This Charming Man (15 page)

This brought Dad’s rant to an abrupt end. Both he and Ma said quite quickly, anxiously even, ‘ “Neither a borrower nor a lender be! For loan oft loses both itself and friend.” ’

I shook my head. ‘I won’t be looking for anything from you.’

‘Just as well. We haven’t a pot to piss in,’ Dad said.

‘I’d better go.’

‘Where?’

‘Hairdresser’s. Getting my colour done.’

Ma disapproved. Her own hair was a short grey pudding bowlthat she cut herself with the nail scissors. Even Dad took more pride in his appearance. Aged sixty-nine, he still had a thick sweep of silvery hair and attended Champs Barbers on a monthly basis to maintain his favoured style of Left Bank Thinker, circa 1953.

Into the quiet came the sounds of Auntie Bid puking her guts out in the upstairs (only) toilet.

Ma asked, ‘Do you know how much Irish women spend annually on haircare? Money that could be better spent on –’

‘Please, Ma, it’s just some highlights!’ I did a quick sweep of my appearance, from my black trouser suit to my flat boots. ‘I’m hardly Barbie!’

In the hairdresser’s, my bruised cheekbone caused a stir.

‘You must have really riled him,’ Carol said. ‘What d’you do? Burn his dinner? Forget to wash his jocks?’

I started channelling Ma and wanted to say something po-faced like, ‘Domestic violence is no joke.’ But I kept my mouth shut. No one with sense locks horns with their hairdresser.

‘I’m a journalist,’ I said. ‘It goes with the territory.’

‘You? You write about breast-feeding and drunk teenagers. Like, you’re not a crime reporter.’

Carol knew me well. I’d gone to her for years. She had no imagination and neither had I. All I had ever wanted was for her to make my mousey roots blonde. I didn’t want lowlights or stripes or anything fancy and, as luck would have it, she didn’t know how to do them. It was an arrangement that suited us both.

‘Tell me what happened,’ she said.

‘You won’t believe me.’

‘Tell me anyway.’

‘I fell over in the street. I tripped on a loose paving stone outside Trinity and landed flat on my face. Everyone waiting for the 16A saw me. Lots of people laughed.’

Carol thought I was holding out, so she left the stuff on for too long and burnt my scalp. Out at the rainy bus stop it was rush hour and I had to jostle with what seemed like hundreds of teenage schoolboys to get on the bus, and when I was turned away because the bus was full my mood took a downward turn. I was sad about Auntie Bid, even though she was a contrary old boot, and sad about my car and full of dread that I might have to give up smoking.

Also quite annoyed because, in the melée as we’d tried to board the bus, one of the schoolboys had pinched my arse and I wasn’t able to identify the culprit in order to ‘discuss’ it with him.

Despite swathes of them having swarmed onto the bus –
my
bus, taking
my
seat – there were still an unholy number left at the bus stop. Sourly I eyed them swinging their satchels at each other and passing around a single cigarette. I hated teenage boys, I decided. I absolutely hated them. I hated their spots and their randiness and I hated the way they were different sizes. I mean, look at them! Some were miniature four-foot squirts and others were six-foot lummoxes with overextended, gangling arms that scraped off the ground, and they all hung around together in one ridiculous mismatched gang.

My disconsolate gaze landed on a cluster of schoolgirls covertly watching the boys from beneath sparkly eyelashes, and I decided I hated them too. Their exaggerated giggles and stench of fake strawberry and inch-thick layers of sticky lipgloss literally dripping off their pouty mouths. Also the way they tended to despise me for being ancient (thirty-five) and not wearing high-heels or enough make-up.
If I ever turn into her, just shoot me
. I once heard one of them actually say that! (Which was very unfair as I’d just spent forty-nine hours in a freezing, muddy field, without bathroom or coffee-making facilities, trying to get a story. That’s why I don’t work hard news any more. Too much time standing in a ditch in the pelting rain, day in, day out.)

Nursing my grievances, I sent Damien a text.

I sighed. Put my phone back in my pocket. We’d go to the Indian.

Another bus rounded the corner and the crowd surged forward. God, this was so stressful. I clenched my jaw with grim determination. I was getting on this bus, as God was my witness. (Actually he probably wasn’t. Not according to letters sent from readers, telling me I would burn in hell.) And if any of those spotty oiks tried pawing me, they were getting an elbow in the spleen. Pinch my arse once and get away with it, shame on you. Pinch my arse twice and get away with it, shame on me.

This time I got on, I even got a seat, and I tried to lose myself in my Dennis Lehane, but the journey took for ever, letting the entire population of Ireland on and off at each stop, and every now and again I’d have to put my book down and sigh heavily to demonstrate how pissed off I was.

On the up side, at least I’d have something to write about for next week’s column. But all the same. It’s not every day your car is stolen and burnt out, and even though it was nothing personal– at least I hoped it wasn’t… I’ve offended one or two people over the years, but surely I couldn’t have riled them to that extent? – I still felt slightly paranoid, like the world wasn’t a very nice place, which of course it wasn’t, but most of the time I didn’t mind.

I was hungry. I didn’t know how I’d let that happen. I feared long stretches without food and believed in preventative eating, eating even when I wasn’t hungry, just to avoid it.

My pocket started vibrating, and when I got my phone out I nearly elbowed the woman beside me onto the floor.

‘You’re not going to like this.’ It was one of the subs, Hannah ‘Dreary’ Leary. ‘Big Daddy won’t go with your column. Not controversial enough. Look, I’m only the messenger. Can you file another?’

‘When?’ I knew when. I was just being awkward.

‘Next half-hour.’

I snapped my phone shut and my hand lit up with pain. I kept forgetting about it, then being reminded in the most unpleasant way possible. Proceeding with more caution, I gingerly extracted my laptop from my satchel,
apologized to the unfortunate woman next to me for once again invading her space with my elbows, and started typing.

Controversial? I’d give him controversial.

It was ten to eight before I got home. Home was a red-brick terrace in ‘the upmarket suburb of Donnybrook’. (Quote from estate agent.) A pretty house, very charming with originalfeatures.
Extremely
small.

Of course it wasn’t exactly in the heart of Donnybrook, because if it was it would have cost us an awful lot more and wouldn’t have been such a long walk from the bus stop outside the Donnybrook Pharmacy. In fact, none of the shops near us was called the ‘Donnybrook’ anything. Not a good sign. Perhaps we didn’t live in Donnybrook at all. Perhaps we’d been had by the estate agent and actually lived in Ranelagh, which wasn’t half as nice.

Damien – he of the powerfulbuild and fine naked thighs – was standing at the kitchen counter, the paper open in front of him, colouring black teeth into a picture of Bono. He looked knackered.

‘Finally!’ he declared. He baulked, the way he did every time he saw my bruised face. ‘I was just going to text you. What kept you?’

‘Fecking bus.’ I threw down my bag and started unbuttoning my jacket. ‘Ten minutes at each stop.’

‘Sorry I didn’t get to talk to you all day,’ he said. ‘Small scandalette emerged in the Dailsession and it was allhands to the pumps.’

I waved away his apologies. Damien was also a journalist, the political correspondent on the
Press
. I knew about deadlines.

‘What did the insurance company have to say for themselves?’ he asked.

‘Ha! You’ll love this. If my car had been just damaged, I’d be entitled to a loaner until it was fixed. But because it’s a write-off, no loaner. Can you believe it? I spent the whole morning on the blower to them, I did no work. Jacinta wasn’t happy –’

‘ – Jacinta’s never happy.’

‘Then
I disappeared early to get my hair done.’

‘It’s very nice,’ he said quickly.

I laughed.

‘How long before the money comes through for another car?’ he asked.

‘Your guess is as good as mine. And whatever they give me, it won’t be enough to buy a new one.’ Gloomily I unzipped my boots.

‘Don’t take them off,’ he said. ‘Stick your jacket back on, let’s go down to the Indian and get a takeaway.’ He wrapped his arms around me. ‘Grace, we’ll do the sums, see if we can get a bank loan to buy you new wheels right now. And untilthen I can bring you to work on the bike.’

Damien was too impatient to drive a car. Instead he wove in and out of the ranks of Dublin gridlock on a black and silver Kawasaki. (Ma calls it a Kamikaze. She worries.)

‘But you’ll have to go miles out of your way.’

The
Press
were based in some wretched industrialestate on the M50, where you can buy eight thousand scanners but you can’t buy a single sandwich, while the
Spokesman’s
offices were in the city centre.

‘It’s okay. You’re worth it. So how’s Bid?’

‘Bad. Out of the blue she said she reckoned you have a fine pair of thighs when you’re naked.’

‘Jesus! What brought that on?’

‘Nothing.’

He went quiet, locked inside himself for a few moments. Then gave a little laugh. ‘God. Anyway, how’s the chemo going?’

‘She looked awful. The colour of butter.’

‘Butter? But that’s a nice colour.’ He thought about it. ‘Maybe not in a human being.’

Almost eight months ago Bid had gone to the doctor because her persistent cough was driving Dad round the bend. The doc had told her to have a bronchoscopy, but an appointment didn’t come free for seven months. When it finally did, cancer was diagnosed immediately. Surgery followed, when a ten-centimetre primary tumour was removed from her left lung, but her lymph nodes showed ‘positive for metastatic disease’. Translation: it had spread to her lymph nodes. (I was fooled briefly by the word ‘positive’, thinking it meant something good.) To treat the lymph nodes, she was to get six rounds of ‘aggressive’ chemo, at four-week intervals. It would be next February before we knew whether or not she’d be okay. If she’d been given the bronchoscopy when she’d first gone to the doctor, the cancer wouldn’t have had time to metastasize to her lymph nodes and she’d be better already.

‘Poor Bid,’ Damien said.

‘… Ah… listen.’ I decided to go for it. ‘I’m glad you’re sympathetic because I’ve something to tell you and you’re not going to like it. Ma and Dad are giving up smoking. And so are you and I.’

He stared at me.

‘In solidarity,’ I urged.

‘Solidarity,’ he muttered. ‘With Bid, it’s like having a second mother-in-law. I’m the most misfortunate man alive.’

Now and again Damien and I discussed giving up cigarettes. Usually when we were skint and one of us added up how much we spent on them. We always agreed that the right thing would be to give up, but rarely did anything about it.

‘I’m worried about Bid,’ he said. ‘I
need
to smoke.’

‘Nice try. Go again.’

‘Grace, if we stop smoking, we’ll put on four stone each.’

‘We could start jogging again. We were going great guns there for a while.’

‘Easy in the summer.’

We’d been so good. All through May and June, we had gone running in the early morning, in our matching sweats, like a couple from a mortgage ad. I used to watch us from the outside and marvelat how convincing we looked. Sometimes I’d smile at people coming home from getting their paper. Once or twice I even waved at a milkman. He never waved back, just stared after us suspiciously, wondering if we were somehow taking the piss out of him. Over the weeks, we’d built up the distance covered, making measurable progress. Then we’d gone on holiday in July and ate and drank our heads off and just never got back into it.

‘Even talking about giving up is making me want to smoke more.’ Damien reached for his pack, the way devout Catholic women reach for their rosary beads. ‘Let’s have one for the road.’

We sat outside on the back step, savouring cigarettes that seemed even more delicious than usual.

Blowing out a long plume of smoke, his eyes narrowed, Damien said, ‘Are you serious?’

‘Ma has put the guilts on me,’ I said. She’s a master at that. Always for a good cause, though. ‘If Bid doesn’t get better and I haven’t stopped smoking, it’ll be my fault. And yours too, Damien Stapleton,’ I added. ‘Murderer.’

‘Take a look at this.’ Damien picked up the remote.

‘What is it?’

‘You’ll see.’

The screen went blue, then jumped into life. A man, a young man was emerging from the front door of a suburban-looking house. Longish, mid-brown hair and oozing sex, he walked with a hint of a swagger, very sure of himself. ‘Oh my God!’ I yelped. ‘What age were you?’

‘Twenty, as far as I can figure out.’

On the screen, Damien stopped and leant against a car, then gave a slow smile straight at the lens. ‘What?’ his voice asked. ‘You filming me?’

‘Yes,’ a girl’s voice said. ‘Say something.’

‘Like what?’ Damien laughed, a little bit awkward, a little bit shy, more than a little bit sexy.

God, I thought. Sixteen years ago. Half a lifetime.

‘Say something profound,’ the girl’s voice urged.

The twenty-year-old Damien shrugged. ‘Don’t eat yellow snow.’

‘That’s your message to the world?’

‘Work is the curse of the drinking classes!’ He gave a clenched-fist salute. ‘Power to the people.’

‘Thank you, Damien Stapleton.’

The screen went blue again. It was over.

‘Where did you get this?’ I asked.

‘Juno.’

‘…
Juno?’

His ex-wife.

To be fair, it’s probably not as dramatic as it sounds. They’d only been married for three years, from the ages of twenty-two to twenty-five. (Yes, both of them; they were the same age, they’d been at schooltogether.) It was just the usualtwenty-something relationship that everyone has, the only difference was that they’d made the mistake of actually getting married.