It sounded more like a threat than a promise. Claire was dreading this party more by the minute. She was relieved when Tom emerged from the back room where he had been doing the ordering and paperwork.
‘How’s your mother, Claire?’ he asked, as he joined them.
‘She’s fine. I called the hospital and she’s over the operation, back on the ward.’
‘Glad to hear it. She’ll be there for a few more days, I suppose?’
‘Yeah, they’re keeping her in for two or three days, and then she has four weeks in a convalescent home.’
‘Oh, that’s great. It’ll be a nice break for you,’ Tom said. ‘Why don’t you go early today? You can visit her and still get home at a decent hour.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Positive. Yvonne and I can cope with the hordes,’ he said, indicating the lone customer he had passed earlier, who was browsing the travel shelves. ‘Can’t we, Yvonne?’
‘Absolutely!’
‘Okay, thanks.’ Claire smiled gratefully at him.
‘Oh, look! He’s getting away!’ Yvonne wailed as the customer headed for the door.
‘He was looking for guides to Bolivia,’ Tom said. ‘We don’t have any.’
‘But we’ve got Chile!’ Yvonne said, already moving from behind the desk to chase after the man. ‘I hear that’smuchnicer.’
‘She’s amazing, isn’t she?’ Tom said admiringly, as Yvonne accosted the man at the door and led him gently back towards the travel section. ‘Born to sell.’
‘No one goes home empty-handed…’
2
Claire breathed a contented sigh as she let herself into the house that evening having paid a visit to the hospital on the way home. Her mother was still groggy after the anaesthetic so she hadn’t stayed long, but now that she knew the operation had gone well, she could relax and enjoy the rare luxury of having the house to herself. She didn’t like to admit it to Yvonne or Tom – she felt guilty acknowledging it to herself – but it was nice to have the freedom to be spontaneous and to please herself, with no one else to answer to or worry about.
Her mother’s health had been so bad over the past year ? hardly a month had gone by without some incident. Claire had come to dread getting a phone call at work to tell her that Espie had been rushed to hospital, and as she turned the corner into their road each evening after work, she would find herself automatically checking for an ambulance outside their door. It was a relief to know that her mother would be surrounded by medical staff for the next few weeks, and if anything happened, she was in the right place.
Claire had enjoyed living alone when she was at university, and it was nice to have the freedom and independence of her single life again, if only for a short while. Of course, things were different now. When she was a student, all her friends had been footloose, and there was always someone to ring up on the spur of the moment to go for a drink or see a movie. But she had left her university friends behind when she moved home, and she had lost touch with most of her old schoolmates. Though she had loved Edinburgh, she sometimes wished she had gone to university in Dublin: now she would have had college friends living nearby. Lisa, her best friend since childhood, had moved to Canada at the start of the year, and though they emailed and Skyped regularly, Claire missed having her around. Other friends were pairing up, so she saw them less and less, and over the last few years her circle had shrunk to the point where it was almost non-existent.
Nowadays she did most of her socialising online. She chatted to people on Twitter and Facebook, most of whom she’d never met, and the closest thing she had to a sex life was writing her blog, ‘Scenes of a Sexual Nature’, in which she lived vicariously through the erotic adventures of her alter ego. It was a quiet, almost nun-like existence for a girl of her age, and from time to time she worried that she was becoming a freakish loner. Even her mother occasionally suggested that she should be out enjoying herself with people her own age, meeting men, falling in love and having adventures. But Claire had never been the type for adventures. She hated nightclubs and was content to spend quiet nights in reading, chatting to her online friends or watching television with her mother. Besides, her dismal social life gave her more time to devote to writing and blogging. Sometimes when she thought about the future, she feared that life had left her behind and she would nevercatch up. The idea scared her, but she tried not to dwell on it too much, and mostly she was happy with things as they were.
But it was very different from the life she had envisaged for herself – a life that had seemed to be rolling out in front of her just three years ago. After studying English literature, followed by an MA in creative writing, she had been planning to move to London and get an entry-level job in publishing. She had been looking forward to finding work and a boyfriend, starting a career… and then she had got the call that changed everything. Her heart still leapt into her mouth whenever she remembered the night Ronan had rung to tell her their mother had been rushed to hospital with heart failure. Claire had dashed home, not knowing what she would find. Espie had pulled through, but tests revealed a heart condition that needed constant monitoring and care. Despite her mother’s protests that she was fine living alone, Claire would never have felt easy about it and, besides, she wanted to be on hand in case her mother had another crisis.
At first she had tried to find a job in publishing, but if they were hard to come by in London, they were even scarcer in Dublin. So, determined to make the most of her circumstances, she had decided to shelve the idea for a while, get a relatively undemanding job, and concentrate instead on her writing. All her life she had dreamt of being a writer, so it looked like a satisfactory Plan B. She had taken the job at Bookends, intending to devote all her free time to her novel.
It hadn’t worked out like that, though. Between her job and her mother, she had found she didn’t have as much time to herself as she’d hoped, and progress on the novel was slow and patchy. Then, a couple of years ago, she had written an erotic piece as an exercise for a creative writingclass. She had enjoyed it so much that she had set up the blog to practice sustaining a voice convincingly – as well as to give herself an outlet for her creativity that didn’t demand as much of her time.
She hadn’t expected it to be so successful, but the feedback had been gratifyingly enthusiastic from the start and spurred her on to continue. Now it was one of the most widely read and popular sex blogs on the net. It was fun to write, and its success was a great source of pride and satisfaction. She loved getting an instant response to something she had written, and the way her followers engaged with her was a tribute to how completely she had been able to inhabit her character, the anonymous NiceGirl. Her ‘About Me’ set out her mission statement:
I’m not a slut or a skank, just a nice girl who likes sex. Because nice girls do.
NiceGirl had her own Twitter and Facebook accounts, with thousands of friends and followers. Claire often wondered what they would think if they discovered the reality – a twenty-eight-year-old woman who lived at home with her mother and had had sex only a few times in her life. Even then she hadn’t been sure what she was doing.
They would probably think she had all the hallmarks of a serial killer, she thought wryly, as she settled on the sofa with a glass of wine and opened up her laptop. There was a long, newsy email from Lisa, who was having a ball in Toronto. Claire enjoyed reading about her friend’s adventures. If things had been different, they would have gone to Canada together. Instead, she was in the same old rut, and when she tried to dredge up some news to put in a reply, she couldn’t think of a single thing.
She put the email aside to reply to later, and settleddown to finish the blog post she had started at work today. When she had published it, she logged onto Twitter as @NiceGirl and posted the link to it with the message:
In which I talk about shitty break-ups… literally.
Scrolling down her timeline, reading through recent tweets, she saw that Mark Bell was around. A well-known London publisher, he was young, handsome and hugely influential, and Claire knew she wasn’t alone in having a massive crush on him. He was the pin-up of London publishing, and had caused quite a flurry of excitement among the female members of her class when he had given a seminar on her MA course. As @NiceGirl, she had struck up an online friendship with him, and she loved their flirty, sparky relationship. He was a big fan of her blog, which was enormously flattering coming from someone of his stature in the publishing world, whose opinion she rated highly. She flicked back and forth between her blog and Twitter as the comments started rolling in on both, and it wasn’t long before Mark tweeted her.
