Bleekland’s face does not shift in any way. “It’s possible that Millburn isn’t the right school for Aideen, Mr. Gogarty. You probably don’t know that the only friendship she’s struck up is with the single most-troubled girl in fifth year, a girl who is rarely allowed home.”
Kevin, not remotely surprised, says, “I’m really surprised. Look, I have to say I think she just needs to settle in. I think she’ll do splendidly here, given the chance.”
“Whether she was acting out of rebellion as you say or because she had every intention of drinking an entire bottle of vodka and a number of cans of lager”—here again the rising perturbation—“for which the school would be held liable, you see, the rules are the rules.”
“I understand, I do, of course,” Kevin says, thinking, Fuck, they’re going to expel her. “But would you consider the fact that she was throwing it away? Obviously she came to her senses, regretted what she’d done and decided, in the end, a bit late, I’ll give you that, but decided nonetheless to do the right thing, which was to not drink it, and to not share it with the other girls, to not do the wrong thing.” He has an image of Aideen climbing out of his car the first day they’d pulled up here, probably scared shitless, but still brave, resilient. “Please let that be what you judge, and not her initial mistake. She’ll do better, I promise.”
15
Donnelly’s is no longer a viable destination for the bits and pieces, which leaves Millie no choice but to head to the dreaded supermarket, a Goliath for the modern, hard-core food shopper. Erected in the pompous early naughts, the store looms crass and superior just off a busy roundabout, its armies of carts gleaming and symmetrical beside the grand set of automatic double doors, its smug self-pay car park encased in a translucent pod.
“Paying for parking in my own village,” she harrumphs to Sylvia. Millie hasn’t bought a week’s worth of groceries in months—nay, years. As she once happily explained to a supermarket employee after gawking at the price of a pound of salmon (pulled from the harbor!) she’s offended by the store, and if she’s being honest (which, in truth, she often is not), Millie is philosophically opposed to such a grand show of decadence as toting home a great gaggle of plastic bags filled with more food and drink than is necessary. Millie Gogarty is a survivor, a citizen of the Republic of Ireland whose mother clutched her brown ration books doled out in wartime with the triumphant sense of rising to the occasion; she is a great believer in making do. She makes do, on a weekly basis, with a pint of milk, a loaf of sliced pan, rashers and butter and tea, a jar of jam and the odd egg.
“Look out!”
Millie snaps back from her reveries to find her trusty Renault is smashing with an almighty volume into a concrete wall that runs the periphery of the car park. With a loud crush of metal, she and Sylvia scream in unison. The car, in its momentum, bounces backward into the direct path of a passing motorcyclist.
“Watch out!” yells Sylvia. “Stop!”
Millie means to access the brakes but her foot’s on the accelerator.
“Stop the car!”
Sylvia yanks at the emergency brake, which immediately halts them. The biker swerves away, nearly loses his balance, and then rights himself just in time to flip Millie off.
“Fucking eejit!” he screams loud enough for shoppers returning their empty trollies nearby to hear. “Get off the bleedin’ roads!”
“Oh my God,” says Sylvia. “Are you okay?”
Even for a woman like Millie, who craves diversions of almost any kind, this is a lot. Adrenaline courses through her like she might explode with it, and her left hand feels welded to the gear stick. She releases her fingers, one by one, from their mighty grip. The good news is there’s no pain in her body—toes, limbs, fingers, all check.
“Mrs. Gogarty?”
Millie rips the keys from the ignition as if they’re to blame.
“I’m okay,” she says. “Are you okay?”
This is her third minor accident of late (though she plans to share that particular data with no one) and each has given her a case of momentary madness, a jittery, out-of-body experience that her physical being is unraveling.
“That was… oh my God,” says Sylvia. “We should check for damage.”
Millie gets shakily out of her Renault and the two women stand at the front of it, bearing witness: The bumper is bent to bits and the front left light is decimated. Shards of translucent plastic are splayed across the tarmac and black angry scuffs like graffiti markings are scrawled on the wall in front of them.
“You sure you’re alright?” the American says.
Millie nods, but her mind’s already jumping forward to consequences. She’s trying to think lucidly about priorities here; she mustn’t muck this up.
“Listen,” she says. “Kevin can’t find out about this. I’m in enough trouble already.”
“It’s not that big of a deal,” says Sylvia. “Just some minor damage. At least no one was hurt.”
“But he’ll use this against me. He keeps threatening to take the car keys off me.”
A delivery truck backs into the loading dock with its insistent reversing beeps while shoppers push laden trollies toward minivans, the world around them carrying on.
Sylvia says, “Why don’t we—maybe we should get some coffee somewhere. What about that nice café we went to last week?”
“Any innocent person could drive into something, you see? Jolly Jessica has had her share of dents and bumps. Even Kevin has.”
“Of course. I really wouldn’t sweat it.”
“Please.” She stares at Sylvia. “You’ve got to promise me you won’t tell him.”
“The thing is, I give a, like, report each week to him, you know, what’s happening, where we go, what you’re eating, and whatnot.”
Millie sniffs. This is the first she’s heard of a report. Things on paper always lead to trouble.
“I’d like to see those,” she says.
“Oh no, it’s not—it’s just a phone call, I mean. Like a five-minute phone call.”
For the first time, Millie turns with suspicious eyes onto Sylvia. Is the woman spying on her, reporting back all sorts of gossip to the very person who should be privy to none of it?
“Kevin just wants to make sure you’re okay.”
“He most certainly does not,” says Millie. “I think Kevin’s trying to put me in a nursing home, you see. He thinks I shouldn’t be living alone and this’ll just give him more ammunition.”
“Okay, hold on,” Sylvia says. “Let me just think for a minute.” In the quiet that follows, Millie’s panic does not dissipate.
“Okay, let’s just say for a sec that I don’t tell Kevin.”
“Yes, yes!”
Sylvia looks pained. “If he found out, I’d be fired.”
“He won’t. He’ll never find out.”
“I don’t know…”
“I could pay you extra.”
Sylvia jerks her head in surprise. “What? No. I couldn’t—I would never do that.”
“Oh but no,” says Millie. “Even if you don’t tell him—he’ll still find out, won’t he? He’ll see the car’s not in the drive. It’ll take days to repair.”
“It’s not that much damage. It won’t take days.”
“This is Ireland,” says Millie. “Everything takes days.”
“What if we—no, no.”
“What?”
“Oh my gosh.” Sylvia frowns. Even frowning she’s quite attractive. “Well, I was just thinking… what if we tell Kevin it was me? That I was the one driving?”
It takes Millie a moment to fully absorb the kindness, the loyalty, the selflessness, of this offer.
“You would do that?”
“I’m not gonna say I’m totally comfortable with—”
“That’s a brilliant idea.”
“You think? It might work? But it would have to be our secret.”
“Cross my heart.” Millie puts a hand on her sternum.
&
nbsp; Sylvia says, “I mean, you shouldn’t be in a nursing home. That’s crazy. And if Kevin finding out about a little car crash will help his case, then why should we do that?”
Millie throws her arms around Sylvia, considers delivering a giant, grateful kiss onto the woman’s neck but decides against it. Into her shoulder, she says, “What did I do to deserve you?”
Sylvia, mid-hug, says, “Don’t be silly.” Then she takes Millie by the shoulders and says, very directly, “You’re awesome. You are an awesome person. Never forget that. But top secret, right?”
“If I breathe a word, you have my permission to take me into the town square and stone me.”
“Town square!” Sylvia laughs.
“Come for dinner on Friday? You and your nephew.”
“Oh that’s not necessary.”
“I insist!”
Millie can phone up the mechanic later to come collect the car. For now, she links her arm through Sylvia’s and heads into the market, a dinner menu—roast beef, mashers, green beans—already presenting itself.
16
Kevin’s job interview is at Starjar.com, an Irish offshoot of a British celebrity entertainment and media fiefdom. The offices take up the second floor of a bank gone under just off Grafton Street. Kevin sits in the swank waiting area rubbing his not yet blatantly middle-aged head. Clammy-palmed, funky-breathed (tooth decay having been reduced to lowest-level priority in the general scheme of things), he’s been waiting nearly an hour. This job—deputy banana—let’s just say he can see it now: a singular staff (literally), crippling non–family man hours, a shoestring budget, pickups and write-arounds, the writers being unpaid interns exchanging free labor for a byline. Which means hack jobs, which means rewrites, which means more work, which means utter shite.
Still. It’s the only editorial position Mick knows of in the entire country and Kevin is singularly qualified for it. He’s worked for celebrity magazines, here and abroad, his entire career. He knows every bit of the industry—from writing arresting headlines to finessing colorful interviews with reluctant stars to choosing the of-the-moment cover subjects who will most register on newsstands. Kevin must demonstrate this all today; he must wow Starjar despite his aversion to self-pitching, the whole endeavor being embarrassingly obvious and about as attractive to him as spending the morning sitting on a damp cardboard box begging for coins in a city alley.
No one here, save one builder milling about with a drawn, stubbled face, which brings a comradely surge of comfort to Kevin, looks older than twenty-two. Hipsters in colored drainpipe jeans and gray infinity scarves and dense, square, librarian eyeglasses drift in and out in a blasé fashion, as if the world were theirs. Or maybe it’s the same hipster entering and exiting.
Presiding over the front desk is one such fashionista—black net shirt over a black lace bra, bare full lips, two thin silver discs sliced through a coffee-stained tongue—who occasionally rests soulless eyes upon Kevin as he fakes his way through a stack of glossy design ’zines, tapping his “good” (gangrene onset) shoes against a hand-tufted, wavy-patterned designer rug that is doubtless the equivalent of a year’s worth of minivan payments.
The hopeful jubilation Kevin had experienced at dawn—donning his suit (beyond obsolete, he winces), fixing himself a cappuccino—has waned considerably during his sixty minutes in this room with its absurd, plastic-molded, ass-numbing chairs and blank canvases in identical blond-wood frames hung in neat, symmetrical rows. Finally, the desk girl removes her ridiculous telephonic headgear and rises, summoning him with a bored two-finger wave. Nearby, a drill or floor sander or machinery of some sort whirrs at great volume. The whole place seems under construction, in stark contrast to, say, Kevin who currently feels as if he’s deconstructing, or at least on a slow-mo, daily unraveling.
He squeezes the handles of his portfolio, reassured by its presence and heft. All weekend, between carpools and cooking, absent Grace (in the West of Ireland for a team retreat), he’d culled twenty years of clips down to a handful of high-gloss sleeves and sandwiched them between two pieces of soft, worn black Florentine leather. Vetting the portfolio was the first creative work he’s done in ages (unless indulging in silly extramarital fantasies counts).
Kevin had never actively sought a career in celebrity journalism; he’d meandered into it. After university, he knew exactly the things that did not interest him—banking, law, medicine, sales—but he hadn’t a bog about what did. When he and Grace moved to London just after college, Kevin had tried his hand at stand-up again. He soon realized he lacked the perseverance, the hunger, required, but he did like writing the bits. He liked writing. Grace would head out to work—she was already climbing the ranks at British Airways then—and he’d sit in their sunny flat in Clapham South with a carafe of French pressed coffee and twenty Marlboros and write sentences and then go back and rewrite them, again and again, trying to make them better until they weren’t hideous, until they were alright actually, and the carafe beside him was empty. Writing presented problems he felt he could solve.
Grace was Kevin’s first, and only, reader. She was outrageously supportive as he was of her meteoric rise in BA’s marketing and promotions department. They wouldn’t put it thus, but they were a team. She urged him to submit to literary magazines (he didn’t) and to attend author readings around the city (he did). During summer weekends, they’d buy meat samosas and a bottle of rosé from the shops and arrange their borrowed deck chairs on the Common and talk until it grew dark. Grace would read aloud from Time Out and they’d choose an affordable outing or two for the following week—a spin through the National Portrait Gallery (free) followed by coffee in the ancient crypt at St. Martin’s-in-the-Field just across the way, or a Brixton Poets slam (two quid) or fringe plays that took them all over the city. The last show he remembered seeing, The Shadow of a Gunman for a fiver in a Killburn community center, made him homesick.
Meanwhile, a friend of theirs from university was moving to Australia and offered Kevin his job, the oxymoronic position of fact-checker at one of the most vilified tabloids at the time. He’d gone on to spend years at various gossipy magazines, endlessly begging, cajoling, hair-pulling, brainstorming, and indulging in carefree, heavy after-hours drinking. He’d enjoyed the work, and the camaraderie of it, immensely, and while it wasn’t creative writing exactly, it was writing—and he was getting paid. Some nearly twenty years later, his career had ended in sixteen head-spinning high-wire months at the top of an Irish masthead when, due to budget cuts, he’d been summarily laid off.
Despite the ubiquitous presence of industrial-sized bin bags sagging and spilling forth like entrails and a definitive air of unsettledness about the place, the boss’s nameplate has already been hung outside his frosted glass door in large font: ROYSTON CLIVE, PUBLISHER. According to the kind of catty details one might find in one of Kevin’s now-defunct publications, Tattle Tales, Clive is a colorful and brilliant, if insufferable, queen from the London exurbs with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers and a famously decadent double town house in Mayfair. Apparently if you swipe at a screen on the wall, the sofa heats up your bum.
Kevin sighs, envisions his grandchildren plugging in their easy chairs, or charging their cushions. All this crap has already seeped poisonously into too many corners of his own household, eradicating key signs of his times. The thermometer to check whether the turkey’s done, the pump he uses to fill the bike tires. Even their wine opener requires batteries and lights up as the cork ascends, like a UFO lifting off the earth. Why every minor irritation and inconvenience must be conquered, mapped out in some Silicon Valley office among a precocious group of twenty-year-old hypereducated, overly indulged, grossly entitled techies, a prototype created, a market interrogated, capital raised, a product “rolled out—it’s beyond his fathoming. Where is the challenge, the spontaneity, of solving simple problems with common sense? Chilly arse? Get a blanket, put a brick on the fire. Better still: go to bed, be thankful you�
�re alive to feel the cold.
The door swings open and out steps a petite, bearded, round-nosed man-child who calls to mind a twentysomething Papa Smurf.
“Kevin? Did I keep you? So sorry. Royston Clive. Come in, please.” Clive smiles but in it Kevin reads an unmistakable whiff of insecurity. “Sit down, please. Has that little minx already fled? Oh, Gemma!”
The girl, Gemma, returns.
“Hold all my calls. Unless it’s Ted, in which case tell him to kindly go and fuck himself with a rusty stick.”
Clive cracks up while Kevin, trying to mask his instant revulsion, settles into a black leather Eames knockoff, or possibly an original. Kevin is not a tall man, yet here he feels like a giant in a dwarf’s lair. Royston plops himself into a rolly chair behind a massive alpha desk and swivels toward a slick silver laptop and begins typing. With no eye contact, he says, “So Kevin Gogarty, what makes you tick?”
“Sorry?”
“An American—a rather famous filmmaker actually, you’d know his name—once asked me that at a dinner party in some Hollywood Hills mansion. Can you imagine? I said, ‘Dinner companions who don’t ask dull questions.’ Would you care for coffee? Gemma!”
Gemma reappears, leaning beneath the doorjamb like a moody adolescent undecided whether to bother sticking around for the grown-ups’ convo, which has proved, thus far, to be a total yawn.
“Two coffees, pronto. And bring some of those jam biscuit thingies. Even though I really shouldn’t. But I’ve got Davey today at five, don’t I?”
Gemma frowns and slinks off. Clive leverages himself against the edge of his desk and pushes off from it, whirling past a corporate gift basket bursting with the sort of impersonal, inedible crap—dried fruit cookies, honey-coated pistachios—that would only be unsealed and consumed in an apocalyptic scenario.
The bearded pip-squeak arrests his chair, peels open a square of Nicorette, and says, “So tell me this: What makes a great magazine? In ten words or less.”
Good Eggs Page 8