Good Eggs

by Rebecca Hardiman

  “I’m Irish.” Kevin summons up a winning smile. “I can’t possibly describe anything in ten words or less.”

  “Give it a whirl.”

  As if you could nutshell an entire industry in a top-ten list. Typical clueless vexing youthful little tit. Lacking any sense of nuance or modesty, thinking he knows everything and if he doesn’t, then it’s hardly worth knowing. What is it with this global proclivity—he vaguely feels America or the U.K. is to blame—to simplify and wrap up or water down instead of failing to recognize the complicated and inherent fuckedupness of life?

  “Let’s see,” Kevin says. “Stunning photography. Revealing interviews… top celebrities… access to the big names of course, the ability to pitch—”

  “Oops! You’re out of words.”

  Kevin would like to reach across the desk and pummel Royston Clive’s cocky mug with his ridiculous Father Christmas facial hair—sparse in some bits, more Galway fishmonger than publishing guru. He takes in the kid’s three-hundred-quid dress shirt and his glittering ferret eyes and knows he’s just the kind of tight arsehole who’d throw his credit card at a bartender and loudly announce drinks on him, and then spend the rest of the night reminding all within earshot of his largesse.

  “I’m joking. But you did skip one,” Clive says.

  “Did I?”

  “Eyeballs.”

  “Sorry?”

  “How many people are seeing the ads.”

  “Oh but that’s not really my—” Kevin struggles to remove the superciliousness from his voice. “That would fall more under your area of expertise, wouldn’t it? Church and state and all that.”

  “No,” Clive replies with a wicked glint and begins fiddling with his phone. He seems unable to sit still. Maybe he’s on something. This generation is always on something. “Not here it doesn’t.” He taps the screen of his mobile and screams, “Are you handpicking the fucking beans?” and taps again, grinning at Kevin for approval. “Without the ads, what’s going to support your media content?”

  Media content! Would you ever fuck off? The little pissant winks at Kevin, and removes the gum, now a hardened, cement-colored blob, like putty, and sticks it directly onto the beautiful teak grain of his mid-century desk where, Kevin now notices, others have been abandoned. It’s a war-torn landscape of discarded Nicorette mines.

  Hands locked behind his head, Royston Clive spends the next ten minutes holding forth on the “ingredients” of a successful celebrity news blog “cocktail.” He follows this up with his own immodest saga of success—most of it utter bollocks—shamelessly interweaving erstwhile celebrities—one of the Spice Girls, the Duchess—into every tall tale. As in, “Fergie once arrived to a photo shoot with a royal wrangler and twenty others in her entourage demanding piping hot Moroccan mint tea and fresh mangoes. In fucking Fulham!”

  Kevin hopes he appears thoughtful and engaged, but wonders how desperate he really is. Could he actually arrive here every morning and work for such an absolute dickhead? Gemma returns with a pot of tea and cups and saucers and a plate of Jammie Dodgers.

  “I said coffee!” Clive roars and smacks his desk.

  “Oh,” says Gemma.

  “You’re fired, you lesbian!” he screams and laughs. Gemma rolls her eyes and leaves.

  “Okay, seriously, I’ll tell you though, here’s the thing.” Clive picks up an emery board and begins sanding down a thumbnail covered in transparent glitter varnish. “I’m not concerned remotely with your taste.”

  Clive’s phone buzzes.

  “It’s Andrew from that reality show. You know the one with the hot unibrow? You should see his ass.”

  Kevin ekes out a faint chuckle as Clive pushes away his phone. “Look, I know your work, I’m familiar. I’m a fan.”

  “That’s kind of you to say,” says Kevin, reaching for his portfolio and cursing himself for leaving out the black-and-white studio shot of a shirtless and well-oiled David Beckham on a Harley gazing moodily off-camera. That alone, he sees now, would have landed him the job. “I brought along some samples—”

  “My problem,” says Clive, tossing the nail file aside and pouring tea into his own cup, “is your lack of digital experience.”

  “Right, well, yes, I did want to address that. The bulk of my career has been in print, that’s true. But at Tattle Tales, as you know, we had a companion website that did really very well, a launch that I headed up.”

  “Two thousand unique visitors per week. Put it this way: chlamydia.com probably gets more eyeballs.”

  Kevin fake laughs at this lunatic, though there is truth to his words. Kevin had resisted the digital stuff from the start, nearly lost his job over a bitter dispute in which he was supposed to do lots more work online for the same money.

  “There’s a big difference between print and online,” Clive waxes on. “I’m not talking about breaking a story a month or every two weeks. I’m talking about breaking stories all day long. It’s a completely different beast. And really, you know way more about print media than I do. I’ve never even worked in print,” he says, as if print is a heaping pile of dog shite tracked into just-installed lounge carpet. “But obviously it’s much slower. You have, what? Three weeks, a month to develop a story. You’re not breaking news. I mean, news is cheap now—it’s fucking free! I put a story on the site that some fading singer’s breast implants have dropped out of her housecoat or Hollywood’s most hetero movie star is actually getting rim jobs from his poolboy in Beverly Hills. That’s old, that’s everywhere, in twenty minutes. You want to talk viral? Just look at the Jamie Grosnance mess.”

  Jamie who? Kevin nods knowingly, though unease flutters in his gut. The truth is he’s receded somewhat from the celebrity news cycle in the past month or two.

  “May I?” Kevin says, reaching toward the teapot.

  Clive chuckles evilly. “I mean, I’m the last to judge illicit activity, you know, a bit of blow or whatever, but that night was off the charts. And the text messages? You can’t make that shit up.”

  Ought he to fake his way through and then go home and bone up on pop culture—twenty minutes’ chat with Nuala or Aideen ought to cover it—or cop to being out of the loop, which would almost certainly tank his prospects? Kevin smiles. “Better than fiction.”

  “OK, so you’re the editor, the Grosnance story comes in, you have to put it up live in sixty seconds. What’s your headline?”

  Kevin’s mind races even as he tries to project calm. Is Jamie Grosnance a film star, a reality TV show star, a YouTube star, a pop star? Gun to his head, he’d guess music but it’s too risky to guess. He decides to go general so as to avoid making a consummate arse of himself.

  “Maybe a play on the drugs… something like ‘Jamie’s blown it again.’ ”

  Clive looks with mild derision at his interviewee. “It wasn’t coke, though. It was crystal meth.”

  “Ah, right,” Kevin mumbles. “How about…” He’s blanking. “ ‘Bad boy on a bender.’ ”

  Given he’s had milliseconds to produce it, Kevin feels this isn’t half bad, but Clive looks decidedly underwhelmed. He picks up his phone and begins typing and says, “Listen, I appreciate you coming in, but I don’t think this is the right fit.”

  That’s it? He’s ruined his chance because of one uninspired, off-the-cuff headline?

  “I’m sure I could come up with something better.”

  “You’re fine.” Clive stands up, yet he seems barely taller than when seated.

  Kevin unfurls his runner’s legs, gets to his feet.

  “Fair enough,” he says. “You wouldn’t mind, would you, if I took one for the road?” He reaches for the final Jammie Dodger.

  Clive regards him with a mixture of curiosity and pity.

  “Go for it.”

  Kevin stuffs the biscuit into his mouth. Clive is already screaming for Gemma. As Kevin nods a goodbye from the door, his interviewer grins and says, “Nothing personal, mate, but I need someone who’s up on
all this shit. Jamie Grosnance is not a bad boy. She’s not even a boy.”

  17

  Friday at dusk, before her guests arrive, Millie finds herself crouching in her garage on the hunt for her secret stash of smokes. Who she hides them from, or why she bothers, she hardly knows. Millie hasn’t broached the topic of smoking with Sylvia—being American, Sylvia is presumably puritanical regarding carcinogenics. Millie keeps her vice from Kevin too, given all the tedious abuse he’s hurled upon her after he himself quit, and then again following her tumor scare two years ago (an unsightly lump the size of a walnut jutting from her chin, biggish but benign).

  Millie eyeballs the rickety stepladder, which she employs to root out gunk from gutters every decade or so—not going to part with two hundred bob for that—and climbs gingerly to the top step and feels blindly along a high, cluttered shelf. She can’t remember where she put her ciggies, or anything. Once, she found a packet with a gold lighter in her oven. What a mind she has to put twenty Dunhills in the cooker!

  She gropes about for the light switch which, when toggled, casts a murky illumination on piles of junk everywhere: tins of motor oil long solidified, skeletons of bike-frames from decades past splayed rudely on the ground. Would any of the Fitzgerald kids down the road have a ride on these? The fact that the chains spill off them, that the saddles sit on two rusty stumps—this does not deter her. Then again, Millie’s a bit miffed with their builders pounding and drilling day and night, all to install some vile, ostentatious extension. Still, she might call up to Laura Fitzgerald and make the offer of the spare bikes—the woman does, after all, make a lovely ham and butter sandwich.

  Millie ignores the SMOKERS DIE YOUNGER warning emblazoned in bold lettering along the packet’s side—she’s old, she smokes, she’s not dead—and is soon exhaling when she hears footsteps and voices at her front door. Her dinner guests are early. Millie has only a murky grasp of Sylvia’s history. She knows the girl recently arrived in Ireland, her nephew in tow, to work as a roadie with her then-boyfriend, a drummer from Irishtown who turned out to be moody and difficult. When the band split up, Sylvia and the boy, Sean, stayed on, having little to go home to. Since then, she’s been taking up odd jobs, trying to save money, get herself sorted. Sylvia has mentioned this Sean, the son of her sister who had died tragically young. He’s on the quiet side, apparently, helpful and artistic but insular, maybe lonely or homesick. Millie—with a brainwave—had invited Aideen to come along.

  Sean turns out to be short, with soft features, an abbreviated brow, penetrating liquidy eyes and an olive pallor that bears no resemblance to his aunt’s paler complexion. She’s certain Aideen will like him. With his hair like a mess of thick weeds, he’s not unlike that scraggly Irish lad Aideen adores, carefully chosen by some cynical music mogul to embody everything hopeful and heartbreaking about youth. He wears a checked shirt, two buttons missing down the middle, and dark low-slung jeans from which the neon elastic of his undershorts peeks out.

  When Millie squints into his face, she sees some lost thing in it. He nods and says a polite hello, but keeps his eyes trained shyly on the hall carpet. Sylvia has brought wine and as she opens it, Millie prepares a glass of squash for the boy, diluting the orange syrup with carbonated water from her old-school siphon, a treat she keeps on hand for the grandchildren.

  “Aren’t you very good to come all the way out here,” she says. “Your mum told me you’re not in school?”

  “My aunt,” he corrects gently. “Yeah, I’m working toward my GED. It’s, like, a high school diploma. I’m almost done.”

  “Sean’s a big reader,” says Sylvia. “He’s always reading, like, serious books.”

  “I’m not a citizen,” he says. “I guess it’s like impossible to enroll here?”

  “Is it now?” says Millie. “Well, you don’t need to be learning Irish history and Irish language, anyway. How is any of that useful? Tell me something. A secret.”

  Sean ponders this and says, “I’m an atheist?”

  Millie claps her hands. “I’m an atheist as well. Another!”

  He smiles. “OK. I hate when people talk baby-talk to their dogs.”

  “I hate dogs!”

  “No.” He laughs. “You can’t hate dogs.”

  “You’re right. Sure, they’re harmless.”

  “They’re so devoted. They just want to hang out.”

  “What about your favorite place in Dublin? If I know anything in all the world—and I hardly know a thing!” She giggles. “I do know my Dublin.” In truth, she has been getting rather lost in her Dublin of late—so many new housing developments and shopping centers and office parks, so many once optimistic cranes, all now frozen midair across the city’s skyline, like a diorama of long-necked dinosaurs mid-graze, just before the asteroid hit.

  Sean motions to the view through the picture window, specks of lights forming a twinkling horseshoe across to the north side and all the way to Howth. “I’d say right here is pretty nice.”

  Millie’s positively beaming. “I grew up just down the road, in Killiney, you see. Have you been there? I’ll show you a photograph.” Millie roots around the shelves and shows Sean a framed picture of a house that isn’t, in fact, the house she grew up in—that was torn down ages ago to make way for apartments—but it’s close enough; it feels like her home.

  “Sylvia told me you’re a musician,” Millie says. “Is that right?”

  “Well, that’s kind of my—”

  “My granddaughter’s due here any minute. She loves pop music. Well, sure, I suppose you all do. Throw on a few of those briquettes, Sean—there’s a good lad—the fire’s dying.”

  Sean carefully, methodically, arranges three briquettes into an erect triangle, fills the gaps with wedges of reeking fire-lighters, and gets a quick blaze going. He stops when Aideen slips quietly into the room. She greets the Americans and gives Millie a limp embrace, waving off her excessive kisses.

  “She’s as pretty as you said, Mrs. Gogarty,” says Sylvia. “Isn’t she, Sean?”

  Sean, coloring, says, “Yes ma’am,” and they all laugh. He tongs the rogue embers that have sparked onto the hearth and returns them to the fire and then, with the little broom, brushes the dirt and ashes onto the shovel and deposits it all back into the fireplace. With nothing more to do, he sits in the only unoccupied spot, beside Aideen. When he stretches, his arms reach up through the air and Millie spots a flash of flat, swarthy stomach and a trail of dark hair crawling scandalously toward his navel.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” Millie says to her granddaughter. “Because, guess what? Sean likes music.”

  “Oh my God,” Aideen says.

  “What’s so bad about that?” says Millie, delighted. She looks at Sean. “Did you know your aunt has promised to put me in her suitcase one day and take me as a stowaway to America? Look at this, three guests in one day! Proof of what I always say: It’s feast or famine round here, isn’t that right, Sil? I’ve had no one here all week—”

  “Well,” Sylvia says, “Kevin came by—”

  “And today I have you and Sean and now Aideen,” she says, already feeling the wine’s effect. “Tell me something sexy.”

  “Gran!”

  Millie looks Aideen up and down: somehow the girl, who appears to be deeply blushing, has gotten even skinnier since she started at Millburn. “Tell us what that new school of yours is like.”

  “Crap,” says Aideen.

  “Is it really?”

  Aideen nods.

  “How’s the food?”

  “Crap.”

  “I’ll need to have that crap broken down a bit,” Millie says and Sean laughs. She is beginning to quite like Sean. “What do they give you for tea, I wonder?”

  “Sausage rolls. Which are vile. Or beans on toast.”

  “But who doesn’t love beans on toast?”

  “Not these beans,” says Aideen. “Not this toast.”

  “Poor Duckie. Well you’re here now
, and that’s all that matters.”

  “So you, like, live at your school?” This is the first question Sean has addressed directly to Aideen. “Like in a big dorm room?”

  “Yeah,” says Aideen. “Just during the week though. I come home, like, at the weekend.”

  “I’m picturing an army barracks.”

  “More like a lunatic asylum.”

  He grins. “Really?”

  “Well, like this one girl—she’s homesick every night. It’s really sad. She doesn’t want anyone to know so she, like, cries into her pillow. I feel bad for her. And another one—her parents are always sending her money and expensive presents and things but they never visit. She only goes home at Christmas and the summer. She’s been there since she was six.”

  “I’m practically a pauper,” Millie says. “Oh, that reminds me—did any checks come in, did you see, Sylvia? I usually get my dividends this time of year.”

  “Yes, a couple did. I deposited them Wednesday I think it was. Shoot, did I forget to give you the receipt?”

  “Oh I have no idea. I’m sure you did. Never mind. These things are a terrible nuisance, aren’t they, Sean? Young people don’t need to be talking about money.”

  Sean shakes his head politely and then turns to Aideen, smiling. “So you like music too?”

  18

  Aideen, buoyant, flies down Gran’s road on her bike alongside the blackened Irish Sea and the black road, whose lights are intermittent at best and generally shit. Brutal gusts of wind sting her face and ears and fingers but she doesn’t much dwell on it, or care. She owns the fucking road! Once she turns onto a more private lane, she shrieks, laughs maniacally, and kicks her feet up from the pedals, a pure downhill glide, Clean-Cut’s take on “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight” blasting in her ears. But there’s a warm wind blowin’ the stars around/And I’d really love to see you tonight. She tries to work out Sean’s age. Seventeen? Eighteen? Does it matter? He has rock-star hair. He wears a leather jacket. Has he had sex? Aideen’s grasp on the fundamentals of sex are murky at best, though Brigid’s always offering up various bossy, unsettling particulars during the midnight chats at Fair: pinch a condom at the tip, have a towel nearby, expect pain.