The Flower Arrangement (22 page)

“How much is it?” Noah held his breath while the bloke checked the price on a list and looked at him.

“How much do you have on you?”

“Thirteen euros fifty cents.”

“Funny,” the bloke said, “that's exactly what it costs.”

*   *   *

She pulls a packet of Silk Cut Blue out of her pocket and holds her hands up as if she is surrendering. Her blue nail varnish is chipped. There is a number scrawled in pen on the palm. “Okay, okay, I was supposed to give up. You're not going to kill me, are you?”

If this was a computer game, Noah could press a key now and go into bullet time. Jump up, spin around, stop her from lighting the cigarette, freeze the flake that is about to land on her shoulder, stare into her open palm until he found himself in there, somewhere between the lines.

But she is already fiddling with her lighter. “I'm too young to die.”

He will be sixteen in ten days. He wants her to mention this, to reassure him that she remembers, but she doesn't.

Instead she leans back and looks at the sky again, letting the smoke curl up into the air. Her phone rings. Her ringtone is “The Only Girl in the World.” She pulls it out of her bag and clamps it to her ear. Noah can hear the voice on the other end. Deep. Male. Baz. She was supposed to give him up too.

“I'm on my way, babes,” she says and her eyes sweep the street, one way and then the other, sliding right past Noah.

“No, don't! Wait for me! Hang on,” she says softly. “I'll only be five minutes.”

She hangs up, then stands up.

“Got to go, No,” she says, tossing the cigarette.

He stands too. His left leg is dead and he feels it give way, makes a grab for her hand.

“Don't!” she says sharply, but she doesn't push him away and for a
moment they are standing holding hands in the snow. His hand is bigger than hers now; he wonders when that happened.

He wants somebody to see them like this. A witness to make this moment real. That woman who frowned at him from the car. The man with the boxer dog. The bloke from the shop. But rush hour is over now. The street is empty except for the two of them.

She pulls her hand away and quick as a flash he bends down and picks up the paper bag by the handles and gives it to her.

She looks into the bag. “What's this?”

“It's a moth orchid.”

“A moth orchid!” She stares at it for a long moment. She likes it, he thinks, and a warm buzz fizzes from his heart down to his frozen feet. Then she looks up at him. “What's it for?”

“It's for my birthday.”

“
Your
birthday.”

“Next week.”

He waits for her to get it, then when she still doesn't, he prompts her. “You said I could come and live with you again when I was sixteen.”

She puts the bag down on the wall, takes out her cigarettes. Lights another one. “Sure, but the thing is, now is not a good time, okay?”

Noah blinks at her in disbelief. He has been in a tunnel for two years. Four foster homes. This has been his light.

“I had to move someone into the flat. To help with the rent.”

She gets rent allowance. “Baz?” He spits the name out. “You're with him again!”

“Jesus! Give me a break, No, he's just a friend.”

Who sleeps in her bed and takes her money, Noah thinks, and gives her drugs.

“Look, when I get everything sorted, then you can come back, I promise. Come here.” She puts her arms around him, all affectionate now, and pulls him in for a hug. He can smell the smoke and honey of her breath. “By the summer, definitely,” she says, “I swear!”

He pretends to be busy pulling his hood out of his backpack so he doesn't have to watch her cross the road, hurry past the line of shuttered shops and turn the corner.

When he looks up, he realizes that she has forgotten the bag with the orchid in it. He thinks about going after her but doesn't. Instead he picks it up and hugs it to his chest, not caring that he is crushing the delicate purple flowers. All that is left of her now is the two ragged lines of her footprints that lead away from him. He stands for a minute and watches them as they begin to fill up with snow.

Every single woman Ciara knew was going to see a psychic of some kind. Single as in unattached. Psychic as in phony.

“You have to see this clairvoyant,” her new flatmate, Suzanne, said as she picked her way around the packing boxes and parked herself on the end of Ciara's bed. She was starry-eyed with excitement. Ciara looked up from the book she had only been half reading.

“She says I'm going to meet a tall, athletic man.” Suzanne kicked off her shoes and curled up, settling in for a long chat. “Do you think that's clairvoyant-speak for a six-pack and a great ass?”

“It's hard to say.” Ciara tried to sound neutral.

The stars in Suzanne's eyes dimmed a little. “You're being cynical.”

“I'm being skeptical,” Ciara said. “There's a difference.”

*   *   *

“I don't need someone with a crystal ball,” she told Lara, “to tell me that
my
future contains an ass. All I have to do is look at my past.”

“Go easy on yourself, Ciara,” Lara said softly. “It's early days.”

It was the eve of Valentine's Day, and they were working late in Blossom & Grow. The shop was outdoors-cold and heady with the scent of hundreds of roses and stargazers and freesias. Lara was sitting cross-legged on the floor in a soft gray woolen dress hand-tying bouquets of Holland roses with meter-long stems and perfect crimson
heads. The light picked out silver threads in her waist-length black hair. She had tucked a white lily behind one ear. She looked, Ciara thought, like an Indian queen on a carpet of flowers.

Ciara was slouched on a stool at the counter. Her blonde highlights were growing out and her dark roots were growing in but she couldn't be bothered doing anything about it. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail with a rubber band and her post-breakup uniform of black sweatshirt matched her frame of mind. She had a pen pinched between her numb finger and thumb and she was writing sappy message after sappy message and checking each one against the order book.

All these idiots out there genuinely believed that their love was unique, she thought, slipping another creamy card into its Lilliputian envelope. But the world was hopping with “Honeybunnies” and “Studmuffins,” “Secret Admirers” and “Devoted Husbands.”
Supposedly
Devoted Husbands.

“I went to see a medium after Christmas.” Lara was ringletting an ivory ribbon with the blade of her scissors. “Phil gave me a present of a session with her.”

“Phil sent you to a fortune-teller? Did she tell you that you have a very gullible brother?”

Lara smiled. “No. She said I was a healer, but she probably says that to everyone.”

It wouldn't be true of everyone, Ciara thought, despite herself. “Did she tell you anything useful? Like the winning lotto numbers? Or where the key to the petty cash box has gone?”

Lara looked down at the flowers. “No. But she said I haven't met my soul mate yet. Apparently he's still out there somewhere.”

If he was out there, Ciara thought, he might as well get used to it. It was ten months since Lara had found out that her husband was gay and she was still in reeling from the shock of it. She wasn't bitter about the end of her marriage—unlike Ciara, who felt as sour as a rotting brassica—but she was adamant that she was through with relationships, which was a shame, because Lara spent ten hours a day
making other people happy. If anyone deserved to be happy, she did. She deserved a little happiness herself.

“So who do you think it is? Your soul mate?” Ciara flapped a card in the air to dry the ink. “That wildflower man who's always coming on to you? That guy Frank you used to work with who just keeps happening to pass by?”

“I know, soul mates! It's ridiculous, right? But . . .” Lara paused, the ribbon in one hand, a rose in the other. “The weird thing was, she knew things.”

Ciara bent her head over the book so Lara wouldn't see her eye-roll. “What kind of
things
?”

“Well, that both of my parents were dead.” Not exactly rocket science, Ciara thought, when Lara was forty-one. “And that I'm going to put a water feature in the garden in Dad's memory. She said he had a message for me.”

“What was it?” Lara's father had been a straight talker. Ciara hoped the message had been: “Don't believe anything this con artist says.”

Lara started to laugh, and at the same time a tear slid down her cheek and dropped on the rose. “‘That builder you got a quote from is a cowboy.' Which is exactly the kind of thing he'd say. Do you believe in, you know”—she waved the rose—“spirits?”

“Absolutely not.” But a contradictory trail of goose bumps tiptoed up Ciara's spine as she said it. When she was six, her sister, Alice, had moved out of their bedroom and her granny Rose moved in on a cloud of Coty L'Aimant, Elnett hairspray and cigarette smoke. She was in Dublin to do “tests.” Ciara had hoped they weren't math tests, which were her least favorite kind.

Her grandmother stayed up late every night reading, sitting up in the bottom bunk wearing one of her many pastel chiffon nighties. Every morning, the cut-glass ashtray on the bedside table was full of John Player Blue cigarette butts with lipstick-smeared filter tips.

Ciara was fascinated by her grandmother's library books. The covers had lurid pictures of women with cascading hair and wasp waists
wearing nurse's uniforms or swimsuits or ball gowns. They had titles like
Sudden Surrender
and
Passion's Promise
and
Moonlight Mystique
.

“What's a mist-i-queue?” Ciara had once asked, hanging over the top bunk like a bat and reading the word upside down. Blood fizzed and popped in the roots of her hair like space dust.

Granny Rose inhaled deeply on her cigarette. “It's what makes men want to . . .” She took a puff of her cigarette and pressed her lips together. “To give you flowers.”

Ciara hooked her bare toes under the bars of the bunk and swung down a little lower. “How do you get it?”

Her grandmother squinted up at her through a haze of shifting smoke. “You're born with it. But you lose it if you ever let your husband see you in curlers.”

Ciara had found out about her grandfather by eavesdropping, which she knew was wrong but was always interesting. “Did Grandad see you in curlers?” she asked. “Is that why he ran away with the little shopgirl?”

When her grandmother laughed, no proper laughing sound came out; just a chorus of wheezes, squeaks and faraway whistles that gathered into a rattling cough.

“That's the first thing I'll ask him”—she gasped when she caught her breath—“if I ever see the SOB again.”

“What's an SOB?” The upside-down-ness was starting to make Ciara's head feel weird.

Granny Rose tilted her chin and exhaled a smoke ring for Ciara to pop with her finger. “I hope you never find out.”

Her grandmother spoke to Ciara as if she was a proper person and not “the baby.” She was always available for hugs, unlike Ciara's mother, who was permanently late for something. She didn't think sleeping with a teddy bear was stupid, like Ciara's sister, Alice, did. She produced an endless supply of Cadbury's Tiffin from her handbag and she didn't make Ciara brush her teeth after she ate it. Her own teeth grinned out from a glass of water on the bedside table, like the Cheshire Cat's ghostly smile.

All in all, it was a very satisfactory arrangement, but unfortunately it didn't last. One afternoon when Ciara was at choir practice, a girl from sixth class came in and whispered importantly to Sister Barnabas. The nun told all the other girls to sing “Greensleeves” and took Ciara out into the corridor.

Twenty-five years later, every time Ciara was put on hold and heard the tinny strains of that song, she remembered the day that Granny Rose died.

“She's in heaven, pet.” Sister Barnabas had tried to unstick Ciara's hair from her tear-stained face. “Now she can watch over you always.”

Ciara grew up imagining the ghost of her grandmother watching over her, which was fine unless she was doing something embarrassing. Peeing. Picking her spots. Stealing Alice's sequined Whistles dress to wear to the Trinity ball. Doing that clumsy little dance that was supposed to look sexy before she took the dress off and got into bed with Barry Quinn.

Sometimes her grandmother was joined by other ghosts. Mr. Duncan from across the road. The Caseys' puppy, Grin, who had been squashed by Mr. Casey's Volvo. River Phoenix. Audrey Hepburn. John Lennon. It could get quite crowded in Ciara's bathroom sometimes.

“Promise me you'll never, ever take hallucinogenic drugs,” Mort had said when she'd told him about her spectral voyeurs. They were about to get married, and every time he made love to her, some old, hurt part of her past healed and a dried-up scab of truth came loose.

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

Her head was pillowed on the hard cage of his ribs. The tip of her ear had pins and needles, but she still had trouble believing that this man's heart belonged to her. Mort shuffled down until his long-lashed green eyes were level with hers. He was already tanned, though they'd only been in Bali for three days. The ceiling fan that stirred the soupy tropical air was lifting the ends of his blonde hair.

“Promise me one other thing.” He kissed her lightly on the nose. “If you do die, promise you won't come back and haunt me when I'm taking a leak.”

*   *   *

“Just think,” Lara said, tying the last ribbon on the last bouquet. “Tomorrow morning, women all over the world will wake up to a hundred and ninety-eight million roses.”

All Ciara could think about was whether one of those women would be waking up next to Mort. She began to line the bouquets up for Phil, who was coming in at six to start the deliveries. When she was finished, they looked like a cellophane army waiting to launch a surprise attack.

She washed her hands under hot water, trying to get some feeling back into her frozen fingertips. “Are you sure you don't need me tomorrow?” she asked, shrugging on her coat.

“I'm absolutely sure. I know it's going to be tough.” Lara sighed, then handed her a dozen red roses tied with a red bow.

“Come on, boss,” Ciara said, trying to sound hard-bitten. “You're giving me a day off on the busiest day of the year. You don't have to give me flowers as well.”

Lara hugged her carefully so as not to squash the bouquet. “I just wish there was more I could do.”

Nobody could have been kinder than Lara had been, Ciara thought, turning down a lift, turning up the collar on her coat and setting off along Camden Street. She had helped Ciara move her stuff out with the van. Lent her the money for a deposit for an apartment. Listened to her catalogue her pain, even though it must have brought up painful memories of her own.

A moon she couldn't see was silvering the few shreds of cloud in the clear February sky. Her eyes automatically picked out the constellations Mort had given her from the glittering geometry overhead.

Orion. Cassiopeia. The Pleiades. Pegasus. Leo. One for each birthday and each wedding anniversary she'd spent with him. Now she wished that he'd given her something less permanent. She couldn't exactly stuff bits of the universe into refuse sacks and give them away to Oxfam.

“What's wrong, Mort?” she'd asked him that day last August. He had been avoiding her eyes for weeks. They were sitting in the car in Killiney. His wetsuit was drying on the bonnet in the sunshine. His hair was still damp. He smelled of the sea.

She expected him to say that he was homesick, or bored. That he wanted to quit working at the bar. That they needed to plan another trip. He was always restless when they came back from holiday.

“It's not that anything is wrong,” he had said carefully. “It's just that this doesn't feel right anymore.”

Ciara stared down at her bare, faintly tanned knees. Mort had kissed her behind her knees in Sicily. He had kissed her everywhere, but absently, as if he was thinking about doing something else.

She looked up. “We can get the rightness back. That's what being married is all about.”

He sat perfectly still, but his eyes were moving, scribbling a message that she didn't want to decode. She stared back down at her knees. They looked, suddenly, like babies' heads. Mort had wanted a child, but Ciara had wanted to wait. Afraid, in some tucked-away pocket of self-doubt, that if she lost her body, he might love her less. Now she wished that she
was
pregnant, because if she was, he wouldn't leave.

“Mort,” she said. “Is there somebody else?”

He shook his head. “But there would be someone else at some point. And I don't think you could deal with that, do you?”

She'd thought, after Michael had left Lara, that nothing could be as bad as being left by a man for another man, but she'd been wrong. Being left for a woman who hadn't even come along yet? That was worse.