The Mystery of Mercy Close

by Marian Keyes

  ‘And?’

  ‘Would you like to?’

  I went silent for a long, long time. Eventually I asked, ‘Would you like me to?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see.’ I got to my feet and picked up the plastic cup I’d been drinking out of. I carried it several yards away and planted it in the grass, then I came back to Artie and gave him the cork from the bottle of Prosecco.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a test. Throw the cork and if you can get it in the cup I’ll meet them.’

  He looked at me to see if I was serious. ‘No.’ He sounded almost scornful.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No one’s throwing any corks in any cups. Meet my kids or don’t meet them, but don’t play these sorts of games.’

  I started to laugh. ‘That was the test. You’ve passed with flying colours, whatever they are.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You’ve manned up.’

  ‘Is that right?’ He was twirling the cork between the thumb and fingers of his right hand, turning it over and over.

  ‘I’ll meet them,’ I said. ‘Fix up something for us all.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Nothing too long for the first time. No dinners with eight-course tasting menus. I don’t want to be trapped. Just something … speedy.’

  ‘Done.’ Casually, almost without looking, he chucked the cork and it flew high in the air in a graceful arc, then landed right slap-bang in the middle of the cup, rattling it and knocking it over.

  The official meet with Artie’s family took place in their living room one Saturday afternoon. I was just ‘popping in’ (Shovel List) for a cup of tea, even though I would sooner walk to Santiago de Compostela in my Louboutins than ‘pop into someone’s for a cup of tea’, and they were all there, waiting for me, even Vonnie.

  Bella put a hand to her chest and said in a fluttery way, ‘Helen, it’s been soooo long.’

  Vonnie was even nicer to me than Bella was. Together they exclaimed and squealed over my cuteness, as if I was a doll.

  ‘Mum?’ Bella cried. ‘Didn’t I tell you that she’s adorable?’

  ‘Add. Ore. Abb. Ill,’ Vonnie agreed.

  Leeettle bit patronizing, just the tiniest amount, but you couldn’t fault her for warmth and friendliness.

  To my great surprise (category: pleasant), Iona was also very sweet but not terribly interested in me. The big shocker was Bruno.

  He looked nothing like the photos of him that were dotted about the house. In those he was a gawky, smiley, pre-adolescent lad. But he’d obviously grown up a bit because he was dressed, toe to neck, in narrow-fitting black clothes, his hair had been peroxided to within an inch of its life, he was wearing mascara and he was bristling with hostility.

  ‘So you’re Dad’s friend?’ he said haughtily.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve been here before? To this house?’

  ‘Er … yes.’

  He produced a pretty little pink thong and placed it in my hand. ‘I think you left this behind.’

  I stared at it, then shook my head. ‘Not mine.’

  ‘Well, it’s not Mum’s and it’s not Iona’s and it’s not Bella’s. So whose is it? Dad must have another … friend.’

  Maybe Artie did have another friend. Maybe he was fucking someone else. It was such a horrible thought that I wanted to vomit. Well, if he was, he was; I’d deal with it later.

  ‘Or maybe –’ I flicked the thong back at Bruno – ‘it’s yours.’

  Bella gasped theatrically and both Vonnie and Iona were tripping over their words in their haste to insist that actually the thong was theirs.

  Bruno and I ignored them and eyed each other steadily: this was war.

  In the interests of long-term harmony, I should have rolled over and let Bruno win. Instead I’d behaved as badly as him. I had to admit that even I – who had spent plenty of time with Claire’s savagely nasty daughter, Kate – was shocked by his spite.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Artie asked Bruno. ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Bruno said to Artie, and he flounced from the room. ‘And,’ he paused at the door and gave me a venomous look, ‘fuck you.’

  In the subsequent investigation launched by Artie and Vonnie, Bruno admitted that he’d bought the thong himself to cause maximum upset.

  But the tone was set for all future engagements between myself and Bruno.

  43

  I plugged in my phone to charge it and forced myself to think of how lucky I was to have electricity and how lucky I was to have a roof over my head and a bed to sleep in. But I was nearly thirty-four and, after thinking I’d made the transition to adulthood, I was once again living with my parents. The pain was terrible.

  I wanted to climb into the bed and take all my sleeping tablets and just dissolve into oblivion, but Mum appeared.

  She took one look at me and I could see her setting her jaw: she was not going to let this ship sink. ‘Quick!’ she said. ‘Into the bathroom with you. We’ve a barbecue to go to.’

  ‘No, Mum, I can’t –’

  ‘No such thing as can’t. Come on, let’s go wild here and even wash your hair.’

  ‘No, Mum …’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  Gently but very, very firmly she persuaded me to peel off my clothes and get into the bath. It was like being a little girl again. Right down to her getting shampoo in my eyes and me crying my head off.

  ‘Stop that boohooing,’ she said, swaddling me in towels. ‘At least you’re clean. Now we’ll get you dressed. Come on. Nice clean clothes … in you get.’

  She helped me into a little T-shirt and lightweight jeans that Claire had brought over. All credit to Claire. Unreliable as she was, she could surprise you the odd time, because this stuff – which she’d obviously stolen from Kate – was perfect for the mild (i.e. crappy) Irish summer.

  Mum insisted that I put on some tinted sunblock, mascara, blusher and lip gloss, then show her my Alexander McQueen scarf, the one I’d given away to Claire before my first go at topping myself.

  ‘Drape it on the window where I can see it,’ she said. ‘That way I’ll know you’re safe.’

  Wearily I did as I was told. No point telling her that the Alexander McQueen scarf no longer had any fashion currency with me. In fact, now that I thought about it, I didn’t have any precious commodities to give away this time. That gave me a little fright. Was I already that bad? To be thinking about ‘this time’?

  ‘Here’s the deal,’ she said.

  ‘Shovel List,’ I said automatically. ‘You saying “here’s the deal”.’

  ‘My apologies.’ She was relentless. ‘Come to the barbecue for ten minutes. Then you can go back to work.’

  ‘No work. Finished.’

  ‘Good girl, case solved!’

  ‘Ah …’ I mean, what could I say?

  ‘So tell me what it was all about.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘No such thing as can’t,’ she wheedled.

  ‘Really, Mum, I can’t.’

  ‘But we’ve still got the tickets for Laddz, right?’

  ‘Right.’ I’d do something. Just buy them if I had to.

  ‘So Jay Parker won’t be calling round any more?’

  ‘Jay Parker definitely won’t be calling round any more.’

  ‘Ooooooh,’ she said.

  ‘Ooooooh what?’

  ‘I sense a little, whatchamacallit? Unfinished business between yourself and Jay Parker.’

  ‘There is no unfinished business with me and Jay Parker. I have a …’ The issue of the photos of a naked Artie had to be addressed. Might as well be now. ‘I have a boyfriend.’

  ‘That’s no boy, girlfriend. That’s definitely a man!’

  ‘Why are you talking like that? What shows have you been watching?’

  ‘Ah, you know, the usual. America’s Next Top Model. Whatever is on.’

&n
bsp; ‘Anyway. I want to make this clear. Artie. I …’ I hesitated. ‘I hold him in very high regard.’

  ‘High regard, is it? Who’s been at the Jane Austen? Okay, if you’re not working, then you can definitely come to Claire’s barbecue.’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ I said. ‘And only if I can go in my own car.’ So I could make good my escape if I needed to.

  Over in Claire’s back garden the conviviality was already at award-winning levels. No fear of anyone being carted off in the green re-education van here. Lots of Claire’s female friends were there, ignoring their children and flicking their highlights and wearing knock-off Versace shades (Versace, I ask you!), and gaily guzzling back the wine, which they persisted in calling vino. Which went straight to number one on my Shovel List.

  Claire was circulating with bottles of said vino, filling glasses to the very brim, so that wine was splashing on to freshly manicured, coral-coloured toenails. She took her duties as a hostess very seriously. Every party she had, if at least three people weren’t hospitalized with alcohol poisoning, she felt she’d failed.

  ‘Oh, you’re here,’ she said to me. ‘Good, good, we were a bit … worried … about you.’

  ‘Ah, I’m grand,’ I said.

  Four or five cackling kids, churning up the grass as they went, bumped their way between Claire and me. Once they’d passed, I said, ‘How did you get on with the traffic police yesterday?’

  ‘I’m getting three points on my licence and a fine – I think they said two hundred euro. Fuckers.’

  ‘Yes, right, fuckers. So listen, thanks for doing my unpacking.’

  ‘Very welcome. Only it wasn’t really me. It was Mum and Margaret. Full disclosure: I only came back to the house when I heard about the pictures of Artie. Christ. Fair play.’ She paused in her praise of the size of Artie’s nethers to yell at the children. ‘Watch it, you little brats. You’re knocking people’s drinks over!’ Then she turned her attention back to me, ‘I mean, really, Helen, full marks.’

  ‘Yes, thank you. C’mere, Claire, just tell me, why are you having a barbecue today?’

  ‘Dunno. It’s Saturday, the weather’s nice, it’s summer. Any excuse to partake of a tincture or two of the old vino.’

  ‘No one forced you to do it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s not a law or anything?’

  She inhaled for a moment, unsure of what to say. ‘Are you … okay?’

  ‘Grand, grand, fine.’

  ‘Have a drink,’ she said quickly.

  It was very tempting, the thought of getting scuttered, but I was afraid to. With the way I was feeling today I knew that if I had one glass of wine, I’d want a hundred, and I couldn’t take the horrors of a hangover. Safer to have nothing.

  ‘Have you any Diet Coke?’

  ‘Who for? You?’ Claire seemed startled at the notion of an adult drinking something that wasn’t alcoholic. ‘Well, if you’re sure. There’re a couple of bottles over there on the table beside the grill. We had to get some because there are children here, but if it was up to me they’d be given Dublin’s finest tap water. Little bastards.’

  I made my way towards the Diet Coke table, keeping my head down, successfully avoiding any conversation.

  As is the rule with all barbecues, the grill was being overseen by a man, in this case Claire’s husband, Adam. He was – another rule – wearing some plastic apron bearing a wisecrack too lame for me to remember and being assisted in his labours by the husbands of Claire’s friends, who were milling about, drinking beer and looking a good deal older than their vino-drinking wives. The funny thing is that they weren’t any older, they were roughly the same age; they’d just let themselves go to hell, the way Irish men do. (Except for Adam. He looked around the same age as Claire, but only because he was five years younger than her.)

  Someone passed me a paper plate with a burger on it and I recoiled. It looked horrifying, like a little charred circle of death. It sat on a big fat bread roll and, to try to act normal, I took a tentative bite of the bun. It tasted like cotton wool. The ball of stuff rolled around in my mouth, feeling alien and refusing to change into food. Had I stopped producing saliva? Or could the bread really be made of cotton wool? Like, a practical joke? You never know with my family.

  I flicked a paranoid glance around the garden but there was no cluster of gleeful faces grinning at me, ready to shout, ‘Gotcha!’

  There were just lots of people cramming burgers into themselves, spilling ketchup and mustard and drool down their chins. Suddenly it seemed that the garden was full of a race of people who were barely human, who looked like they’d been crossed with pigs.

  I closed my eyes to block out their awful hog-like faces, but when I opened them again I was staring at the grill, where the sausages looked like fat, repulsive, gristly bundles and the chickens made me think of dead headless babies. The ketchup was too red and the mustard was an extraordinary, terrifying yellow.

  I turned my back on it, only for my eyes to be drawn upwards to a bedroom window. Kate was there, staring down at us with a malevolence that was startling. It was like a horror film.

  I should leave.

  No need to say goodbye to anyone. There’s a lot to be said for a rude family. I started pushing through the hog-human hybrids to get to the sanctuary of the house, so I could slip away to merciful freedom, when some woman popped up into my path. Just appeared out of the ground, like the hand out of the grave in Carrie.

  ‘Helen Walsh!’ she declared.

  I stared at her. Who in the name of Christ?

  ‘Josie Fogarty!’ she said. ‘From school! What a coincidence! Only the other day I met Shannon O’Malley – you know, Dr Waterbury’s receptionist – and we were talking about you. We were saying how mental you were, that you were an absolute scream. We should all meet up. My eldest kid does judo with Claire’s youngest, which is how come I’m here today. I still see loads of people from school. Who do you see?’

  Her flow of words had stopped and I realized she was waiting for me to speak.

  ‘I …’ But that was all I could say. I tried again. ‘I …’ I looked beseechingly at her. Something horrific was happening: I couldn’t answer her. I was too far away. I was buried too far in. Answer her, I urged myself, answer her. But I was eight thousand miles behind my face and the distance was too vast for my voice to make it through.

  ‘I …’ I couldn’t control my face. I was working hard to look normal and pleasant but the muscles had become as herky-jerky as a puppet show. I knew my eyes had gone starey and there was nothing I could do to influence them.

  Josie Fogarty was looking at me oddly. Confused. Then afraid. Suddenly very keen to be away. Desperate for me to say something to release her, to release us both from this terrible endless stand-off that we were both locked into.

  ‘Nice to see you again,’ she blurted out, then she skittered away as fast as she could.

  Such humiliation. But my path was free; I could go now.

  44

  They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but that’s not true. It makes you weaker. It makes you more fearful.

  You see it sometimes with, for example, professional football players. They break their ankle, they get it set, they spend time with their leg in a funny glass oxygen chamber that speeds up recovery, they do cutting-edge physio and they’re declared fully fit again. But they’re never again as good as they once were. They just can’t surrender themselves to the game with the same aggression.

  Not because their ankle is weaker than it used to be, but because they’ve discovered pain, they’ve experienced their own shocking vulnerability and, on a primal level, they can’t help but try to protect themselves. The innocence is gone.

  I’d ‘survived’ a bout of depression but I’d been terrified of it happening again. And here it was, happening again.

  I was going down fast. Looking for Wayne had been keeping me afloat. Now there was nothing.

  Ma
ybe seeing Artie would help to steady me. But maybe not. Artie liked strong women. And I wasn’t strong, not at the moment.

  No doubt about it, the Devlin barbecue was a possible Gold Star winner. I wouldn’t be surprised if the inspectors did a brochure of it, as an example to others of how it should be done.

  Although it seemed to be in the process of winding down – it was gone eight o’clock – it was nonetheless pitch-perfect. The mood was cheery but not rowdy. The guests seemed to be made up of neighbours, work colleagues and friends of the kids. The more cynical among us would wonder if they’d been invited based on their good-lookingness, but I knew that that wasn’t the case. In the unlikely event that ugly people ever accidentally strayed into the Devlin orbit, they would be afforded the same warmth and cordiality as the very attractive, but somehow it just never happened.

  The garden itself, with the deck and the perfect lawn, looked, as always, like it belonged in a magazine. But an extra-special effort had been made with the sky. The background colour was a deep blue but they’d managed to source some unusual feathery clouds – very white with just a tinge of pink along the edges – and done a stunning arrangement of them.

  It looked like someone – Vonnie, probably – had just grabbed a handful and strewn them casually across the sky, letting them lie where they landed, but you could be sure that it was a lot more artful than that. Vonnie would never leave something like that to chance.

  And speaking of which, there she was, moving the condiments a nano-centimetre to the right, so that they all lined up beautifully.

  ‘Here again?’ I said. ‘Are you ever not here?’

  She laughed and threw her arms round me in a tight hug. ‘Come over to Artie with me,’ she said.

  At the back of the garden, by the cypress trees, Artie was in charge of the burger-grill. He wasn’t wearing an apron that said ‘Natural Born Griller’. What a class act.

  ‘Look at him,’ Vonnie said.

  ‘I’m looking.’

  ‘He needs to get his hair cut.’

  ‘He doesn’t.’

  ‘Tell him to get his hair cut,’ she said. ‘He’ll listen to you.’

  ‘I don’t want him to get his hair cut.’