This Charming Man (79 page)

Last night, Dee had tried to be ‘Art of War’ about the disastrous showdown.

‘We can learn from our mistakes,’ she said.

But I didn’t believe in that sort of thing. I preferred not to make mistakes in the first place. And ifI did make them I’d rather cover them up and pretend they’d never happened.

God, I’d been so wrong about Leechy; I was
certain
she’d have a cigarette scar on her hand. Because she’d been the person who’d persuaded Christopher Holland to sell his story about Dee I’d made the mistake of thinking she was just another of Paddy’s lackeys. Herselfand Sheridan running around, ordering the world to Paddy’s vision, no better than Spanish John.

But maybe Paddy treated Leechy like an equal, maybe they’d come up with the idea together, as a team. Maybe Paddy had found the one woman he didn’t need to abuse. Maybe he really did love her.

I was almost an hour late for work and I was wondering what excuse I’d give Jacinta. As I crossed the office to my desk, she was embroiled in some sort oftussle with TC.

Good. Maybe I could just slip in and pretend I’d been there all along…

‘I can’t do it,’ TC was saying, in a high panicky voice.

‘You have to,’ Jacinta said, her voice steely and calm.

TC saw me and his face lit up with hope. ‘Grace!’

Well, there was my cover blown.

He darted out from behind Jacinta. ‘Will you do it, Grace? Please, Grace.’

‘Do what?’

‘Interview Zara Kaletsky. I’ve lost my nerve. I love her too much.’

‘I – ’ Christ, could things get any worse?

‘TC, you begged for the job,’ Jacinta said with a sort of amused contempt. ‘So go and do it.’

‘Please, Grace?’ TC thrust his beautiful red binder at me. ‘I’ll cover all
your work. I’ll stay late. I’ll have sex with Damien. I’ll do whatever you want.’

‘Where the hell have you been?’ Jacinta demanded of me. Then she switched back to TC and yelled, ‘Why should Grace do it?’ She was in her element, having two people to shout at simultaneously – probably as enjoyable as those four-hands massages where two therapists rub you at the same time. (Not that I’d know.) ‘For God’s sake, TC – ’ her tone dripped with scorn – ‘be a man.’

It was that sentence – the unnecessary disparagement of it – that changed my mind. She was such a bully and right at that moment I’d had a bellyful of bullies.

‘Which hotel?’ I asked TC. ‘Where’s this thing going down?’

‘The Shelbourne.’

They had nice biscuits there. I hadn’t had any breakfast. I’d like some sugar.

‘I’ll do it.’ I scooped up the red folder of loveliness and headed for the door.

‘I’ll decide who does what around here.’ I could hear Jacinta yelling after me, but I was already gone.

A grim hotel corridor; disgruntled journalists lining the walls; the customary impenetrable selection process – business as usual. I parked myselfin a plastic seat and prepared to endure. No one spoke. Seconds took hours to pass. Despair circulated instead of oxygen. Hell’s waiting room might be a bit like this, I thought.

TC had compiled a volume of research notes weighty enough to rival
War and Peace
but everything seemed so pointless and stupid that I could bring myselfonly to glean the bare bones about Zara Kaletsky. Her life was such a cliché, it was almost parodic. She’d been a model, who’d crossed over to acting. A few years ago she’d moved to LA and fallen off the radar and the Irish press would have been faster to interview a zinc bucket. Then she’d got a part in a Spielberg film and suddenly all Irish outlets were clamouring like hungry dogs for a piece of her.

The terribleness of last night – the hubris, the failure, Marnie’s anger, Paddy’s easy victory – had imbued me with wretched hopelessness, with a sense that life on earth was a miserable business, that goodness was always trumped by bad, that those with power would never cede any of it, that the
little person would never win even the tiniest of victories. It felt immoral to celebrate a woman who earned a shockingly large amount of money from the frivolous business of pretending to be other people.

‘Grace Gildee? The
Spokesman?’

I got to my feet. I’d only been waiting two hours and seventeen minutes. That must surely count as a record.

‘Thirty minutes,’ the clipboard maven hissed malevolently as I passed her to enter the sanctum. ‘Not a second more.’

‘Grand,’ I hissed back. I took a moment to gather more spittle on my tongue – proper hissing requires a good deal of it – then, like air leaving a burst tyre, said, ‘Csssertainly, missssss. Not a sssssssecond exsssstra. Thanksssssssss for your assssssssissssssstancsssssse.’

I was pleased with the way I’d managed to think of so many words with sibilant sounds. No notice. Just off the top of my head. With a perky – but, I hoped, unsettling – smile at her, I closed the door. Then – I just couldn’t stop myself– I opened it again, thrust my chin at her, gave a quick, snaky, ‘Ssssss!’ and closed the door once more.

She’d think she’d imagined it.

Zara was alabaster pale, with a cap of short shiny hair and eyes so dark and soulful they were almost black. She rose and smiled. Six foot tall and thin as a whip.

I waved her back into her seat, ‘Don’t get up, no need,’ whipped open my notebook and clattered my tape recorder onto the table.

‘I didn’t catch your name,’ she said.

‘ – Oh? Grace. But it doesn’t matter. We’ll never meet again. And you don’t need to end every sentence with my name to convince me of your sincerity. I’m already convinced!’

She looked a little alarmed.

‘So no publicist sitting in and monitoring our every word?’ I asked.

‘… No. I thought – think – it makes everyone uncomfortable.’

‘Grand.’ It just meant she wasn’t proper really-weird-with-many-perversions A-list. ‘Okay, Zara, let’s do us both a favour. You must be sick of doing interviews and I’m not really in the mood either. We’ll make this quick. Wheat allergy?’

‘ – What?’

‘Wheat allergy?’ I repeated, louder this time. ‘Yes or no?’

‘… No.’

‘Really? Lactose intolerant, then, yes?’ I scribbled on my pad. ‘No? Sure? Okay. You might want to sort that out, ifyou don’t mind me saying. Yoga? Saved your life?’

‘Meditation, actually.’

‘Same difference,’ I muttered. I’d done neither but why let the facts get in the way?

I scanned TC’s notes. ‘Middle child,’ I said. ‘Let me guess. Parents more interested in your siblings, blah, you started singing and dancing, blah, to get their attention? Yes? Yays? Good girl. Let’s see. Six foot tall at the age of twelve, ugly duckling, blah, swan, beauty queen, Miss Donegal, so far so blah. Anorexia?’

‘… Um.’

‘Bout of anorexia?’ I said. ‘As a teenager? Yes?’ I nodded along with her. ‘But you’re grand now, great appetite, always stuffing your face, just a very high metabolism.’

My glance leapfrogged further down the page. ‘Lalala, let’s see, Irish soap. Big success. Mmmmmm, had gone as far as you could go in Ireland, yes? Yes? Yays. Good. Went to LA, hoping to make the blah-time? Struggled initially, then got lucky when Spielblah saw you in something or other.’

Tell me, why did these people bother having lives at all? When they’re not capable of one original action? When everything has already been pre-scripted in the pages of
Hello
!

‘No, wait, whoops, nearly missed that. You went to South Africa first,
then
you went to LA. Why’d you go to South Africa? Since when did they have a film industry?’

‘Fancied a change of scene,’ she said, in a strained voice.

‘Grand,’ I said breezily. ‘Don’t tell me, I don’t care. Whatever it was, bankruptcy, plastic surgery spree, your secret’s safe with me. So what else can we discuss? Men? Let me guess. No one special, you’re having fun at the moment, but you hope to settle down at the ancient age of thirty. Yays?’

‘I’m already thirty-three.’

Was she? Looking good on it. That’d be all the poison she injected into her forehead, I presumed. ‘You’d like two children, a boy and a girl. You’re based in LA now but Ireland will always be home? Yes? Yays. Excellent! Let’s call that done!’

I got to my feet and stuck out my hand. ‘Pleasure, Ms Kaletsky.’

She wouldn’t take my hand. Uppity diva.

‘Come on,’ I cajoled. ‘No hard feelings.’ I thrust my hand at her again.

She looked at it but wouldn’t hold it, trying to shame me into letting it drop.

‘Have it your way,’ I said. ‘Nice meeting – ’

‘How did you get that mark?’

‘… What mark?’

It was then that I realized she wasn’t refusing to shake my hand, but that her attention had been caught by something. She took my right hand between both of hers and uncurled my fingers. ‘That mark,’ she said.

We both looked at the circle of pink shiny skin in the middle of my palm. ‘… I–’

Then we looked at each other. Something passed between us, information that was fully articulated without having to even say his name. My fingers tingled.

‘Snap.’ In one lithe movement she splayed the fingers on her right hand, flashing her scar like an ID.

I couldn’t speak. I was literally struck dumb.

‘Let’s see.’ Zara surveyed me. ‘Always considered yourselfa bit of a firebrand. Yes? Edited the school magazine. Got up a couple of small petitions. Nothing too controversial. Decided not to go to college but to learn at the university of life. Yes? Worked hard news until you found you didn’t have the stomach for it. At some stage crossed paths with Paddy de Courcy, thought you’d be the girl to change him, but ended up with a faceful of bruises and a burnt hand for your presumption. Yes?’

I opened my mouth. Sentences floated and danced in my head but none of them emerged as sounds.

Finally I said, ‘He’s the reason you left Ireland?’

‘I made the mistake of going to the police. He was so angry I thought he was going to kill me.’

She went to the police
?

‘And was he, like,
charged?’
How had he kept that out of the press?

‘Not at all.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘These two fat eejits showed up in their yellow jackets and as soon as they’d established it was “only” a domestic, they told us to kiss and make up, then were off down the road to buy chips and batterburgers. All I could do was apply for a barring order – which would take twelve weeks. By then I was long gone.’

‘Why South Africa?’

‘It was the furthest place I could think of.’

Why hadn’t I thought of Zara? I didn’t know. Perhaps I’d assumed that Paddy wouldn’t hurt glamorous women, those who might be listened to.

Excitement began to build. An idea was taking shape ‘

‘It’s not just you and me,’ Zara said.

‘I know – ’

‘There’s Selma Teeley.’

‘The mountaineer?’

‘Retired. He broke a bone in her hand that never healed properly.’

‘What? Really?’

‘She rang me when I started going out with him, trying to warn me. By the time I discovered she wasn’t some mad stalkery ex-girlfriend, he’d made me come off the pill, got me pregnant, made me have an abortion, then raped me the same day.’ She paused, then added, ‘Among other stuff, of course. But that’s the one that stands out most.’

‘Christ,’ I breathed.

‘Did
you
go to the police?’ Zara asked.

Ashamed, I shook my head.

‘Like they’d have believed you anyway.’ Zara flicked her eyes heavenwards. ‘It’s hard enough ifyou’re getting lamped by a bloke, but ifyou’re being hit by delicious Paddy de Courcy, the housewives’ choice, you haven’t a hope. I don’t know why I bothered. Who would ever have taken my word over Paddy’s? Me, an ex-model in a crappy soap?’

‘But you’re not an ex-model in a crappy soap any longer,’ I said. ‘You’re now a Hollywood star.’

‘God, yeah, when you put it like that, I suppose I am.’

‘You’re powerful now, Zara. More powerful than him.’

‘God, yeah, when you put it like that, I suppose I am.’

She was lying in bed in what had been her teenage bedroom, playing the Leonard Cohen record she used to listen to when she was fifteen. The original vinyl record. Some people would probably get excited about that – idiotic boys in black T-shirts.

A person was at the front door – her bedroom was right over it, she heard everything that happened down there.

‘Grace!’ Ma’s voice declared. ‘What a lovely surprise. And in the middle of the working day!’

Grace. Marnie had been expecting a conciliatory visit from her. In fact, she’d been starting to wonder what was taking her so long.

‘Where’s Marnie?’ Grace’s voice was terse.

‘Upstairs, in her old room. Playing that wretched Cohen man’s record. I should have snapped it over my knee the day she left home.’

A moment later there was a light tap on the bedroom door and Grace’s voice called, ‘Marnie, can I come in?’

Marnie contemplated refusing: she could simply send Grace away without seeing her. But she’d spent a sleepless night at the mercy of her imagination: the pictures in her head had been excruciating. What exactly had gone on with Grace and Paddy? She needed to know. ‘Door’s open,’ she said.

Grace sidled in. She looked abashed but there was something about her she was trying to contain: an energy, an excitement. ‘Marnie, we need to talk. I – I’ve so much explaining to do to you. And I will. But something has happened and it won’t wait.’

‘I don’t care,’ Marnie said. ‘Whatever is happening will
have
to wait. I want to know all about you and Paddy. Now. And,’ she added with as much hostility as she could muster, ‘don’t do a PG version to save my feelings so that I won’t drink.’

Grace actually squirmed – then rallied with, ‘Are you sober? Not much point me telling the story if you’re not going to remember any of it.’

‘I’m. Sober.’ Marnie bit the words out, with icy dignity.

She stared at Grace, hoping the bitterness she felt showed on her face. Grace stared back at her. They flat-eyed each other for several long seconds, then Grace dropped her look.

‘How come you didn’t drink…’ she asked.

The truth was that Marnie had no idea why she hadn’t got drunk. The rejection she’d experienced last night, the humiliation, the self-hatred, the sense that she was an idiot and had always been an idiot – these were the exact feelings she usually sought to obliterate with alcohol. Add anger into the mix – anger with Grace and Paddy – and extreme drunkenness could be considered a dead cert. Instead she’d sat in the kitchen, chatting with Ma, drinking cocoa and eating poppy-seed cake and complaining about how the seeds stick between your teeth.