Read A Silver Lining Online

Authors: Christine Murray

A Silver Lining (8 page)

BOOK: A Silver Lining
9.66Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

‘She said there are auditions next week for a new play with Onyx Odeon Productions. I was looking up a copy of the script, managed to track it down.’

‘Cool, what is it about?’

Daniel laughed as he speared more pasta onto his fork, ‘I’ll tell you when I’ve read through the thing!’

‘Fair enough, so.’ They both continued to eat in silence.

‘No news on that programme for TV3?’ Rose asked.

Daniel had auditioned for a part in a new soap opera, and was waiting to hear how it had gone. Rose was hoping fervently that he got the job. Not just for him, though she knew that he’d be over the moon to receive the part. The idea of supporting two people on her salary was quite a scary thought; secondary school teachers didn’t earn a lot of money, not until they’d been working for a certain amount of years. Daniel had to socialise a lot to try to make the kind of contacts that might give him a break, and that cost money too. He brought in some money from side projects, but the amounts were so small that they would barely make a dent in their bills. He had survived for the last couple of years on inheritance from his grandmother, but there was precious little of that left now.

‘Nope I’ve heard nothing back at all on that front. And in this industry, no news is probably bad news. They’re due to start shooting it in the next couple of weeks, so I should have heard by now if they were planning to give me the part.’

Rose placed her knife and fork side by side on her empty plate. ‘Aw, I’m sorry honey. I know how much you wanted it.’

‘Ah sure, I gave it my best shot,’ he said with a sad smile. ‘What more could I have done?’

‘Sneaked backstage and poured poison in the lead character’s ear?’ Rose asked.

‘It’s a feckin’ soap opera, not Shakespeare!’ Daniel said with a grin. ‘The character is meant to be a bit of a womanizer. I could give the actor a box on the nose, he can’t do much womanizing with a mangled face, can he?’

‘I don’t know, it might add to his roguish charm,’ said Rose, pretending to consider it.

‘You think?’

‘I do.’

Daniel crinkled up his nose in disgust. ‘Ah feck. ‘

They’d met at a barbecue held by a mutual friend of theirs, Shannon. Shannon had been in Rose’s class in school and had gone on to study acting in college. At one point she had played Ophelia in an inner city theatre’s production of Hamlet. Hamlet had been a set text for the Leaving Certificate that year, and small companies were cashing in by staging low cost productions of it in order to collect from classes of frazzled sixth year students looking for any means possible to cram the details of the play into their heads.

Daniel had been playing Horatio in that same production. When its run had come to an end, Shannon had held a barbecue for all involved plus a few extra friends.

It had been a great party. One of the cast members (Laertes) also worked as a barman occasionally to make ends meet, and had volunteered his services. He made eye-wateringly strong cocktails. Rose, who usually didn’t drink spirits, had gotten hammered fairly quickly. By the time night fell she was dancing barefoot on the lawn to the Shakira song Underneath Your Clothes. Dancing light as a fairy in the moonlight, Rose was feeling ethereal until she danced over the still red hot butt of a cigarette that someone had let fall in the grass.

Knowing, even in her inebriated state, that burns needed water fast, she limped into the kitchen. She opened cupboard doors randomly in a vain attempt to find a suitable receptacle to pour water into, but every container had been used to hold potato salad, fruit punch or vodka jelly. It didn’t help that Rose kept reopening cupboards that she’d already looked in, while completely ignoring others. In the end she stuck the plug in the kitchen sink, pulled the dirty crockery out of it and filled it to the brim. She pulled herself up on to the counter, a feat that took her three attempts, and plunged her feet into the ice cold water. She sighed in contentment as the water gave her relief from the painful burn.

Just at that moment, a man came in carrying a crate of lager. He was beautiful, casually dressed in a pair of khaki coloured combats and a white t-shirt. He looked familiar. Rose struggles to place him in her head.

‘Horatio,’ he said, pre-empting her question. ‘I played Horatio.’

Of course
, thought Rose. She had brought her sixth year English class to see the play, hoping to both support Shannon and ignite her student’s interest in Shakespeare. Well, one out of two wasn’t bad.

‘You were very good’, said Rose. She cursed herself inwardly. Was that the best she could do?
You were very good?
She sounded like a teenage girl who had never seen a good looking man in her life. And this Horatio was good looking.
Very
good looking, as a matter of fact.

‘Thanks’, grunted Horatio as he put the crate on the table. ‘Would you like a beer?’

‘Oh’, said Rose, aware that a red flush was making its way across her cheeks. ‘Ahm…yeah. That’d be nice.’

He took two of the beers and deftly removed their tops with a bottle opener. He walked over to the sink and handed her a bottle.

‘Is there any particular reason why you’re sitting with your feet in the sink and being anti-social?’ he asked.

‘There is actually.’ Rose took a long draught of her beer. It was warm, but she was way past caring. ‘I burned my foot on a cigarette butt on the grass outside. I needed cold water and all the bowls were used up. So I’m stuck here.’ Rose made a sweeping motion that took in all of her body to illustrate that point.

‘You must be awfully lonely’, said Horatio, smiling at her.

‘Oh I am.’ Rose said seriously. ‘Although I’ve recently befriended that kind tea caddy over beside the kettle there, which kind of takes the edge off it.’

‘I could keep you company? If you and the tea caddy don’t think that I’m intruding, of course.’

‘We don’t mind in the slightest’, Rose said graciously.

Horatio disappeared out the back door. Rose turned around and examined her face in the large plate glass window that was above the sink. She still looked the same, pretty ordinary, not beautiful. Her blonde hair was cut at her collar bone, and her large green eyes gave her an innocent childlike look. She wet her fingers and rubbed the area under both eyes to eradicate any rogue bits of mascara. She wished she had her make-up bag to do a repair job, but in her current position that was possible.

Horatio came back into the room with a patio chair in one hand and a bowl of crisps in the other. He placed the chair beside the counter and sat down, perching the bowl of crisps on the draining board.

‘You can’t have a decent beer without a few crisps’, he said.

Rose looked at the side of her bottle dubiously. ‘And is Bluebeard Beer classed as a decent beer?’

‘It is indeed. Now what’s your name?’

‘Rose. Rose Langan. And you’re Horatio.’

‘Daniel. Daniel is my real name,’ he told her.

‘Ooooh. I get you.’ Rose gave an exaggerated wink.
My God
, she thought,
I’m plastered
.

Regardless, she seemed to make quite a good impression. Daniel told her about the acting courses he’d taken straight after school, and anecdotes about the various plays he’d been in and the one or two television parts he’d gotten. Although the roles were relatively small – he’d been a mechanic in a made-for-television movie and a theatre nurse with one line in a hospital drama, Rose was impressed. The nearest she’d ever gotten to a television personality was the time that Roger had been interviewed by RTE News after students from St. Jude’s had spray painted a giant penis onto the schoolyard on the day when the minister for education was coming to visit the school.

She told him about her job as a secondary school teacher, dredging up the funniest anecdotes she knew to make her life seem as entertaining his. He lit a cigarette and offered it to her. She took it shyly, not wanting to tell him that she didn’t smoke, it felt such an intimate gesture. She didn’t have an ashtray, so she tapped her ash into the sink, turning the water a dark grey colour. They were getting on so well, that when he stood up to kiss her later that night she thought that she might melt with happiness. The kiss was firm, yet soft. The moment seemed to go on forever, which was just as well because they were brought up short by a big cheer from outside where they could be seen through the window.

‘Well how was it for you?’ he quipped as they pulled apart.

Rose put her head to one side and pretended to consider it. ‘Just about bearable’. Then she burst out laughing at his mock indignant face. He laughed with her. A shout came from the hall.

‘That’s my taxi unfortunately,’ he said. His face was a mask of disappointment. ‘I’d really like to see you again. Can I give you my number?’

Rose shook her head. ‘No, I’ll give you mine.’

‘And here was me thinking that all you liberty loving females were claiming their right to be the one to make the first move,’ he teased her.

‘Oh I acknowledge my right to. I just choose not to.’ She took his phone from him and punched in her number. She handed it back to him smiling, and he leaned over and kissed her gently on the inside of her wrist and walked away. She sighed happily. Now how was she going to get out of the god damn sink?

She’d woken up the next morning lying on one of Shannon’s battered couches. The sun was streaming through a crack in the curtains, painting a bright butter yellow strip across the living room floor. Rose could tell from the strength of the colour that it was late morning. A glance at her watch confirmed her suspicions. She sat up slowly, giving a low groan as a dull pain pulsed in her head. Her head felt heavy and her eyes were slightly grainy. She had definitely drank too many cocktails the night before.

She put her feet on the carpet and got a shock. Her feet were devoid of all colour, a pale grey. They looked like the feet of a corpse. Then Rose remembered the cigarette ash in the sink water. She turned her foot over and saw the blister, pink bare and vulnerable on the sole. She was due to babysit for her sister Charlotte in an hour or so. She wished she hadn’t offered to look after her niece and nephew. She loved them to bits, but small kids and hangovers did not mix.

She went to the bathroom and scrubbed her feet so they didn’t look like they’d spent the night wrapped in newspaper. She walked into the kitchen, stepping over the recumbent body of someone she could identify only as Polonius. She walked over to a white board that was mounted on the wall and uncapped a large blue marker. She scribbled
Hey Shannon, thanks for a great party. I’ll be in touch, Rose
. She thought about adding a smiley face to the end of her message but she decided against it. She was way too hung over to be upbeat. She poured herself a glass of water and chucked some empty cans into the recycling bin, before walking outside to try and locate her shoes.

It was a beautiful spring morning. The sky was fresh and such a light blue that it looked like it had been scrubbed clean with a hard brush and bleach. Rose inhaled some of the fresh spring air, pulling it deep into her lungs. She wandered around the garden for a few aimless minutes until she finally located her canvas flats in a patch of long grass, slightly damp with dew. She eased them onto her feet, wincing slightly as the shoe pressed against burnt skin.

She’d spent the hours in Charlotte’s daydreaming about Daniel, wondering whether or not he would call, and trying to block out the high-pitched shriek of a colicky Amelia which pierced through her delicate head.

He rang her the next day, inviting her to a small production that some friends of his were holding in a vacant rental unit in the Docklands. The play was awful, largely down to the fact that two of the main actresses had been cast more for their looks than for their talent. Daniel took her backstage afterwards and introduced her to the cast. She’d dredged up enthusiasm, telling the two lead women that they’d been fantastic, who nodded cooly, taking such praise as their due.

They’d gone for a drink in a local bar, a monument to the Celtic Tiger period, which had been built to quench the thirst of the workers in Dublin’s financial district. Recent months had seen many jobs disappear from the area, and cranes hung in the sky beside building projects that had long since been abandoned. The bar that would have once been crammed to the top of its stylish metal rafters with after-work revellers now had only a few customers so the large group of cast and groupies had little trouble squeezing in.

Rose had been worried that she’d be stuck making small talk to the terrible twins, so she was relieved to be wedged between Daniel and the lighting assistant Guy, who, sensing a kindred no-bullshit spirit in Rose, whispered bitchy comments to her out of the side of his mouth like a ventriloquist, leaving her in kinks of laughter. Afterwards, Daniel and Rose had walked across the Sean O’Casey Bridge, and stared toward the city lights which burned brightly against the dark night sky.

Daniel leaned over and kissed her gently. All she was aware of was the softness of his lips, the feel of his body against hers, his warmth contrasting with the cold wind that was blowing in from the coast.

She pulled away slightly and looked into his eyes.
Yes
, she thought.
He’s the one I want
.

 

 

*** *** ***

 

Storms in Teacups
is available from Amazon, Smashwords & Kobo

 

About the Author

Christine Murray is a bestselling contemporary fiction & fantasy author from Dublin, Ireland. Before embarking on a writing career, she studied history at university and has a master’s degree in medical history. She also worked as a freelance journalist and ghost-writer.

When not writing, Christine enjoys reading, watching spy thrillers and spending too much money at make-up counters. She loves both coffee and cocktails, and thinks that the espresso martini might just be the most underrated invention of all time. You can find out more about her on her website, or alternatively you can find her on Twitter and Facebook.

BOOK: A Silver Lining
9.66Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Eye Of The Leopard by Mankell Henning
Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell
Forbidden the Stars by Valmore Daniels
The Middle Kingdom by David Wingrove
Rumpole Misbehaves by John Mortimer
Possession by Ann Rule
The Ball by John Fox
Tarzán en el centro de la Tierra by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Pants on Fire by Maggie Alderson