluster—“don’t let him dance.”

  “No, no. That would be horrific. One of us will keep him talking. How about Bryan?”

  “Yeah, I don’t want Bryan dancing either,” Poppy said. “If I see him dancing I’m afraid I’ll call off the wedding.”

  Conall fingered his BlackBerry in his pocket. Could he . . .? Just a quick look? Would it be so bad? After all there was no one there to care. There was no one but him in the booth; everyone had peeled away. Within moments he was openly answering emails.

  He hadn’t seen Lydia in about an hour. She and the other three girls had swept off to dance and although he hadn’t planned to dance himself—he had some dignity—Lydia had pressed her hand firmly against his chest and said, “You stay here and talk to Steady Bryan.”

  But Steady Bryan wasn’t a scintillating conversationalist. He seemed so freighted by his forthcoming marriage that he could barely speak. He muttered something about a cigarette and that was the last Conall had seen of him.

  Initially, BusAras Jesse had seemed a better prospect. He had treated Conall to an account of how he had met Sissy in the queue at BusAras. Something to do with a conversation about the word glum that seemed to have involved several hundred bus-goers. Then he’d heard about the many different countries that Jesse had bungee-jumped in. And about his plan to snowboard on some black run where people were always getting killed. “It’s illegal, but I know a guy. Gaddafi’s Praetorian Guard train there.” What was it with people from the Southern Hemisphere and their thing for extreme sports? And did Gaddafi have a Praetorian Guard?

  Then Jesse challenged him to a breath-holding competition in the upstairs pool, and when Conall declined, Jesse seemed surprised and offended. “Please yourself, man,” he said, and stalked angrily away, leaving Conall alone with his BlackBerry.

  “How are you doing for drinks here?” The waitress was back.

  “. . . Ah . . . another bottle, I suppose,” he said.

  “Sure thing. Anything else?”

  Conall was sorely tempted. They did food here. But he couldn’t go through with it—a grown man eating a bowl of chocolate ice cream in a nightclub would cut too risible a figure. Cocaine, that was what you did in nightclubs, not ice cream. “No, no, thanks. Just another bottle of that stuff.”

  As soon as she’d disappeared, Conall started to have serious doubts. It was so long since he’d seen Lydia, she and her friends could have left for all he knew. He stood up, trying to see her on the dance floor, and suddenly she appeared right in front of the booth.

  “We were up at the pool,” she said. “Very small.” Then she flicked both her hands up at him, spattering him with water, and ran away, laughing.

  Slowly, he wiped his forehead with his sleeve. He’d had enough. He didn’t like it here. He was a member of every club in Dublin in case a visiting shadowy figure wanted to go, but he didn’t normally frequent them and this place seemed worse than most. He’d noticed he wasn’t the only man in Float with a posse of much younger women; the only difference was that his girls weren’t Russian. All of a sudden, Conall felt foolish and exploited and exploiting, and really quite miserable. He was almost unable to consider failure but his heart wasn’t in this. You choose your battles and he no longer cared about winning this one.

  Out of nowhere, he thought of Katie.

  Da
y 26 . . .

  Katie leaned forward in her seat as the opening sequence of Your Own Private Eden appeared on screen. Loads of them were crowded into the tiny edit suite: Jemima, Grudge, Grainne Butcher, Mervyn Fossil, Alina and any number of techies and runners. They were all squashed together on the couch, almost sitting on top of each other. This was just a rough cut—music still had to be added—but it was fairly momentous because until now no one other than Grainne had seen a full show.

  And there was the first shot of Fionn! Standing on a hill gazing moodily at the horizon. Katie squeezed his hand, which was sweaty with nerves.

  Fionn had called her earlier at work. “Grainne says episode one is ready. We’re going to look at it tonight. Make a bit of an occasion of it. Will you come?”

  She’d been surprised and touched, especially because she hadn’t given him her office number. “Alina found it for me,” he admitted.

  Rigid with concentration, Katie carefully watched the monitor, praying that the program wouldn’t be complete shite. What if it was? What would she say? Brave, that was a good word. Astonishing, that was another.

  Anxiously, she had to admit that the camera didn’t do Fionn justice; he was far more beautiful in real life. And the piece about starting your own compost heap wasn’t really for her. But when they moved to the next segment, Fionn rambling through a farmer’s market, talking through seasonal produce, the screen filled with plenty of close-ups of him slowly handling and rubbing phallic vegetables with his big hands, Katie felt some interesting sensations.

  “Wow,” she murmured and Fionn looked at her gratefully.

  Now and again the camera cut to scenes of Fionn spontaneously producing pebbles or herbs or crystals from his pockets and gifting them to random passers-by. The reaction of the recipients was variously startled, receptive and interested, and often the random gift would be curiously appropriate in their life. These little human vignettes became a recurring motif throughout the show, and when Fionn once again reached into his onscreen pocket, Katie found she was actually excited. What was going to emerge? What would it mean to the person?