Better Together (4 page)

‘I hate all this,’ said Martyn. ‘It’ll change the paper completely. We’re going to take more stuff from agencies. Paudie O’Malley has media interests in the UK as well as Ireland. He’s an investor in a couple of local papers and radio stations, and I believe he’s diversifying into telecoms too.’

Sheridan couldn’t have cared less about Paudie O’Malley’s business empire. All she cared about was that he’d put her out of work, the capitalist bastard!

‘I’m sure you’ll get something else,’ said Martyn. ‘You’re a good reporter, Sheridan.’

‘Not good enough, obviously.’

‘Look on this as an opportunity,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’ll get something even better. And you can always freelance. I’m sure any editor would love to get stuff from you.’

‘The
City Scope
is one of the best newspapers there is!’ cried Sheridan. ‘Working here
was
my great opportunity. I don’t want to be a freelancer. I want to work for a decent newspaper.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Martyn again.

Sheridan had never cried in front of anyone on the paper before, but she knew she was about to now. So she got up from the chair and hurried quickly to the Ladies’, where
she locked herself in a cubicle and only came out when Talia eventually banged on the door asking if she was all right.

‘How can I be all right?’ Sheridan asked later that evening when they were (once again) in the pub closest to the
Scope
’s offices. ‘How can I be all right when I know that I’m better than Martyn bloody Powell but I’m the one who’s been given the boot? How d’you think that makes me feel?’

‘It’s not fair,’ said Talia, as she’d already said more than a dozen times since Sheridan had emerged, blotchy faced, from the cubicle.

Sheridan emptied her bottle of beer into the glass in front of her. It was her fourth since they’d arrived and she was beginning to feel its effects.

‘I know it’s not just me,’ she said. ‘I know other people have lost their jobs too. I realise that.’ She sniffed. ‘It’s just that I loved it. OK, it wasn’t what I’d started out thinking about, but I worked my way into it. And I did well. Now it’s been whipped away from me and I can’t believe it.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ Talia had said this more than a dozen times too. ‘I feel terrible about it.’

‘You’re not to feel guilty because they’re keeping you on,’ Sheridan told her. ‘I’m glad for you, honestly.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m the one who should apologise, for being so self-absorbed.’ She scrabbled in her bag for a tissue and blew her nose loudly.

‘Hey, you’ve had terrible news. You’re entitled to feel self-absorbed.’

‘It’s just . . .’ Sheridan stared unseeingly across the pub.
‘How am I going to tell them this at home? They’ll be so disappointed in me.’

Talia was startled. ‘They’ll be disappointed
for
you, not
in
you,’ she corrected her.

‘No,’ said Sheridan. ‘They’ll think it’s my own fault. That there’s a reason I was picked. They’ll assume it’s because I was the weakest person at the paper, or at least in the sports department. That’s how they think. It’ll be like the time I was dropped from the basketball team at school. They reckoned it was because I wasn’t trying hard enough. Mam said I needed to make my presence felt a bit more, and I told her I was trying, and she said if I wasn’t good enough I deserved to be dropped even if I
was
doing the best I could against girls who were way faster than me.’

‘Wow,’ said Talia. ‘That’s a bit harsh.’

‘It’s not that she’s harsh.’ Sheridan defended her mother. ‘She doesn’t sugar-coat things, that’s all. She sees life through the eyes of a coach. Like my dad. They look at the bigger picture all the time, and I wasn’t good enough for the bigger picture.’

‘Well I don’t know what the
Scope
’s big picture is, but you were certainly good enough for it.’

‘Sometimes a coach benches good players anyway.’ Sheridan’s voice was glum. ‘Oh Talia, I can’t believe this. It’s so unfair.’ Then she looked anxiously at her friend. ‘I’m good for the rent this month,’ she said. ‘I can pay my way for a while from my savings. And I’ll have my statutory redundancy plus another couple of months that they’re giving us too. Hopefully I’ll get another job before that runs out and everything’ll be fine.’

‘I wasn’t even thinking about that,’ said Talia truthfully.
‘Don’t get into a state about it, Sher. I’m sure it’ll all work out in the end.’

It was about an hour later that the door of the pub was pushed open and Griff Gibson walked inside. Everyone turned to look at him because Griff was a striking figure – a tall man with corn-coloured hair, wearing a black leather jacket, black jeans and black boots.

He sat down beside Sheridan and hugged her.

‘How’s my honey?’ he asked.

‘Not good,’ said Talia over Sheridan’s head. ‘She switched from Bud to Jemmies half an hour ago.’

‘Whiskey!’ exclaimed Griff. ‘She doesn’t drink whiskey.’

‘Only on shitty days,’ mumbled Sheridan. ‘And this has been a shitty day.’

‘I know,’ said Griff. ‘But you’ll get over it. They don’t deserve you anyway.’

‘Stop with the trying-to-be-nice-to-me stuff,’ she said. ‘They made some kind of commercial decision that I wasn’t good enough. That I’m a loser.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ said Griff. ‘You’re not a loser to me.’

‘But I am to them,’ said Sheridan.

‘She keeps talking like this,’ Talia told him. ‘Obsessing about winners and losers. Blaming it on herself.’

‘For crying out loud, Sher, you’ve done a cracking job,’ Griff said.

‘Still not good enough.’ Sheridan straightened up and rubbed her eyes. ‘Stop talking about me as though I’m not here.’ She sniffed and looked blearily at them. ‘Sorry. I know I’m being an arse. I don’t mean to be. I just can’t help it.’

‘It’s perfectly understandable,’ said Griff. ‘C’mon. Let’s go back to my place. You’ll feel a lot better there.’

Talia looked at him gratefully.

‘I need to phone my parents first,’ said Sheridan. ‘I have to tell them.’

‘Leave it till the morning,’ advised Talia. ‘I know how your mum feels about drink. If she hears you now, she’ll know you’ve been hitting the bottle. Probably best not.’

Sheridan’s sigh came from the very depths of her being. ‘Probably. Thanks, Talia. You’re a lifesaver.’

‘Yes, you are,’ said Griff. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Talia. Meantime, I’ll get her home.’

‘Thanks,’ said Talia again. She stood up and so did Sheridan. Talia put her arms around her and hugged her. ‘It’s going to be fine,’ she told her friend. ‘
You’re
going to be fine.’

‘Maybe,’ said Sheridan as she sniffed again. ‘I know it should be an opportunity. I just don’t know what kind of opportunity it could possibly be.’

Nina Fallon worried at night. She didn’t have time for worrying during the day because she was far too busy with running the guesthouse (even though that brought its own regular panic attacks, which sometimes left her frantically gulping for air); but in the dark, when everything was silent and she was alone in her bed, all the things that worried her most crowded her mind and kept her awake long after she wanted to be in a dreamless sleep.

She usually worried about the same things but not necessarily in the same order. The guest house, naturally. Her children, always. Her husband . . . she didn’t want to worry about Sean any more, but she did. Although the truth was she couldn’t be sure if she was actually worried about him, or whether her real worry was about herself.

She rolled over in the bed and let out a little yelp of pain. Tonight it wasn’t worry that was keeping her awake but the pain in her back caused by the fact that she’d stupidly tried to move a heavy dresser in one of the guest bedrooms and had jarred her back doing it. That was the trouble about trying to do everything on your own. Sometimes something had to give.

But, she reminded herself, she was coping despite everything. The guesthouse was holding its own in the toughest times she’d ever experienced. She had a good relationship with her two children, although they were currently far from home. Alan was on a peacekeeping mission with the Defence Forces (thankfully not in the front line, though she still said a prayer for him first thing in the morning and before she got into bed each night); while Chrissie was backpacking in Australia. However, they were sensible people and kept in touch with her. In fact they probably kept in touch more with her when they were away than they ever did when they were in Ardbawn. So she always knew what they were up to.

But Sean. She felt her entire body tense up as she thought of Sean. Sean was another matter altogether. She could talk to her children and she could fix things in the guesthouse but she didn’t know what the hell to do about Sean. She didn’t know if she’d acted out of hurt or rage or bloody-mindedness, or even because she had no other course of action, but she still didn’t know if she’d done the right thing. She occasionally wished there was someone she could turn to for advice, but Nina had always kept her problems to herself, even though she had plenty of friends who would be only too happy to discuss the state of her marriage with her. People in Ardbawn loved to dissect each other’s relationships. Nina had never been like that. She wasn’t interested in gossip and she certainly wasn’t interested in being a topic of gossip either.

So, despite the concerned phone calls from people like Peggy Merchant (who ran the local riding school) and Hayley Goodwin (who’d phoned and said that she felt it was all her fault), she’d simply said that they were working their way
through their issues and that hopefully things would be resolved in the best way possible. She knew she was talking bullshit, because they weren’t working their way through anything and she truly didn’t know what a good resolution would be, but she had to say something to keep them off her back. Rather embarrassingly, and entirely out of character for her, she’d turned to the horoscope column in the local paper for the comfort she wasn’t able to accept from her friends. The last few weeks for Cancerians had all been about embracing change, but the honest truth was (as she allowed herself to admit during the night) that she hadn’t wanted anything to change at all.

It was almost impossible to believe that a few months ago she would have been able to turn to Sean himself for comfort and he’d have sleepily rubbed her aching back, which would have relaxed her and helped her to drift off. Now, thinking of him sent a white rod of rage right through her, followed by the sweeping desolation that brought her, as always, to the brink of tears. She should be all cried out by now, she told herself, but she was nowhere near that state. She didn’t know if her tears were because she’d been devastated by what Sean had done, or because she felt so foolish. She felt it was important to know, but she simply couldn’t decide. So she worried about that too.

Yet it had all started out so innocuously, with no reason to worry at all. That was what was gut-wrenching about it. Plus the fact that she’d encouraged him, not realising what she was about to allow to happen. Not realising how it would all end.

She hadn’t imagined that an unstoppable chain of events would be set in motion the day Hayley, the bubbly
chairwoman of the local amateur dramatic society – and someone Nina regularly met for coffee in the Blue Rose café – called to the guesthouse to ask Sean if he’d be interested in putting an ad in the programme for their upcoming production of
Pygmalion
. Nina had continued preparing the evening meal while Hayley sat at the kitchen table and tried to persuade Sean to hand over some cash.

‘I wish we could.’ Sean looked up from the laptop on which he’d been balancing the bank statement. ‘But the truth is that we don’t have a red cent to spare this year. Do we, Nina?’

She paused at her peeling of potatoes for a moment, slightly irritated that he was putting her in the position of having to make the actual refusal, and shook her head. ‘Afraid not,’ she’d said. ‘People are leaving it later and later to decide about holidays or short breaks. Our bookings have fallen to a trickle; sure, we haven’t even got any guests here right now.’

‘It’s a tough time for everyone,’ Hayley agreed. ‘The hotel’s quiet too.’

The Riverview Hotel was on the other side of the town (and the river) to the Bawnee River Guesthouse. It had been built during the last property boom and had an impressive spa and leisure centre as well as an over-the-top nightclub. At the time of its construction there had been much amusement at the thought of a nightclub in Ardbawn, but it had proved to be surprisingly popular, with people coming from the neighbouring towns every weekend. At first Sean and Nina had been worried about a possible loss of business to the hotel, but the people who came to the guesthouse (usually for fishing and horse-riding, with some occasional golfers)
weren’t the sort of people who wanted to stay in an ultramodern hotel. And, as it turned out, the hotel drew more people to the town anyway, so the reality was it had been a bonus.

‘Ah, well, times have been tough before and we’ve got through them,’ Sean said brightly. ‘We’ll get through this too as long as we don’t spend money on things we can’t afford. Like the ad in your programme, Hayley. Sorry.’

‘The hotel is taking an ad,’ she told him.

‘I wish we could.’ He sounded truly regretful. ‘But I never do anything without Nina’s say-so. If it’s any use, we can do a special deal for anyone who stays over in the town for the nights of the production.’

‘That doesn’t help the drama society,’ Hayley pointed out.

‘You might get people coming who otherwise wouldn’t.’ Sean’s dark eyes twinkled at her.

‘I doubt it,’ she said.

‘All the same, it’s something to offer.’

‘Hmm.’ She looked doubtful.

‘If you’ve got leaflets and stuff, we’ll keep them here, of course,’ said Sean, ‘and we’ll hand them out to our guests. You never know, some of them might return for the show.’

‘You think?’ Hayley was sceptical.

‘The amateur dramatic group is very accomplished,’ Sean assured her. ‘Why shouldn’t people travel to see them?’ He allowed his eyes to twinkle at her again. ‘Are you playing Eliza?’