Angels (44 page)

I knocked on the glass of the front door and a slender beardy type tiptoed over and held a finger to his lips. “It's the story of Famous Seamus. How he won the love of the doctor's daughter.”

Emily, Helen, Anna, and I exchanged baffled looks, followed him in, and took our place on the floor. Right away, I was worried.

Mum's accent was more Irish than I'd ever heard it before and the

“Musha” and “Wisha” hit rate persentence was alarmingly high.

“…Wisha, me prime boy Seamus could do it all. Reversing tractors, making reeks, and as for the dancing! Musha, he was the tidiest dancer you ever saw, he could dance on a plate…”

I was mortified, she was making such a show of herself. But a glance at the assembled faces gave me pause for thought: they were spellbound. Every person there was angled toward her as though she was a magnet and they were iron filings. You could have heard a pin drop.

“He could jive, he could line-dance, he could do an eighthand reel. But he had brains too, musha, brains to burn! Great he was at the book learning…”

“Book learning?” Emily whispered. “What is she
doing
?”

“Sshhh,” a poster girl for tie-dyeing hissed fiercely at her.

“…he'd the heart of every woman in Ireland broke. Every mother in the townland had her eye on him.” A professionally timed beat.

“And not just for their daughters!”

Much laughter ensued and I took advantage of the disturbance to make wind-it-up gestures at her. She saw and acknowledged.

Mind you, she looked disappointed.

354 / MARIAN KEYES

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she cut across the laughter. “Ladies and gentlemen. As you can see, my daughters have arrived and want to take me away to the Viper Room.”

Instantly, several heads snapped around and glowered.

“So reluctantly I have to take my leave of ye.”

“‘Ye’?” Helen questioned. “‘
Ye
’?”

“Couldn'tja wait five minutes?” A large ponytailed man turned to us and asked aggressively. “We wanna hear the end of the story.”

“Yeah,” someone else called, “
let
Johnny Depp wait.”

How was it we were getting the blame? “Fine,” I said. “Makes no difference to us.”

“Wisha,” Mum acted coy. “I'd no idea ye were enjoying it so much. Sure, if ye insist…”

“WE INSIST!” the room erupted; then one of her front-row acolytes touched her gently and said, “Carry on, Mammy Walsh.”

Mammy Walsh carried on for quite some time, and by the time they finally let her go, she was floating on air and so was Dad.

Unfortunately, things got a little ugly out on the street when she discovered that she wasn't really going to the Viper Room, that it had only been a ruse—agreed upon by herself, we had to remind her—to get her out.

“I want to go to the Viper Room.” She sounded like a spoiled child.

“You can't, you're too old!” Helen said.

“You said it was oldies night.”

“It was a joke. And we're tired, our jet lag has caught up with us, we're going home to bed.”

Mum turned an “Et tu, Brute?” look on Emily and me. “I've a screenplay to write,” Emily said nervously. “I need my zeds.”

“And I'm helping her. 'Night all, see you tomorrow.”

Emily and I hurried into the house and closed the door behind us, but from the street we could still hear her plaintively insisting,

“But I'm on holiday. You lot are no fun.”

THE HOLIDAY THAT
was supposed to do Garv and me the world of good did the exact opposite. We returned frayed and shrouded in a dreadful suspicion that everything we did together would go wrong, that we were traveling on a non-stop, one-way ticket to Disasterville and, as in a rabbit trap, the more we struggled to extricate ourselves, the more trapped we'd become.

The atmosphere remained strained on our return and once or twice I caught Garv looking my way, blame in his eyes. But about ten days after we got back, we had an appointment with Dr. Collins, my gynecologist, where we tried once again to find a reason why I'd miscarried twice. It was in that room that the final prop was removed for Garv and me. I can pinpoint, almost to the second, the exact moment that my marriage keeled over and died.

However, often when fatal things are happening, you don't know at the time that they're fatal. You get an inkling that they're Not Good, that they Haven't Helped, but only the passage of time will reveal just how bad they are.

I blame routines. Routines mask disaster. You think if you're getting up in the morning, putting on clean clothes, going to work, eating from time to time, and watching some telly that everything's under control. And we were doing all that, but dragging the weight of our moribund relationship with us.

356 / MARIAN KEYES

After the first miscarriage, we'd both been eager to try again immediately. We'd had a lot of hope that a new pregnancy would erase our sadness. This time was different. I think I was afraid of getting pregnant again, in case I miscarried once more. But nevertheless I consulted my temperature thing daily, and Garv and I dutifully had sex if the signs were auspicious. Until one day something that had never before happened, happened. We were in bed, and Garv was about to enter me when I noticed that he was having trouble. His erection had gone a bit bendy and flippy.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“It's just a bit…” he said, trying again to hit the target.

But he hadn't a hope, and before my eyes it got softer, softer, softer, shrinking in seconds from a hard baton to a shy marshmallow.

“Sorry,” he said, rolling away from me and staring at nothing.

“It must be the drink.”

“You only had two pints. It's me, you don't fancy me anymore.”

“It's not you, of course I fancy you.”

He rolled back to me and we lay wrapped around each other, rigid in our separate miseries.

The next time we tried, it happened again, and Garv was wretched. I knew, from
Cosmopolitan
and sessions with my girlfriends, that this was the worst thing that could happen to a man, that he felt his very manhood was failing him. But I didn't have what it took to provide comfort. I was wound too tightly around myself, sore that he'd rejected me and angry with his uselessness—how could we ever have a baby with this business?

We made one more disastrous attempt before reaching a silent, mutual decision not to chance it again. From then on, we barely touched each other.

On Sunday night we were watching a video—I think it was
Men
in Black
—one about the world being about to end unless someone does something heroic very quickly. It was ANGELS / 357

near the end of the film, time was running out, urgent music was playing, it was all very tense…And suddenly Garv says, “Who cares.”

“Sorry?”

“Who cares. Let the world end. We'd all be better off.”

It was so unlike him that I took a good look to see if he was joking. But of course he wasn't. I watched this person slumped on the sofa, his hair flopping over his dark, mutinous face, and I wondered who he was.

The following morning I'd gotten up, had my shower, had my coffee, and gotten dressed and he was still in bed. “Get up, you'll be late,” I said.

“I'm not getting up. I'm staying in bed.”

He'd never done that before. “Why?”

He didn't reply and again I asked, “Why?”

“For tax reasons,” he mumbled, turning his face to the wall.

For a short time I stood looking at the inert mound of him under the duvet; then I left the room and went to work. He wouldn't talk to me and I was barely even frustrated. Upsets no longer sent me plummeting with despair, they simply settled calmly on top of the others. Probably because there was no place left for me to plummet to; I was as low as it got.

Apart from the occasional day of skipping work—but never together—our routines kept us running like rats in a wheel. We thought we were moving forward, but all that was happening was that we were marking time, getting nowhere. It was around then that I started drinking my contact lenses.

Click, click, click
, the days passed. We paid our mortgage, we marveled at how expensive our phone bill was, we discussed Donna's love life, all familiar stuff, the lifeblood of normality. We went to work, had the occasional night out with friends where the pretense was maintained, then went to bed without touching and got a few hours sleep before waking at four A.M. to worry. And yes, I did wonder when things were going to get better. I was still convinced that this horrible patch was temporary. Until the night, shortly before

358 / MARIAN KEYES

it all went really wrong, when I was afflicted with sudden X-ray vision. I could see straight through the padding of the daily routine, the private language and the shared past, right into the heart of me and Garv, into all that had happened. Everything was stripped away and I had a horrible, too-clear thought:
We're in big trouble
here
.

Somehow three months had passed since the holiday in St. Lucia.

The day we were supposed to be going out with Liam and Elaine dawned no differently from any of the others. No one could have predicted that today was the day that the whole rickety structure would come crashing down. Then, inexorably, the series of events kicked off—the flat-screen telly falling on Liam's toe, the phone call where I'd said I'd pick up some food, the box of truffles in the chilled compartment—ending with the awful tableau of Garv lifting them out of the shopping bag and exclaiming, “Hey, look! Those chocolates again. Are they following us?”

Then I was looking at him, at the box, then back at him. Baffled.

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

And then it all went see-through and I
knew
. He was talking about someone else, another woman.

I felt as if I was falling, that I would go on falling forever. Abruptly I made myself stop. The gig was up, the end had come, and I just couldn't do it. I couldn't bear to watch the downward spiral of my marriage begin to catch other people and spin them into the vortex too.

ON FRIDAY DAD
went to the chiropractor and Mum, Helen, and Anna went to Rodeo Drive. Mum had insisted on going even though we'd told her it was very expensive. But she'd enjoy it or at the very least she'd enjoy tut-tutting about the outrageously high prices when she returned.

I couldn't go with them because, as Emily put it, I had to help her hammer the final few nails into the coffin of her rewritten script.

Larry Savage wanted it by lunchtime and it was all hands on deck.

We worked though the morning, reading aloud, looking for inconsistencies and checking for continuity. Then at midday—“High Noon,” Emily kept calling it—we printed it out, the courier came, and Emily kissed the bundle of pages good-bye: “Good luck, you poor bastard.”

Right away, an exhausted Emily went to bed. With Lou. I found myself at an unexpectedly loose end. It was too hot to sunbathe, there was nothing on telly, and I was afraid to go shopping in case I bought stuff.

My thoughts turned to that night's dinner. I was pretty sure Shay wouldn't show; you'd have to have seen his face when Dad had strong-armed him with his invitation. Not eager—he'd just said yes so he wouldn't give offense and it would come as no surprise to get a message saying he'd been unavoidably detained at a meeting or something.

But what if he did come? Then what?

360 / MARIAN KEYES

In no time at all, I'd decided to get my hair blow-dried. My only real option was Reza.

I rang for an appointment, and when I showed up at the salon, it was no surprise that Reza wasn't friendly—but she wasn't as brusque as she'd been the other time, either. In fact, she seemed a little subdued. A few times while she was lathering my hair she exhaled wearily onto my scalp, then as she started tugging the head off me with the blow-drying brush, she gave a big, heavy, despair-sodden sigh.

Seconds later came another huge sigh, gathered up from her toes and released like a hurricane all over me. Then another. Eventually I had to ask, “Are you okay?”

“No,” she said.

“Er, what's wrong?”

Another sigh was on the way. I could feel it, being collected, climbing its way through her body, expanding her chest, then being exhaled. It took so long I thought she wasn't going to answer me.

Then she found words. “My husband is cheeedink me.”

God, was I sorry I'd ever risen to the bait. “Cheedink you? Out of money?” I asked hopefully.

“No!”

Oh dear, I didn't think so, and I simply couldn't bear to discuss unfaithful husbands.

“He has found another love.”

To my horror, a tear zoomed down her cheek, then another and another.

“I'm very sorry to hear that.”

“But still he sleeps in my house and eats my food and rings this
whore
on my phone bill!”

“That's really terrible.”

“Yes, my sorrow is great. But I am strong!”

“Good for you.”

Then she seemed to notice my hair for the first time in ages.

“Your bangs are too long,” she said mournfully.

“Ah, no, they're fine!”

But it was too late. She was reaching for the scissors, ANGELS / 361

then she was cutting, and all the while tears filled her eyes, blinding her vision.
Blinding her vision
.

It only took two or three seconds for the terrible damage to be done. One second I had normal hair, the next my bangs were a pure diagonal, as if I was a New Romantic. At their shortest point, they were less than an inch long. Appalled, I gazed into the mirror.

Reza might as well have gone whole hog and given me a Mohican.

And what could I say? I could hardly berate her, a woman in her condition. (Not that I would anyway. Don't we all know that it's harder to be honest with hairdressers than it is to get a camel through the eye of a storm, or whatever it is?) Feeling sick, I paid up, then, my hand over my forehead, I hurried toward home. But as I passed the goatee boys' house, Ethan opened a window and yelled, “Hey, Maggie, your bangs look kinda weird.”