A Few of the Girls (11 page)

She remembered counting the hours after she had said good-bye to him in Dublin last week.

Now she was counting the hours until morning when she could tell him that they should see the priest while they were at it. She was going to live here—she might as well get married here.

After all, that's what Maria had done all those years ago, and she had never known a day's regret.

It was amazing how quickly “Fiona's Phone-In” took off. Fiona was very different from any of the others. She wasn't concerned with issues and welfare and lifestyles like Marian and Gay and Pat and Derek and Des. Fiona specialized in one thing: her forte was getting people out of whatever ludicrous trouble they had got themselves into.

If you had invited your future mother-in-law to afternoon tea and you had no idea what to serve, a listener would come to the rescue and advise.

To make her phone-in on her part of the
Afternoon Talk Show
exciting, there had to be an element of urgency about it. The mother-in-law had to be coming today, the boss and his wife tonight, or the drunk you had agreed to go greyhound racing with would have bought the tickets for Shelbourne Park.

Fiona was great at communicating the lurking danger.
Unless someone phones in now, this poor person is up the creek!
And, from all over Ireland, people began to phone their advice, showing the country to be utterly devious and cunning and able to get out of almost any situation, no matter how terrifying.

For a radio personality, Fiona kept a very low profile. You never saw pictures of her at art exhibitions or theater first nights. She never opened supermarkets or presented prizes at schools, and nobody ever remembered seeing her in a fashionable restaurant or a country hotel. A small picture appeared from time to time in the RTÉ Guide. She had a lot of curly—well, frizzy—hair and wore huge glasses. It was impossible to guess her age. No papers ever said whether she was married or single. Fiona was one thing and one thing only: the frenetic excitement and drama of her own program.

She sounded anguished about the problems that came her way twice a week. This boy who had intercepted his school report because he knew it would be bad. Now his parents were going to the school tonight to check. What should he do? There were only a couple of hours left before he had to act.

This girl who had told her friends she knew all about boats had been invited out on a yacht this weekend. There were only two days for her to become an expert.

And people rang in inviting the would-be yachtswoman out on their boats or getting the report stealer to repost the envelope and it would be delivered eventually.

Fiona's ratings were high. The station considered putting the program out more frequently but Fiona said there would be a danger it would falter and flag, better to leave them wanting more.

If you asked anyone in RTÉ about Fiona they were always a bit vague. She was a freelance they said, she was always rushing in and out. No, she didn't sit in the canteen much, or indeed ever. Did she drive a car? Well, it was hard to say; no one had seen her driving one or riding a bike. Most people found it hard to remember her second name. And still the program went from strength to strength.

A woman who was afraid to go into her house because she thought that there might be intruders inside rang Fiona. She said she didn't want to bother the Gardai in case it was a false alarm. In minutes she had a posse of people to escort her, and it turned out that there
were
burglars inside, who were caught red-handed.

There was a lot about Fiona and her program in the papers on that occasion, but her only quote was to say that it was further proof that it was the listeners who made it all such a success.

Rory had always been very interested in Fiona and her program, as he had been one of her very first callers. His ex-wife had suddenly decided to let him have their nine-year-old daughter for the whole weekend. She would be arriving in two hours. Having only been able to see the little girl for three hours on a Saturday up to now he had no idea what a nine-year-old girl would want for a whole weekend. The airwaves were swamped with advice, all of it marvelous.

His daughter, Katie, had an unforgettable weekend, and even been invited to two children's parties. It had formed the basis of all her future visits to him. He had written to thank Fiona and got a businesslike little postcard in return.

He listened to her phone-in regularly and twice he was able to help people who called in. He minded a cat for a weekend for an old woman who wouldn't have gone away to a wedding otherwise, and he had faxed clear instructions on how to program a video for someone who needed desperately to set the timer and couldn't manage it.

Rory had always hoped that Fiona would remember him when he called in, that she would say, “You're the man with the nine-year-old girl! How good of you to come back to us.” He even fantasized that she might ring him and suggest they meet for a meal so that she could say a proper thank-you. He would be wonderful and lively and restless, and the meal would be interrupted from time to time with calls on her mobile phone and requests from other tables and waiters asking for her autograph.

In his dreams she would wear a black dress and a simple gold chain. Her frizzy hair would stand like a halo around her head and she would take off her glasses, showing big dark pools of eyes.

But Fiona never thanked him personally. At the end of her program she thanked all the good, kind people out there who proved that we were really all one big community ready to help each other if given the opportunity. And then, breathlessly, she would say good-bye, rushing her words at the end to be finished before the time signal and the next program started.

Rory envied her so much—busy, active, caring, rushed off her feet.

Wasn't it amazing that some people had those kinds of lives while people like him had hardly any life at all?

Perhaps it was just as well that he would never meet Fiona. She would scorn him as his wife, Helen, had eventually scorned him. A man without passions, without interest, without any sense of living, that's what she said he was when she left with their daughter, Katie.

“Why did you marry me, if I am all those things?” Rory had asked.

“Because I didn't know you were like that, I thought you were just quiet.”

Helen had thought there were depths there, depths that apparently didn't exist.

Rory was philosophical about this; it was probably true. He didn't support any causes, he was on no committees, he had never carried a placard, he didn't always vote at elections, he was not a member of a trade union. He read a little, watched some television; he cooked simple meals like lamb chops or else bought convenience foods. Rory thought of himself as Mr. Average.

Friends had introduced him to other women since Helen had left. But somehow he never followed anything up. He thought that people might describe him as perfectly pleasant. Which was fairly damning these days. It was funny that he could not get Fiona and her phone-in show out of his mind. He would love to do something to impress her, something where she would have to take notice of him. But he couldn't think of anything. Not anything that didn't need an accomplice.

Like suppose he had a friend…He could say to her that she should pretend to be burning to death in her house and that Rory would run in and save her. There wouldn't need to be a fire at all. And he would be a hero.

But that wouldn't work, even if he could find an accomplice.

Fiona had fleets of people checking that calls were genuine. He would be unmasked at once. Maybe if he could meet her socially and tell her that he had minded the cats and set the video…but they didn't seem very brave things to have done. In fact, they seemed a bit wimpish. Yet he would dearly love to meet her. He might get some more life in him just by talking to her, some sense of purpose, a share in her electricity.

It was perfectly possible that he could meet her. This was Ireland, not New York; he could say hello to any celebrity in Grafton Street, thinking he knew her and she had said hello back.

Why shouldn't he meet Fiona of the afternoon phone-in?

Rory worked from nine to five so he couldn't lurk outside RTÉ at four-thirty when Fiona's show ended. But his holidays were coming up and Rory had nothing better to do with his time. He had painted Katie's room for her since she now stayed over at least one night a week. He had toured bookshops and even gone to children's book events to know what normal nine-year-olds would like.

He didn't like going off to a hotel for a holiday by himself since he always looked odd, he thought, and if he did approach people he seemed to do it wrong and they thought he was making advances or trying to go home and live with them. He really was a sad sack, Rory admitted to himself. Helen had been right to make her own life without him.

Three days hanging outside the entrance to the radio and television station did him no good. There wasn't a sign of Fiona. He watched the cars, the bicycles and pedestrians come in; he saw a lot of famous faces but nowhere the frizzy hair and big glasses of Fiona, solver of the nation's dramas.

He didn't like to ask the security guards or people at the information desks. They might suspect he was some kind of pervert or nutter. And there was no point in writing to her saying he was a constant listener and would she like to join him for a supper one evening. No, it would have to be an accidental meeting or nothing. But what kinds of places did she go? She sounded as if she must know all sorts of people in every different class and age group. Nothing was alien or difficult to Fiona. She might be having a hamburger or she could be in a big posh restaurant. Was she at the theater or the cinema? At a party with her boyfriend? He didn't think of her as married—a husband had never been mentioned.

But then he began to wonder if he was becoming fixated on her. It was bad enough to be dull and sad and ordinary—he didn't want to end up like something from
Psycho.

He had half his holiday left and he would go around Dublin as if he were from a different place altogether and he might well bump into her somewhere. He went to gyms and leisure centers in the early mornings to ask for brochures. Lots of these broadcasters did workouts, he heard. Maybe he might see her in the foyer or something. He saw a lot of glowing healthy people, but no Fiona.

She might have breakfast in health food places or lunch near Donnybrook. She would be invited to poetry readings or art exhibitions. It wasn't hard to get invited, if you went about it cleverly. Rory had a full week and indeed a happy week, even though he never laid eyes once on Fiona of the
Afternoon Talk Show.

“Are we looking for anyone?” Katie asked him one Saturday afternoon in St. Stephen's Green when her father's eyes roamed all around the place.

“Often I look, Katie,” he said. “I look for someone who will make me more lively and exciting, more interesting than I am.”

“I think you're nice the way you are, Daddy,” his daughter said. “I wouldn't want you different, I feel safe with you.”

That's because she's nine, he thought, when she's fourteen even she'll realize what a shell I am. The visits will be shorter, the impatience very obvious.

Rory was invited to a colleague's wedding. Brian, the bridegroom, sat beside him at work, and he had been through all the highs and lows of the romance with Maureen, the dramas of the courtship, the on-off nature of the engagement. The throwing away and retrieval of the diamond ring. Now the day was almost here.

Normally he would have made an excuse and got out of it, but not on this occasion. He couldn't let Brian down.

“You know, I owe it all to that girl Fiona on the radio,” Brian had said unexpectedly the day before the wedding. Rory blushed as if he had been found out. Fiona was
his
secret—he didn't want her shared with everybody. Not in a personal way.

“Did you phone her show?” He could hardly believe it. Rory thought he was the only one in the office who listened to Fiona on his earpiece.

“No, but my fiancée, Maureen, did. She rang her last week and said she was so nervous of giving up everything, and changing her name and becoming a chattel, all the usual crap, and Fiona was great to her.”