‘Right.’
‘And you’re here on holiday?’
Is that what I had told him last night?
‘Um, no, I live here.’
A flash of panic crossed his face.
‘But you said … you’re American? Your accent …’
‘I moved here when I was seventeen. I guess I never entirely lost the accent. Where are we? I mean, this house? I’m a bit fuzzy about getting back here last night.’ I did not want to admit to a blackout.
‘You said you were going back home to Boston.’ He seemed outraged at the lie.
‘I live in Ranelagh, okay?’ I was impatient now. ‘Where are we?’ I said again. ‘I don’t want to bump into you any more than you want to bump into me.’
‘Castleknock,’ he said, ‘the other side of the city. You don’t remember the cab ride home?’
I ignored the question. ‘Okay, we’re unlikely to be in the same tennis club. We won’t be seeing each other in a local restaurant or the supermarket. It’s okay.’
‘Fine. You’d better go. Please. The cleaning lady often comes early.’
I left before he could tell me a third time, grabbing my handbag, reassured to feel the shape of my phone and keys inside it, although the orange and the Polo mints were gone. I made my way down a mahogany staircase to a Georgian front door with a fanlight above it. I pulled the door behind me and glanced around. It was still early, there was nobody about. I walked towards a junction at the bottom of the street and hailed a cab idling at the traffic lights. Time to face the music. While I wracked my brain to come up with a plausible excuse, my thoughts were astray with Rebecca, Christopher’s wife. Poor Rebecca.
65
I took my phone out of my bag. Clearly, I had turned it to silent at some stage last night. Seven messages and eight missed calls from Jack and Lucy, the last one at 4.37 a.m. from Jack. One from Jane too:
Jack knows you’re not withSinéadand me. Have you relapsed? We’re worried about you. Hope you’re only having an affair
The earlier messages from Jack displayed fondness.
Hey Rubes, want me to pick you up? I can zip into town around midnight. Lucy is upset again
read the first. But the later they got, the more the tone turned to concern and then to anger.
There were messages from Lucy after midnight, saying
Where are you Mum?
Her last one, at 2 a.m., was all in caps.
The final message from Jack:
I called Jane andSinéad. I know you lied. I called the Trocadero too. You’ve relapsed. If you were having an affair, you wouldn’t be this stupid about it. Lucy cried herself to sleep again. We can’t go on like this.
Ihadbeen stupid. My plan had been to drink until about midnight and then make an excuse to hop in the shower when I got home and sleep in the spare room. Nothing had changed since I was sixteen years old. I did not think things through. Never looked at the consequences. What did he mean byWe can’t go on like this? Would he insist on couples therapy? Surely not now, when Lucy was going through her fake crisis.
The taxi driver watched me like a hawk. I wished he’d keep his eyes on the road.
As we bumped over Charlemont Bridge, I asked the driver to pull over. I needed fresh air and I needed a straightener. From practice, I knew there was only one way to quell the nausea. I wondered where I would get booze at that hour on a Tuesday morning. I walked back towards the bridge and looked underneath it. Sure enough, some of the tented community were awake, one of them shuffling like a zombie around a gas stove. I clambered down the grassy embankment to be confronted by a woman clad in filthy jeans and a black polo-neck sweater. She looked about sixty, but her face was destroyed by broken veins and dark shadows under her eyes. Maybe she was the same age as me. A small terrier mongrel ran around her feet, barking at me.
‘What do you want?’ she rasped in a cross between an Eastern European accent and a Dublin one, and the voice of someone who had smoked forty a day for forty years.
‘Could you spare a can?’ I said. ‘I have money.’
‘I don’t want your money.’ She looked me up and down. ‘The shoes,’ she said.
