Someone Like You (6 page)

‘Watch those souks and markets though,’ warned Anita, a distrustful traveller who believed that anywhere beyond the English Channel was off the beaten track. ‘They love big women in the East, you know.’

‘Oooh, goodie,’ growled Leonie, instinctively reverting to the Leonie Delaney: wild, sexy, earth goddess image she’d been projecting for years. If Anita guessed that the image was all fake and that most of Leonie’s hot dates were at home with the remote control and a carton of strawberry shortcake ice cream, she never said anything.

After a few more minutes’ chat where Leonie promised to enjoy herself, she hung up, privately thinking that if any white-slave trader wanted to whisk her away to a life of sexual servitude, he’d have to be bloody strong. At five eight and fifteen stone, she was hardly dancing harem girl material and was powerful enough to flatten the most ardent Egyptian bottom-pincher.

Anita was sweet to say it, she thought later, examining the effect of her saffron Indian skirt worn with her favourite black silk shirt and a coiled necklace of tiny amber beads. Black wasn’t really suitable for travelling to a hot country, she knew that, but she felt so much more comfortable wearing it. Nothing could hide her size, Leonie knew, but black camouflaged it.

Rich colours suited her and she loved to wear them: flowing tunics of opulent crimsons, voluminous capes in soft purple velvet and ankle-length skirts decorated with Indian mirrors and elaborate embroidery in vibrant shades.

Like an aristocratic fortune-teller or a showily elegant actress from thirties Broadway, Leonie’s style of dressing could never be ignored. But black was still her favourite.

Safe and familiar. As satisfied as she’d ever be with her reflection, she started on her face, applying the heavy pan stick make-up expertly.

If she hadn’t been a veterinary nurse, Leonie would have loved to have been a make-up artist. She hadn’t been blessed with a pretty face, but when she’d worked her magic with her pencils and her brushes and her eyes were hypnotically ringed with deep kohl, she felt she looked mysterious and exotic. Like the girl in those old Turkish Delight adverts who sat waiting in the dunes for her sheikh.

Certainly not too big, too old and too scared of a lonely, manless future.

Her mouth was a lovely cupid’s bow that would have looked fabulous on some petite size-eight model but seemed slightly incongruous on a tall solid woman. ‘A fine hoult of a woman,’ as one of the old men who brought his sheepdog into the vet’s used to call her admiringly.

Her face was rounded with cheekbones she adored because, no matter how fat she got, they stayed defiantly obvious, saving her face from descending into plumpness.

Her hair, naturally rat-coloured as she always said, was golden from home dyeing because she couldn’t really afford to have it done professionally any more.

But Leonie’s most beautiful features were her eyes.

Huge, naturally dark-lashed, they were the same stunning aquamarine as the Adriatic and looked too blue to be real.

‘Your eyes make you beautiful,’ her mother would say encouragingly when she was growing up. ‘You don’t need to speak, Leonie, your eyes do it for you.’

Her mother’s attitude had always been that you were whatever you wanted to be. Glamorous herself, Claire told her daughter that stunning looks came from the inside.

Unfortunately, Leonie had decided at the age of nineteen that her mother was wrong and that lovely eyes weren’t enough to make her the beautiful woman she longed to be, a Catherine Deneuve lookalike. This realization had come about when she went to college after years of being educated in the closeted female environment of the convent school. At University College Dublin, she discovered men for the first time. And also discovered that the ones she fancied in biology lectures were much more keen on her less intelligent but smaller classmates. Her long-distance paramours asked Leonie if she’d join in their Rag Week mixed tug-of-war team, and asked other girls to go to the Rag Ball with them.

Miserably, she concluded that she was nothing more than a plain, fat girl. Which was why she’d decided to reinvent herself. Leonie Murray, shy girl who was always at the back at school photographs, had become the splendidly eccentric Leonie, lover of unusual clothes, wacky jewellery and plenty of war paint applied as if she was ready for her close up, Mr De Mille. As she was physically larger than life, Leonie decided to become literally larger than life.

Vivacious, lively and great fun, she was invited to all the best parties but never asked to go outside for a snog on the terrace.

Her first and only true love, Ray, had seen beneath the layer of Max Factor panstick to see the deeply insecure woman she really was. But she and Ray just weren’t meant to be. Their marriage had been a mistake. She’d been grateful to be rescued from loneliness, and being grateful was no reason to get married, as she knew now. Neither was being pregnant. Sometimes she felt guilty because she’d married him for all the wrong reasons and then she’d ended it, after ten years of marriage.

They’d been opposites, she and Ray. He was a quiet arts student who’d never gone to wild parties and who spent every spare minute in the library. Leonie had been the grande dame of first-year science. While Ray was reading Rousseau, Leonie was reading the riot act to the impertinent agricultural student who’d teased her about her heavy make-up. (She’d cried over that later but, at the time, she’d been magnificent.)

They met at a screening of Annie Hall and ended up ; spending the evening together laughing at Woody Allen’s humour. In the later years of their marriage, Leonie realized , that a sense of humour and a love of Woody Allen movies was one of the few things they’d actually shared. Otherwise, they were poles apart. Ray liked non-fiction, political discussions and avoiding parties. Leonie loved going out, disco dancing, and reading potboilers with a glass of wine and a Cadbury’s Flake in her hand. It wouldn’t have lasted but for advance warning that baby Danny was coming in seven months. They got married quickly and were blissfully happy until the honeymoon wore off and they discovered just how unsuited they really were.

It was a testimony to something, Leonie always thought, that they went through another ten years of being civilized and kind to each other, even though there were more sparks in the fridge than there were in their relationship. She’d lived with the knowledge for a long time, enduring it and the barrenness that was her marriage for the sake of Danny, Melanie and Abigail. But finally, something had snapped in Leonie and she knew she had to get out. She felt suffocated, as if she was slowly dying and wasting her life at the same time. There had to be more, she knew it.

She didn’t know how she found the courage to sit Ray down and ask him what he thought about them splitting up. ‘I love you, Ray, but we’re both trapped,’ she’d said, given Dutch courage by two hot ports. ‘We’re like brother and sister, not husband and wife. One day, you’ll meet someone or I’ll meet someone and then this will turn into a nuclear war of retribution, you fighting me and vice versa.

We’ll hate each other and we’ll destroy the kids. Do you want that? Shouldn’t we both be honest about this instead of kidding each other?’

It had been a tough time. Ray had insisted that he was happy, that their way of muddling along suited him. ‘I’m not a romantic like you, Leonie, I don’t expect great love or anything,’ he’d said sorrowfully. ‘We’re happy enough, aren’t we?’

Once the doubts were out in the open, it was as if the wound couldn’t heal. Gradually, Ray and Leonie drifted apart until, finally, he had said she was right, it was a half-marriage. He’d shocked her by how quickly he found another life, but she was too busy trying to explain things to three uncomprehending children to think about it. Away from her, he’d blossomed. He had scores of friends, went on interesting holidays and changed jobs. He went on dates, bought trendy clothes and introduced the kids to his girlfriends. Leonie had worked hard, looked after the kids and hoped that Mr Right knew he could safely step into her world now that she was a single woman again. So far, zilch.

As she told Penny sometimes: ‘I should have stayed married and had affairs. That was the right way to do it! True love and romance with a safety net. Trust me to get it wrong trying to do it right.’

She and Ray were still the best of friends and he was a good father.

Now the only people who saw Leonie as she really was were her three children.

With them, she only wore two coats of mascara and a bit of lipstick and they were allowed to see her in her dressing gown. God, she missed them.

Determined not to blub over the kids again, Leonie thought of how she’d always wanted to visit magical Egypt.

Fear of flying was no reason to cry off. For a start, she couldn’t afford to waste the money the holiday had cost her and, secondly, when did Leonie Delaney balk at anything?

She got out her eyeliner brush and fiercely painted on a thick line of dusky kohl that’d have made Cleopatra proud.

How could you jump-start your life if you quailed at the very first fence - a holiday on your own?

Four hours later, Leonie stood in the queue at the airport clutching her guide book to her chest and wishing the plane journey was over. Ever since she’d seen that disaster movie about the guys in the Peruvian mountains who’d had to resort to cannibalism to survive after a plane crash, she’d hated flying. Loathed it.

‘I’ll give you some ketamine for the trip,’ joked Angie the previous day, referring to the heavy-duty animal tranquillizer.

‘I’d

almost take it,’ Leonie had replied, not joking. She’d bought a bottle of herbal relaxant tablets, her travel sickness wrist-bands and some aromatherapy oil to rub on her temples, but she still felt more stressed than Mrs Reilly’s hyperactive cat when it was getting its claws clipped. A lovely, sweet animal in the home - or so Mrs Reilly regularly assured them immediately after Sootie had mauled somebody - the five-year-old tabby was labelled ‘dangerous’

in the surgery. Heavy gloves and sedation were required to calm Sootie before even the simplest job. Leonie wished that cabin crew sedated their patients.

She pushed her trolley further along the queue and looked at the other passengers taking Flight to Luxor. Nobody else appeared to be sweating with fear.

Especially not the very slim woman at the front of the queue who had the nervous expression of a purebred Saluki hound. Long, silky, light brown hair that fell over her big saucer-like eyes added to the effect. In an unflattering cream knit outfit, she looked terribly thin and unhappy. She must have been about thirty, Leonie guessed, but she carried herself with the unease of a teenager going on a hated family holiday when she longed to be at home.

An older woman, obviously her mother, stood beside her talking animatedly. The older woman was wearing a very old-fashioned floral dress, the sort of thing Leonie’s rather Bohemian mother would have refused to wear years ago because she might have to wear gloves or a pillbox hat with it. A giant of a man with a beard appeared beside them and started arguing with the girl behind the airline counter, his booming voice easily audible along the length of the queue as he roared.

Td make a complaint to you, young lady, but I don’t see the point,’ he thundered at the airline girl. ‘I’ve made my feelings more than plain to the travel people. You mark my words, they won’t be taking advantage of me.’

The Saluki Woman looked away, eyes wide with embarrassment, and caught sight of Leonie gazing at her.

Abashed, Leonie looked down at her trolley. She loved people-watching but hated being caught. Figuring out what .

they did and what sort of people they were from peering into their trolleys in the supermarket was her favourite hobby, and she couldn’t sit on the train into Dublin for longer than five minutes without speculating on the relationship between the passengers sitting opposite her.

Were they married, going out, about to break up? Did the woman with a trolley full of Haagen-Dazs chocolate chip but a figure like Kate Moss actually eat any of the ice cream or did she have a fat portrait of herself in the attic?

Up ahead, the woman at the desk said ‘Next’ with a relieved voice. When the difficult trio finally walked back down the queue after checking in, Leonie kept her eyes averted but risked a surreptitious glance at the younger woman.

As she walked past, carefully stowing her travel documents into a sleek little handbag that wouldn’t have held a quarter of Leonie’s cosmetic junk, Leonie noticed that the Saluki Woman had pink varnished nails which had been bitten down to the stubs. She looked resolutely ahead, as if she knew the entire queue had heard the argument and was terrified of making eye contact with anyone. Definitely not keen on holidaying with the parents, Leonie decided.

The queue shuffled forward and, with nobody interesting to gaze at, Leonie toyed with the idea of skipping off and driving home. Nobody would have to know: well, her mother would, because that would be her first port of call, to take her beloved Penny and the animals home. But nobody else had to know.

Meaning Anita. Safely on the way to West Cork, Anita wouldn’t be in Wicklow for another three weeks and would remain oblivious that her flamboyant, outwardly dauntless, divorced forty-two-year-old friend had cried off from her first single holiday ever because of fear of flying.

‘I’m going to the loo. I won’t be long,’ said a soft female voice behind her.

‘I’ll miss you,’ answered a male voice.

‘Oh,’ sighed the woman. ‘I love you.’

‘Love you too,’ answered the man.

Newlyweds, Leonie realized wistfully.

She pretended to look around her in boredom and got a glimpse of a young couple kissing gently before the woman, wearing a virginal pale pink short cotton dress that wasn’t exactly suitable for travelling in, hurried off in the direction of the toilets, looking back at her husband all the time, giving him sweet little waves and smiling with sheer joy.

He smiled back at her, one hand holding two suitcases on which some joker had written ‘Mr & Mrs Smith’ in sprawling white Tipp-Ex letters.