Angels (2 page)

But even Garv agreed that Elaine was terrifying. She-spokerealfast.

Firingquestionsfromamachinemouth. How's-work? Whenareyougetting promoted? Her dynamic glamour reduced me to stammering inadequacy, and by the time I'd cobbled together an answer, she'd have lost interest and moved on.

But even if I had liked Liam and Elaine, I still wouldn't have wanted to go out that particular night—putting on a big fat happy head is that much harder if you've an audience. Also there was a pile of scary manila envelopes to be dealt with at home. (Plus two soaps eager to tend to my needs and a couch that couldn't do enough for me.) Time was too precious to waste an entire evening out enjoying myself.

And I was
so
tired. My work—like most people's, I ANGELS / 7

would imagine—was very demanding. I guess the clue is in the word: “work.” Otherwise they might call it “flat on your back on a beach chair” or “having a deep-tissue massage.”

I “worked” in a legal firm that had a lot of dealings with the U.S.

Specifically, entertainment law. (After we'd gotten married, Garv, on account of his general fabulousness, had been sent for five years to his company's Chicago office. I'd worked for one of the big legal firms there, so when we'd returned to Ireland three years ago, I'd claimed to be well versed in U.S. entertainment law. The kicker was that even though I'd done night classes and gotten some qualifications in Chicago, I wasn't a proper lawyer. Which meant I got tons of the work, most of the abuse, and only a fraction of the moola. I was more of an interpreter, I suppose; a clause that meant one thing in Ireland could mean something different in the states, so I translated U.S. contracts into Irish law and drafted contracts that should—hopefully—stand in both jurisdictions.) I lived in vague but constant fear. Sometimes I had dreams that I'd left out a vital clause and my firm got sued for four trillion dollars, which they deducted from my wages at the rate of seven pounds fifty a week and I had to work there for all eternity paying it back. Sometimes, in those dreams, all my teeth fell out as well.

Other times, I'm sitting in the office and I look down to find that I'm naked and that I need to get up and use the photocopier.

Anyway, the day the balloon went up, I was very busy. So busy that my new fitness regime had gone by the board. I'd recently realized that biting my nails was the only exercise I was getting, so I'd hatched a cunning plan: rather than call Sandra, my assistant, to come and collect my dictaphone tapes, I'd walk the twenty yards to her office and hand-deliver them instead. But no time for such self-indulgence that particular day. A deal with a film studio was about to fall apart, and if the contract wasn't finalized that week, the actor who'd attached himself to the project was going to walk.

8 / MARIAN KEYES

(For a minute there my job almost sounded glamorous. Take my word for it, it was as glamorous as a cold sore. Even the occasional business lunches at expensive restaurants weren't all that. I could never truly relax; the client always asked a question requiring a long and detailed answer just after I'd put a forkful of food into my mouth.)

The scriptwriter—my client—was desperate to get the contract all sorted out so that he could get his fee and his family could eat.

(And his father might finally be proud of him, but I digress.) The U.S. lawyers had come to work at three in the morning, their time, in order to try and close the deal, and all day E-mails and phone calls zipped back and forth. Late in the day we dotted the final
i
and crossed the final
t
, and even though I was wrecked, I felt light and happy.

Then I remembered that we were supposed to be going out with Liam and Elaine that evening and a cloud passed over the sun. It wasn't so bad, I consoled myself; at least I'd get a nice dinner out of it—they were fond of fancy restaurants. But God, I was exhausted. If only it was
our
turn to cancel!

And then, just when it seemed that we were beyond all hope, the call came.

“Liam's broken his toe,” Garv said. “His new flat-screen telly fell on it.” (Liam and Elaine had every consumer durable known to man—and I stress
man
, not woman. Give me a cell phone and a curling iron and I'm happy. But Garv, being a man, yearned after digital this and Bang & Olufsen that.) “So tonight's off.”

“Great!” I exclaimed. Then I remembered myself: “Well, not great for him and his toe, but I've had a tough day and—”

“It's okay,” Garv said. “I didn't want to go either. I was just about to call them and pretend our house had been burned down or something.”

“Dandy. Well, see you back at the ranch.”

“What'll we do about food? Should I pick up something?”

“No, you did it last night. I'll do it.”

ANGELS / 9

I had launched into an orgy of switching stuff off when someone said, “Going home, Maggie?” It was my boss, Frances, and her
already
? might have been silent, but I still heard it.

“That's right.” Lest there be any confusion. “Going home.” Polite but firm. Trying to keep my prone-to-quaver-under-pressure voice free of telltale traces of fear.

“Is that contract ready for tomorrow morning's meeting?”

“Yes,” I said. No, actually it wasn't. She was talking about yet another contract, one I hadn't even started on. There was no point whining to Frances that all day I'd been frantically sewing up a great deal. She was an
Über
achiever, well on her way to being made a partner, and she'd made hard work into a performance art. She rarely left the office, and popular opinion (not that she
was
popular, of course) had it that she slept under her desk and washed—like a bag lady—in the staff toilets.

“Can I take a quick look?”

“It's not really laid out properly yet,” I said awkwardly. “I'd rather wait until it's all done before I show you.”

She gave me a watchful, too-long look. “Make sure it's on my desk by nine-thirty.”

“Right!” But the good spirits engendered by being let off the hook for the evening had all leached away. As she hammered her heels back to her office I looked appraisingly at the computer I'd just switched off. Should I stay and do a couple of hours on it then and there? But I couldn't. I was all out. Of enthusiasm, of work ethic, of whatever. Instead I'd come in very early tomorrow and do it then.

I hadn't eaten much all day. At lunchtime, instead of stopping work, I'd foraged in my desk drawer for a half-eaten Mars bar that I'd vaguely remembered abandoning some days earlier. To my delight I found it. I brushed off the worst of the fluff and paper clips and, I must say, it was delicious.

So as I drove home I was hungry and I knew there would be nothing in the house. Food was a big problem for Garv 10 / MARIAN KEYES

and me. We subsisted, like most people we knew, on microwaved stuff, takeout, and meals out. Now and again—at least, before things had gone weird on us—when we'd cleared our backlog of ordinary worries, we'd spend a bit of time worrying that we weren't getting enough vitamins. So we'd vow to embrace a new, healthier way and buy a jar of multivitamins, which we'd take for a day or so, then forget about. Or else we'd go on a mad splurge in the supermarket, pulling our arms out of their scurvied sockets lugging home heads of broccoli, suspiciously orange carrots, and enough apples to feed a family of eight for a week.

“Our health is our wealth,” we'd say, as pleased as punch, because it seemed that
buying
raw foodstuffs was an effective thing to do in itself. It was only when it became clear that the food had to be eaten that the trouble would begin.

Immediately, events always set about conspiring to thwart our cooking plans: we'd have to work late or go out for someone's birthday. The ensuing week was usually spent in edgy awareness of all the fresh fruits and vegetables clamoring for our attention.

We could hardly bear to go into the kitchen. Visions of cauliflower and grapes constantly hovered in the corner of our consciousness, so that we were never truly at peace. Slowly, day by day, as the food went bad, we'd furtively throw it out, never acknowledging to each other what we were doing. And only when the final kiwi had been bounced off the inside of the trash can did the black shadow lift and we could relax again.

Give me a frozen pizza anytime, far less stressful.

Which is precisely what I bought for that evening's meal. I ran into the grocery store and flung a couple of pizzas and some breakfast cereals into a basket.

And then fate intervened.

I can go without chocolate for weeks at a time. Okay, days. But once I have a bit I want more, and the fluff-covered lunchtime Mars bar had roused the hungry beast. So

ANGELS / 11

when I saw the boxes of handmade truffles in a chilled compartment, I decided in a mad splurge of go-on-you-devil justification to buy myself one.

Who knows what would have happened if I hadn't? Did something as benign as a box of chocolates alter the entire course of my life?

Garv was already home and we greeted each other a little warily.

We hadn't expected that this evening would be just the two of us; we'd been kind of depending on Liam and Elaine to dilute the funny atmosphere between us.

“You just missed Donna,” he said. “She'll call you at work tomorrow.”

“So what's the latest?” Donna had a messy, high-concept love life and, as one of her best friends, I felt it was my duty to provide advice. But she often consulted Garv to get what she called “the male perspective,” and he was so helpful that she'd rechristened him Dr. Love.

“Robbie wants her to stop shaving under her arms. Says he thinks it's sexy, but she's afraid she'll look like a gorilla.”

“So what did you advise?”

“That there's nothing wrong with women having hair—”

“Right on, sister.”

“—but that if she really doesn't want it, she should say that she'll stop shaving under her arms if he'll start wearing girls' panties.

What's good for the goose and all that.”

“You're a genius, you really are.”

“Thanks.”

Garv pulled off his tie, flung it over the back of a chair, then raked his fingers through his hair, shaking away the vestiges of his work persona. For the office his hair was Ivy League neat: sleeked back off his face and shorn close at the neck, but off duty, it flopped down over his forehead.

There are some men who are so good-looking that meeting them is like being hit on the head with a mallet. Garv isn't one of them; he's more the sort of man you could see 12 / MARIAN KEYES

day in, day out, for twenty years, then just wake up one morning and think, “God, he's nice, how come I never noticed him before now?”

His most obvious attraction was his height. But I was tall too, so I'd never gone around saying, “Ooh, look at how he towers over me!” All the same, I was able to wear heels with him, which I appreciated—my sister Claire had been married to a man who was the same height as she was so she had to wear flats in order that he not feel inadequate. And she really
loves
shoes.

But then Claire's husband had an affair and left her, so everything works out for the best in the end, I suppose.

“How was work?” Garv asked.

“Mostly awful. How was yours?”

“Bad for most of the day. I had a nice ten minutes between four-fifteen and four twenty-five when I stood on the fire escape and pretended I still smoked.”

Garv works as an actuary, which makes him a cheap target for accusations of being boring—and on first meeting him you might confuse his quietness with dullness. But in my opinion it's a mistake to equate number crunching with being boring; one of the most boring men I ever met was this idiot novelist boyfriend of Donna's.

We went out for dinner one night and he BORED us into the ground. Loudly monologuing about other writers and what overpaid, meretricious bastards they were; then he began questioning me about how I'd felt about something or other, probing and delving with the intimacy of a gynecologist. “How did you feel?

Sad? Can you be more specific? Heartbroken? Now we're getting someplace.” Then he hurried to the men's room and I just
knew
that he was writing everything I'd said into a notebook, to use in his novel.

“You're not to be jealous about Liam's flat-screen telly,” I said to Garv, happy to pretend that his subdued mood was on account of his mate having more consumer durables than he did. “Did it attack him? It might have to be put down.”

ANGELS / 13

“Ah.” Garv shrugged the way he always does when he's bothered.

“I'm not bothered.”

(Though happy to discuss Donna's problems with her, you'll note his reluctance to talk about his own feelings, even when they're only about a telly.)

“But do you know how much it cost?” he blurted out.

Of course I knew. Every time I went into town with Garv we had to stop at the electronics department in Brown Thomas and stand before said telly, admiring it in all its twelve thousand pounds'

worth of glory. Though Garv was well paid, he didn't earn anything like Liam's telephone-number chunk. And between our high mortgage, the cost of running two cars, Garv's addiction to CDs, and my addiction to face creams and handbags, funds just didn't run to flat screens.

“Cheer up, it probably broke when it fell off the wall. And one day soon you'll be able to afford one of your own.”

“Do you think?”

“Sure I do. As soon as we finish furnishing the house.”

This seemed to do the trick. With a slight spring in his step, he helped unload the shopping. And that was when it happened.

He lifted out my box of go-on-you-devil truffles and exclaimed,

“Hey, look!” His eyes were asparkle. “Those chocolates again. Are they following us?”

I looked at him, looked at the box, then back at him. I hadn't a clue as to what he was talking about.

“You
know
,” he insisted skittishly. “The same ones we had when—”

He stopped abruptly. My brow furrowed with curiosity, I stared at him. He stared back at me and, quite suddenly, several things occurred at once. The playful light in his eyes exited, to be replaced with an expression of fear. Horror, even. And before the thoughts had even formed themselves into any order in my consciousness, I
knew
. He was talking about