Angels (6 page)

But I felt I'd no right to mind about the girl and that it didn't make any difference anyway. With or without her, the game was up.

I'd been back at my parents' about twenty-four hours when the reaction set in. As I listlessly watched telly, my temperature abruptly plummeted. Though the room was warm (far
too
warm), the skin on my arms had contracted like plastic wrap before heat and the hairs were standing to attention from goose-pimpled follicles. I blinked—only to discover that my eyes hurt. Then I noticed that my head was packed tight with cotton wool, my bones ached, and I was unable to find enough energy to even pick up the remote control. Muzzy and spaced, I watched
Animal Hospital
, wishing I could do something to make whatever this was stop. What was wrong with me?

“What's wrong with you?” Mum had come into the room. “Lord above! What are they doing to that poor Alsatian?”

“He's got hemorrhoids.” My tongue belonged to someone else, someone with a much bigger mouth. “And I think I've got the flu.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm cold and everything hurts.” Me, hardy Maggie, who never got sick.

38 / MARIAN KEYES

“I didn't know dogs could even
get
hemorrhoids.” She was still glued to the screen.

“Maybe he sat on a cold step. I think I've got the flu,” I repeated, slightly louder this time.

Finally I had her attention. “You don't look the best,” she agreed.

She looked concerned. Almost as concerned as she had been about the Alsatian.

She placed her hand on my forehead. “I wonder if you've got a temperature.”

“'Course I have,” I croaked, “I've got the flu.”

She located a thermometer and gave it several of those violent flicks that people always do before they take someone's temperature.

An energetic throw, as if they're about to fling the glass stick across the room, but change their mind at the last minute. But despite her adherence to protocol, my temperature was normal.

“Though it's hard to be sure,” she added, casting a jaundiced eye at the thermometer. “Thirty years we've had it and the thing has never worked.”

I went to bed at nine-thirty and didn't come around until two the following afternoon. I was lying in exactly the same position I'd been in before I went to sleep, as though I hadn't moved once in any of that time. Instead of feeling better, I actually felt worse, lethargic and hopeless. And I continued to feel wretched.

I'd never believed it was possible to become sick from sadness.

That it was a nonsense concept confined to melodramatic Victorian novels. But some time over the course of the following week, I understood that there was nothing wrong with me, nothing physical, in any case. My temperature was normal, and how come no one else had caught my flu?

Whatever was wrong with me, it was emotional. Mourning sickness. My body was fighting my separation from Garv as though it was a hostile organism.

I couldn't stop sleeping. Deep, druggy sleeps from which I never fully woke up. Once conscious, I could barely manage the smallest things. I knew I was supposed to be getting ANGELS / 39

on with things. Getting another job. Tidying up the loose ends of my old life. Sorting out my new one. But I felt as though I was walking underwater. Moving too slowly though an unwieldy world.

When I got beneath the shower, the water felt like a hail of sharp gravel being hurled at my tender skin. The house was too noisy—every time a door slammed, my heart pumped too hard.

When Dad dropped a saucepan with a clatter on the floor, I got such a fright my eyes filled with tears. I carried a permanent oppression, as though a dirty gray sky had been nailed in place two inches above my head.

I continued to perform poorly in the opinion polls. Mum was still vacillating between “Sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child” chilliness and “Would you just get over it and go home to your husband” cajolery. I wasn't getting the same degree of grief from Dad, but then again, I've always been his pet. What with my once having played team sports and going to the snooker championship with him, he's nearly managed to convince himself that I'm his son.

Outside of my immediate family, I spoke to no one. People were eager to speak to me, however. Nothing like a disaster to get those phone lines a-hopping. Close friends like Donna and Sinead rang, but I mumbled, “Tell her I'll call her back,” and never managed it.

Coffin chasers like Elaine also called. (Mum thought she sounded like “a lovely girl.”) Claire rang from London and begged me to come and stay with her. Rachel rang from New York and we had much the same conversation, but there wasn't a hope of my visiting either of them—walking from the telly to the kettle was about the only journey I could manage.

I didn't call Garv—and to the great disappointment and confusion of my parents, he didn't call me either. In a way it was a relief, but a relief that somehow managed to be an unpleasant one.

Anna was also in the house a lot—she was devastated about Shane. We hung out furtively because when Mum saw 40 / MARIAN KEYES

us together, her mouth would squinch like a cat's bottom and she'd enquire, “Is it a rest home for fallen women I'm running here?”

As best we could, we talked about our respective breakups. What had happened with her was that Shane had set up a computer business making on-line music, and from out of nowhere he had become ambitious. “He got his hair cut. At a hairdresser's. Then I knew it was all over.

“I suppose,” she sighed, “he wants to grow up and I don't. So what about you and Garv?”

“Oh, you know…” I couldn't tell her about truffle woman.

Whatever energy was required to pull those words out of my gut and into the open just wasn't there.

“Mostly I feel nothing,” I managed. “It's a horrible sort of nothing, but…you know…that can't be right. Shouldn't I be shrieking, crying?”

Shouldn't I be breaking into truffle woman's house and planting
grass in her carpets and shrimps in her curtain rods? Shouldn't I be
making plans to cut off the arms and legs of all Garv's clothes
?

“I haven't even rung Garv to say I miss him.” Even though a spasm of longing for him jackknifed me roughly once every waking hour. “My life is ruined and all I feel is nothing.” My future was a roped-off area—I managed occasional fleeting glimpses of the sadness, but they didn't stay. It was as if a door into a noisy room opened and immediately slammed shut again.

“You're depressed,” Anna said. “You're very depressed. Is it any surprise after all you've been through?”

But that didn't sit comfortably. “I'm not a depressive.” (I know because I did a quiz in
Cosmopolitan
.)

“You are now. And Garv probably is too.”

She'd said something interesting, maybe even important, but I couldn't hold the thought, I was too weary.

Unlike me, Anna couldn't sleep—at least not in her own bed. So she wandered the house at night, moving from bed to bed. She often got in beside me, but was usually gone ANGELS / 41

when I woke up, leaving the faint residue of a wraithlike creature who sighed a lot and smelled of Bacardi breezers. It was like being haunted by a benign ghost.

Occasionally she was still there when I woke up. One morning I came to, to find one of her feet resting on my ear and the other in my mouth; for reasons best known to herself, Anna had decided to get into bed upside down.

Another night I emerged from sleep feeling absurdly happy: warm, safe, cherished. Then, going into a hollow free fall, I realized what it was—Anna was snuggling into me, nuzzling and mewing,

“Oh, Shane.” Deep in sleep, her arm tight around me, I'd thought she was Garv.

Sometimes Anna and I could provide comfort for each other, especially when she developed a theory that our lives were so awful because our guardian angels had gone on sabbaticals, and that currently we were being minded by temps who took no pride in their work. “They do the bare minimum. We won't get our hands caught in a mincing machine, but that's all they'll do for us.”

“What's my real angel called?”

“Basil.”

“Basil?”

“Henry, then.”

“Henry?”

“How about Clive?”

“He's a boy angel?”

“Oh no, they're neutral.”

“What's he like?”

“He smells like cotton candy and he's pink.”

“Pink?”

“With green spots.”

“You're not taking this seriously.”

“Sorry. What's mine called?”

“Penelope.”

“Favorite food?”

“Carrots and parsnips mashed together.”

“Best bit about being a guardian angel?”

42 / MARIAN KEYES

“Helping people find the right dress and shoes for their Christmas party. What's Clive's best bit?”

“Finding lost earrings.”

And sometimes we couldn't provide comfort for each other.

One bad morning she got in beside me and we both lay on our backs, staring miserably at the ceiling. After sometime she said, “I think we're making each other worse.”

“I think we are,” I agreed.

“I'll go back to my own bed, okay?”

“Okay.”

Unlike me, Anna occasionally left the house—if only in response to a request from Shane. “He says he wants ‘to talk.’”

“And what's wrong with that?”

“He really means he wants to have sex. That's what's happened the last three times. It gets my hopes up, then leaves me feeling even worse.”

“Maybe you shouldn't sleep with him anymore,” I suggested.

“Maybe,” she said vaguely, not meaning a word of it.

“Maybe you shouldn't even meet him.”

But the next time he rang and said he wanted to see her, she agreed.

“Don't worry,” she promised me, “I'm not going to sleep with him.”

But as I went to bed that night she wasn't back. Mind you, it was barely nine-fifteen and she'd been gone only half an hour.

Some unknown time that night, I woke in darkness. I wondered what had disturbed me—and then I heard it, a noise I remembered well from my teenage years: a scraping and scratching at the front door. One of my sisters—Anna, in this case—was having trouble getting her key in the lock. It went on for so long that I was just about to get up and let her in when the door was finally pushed open; then I heard the reassuring crash as she bumped into and knocked over

ANGELS / 43

the hall table, followed, a few minutes later, by the disgusting smell of baked beans heating in a saucepan. Just like the old days, I thought dreamily as I sank back into sleep. It's yesterday once more…

Some time later I jumped awake again; the fire alarm was beeping in a fussy frenzy and Dad was hopping about the landing in a wild-eyed, pajamaed panic. “How do I turn this shagging thing off?”

Gray smoke was swirling around the hall, the beans and saucepan were burned to a crisp, and Anna was slumped on the kitchen table, deep in sweet slumber.

We put her to bed, but some time later she got in beside me, reeking so strongly of alcohol that if I'd been awake, I'd have passed out. As it was, her incendiary breath had the effect of smelling salts, and woke me up.

Later that same night the whole house was once again awakened—this time by an almighty thump; it sounded as if a ceiling had fallen in. Closer investigation revealed that it was nothing quite so exciting. All that had happened was that Anna had tried to get into bed beside Helen, and Helen, who objected to sleeping with “a one-woman brewery,” had pushed her out, onto the floor.

“But at least I didn't sleep with him,” Anna said the following morning as she inspected her bruises. “Okay, I drank myself into a coma and nearly burned the house down, but at least I didn't sleep with him.”

“It's progress,” I agreed.

At some stage during the second dreadful week, I needed
something
, but there were so few options open to me.

“Go for a walk,” Dad suggested. “Get some fresh air.”

I've never really understood the concept of Going for a Walk.

And not even at my sportiest did I get the appeal of Going for a Walk in suburbia. But I was bad enough off to give it a try.

“Take a coat,” he advised. “It might rain.”

“It's June.”

“It's Ireland.”

44 / MARIAN KEYES

“I haven't got a coat.” Well, I had, but it was in my house, Garv's house, you know the one I mean. I was afraid to go there in case he'd moved the girl in. Perhaps that sounds like a wild overreaction, but my instinct was warning me that anything was possible.

“Take mine.” Dad's anorak was red, nylon, awful, but I longed for affection and I couldn't resist letting him help me into it.

Off I went. Nothing too ambitious. I walked a couple of hundred yards to the park and sat on a wall, watching some teenagers do whatever teenagers do in parks: surreptitious smoking, trading inaccurate information on sex, whatever.

I felt horrible. The sky was mushroom gray and stagnant, even the parts that weren't directly over me. After a while, when I didn't feel any better, I decided I might as well go home again. It was bound to be time for some version of “Girlfrien', you ain't so all that.” No point in missing it.

I was traipsing back down the hill when someone flickered across my vision and vaguely alerted me. I looked properly. It was a man about fifty yards away, lifting things out of a car trunk. Oh my…God. Shay Delaney. Well, for a second I thought it was him, then it was clear that it wasn't. There was just something about the man that reminded me slightly of Shay and even that was enough to make me unsteady.

But as I continued, with a whoosh of dizziness, I saw that it
was
him. Different, but still the same. The change was that he looked older; this gave me some pleasure until it dawned on me that if he looked older, then so would I.

He was lifting stuff from the trunk of the car and stacking it at the gate of his mother's house. How could I not have instantly known it was him—he was outside his own house. Well, the house he'd lived in until he'd left to go away to college fifteen years ago.

Fifteen years
. How? I'm young now and I was grown up then, there isn't
room
for fifteen years. Dizziness again.