This Charming Man (14 page)

It went on for fearsomely long time.

Woken by slamming of front door (not mine). Hopped out of bed and into front bedroom to stare down on Firestarter Considine leaving for work.

Whole thing very odd. Firestarter Considine having a woman in his house, fine. But woman in wedding dress? And no one in town knowing he was getting married? Then him burning the dress on big bonfire?

Wild thought – had he kidnapped and killed her? But that was absurd. If she’d been kidnapped, she wouldn’t have been twirling around in a Vera Wang dress. When she saw me in road, she’d have
banged window and mouthed, ‘Help me! Being held against will by environmental man!’

Mystery. Undeniable mystery.

Mobile went. Local number. It was the foxy dole-bloke. (Not foxy as in attractive, foxy as in fox-like. Vulpine, if you will.) He wanted to see me.

‘Which obscure bit of paperwork you want me to bring?’ I asked.

‘No, want to see you outside work,’ he said.

Foxy doleman fancied me! Cripes! I’d have to sleep with him if I wanted any dole!

Once I thought about it, didn’t really care. So long as could just lie there.

‘Look, Mr Doleman –’

‘– Noel, call me Noel.’

Noel from the dole. Okay, should be easy to remember.

‘Noel,’ I said, ‘I’m just out of relationship, I’minno fit state –’

‘That’s not why want to see you.’

Oh?

‘Will explain when we meet. In meantime, watchword is discretion. We cannot meet in Ennistymon. Walls have ears.’

‘Come to Knockavoy.’

‘No –’

‘Walls have ears here too?’

Was being sarcastic, but he just said, ‘Copy.’

Copy? God’s sake!

He asked, ‘You know Miltown Malbay?’

Miltown Malbay, town further along the coast from Knockavoy.

‘Meet me tomorrow night, ten p.m., Lenihan’s, Miltown Malbay. Don’t ring this number.’

He hung up.

Woken by ‘bip’ of car horn. Propelled self from bed, into other bedroom, to look out front window. Some manner of filthy four-wheel-drive vehicle gunning engine outside next door. Men within. Hard to see
because of mud-flecked windows, but impression of roistering machismo.

Sound of front door slamming. Rossa Considine appeared in stampy boots, rucksack and black North Face fleece. Coils of rope were slung over his shoulder, small metal things dangling from them.

He strode towards the soiled charabanc and called some early morning manly greeting. (Something along the lines of ‘Didn’t expect any of you girls to be able to get out of bed this morning after great feed of pints we had last night.’ Didn’t catch exact wording but divined message from tone.)

Suddenly, as if intuited he was being spied on, his head turned to look back over his befleeced shoulder at Uncle Tom’s cabin. Jerkily I withdrew from sight. But too late. Had been spotted. Rossa Considine did lopsided
Caught you, you spying oddball
smile, gave sarcastic-style wave, wrenched open the door of the vehicle, vaulted in and screeched away in shower of mud.

Lenihan’s, Miltown Malbay
Noel from Dole was sitting in alcove, pointy knee crossed over other pointy knee, pointy elbows resting on table. He looked around and gave me full 180 of his pointy foxy features. If toppled on top of him, could sustain quite nasty puncture wound.

He leapt up, summoned me into alcove and whispered, ‘Did anyone see you come in?’

‘I don’t know. You didn’t tell me to sneak in.’

‘Yes, I know, but this is highly confidential.’

I waited.

‘It’s about your job,’ he said. ‘Being a stylist. You ever help people track down clothes in difficult-to-find sizes?’

That was it?

‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘Actually my speciality. Worked for wife of investment banker who had to go to unmerciful number of gala dinners, but, unusually for wife of investment banker, was a size fourteen. Rarely come in such a large size.’

‘What about accessories?’

‘I do everything. Shoes, handbags, jewellery, underwear.’

‘I have this friend, you see,’ he said. He sounded nervous. Suddenly he declared, almost in anguish, ‘Look, I’m married! And I have a friend.’

‘A lady-friend?’

He nodded.

Married
and
with a girlfriend? Just goes to show, looks aren’t everything. Perhaps he is very good at telling jokes.

‘My girlfriend. I like to buy her nice things. But she has trouble getting nice shoes in her size. Can you help?’

‘I’m sure I can. What size feet has she?’

After perplexingly long pause, he said, ‘Eleven.’

Eleven! Eleven is HUGE. Most men aren’t even size eleven.

‘… Is quite large size, but will see what can do…’

‘How about some clothes for her?’

‘What size is she?’

He stared. Stared and stared and stared.

‘Wha – at?’ I asked. He was beginning to scare me.

He exhaled with abnormal heaviness, as if he’d made decision, then said, ‘Lookit.’ Expression of intense distress. ‘Can you keep a secret?’

‘Oh God,’ he groaned into his hands. ‘Oh God.’

He looked up at her and to her surprise his face was wet with tears. ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry. You’re the best thing in my life, the only thing of any goodness. Forgive me, for the love of Jesus say you’ll forgive me. It’ll never happen again. I don’t know what happened. Stress at work, been building for ages, but to take it out on you, of all people –’

He broke down into proper shoulder-jerking crying. ‘What kind of animal am I?’ he moaned
.

‘It’s okay.’ She touched him with tentative fingers. She couldn’t bear to see him so prostrate
.

‘Thank you! Thank God.’ He grasped her to him and kissed her hard, and although her split lip was raw to the touch, she let him
.

Dad opened his front door and asked, ‘What happened to your face?’ Then he looked over my shoulder, an automatic reflex to make sure I hadn’t stolen his parking spot. ‘What have you done with your car? I can’t see it.’

‘That’s because it’s not here.’ I followed him down the stairs to the kitchen. ‘As we speak, my car is on the Tallaght bypass, burnt to a crisp.’

‘Stolen?’

‘No, did it myself last night. Nothing good on telly. Of course stolen!’

‘Ahhh dear, dear. “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” ’ That’s what Dad always says. That’s because Dad’s an intellectual.
‘Hamlet
. Act four, scene five,’ he informed me.

‘Where’s Ma?’

‘With Bid.’ Bid is my mother’s sister and has lived with my parents since before I was born. ‘Collecting her from her chemo.’

I flinched. Bid had been diagnosed with lung cancer ten days ago. It was taking some getting used to.

‘God, it’s perishing in here.’ Even when it’s the height of summer, it’s always stone-cold in that house. It’s big and old and has no central heating.

Down in the kitchen I clung to the Aga. I would have sat up on it if it wasn’t for the danger that I’d fry myself. (An Aga! I ask you. In a city.)

‘Do you want to hear what other sorrows are going on?’ Dad asked.

‘You mean there’s more?’

‘Ma says we have to give up the fags. All of us.’ He glared to emphasize his point. ‘Not just Bid. All of us. And I’m very fond of my fags,’ he added wistfully.

I knew how he felt. I couldn’t imagine a life without nicotine.

I stared out of the window, lost in a cigarette reverie. In the back garden, Bingo was chasing a late-season bee. Eagerly leaping and lolloping and tripping over his legs, his russet ears swinging, he looked mentally ill.

Dad caught me looking. ‘I know he’s a handful, but we love him.’

‘I love him too. And he hasn’t run away in a while.’ Or if he had, they hadn’t involved me in tracking him down.

‘Well, that’s a fine injury you have there,’ Dad said. ‘Fighting again outside pubs, were you?’

I clicked my tongue. The bruise was nearly gone and I was sick of talking about it. ‘It’s such a silly story –’

‘Wait a –’ He seemed to suddenly notice something. ‘Grace! Have you been growing again?’

‘What? No!’ I’m only five foot nine, but they make me feel like a freak.

‘You must have been! Look at us, we’re the same height, you and I! And we never were before. Look!’ He gestured for me to stand beside him and measured a line with his hand from the top of his head to the top of mine. ‘Look!’

He was right.

‘Dad, I’m the same height I’ve always been.’ I gestured hopelessly. ‘I don’t know what to say. You must be shrinking.’

‘Gaah! Old age. It’s so undignified. Sorrows etc., etc.’

Dad was a small-boned man with soulful eyes and a big nose. Between the nose and the cigarettes, he could have passed for French. On holidays, once in Italy and another time in Bulgaria, people thought he actually
was
French and he couldn’t hide his pleasure. He thinks the French are the most civilized nation on earth. He loves, loves, loves J-P Sartre. Also, hearteningly, Thierry Henri.

There was the sound of the front door opening and closing. Ma and Auntie Bid were home.

‘We’re in the kitchen,’ Dad called.

They fluttered down the stairs, taking off gloves and unbuttoning raincoats and complaining about the smallness of ten-cent coins (obviously continuing some conversation they’d been having in the car). They looked very alike, both tiny little creatures, except that Auntie Bid was half bald and the colour of urine.

‘Bid…?’ I asked helplessly.

‘I’m grand, grand.’ Feebly she waved away my concern. ‘Don’t try hugging me, I’ll puke.’

‘Grace!’ Ma was pleased to see me. ‘I didn’t see your car outside.’ She furrowed her forehead. ‘What’s up with your face?’

‘Her car got stolen and burnt out on the Tallaght bypass,’ Dad said. ‘And I’m shrinking.’

‘Oh! Oh Grace!’ Ma was saddened. ‘ “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”
Hamlet,
act four, scene five.’ (Ma is also an intellectual.) She put gentle fingers on my cheekbone. ‘What happened here? Surely it wasn’t Damien!’

I had to laugh.

‘Damien’s a handsome man,’ Auntie Bid croaked.

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Nothing. Just saying. Don’t mind me, I’m not myself. I think I’ll sit down.’ We all leapt to usher her into a chair, from where she continued her unexpected speech. ‘I always liked a man with a powerful build. I’d say when he’s naked, Damien has a fine pair of thighs? Does he?’ she asked, when I didn’t answer. Too startled to. Naked thighs! Could the cancer have spread to her brain?

‘Um, yes, I suppose he does.’

‘And moody, of course; nothing as alluring as a moody man.’ She sighed wistfully. ‘His intelligence, his sensitivity, his essential unknowability.’

Now there she was wrong. The thighs I could go along with, but not the allure of moodiness. Not that Damien was exactly Heathcliff.

‘If Damien ever hit me,’ I tried to wrest controlof the conversation, ‘I’d clobber him right back, and he knows it.’

‘Lovie, if he ever touched you, there’s always a bed for you here.’ Ma just lives for a good cause.

‘Thanks, Ma, but the cold would kill me.’

Ma and Bid had inherited the house when their great-uncle Padraig – the only member of their family to have ‘done well for himself’ – shuffled off his mortalcoil. Thirty-nine Yeoman Road was a Georgian Preservation Society’s delight: high-ceilinged rooms, all the better for frozen air to circulate mistily in; original multi-paned windows which courteously permitted all draughts ingress and rattled like a box of cutlery whenever a lorry passed.

Every other resident on Yeoman Road – well-upholstered gynaecologists and estate agents – had bought their house with their own money. And indeed, had plenty more to pay for underfloor heating and ergonomic German kitchens, and to freshly lacquer their front door so it shone as sparkly and confident as a politician’s smile.

Defiant in shabby, chilly gentility, Ma and Dad were never invited to the Yeoman Road Residents Association, mostly because the meetings were
about them and the fact that they hadn’t repainted their facade in fourteen years.

‘Bid, cup of tea?’ Dad was poised with the kettle.

Bid shook her patchy little head. ‘I think I’ll go upstairs for a while and do some vomiting.’

‘Good woman.’

As soon as poor Bid had headed off, I rounded on Ma. ‘What’s she
on
? That stuff about Damien?’

Ma shook her head sadly. ‘She’s been reading Mills and Boons. Too sick to concentrate on anything else. They’re poison, those things. Refined sugar for the brain.’

‘Dad says you’re giving up smoking?’

‘That’s right. We must provide a supportive environment for Bid. In fact, Grace, if she knew
you
were giving up too, she’d appreciate it.’

‘… Er…’

‘Ask Damien as well.’

‘God, I don’t know about that…’

‘Solidarity! Go on, he’s scared witless of you.’

‘Ma, he’s not.’

‘Everyone’s scared witless of you.’

‘Ah Ma…’

‘Tell me what happened to your car.’

I sighed. ‘Nothing much to tell. It was outside the house when I went to bed last night, it wasn’t there this morning. I rang the rozzers and they found it, a charred husk, on the Tallaght bypass. It happens. It’s just a great big pain in the arse.’

‘Were you insured?’ Ma asked, triggering a rant from Dad.

‘Insured?’ he cried. ‘As if it would make a difference. You check the small print on your policy, Grace, and it wouldn’t surprise me to discover you’re covered for absolutely everything,
except
burn-outs on the Tallaght bypass on a Thursday at the end of September. A crowd of amoralcrooks, insurers. Big business holding the ordinary man to ransom, putting the fear of penury in him, leaching billions a year from his meagre pay packet, with no intention of honouring their side of the bargain –’

Dad looked set to run for some time, so I answered Ma. ‘I was insured but, like Dad says, they’re bound to pull some stunt so I won’t get enough money to replace it.’ A pang of loss pierced me. I’d loved that car – zippy,
sexy, all mine. The first new car I’d ever owned and I’d only had it four months. ‘I’ll have to get a loan or something.’