‘When are you meeting him?’ Ashling asked.
‘Next week some time.’
‘Is that so? Well, I’m going out with him on Monday night… That’s sooner,’ she added, just in case Lisa hadn’t noticed.
She and Lisa locked into a tense, truculent scowl.
‘So I win!’ Ashling didn’t know what had come over her.
Startled, Lisa glowered at Ashling, at her meek face doing its best to be confrontational. She’d been bested. And to her surprise, she thought it was funny. She began to laugh. ‘Good for you,’ she chortled.
It took Ashling a moment to swing with the change of mood, then she too started laughing. They were both being ridiculous!
‘God, Lisa, it’s not even as if we want the same thing from him,’ Ashling was briefly brave enough to say. ‘Why are you bothered?’
‘Dunno.’ Lisa indicated ignorance with a downward moue. ‘I suppose a girl’s got to have a hobby.’
28
The offices of Randolph Media buzzed with an end-of-term mood. It was the Friday of the June bank-holiday weekend (which had thrown Lisa entirely because in England the bank holiday had been the previous weekend), coupled with the news about the L’Oréal ads, coupled with the fact that Jack Devine was elsewhere, coupled with the arrival of a crate of champagne which was meant to be a reader-competition prize. (‘What area of France does champagne come from? Answers on a postcard to… First one out of the hat wins twelve of the best…’)
Lisa looked at the champagne, looked at her watch – quarter to four – and looked at her staff. They’d worked so hard over the past three weeks and Colleen was actually shaping up to be not a total disaster. She’d just remembered how important it was to keep morale up amongst the workers. Well actually, if she was honest, she had to admit that she was in the mood for a drink and suspected she might have a mutiny on her hands if she poured one just for herself.
Theatrically, she cleared her throat. ‘Ahem,’ she said gaily, ‘would anyone care for a glass of champagne?’ Meaningfully, she inclined her glossy head at the crate, and it was the work of a moment for everyone to realize what she was getting at.
‘But what about the reader competition?’ Ashling asked anxiously.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Trix hissed, then turned to Lisa. ‘That would be the business, Lisa,’ she toadied, loudly. ‘We can celebrate you getting that loads-a-money ad from L’Oréal.’
No second bidding was needed. The words, ‘Lisa says we can drink the reader-competition champagne, Lisa says we can drink the reader-competition champagne,’ blew like a whispering breeze across the office. Tools were downed and demeanours relaxed. Even Mercedes looked cheerful.
‘But we don’t have any glasses.’ Lisa was suddenly anxious.
‘No problem.’ Before Lisa changed her mind, Trix was already ferrying a trayful of dirty coffee-cups to the ladies’. The first time in six months that she’d done the washing-up. She was back in double-quick time and it didn’t matter a damn that she hadn’t rinsed the mugs properly because any excess of foaming could be attributed to the champagne.
‘It’s not terribly chilled, I’m afraid,’ Lisa said graciously, putting a chipped ‘Windsurfers do it standing up’ mug full of frothing champers into Kelvin’s beringed hands.
‘Who gives a fiddler’s!’ Kelvin enthused, delighted to be included, despite not working on Colleen.
The small clump of clerical staff waited anxiously in their corner to see if they were getting any. Huge sighs of relief all round when Lisa popped the cork on a second bottle and arrived bearing mugs emblazoned with the respective legends ‘I can’t believe it’s not butter’, ‘Kia-Ora, I’ll be your dawg’ and two ‘Does exactly what it says on the tin’s.
‘Your good health, Mrs Morley.’ Lisa gave ‘I can’t believe it’s not butter’ to Jack’s over-protective PA.
‘Cheers,’ Mrs Morley muttered suspiciously.
When everyone had a mug, Lisa raised hers and said, ‘To all of you. Well done for all your hard work over the past three weeks.’
Ashling and Mercedes exchanged a moment’s incredulity. You’d swear Lisa was drunk already. Everyone then drank deeply, except for Trix. But only because she’d already finished hers. And it didn’t take the others long to catch her up. Silence stretched, as everyone’s eyes flickered between the foam at the bottom of their empty mugs (which continued to crackle and fizz in a strange radioactive fashion) and the ten remaining bottles.
Lisa shattered the silence. ‘Shall we open another?’ she asked innocently, as if it had just occurred to her.
‘We could, I s’pose.’ Trix did a good imitation of not caring either way.
‘Sure, why wouldn’t we?’ One mugful had considerably softened Mrs Morley.
But as Lisa was unwinding the wire helmet, the office door opened and everyone tensed. Fuck!
There was a good chance that Jack would go mental if he caught them slugging reader-competition champagne during office hours.
But it wasn’t Jack, it was Mai. Her heels were enormous and her hips were tiny. But not as small as her waist. Ashling was queasy with envy and admiration.
Mai seemed rather taken aback by the complete silence in the office and the way everyone was staring guiltily at her. ‘Is Jack in?’
The silence endured.
‘No,’ Mrs Morley mumbled, wiping her mouth in case she had a champagne moustache. ‘He’s gone to put manners on the people at the television studio.’ Then she triumphantly folded her arms, her demeanour implying that, really, it was Mai who Jack should be putting the manners on.
‘Oh.’ Mai’s plump mouth was pouty with disappointment. She twirled to go, her wall of silken hair swishing with voluptuous weight.
‘You can wait if you like,’ Ashling found herself saying.
Mai swung back. ‘Would that be allowed?’
‘Sure! In fact, why don’t you have a drink?’ As soon as she’d said it, Ashling braced herself for the wrath of Lisa. Bad move to invite their boss’s girlfriend to join in with their lead-swinging. Ashling suspected she was perhaps a little tipsy.
But instead of being furious, Lisa agreed, ‘Yeah, have a drink.’
The thing was, Lisa was as curious as everyone else about Mai. More, probably, all things considered.
‘Cheers.’ As Mai accepted a mug from Lisa, Ashling said hospitably, ‘Come over to my desk and pull up a chair.’
Trix and Lisa also gravitated immediately to Ashling’s desk, reeled in by avid interest in the exotic Mai.
‘I like your bag,’ Lisa said to Mai. ‘Lulu Guinness?’
Mai gave a surprisingly raucous bark of laughter. ‘Dunnes.’
‘Dunnes?’
‘A chain store,’ Ashling explained, with red-cheeked earnestness. ‘Like Marks & Spencer.’
‘Only cheaper,’ Mai added, with another snigger. Despite her lotus-blossom face she suddenly seemed very ordinary.
As Lisa circulated, topping up mugs, Mai said, with sly humour, ‘This is a great place to work, do you do this every day?’
There followed a burst of slightly hysterical laughter. ‘Every day? Not at all! Not at all! Special occasions, bank holidays, that kind of thing.’
‘You won’t tell Jack on us, will you?’ Trix asked.
Mai flickered her eyes in caustic scorn. ‘As if!’
‘Where do you work? What, um, what do you do?’ Trix dared to ask.
Mai tossed her heavy hair, her tilted eyes were all-knowing and instantly she’d become an inscrutable, mysterious babe again. ‘I’m an exotic dancer.’
This plunged the office into a short, nonplussed silence, before everyone rallied in ultra-blasé fashion. ‘Isn’t that lovely?’ they chorused stoutly. ‘Good girl yourself.’
‘Aren’t we having great weather for it?’ Boring Bernard got it wrong, as usual.
‘Good for you,’ Lisa managed. She bet that Jack and Mai had great sex and she flared with bilious jealousy.
&nbs
p; ‘What’s an exotic dancer?’ Mrs Morley muttered to Kelvin.
‘I believe it involves some, er, nudiness,’ he whispered tactfully, mindful of her elderly sensibilities.
‘Oh, so she’s a lap-dancer. She must be minting it.’ Mrs Morley studied Mai with something suddenly akin to respect.
‘No, I’m fecking not an exotic dancer,’ Mai said scornfully, flipping back to being ordinary. ‘I’m joking. I work flogging mobile phones but because of the way I look people expect me to be some sort of sex kitten.’
‘Isn’t that desperate altogether?’ another enthusiastic chorus kicked off. ‘Fierce! Aren’t people awful eejits?’
‘Have I got this right, she’s not a lap dancer?’ Mrs Morley discreetly enquired of Kelvin, who shook his peroxide head. It was hard to tell who was more disappointed.
‘It’s dreadful tereostyping,’ Ashling complained. I’m twisted, she realized.
‘It is,’ Mai complained, fuelled by her second mug of washing-up liquid and champagne. ‘I was born and brought up in Dublin, my father is Irish, but because my mother is Asian, men treat me like I’ll know all these special Oriental tricks in the scratcher. Ping-pong balls and the like. Or else they’re shouting, “Egg-flied lice” after me in the street.’ She sighed heavily. ‘Either way, it gets me down.’
She flicked a look around at Kelvin and Gerry who were watching her lasciviously, then huddled nearer to Ashling, Lisa and Trix and said candidly, ‘That’s not to say that I’d never try the ping-pong balls. Of course I’d lay on something special if I really fancied the guy.’
Like Jack, do you mean? Everyone wanted to ask. But no one had the nerve. Not even Trix. But as the number of full bottles continued to diminish and the empties mounted up, tongues loosened.
‘What age are you?’ Trix asked.
‘Twenty-nine.’
‘And how long have you been going with Jack?’
‘Nearly six months.’
‘He’s terrible cranky sometimes,’ Trix admitted.
‘Who are you telling! Since the business of Colleen started, he’s been in a fouler. He works too hard and worries too much, then he goes sailing to unwind and I never get to see him. I blame you lot for his bad mood!’
‘That’s funny!’ Trix exclaimed. ‘Because we blame you.’
At that, Mai began shifting and wriggling in her seat.
‘Sorry, are we embarrassing you? We’ll shut up,’ Ashling interjected. But with disappointment. She was finding this fascinating.
‘No, it’s OK,’ Mai grinned, still wriggling. ‘Knickers up my bum, drives me mad.’
She was so pretty and fresh and brazen that Lisa swallowed. She was sure she hadn’t imagined Jack’s interest in her, but she could see how he’d find Mai alluring.
By the time Jack returned, everyone had kicked back to such an extent that they didn’t even bother to hide it.
‘Having fun?’ he half-smiled.
‘’sabankoliday,’ glared Mrs Morley, an infrequent tippler, who in the last hour and a half had passed through suspicion, mellowness, marvellous well-being, maudlin regret, and had now arrived, as expected, at aggression.
‘Certainly is,’ he agreed.
‘Hello, Jack.’ Mai gave a shark’s smile. ‘I was passing and I thought I’d come in to say hello.’
Jack looked embarrassed.
Mai followed him into his office and closed the door very firmly.
When Trix put her mug up against the door, then put her ear to it, everyone laughed. But no mug was needed. Mai’s voice, high-pitched and berating, carried to the furthest desks. ‘How dare you ignore me when I visit you… If you think I’m going to put up with…’
Nothing at all could be heard from Jack, but he must have been saying something because there were pauses between Mai’s accusatory bursts.
‘Keep all the exits clear,’ Kelvin said, like an air-hostess.
And sooner rather than later, Jack’s door opened, Mai emerged, blazed a furious trail to the door and then she was gone, leaving the air humming with her absence. She hadn’t said goodbye to anyone.
‘Now that the floorshow is over, I’m going,’ Kelvin announced, swinging his inflatable orange rucksack on to his back. ‘I’ve seventy-two hours of Class As ahead of me.’
‘Me too,’ Trix said.
‘Me three,’ Boring Bernard agreed, once more grasping the wrong end of the stick.
Everyone packed up and sloped off, until the only people left were Jack and Ashling. Jack because he was waiting for a call from New York, and Ashling because she was meeting Joy at half six and didn’t think there was any point going home. While she waited, she kept working because she was in the process of setting up a database for Lisa, and had fallen very behind because of the earlier impromptu drinking session.
‘Leave it, Miss Fix-it,’ Jack groused. ‘It’s a bank holiday. Anyway you’re jarred, you’ll just have to do it all again on Tuesday.’
‘You’re right.’ Ashling was just sober enough to know that she was drunk. ‘I’m making a pig’s mickey of it.’
‘Go home,’ he ordered.
It was nearly half six anyway. Fuzzily she picked up her bag, then asked tentatively, ‘Doing anything nice for the long weekend, JD?’ Only because she had a drop taken.
‘JD?’ Jack enquired, curiously.
‘I mean, Jack, Mr Devine, whatever.’ Ashling was embarrassed to have let slip her own private nickname for him. ‘Doing anything nice?’
Jack was surly. ‘Don’t know. I’ll visit my parents on Sunday. The rest depends on the weather. If I can’t go sailing, I’ll just bunker down and watch Star Trek videos.’
‘Star Trek? Well, er, “Live long and prosper,”’ Ashling encouraged, trying to do the Vulcan split-finger salute.
Jack stared at her narkily. ‘Illogical, Captain Fix-it. I won’t be doing any prospering this weekend.’
‘Why not?’
With sudden embarrassment, he admitted, ‘It can’t have escaped your notice that my girlfriend is in a strop.’
Ashling couldn’t help it. The words were out before she knew it. The drink talking. ‘Why do you always fight with her? She’s lovely. Can’t you make a bit more of an effort? She says she never sees you because you’re always out sailing. Perhaps if you went less often… ?’
She realized she’d way overstepped the mark and waited for the wrath of Jack, but instead he laughed, albeit unpleasantly.
Too late Ashling remembered that there were two sides to every story. ‘Isn’t it true?’
Jack paused. ‘Far be it for me to bitch about someone who isn’t here to defend themselves.’
‘So you don’t go sailing?’
‘I do.’
‘But…’ Then Ashling thought that perhaps she understood. ‘Does she say it’s OK for you to go, then get cross afterwards?’
After a hiatus, Jack admitted reluctantly, ‘Something like that.’
‘But you see,’ Ashling explained, ‘even though she says it’s OK to go, she doesn’t mean it. Go on, talk to her, be nice.’ Her eyes lit up. Problem solved.
‘Little Miss Fix-it,’ Jack shook his head indulgently, ‘why do you have to make everything all right for everyone?’
‘But I’m only…’
‘Little Miss Fix-it,’ he repeated, amused. ‘I’ll think about it. And how about you – are you going away for the weekend?’
‘No.’ Ashling was shy as soon as the spotlight was trained on her. ‘I’ll just see my friends and stuff…’ Go out with Marcus Valentine, hopefully, but she wasn’t telling Jack that.
‘Have a good one,’ he said.
As Ashling headed for the door, Jack, suddenly curious, called after her, ‘Hey! Miss Fix-it! Do you ever watch Star Trek videos?’
Ashling looked over her shoulder and shook her head. ‘No.’
‘I suppose not,’ he said.
‘I’ve nothing against them.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ Jack muttered.<
br />
‘But I’m more of a Doctor Who girl, myself.’
29
On Saturday evening, at a quarter to seven, Ashling and Ted arrived on Ted’s bike for babysitting duties chez Dylan and Clodagh.
‘They own this?’ Ted took in the double-fronted red-brick house.
‘Fantastic, isn’t it?’ Ashling stood on the doorstep and rang the bell.
‘We won’t have to change nappies, will we?’ Ted asked, suddenly stricken.
‘No, they’re too old for that. We’ll just have to play with them, amuse them.’
‘Well, that should be easy enough.’ Ted cleared his throat and self-consciously smoothed back a lock of his hair. ‘Ted Mullins, funniest man in Dublin, reporting for duty, sir!’
‘They might be a bit young for post-modern, ironic stand-up.’ Ashling’s heart sank. ‘I’d say the Three Little Pigs would be more their cup of Ribena.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ Ted corrected. ‘People underestimate children’s intelligence. Will I ring the bell again?’
It took a while before the door was answered. Dylan arrived, his arms soapy, his T-shirt wet and sticking to his chest.
‘How’s it going?’ He seemed distracted. Then Ashling and Ted noticed the echoey howls and bawls coming from upstairs.
‘I’m bathing Craig,’ Dylan explained.
‘He doesn’t seem happy.’
‘The worst is yet to come. I still have to rinse his hair.’ Dylan winced. ‘It’ll sound like he’s being burnt alive, but don’t be alarmed… I’d better get back.’ He was halfway up the stairs. ‘Clodagh’s in the kitchen.’
Clodagh was at the table desperately trying to persuade Molly to eat something. Anything that wasn’t a biscuit, crisp or sweet. In the last couple of weeks, Molly had gone on hunger-strike, just for the hell of it.
Ashling passed Clodagh a folder containing ten copies of her CV.
‘What’s thi—? Oh right, thanks.’ In a fluid motion, Clodagh stuffed the folder beneath a pile of children’s books strewn on the table.
‘Aren’t you going to get ready?’ Ashling took in Clodagh’s jeans and T-shirt. ‘Your taxi will be here soon.’