Reluctantly Charmed (16 page)

“Right.” He nodded, staring at me, interested.

“You’ve got to be able to reproduce it across all mediums, too, so that’s important to bear in mind. It should look good really small or really big.”

“Right.”

“And the colors will become your brand. They’ll be your walls, your floors, your building.”

“Right, so which one do you like?”

I hunched over the draining board, studying the pages in front of me. He inched slightly closer to me, breathing, looking, smelling like the sea, his elbows white against the board edge and his whole body angled forward.

I couldn’t focus. I shook it off and pointed at a red and black design like a bull’s-eye. “This one.”

He ran his tongue across his lips and nodded. He wasn’t looking at the logo; he was looking at me, expectantly. “That’s the one, then.”

“No, no. Look, I don’t know anything about your business, thank God,” I said, snapping back to reality and taking a step
back into the kitchen. “Maybe this one is totally inappropriate, not that appropriate really is your business, let’s be honest.” I was rambling now, nervous words tumbling out of my mouth. I could feel my color rise. I didn’t know if it was because we’d just had a normal polite conversation without any disagreements, a conversation that was beginning to feel flirtatious, or if it was the way he was looking at me, but I suddenly felt light-headed and in a spin.

“No, no, this is great. This will work great. Thanks.” He took a step closer toward me. I could feel his breath, see his chest rising.

“My work mightn’t save the world, but neither does yours, no siree.” My voice was high-pitched now. I felt jittery and panicky. “In fact, you might be the ruination of it.” I waved my arms around as I twirled toward my coffee cup, which I grabbed and half spilled in one gesture. There I went again, but it was true, and I had to remember whom I was talking to, and, yes, he might have a smile that caused me to wobble, but he represented all things wrong, and anyway, everyone said he was hateful. Why was he being so nice to me now, then? Oh, my head was spinning.

“What?” His arms rose up on either side, looking like he might catch me from falling.

“I should go.”

He shook his head, looking puzzled. “Okay.”

I ran away from the porn guy, coffee cup in hand, not knowing which one of us was crazier, but knowing that seven o’clock and a glass of white wine couldn’t come soon enough.

I met the girls in some Mongolian restaurant in Temple Bar. We wouldn’t normally go to Temple Bar, Dublin’s cultural quarter. The cobblestones catch in your heels, and it’s full of English stag
parties over to get drunk, puke, and get laid, in that order. But apparently you could cook your own meat in this restaurant and choose from an all-you-can-eat buffet. I thought it sounded like a lot of work.

Fiona’s older and married sister, Anne-Marie, was joining us, which meant one of two things: she’d either bore us to death with how happy and fulfilled her children made her, or drink us to death with how depressed and trapped her children made her. It was a toss-up. When I spotted her tired eyes and pasty skin, more pronounced because her dark hair was pulled back tightly off her face, I knew it was the latter.

The restaurant was really buzzy for a Monday night, with people shouting over each other to be heard and big gangs of friends laughing and shaking off the weekend. It put a spring in my step. I could forget about fairies, witches, porn sites, and handsome rock stars.

Anne-Marie hugged me hard at the table. “I promise I won’t talk about the kids, I promise. It’s just so good to be out. Do you want a cocktail?”

Everyone was in great form. Lily pulled on her blond curls and reapplied her lipstick. She was beaming.

“Hello? Cat? Cream?” Fiona eyed her suspiciously.

“Ahhh!” Lily gave a short scream. “Guess who asked me out.”

“No way.” Fiona slapped her hand onto the table. “Mr. Goatee?”

“I baked the cookies, and he ate them.”

“Cookies?” Anne-Marie raised her eyebrows.

“Yeah. Kate read an article in a magazine, some old love potion.” Lily grinned.

“Really?” Anne-Marie asked. “So what was it?”

Everyone inched in closer to the table to hear Lily’s story.

“A love potion. You have to bake a cookie and give it to the man you love or fancy. And last Thursday I decided to go for it, so I googled a cookie recipe. Do you know you need a special tin to cook them in? I went to four different shops. I haven’t baked since home economics classes at school. I still had the instruction booklet for my oven
in
my oven.”

“I wouldn’t have a clue how to work my oven, either.” Fiona shook her head.

“Really? But you do all those multimillion-dollar deals?” Lily asked.

“Them I can do. An oven, not a clue.”

“Well, one day when you’re an old married woman like me . . .” Anne-Marie smiled at her.

“Never going to happen, Anne-Marie. My oven is going to remain unused. Anyway, Lily, domestic goddess, tell us what happened.”

“So I started baking with all the stuff you’d said, Kate, the vanilla and rose petals. I quite enjoyed it, actually. I started laying all the mixture out, and then there was the one that I had to make into the shape of my face. I didn’t really know how to do that but I used some raisins for eyes, rose petals for lips and oatmeal as hair. I was feeling very inventive and creative.”

“Very ‘Mary Make and Do.’ What’s with the face, though?”

“All part of this love potion. I did feel a bit strange doing it, but I do really like Mr. Goatee.” Lily smiled, embarrassed, but we all nodded it away, aware of the lengths we’d all gone to for men we really liked.

“At work at eleven, I sent an e-mail around the department saying there were freshly baked cookies in the kitchen. Everyone made a scramble for them, as they always do, including Mr. Goatee. I hung on to my face one and then pretty much cornered
him between the kettle and the microwave. When I think about it, I was really quite pushy.” She bit her lip remembering. “I held it up in front of him and said, ‘Here, take this one.’ I think he was surprised. He didn’t say anything, but he had an expression on his face that wasn’t great, kind of ‘You’re a crazy, weirdo baker lady.’ But then he bit into it, and I said it.” She took a deep breath. “I said: ‘You love it, don’t you?’ and his face . . .” She beamed. “It softened around the edges and he locked eyes with me. It was a nanosecond but it was all there. And about an hour later, he marched up to me and asked me out to dinner on Tuesday.”

“That’s so exciting! I knew he’d ask you. He just had to see you.” I smiled.

Anne-Marie clapped her hands together, delighted. “I love all this magic!”

“I know,” Lily said. “And the best thing is, when he asked me out he had that puppy-dog face, you know the one guys get when they like you, when their eyes go really big and their mouth kind of hangs open? He had that.”

“That’s not the look of like. That, Lily, is the look of love,” Anne-Marie said.

“Thank God you read that magazine article,” Lily told me. “You can be a bridesmaid at our wedding.”

We all smiled, excited about Lily’s romance, and filled up our wineglasses to toast it. Then I turned to Fiona. “And what’s going on with you, my lovely?”

“Work dramas,” she said. “Don’t want to talk about it anymore. It’s my free time. They will not get into my free time.”

We nodded in agreement, knowing we would probably get around to talking about it after a few drinks, but we’d let her ignore it for now.

Fiona eyed me. “You look great,” she said.

I smiled. I’d dipped into the remainder of my pay packet and bought myself a Karen Millen dress as a little pick-me-up. It was yellow silk, and it felt feminine and dressy.

The wine was flowing and soon we’d discussed the looming economic crisis, which we all agreed we were bored to death of; a new yoga teacher on Harcourt Street, who was said to be revolutionary; and Fiona’s work (I knew she’d crack). Apparently she was to be brought in front of the board to defend her error. She didn’t have a defense. She knew she’d messed up. She could only hope that her flawless track record would be taken into account. She was very angry about the injustice of it all.

We were all a bit tongue-tied. Fiona had poured her life into her career, and the possibility of it being snatched away was unthinkable. We talked it through as best and supportively as we could, but without much solid advice.

Eventually, the conversation slipped back to idle gossip about mutual friends who were buying houses out in the country, much to our absolute bewilderment as city girls. And I thought about Hugh Delaney and how a peaceful look had washed over his handsome face as he talked about the countryside.

“Why would you do it? There’s no cinema, no restaurants, and you have to drive for hours to get to an airport to get out of this country.” Lily shook her head in dismay.

“And there’s the muck . . .”

“And there’s the locals. They’d all be in your business. Small-minded and superstitious.”

Anne-Marie nearly spat out her drink. “Superstitious. God, I haven’t asked you! What’s this about the fairies and witches?”

Lily and Fiona threw each other a glance, a brief moment that I caught. I looked at them, confused. I knew them so well that I
could see immediately they’d been talking about me, about the fairies and witches.

“What?” I ignored Anne-Marie’s question, and directed mine at the glance between them.

Fiona looked uncomfortable. “We, em . . . We just . . . we think there might be something in them.”

“What?” I was shocked.

“You. We think there might be something in this for you.” Lily stared at me, nodding her head. I realized that this was a rehearsed speech.

“Is this an intervention?” I laughed.

“No.” Fiona looked serious. “But the fairies, they were real. My aunty used to wash the steps of her house down so the fairies had somewhere to sit when they were passing through.”

“Oh, come on,” I said, exasperated. “Is this like Bono? The way everyone in Dublin has a Bono story—went drinking with him, danced with him, mother embarrassed him. Does everyone have a fairy story now? We never talked about fairies before, ever, and now all of a sudden they’re everywhere.”

“Well, a lot of people do believe in them,” Lily said, sagely.

“I’m not saying I don’t believe in them or, rather, in the possibility of them—I can’t make up my mind. I mean, one part of me thinks there’s always a possibility of there being something else out there: ghosts and spiritual connections and maybe even fairies, I don’t know. But then, another part—the part of me that throws away books like
The Alchemist
halfway through—can never believe in palm reading or tea leaves. That part of me thinks that this is a load of nonsense. Honestly.”

Lily shook her head at me disapprovingly. “That doesn’t sound very open-minded.”

“Look, the truth is, this ancestor was probably completely nuts
and wrote these Steps herself. It’s interesting in terms of exploring my family history, but the other stuff is probably just folklore.”

I tucked into my steak, shaking the conversation off as best I could.

Lily and Fiona looked at each other again.

“What? Come on, out with it.”

Fiona cleared her throat. “Well, ultimately, this letter and these Steps are pointing to you. Potentially, you might have some kind of insight or something.”

“What a joke, right?”

“Well, not really, no.” Fiona shrugged her shoulders.

I put my knife and fork down, getting ready for my next speech.

“Sometimes you know things, things we don’t know, we couldn’t know,” Fiona said.

“What? What are you talking about? I don’t know anything. I’ve never known things. Oh my God, are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“No. I don’t think so. No.” Fiona was going bright red, struggling to get the words out.

Lily took over. “You asked me if my uncle was sick the day before he was diagnosed with cancer . . .”

“That’s because I was watching a film and the guy in it looked like your uncle and he was sick. It was just a scattered thought.”

“Sometimes you finish my sentences,” Fiona said.

“I’ve known you for nearly ten years. Lily does the same.”

“No, you do it more.”

I sighed. This was ridiculous.

“At my movie night last month you knew I was going to show
Point Break
.”

“Fiona, if you’d ever get over your obsession with Patrick
Swayze’s back we’d watch something other than
Point Break
or
Dirty Dancing
at your movie nights. It was a pretty safe guess.”

“What if this is a thing? You can’t ignore it,” Fiona pleaded.

I exhaled heavily, thinking how I wished I could have a cigarette, even though I smoked only on rare occasions. This felt like an opportune time to wave a cigarette around. “Okay. Let’s say I have a gift. That somehow I am some type of clairvoyant or fairy whisperer—whatever. Wouldn’t I know? Surely I would know. That’s what being a psychic is—you know things. And I don’t. And let’s say I have a gift. Why would I be a junior copywriter five years on? Surely I’d have the intuition or whatever to have nailed every campaign that came my way? And surely I’d have more money than I have and fewer credit cards, and I’d have a nicer wardrobe. And I’d know who stole my bike. And, and, and . . .” I was swirling my glass of wine around. “I’d be dating hot Hollywood stars.”