This Charming Man (19 page)

Mrs Singer’s voice was so wheezy from the chemo that the tape recorder couldn’t pick it up. I was scribbling into my notebook, trying to get everything down, when there was a thundering up the stairs. The girlwho’d opened the door to me burst into the room and complained, ‘Mu-um, Susan won’t peelthe potatoes.’

‘Would you mind doing them, then, Nicola, love?’

‘But I’ve to stick my hand up the chicken’s bum. That’s worse!’

Nicola stomped back down the stairs and raised voices reached us from the room below.

‘I worry about the girls,’ Mrs Singer said. ‘They’re only fourteen and fifteen. It’s a bad age to leave them.’

I nodded. I never cried on a job, over the years I’d trained myself not to. But sometimes I got a forward-pushing sensation in my sinuses, a crowding and gathering beneath the bridge of my nose, accompanied by a wash of extreme sadness. I got that now.

Nicola was back. ‘There’s a man at the door. He says he’s a photographer.’

‘Mrs Singer – ’ Christ, this was pushing it – ‘I should have mentioned he’d be coming.’

‘I look too awful to have my picture taken.’

Alas, that was the whole point.

‘Susan and I could put some make-up on you!’ Nicola said. ‘And could we be in it too?’

We waited twenty minutes while Nicola and Susan piled on bronzer and bucketloads of sticky pink lipgloss and the picture – two young, healthy girls, one on either side of their dying mother – would have broken your heart.

Keith Christie, the snapper, had his car. He drove us to the next nearest address on the list, where the woman’s husband told us to piss off. ‘Fucking vultures,’ he yelled after us as Keith reversed out of the cul-de-sac.

‘Where now?’ Keith asked.

‘Booterstown.’

My mobile rang. Dad, in a terrible fluster. ‘Bingo’s got free. Postman. Front door open. Saw his opportunity. Made a break for it. Indomitable spirit. He’s been spotted in Killiney. We need you to come.’

‘Dad, I’m on a story.’

‘But Ma doesn’t know how to focus the binoculars.’

‘Then let her drive.’

‘Her responses are too slow. If I say “left”, I mean “left,
right now!”
Not “left in ten minutes’ time”.’

‘Dad, I’m at
work.’
I couldn’t spend the rest of the afternoon driving around the countryside, binoculars clamped to my face, scouring the landscape for Bingo. ‘Good luck, I hope you find him.’

I snapped my phone closed.

‘Is it the dog?’ Keith asked. ‘He’s at large again?’

I nodded.

‘If he wants to escape that badly,’ Keith said, ‘maybe they should just let him go.’

‘Maybe.’ I sighed.

‘Okay, we’re here. You go and do the talking, I’ll keep the engine running in case they turn nasty.’

This time, we were let in and although the woman was in her fifties, about ten years older than Mrs Singer, her story was just as grim.

In silence, Keith and I returned to the office, me to write up my story and him to develop the photos. Even though I’d been hardened by years of exposure to the most heartbreaking stories you can imagine, being in such
close proximity to death had brought my mood low. I was thinking of Bid. She’d better not die.

Christ, I’d love a cigarette.

Coming up the stairs to the newsroom, I heard bellows of laughter, then one or two shrieks. I pushed open the door. Loads of people were gathered around reading from a sheet of paper. Someone would read out a sentence then another roar of laughter would rise towards the rafters.

‘Grace, Grace, c’mere, take a look at this,’ a mirthful voice said.

‘What is it?’ I came closer, bursting with curiosity. Then I stopped. I’d guessed what it was. ‘Hahaha,’ I said.

It was a copy of the police report of my stolen car. Dickie McGuinness had hacked into the police database and emailed it to the entire staff. For extra enjoyment, certain sentences had been highlighted. ‘… car four months old…’‘… doused in petroland set alight…’‘… nothing remaining but the metalframework…’

Just tell me this,
why
do dithery swimmers go in the middle lane when there’s a nice, slow lane for them to dawdle around in like Sunday drivers? And
why
do aggressive, choppy, water-slapping types come into the middle lane and intimidate us all when they can be among their own in the fast lane?

It’s hard enough to gear myself up to go near the pool, it’d be nice to feelafterwards that it was worth it.

I’d finished up late at work. Most days I didn’t get the chance to make the world a better place and the breast cancer story needed the right balance. It had to be crusading but not ranty, and moving but not so maudlin that people wouldn’t read it. It was a challenge, and as soon as I’d filed it I wanted alcohol, but because it was Monday no one was going to Dinnegans. Instead – bloody reluctantly, I can tell you – I went for a health-giving, stress-busting swim, but there were so many people in the lane, swimming at all the wrong speeds, that I was far narkier after I got out than before I went in.

And I don’t know what it is about swimming-poolchanging rooms but I can never get myself properly dry afterwards. The backs of my thighs stay defiantly damp and if I’m wearing tights (to be fair, almost never) it’s a realstruggle to tug them up as far as my waist.

Outside, with the wind blowing through my trousers and chilling my damp legs, the thought of the bus was too much. All that stopping and starting, too reminiscent of my disappointing swim. So I walked, formulating an ambitious plan to do it every day until my car was sorted out. It might combat the inevitable weight gain from giving up the fags.

On the way I listened to my messages. There was one from Dad. Bingo had been run to ground and returned to custody. ‘No thanks to you,’ he added snippily.

‘Fuck
off,’
I said to the message. ‘I was at
work
.’

Then I rang Damien and told him about Mrs Singer. ‘I felt so sad.’

‘That’s good,’ Damien said. ‘You’re not so jaded that you don’t care.’

‘Thanks for that. Enjoy your me-time.’

Monday night was Damien’s night with ‘the boys’. He drank whiskey and played poker and generally indulged his oft-repeated need for his ‘own space’.

‘I’ll be late,’ he said.

‘Be as late as you like.’

‘Sarcasm, Grace? Why do you begrudge me this one night?’

He liked to behave as if I resented every second he spent with his pals, and I was happy to indulge him. A man needs his struggles.

I let myself into the empty house – I liked having it to myself – and rummaged around in the kitchen looking for food. I’d been eating all day, I should stop now, but I knew I wouldn’t. Out of habit, I put the news on in the living room and when I heard ‘… Paddy de Courcy…’ I darted from the kitchen and stood in the doorway, watching the television. Paddy was striding through a corridor wearing an expensive-looking, dark blue suit. An efficient-type woman carrying a clipboard scurried along in his wake, and a reporter lolloped alongside him in an undignified crouching lope, holding a microphone to his beautiful mouth, to catch whatever gem of wisdom he was about to impart. Paddy was smiling. Paddy was always smiling. Except when some tragedy had happened, when he was appropriately grim.

He was being asked about Dee Rossini. ‘Dee is as honest as the day is long,’ he said. ‘She has my full support and the backing of the entire party.’

The phone rang and I jumped guiltily.

It might be Damien. Sometimes, between his fourth and fifth drinks, he came over all sentimental.

‘Grace?’

‘Marnie!’

‘Quick!’ she said. ‘Turn on Sky.’

I grabbed the remote and found myself watching a segment about a man who’d taught his pet monkey to knit. It was amazing really. The monkey – whose name was Ginger – held the needles in his paws and awkwardly added a couple of stitches to a little red monkey-sized scarf. The man said that when the scarf was finished, the plan was for Ginger to knit bootees. I watched in Dublin and Marnie watched in London, both of us howling with laughter.

‘Oh God, that’s fantastic,’ Marnie said. ‘I needed that.’

My heart clenched. I’d always worried about her and recently more than ever.

More than anything I wanted her to be happy and she never seemed it. Not fully. Even on the most joyous days of her life – the births of Daisy and Verity – she seemed to be holding on to a little pocket of melancholia.

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

‘I can’t stop thinking about Bid,’ she said. ‘I was talking to her yesterday, she sounded okay, but how do you think she’s doing?’

‘Hard to say. We won’t know untilshe’s done the six goes of chemo.’

‘Well, I can see for myself in three days’ time.’ As soon as Bid had got her diagnosis, Marnie booked time off from work. She was coming from London on Thursday with the girls and her husband, Nick.

‘I’ll be straight out to Ma’s as soon as I finish work,’ I said.

‘How
is
work?’ I’d kept her abreast of my insecurities about Kaplan. She was the only person, apart from Damien, in whom I felt I could confide.

Of the two of us, Marnie was far more clever, but somehow she had ended up punching in the hours in some mind-numbing mortgage brokers’ office, while I sometimes got to profile celebrities.

But she never made me feel like I’d got her share of the luck.

‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘You got sent to cover the ploughing championships while your man Casey Kaplan interviewed the Pope, Johnny Depp… say one more.’

‘JD Salinger, he hasn’t done an interview in a hundred years.’

‘I thought he was dead.’

‘God, maybe he is.’

‘Well, if he is, that’d be a great coup. Wait, I’ve got a better one. Marilyn Monroe’s made contact from the other side and she’s only doing one interview and she insists it’s with Kaplan.’

I was about to go to bed with my Michael Connolly when the phone rang again.

‘Hello, Grace, this is Manus Gildee, your father, calling.’

‘Hello, Dad.’ He was about to apologize – a formal introduction always preceded his eating humble pie, as if to distance himself from the shame of it.

‘I believe I owe you an apology. Ma said I was hard on you earlier, about Bingo. It’s the cigarettes, Grace. I’m finding it next to impossible to do without them. Am I forgiven?’

‘You’re forgiven.’

‘Also, Ma wants to know what time you’re fetching Marnie and co. from the airport on Thursday?’

‘Me?’

‘Who else?’

‘Ahhh… you?’

‘I don’t want to fetch them,’ he stuttered. ‘Verity puked in the car the last time. The floor mat is still smelly. It upsets Bingo.’

‘Dad, I don’t even have a car at the moment.’

Mutterings of ‘What fresh hell’ reached me. ‘Still burnt out, is it?’

‘Yes, Dad, still burnt out.’

‘Let me tell you what my life is like at the moment. People say to me, Any plans for this evening, Manus? Theatre, perhaps? A concert? A meal with friends? And I reply, Not smoking. Yes, all evening, from the moment I finish dinner to when I retire, I’ll be Not Smoking. It’s an activity in itself.’

Christ, it had only been a day. What would he be like after a week of nicotine-deprivation?

‘So you’ll do the airport run, Dad?’

‘Without cigarettes, I feel, how can I put it…
unfinished?’

‘You’ll fetch them from the airport?’

‘What’s the line from that asinine film that Marnie made me watch?’ I heard him click his fingers. ‘Yes, I believe I have it. “They complete me.” ’

‘Am I to understand – ’

‘Yes, yes,’ he interrupted irritably, ‘I’ll go to the feck-bollocky airport.’

I was just drifting off to sleep when I heard the front door open, followed by the sound of a briefcase being kicked under the hall table. Damien was home from his me-time.

‘Grace – ’ he came up the stairs – ‘are you awake?’

‘I am now. What’s up? And make it quick, I’ve got to get up in about four hours to fly to London.’

‘Okay. Should we have a baby?’

‘Right now?’ I eyed him speculatively.

He laughed and sat on the bed to pull off his boots.

‘What’s brought this on?’ I asked. He usually raised this subject when he was dissatisfied with his life. And when it wasn’t babies, it was that we give up our jobs and rent out our house and go travelling. ‘Someone at the poker game’s just had a baby?’

‘Yeah, Sean. And everyone at work’s got one.’

‘… Christ, Damien… a baby’s not like a company car.’

‘Ah I know, I know… but you should hear them – all men – boasting about having to get up three times in the night to feed the baby.’

‘Really?’ I yawned. Just the thought of middle-of-the-night feeds was enough to set me off.

‘Four of them have new babies and every morning they come in with stories, Grace. Competitive sleeplessness. Angus Sprott hasn’t been to bed since July – now
Fm
yawning – they make me feel… left out, like I’ve got no balls… for getting my full seven hours.’

‘The grass is always greener.’

‘Say something else.’

‘You’d be a terrible father, you’re too moody.’

He seemed to brighten at that. ‘I would, wouldn’t I?’

‘Christ, yes. And if we had a baby we’d have to sell this house. It’s too small. We’d have to move very far away and buy a starter home in an estate with twenty thousand identicalones.’

‘Maybe we shouldn’t have a baby,’ Damien said. ‘Moment of madness there. I’m over it now.’

‘Maybe we shouldn’t.’

I didn’t want children. And of all the shameful things a woman could
admit to – breast enhancement, sex with her boyfriend’s father – this was the most taboo.

I’d read enough magazines to expect that in my late twenties my hormones would seize the controls and I’d find myself in the grip of a powerful baby-hunger. I was quite excited about it – but it simply never happened. Marnie, on the other hand, had always
adored
children and couldn’t wait to have her own. Sometimes I wondered if there had been a mix-up in the womb and she’d got my share of baby-longing as well as her own.

Oddly – or maybe not, I didn’t know – I had heartfelt sympathy for women who couldn’t get pregnant, because I knew what it was like to be unable to control my own body. I wanted
to want
to get pregnant and never got it.