The Flower Arrangement (15 page)

Everything Hilary says to Ronan seems designed to exclude her. She starts intense conversations about artists Mia has never of. She brings up exhibitions they've seen together. She makes little in-jokes about people Mia has never met—lecturers from art college, characters she and Ronan met the summers they backpacked around Greece and Croatia. It was bad enough finding out that Ronan is best mates with a woman who strolls around naked. It's worse listening to her finishing his sentences.

Mia tries to avoid Hilary as much as she can, but she can't avoid her completely, because every time Ronan passes a Dumpster, he feels compelled to hoist himself up into it and rummage around to find something for her psychological baggage project. A detached steering wheel or a broken clock or an empty paint tin. Usually Mia tries to avoid skips too, but Ronan spots one as they are hurrying along Grantham Street on their way to a movie.

“Hang on!” He sprints back and climbs into it. After a moment, he reappears with a broken vacuum cleaner in his arms.

“Put that back!” Mia plants her hands on her hips. “We are not taking it to the cinema.”

“You don't understand!” He lowers it carefully to the pavement by the hosepipe and gazes down at it in rapture. “This is a genuine 1970s Electrolux. Hilary's dad used to work for them. This will definitely have to go in the piece.” He turns and disappears again.

“Ronan! Get back down here or I'll walk away.”

“Hi, Mia!” She turns to see Dermot from her office. He's wearing jogging pants and a T-shirt, but he looks immaculate, as if he has just stepped out of a taxi around the corner and jogged the last few yards. “Who were you shouting at?” He looks up and down the street.

Ronan doesn't care who sees him rummaging in a skip, but Mia cares, on his behalf and on her own.

“I was on the phone,” she says. Dermot looks at her empty hand. “On my headset.” He looks at her head, where no set exists.

“Wait till you see this!” Ronan swings himself down off the skip and then hauls down a filthy wooden contraption with a long flex and puts it on the pavement. He has cobwebs in his beard and his jeans are filthy, but he is so excited that he doesn't even notice Dermot, who is staring at him openmouthed.

“Ronan,” Mia says tightly, “this is Dermot, who works with me.” The two men shake hands.

“I work
for
you really,” Dermot corrects her, “don't I?”

“I can't hang around quibbling about prepositions,” Mia says imperiously. “We're late for the cinema.”

“Well”—Dermot smirks—“it's nice to finally meet Mia's mystery man!” He wipes the dust Ronan has left on his hand on his sweatpants. “I've got to run.” He jogs away.

Mia wants to kick herself for caring what Dermot thinks but she kicks the wooden contraption that Ronan has dumped beside her instead. “What is this?”

“A trouser press,” Ronan says, in the tone most men save for when
they're saying “a Lamborghini.” He rubs the dust off the top of it with his sleeve. “Did I ever tell you that me and Hilary once made a toasted cheese sandwich in one of these in our room when we were working in that fancy hotel in Antiparos?”

He didn't. He didn't mention that he and Hilary had shared a room either.

*   *   *

All summer Mia turns down invitations from her friends. Dinner parties, cocktail evenings, engagement drinks, a wedding in a country hotel in Laois. She doesn't want to expose Ronan to their scrutiny. Not yet.

“What kind of artist is he again?” her friend Caroline keeps asking. She is in charge of investments for one of the country's leading pension funds, but she can't seem to place the word “conceptual.”

He's the kind kind, Mia wants to say. When she gets period pains in a tapas bar, he disappears to the pound shop next door and returns with a hot-water bottle, which he persuades the waiter to fill. He listens to her sardonic little anecdotes about how unhinged her mother was when she was growing up but doesn't laugh at her polished punch lines. Instead he says, “That must have been tough, how did you and your sister cope?”

In August, one of Mia's clients, a property developer who lost everything in the recession, drives all the way from Dublin to Clare and then over a cliff into the Atlantic. Ronan insists on going to the funeral with Mia. He puts his arm around her in the church, and afterward he walks up to the man's sons and shakes their hands and says he's sorry for their trouble. When Mia starts to cry on the way home, he makes her pull over and he holds her while she sobs. He seems to know, without her telling him, that she is crying not just for her client, but for her own father too.

But kindness does not pay Ronan's bills. When Mia counts the
number of hours he has already spent on his current project and divides it by the pitiful arts grant he is getting, she realizes that he is earning about a quarter of the minimum wage. Mia has had her future mapped out since she was a student, but it is quite possible that Ronan will still be living like a student when he is forty.

So the next Saturday, on the way home from Cassidy's, after she has spent an hour listening to a bunch of his mates having a collective moan about cuts in arts funding, she says, casually, “Maybe you should think about building your own brand, like Damien Hirst.”

“I don't”—Ronan frowns—“like Damien Hirst. All shock, no trousers.”

Mia doesn't like him either. What sort of a person wakes up in the morning and decides to saw a cow in half or pickle a shark? But he is a conceptual artist and he is successful. That proves it can be done.

“Okay,” she says, “but a bit of profile building might help you to get funding. I could set up a Facebook page for you. You could tweet about your work in progress.”

“Mia, I'm too busy working to give a running commentary on what I'm doing.”

“What about if I talk to my clients about corporate sponsorship?” she says. “It's tax-deductible, so you'd be doing them a favor.”

“I can't see corporates going for my work.” Ronan sounds doubtful. “Maybe Hilary's. Her installations are easier to put in an office foyer. You should suggest that to her.”

The only thing Mia wants to suggest to Hilary is that she talk less and wear more. “Ronan, these cuts in funding are not good news, and with my accountant's hat on, I think you need to be thinking about a plan B. I suppose you could go back to lecturing.”

“If I ever need a shortcut to destroying my soul, maybe.” He shudders. “What's all this about?” He stops beneath a street lamp and looks down at her. “Oh, hang on, it's coming back to me, the very first thing I heard you say.” He grins. “What was it? I'm broke and you're going to fix me.”

Mia jabs him in the chest with her finger. “You told me you'd slept through my talk!”

“I was awake for the most important bit.” He bends down and nuzzles her clavicle. “The money shot! Now, let me take that accountant's hat off . . .” He tries to lift an imaginary hat off Mia's head but she pulls away.

“I'm supposed to be interested when you talk about art, but you have no interest in what I do, what I'm good at.”

“Mia, wait! Listen!”

“Why should I?” She hails a cab and climbs into it. “You don't!”

She is in bed, with the lights out, telling herself that she hates him, when the doorbell rings. When she opens the door, he picks her up and carries her back upstairs, and soon it turns out she doesn't hate him that much after all.

*   *   *

There is a box shoved into a corner of Ronan's room, between a bookcase and the wall. When he is downstairs making coffee, Mia tiptoes over, opens it and finds dozens of spiral-bound sketchbooks. She flicks through one. It's filled with drawings, two or three on every page—proper portraits. A study of a teenage boy hugging a football. An old man sleeping on a bench. A tough-looking woman smoking a cigarette.

Ronan can draw, really draw! If he can do this, she thinks, looking over her shoulder at his latest artistic endeavor—a body suit made from stitched-together leaves—why on earth is he doing that?

“Out of milk again!” he calls from the bottom of the stairs. “I'll go and get some.” It's a ten-minute walk to the nearest Centra, so Mia takes her time as she turns the pages of the other sketchbooks, stopping to examine faces she recognizes. Ronan's housemates captured washing dishes at the sink, asleep on a sofa, playing cards. Two of his male housemates anyway. There isn't a single drawing of Hilary. Mia checks again, and this time she notices that a handful of pages have been torn
from each sketchbook. Ronan must have thrown them away, she thinks, or deliberately hidden them.

She can't ask him if he's slept with Hilary, not straight out, but she desperately wants to know, so she starts by asking him how many women he has slept with. They are playing chess. Mia has just put Ronan's black king—represented today by her MAC lipstick, because the real king is missing—into check.

“That's a pretty weird question.” His gray eyes drop in temperature, wet gravel to stone. Then he shrugs and takes the top off the lipstick and draws the number thirteen on his palm. He looks down at the board. “Your turn.”

She doesn't have to think about it, but she pretends to, hoping to make him just a little bit jealous but also wondering how he'll react. “I've slept with—”

“I don't want to know,” he says firmly. He nods at the board. “I meant it's your turn to make a move.”

*   *   *

Nothing Mia owns is too short or too tight or too clingy, but she has always known how to draw attention to herself without appearing to try. She can flick through a clothes rail and pick out a color that will switch on her white-blonde hair like a lightbulb, a dress with a scooped neckline that will give her the neck of a Degas ballerina. If she rates her attractiveness against other women in a room, which she does, automatically, she is always in the top 10 percent; all right, 5 percent. But she has no idea how to measure herself against Hilary, who plays by different rules. Wears tiny camisoles over shapeless tweed skirts. Baggy jumpers with cutoff denim shorts. And then there are the tattoos.

“Is there a unifying principle to your body adornment?” Eamon's girlfriend asks one night in Cassidy's. Roughly translated this means “Tell us about your tats.” If Mia had a euro for every time Ronan's mates used incomprehensible jargon like “context of futility” or
“postmodern discourse,” she would be richer than Bono. It turns out that Hilary did not just get very drunk and wander into a tattoo parlor, like a normal person. Instead she has turned her own body into a performance space. “People are works of art,” she explains, “shaped by everyone who matters to them.” So she has asked everybody important in her life to sign her skin and then turned the signatures into permanent markings.

Where is Ronan's name? Mia wonders. A few days later, when Hilary climbs onto a stool to open the kitchen window, she sees it, “Ronan Slattery,” scrawled across her dusty right instep.

It could have been worse. It could have been on her inside thigh or on her bum, but still Mia's inner auditor decides to add Hilary in permanent marker to the list of “Things That Will Have to Go,” right up there after “Beard.”

*   *   *

Mia wants to fly Ronan to Rome for his birthday. “It's too much,” he says, meaning the expense, not the eternal city.

“I can afford it, and I'd get to go too.”

“You don't need me to go,” he points out. “You could bring your sister.”

A month ago, when Katy was still miserable about Ben, she might have come. But Ben, so much a part of Mia's history, is now actual history and her sister is seeing someone called Phil.

So instead of dining by candlelight in Trastevere on Ronan's birthday, Mia finds herself drinking beer and eating chicken wings in Rathmines with all his arty mates. And as if that isn't bad enough, Ronan is more impressed with Hilary's present—a piece of paper that says he has sponsored a tree—than hers—a brown cashmere jumper from Harvey Nichols and a set of expensive oil pastels.

By the time they pile out onto the street to go to a nightclub, everyone, including Mia, is drunk. They are too broke to pay for taxis to Leeson Street, so they walk up along the canal. It's cold and clear and
the full moon is a silver balloon tangled in the reflections of the reeds. It should be a romantic walk but Ronan's mates ruin it, chasing one another along the grassy banks like overgrown children, which, Mia thinks spitefully through a haze of beer and bitterness, is what they are. Grow up! she wants to yell at them. Get a real job! Stop endlessly discussing the meaning of life and start living it.

*   *   *

The oil pastels are still in their box a week later. “Aren't you going to even try these?” Mia asks, hurt.

Ronan is sitting on the side of the futon, one sneaker off, one sneaker on. He has just pulled a T-shirt over his head and his hair is sticking out, a messy halo of static. “Probably not,” he says, after a long pause. “I don't really draw.”

“But I saw your sketches,” she says before she can stop herself. “They're amazing!” He stares at her. “I was . . .” She clutches for a word that sounds prettier than “snooping.” “I was curious.”

“I see.” Ronan frowns. “Well, those notebooks are pretty old. I moved on from figurative work a long time ago.”

“It seems a shame not to use all that talent. You wouldn't have to stop doing your conceptual stuff but you could always do some portraits on the side. Commissions, you know, to earn a bit of money.”

“I could.” Ronan looks at her levelly. “But I don't want to. I'm curious too, Mia.” His eyebrows disappear into his fringe. “Were you looking for something in particular? Because if there's anything you need to know about me, you can just ask.”