‘Yeah, I like him.’ It stung that I was finally admitting it out loud and not just to myself. And I do like him. I like him a lot. Maybe I do want to date him. Dammit – this wasimpossible.
‘Go. State your parameters. Bring your highly illegal pepper spray. But you’re a good judge of character, Sid. The best. Ifyoulike him with all your antennae up like you’re looking for life in outer space, then he’s good stuff.’
I let the crack about my antennae go.
‘What if it hurts, emotionally?’
‘Life is a risk,’ said Adrienne, picking up her pen and her phone at the same time. ‘Everything we do is a risk, so take some of your own. Marc’s gone. He flew the nest. You can fly too. Now I’m going to ring those people again. No, I’m not, I’m going to ring the press office. That normally scares the shit out of them. Should have done that in the first place.’
Delighted with herself, she scrolls through her contacts and I leave.
I think about what she’d said – life is a risk. I knew that. I’d once blindly stumbled into a risk and it had ripped me in half so badly that I’d been hiding from any risk at all for fifteen years. Dare I risk anything again?
28
Marin
I’m not a fan of January – January means cold weather, rain, grey skies and if a bit of low winter sun manages to pierce through the clouds, it only stays for a moment and then it’s gone. The plus about January is that it’s sale time. Normally, I go shopping to fill the hole in my wardrobe and my psyche – now, I’m going shopping because I feel so empty and alone.
Nate seems the same as ever but I’m not. I can’t unsee what I saw at Christmas: him and Angie coming back into the house. I should ask him about it all but I’m afraid he’ll have some glib explanation for it, which would be worse because I’d know if he was lying.
This year, I’d had so many plans for New Year resolutions involving things like doing more exercise, cooking more nutritious food (too much cheese is creeping into everything!) and, most importantly, staying out of the shops.Pre-Christmas, I’d been doing very well at this. I felt like a junkie looking for a fix every time I passed one of the little boutiques I love and saw the word ‘Christmas party sale’ winking at me from the window, like it was covered in glorious diamonds and it was calling just to me.‘Marin, we have the perfect outfit for you, this will change your life, this will let you be the person you were always meant to be...’
The new me is supposed to be walking firmly past, nose in the air, ignoring the siren call of the sale rail. I’ve been caught that way so often before. I could show you the pink satin opera coat thing I bought once, that looked spectacular in the shop and was down to fifty euros and was a bargain, if, for example, you were a bit taller and went to the opera, whereupon you mightneedan opera coat.
However, not being anopera-going person and not being tall enough to wear it, I just looked like a meringue in a tightly belted coat, who’d never be knocked down because she was almost luminous. I never did manage to sell that one, the charity shops got it. Now, however, I’m buying like the end of the world is nigh and the only way to save us all is for me to shop.
But, and this is the really scary thing, something that would worry me senseless if I wasn’t so anxious anyway, we seem to be running low on money. And I can’t figure out why.
Nate and I rarely talk about money. Why is money such a tricky subject with couples? We can go to bed and kiss and exchange bodily fluids and lie there bathed in each other’s sweat. But we can’t say, you know we are about four hundred quid down, what’s happening there, was there some bill I didn’t know about? Did you buy something for some woman? And I can’t tell anyone, certainly not April, whom I’m rushing to meet through the horrible rain. I’ve got an hour for lunch today and then I have to drive out to a beautiful house in Shankill that I’m showing.
January is not a prime time for selling houses, but needs must. April has been in a very sad, depressed mood since Christmas, when Jared inevitably did not leave his wife. I have not said, “I told you so”, because it would be cruel and I love her to bits. She needs support from the only member of her family who knows about her life. Ma would stab her with a sharpened crucifix if she knew about April’s fondness for married men.
We have arranged to meet in a small café around the corner from my work, so I can belt back to the office, grab my car and change into my niceshowing-house jacket.
She’s sitting in the corner of the restaurant and I go over to her and give her a hug. Even miserable, her eyes swollen with tears and her lips quivering, she manages to look desirable. Poor, poor April.
‘Do you want anything else?’ I say, looking down at her cup of coffee and sandwich barely nibbled, which is how she has always kept so thin. She doesn’t do that ‘leave half of what’s on your plate’ thing. No, April does the ‘leave three quarters of what’s on your plate’ thing. When she was younger, April was a more rounded girl and Ma never let the opportunity to tell her so pass by. It’s meant a lifelong aversion to eating for any reason other than pure sustenance.
‘No, this is enough,’ she waves an airy hand, ‘maybe a water. Still, bottled.’
‘Of course,’ I say, determined not to transform into my mother and say,It’s far from bottled water you were reared, what’s wrong with tap water?Instead, I go up to the counter, order a sandwich, a cup of tea, bottled water and wilfully add a chocolate muffin to my order.
Then, I sit down beside April, reach over and grasp one long elegant hand with its beautifully manicured nails. April so often works in terrible jobs because she’s never found any great ambition for her own career, so she never has the funds to get her nails done professionally. She’s brilliant at doing them herself though. Today, they’re a delicious rich espresso brown.
‘So, how are you?’ I ask. I haven’t seen her since our Christmas party.
‘How am I? How do you think I am?’ she says, and tears well up in those huge beautiful eyes and it’s easy to see how so many men have fallen into their depths. However, the men always seem to scramble out at some point and go back to their wives.
‘Is there any word from Jared?’ I say. Jared went long before Christmas but she’s still been holding out hope that he’d come back to her.
‘Don’t speak his name,’ she says brokenly. ‘He was full of lies, why did he tell me he wanted to be with me, why did he say that I was his immortal beloved?’
The part of me that knows how to placate and the part of me that really, really wants to tell the absolute truth, battle for supremacy in my head. Absolute truth wins. I poke my teabag around in the little teapot until it’s nice and strong, pour it, add milk and begin.
‘April, you know I love you.’
‘I don’t want a lecture,’ she interrupts.
