The Flower Arrangement (29 page)

*   *   *

Phil wasn't the only one who looked different, Lara thought. The honeymoon had changed Katy too. Her dark curls had grown out, her skin was tanned an olive gold. She had blossomed.

She put the sweet peas that Lara brought into a pink jug on the mantelpiece. The tiny blossoms exhaled a breath of sherbet and rain.

“Phil's out getting wine and I'm at a tricky bit of my Moroccan chicken!” Katy went over to the cooker. “Grab a chair. I'll only be a minute.”

Lara sat on a stool and took off her coat. A year ago, when Katy had come into the shop to pick up bouquets for a shoot, she had been a stranger. Now she was practically a sister. It was so weird and so wonderful. She looked around the cluttered room. At the overflowing bookcases, at the Balinese temple door that had been covered in a sheet of glass and made into a table, at the framed watercolors of Sandymount Strand.

Ben had lived here. He had eaten at this table with Katy and slept with her in the bedroom down the hall. She tried to picture him watching the tiny TV or reading in the velvet armchair by the window, the sunshine picking out the red in his hair. She looked into the oval mirror above the mantelpiece where he must have seen his reflection thousands of times. But all she saw was herself. The steely glints of gray in her own hair, the starbursts of lines at the corners of her eyes. Even if Katy and Ben had not been involved, she was too old for all this.

Mia arrived alone. “Ronan can't come.” She shrugged off her coat. “He's stuck in his studio being angst-ridden about his new performance piece. It involves nudity”—she stuck her finger into a pot of hummus and licked it—“feathers and a bucket of self-raising flour.”

Lara laughed.

“Yes, yes,” Mia said darkly, “you can laugh, but this family has had its fair share of tortured artists.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Katy's ex, Ben, spent forever trying to write a screenplay. Put it this way, a lot of angst was ridden.”

“Lara's met Ben,” Katy said evenly, without turning from the cooker.

“Really? When? How?” Lara flushed. But before Katy could answer, a plume of dark smoke rose from the pan.

Mia kicked off her shoes, hitched up her dress, climbed onto a chair and took the battery out of the smoke alarm. By the time she had climbed down again, she had forgotten all about her question.

*   *   *

They shared a platter of meze and dips and, for dessert, summer berries dipped in four kinds of melted chocolate. Lovers' food, Lara thought, watching Phil feed Katy a strawberry.

When she was married, she had made special trips to obscure ethnic supermarkets for Vietnamese rice pancakes and soba noodles. She had bought extra-virgin olive oil online from a tiny estate in Sicily. She had discovered celeriac and plantains and Jerusalem artichokes. She had sautéed and ceviched and fricasseed and brûléed. Now she ate like an astronaut. Packet soups and cereal bars and microwave pots that announced their touchdown with a ping.

After dinner, while the others were still clearing up, she slipped out to look at the small, overgrown garden. There had been a lawn once, but it had been claimed by dandelions and dock leaves and fool's parsley and the tiny blue stars of forget-me-nots and speedwell. What had been a flower bed was a riot of shepherd's purse and fireweed. Michael had waged an ongoing battle with weeds, but Lara had a soft
spot for them. “Weed is just another word for flower,” her mother used to say when they collected cowslips or sat on the lawn making daisy chains.

“It's all a bit of a mess, isn't it?” Katy was standing behind her.

Lara nodded, unsure whether she meant the garden or something else.

Katy pulled a waxy white bell from the creeper that had woven a thick carpet over the high granite wall. “What's this called?”

“It's convolvulus. Gardeners call it bindweed.”

Katy looked down at the flower. It was already growing limp in her hand. “How did you become a florist? Did you do a course, or teach yourself along the way?”

“Both,” Lara said. “And my ex-husband helped with the business side of things. He was—is—a landscaper.”

They watched a wheel of starlings turn in the rectangle of sky overhead. Dusk was falling into the garden like a fine mauve dust. Katy pulled another convolvulus blossom and it glowed in her hand in the gathering darkness. “You're going to think I'm awful,” she said softly.

“Why would I think that?”

“Because Ben called while we were on honeymoon. He asked for your number, but I didn't want to give it to him.” She frowned down at the flower. “I don't have feelings for him, it's not that. It's just that you're Phil's sister. It seemed too close.”

“It's okay. Really.” Lara's heart had been perched high in her rib cage for a week. Now it fell through her chest cavity like a stone.

“But—”

“Really. I'm not interested in him. And even if I was, I'm not ready for a relationship.” She wrapped her arms around herself and around the invisible weight that was still there, pressed against her heart. The baby she had dreamed of holding the morning her marriage ended.

“Let it go,” Leo had said. But she didn't know where that dream ended and where she began.

“That's a shame”—Katy twirled the flower in her fingers—“because
Phil changed my mind. He reminded me of how happy we are. How selfish we'd be to rain on anyone else's parade. I called Ben back this afternoon. I didn't give him your number . . .”

“I don't understand.” Lara's heart had stopped falling, but now it gave a sickening lurch.

It was too dark to see Katy's face, but there was a smile in her voice. “I promised I'd give you his. Leave it up to you to call him.”

She took Lara's hand and folded her fingers around a torn piece of paper and a flower.

All week Lara looked for signs not to call Ben. She found plenty. The billboard on Dame Street was covered with posters for a charity called Alone. Her Dart ticket said “Adult Single.” When she turned on the radio in the van, Natasha Bedingfield was singing “Single.”

But on Friday evening, when she was locking up the shop, she heard a familiar voice behind her, or thought she did. “Just do it!” And when she turned and looked up, there was a perfect Nike swoosh of a contrail in the sky above the jumble of chimney pots.

“Subtle, Dad,” she muttered. “Very subtle.” But one hand was already reaching for the folded piece of paper with the flower pressed inside it, and the other hand was pulling out her phone.

*   *   *

She should have picked somewhere dark and quiet, but she had named the first restaurant that came into her head. Glitzy sunshine bounced in off the water through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Ben was already there. He stood up.

“You're early.”

“So are you.”

She moved around to the other side of the table before he could kiss her cheek or shake her hand. She had remembered him all wrong. His hair was more red than brown. The little scar on his chin was shaped like a catapult not a crescent moon. His eyes were gray not blue,
and in the swimming-pool light from the water outside he looked even younger than she'd thought.

This is a mistake, she thought. What am I doing here? A waiter appeared and began to recite the brunch menu in a sitcom Spanish accent. “Botched eggs. Crumpled eggs. Fright eggs on toes. Egg and backcomb or,” he added with a flourish, “the fool Irish.”

They managed to hold it together until he had taken their order and gone back into the kitchen. Then, while the door was still swinging closed, they started to laugh. Ben leaned forward, bent over his knees; Lara lay back, helpless, tears of laughter blurring the watery reflections dancing on the ceiling. She wasn't someone who had ever laughed easily. Since her marriage had ended, she hardly laughed at all.

Ben talked as if he was afraid that if he stopped, she'd get up and leave. He talked about his job at the library and the screenplay he had just finished and his apartment, which had a handkerchief-sized view of Dublin Bay.

“Where do you live?”

“In Ranelagh,” Lara said. “Near the rugby stadium.”

“I used to go to the disco there when I was seventeen.”

“Me too.”

He grinned. “We could have met.”

Lara moved a little pile of scrambled eggs from the plate to her fork and then back again. “I'm not sure they would have let me in,” she said quietly. “When you were seventeen, I was nearly thirty.”

Ben pushed his plate away. “Is that why you took a whole week to call me? Because of the age thing?”

“That”—Lara pushed the eggs under a limp corner of her toast—“and Katy.”

“Age doesn't matter to me. And Katy is happy and she's history. If she's told you stuff about me, stuff that might put you off, then all I can say is I made mistakes in that relationship that I won't be making in this one.” She looked up at him. “If”—he looked flustered—“this is
one. Which I hope it is because”—he looked out the window and then back at her and she saw his pupils widen—“because I feel something here.”

He put his hand over hers, and his fingertips covering her knuckles sent four little shots of warmth traveling up her arm and then down her spine, threading her vertebrae together like fairy lights. It was something she'd never had with Michael, with anyone. Chemistry.

Ben let go of her hand to pay the bill, but he took it again when they were outside. They walked along the sunny side of Barrow Street, past the sooty redbrick houses and the shiny office blocks that had nothing in common. Like us, Lara told herself. Ben didn't speak and she couldn't. Her mind was too busy listening to the steady hum of her blood to get around to words. By the time they turned onto Grand Canal Street, her palms were slippery with sweat. She didn't know whether it was hers or Ben's and she didn't care.

Boys were jumping off the lock gate at Mount Street Bridge. The canal was full of summer and sky. Ben led her by the hand down the narrow stone steps. They walked more slowly now and Lara's mind tripped ahead of them on the sun-splashed path, past the dog walkers and the children feeding the swans, looking for trouble.

Chemistry didn't last, she reminded herself. It was just a quick cocktail of estrogen and testosterone, serotonin and dopamine.

Ben stopped and turned to face her, looping his arms around her waist. His gray eyes moved from her mouth up to her eyes and then back down again.

Lara gulped back a little air pocket of panic. Her mind was fizzing with questions she couldn't bear to ask.
Why me? Why not someone your own age?

He was leaning toward her now. “Wait!” She leaned back. There was one question she had to ask.

“Why did you come to the church the morning of the wedding? Were you going to ask Katy not to go through with it?”

“No.” He looked over her shoulder as if he was trying to remember.
“We were friends for a long time. Better friends than anything else, you know?” Lara nodded. She and Michael had been friends too.

“Katy doesn't have a father. Well, she does, but he left when she was young, so I came that day to give her away, in my head I mean.” He looked back down at her. “I'm not crazy. I wasn't planning on hanging around and walking her up the aisle or anything. It was a symbolic thing. I just figured that I had to find a way to let her go. And when I was sitting in that church, with my eyes closed, so if anyone walked in, it would look as if I was praying or something, I realized that what I'd been holding on to all those years with Katy, it wasn't real. Then I opened my eyes and there you were. And you were,
real
I mean. At least I hope you were. I hope I'm not just imagining you.”

“Wait!” Lara said again. She could feel Ben's eyes on her back, the way she had in the chapel, as she stepped onto the grassy bank and closed her eyes.

She had been holding on to the idea of the baby she could have had with Michael as tightly as she'd held on to Ryan the night before he was buried. Now she opened her arms and held them there until she felt the weight leave her. When she opened her eyes, she saw two bright spangles of light dancing together on the surface of the water. She turned around and walked back to Ben.

“Where were we?” She looped her arms around his neck.

His arms crossed behind her back. “Here.”

Some people are just asking for it. That's what Baz says. Leaving their cars unlocked, their curtains open, their wallets and phones sticking out of their pockets, their bags hanging over the backs of their chairs. The woman in the flower shop is on her own and she isn't even close to the till half the time. Sharon has walked past twice now eating her chips, watching her.

Call that a job? she thinks, dropping the greasy chip bag and licking the salt off her frozen fingers. Sitting on your bum all day playing around with flowers, having a gab with some Southside Fanny who can drop fifty euros on a bunch of daisies without batting an eyelid.

Sharon pulls a packet of smokes out of her jacket, lights the last one and walks past for a fourth time, nice and slow. She stops in front of the window, looks inside, acting interested in the three skinny vases full of big, fat white roses, flicking her eyes up over them to scope out the shop beyond. The till is behind the counter on the left. The woman is on a stool in front of it, smiling to herself, sticking flowers in a jam jar. She is tall and skinny and she is older than she looked from the other side of the street. Old is good. If she catches Sharon with her hand in the till, she won't win a fight.

But if she does? Sharon rehearses it in her head. Quick jab in the eye or a sharp elbow in the tits. She shivers in her damp coat, folding one arm across her chest to hold the two sides of the broken zip together, taking a deep drag on her smoke, psyching herself up. She
hasn't hit anyone, not ever, but Baz says she's more than capable. Women are dirtier fighters than men, that's a fact. Still, she's not going looking for it.

A taxi pulls up behind her. A blonde woman in a cream coat gets out and goes into the shop. Sharon crosses the street and stands under the awning of the pizza restaurant and keeps her eye on the door.

After a minute the woman comes out again with her arms full of pink flowers and gets back into the taxi. It does a U-turn and speeds up as it passes Sharon, churning up a puddle that drenches her leggings. She'll never get them dry now. The heating doesn't work in the flat. She's even started using the gas rings on the cooker to warm it up. Baz will kill her if he catches her.

Sharon glares after the disappearing taxi. Fucking bitch probably doesn't even know where the cooker is in her nice big, warm house. Probably has someone else to do all the cooking for her.

The rain is starting again and a waiter in a bow tie is eyeballing her from the other side of the restaurant window. The best chat line blokes used to give her was that she looked like Kate Moss but she hasn't had that in a while now and the waiter looks more annoyed than interested. She moves along the street a few doors, wishing she had another smoke. There's another customer going into the flower shop now. An old dear with a skinny gray dog in a coat that she's left tied to the lamppost outside.

Nick it? Sharon thinks. Get a reward? Too complicated. Anyway, the dog might get freaked, and she likes dogs. When Noah was only tiny, when they'd lived in the flat in Charlemont Street, he used to make this excited high-pitched sound when he saw a dog. He'd stagger over to it with his arms out, like a little drunk. He knew the names of all the dogs on every floor of the flats. The lift was always broken and he'd rattle them off like a mad poem when she carried him up the five flights of stairs. How did it go? Bambi, Chippie, Prince, Foxy and Pal.

God, he was sweet, she thinks, but too much for her to handle. Things got messy. She was gutted when Social Services took him off
her. Cried for a week. But in the end they'd done her a favor, hadn't they? She was only a kid herself really.

Noah's long gone now and the Charlemont flats are gone too. Demolished last summer. She told Baz she was going to shoplift some stuff in the center but she hopped the Luas into Harcourt Street instead. It was like 9/11 or something, watching those big blocks collapse into a cloud of their own dust. She had to look away. Gone, everything gone. But fuck it, life went on.

The dog across the road is shivering and he's wearing a bloody coat: that's what kind of a day it is. Sharon's arm is starting to ache. It's done that in the cold since she broke it. She was selling Ecstasy outside a gig on Francis Street and some smart-ass grabbed four off her and done a runner without giving her the eighty quid. When she got home, Baz flipped. Grabbed her. Asked her what he looked like, the kid, but she couldn't remember, could she? She slipped and cracked her arm off the windowsill. He was gutted. Paid for a taxi to take her to St. James's Hospital. Sat out in the waiting room while they put five pins in her wrist. When they wouldn't give her any pain meds except bloody paracetamol, he sorted her out.

They have their ups and downs, but he loves her. He went out on the rob to get her a new coat last week. Black with gold zips and a fur-lined hood; she'd seen it in Zara. But he got caught, didn't he, and now he's in remand. Bail was five hundred euros and there was only three hundred and fifty in the balled-up sock where he keeps the cash. That's why she's standing here freezing her ass off, waiting for the old dear to come out of the flower shop so she can go in, rob it and get this over with.

The door of the shop opens and the old dear comes out with a bunch of bright pink daisies or whatever. She unties the dog and they totter off, the dog stopping to sniff the chip bag where Sharon dropped it.

Her palms start to sweat as she crosses the road. Her heart speeds up like she's halfway up an amyl nitrate high.

Don't take drugs, you're supposed to tell your kids. Don't drink.
Don't steal. Do your homework. Get a job. But kids aren't stupid. They have eyes. They'll copy you, like she copied her mam. Way of the world. The rain is coming down now: good. The street is empty. Just before Sharon gets to the door, the woman on the other side picks up an empty bucket and disappears through the doorway at the back of the shop.

There is a little jingle of bells as the door opens. Sharon's heart springs into her mouth, wet and trembling. She holds her breath and listens, then she hears the faint sound of footsteps from above. Better be quick.

The smell hits her first. The street outside smelled of car exhaust and litter and damp clothes, but in here it smells like fresh air. Then she sees the flowers. The floor and shelves are packed with them. Each bucket is full of one kind, one color, and the spotlights in the ceiling and the candles flickering make them look like stained glass in a church.

Sharon hurries past them, gets to the counter, slips around it. First thing she sees is a green leather handbag, the zip open. There's no wallet but there's an iPhone in a flowery cover; she fishes it out and slides it into her back pocket. She touches the release button on the till and the drawer slides open. Four fifties, a couple of twenties, a ten. She stashes them away quick.

Halfway to the door she hears the woman. She whips around and, keeping her face hidden, bends over a bucket of lilies.

“If you want a hand,” a voice behind her says, “just ask.”

Sharon nods, shoots a quick sideways glance from around the damp fur of her collar. The flower woman reminds her of that Pocahontas cartoon Noah liked. Long black hair, big dark eyes in a pale face, good-looking, though she's old, forty maybe. She's pouring tea from a big flask into a little red glass, not a cup. “Do you want some mint tea? It's nearly as cold in here as it is out there.”

“Yeah,” Sharon says, thinking, This'll get rid of her. “Yeah, I would like some.” Bingo. She waits for the woman to go back into the kitchen, then goes to leg it. She has her hand on the doorknob when she looks up and sees it, high up on a shelf near the ceiling, and stops dead. That
weird plant Noah tried to give her once. If she'd brought it home, Baz would have wanted to know where she got it and then there'd have been trouble.

She's sure this is the same kind. Big flat leaves, a tall straight stem and all the flowers crowded together at the top, big lush purple petals that look too perfect to be real. She should be well out of here by now, back on the street, but instead she stares up at it and it all comes back. The snowy day nearly a year ago. The last time she saw her son.

She hears the voice behind her again. The woman is back. “That's a phalaenopsis.”

“Thought it was a moth orchid?” Sharon says.

“It is.” The woman sounds a bit surprised, like how would she know? “That's the other name for it. I'll leave your tea here.” She turns away and opens a drawer and starts tidying it, like she's giving Sharon space.

Run! Get out now before she gets a proper look at your face, Sharon tells herself. But instead—she just can't help herself—she rises onto her tiptoes and reaches up to touch the velvety tip of one of the big flat purple petals.

She kept Noah hanging about that day, hoping he'd be gone by the time she showed up. But there he was, stupid kid, snow in his hair, shivering on the wall by the bus stop. He'd bought her a flower. Nobody had ever done that before. Not Baz, not Noah's father. And none of the tossers in between.

He's sixteen now, Noah. Probably over six foot. How tall was he last year? All her memories of him are tangled up in a knot like the Christmas lights when you get them out again. She's only seen him ten times in twelve years. Big gaps in between.

In the moves from flat to flat, she's lost all the photographs she's ever had. She has only one left. Him at four, the year he was taken into care. And it's a picture she hates. She can see now what she was too spaced to see then. How scared he was.

She left him on his own for a weekend. That was why he was taken
away. Well, she'd only meant to go to the pub for a few hours on a Friday night, but she got wasted, didn't she, and ended up going to a party in Kilkenny in a car someone stole. She was too out of it to know what day it was until Sunday.

Noah had yelled the place down. All Friday night, all day Saturday. Someone called the guards on Sunday morning. The fire brigade came too, broke the door down to get him out.

“I saw a fireman,” he said when she was allowed to see him, like he was delighted with himself. He looked like someone else's kid then. Clean clothes, color in his face, clutching a Mr. Potato Head toy with little eyes and ears that popped off.

She fought it—they'd have thought there was something really wrong with her if they saw it in her face—but deep down she was relieved. Even if she'd been straight, there were too many lowlifes coming and going in her flat to raise a kid. She knew he'd be better off without her. That was the truth, God help her.

“They're easy to look after,” the woman says, jolting Sharon back from memory lane.

“What?” She turns around.

“Moth orchids.” The woman is looking straight at her.

Shit! Sharon digs her fingernails into her palm till it hurts. She's seen her face now. She'll be able to ID her. What's she still doing in the shop?

“The most important thing is not to water them too much. They're like cacti: sometimes they do best when you ignore them altogether.” She walks over and stands next to Sharon, looking up at the plant. She smells of some kind of rose perfume and bleach. “Whatever you do, they still keep coming back.”

She hands Sharon a little glass of tea and takes out a wooden crate. She climbs onto it, her back to her, and reaches for the orchid. All Sharon has to do is kick the crate away now and this woman will be flat on her face. She could nip out with the money and the phone and whip the orchid too. Jesus, she could take half the shop if she wanted a flat full of
flowers. But she doesn't. Instead she watches the woman lift the plant down carefully and carry it to the counter.

“When all the flowers have fallen off, the flower spike will look dry and brittle. Orchids fool lots of people into thinking they're dead, but if you look after them, they'll come back. You cut it here . . .” She points at the stem. “Just below the place where the first flower was, and it'll bloom again.” She looks up. “Do you mind if I ask how you knew it was a moth orchid? Most people wouldn't.”

Sharon takes a sip of the tea. Feels the comforting heat travel down her throat. “My son bought one for me once,” she says.

“How old is he?”

“Sixteen.”

“You have a sixteen-year-old son?” The woman shakes her head. “You hardly look seventeen yourself. You look like Kate Moss's younger sister.”

The heat travels back up Sharon's throat now, flushes her face. She's pleased. Who wouldn't be? And for a moment, she forgets that she's talking to a woman she has just robbed.

“What's his name? Your boy?”

The word has to squeeze its way up through Sharon's tightening throat. “Noah.” She takes another gulp of tea. And then, for some reason, maybe because she can't remember the last time anyone paid her a compliment, maybe because if someone can read your mind you might as well say it as it is, maybe because she doesn't give a shit, she goes on. “He's in foster care. I lost him when he was four.”