The Other Side of the Story (26 page)

I nodded. As soon as I had walked in I fell head-over-heels in love and knew it was the one for me.

'I love it too. It's the perfect house — at a
great price
. House prices might have dropped this year but they'll soon take off again. We might never get this chance again. Would it help if we took a second look at it?'

I jumped at the chance, I was longing to see it again.

The calm sense of belonging which had filled me on my first visit was even more profound second time round. Anton was right when he said that it did not belong in London; it was the type of house you might find in a clearing in the woods in an old-fashioned fairy tale. Once I was within its walls I felt safe, somehow touched by enchantment.

Funny how these things happen because the same day that we visited the house, we were notified by Mr Manatee, our landlord, that due to 'unexpected costs' he was increasing our rent. When I saw the new figure I almost died — it had more than doubled. 'That's outrageous! I'm going to speak to Irina about this, and, oh God —' I passed a hand over my eyes — 'and Mad Paddy. If we present a united front, we have a better chance of winning.'

But neither Irina nor Mad Paddy had had their rent increased. Light began to dawn.

'Manatee must have read about you,' Anton said. 'Opportunistic prick. This is extortion.'

'Anton, we can't afford the new rent, it's out of the question.' Our eyes met, sparking with realization. 'We'll have to move.' I look for 'signs' everywhere and I reluctantly acknowledged this as one.

Anton seized his chance. 'They're looking for four two five. I say we offer four hundred and see what happens.'

'We haven't got four hundred thousand, we probably haven't got four hundred.'

'Let's just make an offer on the house and busk it. You never know what might happen because this isn't an ordinary chain situation, the vendors -'

Vendors! — he was talking a different language, one that excluded me.

'— the vendors aren't stuck in a chain, they don't need the asking price to buy a new house, they're just waiting for an inheritance windfall. They're a lot more likely to take a lower offer, they must be sick of waiting for all that loot, tied up in Dad's old house that they can't get shot of.'

'Anton! We cannot offer to buy a house when we have no money in place.'

'Of course we can.'

'You're not going to believe it!' Anton cried. 'They've accepted our offer of four hundred grand.'

I felt the colour drain from my face. 'You've offered to buy a house and we've no money! What kind of idiot are you?'

He couldn't stop laughing. He fell onto my neck, giddy with glee. We'll get the money.'

'From where?'

'The bank.'

'Do you plan to rob one?'

'I agree with you that we're not standard mortgage application material. What we need is a bank with vision.'

'I want no part in this. I want you to ring that poor Greg and tell him you've been wasting his time.'

That creased him up again. '"Poor Greg" — Lily, he's an
estate
agent.'

'If you don't tell him, I shall!'

'Don't, Lily, please don't ring him, just give me a little time. Trust me.'

'No.'

'Please, Lily, please baby, just trust me.' He pulled me round to him and his love for me was stamped on his face. 'I will never do anything to hurt you. I will spend my life trying to make things beautiful and perfect for you and Ema. Please trust me.'

I shrugged. It was not quite a yes, but it was not a no either. It never was.

He took to making phone calls, the type that necessitated turning away from me whenever I came into the room. When I asked, 'Who was that?' he would tap the side of his nose and wink. The post began to yield up fat letters, which he spirited away to open in private and when I questioned him about them, there was more nose-tapping and mysterious grins. Of course, I could have insisted on disclosure, but manifestly I did not want to know.

I had a bad dream where I was in a huge warehouse packing mountains of my possessions into a sea of ten-foot-high cardboard boxes. A whole box of single shoes, another one filled with broken televisions, then I was trying to squeeze the William Morris fireplace into a box the size of a biscuit tin and a disembodied voice said, 'All fireplaces must be securely stowed.' Then the dream jumped and Ema and I were sitting on the grass strip in the middle of a motorway, with all the boxes and I knew with hollow sick certainty that we had no place to call home.

But when I was awake I thought constantly about the house in a dreamy, love-sick way. In my head I had painted, decorated and furnished all the rooms and I rearranged the furniture constantly, as if it were a doll's house. I had a cream-painted, curvy, antique French bed, with a matching claw-footed armoire, a high-headboarded brass bed with a charmingly squeaky mattress, carved trunks, rose borders, pot-bellied bedside cabinets, plump bolsters, satin eiderdowns, scatter rugs strewn across my shiny wooden floors…

When I thought about living there, different versions of my life opened up. I wanted to have other children, at least two more, but it was a desire I had tamped down firmly because under our current living arrangements it simply was not viable. But it could happen in the new house.

Then Anton came to me and said, 'Lily, light of my life, love of my heart, are you free tomorrow afternoon?'

'Why?' Suspiciously. The light-of-my-life stuff usually preceded a request to collect his dinner jacket from the dry-cleaner's for some media do.

'I've got us an appointment with a bank.'

A bank. 'You haven't?'

'Oh, but I have,
ma petite
, my little pumpkin.'

The following afternoon, we left Ema with Irina and asked her
not
to put the green face mask on her again, we were still picking bits out of her hair. Then kitted out in our most respectable clothes, we arrived at the bank to be greeted by three interchangeable men in sombre suits. I was embarrassed, as though we had got into their offices under false pretences, but Anton was absolutely dazzling. Even I was convinced. He talked about what a star I was, how this was the start of a storming career, how they'd benefit from getting on board now, how we would remain loyal in the future when we were earning millions and owned other homes in New York, Monte Carlo and Letterkenny. (Ancestral seat of the Carolans.) Then, to back up his puff, he produced letters from Jojo and Dalkin Emery's accountants, copies of my sales figures to date and related earnings, a projection of sales of
Crystal Clear
from Dalkin Emery's Head of Sales and an approximate calculation of how much I could expect to earn from that. (A lot, as it happens. I was astonished at their ambition.)

To assuage their anxiety over us having neither a down-payment nor steady income, he passed around a spreadsheet of proposed repayments, with a lump sum due to be paid when I received my first royalty cheque in September and another lump sum when I signed my new contract in November. 'Gentlemen, have no fear that you will get your money back.'

With a final flourish, he produced three copies of
Mimi's Remedies
which I signed for the wives of the sombre-suited men.

'It's in the bag,' he said, as we got the tube home.

The letter bearing the bank's masthead came two days later. My stomach sloshed with nausea as we both tried to tear it open. My eyes skidded along the words, trying to extract their meaning, but Anton was faster than me.

'Shit!'

'What?'

'They wish us luck but they're not making with the readies.'

'That's it then,' I said, devastated yet strangely half-relieved.

'The fuckers.'

But of course, that was not it. Anton, ever the optimist, simply made an appointment with another bank. 'Knock on enough doors, someone will eventually let you in.'

Despite another tour de force from Anton, the second bank also turned us down; he did not even stop to lick his wounds before he had lined up yet another. This time, knowing how likely they were to turn us down, I felt an utter fraud as Anton pitched me. And when they sent their letter of regret, I begged him to stop.

'Just one more,' he insisted. 'You give up too easily.'

I was feeding Ema her breakfast, a protracted, messy experience which usually left the floor, walls and my hair splattered with clods of wet Weetabix, when Anton frisbeed a letter onto the table. 'Have a read of that.' He was grinning like a loon.

'Tell me.' I was afraid to believe, but what else could it be…

'The bank said yes, they'll loan us the money. The house is ours.'

This was my cue to launch myself into his arms and be twirled around the kitchen, both of us laughing our heads off. Instead I became very still, and stared at him, almost in fear.

He was some sort of alchemist, he had to be. How did he continue to conjure up dream solutions out of thin air? He had got me an agent, who had got me a publisher, he had 'found' my second book when I thought I had none, and now he had secured my dream house even though we had no money upfront.

'How do you do it?' I asked, faintly. 'Have you cut a deal with the devil?'

He polished an imaginary medal on his chest, then laughed at himself. 'Lily, take a bow. This is down to you about to bring in a ton of money in September and more when you sign your new deal. Without that, me pestering them wouldn't have cut any ice. They'd have got security to throw me out.'

'Oi!' I wrestled the letter back from Ema, who had been using the back of her spoon to carefully cover it with mushy Weetabix. She squawked in dismay, but was trapped in her high chair and could not do much about it. As I read the typewritten page, joy began a cautious trickle. If the bank had said yes, then everything must be fine. Clearly they thought I would earn enough to pay it all back; this was not just a loan, it was an endorsement of my career.

Then I read a sentence which caused my plucky little trickle of joy to make an emergency stop. I gasped.

So did Ema; her eyes were wide and alarmed, just like mine. 'Anton, it says the loan is "subject to survey". What does that mean?'

'Anton! Whazat
meen
?

'They want to be sure the house is worth what they're lending us for it, just in case we default and they need to repossess.'

I winced. Talk of repossession froze my innards; it brought back the day we left the big house in Guildford.

'So they do a structural survey to make sure the house is sound.'

'And what if it isn't?'

'Did it look sound to you?'

'Yes, but-'

'Well, then.'

Anton opened the letter. He read it in silence, but something sombre pervaded the room.

'What is it?'

'OK,' he cleared his throat. 'This is the result of the bank's survey.'

'And?'

'They've found dry rot in the front room. Quite bad, they say.'

I belly-flopped with disappointment and tears sprang to my eyes. Our beautiful, beautiful house. What about the raspberry bushes, the daybed in the bay window, me in the floaty dress, carrying the overarm basket? The bohemian dinner parties I would throw to repay Nicky and Simon, Mikey and Ciara, Viv, Baz and Jez and all the other people who had had Anton and me round to their homes and whom I had never invited here because it was far too small?

I heard myself say, 'Well, that's that then.'

'It is not. Lily, don't fold on me, dry rot can be fixed! Piece of piss! They'll still give us a mortgage, but for less. For three hundred and eighty.'

'Where will we find twenty thousand pounds?'

'Catch yourself on, Lily, we don't. We go back to the vendors and drop our offer by twenty grand.'

'But we still need to fix the dry rot! I repeat, where do we find twenty thousand pounds?'

'There's no way a little bit of dry rot will cost twenty grand to fix. A couple of grand, at most.'

'But the bank said -'

'The bank are just covering themselves. What do you think?'

'OK,' I said. 'Do what you have to do.'

To my utter astonishment the vendors accepted the reduced price. How many more signs did I need that this house was meant to be mine? Nevertheless, I got a final-furlong bout of the wobblies: when Anton said, 'Will we buy it?' I heard myself wail, 'No, I'm too frightened.'

'OK.'

'OK?' Surprised, I looked at him.

'OK, you're too frightened. Let's forget it.'

'You don't mean that, you're just trying reverse pyschology.'

He shook his head. 'I'm not. I just want you to be happy.'

I looked at him, with suspicion. I
thought
I believed him. 'Alright then. Talk me into it.'

He hesitated. 'Are you sure about this?'

'Quick, Anton, before I change my mind again, talk me into it.'

'Er, right!' He listed out all the reasons we were meant to buy this house: we had royalty money coming in; my career was on fire and I was bound to get an enormous advance in November; the bank - notoriously cautious - had given us approval; buying this house was better than buying a small place now and having the upheaval of a second move in a year's time; we didn't just want
a
house, we loved this
particular
house, it was very us. And finally, 'If everything goes pear-shaped, we can sell the house and get back more than we paid.'

'What if its value drops instead of increasing and we end up owing heaps of money?'

'A house like that, in that area? — Course it'll go up, it's a no-brainer. We can't lose. Nothing can go wrong.'

PART TWO

GEMMA

1

It was eighty days since Dad had left. Or not even three months which, when I put it like that, didn't sound so bad. Not much was going on when suddenly four BIG things happened, one after the other.

The first thing - at the end of March the clocks went forward. No big deal, I know, but wait, that's not actually the thing, that was just the trigger. Anyway, the clocks went forward and even though I spent most of Sunday changing the time on Mam's cooker, microwave, video, phone, seven clocks, even her watch, the implications didn't hit me until Monday afternoon at work when Andrea put on her coat and said, 'Right, I'm off.' It was still bright so I said, 'It's the middle of the afternoon,' and she replied, 'It's twenty to six.'

Suddenly I got it and nearly choked with terror. The evenings were stretching towards summer; when he'd left it had been the dead of winter. Where had all the time gone?

I had to see him. Nothing to do with Mam; this was about me. Though I rarely left work before seven I was fuelled with such desperate need that not even the combined forces of Frances and Francis could have stopped me.

I jostled my way out of the office, into the car and drove straight over to his work - I wouldn't go to their apartment for a million quid. His car was in the car park, so he hadn't left for the day. I watched anxiously over my steering wheel as the staff trickled out. Funny how they weren't all tubby, I mused. Very few of them actually were and you'd think with all that chocolate lying around… Oh Christ, here he comes. With Colette.
Shite
. I'd been hoping to catch him on his own.

He was in his suit and looked much as he'd always looked; he was as familiar to me as myself, it was too strange not to have seen him in so long.

Colette's hair was still highlighted, it didn't seem like she was letting herself go, now that she'd bagged her man. But on the plus side she didn't look pregnant.

As they neared me they were chatting in a dismayingly chummy manner. I got out of the car and stepped in front of both of them. It was meant to be kind of dramatic but they were walking quite fast and had almost passed me.

'Dad,' I called.

They turned; blank faces.

'Dad?'

'Gemma. Ah, hello.'

'Dad, I haven't heard from you in a while.'

'Ah, sure, you know.' He was uncomfortable. He turned to Colette, 'Will you wait in the car, love?'

'Love' gave me a filthier but swung away towards the Nissan.

'Does she have to be
such
a bitch?' I asked. I couldn't help it. 'What reason does she have to be horrible?'

'She's just insecure.'

'
She's
insecure. What about me? I haven't seen you in nearly three months.'

'Is it that long?' He shifted in a vague, old-man kind of way.

'Yes, Dad.' In a desperate attempt at humour I asked, 'Don't you want custody of me? You could have weekend visitation rights, take me to McDonalds.'

But he just said, 'You're grown up, you're your own person.'

'Don't you even want to see me?'

They say you should never ask a question that you don't know the answer to. Of course he wanted to see me.

But he said, 'It's probably for the best that we don't meet up at the moment.'

'But Dad…' Grief rose like a wave and I began to cry. People walking past were looking but I didn't care. The wave became a tsunami. I hadn't seen my father in three months, I was bawling and choking like a peanut had gone down the wrong way — and he wouldn't even touch me. I launched myself at him; he stood like a plank and patted me awkwardly. 'Ah, Gemma, ah don't…'

'You don't love me any more.'

'I do, sure of course I do.'

With monumental effort, I forced myself to stop the choking, then cleared my throat, briefly getting it together. 'Dad, please come home. Please.'

'Noel, we have to collect the kids.' Colette.

I swung around to her. 'I thought he told you to wait in the car.'

'Noel, the kids,' she ignored me. 'They'll be wondering where we are.'

'You know what?' I looked at her and pointed at Dad. 'I'm
his
kid and I've been wondering the very same thing.'

Then I added, 'So fuck you.'

She studied me, cool as anything. 'No, fuck you.'

'Two minutes,' she said to Dad. 'I'm counting.' She stomped back to the car.

'Classy.'

'How's your mother?' Dad asked.

'Your WIFE,' I shouted the word around the car park. The few people who weren't already looking were now. 'Your WIFE is GREAT. She has a boyfriend. A Swiss fella called Helmut. He has a red Aston Martin with gull-wing doors.'

'Has she, by the hokey? Listen, Gemma, I have to go now. Geri goes mad if we're late.'

Contempt was all that was left to me. I looked at my father. 'You're a coward.'

In the sanctuary of my car the tears started again. All men are cowards.

And this wasn't going to be fixed any time soon; it killed me to admit it but Dad and Colette had started to look permanent. So where did that leave me? What about my life?

Mam was doing her best, she really was trying hard to be brave. She'd found a kind of routine, where she used a string of daytime soaps to get her through each day, like a rope bridge over an abyss. She'd started going to Mass again, she'd even gone to a couple of coffee mornings with Mrs Kelly, but she always came back shaking like jelly. It was still necessary for me to stay with her every night.

So what were the chances of her turning around and saying, 'Gemma, why don't you take this weekend off? Go out on the piss, pick up a couple of men and get them to ride you into the middle of next week. I'll be grand.' No, somehow I couldn't see it.

No one would do this for me. I thought of Owen, the youth I'd picked up the night of Cody's birthday (although I had no memory of it). He'd asked me out twice and the second time I'd said yes, but I couldn't name a day because I didn't know how to get it past Mam.

I'd promised to ring him but so far I hadn't.