Desperate, I find the phone book and call every Donovan household in Tullamore, looking for Lar. I’m not sure what I will do when I eventually find him– probably hang up. But a few months later, a bonanza arrives in the Sunday newspaper, because there’s a report on Marie and Joe Donovan, owners of Adam’s Pub in Tullamore, complaining about the plumbing system in the town. The report mentions two sons, Lar and Eamon. Though I am not oldenough to darken its doorstep, I take a train to Tullamore one Saturday afternoon and stand outside the bar, willing Lar to show up.
Back in Dublin, Lar materializes in the beer garden of Mulley’s a couple of Saturdays later. Though he is talking animatedly with two friends, I make my approach with my friend Jilly in tow.
‘Hi. I think I saw you at the Shinola gig,’ I say to him, ignoring the fact that the Shinola gig was five months ago.
Lar Fucking Donovan couldn’t look any less impressed if he’d been paid to be. Heavily, he turns to face us. ‘So you like music then?’ he slurs.
‘I love it!’
‘Do you know the band Blood Sausage?’
‘Yep!’ I lie confidently.
‘What about Cud?’ Lar is talking into the air in a lazy, non-committal way that just about registers as actual interaction.
‘Yes,’ I tell him, less sure.
‘How about Anal Beard?’ The two friends next to him suppress their unkind laughter.
Is he taking the mick here? ‘Only the first album,’ I tell him. He smiles in spite of himself. That’s when he clocks Jilly. Pretty, non-Anal-Beard-loving Jilly.
I can only stand to one side and watch on as Lar Fucking Donovan blooms to life and absolutely hoses Jilly with charm and interest. It’s quite something to watch someone you adore turn on their headlights and put forward their most enthusiastic self for someone else entirely. Jilly, keenly aware of my ardour, is caught in a hinterland between flattery and awkward embarrassment. He tells her about his parents’ pub in Tullamore, how he is starting a soundengineering course next year, where he likes to drink, the house-share in Drumcondra. All this delicious intel about him falls around us like hailstones, and I’ve no choice but to put it in my pocket and wonder what to do with it. He looks at Jilly with such adoring wistfulness that it feels as though someone has physically shoved me.
Nothing happens between Jilly and Lar, but for weeks afterwards I nurse that delicious agony of unrequited love, turning it over and over in my mind like something to be cherished. The next best thing to not having him is to be fully tortured by the thoughts of him.
And somehow, I’m back here now, the agony of having all these feelings for someone and nowhere to pour them. It’s an agony that is sometimes barely distinguishable from its exact opposite.
I just need this fever for Ted Levy to break somehow, I think to myself.I need to move past it, around him. ‘How do I quit you?’ I say out into the room. Even Ted having a beautiful supermodel girlfriend hasn’t dampened my ardour.
On the other hand, I’ve come this far. I’m like the marathon runner that needs to feel the foil blanket on my shoulders– some sort of signifier that the race is over and the hard work has been done. And that it hasn’t all been for nothing.
And, as though the universe has been hearing my exact plea, I get a notification that Alice Andre has finally accepted my friend request to her private Instagram account.
She follows forty-five people, and has 572 followers. There are no pictures of Ted anywhere to be seen on her grid, but the images that are there are eye-popping. I sit down as I am transported to New York, to Los Angeles,to Berlin, to cool warehouse parties in Vancouver, to the slopes of Aspen. There are tanned legs, red carpets, street art, the top of a fucking mountain, a water hut in the Maldives. Alice Andre has the sort of life the like of which I have never seen. She makes the Stoke Newington mums look as if they’re battling for daily survival in a Ken Loach film. What do you need to do in this life, or exactly how saintly do you need to have been in a past life, to deserve all this? I look at a picture of her, floaty and ethereal, at a wedding in Italy holding a four-year-old flower girl, and something approximating a grubby, unclean feeling scratches at me behind my eyeballs. There is something about how unguarded Alice is in front of the camera, that in this moment makes me feel sad and ugly and awful. Me, the unclean outsider, judging her and wishing her both dead and to be adoring of me at the exact same time.
I keep scrolling and scrolling until, halfway down her grid, there’s a picture of Alice and some friends in her driveway, wearing pyjamas and artfully tousled bedhead. The house is painted white, with blue shutters. ‘I love having sleepovers,’ she has captioned the photo. It is tagged to a location in Wilson Heights. In the background, across the street, I see a parked school bus. A quick google of ‘Wilson Heights School’ brings me straight to Palm Drive where, on Instant Street View, I see the blue shutters.
I’ve found them.
I’ve fucking got them.
28
Violet has sent me a reply to the email I sent her at the airport, a single sniggering emoji. ‘Genuinely, what the fuck did you do that for?’ I demand from her. ‘Fuck you,’ she writes back. ‘You have made it perfectly clear we are not friends.’
Instinctively, I know what’s coming next. I open Facebook to look for the Tedettes’ group and realize that I am now on the outside, chucked over the wall of the now private, closed group. They’re all gone: Juliet, Maxi and Molly. I search for profile after profile, but they have all blocked me. This is like secondary school. Yet in the next moment, a calmness washes over me. I no longer need them. I now have the sort of connection to Ted that they could never even conceive of. For all they know, the next time they see me it could be in the media, as Ted Levy’s actual girlfriend. One half of a cool celebrity power couple. Wouldn’t that be a resounding two fingers to the lot of them?
But without Naomi’s room, I am without digs, and this is an expensive city. I check my bank account online and realize that I have less than $1,000 of the IVF money left. I wash my knickers with soap in the hotel sink and wonder, yet again, how it has all come to this.
‘Hey hey!’ I message Elliott on Facebook. ‘So sorry I’veonly seen this now. I was deep in writing mode, which means hibernating for a bit. Would love to meet for a drink and some lessons in urban beekeeping if you’re about?’
In the morning, I stuff pastries from the breakfast buffet into my pockets while staff glower at me, and take a tram downtown to Bloor-Yorkville. I find a forbiddingly trendy looking boutique. A T-shirt is $200 here but I press on, figuring that this will be a monumental purchase, even if it does eat into what little money I have left.
The young shop assistant doesn’t look as though she’s in the mood to help anyone, but I corral her regardless. ‘I need to buy something sort of cool, but smart,’ I tell her. ‘And a bit sexy.’
‘There’s a lot of cool, smart, sexy stuff everywhere,’ she says pointedly.
Walking down Alice’s street, I become even more sure that I made the right decision to leave the airport and try to find Ted. I cram in every detail I can find into my buzzing brain, every cafe and shopfront, imagining Alice and Ted here, living their everyday lives. He feels closer than ever.
