This Charming Man

  ‘I’m worried about Bid,’ he said. ‘I need to smoke.’

  ‘Nice try. Go again.’

  ‘Grace, if we stop smoking, we’ll put on four stone each.’

  ‘We could start jogging again. We were going great guns there for a while.’

  ‘Easy in the summer.’

  We’d been so good. All through May and June, we had gone running in the early morning, in our matching sweats, like a couple from a mortgage ad. I used to watch us from the outside and marvelat how convincing we looked. Sometimes I’d smile at people coming home from getting their paper. Once or twice I even waved at a milkman. He never waved back, just stared after us suspiciously, wondering if we were somehow taking the piss out of him. Over the weeks, we’d built up the distance covered, making measurable progress. Then we’d gone on holiday in July and ate and drank our heads off and just never got back into it.

  ‘Even talking about giving up is making me want to smoke more.’ Damien reached for his pack, the way devout Catholic women reach for their rosary beads. ‘Let’s have one for the road.’

  We sat outside on the back step, savouring cigarettes that seemed even more delicious than usual.

  Blowing out a long plume of smoke, his eyes narrowed, Damien said, ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Ma has put the guilts on me,’ I said. She’s a master at that. Always for a good cause, though. ‘If Bid doesn’t get better and I haven’t stopped smoking, it’ll be my fault. And yours too, Damien Stapleton,’ I added. ‘Murderer.’

  ‘Take a look at this.’ Damien picked up the remote.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  The screen went blue, then jumped into life. A man, a young man was emerging from the front door of a suburban-looking house. Longish, mid-brown hair and oozing sex, he walked with a hint of a swagger, very sure of himself. ‘Oh my God!’ I yelped. ‘What age were you?’

  ‘Twenty, as far as I can figure out.’

  On the screen, Damien stopped and leant against a car, then gave a slow smile straight at the lens. ‘What?’ his voice asked. ‘You filming me?’

  ‘Yes,’ a girl’s voice said. ‘Say something.’

  ‘Like what?’ Damien laughed, a little bit awkward, a little bit shy, more than a little bit sexy.

  God, I thought. Sixteen years ago. Half a lifetime.

  ‘Say something profound,’ the girl’s voice urged.

  The twenty-year-old Damien shrugged. ‘Don’t eat yellow snow.’

  ‘That’s your message to the world?’

  ‘Work is the curse of the drinking classes!’ He gave a clenched-fist salute. ‘Power to the people.’

  ‘Thank you, Damien Stapleton.’

  The screen went blue again. It was over.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ I asked.

  ‘Juno.’

  ‘… Juno?’

  His ex-wife.

  To be fair, it’s probably not as dramatic as it sounds. They’d only been married for three years, from the ages of twenty-two to twenty-five. (Yes, both of them; they were the same age, they’d been at schooltogether.) It was just the usualtwenty-something relationship that everyone has, the only difference was that they’d made the mistake of actually getting married.

  All the same, though… We could have done without another blast from the past; we were still getting back on our feet after the last one.

  ‘Juno?’ I prompted Damien. ‘What’s the story?’

  ‘She’s putting all her old family videos on DVD and came across this. Sent it to Mum, who sent it on to me.’ He added, ‘She told Mum there was more to come.’

  It was ten years since I’d met Damien, on a press trip to Phuket, when I was a features writer on the Times. Damien shouldn’t have been there; he was a serious political correspondent who had no place covering trips to Thailand, but he was skint and desperate for a holiday and his features editor had taken pity on him.

  I noticed him at the airport check-in queue. He was standing in a cluster of other journos but somehow on the margins, and I swear to God, I felt like I’d had a blow to the head.

  There was just something about him, a self-containment, an independence, that made me throb with fascination.

  Right away I knew he’d be choosy. Tricky even. I knew he’d put up a fight. Up until then I’d never understood those women who thought so little of themselves that they fell in love only with emotionally unavailable men. Now look at me.

  But I couldn’t help it. I just gazed at this man – whoever he was – and I thought, I want you. The whole thing gave me quite a fright.

  I cornered my friend Triona (features writer at the Independent) and asked, ‘Your man over there…?’

  ‘Damien Stapleton from the Tribune?’

  ‘Yes. You know him?’

  ‘Yes, what about him… wha –? Oh no, Grace, no.’

  I was surprised. I thought everyone else would lust after him too and I’d have a fierce battle on my hands.

  ‘He’s not your type at all.’ Triona sounded alarmed. ‘He’s too… you’d never know where you were with him.’

  I hardly heard her. I was noticing ancillary details, a secondary layer of attractiveness. He had a great body. Powerful-looking. And although he wasn’t what you might call lanky, he was tall enough – i.e. as tall as me. (Maybe even an inch or two more.)

  ‘He has no sense of humour,’ Triona warned, the very worst thing that could be said about an Irish man.

  But I made him laugh.

  On every bus trip and tourist-board dinner in Phuket, I engineered it so that I was sitting next to Damien Stapleton. Even when we had days ‘at leisure’ he’d find himself cheek by jowl with me at the poolside. But if he was bemused by me popping up wherever he was, he didn’t say.

  That was the whole problem – he said almost nothing. I was the one who did all the talking, wheeling out my best anecdotes and entertaining stories. Often he looked confused – at times even pained – but his eyes never left my face, and now and again, if I said something he agreed with, he’d give a slow nodding smile or even laugh softly. I took this as sufficient encouragement to keep going.

  All the other journos begged me, ‘Grace, would you leave that poor fella alone? You’ve the life scared out of him.’

  Even Dickie McGuinness from crime on the Times – who’d spent so much time hanging around with criminals that he’d developed a menacing persona himself – muttered an intimidating warning out of the side of his mouth. ‘A word to the wise, Grace. Men like to do the chasing.’

  ‘No,’ I said belligerently. ‘Men are lazy and will take the path of least resistance. And stop looking at me like you’re going to staple me to the wall. You shouldn’t even be on this trip, you work in crime.’

  ‘I needed a… holiday.’ He invested the word with heavy meaning.

  ‘I appreciate your advice, Dickie – actually no, that’s a lie, I don’t. And don’t give me any more because I’m not going to take it.’

  The truth was I couldn’t stay away from Damien – it shocked me, to be honest – and now and then he dropped a little nugget of information that convinced me we were perfect for each other. For example, he didn’t like radishes (neither did I) or boating trips on the Shannon (neither did I). He liked thrillers (so did I) and staying up late, watching reruns of bad eighties’ shows like Magnum PI and Knight Rider (so did I). He thought fruit-picking holidays were a swizz. (Again, so did I and no one else did. Everyone else enjoyed them.)

  Looking for advice, I rang my twin sister, Marnie. She was always reading books about relationships. Full of wisdom, so she was. Also she wouldn’t laugh at me.

  ‘Describe everything,’ she asked. ‘What he looked like the first time you saw him, what you were wearing…’

  It was a pleasure simply talking about him and I went on and on. I finished up with, ‘Tell me what to do.’

  ‘Me?’ Marnie said. ‘I’m hardly the poster girl for how to get a man.’

/>   ‘You get plenty.’

  ‘And never manage to hang on to them. I’m too mental.’

  Sad but true. Marnie was deeply intuitive, but it only seemed to work on others; she was unable to use her razor-sharp analysis to sort out her own life. Her relationships usually ended in some sort of disaster. But unlike me, who fell for a man about once a decade, Marnie threw herself into grand passions every second week. In fact, our attitude to romance was similar to our health: Marnie got every bug that was going, but recovered quickly; I, on the other hand, hardly ever got sick but, when I did, I’d parlay a nondescript cold into bronchitis, tonsillitis and, one memorable December, foot and mouth (not as funny as it sounds).

  ‘Just how serious is this?’ Marnie asked.

  ‘Pneumonia. Both lungs. Pleurisy… and possibly TB.’

  ‘That’s bad… But, at the risk of sounding like Ma, Grace, the best advice I can give is to just be yourself. No one is better than you.’

  ‘Aw come on…’

  ‘You are! You know exactly who you are, you don’t take crap from anyone, you can do long division in your head, you tell a good story, you don’t mind getting caught in the rain without an umbrella –’

  ‘But shouldn’t I be playing games? Pretending I don’t like him? Oh Marnie, it’s all such bollocks! If a man likes a woman, he sends her flowers –’

  ‘You wouldn’t want flowers. You’d laugh.’

  She was exactly right. That was precisely what I would do.

  ‘ – or he simply picks up the phone and asks her out. Why can’t women do that? Why do we have to pretend we feel the opposite to how we actually feel? It’s just yet another way that women get shafted –’

  ‘Are you trying out a column on me?’

  ‘No. No. No.’ Perhaps, actually. I meandered to a dispirited halt. ‘He’s divorced.’

  ‘So what? Everyone has baggage.’

  Usually press trips were debauched affairs but I behaved impeccably. If I couldn’t have Damien, I didn’t want anyone else.

  At the airport taxi rank, it was no surprise that he didn’t ask for my number. And I didn’t ask for his because after ten days of getting nowhere, I’d got the message.

  I knew how hard it was to decide that you didn’t care about someone simply because they didn’t care about you. You can’t just unplug your heart at the mains. But I was a practicalperson and did my best. So Damien wasn’t interested, but there were others who were. (Not loads, I’m not saying that, but one or two possibles.) So I gave it a go with Scott Holmes, a fast-living Kiwi who worked for the Sunday Globe. But, despite my best efforts – and I’d tried really hard to like him – at most he amounted only to a ticklish cough.

  Occasional Damien-rumours reached me – that he was getting back with his wife, that he’d been seen getting into a taxi late at night with Marcella Kennedy from the Sunday Independent…

  Now and again I even bumped into him (despite my determination to put my unrequited love behind me, I’d befriended people at the Tribune and even occasionally snuck along to the launch of a political manifesto) and he always seemed pleased to see me. Well, not exactly pleased – not like a cocker spanielwhen his master comes home – but he answered my questions without evident reluctance.

  The night of Lucinda Breen’s thirtieth-birthday party appeared to be no different. It was late in the evening and I was feeling a bit drunk, a bit dangerous and a bit angry, even though it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t fancy me.

  ‘How are you, Grace?’

  Even the way he said my name hurt.

  ‘Annoyed. Why is everything so much easier for men?’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘They can pee standing up.’ Then, segueing from the generalto the particular, ‘And when they fancy someone they can just throw them a cheesy chat-up line.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like… if I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, what?’

  ‘Yes, I would hold it against you.’

  I was dumbstruck for a good ten seconds. ‘You would?’

  ‘Yes. I thought you’d never ask.’

  Again I was dumbstruck.

  ‘Why should I have to ask? You’re the man.’

  ‘Grace Gildee, I never knew you were such an old romantic.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘But if you were… interested… you are interested, aren’t you? I’m not making a big foolof myself here, am I?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, you’re not making a foolof yourself. Yes, I am interested.’

  Was this really happening?

  ‘So why didn’t you let me know?’

  ‘… I wasn’t sure. You were friendly, but you’re friendly to everyone… I’ve been out of the game a long time.’

  I couldn’t believe he was saying these things. It was as if my real life and my fantasy life had merged. Every word I’d ever wished for was coming from his mouth.

  ‘You’re so full of life,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d never be enough for you. Dazzler.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s my name for you. Dazzler Gildee. Because you dazzle me.’

  He had a name for me?

  Extract from the Spokesman Grace Gildee, She’s Sugar-free column, Saturday, 27 September

  I hate teenage boys. I hate their spots and their randiness and, above all, the way they see a woman’s bum as something to be pinched. Every arse is an opportunity.

  And frankly they’re an eyesore. As soon as puberty kicks in, all teenage boys should be rounded up and incarcerated in a compound until the age of eighteen. That’ll clean up our streets.

  While they’re in there, they can forget about reading Nuts and Loaded and Maxim. Feed them a strict diet of feminist literature, everything from Germaine Greer to Julie Burchill. So, when we let them out, they’re fully grown, spot-free and informed about women. Maybe even with a little respect for us?

  Harsh, I know, but they pay me to be controversial.

  ‘Squeeze your mumble in mumble!’ Damien called over his shoulder.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your legs!’ He lifted the visor on his lid. ‘Squeeze them tight to the bike!’

  I saw why. He was about to take us through a slender channel between a dark blue van and a people-carrier. ‘Breathe in!’ he yelled.

  The journey to work on the back of his bike was thrilling. In a very bad way. Damien saw everything as a challenge, almost like a personal test. No space was too tight, no light too amber, no gridlock too dense that it couldn’t be negotiated with a series of cunning zigs and zags. If he’d been given the chance to fly over eighteen buses, to gain a couple of seconds, he’d have jumped at it.

  Maybe he didn’t have enough excitement in his life?

  He pulled up outside the Spokesman and took off his lid to kiss me. His biker leathers, the throb of the machine between my legs, well, it was all quite sexy…

  ‘Be strong,’ I said.

  I wasn’t talking about the remainder of his journey. I was talking about something far more daunting – our decision to stop smoking. Ma had caught Bid having a sneaky fag in the bathroom and blowing the smoke out of the window, ‘Like a teenager!’ as Ma had said in her call. ‘The last straw.’ Then she’d put Bid on the line and I found myself telling her that if I could knock cigarettes on the head, so could she.

  ‘And Damien,’ Ma had called.

  ‘And Damien,’ I’d said reluctantly, while Damien buried his head in his hands and groaned, ‘No!’

  ‘Strong,’ he repeated sardonically.

  ‘Damien, you’re not so much losing a –’

  ‘–friend,’ he said.

  ‘ – habit. As gaining a healthy new body.’

  He didn’t answer. Just shoved his lid back on and roared away, like a cat showing me its bum.

  This wasn
’t going to come off, him taking me to work on the bike. To do my job properly I had to have a car. Not just for getting around, but as a wardrobe. In the boot of my old car, I’d had outfits for all situations. To persuade a nice, middle-class woman to talk about the death of her baby, I had a neat, pretty suit, low-heeled courts, even a string of pearls. For standing by a freezing dockside, waiting to discover if fishermen from an overturned trawler had lived or died, I had gloves, boots and a thermal vest (my secret weapon). For a feature on drugs I had skanger-chic sportswear.

  Yusuf leapt forward to open the glass door. Not something he normally did, but he had a question. Already he was laughing, his teeth very white in his dark face. ‘Was that you on the bike?’

  I nodded. No point lying, much as I wanted to, because I was carrying a helmet. He shot an excited look at Mrs Farrell, the receptionist and most powerfulperson in the Spokesman. Woe betide anyone who fell foul of her. You might as well resign. She could withhold phone calls from your dying mother, ‘accidentally’ give your home address to maniacs, or ‘forget’ to let you know that the fresh kidney for your kidney transplant had arrived. Even Big Daddy (Coleman Brien, the editor) took care around her.

  ‘What happened to your car?’ she asked.

  ‘Stolen. Burnt out.’ Again there was no point lying. Dickie McGuinness in crime would get it from the police database in two seconds. (Dickie and I seemed to always end up working in the same place. We’d been in the Times together; when I left for the Independent, he showed up after a month; then he moved to the Spokesman and six months later they offered me a job.)

  ‘God, that’s terrible.’ Then Yusuf and Mrs Farrell exploded with laughter.

  When Yusuf had first arrived, he’d been a sweet, gentle Somalian man. Then he’d got infected by Mrs Farrell and the Spokesman ethos. He was horrible now, horrible like the rest of us.

  Mrs Farrell hit the phones. It was like a rerun of the Friday before last when my bruised, cut face had caused a similar stir. She was gleefully telling everyone my sorry story. It had been idiocy to think my stolen car could remain a secret and now I was facing a day of major mockery, with all kinds of presents left on my desk: boxes of matches; small scorched red cars; a bus timetable…