The Brightest Star in the Sky

by Marian Keyes

  Grudge couldn’t bear the waiting. He just wanted the show to air and for it to get the slagging it so richly deserved. He’d seen the rough cut of the first episode and everyone—idiots!—had seemed to think it was good. It beggared belief! It was meant to be a gardening show, and instead there was some gobshite going round with a dirty jacket, producing weeds and stones from his pockets!

  Your Own Private Eden would fail. It must fail.

  Day 9

  “Maeve?”

  “Mmm?”

  Tell her, tell her, tell her. “. . . Ah . . .” You useless plank, would you just tell her. “. . . nothing.”

  Head of International Sales, that’s what Matt was now. At least, that’s what it said on the stiff new business cards he’d been presented with that afternoon in the Office of Fear, the day the Bank of British Columbia had said they were buying the Edios system. A storm of congratulations on his promotion had rained down on Matt from the Edios bigwigs. His hand had been shaken by the Finance Director, he’d been clapped on the back by the Chairman and he’d tried to keep his despair off his face as a stream of enthusiastic information flowed from Kevin Day, the MD. “Fighting fire with fire, that’s the way to deal with this recession. You know what ‘International’ means, don’t you, son? That’s right—lots of travel! All those lovely new markets out there in the Far East, just waiting to be conquered, and who better to lead the raiding parties than our very own Matt Geary?”

  No hike in pay, naturally. “A recession on, son, but you can’t beat the prestige and, of course, lots of travel.”

  Maeve would have a total freaker. When he told her.

  But two weeks had passed and he still hadn’t said anything. Time was barreling by, each twenty-four hours whipping around faster than the previous ones. Nat was working out her notice in Goliath; there were only ten more working days before she showed up to oust Matt from his desk.

  Every night he went to bed weary with the weight of another day having elapsed without him telling Maeve, and every morning he knew with sick dread that he had to do it right now. Then a minute would pass, then another and another, and somehow all the minutes stacked up until, amazingly, it would be bedtime again and the words would still be locked inside him.

  Turning down the new post had never been an option—it was a done deal, his old job was in the past, it had been taken from him and given to someone else—yet he couldn’t possibly accept it either, and there was no way, absolutely no way, out of the bind.

  Today stretched ahead of him and he knew he wouldn’t say anything and he’d go to bed tonight and he’d wake up tomorrow and he wouldn’t tell Maeve and the day would pass and end and a new one would start and new days would keep on starting until Nat showed up in Edios and a plane would be waiting at Dublin airport ready to fly Matt to China, and what would happen then?

  Day 9 . . .

  “Off out with Andrei tonight?”

  Rosie attempted an enigmatic smile and busied herself in the syringe cupboard because, no, she was not off out with Andrei tonight, but she was hardly going to admit that to her colleague Evgenia. Never show weakness. Today was the eighth day since Andrei had last made himself available and Evgenia kept a tally.

  Rosie didn’t understand it. In the immediate aftermath of “Door-gate” she’d had Andrei exactly where she wanted him: on his knees. There had been red roses. There had been a heart-shaped charm that she’d had a jeweler take a look at; he’d valued it at 200 euro, not as high as she would have liked, but a respectable enough showing. There had been earnest promises that Andrei would ask his work if he could borrow the van so they could have a romantic weekend away in Kerry.

  Then had come a sharp, inexplicable falling-off in his ardor. On their last two outings his face, when he gazed at her, had lost its customary melting expression, text messages had become patchy and there had been no further mention of Kerry.

  “Make a fist, Mr. Dewy,” she said to the old man in the high narrow bed. “Till we see about this blood.”

  “I’m Mr. Screed,” he said, nervously watching the syringe in Rosie’s hand.

  Was he? So who was Mr. Dewy? Oh yes, the man who’d died in the next bed this morning, she remembered. Sure, they were all the fecking one.

  “Mr. Screed.” She tried to smile. “Sorry, pet. Long week.” She tapped the crook of his elbow. “Have you any veins at all?”

  The unexpected knock-back with that good-looking Fionn had rattled her confidence and it made her even more grateful for Andrei: he’d never leave her sitting in a pub on her own, he was a gent. Admittedly, she had been left waiting outside his flat but he genuinely hadn’t heard her light-as-a-fairy knocking. She’d dressed the accident up as a great betrayal, because that was what you did, but she’d only been playing the game. It was what men like Andrei expected from girls like Rosie: wounded feelings, sensitivity, coaxing-requirements, et cetera.

  Maybe—it was the obvious thing you’d think of—Andrei’s attentions had fallen off because he’d met someone else. She didn’t think it was likely. Andrei wasn’t like Fionn; he was steady and reliable.

  But, funnily enough, she had the odd moment of anxiety about Lydia—even though she was so sharp and shouty and scratchy that Rosie couldn’t imagine any man wanting her. But their flat was so small and men, even the good ones, were essentially animals . . .

  Day 9 . . .

  Little clods of last night’s mascara were dotted all over Katie’s face, looking like dustings of soot. She gazed hard into her bathroom mirror, inspecting the damage. It was amazing really, she thought, that she didn’t look more wrecked. She’d been getting by on no more than four hours sleep a night. Her skincare regime had gone to hell. She was eating crap at all the wrong times: chocolate cookies for breakfast, cheese on toast at four in the morning. And she wasn’t lifting a finger in exercise. Apart from sex and, to be fair, she was doing an awful lot of that.

  “Is there no milk?” Fionn called from the kitchen.

  “Where would it come from?” She leaned on the door jamb and watched him foostering with a tea bag. “You’ve been with me since I finished work yesterday. Unless I went out in the middle of the night to buy it.”

  “I’ll just nip down to Jemima and get some.”

  “Don’t.” It wasn’t right to treat her like a shop.

  “Why not? She won’t mind.”

  She might, though. She just wouldn’t let Fionn know. “Drink it black, it won’t kill you.”

  “We’ll have to get stuff.” Vaguely, he waved a hand in the direction of the empty bread bin. “Food and that.”

  “How about tonight? Quiet night in?”

  He frowned. Was she serious? Then they both burst out laughing. Every single night there was something. There was nothing—nothing—in Dublin that Fionn didn’t get invited to: movie premieres, birthday parties, car launches, hotel openings. He kept all his invitations stuck in the frame of Katie’s mirror and often he stood before it to admire them. “I spent all those years in the back-arse of nowhere,” he’d say. “Look at what I was missing.”

  “In fairness, maybe we should go easy for a night,” she said. Even Fionn looked a bit pale this morning and there were lines around his eyes that she hadn’t seen before.

  “Tomorrow night should be quiet,” he said. “What’s the plan?”

  “My dad’s birthday. Remember?”

  “I know. What time?”

  “Oh! Are you coming?”

  After a pause, he said, “. . . Amn’t I?”

  Anguish stabbed at her. They were having so much fun, the two of them, surfing through their days and nights on adrenaline and excitement. It was like being on a permanent high from some delicious happy drug that didn’t have side-effects or comedowns. Nothing would reintroduce her to the rough edges of real life faster than unleashing her family on Fionn.

  “Well, you know, Fionn, it might be a bit soon.” It would be like throwing him to the wolves. “My family, they’re quite harsh.
”

  Dark red crept up into his face. “A bit soon? We’ve been together for ages.”

  It was only three weeks—although, admittedly, it did feel a lot longer. “My family,” she said awkwardly, “were horrible to Conall.”

  “I’m not Conall.”

  She had to laugh. “Tell me about it.” To wipe away his look of dejection, she said, “How about if I set something up with them for maybe next weekend?”

  “Okay.”

  “And I’m sorry about tomorrow night.”

  “No bother,” he said, but he still sounded a bit huffy. “It’ll probably be boring anyway.”

  Wistfully, she said, “If only.”

  “Will you come out afterward?”

  “It might be a bit late.”

  “Ah Katie.” Moodily, he banged the heel of his boot against the fridge. “I hate not being with you.”

  Day 9 . . .

  Dementia. There it was, in black and white and shades of grey, a digital photo of Ellen Duffy’s brain, showing clearly that she had Multiple Infarct Dementia.

  “So she doesn’t have Alzheimer’s?” Murdy asked.

  “No.” Buddy Scutt latched on to the one piece of good news and rolled with it.

  “Actually, she might.” Lydia knew everything about it from the hours she’d spent trawling the net. “Sometimes multi-infarct can co-exist with Alzheimer’s. It could even trigger it.”

  “If she doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, then we’re grand,” Murdy said heartily.

  “We’re not grand! She has another kind of dementia, just as bad. And she might have Alzheimer’s.”

  “So what’s this multiple-infarct thing when it’s at home?” Ronnie asked Buddy Scutt.

  “She’s had a ton of mini-strokes,” Lydia said.

  “She did not have a stroke,” Murdy said. “We’d know about it.”

  “Mini-strokes, mini-strokes! They’re only small—the clue is in the name—but they’ve damaged the flow of blood to parts of her brain.”

  “Is that right?” Ronnie addressed Buddy Scutt, who was sitting on the far side of his desk, looking cowed and embarrassed. As well he might, Lydia thought darkly.

  Buddy cleared his throat. “Multiple-infarct dementia results from a series of small strokes, which damage the flow of blood to parts of the brain.”

  “Sis just said that.”

  “You’d better fix that so.” This from Ronnie. Just because he spoke softly didn’t make him any less menacing.

  “We can certainly ensure that it no longer happens. We’ll start her immediately on medication to thin the blood and put an end to the seizures.”

  “And you’ll fix the damage, doc?” Ronnie was quite insistent.

  “Ah, you see,” Buddy Scutt twisted miserably in his chair, “the damage already caused is irreversible.”

  “Irreversible?” Ronnie spoke even more quietly. “Dear me, no, that won’t do at all.”

  “Believe me, Ronald, if I could fix your mother, I would.”

  “Sis here came to you nearly a year ago looking for a scan and you sent her packing. A whole year of Mum having them multiple things and her brain getting more and more damaged.”

  “We’ll sue the arse off you!” Murdy declared. “We’ll sue you for every miserable penny you have.”

  “That Beemer for starters.” Out in the car park Murdy was already doing a review of Buddy Scutt’s assets. “And he’s got no wife, so he won’t be able to move his property to her name. They do that a lot, his equals, so even when good people like us get the judgment in our favor, we end up getting nothing.”

  “Shut up, you gobshite,” Lydia said wearily. “We’re not going to sue him.”

  “He should be struck off.”

  “But he won’t be. They stick together, doctors and whoever are meant to strike them off. The likes of us don’t stand a chance.”

  “We might be able to arrange a little extra-judicial punishment all the same,” Ronnie said, almost as if he was talking to himself.

  “You shut up too. Forget about revenge.”

  The brothers were so on-side now, it was almost sickening. All in the gang together: Operation Madzer Mother. Only Raymond, cushioned from the worst of things in Stuttgart, was still keeping his distance.

  “What are we going to do, to take care of Mum?”

  “Aaaahhhh . . .”

  “What does Hathaway have to say about all this?” Ronnie asked.

  “He really should get down here for a parlay,” Murdy said. “So we can put a plan together. When’s he back from Vietnam?”

  “He still has to go to Cambodia,” Lydia said shortly. Love of God! Hathaway? He was nothing to Mum, no one, yet this pair were behaving like he was her savior.

  “Cambodia?” Murdy grinned in appreciation. “He’s a cool customer.”

  “Why don’t we try putting a plan together ourselves?” Lydia suggested sweetly. “And we can run it by Hathaway when he gets back.”

  “Right so.”

  So there it was, Lydia thought, as she drove back to Dublin, finally alone to absorb the news. She’d known something terrible was wrong with Mum. She’d long passed the point of hoping she was imagining it, but to have it made official . . .

  She’d been right. And everyone else had been wrong, and, although it wouldn’t make Mum better, it was nice to be right.

  But the waste, the awful, shameful waste. A whole extra year of Mum being eroded from within. Poor Mum.

  And poor Lydia, she suddenly thought. Her mouth opened and she found herself howling, crying like a little girl, like her heart was breaking. She took one hand off the steering wheel and put it over her mouth, trying to stifle the shocking noise of her own grief. Tears poured down her face and blurred her vision and she kept on driving, because what else could you do?

  Day 9 . . .

  The taxi nosed aggressively across the ten-lane boulevard, navigating between vans, cars, bicycles and roaring motorbikes, and fetched up in the set-down area outside the glinty, glassy hotel doors. A liveried flunky stepped up, smartly opened the car door and Conall collapsed out into the soupy humid night. He handed the taxi driver a handful of crumpled notes and was making his way gratefully toward the cool, blandly international interior, when a shouted imprecation made him turn round again. It was the taxi driver, a tiny, skinny man sweating into a nylon shirt. His expression was mean and he’d got out—out!—of the car, something taxi drivers never did, especially if a large suitcase needed to be wrestled into the trunk. He was waving the handful of notes and addressing Conall in rapid, irate foreignness. The only words Conall understood were Vietnam, Vietnam!

  His thoughts moved too slowly in the thick air. Had he underpaid him? But he was sure he’d added a hefty tip to the sum on the meter.

  The flunky stepped in and explained. “He says you have paid him in Vietnamese dong.”

  So?

  “This is not Vietnam.”

  It wasn’t? So where was it?

  Conall’s mind went entirely blank. Seeking clues, he gazed around him. Behind him, there was the glass and glitz hotel tower; across the hooting, teeming boulevard, a night market thronged with short brown men; beyond that, almost out of sight, was the beginning of some wretched shanties.

  God, your man was right, it wasn’t Vietnam. Vietnam had been yesterday. Today it was that other place. Another hot one. He’d think of it in a second. Indonesia!

  “Cambodia, sir.”

  “That’s right, Cambodia!” He produced his wallet. He should have some Cambodian currency here. There were notes in here all right, from many different places, but . . . “What does it look like?”

  “May I, sir?” Politely, the flunky took Conall’s wallet. Conall noticed the look of contempt that shot between the flunky and the taxi driver: this big rich white man with too much money.

  “It’s been a long day,” Conall said. And it had been. It had started in another country, in another time zone.

  The business wa
s transacted with the driver and Conall’s wallet returned to him. “Sorry about that.”

  “I gave him a tip,” the doorman said.

  “Thanks very much and, er, give yourself one too.”

  “Thank you, sir. Checking in?”

  They put him in a suite, a massive place with a huge sitting room, a dressing room and two bathrooms. He’d be there for five hours. He was leaving to fly to Manila at 6 a.m. The decor was generic luxury hotel— velvet-flocked wallpaper, hefty armoires and suffocatingly deep carpets. Past the elaborately swagged windows, it was blazing hot out there.

  He tried to pull off his tie, but it was already long gone. Somewhere during the course of today’s challenges, he’d discarded it.

  The work used to begin in the car from the airport but now people met him at the gate as he emerged from the plane and briefed him as they moved along the moving walkways and waited in the queue for passport control. Before he’d even left Phnom Penh airport this morning, he had absorbed huge chunks of information on the local infrastructure, the national corporate legislation and the pros and cons of the manpower.

  As usual, a team of on-site lawyers, accountants, translators, transcribers and assistants had been put at his disposal. The Phnom Penh team were well on top of things and it had looked like this was going to be a fairly tidy shut-down—until Pheakdei Thong had brought him a piece of local legislation: generous tax breaks had been given so that the Cambodian operation would stay open for ten years. It had been on the go for less than four. If Conall shut it down the directors would be subject to criminal charges.

  Grappling with tricky treacherous local issues was exactly what Conall was paid for.

  Hang the directors out to dry—that was the most cost-effective thing to do. But . . .