Reluctantly Charmed (5 page)

“And was he a bit gaga?”

Matthew did a look of mock disdain and grabbed his chest dramatically. “How dare you think that my ancestor could be gaga.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, honest, he was fine. Still doing
The Irish Times
crossword every day until the end. I think it was just different then. There were more ghosts in corners and banshees wailing. Everyone went to mass because they were scared they’d end up in hell. It’s not surprising they believed in fairies.”

“But now, like, you don’t believe in them now?”

“They’re a nice idea, but they belong to another generation. A generation long dead.” He smiled at me. “Don’t worry about
this stuff. It’s harmless. You’re not performing any crazy sacrifices or weird religious things. Come on, she wants you to whistle to flowers. It’s grand.”

“Yeah, you’re right. It is grand.”

“Anyway, we’ve done our good deed for the day. Coffee?”

I jumped up. “I’ll get it. I was going to swing by Marjorie’s desk to pick up that show reel.”

I was happy to step away from the fairy chat, which was making me feel uneasy. Besides, Matthew made horrible coffee.

Marjorie was three years younger than me, two years qualified, and one step away from robbing my job out from under me. She made no secret of her ambitions. Her steely determination would have been admirable if it was not in direct competition with my own meekly disguised self-promotion. She sat on the same floor as Matthew and me, but a few departments over. Her back was poker straight, she was neatly pulled into her desk, her sleek blond ponytail contrasting sharply with her all-black leggings and figure-hugging polo neck, highlighting her curves that often caused the cessation of work in the all-male production department, much to her delight.

I idly approached her before picking up and absentmindedly fiddling with the stapler on her tidy desk. “Hi, Marjorie. How’s it going?”

“Kate. Good, yes.” She eyed me perkily. “Busy, busy.”

“Tell me about it,” I lied.

“I’ve been put onto the porn account,” she said quietly, puffing out her ample chest, her eyes shifting narrowly from side to side.

“There’s a porn account?” I asked. F & P is a huge company, and if I was honest, I didn’t know what half the accounts were. They were split between departments and disciplines, so I shouldn’t really have been surprised that there was an account I didn’t know
about. But porn . . . I sat myself down on a vacant seat and pulled in beside Marjorie.

“New to the agency, Internet-based.” She nodded knowingly.

Marjorie didn’t normally lead creative accounts. Normally, she assisted.

“Are you taking the lead on this?”

“I’m ready for it, Kate. Anyway, it’s not something that you and Matthew would be interested in.”

“Porn?” I shook my head. “No, I wouldn’t imagine.”

“I’m a good fit for it. I told Colin you wouldn’t be interested.”

“Okay,” I said, immediately thinking that was weird. I wouldn’t be interested in a porn account, but I didn’t need Marjorie to vet my work. Still, Colin was so busy these days, he would have been happy that she volunteered. And yet it seemed strange.

“The client,” she lowered her voice even further, “Hugh Delaney, is a most hateful man.”

“Well, you’re never going to expect a porno guy to be nice, are you? I’d imagine they’re lowlifes, scummy types? Is he all string vests and medallions?”

“He is . . .” She paused, blushing slightly. “Absolutely hideous. Repulsive, even.”

“Really?”

“Seriously awful. Stinks of aftershave, looks like he has a hairy back, bad teeth. A horrible, horrible man.”

“He didn’t ask you to star in one of his movies, then?” I laughed.

She ignored me. “He has terrible manners. He’s so gruff and rude, and he doesn’t seem to appreciate the way the agency works. He called our planning report a load of bollocks.”

I bit my lip to stop a smile creeping in. Planning reports often
were
a load of bollocks, but it was a case of the emperor’s new clothes—not to be mentioned aloud for fear of discovery.

“He comes to meetings with this big, hairy, flea-riddled, filthy dog, and he’s filthy, his jeans are dirty, he wears these muck-laden boots. He calls everything ‘shite’ or ‘bollocks.’ He really is difficult.”

“He sounds pretty horrible, dirty
and
dirty. Porn, eugh . . .” My face crumpled in disgust. I was still wondering how F & P had let a porn account slip into the building. They’d pitched for the Church of Ireland last year. It was an unusual fit.

Later I quizzed Matthew about it. He wasn’t much help, other than telling me with a wink that the client was supposed to be a wanker but he didn’t know much else.

I had bigger fish to fry than porn, anyway. Two days later, Matthew got a phone call, one that made him drop his briefcase and race to his computer. He tapped on his keyboard with a look of intense concentration.

“You’re not going to believe this!” he shouted from his desk to mine.

“You cracked the Starshoot campaign?”

“Seriously, you’re not going to believe this.”

I’d never seen Matthew so animated. I rolled my chair over to his desk, forcing him to budge up his armrest.

“Seriously.”

“The drama! What?”

He gestured toward his computer screen. Spacemonkeys.com was up in all its neon glory. It was the Kate McDaid page. There were comments posted on a message board underneath the letter.

Grrrril_n_boil: wow this is v interesting. Who is Kate mcdaid?

johnnyBgd: Whats with custodians of mother earth???? Who are???? The fairies?

Herman: I whistled at a flower, it whistled back.

Anna_89: whats this got to do with Red Horizon? Where’s Jim? Jim I love you

Richie_84: The fairies used to take people for 7 years and send them back to their village with powers.

Grrrril_n_boil: Good people = FAIRIES. Any ideas?

johnnyBgd: I thought fairies were evil. Are they still around now?

Anna_89: jim is not a fairy

Marie2x: looking fwd to the next one kate—what else do u know?

I felt a pain in my chest. They were talking about me. These people I didn’t know were talking about me. My mouth went dry, and I struggled to breathe. I felt sick.
Go away
, I thought.
Please, go away
. I looked at Matthew. “I thought you said there was nobody on this site.”

“There wasn’t. Jim just called to ask what was going on.”

Oh no, not Jim. “I thought you cleared it with him.”

“Forgot.”

Jim had one of those e-mail notification alerts set up for any messages on spacemonkeys.com. He’d forgotten he had it until a few days earlier. Red Horizon had a radio interview at the beginning of the week, and he’d mentioned that he used to be in a band called Space Monkeys. A few diehards googled him. That’s how quickly it happened, how quickly it took off, and that’s probably when I should have pulled the plug. Only problem was, now Jim was involved.

4

M
atthew and I got to Grogan’s at seven thirty. Jim had invited us to a Red Horizon gig there. Grogan’s is a tumbledown, creaky pub like an old man with a broken back and knobbly fingers who keeps dirty gold under his mattress. It’s down a back street in the city center, where it’s been for a hundred years. Dublin is full of old pubs laced with heavy carpets and sticky furniture. They’re permanent fixtures in the city. New bars (not pubs) opened and closed every few months within meters of them. They were polished and shiny, with white walls and gleaming mirrors guarded by menacing bouncers with necks as pink as pigs. Now that the Celtic Tiger was roaring like a crazed animal, there seemed to be no end of money to be spent and money to be made. Bars were being redone, and marble and crystal glassware was everywhere. Dublin competes with itself all the time. It feels like it should move on and look modern, but it doesn’t really want to.

It was rumored that U2 had played Grogan’s back in the seventies, but every pub started that rumor. I wasn’t sure why Red Horizon were playing there—I thought they were bigger than that. Grogan’s hosted the faded stars, the has-beens and the never-beens, not the up-and-comings. Red Horizon felt like a band on the cusp: DJs name-dropped them, they were featured on the back pages of
music magazines, guys with long fringes wore their T-shirts. Once in an interview, Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones had mentioned them. “Red Horizon, they’re good,” he’d said. He was drunk at the time, but still, it was impressive. They were almost there.

An Asian woman with a strong Dublin accent, dropping her
t
’s and elongating her vowels, pretended to name-check us on the door. She didn’t even have a list. We marched on in. It was no longer unusual to see Asian people in Dublin, but fifteen years earlier we’d been a nation of freckled-skinned, frizzy-haired individuals, thanks, probably, to an enormous amount of inbreeding due to strict immigration controls. Back then, any pillowcase-wearing member of the Ku Klux Klan might have arrived in Dublin, excited about the rumor of an all-white society, a true Aryan race, only to shake his head in despair when the reality of a really bad-looking nation peered back at him. Thankfully, the gene pool is being rapidly diluted, and soon we’ll no longer have to give christening gifts of sunblock to babies.

There were about sixty people inside Grogan’s that night, busy for a Thursday. Ten were standing at the bar, all men cradling pints. Engaged in thoughtful conversation, they shuffled slowly from foot to foot. The band was vacuum-packed onto the stage. I say stage, but it was really just a step that put them a good half an inch higher than us mere mortals.

The pub smelled of clashing perfumes and furniture polish. The all-female audience on the floor swayed from side to side, their shiny hair flickering in the dim lighting. Chests heaved in unison—
Look at me, Jim, look at me
. I slid into the mob and caught the rhythm.
Look at me, Jim.

Jim was wrapped around the microphone stand looking pained, his face creased with intensity, as if he was desperately trying to remember his pin number. “Yooooouuuuuu—always
youuuuuuuuuu.” His hair was damp with sweat, and as he ran his hand through his flattened curls the mob took a sharp intake of breath. His top lip curled into a controlled smile; we were in the palm of his hand. He shook his shoulders free and started tapping his foot. We did likewise.

I was still on the Red Horizon e-mail list. I never canceled it. I knew when they were touring, enjoying summer weather, or hopping on a Bus Éireann bus to Portlaoise. I didn’t read the e-mails most of the time—I knew
that
bus had left the garage. But this time it was different, because the generic e-mail had been followed by a personal e-mail from Jim. It felt like I’d been hit by a brick in the face when his name popped up. Why was he e-mailing?

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]; [email protected]

Subject: Tonight’s gig

Hi guys, really hope you can make the gig tonight, was hoping to grab you for a pint after??? J

I immediately forwarded the e-mail on to my best friend, Lily and Fiona, for advice. What was going on?

Lily came back first.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]; [email protected]

Hmmmm, I dunno. What does he want? It’s been too long to try and spark anything up. Maybe he wants to be friends???????

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]; [email protected]

No guy wants to be friends with someone he’s slept with!!!! BUT Paul in here is friends with his friend Alan and he just e-mailed him and guess what . . . The Swede isn’t around anymore. Broke up a while back. You never know, K, he could be looking for a repeat offense? Good luck. X

I’d worn a pair of killer heels, pinned my hair up high and let some loose curls fall around my face, and put on a puffball-style black dress that was too short for me and definitely too short for a backstreet gig.

The crowd was clapping loudly. Relieved and happy, Jim threw his head back, smiling. “Here come two of my friends. Late.” He grinned into the mic. “Matthew, and Kate McDaid.”

He said my name like you’d give directions to a Japanese tourist—loud and clear. There was a hush, a few seconds, a murmur. I heard a rumble. “Kate McDaid, Kate McDaid” bounced across the room. I felt my chest cave in and my shoulders bend. What?

Matthew, seeing me flounder, pulled a barstool under me, and I sat crouched.

“What was that all about?” he whispered in my ear.

I shook my head. What
was
that?

A few hours later, I was four beers in and feeling normal again. Red Horizon had packed up their equipment and there was only a sprinkling of golden-haired groupies left. Jim joined Matthew and me at the bar. He was glowing, high after performing. He hugged me again.
Damn you and your hugs
, I thought.
If you didn’t hug so great I might have forgotten about you a long time ago
. But I lost myself to it, and then crossed my legs and stretched my back out at the bar, trying hard to differentiate myself from the groupies in the room.

“Good gig, man, good gig.” I had to stop myself from laughing out loud at Matthew’s Californian surfer-dude act.

“Thanks, yeah. We were a bit off half an hour in, but I think
we recovered.” He nodded toward the barman and ordered a whiskey and lemonade.