Some Girls Do (2 page)
Claire rolled her eyes. ‘And every time someone comes in trying to find a book they can’t remember the title of, you always sell them something.’
‘You say that like it’s a bad thing. I’m giving them what they want – that’s good service.’
‘You’re a charlatan.’
‘You’ll miss me when I’m gone.’
It was still a few months away, but she
would
miss Yvonne when she left, Claire thought, as they giggled their way through a quiet morning in the shop. Yvonne was only working part-time at Bookends while she was at college, and would leave at the end of the summer, when she was taking a year out to go travelling. Tom, the owner of the shop, would miss her too, much to his own bemusement. Yvonne had never ceased to surprise him since the day she’d turned up for work, looking like she’d got lost on her way to a
Vogue
fashion shoot. She’d been a vision in cashmere and silk, and the bag clutched under her shoulder would have cost most of Claire’s monthly salary. With her smooth blonde hair and flawless skin, she’d looked like she lived on Evian water and
alpine air. Claire and Tom had watched with wary scepticism as she’d taken up her position behind the cash desk, clapped her hands and said, with kindergarten-teacher enthusiasm, ‘Right. Let’s sell books.’ But then she had proceeded to do just that, with breathtaking capability.
Claire had never met an actual trust-fund baby before, but Yvonne was the real deal. Her father, a multimillionaire who had made his fortune in plastics manufacturing, gave her everything his money could buy – from the pony she’d got when she was ten to the car she’d picked out for her upcoming twenty-first birthday. At first Claire couldn’t understand why she was working at all. She certainly didn’t need to pay her way through college, and her meagre salary wouldn’t cover so much as the tips of her Hobbs shoes or the taxis she regularly got to work when she was running late – which was most days. But she soon came to realise that what Yvonne craved most was her father’s attention, and this job was one way of making him sit up and take notice. Yvonne had father issues up the wazoo.
But she was unfailingly good-natured, a cheerful, willing worker and a good laugh, and Claire had grown very fond of her.
‘You’re still coming on Friday, right?’ Yvonne asked.
‘Oh, yes. Definitely.’ Claire made an effort to sound excited about the party. One of Yvonne’s friends was opening a new upmarket bar, and Yvonne had asked her to the launch. Claire wasn’t really a party person and she wouldn’t know anyone else there. She wished she had the excuse of needing to keep her mother company, which was her usual fall-back. Yvonne was constantly inviting Claire out, but Claire usually had to turn her down. This Friday, for once, there was nothing stopping her.
‘Yay!’ Yvonne clapped her hands. ‘It’s great that your mum’s in hospital and you can go out and have a bit of fun.’
‘Yeah, brilliant.’
Yvonne gasped, clapping a hand over her mouth. ‘Oh, God! Sorry. I didn’t mean it’s great that your mum’s in hospital—’
‘It’s okay,’ Claire said with a reassuring grin. ‘I know what
you meant. And it is nice to be able to go out on a Friday night for a change – even if I do feel a bit guilty that I’m enjoying myself because Mum’s in hospital.’ Her mother was undergoing hip-replacement surgery.
‘Oh, you shouldn’t feel guilty. That’s not fair. You should be able to go out at the weekend anyway. Why should you always be the one staying home with her?’
‘Well, I live with her …’
‘Even so, you shouldn’t have to give up your social life completely. What about your brothers? Why don’t they take a turn sometimes and let you go out?’
‘Well, they have kids, so I suppose it’s difficult,’ she said, without conviction, parroting the excuses her brothers and their wives would make for themselves. It was okay for her to criticise them, but if anyone outside the family did, she automatically leapt to their defence. But neither of her brothers was much help, and Claire sometimes felt she might as well have been an only child. Neil and Ronan were both considerably older than her so she had often felt like one growing up. There were only a couple of years between her brothers, but Claire was what their mother, Espie, termed ‘the shakings of the bag’, arriving ten years after Neil, the eldest, when Espie was forty and her marriage to their feckless father was stuttering to its end.
‘All the more reason,’ Yvonne said. ‘Your need is greater. You’re single – you should be out there having fun and meeting people. They’re married. They have kids. Their lives are already over. They’ll only be sitting at home watching TV or talking about gardening and … kitchen islands and stuff,’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘They can do that just as easily at your mum’s house and give you a break.’
It was nothing Claire hadn’t frequently thought, but she didn’t want to dwell on it now. ‘Anyway, I doubt I’ll be meeting anyone on Friday. They’ll all be too young for me.’
‘Oh, come on, you’re not that much older than me.’
Though there were only seven years between them, Claire felt
positively ancient next to Yvonne. That was the effect living with a sixty-eight-year-old woman had on her.
‘Anyway, there’ll be lots of people there. They won’t all be my age. Luca’s coming,’ Yvonne said. ‘He’s around your age.’ Her eyes lit up. ‘He might do for you,’ she said thoughtfully.
‘Please! I don’t want your sloppy seconds.’
‘Oh, he’s not! We went out a couple of times, but I never got jiggy with him in the end.’
‘But I thought you told me he had a huge willy?’
‘Oh, I’ve never actually seen it, but you can tell he’s got a huge one the minute he walks into a room.’
‘Why? Does he pull it after him on a trolley?’
Yvonne laughed. ‘No. But no one has that much swagger unless it’s backed up by a very large package.’
‘So, too much man for you, was he?’
‘I think he was. He kind of scares me a bit.’
‘But you think he’d be all right for me?’
‘Oh, he’s not creepy or anything,’ Yvonne said hastily. ‘But he can be a bit … dark. I suppose he has the artistic temperament. He can be a proper moody bastard.’
‘Sounds charming!’
‘And he’s such a player. I just like them a bit more on the tame side.’
‘That’s true.’
Yvonne usually went for rather fey, borderline-effeminate pretty boys, and would spend hours fretting about which side of the metrosexual/gay border they occupied. She was always asking Claire’s opinion about whether a straight man would have facials, watch
Strictly Come Dancing
or own a Kylie Minogue CD.
‘I think you were right – I only went out with him to piss off Dad.’
‘I never said that!’
‘But it’s what you were thinking.’
Claire smiled guiltily. She had indeed suspected that Yvonne was only interested in Luca for his shock value. She could guess
Yvonne’s uptight, stuck-up father would consider him wildly unsuitable boyfriend material for his precious only daughter. An unemployed, permanently broke artist, he apparently lived in squalor in a notoriously rough area of the inner city.
‘And you were right,’ Yvonne said. ‘See? You’re so wise. That’s the advantage of age.’
‘Hey, a minute ago you were saying I wasn’t much older than you.’
‘Well, you’re older in wisdom.’
‘Anyway, if you couldn’t handle Luca, what makes you think I could?’ Claire might have been older in years – and even in wisdom – but she knew that Yvonne had far more experience than her when it came to men.
‘I have complete faith in you,’ Yvonne said airily.
‘Seriously, Yvonne, you know I’m out of practice. Don’t you think I should start off with someone a bit easier?’
Claire’s social life had taken a nosedive three years earlier when she’d moved back to Ireland to look after her mother, and somehow she’d never managed to kick-start it again. She still couldn’t understand how she had let herself get into such a rut, but time had gone by so quickly. Suddenly she’d realised she hadn’t been on a single date since she’d returned home. And the longer it went on, the harder it was to change anything. She felt like such a fuddy-duddy, compared to Yvonne, her life so circumscribed. When she had been Yvonne’s age, life had seemed full of possibilities. Studying in Edinburgh, she’d had a nice circle of friends, gone on dates … It all seemed like a lifetime ago now.
‘Luca might be just what you need,’ Yvonne said, her eyes bright. ‘Dive in at the deep end. I mean, you don’t have much time, do you? Your mother isn’t going to be laid up for ever.’
‘No, that’s true. All good things must come to an end,’ Claire said drily.
‘Oh, you know what I mean.’
‘Well, I’ll do my best.’
‘Still, maybe you’re right – from nought to Luca might be a bit too much. But there’ll be lots of cute guys to choose from. Don’t worry, you won’t go home empty-handed.’
It sounded more like a threat than a promise. Claire was dreading this party more by the minute. She was relieved when Tom emerged from the back room where he had been doing ordering and paperwork.
‘How’s your mother, Claire?’ he asked, as he joined them.
‘She’s fine. I called the hospital and she’s over the operation, back on the ward.’
‘Glad to hear it. She’ll be there for a few more days, I suppose?’
‘Yeah, they’re keeping her in for two or three days, and then she has four weeks in a convalescent home.’
‘Oh, that’s great. It’ll be a nice break for you,’ Tom said. ‘Why don’t you go early today? You can visit her and still get home at a decent hour.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Positive. Yvonne and I can cope with the hordes,’ he said, indicating the lone customer he had passed earlier, who was browsing the travel shelves. ‘Can’t we, Yvonne?’
‘Absolutely!’
‘Okay, thanks.’ Claire smiled gratefully at him.
‘Oh, look! He’s getting away!’ Yvonne wailed as the customer headed for the door.
‘He was looking for guides to Bolivia,’ Tom said. ‘We don’t have any.’
‘But we’ve got Chile!’ Yvonne said, already moving from behind the desk to chase after the man. ‘I hear that’s much nicer.’
‘She’s amazing, isn’t she?’ Tom said admiringly, as Yvonne accosted the man at the door and led him gently back towards the travel section. ‘Born to sell.’
‘No one goes home empty-handed …’
Claire breathed a contented sigh as she let herself into the house that evening having paid a visit to the hospital on the way home. Her mother was still groggy after the anaesthetic so she hadn’t stayed long, but now that she knew the operation had gone well, she could relax and enjoy the rare luxury of having the house to herself. She didn’t like to admit it to Yvonne or Tom – she felt guilty acknowledging it to herself – but it was nice to have the freedom to be spontaneous and to please herself, with no one else to answer to or worry about.
Her mother’s health had been so bad over the past year – hardly a month had gone by without some incident. Claire had come to dread getting a phone call at work to tell her that Espie had been rushed to hospital and as she turned the corner into their road each evening after work, she would find herself automatically checking for an ambulance outside their door. It was a relief to know that her mother would be surrounded by medical staff for the next few weeks and that, if anything happened, she was in the right place.
Claire had enjoyed living alone when she was at university, and it was nice to have the freedom and independence of her single life again, if only for a short while. Of course, things were different now. When she was a student, all her friends had been footloose, and there was always someone to ring up on the spur of the moment to go for a drink or see a movie. But she had left her university friends behind when she’d moved home, and she had lost touch with most of her old schoolmates. Though she had loved Edinburgh, she sometimes wished she had gone to university in Dublin so she would have had college friends living nearby. Lisa, her best friend since childhood, had moved
to Canada at the start of the year, and though they emailed and Skyped regularly, Claire missed having her around. Other friends were pairing up, so she saw them less and less, and over the past few years, her circle had shrunk to the point where it was almost non-existent.
Nowadays she did most of her socialising online. She chatted to people on Twitter and Facebook, most of whom she’d never met, and the closest thing she had to a sex life was writing her blog – Scenes of a Sexual Nature – in which she lived vicariously through the erotic adventures of her alter ego. It was a quiet, almost nun-like existence for a girl of her age, and from time to time she worried that she was becoming a freakish loner. Even her mother occasionally suggested that she should be out enjoying herself with people her own age, meeting men, falling in love and having adventures. But Claire had never been the type for adventures. She hated nightclubs and was content to spend quiet nights in reading, chatting to her online friends or watching television with her mother. Besides, her dismal social life gave her more time to devote to writing and blogging. Sometimes when she thought about the future, she feared that life had left her behind and she would never catch up. The idea scared her, but she tried not to dwell on it too much, and mostly she was happy with things as they were.
But it was very different from the life she had envisaged for herself – a life that had seemed to be rolling out in front of her just three years earlier. After studying English literature, followed by an MA in creative writing, she had been planning to move to London and get an entry-level job in publishing. She had been looking forward to finding work and a boyfriend, starting a career … and then she had got the call that changed everything. Her heart still leapt into her mouth whenever she remembered the night Ronan had rung to tell her their mother had been rushed to hospital with heart failure. Claire had dashed home, not knowing what she would find. Espie had pulled through, but tests revealed a heart condition that needed constant monitoring
and care. Despite her mother’s protests that she was fine living alone, Claire would never have felt easy about it and, besides, she wanted to be on hand in case her mother had another crisis.