2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie (5 page)

“Where are you now?” he snaps.

“On the motorway.”

He scrambles on to his feet.

“Is it a problem, Ronan?”

I smile crazily at Sylvana.

Now Nicole gets up like lightning. Her book falls to the ground. How inconsiderate of me, disturbing her pleasant afternoon read. She stuffs my towel into the yellow bag, arches her slender arms one by one and pokes them through a yellow T-shirt, a brief visual experience which aggravates me intensely.

“Where exactly are you?”

“We’ve just entered the western suburbs.”

He puts his hand over his mobile and says something to Nicole. She starts moving towards the wooden gate. Ronan tells me to hold on a minute, kneels down quickly and stuffs something into a bag. Presumably he is calculating that it will take me a minimum of one hour to get home, taking into account rush-hour traffic. He slips into a mustard-coloured T-shirt, then follows Nicole towards the gate, apparently deep in concentration, mobile phone to his ear. Sylvana and I pull back further round the bend as they approach.

“Aren’t you thrilled, Ronan? Now we can have a few extra nights together.”

“Yes, it’s wonderful,” he says.

He has caught up with Nicole now. Alongside him, she is almost as tall as he. She has a relaxed, graceful way of walking, though she tilts her head downwards. I wish she’d take off her shades. With shades off, you can measure the more abstract qualities such as intelligence and personality, if she has any.

They pass through the gate and head towards the car park.

“Look, Julie,” comes his voice again, “why don’t we have dinner in town together? Say, La Boheme’s? We haven’t done that for a while. You can park your car in town overnight and I’ll drive both of us home in my Porsche.”

Pause.

“In your Porsche?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think that would be quite…feasible.”

He insists that it would be quite feasible.

I tell him it’s a sweet thought but I’m a bit tired. He insists, so for the hell of it I promise to meet him at La Boheme’s at six o’clock.

We say goodbye.

We both stalk them along the narrow pathway to the front of the block. They disappear through the main entrance and I make a beeline through the car park towards my green MG.

Sylvana: “Where are you going?”

She’s panting behind me. Sylvana was never the fittest.

“Never mind.”

“They’ve gone up to your apartment, Julie.”

“You don’t say.”

She starts pleading with me now. To follow them upstairs on a seriously fun slash-and-burn jungle trip.

“No, Sylvana.”

“Julie, you must confront them. You’re not thinking straight.”

Oh yes I am thinking straight.

I’m thinking: Nicole’s address on the back of my hand. Cherbury Court, Sandymount, by the sea. I’m thinking: someone’s house is about to get added to the trash list. I’m thinking: ice-pick. There’s one in the picnic hamper in the boot of my car.

You can’t get much straighter than an ice-pick.

When I get to my car I check to see if it’s still there.

It’s still there.

I circumvent a frowning Sylvana and get into the driving seat.

“Julie, where are you going?”

“See you later.”

She looks flabbergasted. “Julie, they’ll be gone when you get back. Now’s your chance!”

“They’re not going anywhere, Sylvana. Believe me.”

Fifteen seconds later I’m doing ninety down the coast road towards Cherbury Court.

I
’d be lying if I told you tears weren’t streaming down my face, melting deep ravines through my make-up.

But frankly, darling, who
gives
a shit.

I’m numb. Numb drunk. Dizzy. Reality is making strange shapes. Houses are pulling ugly faces at me. I swear that bent green postbox just gave me the finger. And I think that tree stuck out its tongue at me. I’m whizzing past out-of-focus telephone boxes and blurred parked cars and elastic garden walls. Shoe-shaped machines of varying colours are coming at me at various speeds.

Quite possibly, of course, I am hallucinating.

I slow down to seventy – not bad for a residential area.

And suddenly, from nowhere, I am seized by an image of Ronan and Judy the daughter we were going to have, our wonderful new family. I can see Judy walking between us, a lovely tiny person, giggling, holding our hands.

My eyes fill with a fresh wash of tears.

What did I do wrong?

Is it the sex?

The personality? Am I too boring? Smothering?

Do I annoy him? Slam him down, what with his bragged-up vanity and his lesser intellect?

Has it anything to do with my poor skin?

Or the fact that I’m nearly thirty?

Already I’m whizzing up the motorway through Blackrock. Dangerous driving gets you places quick. I’m doing seventy again. The lights at Blackrock College suddenly turn red. I slam on the brakes and almost scream into the back of this bloke in his forties whose silver 2000D Mercedes has been holding me up for the last half-minute in the outside lane with his pathetic sixty miles an hour.

I have been a naive idiot.

I always thought Ronan was different. I thought we saw the world through the same eyes, breathed the same air, shared the same skin. I thought he was refined. Honourable. Trustworthy.

I remember the first time I met him.

It was at a party. Sylvana and I had gone there with the express intention of getting laid – or so we said. I was twenty-six. Not having experienced that great primeval ape-to-ape thing since I’d attended the zoological enclosure frequently referred to as ‘college’, I was, let’s say, moderately hungry for fresh banana. Poor deprived creature that I was in that impoverished five-year interregnum – the most I’d got from a man (apart from the usual insult veiled as casual interest) had been half a night of mouth-to-mouth fornication with one delicious piece of walking beef, followed by an ugly lip sore.

As soon as I set eyes on Ronan the first thing I said was: “Jesus, Sylvana, look at that.”

“I prefer older men,” she replied with disdain.

Next, Ronan appeared with his large brown eyes and serious expression, smart, neat and professional-looking. He spoke to me in that earnest, respectful way of his, although he barely looked at Sylvana, which possibly didn’t get them off to a great start.

Right away I wanted to play apes with him.

The music swirled its warm arms around us as we danced, surrounded by bodies, voices, dimmed lamps, shadows. I loved his lean, handsome designer face and his velvet-smooth sexy voice as he told me of his love for art, for music, for everything French, of his toleration for dentistry.

I was sold. Before falsely imprisoning him in one of the bedrooms upstairs, I flung him a few impressive details from my own curriculum vitae, including my ‘no grade’ in pass maths due in no small part to my original though unautographed doodles of horse-mounted Mexicans toting sombreros on the examination notebook.

To balance the picture a little, I also told him about my three years studying for my law degree, my two years in the King’s Inns imagining what it would be like to be a barrister, followed by my apprenticeship to a Junior Counsel and my scramble for a piece of the rich personal-injuries pie. Within two years, I modestly informed him, I had fought and won so many cases that I could afford to buy a penthouse apartment in Temple Bar where I then resided.

Two hours later, our mouths were locked in mortal combat in the upstairs bedroom on top of two dozen coats, him trying to pull my clothes off and failing, and me trying to pull his clothes off and winning.

With Sylvana standing outside keeping guard.

Little did I know that this small foray was the crucible for marriage one year down the road.

I have managed to overtake the silver Mercedes. I’m so annoyed at him for purposely holding me up on the fast lane that I give him the vigorously-moving-up-and-down hand sign.

I swing to the right across the railway tracks and speed up along the strand road towards Sandymount, maintaining a fairly respectable sixty-eight.

I brought Ronan home to Mother some weeks later. Big mistake. She thought there was something ‘less than fully transparent’ about him. “Is that all?” I wondered.

No, she replied, he was also conceited, opinionated and false. And ‘irresponsible’. Had he not, after all, put his dentistry career on hold while he skipped off to Paris to study aesthetics and the history of art?

From that day on I felt I had to prove something to her. Ronan had turned into a kind of crusade.

We got married. We honeymooned in Paris, city of our dreams. He took me by the hand and led me through yellow streets adorned with ancient jewels; bright, sun-washed boulevards lined with trees and cheered by corner cafes with red awnings; high, dark alleyways with crooked shutters and slanting roofs; the scents of hot bread or
gaufres
or coffee.

We laughed and joked and conversed and planned for our future together in the bustling cafes, the elegant restaurants, the cobbled walkways, the museums and the parks of the city. And in the privacy of our bridal suite we shared the intimate secrets of life and love.

For once in my life I began to believe in something I never thought it possible for me to believe in.

Trust.

Passing the Martello Tower beside the wide expanse of Sandy-mount beach, I take the next left. I drive past Cherbury Court and park in the next street up. Climbing out of the car I immediately lose my balance, lurching over and practically ending up in handstand position. Post-Traumatic Whiskey Disorder.

I open the boot and extract the ice-pick from our picnic box, slide it into my pocket and start walking.

Trust.

Why did I trust Ronan? Simply because I fell in love with him? Because I adored his company? Because I married him? What sort of reasons are those to trust someone?

I squeeze my fingers hard against the sharp tip of the ice-pick. When I feel the pain cutting into me I squeeze even harder. I walk into Cherbury Court. A row of terraced two-storey red-brick houses with front doors painted in luxuriant reds and greens and blues. Narrow strips of garden. Railings in front, well-sheared hedges. Driveways with expensive-looking new cars. Classic middle-class territory.

Unevenly, I walk towards number two. On top of both gateposts are the stone heads of dogs. The narrow gravel driveway is empty. The front garden is neat and lush, enclosed by a clipped hedge and a row of conifers along the front wall. Curved flowerbeds, a small round pond with a fountain in the centre, a pretty bird stand topped by a wooden platform with enough room for, say, two blackbirds to have dinner together.

I approach the front door. On each side stands an evergreen plant in a heavy terracotta pot. Just above the door there hangs a small red octagonal disc with a round mirror in the middle and gold-embossed sign language at the edges. Must be to ward off evil spirits like me.

The front door has a stained-glass panel in the middle, with a picture of a red sailing boat in a blue sea under a yellow sky.

I ring the bell several times.

No one at home.

My fingers clasp the handle of the ice-pick.

Checking first over both my shoulders, I extract the weapon from my pocket and start smashing.

T
he metal blade bounces off the glass like a pencil.

I stop for breath. I smash again, but again it glances off the sailing boat. A quality sailing boat indeed.

There’s no sound from inside. And there’s no suspicious movement from outside. Me apart.

One more blow and the ice-pick goes straight through the middle of the tall red sail. Very functional ice-pick, this. I wait for the alarm to go off. It doesn’t. So I stand on my toes and stick my arm through and open the latch.

The earthenware-tiled hallway at the bottom of the stairs is bright and warm. Just inside the front door is a bright orange curtain and to the right is a small wooden table. On top is a vase containing a two-foot-high jasmine plant. I break it in two like a stick of celery. Hanging on the wall above the table is a pretty watercolour depicting an empty beach with strong waves.

I hack into it, punching a hat-trick of holes into the canvas.

Directly in front of the door is the stairway. On my way into the main room, I hack off a wooden bannister. I pull and pull until it dislodges like a tooth. It falls to the floor. Would make great firewood.

I enter the sitting-room now, close the curtains and start smashing everything in sight. Whole minutes pass.

When I’m done I sit on the lemon-yellow couch, exhausted.

I survey the jungle of devastation around me.

It’s like the aftermath of Gallipoli: there’s a hole in the TV.

The two rhododendrons which flank the TV have been decapitated: large Jurassic leaves lie scattered around the floor. The gold-framed mirror above the mantelpiece is distinguished by impressive Milky Way impressions. The small vase containing one red carnation, which once stood on this same mantelpiece, is nowhere to be seen, although the carnation itself is stuck to the sole of my left shoe. A golden wall light swings from a flex. Silverware and trinkets of all kinds lie strewn about the floor. The stone fireplace is flavoured by the stench of alcohol. Glass fragments sparkle across the room, and over there I spy this most elegant and lovely drinks cabinet. I seem to recall it recently had glass in it.

Anyone would think, looking at all this chaos around me, that I have not been exceptionally well brought-up.

I have – this is the exception.

In one corner I notice two orange porcelain ducks perched all alone on a narrow table. They remain completely untouched. I just didn’t have the heart.

I am now in the process of observing the coffee table. Humiliated and glassless, it is lying on the floor alongside a scattering of magazines and books:
Cosmopolitan, Time, House and Home, Aromatherapy Journal, Amateur Gardening, DIY Home Repair Manual, Woodworker
.