She just held it in her hands, and with an impatient laugh Jack said, ‘Look inside.’
Crumpling plastic, Ashling peered into the pearly light of the bag. To her surprise it contained a carton of two hundred Marlboro, with a red rosette stuck crookedly on the cellophane.
‘Because I kept bumming your cigarettes,’ Jack dead-eyed her. ‘I’m, er, sorry,’ he added. He didn’t sound it.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she mumbled, stunned by the reprieve – and the rosette.
For the first time since she’d met him, Jack Devine laughed properly. An honest-to-God, head-thrown-back, belly laugh. ‘Beautiful?’ he exclaimed, alight with mirth. ‘Sailing boats are beautiful, eight-foot waves are beautiful. But cigarettes beautiful? Actually, maybe you’re right.’
‘I thought you were going to sack me,’ Ashling blurted.
His face twisted with surprise. ‘Sack you?… But Little Miss Fix-it,’ he said, his voice suddenly soft, his eyes playful, ‘who else would keep us in plasters, Anadins, umbrellas, safety pins, what’s the thing for shock – remedy something…?’
‘Rescue remedy.’ She could do with some right now. She needed to get out. Just so she could breathe again.
‘What are you so scared of?’ he asked, even more softly. It seemed to her that his bulk moved closer.
‘Nothing!’ she squealed like a bus’s brakes.
With his arms folded, he considered her. Something in the way his mouth kinked up at the corners made her feel girlish and silly, like he was mocking her. Then, in an instant, he seemed to lose interest. ‘Go on,’ he sighed, moving back behind his desk. ‘Off you go… But don’t tell any of the others,’ he nodded at the bag. ‘Else they’ll all be wanting one.’
Ashling went back to her desk, her legs belonging to someone else. Hold the front page. Jack Devine in Not-Such-a-Miserable-Bastard-As-He’d-Originally-Seemed shock. But the oddest thing of all was that Ashling kind of thought that she preferred him the other way. Though later that day, it was business as usual.
Mercedes lurched into the office, and everyone nearly fell off their chairs when they saw that she was uncharacteristically displaying emotion. A lot of it. As per Lisa’s instructions she’d gone to try and interview mad Frieda Kiely. And even though Mercedes had spent the weekend in Donegal shooting a twelve-page spread of Frieda’s clothes, Frieda kept her waiting an hour and a half, then professed to have never heard of her or Colleen.
‘Who are you?’ she’d demanded. ‘Colleen? What the hell’s that? What is that?’
‘She’s a maniac. A mad bitch,’ Mercedes hissed, then fell into another fit of humiliated convulsions. ‘A mad fucking BITCH!’
‘A premenstrual psycho hoor from hell.’ Kelvin was very keen to get on the right side of Mercedes.
‘A schizoid slapper,’ Trix threw in.
‘And a right skinnymalinks,’ said Boring Bernard, who had no idea what she looked like but who liked a good bitch as much as the next mummy’s boy. ‘There’d be more meat on a tinker’s stick after a good row.’
Trix looked at him scornfully. ‘That’s a compliment, you gobshite. You haven’t a clue!’
Insult after insult was heaped upon Frieda Kiely, except from Ashling who had heard somewhere that she really was mad. Apparently she was mildly schizophrenic and disinclined to take her medication.
‘But,’ Ashling interrupted, feeling someone should defend her, ‘don’t you think before we give out about her, we should walk a mile in her shoes?’
‘That’s right,’ said Jack, who’d emerged to see what all the commotion was. ‘Then we’d be a mile away from her and we’d have her shoes. Sounds good to me.’ He shot Ashling a jeering smile, then barked, ‘For God’s sake, Ashling, act your age, not the speed limit.’
Lisa was amused. ‘What is the speed limit in this country?’
‘Seventy,’ Jack said, slamming back into his office.
Ashling hated Jack again. Things were back to normal.
Even though Marcus Valentine didn’t have her work number, Ashling’s whole being gulped when, at ten to four, Trix handed her the phone and said, ‘A man for you.’
Ashling took the receiver, waited a moment to compose herself, then cooed, ‘Heeeyyy.’
‘Ashling?’ It was Dylan and he sounded puzzled. ‘Have you a cold?’
‘No.’ In disappointment she reverted to her normal voice. ‘I thought you were someone else.’
‘How about that drink this evening? I can come into town at whatever time suits you.’
‘Sure.’ It would keep her from her phone vigil at home. ‘Call into the office around six.’
Then, very quickly, she rang home to see if there were any messages. It was only fifteen minutes since the last time she’d checked, but you never know.
Or maybe you do, because no one had phoned.
At quarter past six, Dylan caused a mild stir when, blond hair flopping into his eyes, he showed up in a well-cut linen suit and an immaculate white shirt. As he stood at Ashling’s desk, there seemed to be something wrong with him, a lopsidedness as if his shoulder was dislocated.
‘Are you OK?’ Ashling got up, walked around him and found that the reason his whole body was twisted was that he was trying to conceal an HMV bag behind his back.
‘Dylan, I won’t tell that you’ve been buying CDs.’
‘Sorry,’ he shrugged sheepishly. ‘This is what comes of working in the wilds of Sandyford. Whenever I come into town, I go berserk in music shops. The guilt kinda gets to me.’
‘Your secret is safe with me.’
‘New jacket?’ Dylan asked, as Ashling switched off things.
‘Actually, yes.’
‘Let me see.’
Insisting that she stood still, he ran a glance along her shoulders, nodded and said, ‘Yeah.’ Ashling tried, in vain, to suck in her waist, as he skimmed a look down the side-seams, nodded and said, ‘Yeah’ again, even more approvingly, then looked up. ‘Suits you,’ he finished with a smile. ‘Really suits you.’
‘You’re nothing but a rogue.’ Ashling’s pleasure had mounted while the examination continued. Dylan was always outrageously lavish with compliments. Yet despite knowing that he flung them around like snuff at a wake, it was hard not to half-believe him, harder still not to glow with delight. ‘You’re dangerous,’ she radiated.
‘Come on.’ She turned to go and saw that Jack Devine was nearby, moodily flicking through a file on Bernard’s desk. She smiled a nervous goodbye and for an alarming second thought he was going to ignore her. Then he exhaled heavily and said, ‘Goodnight, Ashling.’
*
Lisa had been in the ladies’ refreshing her make-up in honour of that evening’s outing with a famous Irish chef whom she hoped to convince to do regular cookery features. As she hurried back into the office to get her jacket, she rounded the door too quickly and smacked into a blond man she hadn’t seen before. She bumped her shoulder against his chest, and felt, briefly, the heat coming through his thin shirt.
‘Sorry.’ He placed his big hands on her shoulders. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I think so.’ As she straightened herself up, they took a long, keen look at each other. Then she saw Ashling at his side. Was he her boyfriend? No, surely not.
‘Who was that?’ Dylan asked, when the lift doors had closed behind them.
‘You’re a happily married man,’ Ashling reminded him.
‘I only asked.’
‘Her name is Lisa Edwards, she’s my boss.’ But Ashling was reminded of the conversation she’d had with Clodagh about all the conferences Dylan attended. Is he faithful to her? Quickly she asked, ‘Where’ll we go for this drink?’
He took her to the Shelbourne, which was thronged with post-work revellers.
‘We’ll have to stand,’ said Ashling. ‘We’ll never get a seat.’
‘Never say never,’ Dylan twinkled. ‘Hold on.’
Next thing he’d swooped down on a tableful of people, had a quick,
smiley chat, then returned to Ashling. ‘Come on, they’re leaving.’
‘Since when? What did you say to them?’
‘Nothing! I just noticed they were nearly finished.’
‘Hmmm.’ Dylan was so charmingly persuasive, he could sell salt to Siberia.
‘Hop in there, Ashling – bye, thanks very much.’ All smiles, he bid farewell to the table donators. Then, with suspicious speed, he tussled through the masses at the bar and returned with drinks. Good things had a habit of just happening to Dylan, and as he placed her gin-and-tonic in front of her, Ashling wondered, as she occasionally did, what it must be like to be married to him. Utter bliss, she suspected.
‘Tell me everything, everything, about this great new job,’ Dylan ordered, energetically. ‘I want to know all about it.’
Ashling was swept along on his contagious enthusiasm. Thoroughly enjoying herself, she outlined all the different personalities at Colleen and how they interacted – or didn’t, as the case may be – with each other.
Dylan laughed a lot, seemingly genuinely entertained, and Ashling half-fell into the trap of thinking she was a great raconteur. This was all part of the same carry-on as when Dylan had admired her new jacket – his great gift was making people feel good about themselves. He couldn’t help it. Not that it was insincere, Ashling knew. Just a little over-the-top. She shouldn’t make the mistake of telling the same lame-brain stories to other people and expecting similar gales of laughter.
‘Christ, you’re funny.’ He clinked his glass against hers in a toast of praise. His flirtatious manner always implied more than he was prepared to deliver. Not that Ashling took it seriously. At least, not any more.
‘So how’s the computer business?’ she eventually asked.
‘Christ! Insanely busy! We can’t fill orders fast enough.’
‘Wow!’ Ashling shook her head in wonder. ‘When I first met you you weren’t sure if the company would survive the first year. Look at you now!’
The mood hiccupped slightly, almost inpalpably, over the mention of the time they’d first met. But, as luck would have it, they had nearly finished their drinks, so Ashling jumped up. ‘Same again?’
‘Sit down, I’ll get them.’
‘Not at all, I’ll –’
‘Sit down, Ashling, I insist.’
That was another thing about Dylan. He was effortlessly, stylishly generous.
When he returned with the drinks, Ashling asked curiously, ‘So was there a special reason you wanted to meet me…?’
‘Yeeaaahhh,’ Dylan drawled, fiddling with a beermat. ‘Yeah, there was.’ Suddenly he wasn’t at all comfortable, and this in itself was cause for alarm. ‘You haven’t noticed…anything…?’ He stopped and didn’t go on.
‘Anything?’
‘About Clodagh.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘I’m…’ Big, long pause. ‘… kind of worried about her. She never seems happy, she’s often snappy with the children and sometimes even… slightly irrational. Molly accused Clodagh of slapping her and we’ve never slapped the kids.’
Another uncomfortable gap, before Dylan continued. ‘This is probably going to sound stupid, but she’s always doing the house up. No sooner are we finished one room than she’s talking about redoing another. And trying to talk to her about any of this is getting me nowhere. I was wondering… I thought that maybe she might be depressed.’
Ashling considered. Now that she thought about it, Clodagh had seemed dissatisfied and quite difficult lately. She did seem to be doing an excess of decorating. And telling Molly that Barney was dead had struck Ashling as weird. Shocking, even. Although Clodagh’s defence that she had feelings too had seemed reasonable. But now, in the context of Dylan’s concern, it instantly flipped over into being ominous again.
‘I don’t know. Maybe,’ Ashling said, deep in thought. ‘But it’s tough with kids. Very demanding. And if you’re having to work long hours…’
Dylan leant forward, listening intently to Ashling as though her words could be held or collected. But when she trailed away into abject silence, he said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying this – but I thought that you might know some of the signs. Because of your mother…
‘Your mother?’ he prompted, when Ashling remained mute. ‘She had depression, didn’t she?’
Dylan’s gentleness wasn’t enough to cajole Ashling to speak.
‘And I thought Clodagh might be the same…?’
Suddenly Ashling was back there, mired in the craziness, the bewilderment, the ever-present terror. Her ears rang with long-ago yelling and screaming and her mouth muscles were unresponsive with the desire not to talk about it. Firmly, almost aggressively, she said, ‘Clodagh is nothing like my mother was.’
‘No?’ Dylan’s hope was laced with prurient curiosity.
‘Decorating the front-room isn’t depression. Well, at least it’s not depression as I know it. She’s not refusing to get out of bed? Or wishing she was dead, is she?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Not at all. Nothing like that.’
Although her mother hadn’t started off that way. It had been gradual, hadn’t it? Against her will, Ashling lapsed into the past and she became nine years old again, the age she’d been when she’d first realized that something wasn’t quite right. They’d been on their holidays in Kerry when her dad commented on a glorious sunset. ‘A beautiful end to a beautiful day. Isn’t it, Monica?’
Staring straight ahead, Monica had said heavily, ‘Thank God the sun is setting. I want today to be over.’
‘But today was glorious,’ Mike challenged. ‘The sun shone, we played on the beach…’
All Monica said was, ‘I’m ready for today to be over.’
Ashling had paused from fighting with Janet and Owen, feeling excluded and unsettled. Parents weren’t supposed to have feelings, not those sort, anyway. They could complain when you didn’t do your homework or eat your dinner, but they weren’t allowed to have their own private unhappinesses.
At the end of their two weeks away, they came home, and it seemed like one minute her mum was young, pretty and happy, the next she was silent, sunken and had stopped colouring her hair. And she cried. Constantly, silently, just letting tears pour down her face.
‘What’s wrong?’ Mike asked, again and again. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘What’s wrong, Mum?’ Ashling asked. ‘Have you a pain in your tummy?’
‘I’ve a pain in my soul,’ she whispered.
‘Take two Junior Disprins.’ Ashling parroted what her mother said to her when she had a pain somewhere.
Other people’s disasters set Monica off. Three solid days were spent crying about a famine in Africa. But when Ashling came home with the joyous news, gleaned from Clodagh’s mother, that ‘they’re sending in food’, Monica had moved on and was now weeping for a baby boy who’d been found in a cardboard box. ‘That poor child,’ she convulsed. ‘That poor, defenceless child.’
While her mother cried, her dad smiled enough for the two of them. Smiled hard. Smiled always. He had a busy and important job. That’s what everyone said to Ashling – ‘Your daddy has a very busy and important job.’ He was a salesman and he made his journeys, from Limerick to Cork, from Cavan to Donegal, sound like the adventures of the Fianna. So busy and important was he that he was often away from Monday to Friday. Ashling was proud of this. Everyone else’s dad came home at half past five every evening, and she couldn’t help scornfully feeling that their jobs mustn’t count for much.
Then her dad came home at the weekends and smiled and smiled and smiled.
‘What’ll we do today?’ He’d clap his hands together and beam around at his family.
‘What do I care?’ Monica mumbled. ‘I’m dying inside.’
‘Sure, what would you want to do a stupid thing like that for?’ he joshed.
Turning to Ashling, he smiled and said, as if sharing a secret, ‘Your mother’s artistic’
H
er mother had always written poetry. She’d even had a poem published in an anthology when Ashling was a baby, and since the crying and strangeness had begun, she’d written a lot more. Ashling knew about poems. They were pretty rhyming words about sunsets and flowers, usually daffodils. But when, at Clodagh’s giggling instigation, they sneaked a look at some of Monica’s poems, Ashling was shocked raw by them. Through the haze of distress there was one thing she was violently grateful for – that Clodagh couldn’t really read.
The poems didn’t rhyme, the verse lengths were all wrong, but it was the individual words that were the greatest cause for concern. There were no flowers in Monica Kennedy’s poems. Instead there were strange, brutal terms that Ashling spent a long time deciphering.
Stitched into silence,
my blood is black.
I am broken glass,
I am rusting blades,
I am the punishment and the crime.
Back in the present, Ashling found Dylan watching her with anxious interest. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked.
She nodded assent.
‘For a minute I thought we’d lost you there.’
‘I’m fine,’ Ashling insisted. ‘Clodagh hasn’t started writing poetry, has she?’ She made herself smile as she asked.
‘Clodagh! The very thought.’ Dylan quietly chuckled, as if realizing how silly he’d been. ‘So if she starts writing poems, then I should be worried?’
‘But until then, don’t bother. She’s probably just tired and needs a break. Can’t you do something nice? Cheer her up by going on a holiday or something?’ Another one, she thought bitchily. She felt a vague resentment that Dylan was asking her for advice on how to make Clodagh’s life even nicer.
‘I can’t take any time off at the moment,’ Dylan said.
‘Well, go out for a fancy-shmancy dinner then.’
‘Clodagh’s worried about the babysitters.’
‘Why, what’s wrong with them?’
Dylan laughed, slightly embarrassed. ‘She’s afraid that they might be child-abusers. Or that they might hit the kids. To be honest I sometimes worry too.’