Panning out, we saw Clodagh who was gesturing to someone off-camera. ‘Thank you, Bridget,’ she said recovering herself. ‘And I wish you the best in your new role.’
My phone beeped. Red.
Are you watching? She’s some mover.
I texted back:
And she was interested in you. You could have been Mr Bridget O’Flaherty.
And then it beeped again.
You’remy type. Meet me at the bandstand at 8 p.m.?
Another beep.
Forgot to say, I love you.
Before
Waiting for Red at the bandstand on the pier in Dun Laoghaire. I am twenty-one years old. I’m wearing jeans and his jacket that I’d been wearing for months now. And there he is, wearing an old navy fisherman’s jumper, his hands in his pockets and he is looking around, at the boats bobbing besidethe pier, tied to their buoys, the seagulls ahead, the skittering clouds. It’s a beautiful evening. And then he sees me, and his face breaks into the most beautiful smile, and I can feel it inside, happiness exploding like a firework in my chest. Red Power. The man I love, the man I want to spend the rest of my life with. And he begins to run towards me. And that’s all I want, everything I love.As the great seer Johnny Logan would say, ‘we’ll always be together, forever in love…’
*
And here I am eighteen years later, older and not particularly wiser. But as soon as I see him, I feel the same. It has never gone away, those feelings, I never stopped loving him. I just learned to pack them up and not to look at them.
He’s sitting on the steps of the bandstand and when he sees me, it’sthe same smile and I smile too and he stands up and waits for me and I break into an awkward little skip and then next minute his arms are around me and it’s him. It’s Red Power and we’re us again and there are fireworks. We never went away. We just… we just had some other stuff we needed to sort out. But it doesn’t matter, none of it matters, because nothing has changed, we are still the same.
‘I wish I’d known that you and Michael weren’t happy,’ he said, holding my hand. ‘I would have rescued you from Fuck Me Foggy, ridden up on a white horse. Or my bicycle or whatever, and taken you away.’
‘It was so stupid. All of it. But I have Rosie and I wouldn’t change an ounce of her. Not one thing. I would do it all again, just to have her exactly the same as she is. She’s been the most wonderfulthing that has ever happened to me.’
‘I’m going to apply for the position to be the number two best thing.’
‘You don’t have to apply.’
He smiled at me. ‘Let’s never let that happen again, all right. Let’s always be Red and Tab or Tab and Red. Let’s be us forever. Deal?’
‘Deal. So, I heard from the department that if you want, you can stay another year in Star of the Sea. We’d love to haveyou, if you stay… Or maybe you’d like to go to the other school. It did sound like a good offer.’
‘They wrote to me too,’ he said. ‘And I would like to have another year being around you. I’d like a lifetime of being around you. So, I’m going to stay.’
‘I was hoping you’d say that.’ We grinned at each other.
‘You’re the reason I stayed away for so long. I came back because Dad had been ill…but I hadn’t ever stopped thinking about you. I hadn’t ever moved on...’
‘Nor me...’
‘I was curious, you know. I wondered how your story, your life was turning out. The one that got away. Or ran away.’
‘And then you came to the school. Was that a coincidence?’
He shrugged. ‘Kind of. Who knows? I saw it advertised and I knew it was your school. I had known that by a very rudimentary Googlesearch. And something made me apply… and then I was in. I think… I think I just wanted to make sure you were all right, that life was working out for you. I needed to know you were happy and I would have been fine with that. Wished you well and then maybe I would have settled down with someone. But…’
‘But what?’
‘You didn’t seem happy, deeply happy. Not really. That first day we met in youroffice, it was like a light had gone out… I wanted to be there for you, sort it out. I didn’t know what to do… But as far as I knew, you were happily married.’
‘And then my life began imploding,’ I said. ‘Did you, by chance, have anything to do with that?’
