The Flower Arrangement (13 page)

*   *   *

I feel too unsettled to go to a film and I know that Ben will be at the flat until eight, visiting Pat, so I walk all the way to Irishtown, to Mia's house.

“Stay for dinner!” she says, and I follow her down the hall, into the kitchen. She's wearing a backless black dress and heels and making a complicated seafood dish from a recipe she found on the Internet.

“It's fuck-me food.” She winks, gouging the bone out of a cuttlefish with a bread knife. She starts to use the same knife to massacre some mange-tout and I wince and hope it's not going to be poison-me food too.

I haven't seen her since my lunch with Ben and she wants to know all about it.

“Yay!” she whoops when I get to the bit about the whole nine yards. “You're going to get married!”

“Not necessarily,” I say. “We haven't really—”

But she doesn't want to hear this. She grins and gives me a spontaneous hug. “Ben's going to be my brother-in-law! For a while there I thought we were going to lose him. Jesus! He hasn't even met Ronan yet. Hey!” She leans back and lifts my chin with a hand that smells of fish and Marc Jacobs Daisy. “What's wrong with you? This is what you wanted? Isn't it?”

What's wrong with me is that I keep thinking about the moment in the shop when I almost kissed Phil. I push it to the back of my mind and nod. “Of course it is.”

*   *   *

Ronan comes in looking exhausted. Mia jumps into his arms, and after he puts her down, she picks a few leaves out of his hair and they examine one another with delight. His hands are painted green. “You have green fingers!” she says.

“And you have fish fingers.” He kisses her fingertips.

“Health and safety!” I say, but they don't break their gaze for a long moment, and when they do, Mia blows her hair out of her eyes and grins at me. She reminds me of her little-girl self and every trace of jealousy I felt before dissolves.

The cuttlefish tastes like damp, chewy suede, but Ronan valiantly clears his plate.

“Here, I'll eat yours,” he whispers, when Mia is in the kitchen opening more wine. “It'll hurt her feelings if there are leftovers!” He swaps plates and posts a forkful of limp mange-tout that Mia has turned into mange pas.

I don't want to run into Ben, not until I have erased the moment with Phil in the flower shop from my mind, so I hang on at Mia's for as long as I can. I hang on until it's obvious that Mia and Ronan are about to tear one another's clothes off whether I leave or not.

When I get home, the flat is in darkness and Pat is fast asleep in his basket. I light a candle and run a bath. I pull my clothes off and get into the scalding water and I lie there trying to think about Ben, trying to imagine the whole nine yards.

But I can't. Instead I imagine what would have happened if Lara hadn't come back into the storeroom. I imagine the kiss that didn't happen. I imagine it in great detail. I imagine unzipping Phil's jacket and the crackle of static as I pull my T-shirt over my hair. I imagine lying down among the buckets of flowers with the cold tiled floor under my bare back and the heat of Phil's skin under my hands.

Then I imagine how Ben would feel if he knew what I was imagining and I make myself stop.

*   *   *

After the water has cooled, I get out and put on my dressing gown and go into the kitchen to make some chamomile tea and I realize that something is different. Something is wrong.

It's Pat. He's too quiet and too still. I turn on the light. His head is
lying at a strange angle, his tongue lolling out to the side from his half-open mouth.

I dash over and pull his head onto my lap. He doesn't open his eyes so I lift one eyelid gently with my finger and see a little crescent of bloodshot white. I put my ear close to his snout. He is breathing, but only just.

I run back into the bathroom to get my phone so I can call the emergency vet. I crouch by Pat's basket while I am put on hold. When I've given my name and address, I hang up. I'm about to call Ben when I feel something hard caught under my heel. It's a ball of half-chewed silver foil. There are still a few hard brown grains trapped in the folds—all that remains of Ben's stash.

“Did he eat any cigarettes?” the vet asks, when he comes. “Or was it just the hash?” He is not even trying to hide the fact that he thinks I am a lowlife.

“I'm not sure.” I have left half a dozen messages for Ben, but he hasn't called me back. “Is he going to be okay?”

“Well, if he'd eaten tobacco, he'd probably be dead by now. And if he is okay, it's no thanks to you.” I nod, my face burning. “If it's just hash, he'll probably sleep it off.”

Pat sleeps all through the night and into Monday morning. The phone starts ringing at eight and it keeps ringing every five minutes until nine. It's Ben finally calling me back, but by now I'm too angry to talk to him.

At eleven, the doorbell rings and I get ready to read Ben the riot act, but it's my mother standing on the steps. It's pathetic how grateful I am to see her.

When she comes in, Pat lifts his head and opens his eyes and gives her a hungover look, and I almost cheer.

“I was just passing, I'm on the way to the hairdresser for a blow-dry. I have a brunch.” Her pale blue eyes take in my bathrobe, my bare feet, my anxious face. “I called the office but they said you hadn't come in. Are you sick?”

“I've been up all night.” I wrap my arms around myself. “I had to get the vet for Pat.”

“Why?”

“He wasn't well.” Tears come into my eyes. “I thought it might be the end.”

Mum goes over and crouches down on the floor beside Pat's basket. She's wearing a green velvet jacket, and she hates getting dog hair on her clothes, but she takes hold of Pat's face. She has always tolerated Pat, but I don't think I've ever actually seen her touching him before. He's drooling slightly onto her sleeve, but she doesn't seem to care.

“Now listen to me!” she says to him sternly. “You're part of this family. You have to stick around!”

Pat gazes at her dreamily. Then he licks her hand.

“Did you see that?” She smiles up at me. “I think he likes me. I knew he'd come around in the end.”

And I wonder if my father has left a space in my mother's heart too. A space she's tried to fill with approval. Mine, Mia's, Ben's, Ronan's. Even Pat's.

“I'd better go.” She stands up.

“Who are you having brunch with?” I ask her at the door.

“Someone I met at bridge,” she says. And from the way she says “someone,” I know she means a man.

She never dated anyone while I was living with Ben. She didn't need to, and neither did Mia. I realize with a jolt that now that Ben has gone, both of them have moved on.

*   *   *

I call Ruth to tell her that I'm too sick to come into work and that Beth will have to art-direct the shoot. Then I switch off my phone and boil up some mince that was lurking at the back of the freezer.

Pat's bloodshot eyes widen as the smell fills the kitchen, and I'm so happy that he's alive that I sing all the songs I can think of, adding in dog-related lyrics.

I'm belting out a pretty awful version of “I'm going to fall from the stars, right into your paws” when the bell rings again.

I have been rehearsing what I will say to Ben, but when I look through the spyhole, he's not there. Instead I see a stem of wisteria held up in a big leather-gloved hand. I open the door warily.

“I heard you were sick,” Phil says, “so I decided to deliver this by hand.” He takes his helmet off and there is his mouth again. It's just as I remembered it.

“It was you!” I say slowly. “Not Ben! You've been leaving all those flowers on my desk.”

“Who's Ben?” Phil hands me the wisteria.

And somewhere in the dark power station of my heart, a light goes on, the kind you leave burning to stop a child being frightened of the dark, and I take a deep breath and open the door and let Phil in.

Forty-nine pairs of eyes are looking up at Mia. The one pair that is closed belongs to a guy who is snoozing in the front row. He has unkempt brown hair and an unruly beard and he's wearing a duffle coat with the toggles done up wrong. If Mia wasn't in a room full of artists, it might cross her mind that he is a homeless person who has wandered in off the street, but all the artists have a carefully disheveled look.

“You're here because you're broke,” she announces dramatically, looking around at their rabbit-in-the-headlights faces. “And I am here to fix you.”

She ignores the few groans at the pun. She has delivered this financial planning talk to dozens of self-employed groups, app designers and day-care managers, B and B owners and dog groomers. She could do it in her sleep, although, she thinks as the man in the front row lets out a small snore, this is the first time she has had to do it in someone else's.

She fires up her PowerPoint and runs through the basics of budgeting and credit control. The sleeping man snores softly when she is talking about double-entry bookkeeping until the woman beside him digs him in the ribs with her elbow. He blinks and rakes his beard vigorously with his fingers, then his head drops down onto the bulging plastic bag he is using as a pillow and he drifts off again.

During the coffee break, when Carlo, the seminar organizer, is shepherding Mia from group to group, one tanned hand planted
proprietorially in the small of her back, the man wakes up and wanders over to the refreshments table. She watches him from the other side of the room as he posts whole triangles of sandwich into his mouth. When she was very small, she convinced herself that her father hadn't abandoned them. That he was lost. Out there somewhere, cold and hungry, trying to find his way home. Sometimes, if she turned the pity around and around in her heart enough, it almost felt like love. Later it turned out that her father wasn't lost at all. That he had found his way home—just to a different home in a different country with, in time, a different family.

She excuses herself and goes to the ladies' to touch up her makeup. On her way back, she stops at the refreshment table to get a cup of coffee. Up close, the man in the duffle coat is younger than he looked from a distance, late twenties at the most. The beard is awful and his coat looks as if it has been dragged through a hedge backward. There are dried leaves stuck to both sleeves. But his teeth, sinking into yet another sandwich, are white and even and he smells strongly and pleasantly of Acqua di Parma cologne. He has a dramatic face. Long and thin and sallow-skinned, full of unexpected angles. A prominent chin. Hollow cheeks. Jutting brow bones that overhang his deep-set eyes. He's not handsome in a highly polished way, like Carlo, but he might scrub up well, Mia thinks.

“Do you have plans for all of these?” she asks drily, pointing at the last few sandwiches on the tray. “Or can I take one?”

“Help yourself!” He hands her a cardboard plate. “They're free. Part of this whole financial seminar thing. I didn't catch the first half. I was out cold.”

“Really?” Mia says. “The speaker must have been pretty boring.”

“I needed the sleep. I was working all night.”

Mia picks up a cucumber sandwich and takes a bite. “What do you do?”

“I'm a conceptual artist.”

“As opposed to a real one?”

“It's a tough job but someone has to do it. Conceptual art allows us to interrogate our ideas of what art is in the first place.” His face takes on a look of almost religious fervor as he warms to his subject. Somewhere between “execution is a perfunctory affair” and “the idea becomes the machine” Mia stops listening and watches his face instead. All his features become involved when he talks. His eyebrows, his forehead, even the tips of his ears, which appear and disappear through the tangle of his hair. He reminds her of the predator from a game she and Katy used to play when they were small: “What Time Is It, Mr. Wolf?”

“Well, thank you for the lecture.” She puts down her plate and her half-eaten sandwich. “It's a shame you missed mine earlier.”

“Was it any good?”

“Extremely.”

“That's a pity. I'm pretty awful with money. I don't suppose you'd give me a one-to-one?”

“Pardon?” Mia says just as Carlo appears at her elbow. Ten minutes ago she had been thinking about giving Carlo her phone number, but now she can't remember why.

“Mia, I need you,” he says in his strange half-Irish, half-Italian accent. “I have a sculptor with a question about the artists' tax exemption scheme.”

“I'll just be a minute,” she says and he pouts and marches back across the room like a sulky child.

“He's got a thing for you,” the wolf in the duffle coat says.

She pretends to be surprised.

He looks her up and down, from the top of her perfectly blow-dried blonde hair to the toes of her Kurt Geiger sandals. “I'm sure he's not the only one. You're exceptionally pretty,” he says bluntly, “and you know it.”

Mia blushes for the first time since Miss O'Connor in Senior
Infants caught her stealing Wendy Williams's felt-tipped markers. She wants to snap back a one-liner but she's lost for words, unexpectedly marooned on an awkward little island of silence with this strange, really strange man.

“Ronan,” he says, without taking his eyes off her.

“Mia.”

Behind those eyes, which are the color of wet gravel, she has the sense of an animal looking out at her. And as if in answer, an animal of her own, one that has been lurking in the neatly pruned maze of her heart, pads out and looks straight back at him.

A smile tugs at the corners of her mouth but she won't give in to it. “I could give you a printout of my PowerPoint presentation,” she says, all business.

Ronan looks puzzled, as if he thinks a PowerPoint might be something electrical. He sighs. “I don't think a printout will save me. I'm so crap with money that I'm about to spend my last tenner—a tenner I should be saving for my share of the gas bill—to buy a girl a drink.”

“That's too bad.” Mia feels oddly flat now. “I mean the bit about your lack of fiscal acumen, not about the girl.”

“Say that again.” He breathes out all five syllables of “fiscal acumen.”

“I think,” Mia says pointedly, “that the girl you're buying a drink for would probably prefer if I didn't.”

“The thing is . . .” He picks up the plastic bag from the floor by his feet. It seems to be full of leaves. “I haven't asked her if she'd like to have a drink with me. Not yet.”

“Ah.” The smile is back and this time Mia doesn't bother fighting it.

“So?” He raises his eyebrows. “Would you?”

She is supposed to stay till the end of the seminar to take part in a panel discussion, and then go for dinner with the other speakers. “I can't. Maybe some other time?”

“The possibility of me ever having a spare ten euros to spend again
is pretty unlikely, but I'm usually in the Palace Bar on Fridays between four and five.”

*   *   *

Guys ask Mia out all the time. Clients at the accountancy firm where she is a partner. Strangers at petrol stations. Assistants in shops. Why is she still single? people always ask. People who think that being picky is a bad thing.

She knows what she wants in a man and she's happy to wait for as long as it takes. On her checklist are, in no particular order: tall, broad shoulders, nice eyes, and hands that are bigger than hers. (It's amazing how many tall men have little hands.) Ambition, modesty, wit, patience and financial independence.

The problem is that on the few occasions when she has found a man who ticks every box, there hasn't been a spark.

“I've had iceberg lettuces that have lasted longer than most of your relationships,” her sister's boyfriend, now perhaps ex-boyfriend, Ben, once teased her. “You're going to be one of those sad old cat-ladies unless you stop ticking all those boxes and start thinking outside of them.”

Running along the slippery cobbles of Temple Bar in heels at a quarter past five the following Friday is further outside of the box than Mia had planned to venture. She is half hoping that Ronan won't be there, but he is sitting at the bar, nursing a half-pint of Guinness, scribbling in a notebook.

He points at a small pile of change on the counter. “I can't buy you a drink,” he says, “but I can get you a packet of delicious ready-salted peanuts.”

“Dry-roasted.” Mia slides onto the stool beside him. She has a rule about never letting a man pay for anything on a first date, but this, she reminds herself, is not a date.

Mia has other rules about first dates. Keep her mouth shut is one.
Let him do all the work. It's strange the things men will say to fill a long pause, and quite off-putting too. Most guys have talked themselves out of a second date within five minutes, but tonight she finds herself having the kind of random conversation that students are supposed to have at three in the morning but that she never did.

At about eight, Ronan suddenly remembers that he has to meet his best mate, and they part hurriedly. Mia gives him her number. He is obviously not boyfriend material, she thinks, but she might have a fling with him. She will decide later, when he calls.

When he doesn't, she replays in her mind all the things she seems to have confided—breaking her first-date rules—and wonders which one put him off. Was it her first memory—collecting insects in a jam jar because her mother had said that life would be easier if they had an “ant” they could count on? Or her desert island luxury—a calculator, so she can keep count of the calorific content of coconuts? Or her phobia—watching kissing scenes in movies? It was probably the calculator or the kissing, she decides. There is only one way to find out, and that's to go back to the Palace, but she has no intention of ever doing that. The most important rule Mia has about dating is never look keen.

The following Friday, Ronan glances up and catches her eye in the gilt-framed mirror behind the glittering optics. The bar is full but he has draped his duffle coat over the empty stool beside him.

She looks at his profile as he orders their drinks. There could, she thinks, be a nest inside that beard. Why then is she wondering what it would feel like against her face? This can't be happening, she thinks. When the pub closes, he walks her to a taxi stand and says good-bye and she is too exhausted from all the sexual tension to care.

Mia has always been looking for that elusive spark but never thought to look for it in a rowdy bar that smells of beer and anoraks, but since that is where it has shown up, the following Friday so does she. There is less talking this time, more drinking, more meaningful staring, longer pauses. There are “whats?” and “nothings!” between them that
would not be out of place at a teenage disco. She feels as though she is being wound up like an old-fashioned watch, one slow turn at a time. It's noisy, and Ronan has to lean over to shout into her ear, and finally she can't wait any longer. She turns her face quickly, intending just to brush his lips with hers, but instead her chin connects with his nose and he jolts back and knocks his glass over. Guinness pours over the counter in a creamy wave. It rains down into the lap of her favorite Karen Millen dress.

“Sorry!” Ronan reaches for a napkin from the bar but Mia has had enough. She grabs a fistful of his shirt and drags him to her. She doesn't care about the scratchy beard or her ruined dress or the man on the next stool who is nudging his friend and gaping at her. All she knows is that if they don't kiss now, she will explode.

*   *   *

Mia owns a neat two-bedroom apartment in Irishtown. She has a walk-in wardrobe. She drives a Volkswagen Golf. She has a pension plan, private health insurance and an investment portfolio. On dating websites she lists her interests as working out and eating out.

Ronan shares a dilapidated house with three other artists on a street Mia wouldn't cross without a personal alarm. He rides a bicycle—not one of those hipster bikes with long handlebars and a white saddle; a scratched and dented BMX held together with duct tape. He has never been inside a gym and most of his eating out involves takeaway cartons.

They have nothing in common. But after that glass-toppling, earthshattering kiss, that does not matter to either of them. Ronan works best at night. He stays late in his small studio in Temple Bar and texts Mia when he is on his way over, often at two or three in the morning. She gets up, puts on her makeup, brushes her teeth and swaps her pajamas for something sexy.

He approaches her the way he approached the sandwiches the day she met him—methodically and with a ravenous appetite. In between
bouts of devouring they lie in Mia's antique sleigh bed, talking about what Mia used to cynically call “life, the universe and everything.”