Reluctantly Charmed (27 page)

I heard some members of the crew groan. They started taking off their jackets again.

Nodding, I agreed with Colin. “I could. I—I—I tried, you know? I rang Aer Lingus, and I got onto the Hoff’s agent and his PA. If you can think of something else, I could get right onto it immediately.” I was poised, ready to jump.

“No, no.” He shook his head, his long hair waving ferociously behind him. “The other stuff.”

I stayed silent, scared of what was coming next.

His eyes narrowed. “You could get him here.”

“How? Even if I went to Germany or wherever he’s going to land, we’d still be a day behind, and he’s out of time. He has to go back to the States. It’s all about time. I’d go if I thought it would help, but I don’t see how that would make a difference.”

“No, no.” Colin waved his fingers in front of me. “The other stuff.”

I sighed heavily. “Colin, there is no other stuff.”

“Well, maybe there is. Maybe if you just focused, you know, really worked at it, maybe you could summon him here, or maybe you could stop time? The fairies, your people, they have some control over time, don’t they?”

“Stop time?” I raised my eyebrows.

“Well, whatever it is you do . . .”

“This is what I do. I work here, in advertising. I can call people on the phone. I can’t summon people and stop time.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Colin believed I had magical powers.

“Oh, come on, that’s bullshit.” He looked angry. “Just try. Try and stop time.”

I was totally taken aback. In five and a half years, I’d never heard him raise his voice, never seen his color go beyond a mild fuchsia. I’d also never seen him cry.

“Colin . . .” His name hardly came out of my mouth.

“The Little Prince said you can do it. He said the only reason the Hoff agreed to come was because of some spell. So come on, work that spell.” The crew members were gathered around red-faced Colin, looking at me like I was a freak show, a real live bearded lady.

“There is no spell, Colin.”

“Oh, come on.”

“There is no spell, Colin.” I spun around. “Tell him, Matthew.”

Matthew, who had remained quiet during the whole transaction, stood two feet behind me, stony-faced.

“There’s no spell, Colin. She used her influence. That’s all.”

“You see? I told you.” My jaw jutted out defiantly. “I told you,” I repeated for the benefit of the goggle-eyed crew, who were waiting for a genie to pop out of a bottle.

“Well, can’t you just try something?” Colin clenched his teeth at me.

“Try what?” I shouted.

Matthew took a step toward me. “You know, Kate—maybe you could, maybe you could just try something.”

“What, Matthew? You know I can’t!”

“Maybe if you just tried.” Matthew looked everywhere but at my furious gaze.

I wanted to punch him. I wanted to punch them all. How could they, how could they put me in this position? How could he? I looked at Matthew, and a gigantic wave of rage washed over me. How dare he!

“How could you?” I spat the words at him.

“Kate, it’s our jobs. I don’t want to lose my job. I love my job. I love working with you.” He raised his eyes slowly and looked at me. “Maybe if you just tried to stop time . . .” His voice trailed off as he realized the mistake he’d made.

“How could you?”

Marjorie sprang into the center. “Maybe I can? Maybe I can?” She started spinning in a circle, like a deranged twister, waving her arms. Then she pulled her hair out of its ponytail and whirled it around furiously, shouting at the top of her lungs: “Hocus-pocus, diddly-ocus!”

The crew took a step back. Nobody knew where to look.
Slowly they inched away and dispersed around the room, leaving Marjorie wriggling and flapping on the ground like a fish. “
Abracadabra!
”

I turned to Matthew. “Hocus-pocus, Matthew.” My eyes filled with tears, and my anger turned to sorrow and then a searing pain of absolute loss. I knew there was nothing else to say. It had all been said. I picked up my jacket, looped my bag over my shoulder, and, wiping my cheeks on my sleeve, I walked out.

21

I
n films, when an actor runs out of a room crying, she’s always followed by someone. Then they have a fight, or some type of romantic declaration, there are more tears, maybe some shouting. But there’s always a resolution after the crying.

It doesn’t happen like that in real life. I stormed off the set, barely able to see through a mist of tears, banged every door behind me and stomped my feet and gritted my teeth until, finally, a blast of cool air hit me. I was outside. But there was no patter of feet racing after me, no shouts or pleas for forgiveness. There was no one.

As the final door slammed I found myself in the deserted car park of an industrial estate somewhere west of Dublin. The wind whistled past windowless cardboard-box buildings with sprawling car parks. There were no cars and no signposts. It felt like a corporate ghost town. I looked left and right. Nothing was familiar. I decided to go right, thinking there must be an exit somewhere or a person I could ask directions from. Five steps in, it started to rain, and heavy plops washed the tearstains from my cheeks.

There are moments in life when you’re entitled to feel sorry for yourself. This was one of those moments. For starters, I’d
probably just lost my job
and
my best friend
and
everyone thought I had superpowers
and
it was raining
and
I was lost in an industrial estate.
Poor me
, I thought.
Poor, poor me
.

But I marched on, trooper-like, past the cement boxes, scanning furiously for a person, a sign. And then one came. Well, it actually fell out of a tree and landed in front of me: a large black cat. He had clumps of fur missing and a lame back leg that he cocked haughtily in an effort to maintain some semblance of dignity. One eyeball protruded while the other eye was at half-mast. He looked like a lazy pirate. I wondered how he’d made it up a tree to fall out of.

“Where did you come from? Does anyone own you? Did the fairies send you? They seem to be popping up everywhere these days.” I knew no one could hear me, except for the cat, obviously.

He cocked a ripped ear in response.

“Left, right, left, right. Where’ll I go?”

Looking decidedly unamused, he turned around on his three good legs and started walking to the left. With no better options, I followed him. I followed him all over the industrial estate as he snaked around Dumpsters. He paused to clean his ears. I stood, waited, and then followed again. And after a while, after I’d stopped crying, soaked to the bone, he led me down a tight alleyway littered with rubbish bags, and at the end I heard the roar of angry traffic, and there in front of me was a monstrous motorway with cars like dangerous bees zipping past. I looked around for the mangy cat; he was sauntering off, his tail poker high.
Bye-bye
, I thought.
Now what do I d
o?
Which way is home, Toto?

I stuck my thumb out. Anywhere was better than here. If I went too far north, I could always turn around and go south. I just needed a car to take me to the nearest petrol station, so I could figure out where I was and then call a taxi. It would all be
fine. I wouldn’t think about what I’d left behind me; I wouldn’t give it one more thought. Except I couldn’t stop seeing Matthew’s face and feeling betrayed.
Stop, stop, stop!
I pushed those thoughts away, closed my eyes tightly, and focused all my energy on the word
stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.

A truck came to a halt. A monster truck. Had I just stopped a truck by thinking about stopping a truck?

A large, ruddy, pockmarked face edged out the window. “I’m going past town.” His words were carried on the wind to me. He opened the door, handed me a sweaty palm, and pulled me up high into his monster truck. I fell into the seat, and a large molded casing surrounded me, like a Barbie Doll in a box. It smelled of vinegary pine freshener. The driver was wearing a patterned woolen jumper with triangles running across his middle in orange and blue—it was the Made in China squeaky wool kind.

“Howerya.” He back-nodded his head, giving the standard Irish greeting.

“Grand, thanks.”

“You were on the motorway.”

I smiled back at him.

“Unusual to see a girl on the motorway.” He moved the gear stick, and the truck let out a large hissing noise. “Into town, is it, so?”

“Thanks, yeah.” Then I had a flash forward of what awaited me at home: cameras clicking wildly, shouting, pleas from the Anoraks, and no food in a cold flat that wasn’t feeling like a haven anymore. My shoulders started to tense up at the thought of the race up my garden path. There’d be press everywhere. I chewed my fingernails, thinking hard.

“I’m on the road four days,” he volunteered. “Four days on, four days off. I pick up hitchhikers now and again. Bit of
company, you know yourself. I get sick of the radio. There’s only so much Tom Byrne a person can take.”

The truck chugged off, blending into the spaghetti lanes of cars. The red furry dice hanging from the windscreen mirror rocked hypnotically back and forth.

“I’m transporting frozen foods. Ice cream, pizzas, you know yourself. Sure, if you were hungry, we could defrost something.” He let out a little chuckle to himself. “Shtick it on the engine, sure, it’d be cooked in no time.” I got the impression he’d told this joke before. It was his, no pun intended, icebreaker, with hitchhikers. And it worked. I laughed. There was something fatherly about him, good-natured and old-fashioned.

“It’s a great truck. Huge.”

“She’s good, all right. Not a bother out of her.”

I stared out the window at the cars whizzing by.

He kept talking. “I used to transport live cattle, but I got sick of it. The mooing and the braying and the neighing out of them, you couldn’t hear yourself think. So I said, I’m not doing it anymore. I said give me the dead things, and they did. Thanks be to God.”

I decided he didn’t need me to agree with him, he just needed someone there to absorb his sound. “I go across the country, collect the delivery in Dublin from a warehouse about thirty miles behind us and then it’s straight all the way to Clare, deliver it to Aldi—you know, Aldi, the Germans—deliver it to them and then come back to Dublin. Spend the night and off again the next day. I’m probably driving about seven hours straight a day. I’d do more if they’d let me, but sure, it’s all unionized and legalized. Sure, you can’t do anything anymore.”

“You go to Clare?” I straightened up in my seat.

“I do. Aldi in Ennis. The Germans.”

I chewed my nails some more, thinking. I didn’t believe in signs anymore. I didn’t believe in coincidences anymore. I didn’t think the universe was weaving a path out for each and every one of us—I thought it was too busy with battling aliens and galaxy wars. But if I did believe in coincidences and signs again, I thought this might have been one.

“Do you know Knocknamee?”

“Sure. Amn’t I driving through it twice a day? We’ve been trying for years to get them to bypass it. You have to go right through the village. It’s a tricky, small road. They’d plans and everything for a bypass, but every time it was about to go in, they objected, the locals. Sure, you wouldn’t know what’s going on there at all.”

“So, you’re going through it today?”

“I’ll be there, all going well, in about three hours, I’d say.”

I watched the raindrops trickle down the windowpane. “Do you think you could give me a lift there?”

“To Knocknamee?”

I felt my heart race. Knocknamee. This felt right. This felt good.

“Yeah, Knocknamee.”

“Why would you want to go there? It’s a tiny place.”

“I’ve got family down there. It’s about time I looked them up.”

“Sure. Hold tight. We’ll be there in three hours.”

Four hours later, we were approaching Knocknamee. George, my truck driver, had regaled me with stories of his life with his wife, Mary, and their four kids. He told me Mary wanted him to stop driving and take a job with the council, but he was having none of it.

George stopped at the top of the hill to let me out. He gave me a quick hug and tried to thrust twenty euros into my hand for a cup of tea and a bite. I refused the money and told him to give it to his ten-year-old son, who was doing a skipathon the following week.

I was sorry to say good-bye to him, but he assured me there’d be a seat next to him for the trip back to Dublin.

I waved him off and took in the view of the village of Knocknamee. The sun was shining—during the trip across Ireland we’d outdriven the weather. I hadn’t expected Knocknamee to be so beautiful. It was the stuff of dreams, and yet it felt familiar. The main street meandered like a peeled orange skin curling back on itself. Peppered on its curves were cozy thatched cottages, some hosting creaking iron signs swaying lazily: Guinness Is Good for You,
Oifig an Phoist
. Their straw roofs flickered in the golden sun.

The village was nestled at the foot of majestic sweeping mountains draped in green velvet, which guarded the place like a mother’s protective hands. A giant shimmering Catholic cross perched on top of a church spire loomed proudly at its entrance. I breathed it in—the purity and sharpness of the air overflowed in my lungs. Beaming, I sprang down the hill toward the lovely village of Knocknamee.