Hernandez assured me that neither Milo nor Margie was complicit in Bermingham’s harassment of me or my abduction. She reminded me that she and I owed an apology to Margie. I tried, but Margie didn’t want to see or hear from me. Hernandez gave her a letter of apology from me and told me she tore it up right in front of her. She talked about suing me for harassment and she could have, but I never heard anything.
Vince was angry that I’d never told him about the campaign that had been going on for years. But I could not deal with another angry man. I didn’t want anyone to touch me, not even Vince. I stayed in the spare room. From that point on, I drove to the office and back. I constantly looked over my shoulder and startled easily. I was unable to get past the fear I felt in that basement. Even though I probably spent less than two hours there, I had truly believed they were the last hours of my life. I was put on an anti-anxiety medication, a low dose during the day and a higher dose at night so that I could sleep.
Of all people, Nick was the one I related to most. He’d had years of paranoia. He understood fear. He shared books with me, byGabor Matéand Eckhart Tolle, and taught me to treat my anxious self like another person, to welcome her in with compassion and to meditate in the moment. He taught me some breathing exercises that helped too.
My physical wounds healed. I had my hair cut into bangs again to cover my forehead, and the scar around my eye socket faded. Vince told me it was invisible, but I could see and feel it. I was Frankenstein’s monster.
Milo did his best to convince me he had nothing to do with Bermingham’s actions and never knew about the messages orthe fire or any of it. I wasn’t sure I believed him. I did not want him back in my house. Vince understood and kept him away. I let Carla take the reins at Cooper Rivera for a while as I tried to recover from the trauma. I began to write stories again. I could find an escape only in the alternate worlds I created.
Part Four
54
Lucy
Growing up with two recovering addicts was not easy. Mum was prone to moods and depression, though she’d never admit it. Dad was not my real dad, but I don’t think I could have loved him more if he was. He was always ready to talk about anything I was curious about. But nearly all their friends were sober alcos too. There was never booze in our house and I thought that was normal until I went for a sleepover at my pal Melanie’s house when I was about thirteen. Her parents had some of their friends around, and they all got drunk; they were singing and hugging each other at the end of the night. Mel said this often happened and used it to her advantage. She knew that when they were ‘merry’ was the best time to ask for an Xbox, or a new iPhone, or for cold hard cash. Cash was the best, because their friends would contribute too. That night, Mel and I made a hundred euro each from her parents and their friends, and they were fun. One lady kept running her fingers through my hair and saying, ‘A natural blonde, don’t ever dye your hair, it’s beautiful,’ and a man did some magic tricks and pulled a twenty-euro note from behind my ear.
When I came home and told Mum and Dad about it, they seemed embarrassed, and Dad said, ‘Don’t you think we’re fun?’ and they were, but not in the same way that the drunk people were. Mum bought a book about magic tricks and tried a fewout on me but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. Dad bought me a new iPhone out of the blue about two weeks later.
They sat me down and explained what addiction meant and how recovery was a lifelong commitment. I kind of knew all this stuff already. There were framed affirmations all over the house. But then they told me the story of what their lives were like before they gave up drugs and alcohol. They gave me a sanitized version of events until I was old enough to handle the truth when I was about fifteen.
They were both alcoholics and cocaine addicts. When Mum was bad, she wasbad, she couldn’t stop. She stole money from Granny and almost died after a suicide attempt when she was just a little bit older than I am now. She said she was deeply affected by having to leave Boston after Granny and Grandad broke up and being separated from her sister. That sounded bad to me, but Dad’s story was a whole lot worse.
Dad was a child actor in a TV show calledWhat’s Upfor seven years, but he was also in a lot of feature films as a kid. His mother was a pushy ‘stage mum’, and his schooling suffered because he missed so much. He was on stage or screen from the age of seven to twenty-five. His father was an alcoholic, and violent with it. If Dad failed at an audition, his father would beat him. His younger sister was a kid actor too and she got the same treatment. One time, when he was fifteen, Dad was hospitalized after his father threw him down the stairs. His mother lied to the doctors about how he tripped and fell, but the doctors noticed other bruises and marks on his body and started asking inconvenient questions. The police were called, and Dad spent a week in a foster home with an ultra-religious family who told him that if he prayed hard enough, he would never be beaten again. Dad had already tried that, and it didn’t work. He soon landed back at home with his parents because he felt he needed to be there to protect his sister.
The rows between Dad and his father became more violent as Dad got older and began to fight back. He put his own dad in the hospital one time, but his father called the police this time and social services got involved again. It was all entirely dysfunctional. As soon as he was eighteen, he asked his mother for access to all the money he had earned, but his parents had spent it or squirrelled it away somehow. They’d had fancy foreign holidays and lived a lavish lifestyle but had never had the sense to buy a house. Both had given up work as soon as their children started earning a substantial living. Dad moved out of the house and took his little sister, Barbra, with him. His parents didn’t put up much of a fight. He changed agent, hired a lawyer and went no contact with his parents. His new agent gave them a place to stay, and various friends in show business helped them out. He never got the money he had worked for from the age of seven, and the pressure of raising his young teen sister was a lot for such a young man.
She died in a car accident on an icy day when he was twenty-two. She was being driven home from school by a neighbour. It was one of those things where nobody was to blame. The road conditions were lethal. Everyone in the car died, including the neighbour and her daughter.
Poor Dad, it was incredibly sad. Sometimes when I was growing up, I thought that he was overprotective of me, but I know he was thinking of Barb. There were photos of her all over the house, a beautiful, clear-skinned girl who never made it past fifteen years of age. I admit I was jealous of her for a time, but when I told Dad how I felt, he was understanding. Photos of me began to replace the photos of her. Dad has always been cool.
Mum has not. She had a few relapses when I was small, but I don’t remember them. She had far less reason to go off the rails, but she was always moody, prone to snarkiness. With Mum, I knew that she felt obliged to love me, but I never thought that she liked me much.
55
I was a good student. My teachers said I was a quick learner and, despite Dad’s objection, I was allowed to skip fifth class in junior school when I was ten. I think Mum was proud of me in those days. In the summer holidays, I would read the schoolbooks for the coming year out of interest, and I’d joined a CoderDojo club when I was nine because school wasn’t stimulating enough, and coding was useful for everything. I didn’t want to do transition year either and consequently I did my Leaving Certificate at sixteen and went to college.
I had no intention of following my parents into show business. When I was younger, I had considered it because Mum thought it was a good idea. Dad was against it. I took all the classes in the Academy, but never felt like I was the person I was pretending to be. It certainly didn’t come naturally. I know that Mum was disappointed in me. Also there were times when we had lots of money and times when we were broke, but it meant never being able to plan anything. When I was eleven, we moved from a mid-terrace house on a former council estate in Inchicore to a detached house in Ranelagh. Mum and Dad fought about that too. She thought she was going to get some big inheritance from Grandad when he died but she got far less than she expected. In the following years, meeting the mortgage payments was like constantly walking a tightrope. Dad had to be away a lot for work after that. Feature films mostly. I suppose you could say my dad was famous, but as far as I was concerned, he was just my dad.
When it came to career options, I was turned off by anything artsy. I wanted independence and I knew that if I was ever going to move out of Mum and Dad’s, I’d have to earn a shitload of my own money. The future seemed to be in FinTech, or Financial Technology as I had to explain to my parents, who looked at each other, bewildered. I was good at maths and science, which also bewildered them. Perhaps I’d inherited those skills from my birth father, whoever he was.
Simon Perry was on the interview panel when I went for the interview for my internship at ComStat Holdings. I was extremely well qualified, having done computer science specializing in cyber security, I was confident and I knew I’d done a good interview. When I started, I was assigned to work with a team that reported to Susan Cunningham, but after a week there was a change. I never knew the reason, but I was reassigned to work for the team that was led by Simon Perry. I was pleased because Simon was more senior. He was a good boss, quick to assign credit when it was due, and when we got things wrong, he explained everything clearly. He didn’t look for who to blame, he was all about problem-solving.
We were in an open-plan office and my desk was closest to his. The first thing I noticed about him was how good he smelled. He would sometimes come to my desk and lean over to show me something on my monitor. He smelled clean, of soap or aftershave. He wore a suit well, and he often mentioned going to the gym before going home. I couldn’t help noticing what good shape he was in when he would stand up and stretch at the end of the day. Sometimes, his shirt might have come loose, and I’d see a bare tanned patch of his toned stomach. One day we were in the break room together at lunchtime and he was talking about some new café bar that had opened and he said to me, ‘Want to check it out for lunch next week?’ There was only me in the room, and I wasn’t sure if it was a date or not, like, he was aboutfifteen years older than me, but I said yes, because it seemed rude to say no to your boss.
I’m not a fool: I had googled Simon, and he was married with a baby and an attractive raven-haired wife. I was not interested in having an affair. The next day, leaning over my desk again, he asked me what I thought of a gold bracelet he was going to buy for his wife. It was over €2k. Okay, I thought, it definitely wasn’t a date, and over lunch in the shiny new café bar, he talked about his political journalist wife and showed me photos of their holidays in the Seychelles. He was wearing board shorts in the photos which he swiped through. I talked about being the youngest graduate at my college. We drank Cokes and sparkling water, and I came back to my desk a little late, but relieved that there was no question of him seeing me in any romantic way.
But after that, I began to think of him differently. I imagined myself on that beach with him in the Seychelles. I was slimmer than his wife. And a lot younger.
A few weeks later, he found another new restaurant that had just opened, though this one was further away. He asked me if I wanted to go and again I said yes, feeling a little ripple of excitement this time.
When the day came and I saw the others on my team dressed up, I had a slight feeling of disappointment that I was not the chosen one after all. We were all going. This time we did not go back to work after lunch and there were bottles of wine on the table. I never drank that much, but Simon was constantly filling our glasses. He was becoming more and more attractive to me, but he didn’t pay me any special attention. Daniel, who’d started in the office at the same time as me, made some comment to me about Simon, that it was obvious I liked him. He’d caught me gazing at Simon while I was supposed to be listening to Steph’s tale of hiking in Tibet. Daniel said he wished Simon was playingfor his team. Daniel was funny and sweet, and I guess this was his way of telling me he was gay, though he didn’t have to. My gaydar was finely tuned, except when it came to myself. I’d had a month-long fling with a Canadian girl in college. I was crazy about her and told Mum and Dad I was a lesbian. They were, as expected, annoyingly laid-back and unshocked. ‘Good for you,’ said Dad, and then Mum said, ‘Nasrin’s daughter is gay too. You might get along?’ and my eyes rolled so far back in my head that I could see my ass.
Daniel was my work pal, and we were seven weeks into the placement. We’d been told that only five out of fifteen of us would be chosen for full-time jobs. I already knew that I was one of the five. I’d won contracts and had created a database to streamline each approach to a new client, based on seven core criteria. It had been adopted across the entire company, and I’d received a hefty bonus. I was popular with the others in our team too – they wanted to learn from me.
But I was not the centre of Simon’s attention on this afternoon that progressed into a drunken evening. At the end of the night, I was feeling out of control. I went to the bathroom and downed a few of the complimentary bottles of water. As I emerged, Simon exited from the gents. He took my arm and twirled me around like a ballroom dance move.
‘You’re something else, you know that?’ he said and, with his arm cradling me, dipped me back, so that my head almost touched the floor. Then he lifted me upright, kissed me a smacker on the lips and moved past me back into the restaurant. It had all happened so fast, I couldn’t believe it was real.
