‘No, you were brilliant.’
‘Left turn coming up –’
‘And you just kept your cool and did it!’
‘Thelma and Louise, that’s who we’re like!’
Wanted to high-five her, hug her, pick her up in my arms and twirl her around.
In the end, settled for snogging her.
Grace
Casey Kaplan tore a sugar sachet open with his teeth.
‘Gobshite,’ I murmured, amazed – almost pleased – that Kaplan had found yet another way to irritate me.
‘Yeah, gobshite,’ TC agreed. ‘What’s wrong with using your fingers?’
‘I know this might sound mad,’ I said in an undertone. ‘But I almost enjoy hating him.’
‘Me too.’
Kaplan’s desk was set a little way off from the cluster of Features, far away enough for us to be able to bitch about him but close enough that we had to do it quietly. Discreetly we surveyed him tipping the sugar into his coffee then – we were agog – stirring it with a blue biro.
‘Gobshite,’ TC breathed.
‘Yeah, gobshite,’ I whispered. ‘What’s wrong with using a spoon?’
‘He could just shout in to Coleman Brien to bring him one and Coleman would jump to it, probably offer to stir his coffee for him –’
‘–with his mickey –’
‘–yeah, with his mickey –’
Suddenly Jacinta’s witchy face appeared between TC and me. ‘I hate him too,’ she hissed angrily. ‘But do some fucking work.’
Office-wide the mood was volatile. Half the paper had given up smoking on the first of January. Eight days in, it was ready to blow sky-high. Because I’d gone through my initialwithdrawalin October, I wasn’t too bad. It didn’t mean that I didn’t ache for cigarettes – because I did – but I wasn’t locked into a state of near-blind rage, like everyone else.
Mind you, nor did I feel the comfort of marching shoulder to shoulder with fellow sufferers because I knew what was going to happen: tomorrow was Friday, and after work everyone would go to Dinnegans and three-quarters of those who had given up would resume smoking between their third and fourth drink. The other quarter would fall off the wagon over the weekend, and come Monday morning I would be restored to my position of lone non-smoker. (Or rather, non-smoking smoker. There were one or two people dotted among the staff who had never smoked, but I felt no kinship with them.)
‘Grace!’ Jacinta urged. ‘Work!’
Reluctantly I returned to my story, and when my mobile rang, a thrill – small but nevertheless a thrill – lit me up like a power surge. Any kind of diversion would do. I checked the number. Was it safe to answer? Dickie McGuinness.
‘McGuinness here.’
The static was so bad I could barely hear him. He sounded like he was ringing from Mars. Which meant he was probably fifty yards down the road in Dinnegans.
‘Dickie, we miss you!’
Dickie had been ‘out on a story’ since the start of the week. It must be great working crime. So long as you came up with an exposé of ne’er-do-wells a couple of times a year, you could spend the rest of your time enjoying a life of leisure.
‘Grace, I’ve something for you.’ Static fizzed on the line.
‘I dread to think.’ Dickie could be very vulgar, especially when he had drink in him.
‘Do you want…’ He dipped out of coverage. ‘… don’t you?’
‘What is it?’
‘Do you want it or don’t you?’
‘Yes, I said! What is it?’
‘The name of the person who paid the two characters to burn out your car.’
My heart seized up in my chest and I pressed my phone so hard against my ear that the cartilage clicked.
Alerted by intuitive nosiness, TC abandoned his typing to look at me.
‘Are you listening?’ Dickie demanded.
‘Yes!’
‘Do you want it or don’t you?’
‘Of course I fecking do!’ Half the office jerked their heads around to stare in my direction.
‘Am I… ah… ih… to… self here?’
‘No, Dickie, I’m here, it’s the line. Tell me.’
‘John Crown.’
‘Say it again.’
‘John Crown. C-r-o-w-n. Like crown of thorns. John. J-o-h-n. Like John the Baptist.’
‘I’ve never heard of him.’
‘… wah … nih …Salome.’
‘No. John Crown. I’ve never heard of John Crown.’
‘Up there for …geh … buh … dancing.’ A great ball of static roared on the line, then I was suddenly disconnected.
With clumsy hands I rang him right back and got a two-note, high-pitched tone I’d never heard before. Maybe he really was on Mars. I tried again and got the same noise. Then again. I stared at my phone wondering what was going on. Was I calling the wrong code? Was my phone broken? Or was it simply the ‘Dickie effect’? He worked hard to create an air of mystery around himself and, to be fair to him, he sometimes pulled it off.
‘What’s going on?’ TC asked.
‘Nothing.’ I clicked off a quick text to Dickie asking him to call me.
‘I will ask again.’ TC bit out the words. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Nothing.’ I needed him to be quiet. My thoughts were racing. John Crown? John Crown? Who was he? Did I know him? What had I done to him? Had I written something bad about him? I searched in my head, flicking back through all the stories I’d ever covered, but I couldn’t get any matches.
My thighs were shaking and I planted my feet firmly on the carpet tiles in an effort to stop them. Knowing the name of an individualwho hated me enough to set my car on fire was distressing in a way I couldn’t ever remember feeling before. In the five weeks since Dickie had told me that it hadn’t been an accident I’d been in such deep shock I wasn’t sure I believed it was true. The only time I felt the fullness of my terror was in the early mornings – six mornings out of seven the fear was waking me at 5.30. However, learning this man’s name had brought the horror of it right up against me. It was unavoidable – I was petrified.
‘It’s obviously not nothing,’ TC persisted. ‘Do I look stupid?’
‘Yes. Really stupid. Especially when you’re doing a sudoku. You press your tongue against your upper lip and we can see the funny black bits under your tongue and you don’t even know you’re doing it.’ I looked up from examining my phone and made humble eye contact with him.
‘Sorry, TC.’
‘Who’s John Crown?’ Tara asked.
‘Yeah, who’s John Crown?’ As well as the narkiness, another feature of a nicotine-starved workplace was a great hunger for entertainment.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You do!’
‘Yes, you do!’
‘Tell us, you do!’
Lorraine didn’t ask me anything: she’d buckled and resumed smoking on 3 January.
Joanne didn’t question me either. She’d never smoked in the first place. (As people frequently observed, she’d never really fit in.)
‘Your ear’s bright red,’ TC observed. ‘It looks abnormal.’
Actually it was very painful. Could I have broken it? Can you break your ear?
‘Work!’ Jacinta hissed like a goose. ‘All of you, work!’
‘Can we get cake?’ Tara asked.
‘Oh yes! Please, Jacinta, cake!’
‘No, no, we can’t bloody well get cake!’
I couldn’t work. The pressure in my head was building. John Crown? Who was he? Why would he pay people to steal my car? Why would some complete stranger do that to me? Perhaps it was a case of mistaken identity? But how could I find out?
Without explaining myself, I slipped out of my seat and made my way to the fire exit.
I needed some peace to think. And perhaps the cold air might calm down my red ear.
The fire escape – strewn with a thick carpet of cigarette butts – was deserted. I sat on a metalstep. The a
ir was bone-cold and misty and the quiet roar of the city was all around me, but at least people weren’t yelping into my banjaxed ear about cake.
I took a deep breath and acknowledged something: Damien might know who John Crown was. I could ask him. But something – and I didn’t know what it was – was stopping me. The same something that had stopped me from telling him what Dickie had originally told me – that my car had been burnt out deliberately. Usually I told Damien everything; well, nearly everything. I mean, he didn’t know that every month just before my period I had to pluck three wiry whisker-style hairs from around my mouth. Not that it was exactly a state secret – if he asked me straight out about it, I wouldn’t lie, but I wasn’t going to unilaterally volunteer the information.
Anyway… I didn’t know why I hadn’t told him that someone had had it in for me.
Maybe I was afraid that if he knew, it would make it real?
And it was real.
I started shaking again but at least this time I could blame it on the cold.
God, what a life. All this on top of me going out of my mind about Marnie. Shortly after I’d last seen her, the worst-case scenario came to pass: she’d lost her job, Nick had left her, taking the two girls with him, and he’d put their lovely big house on the market. The only reason it hadn’t sold yet was because we were in the depths of winter, but it wouldn’t be January for ever.
Christmas had been utterly miserable. Bid’s fourth bout of chemo had finished on Christmas Eve but there was no way of telling if it was working. Apparently it didn’t bring about gradual healing; in fact, it might have no effect whatsoever until the very last dose on the very last day. Until she had a scan after her final bout in February, no one would have a clue if she was going to live or die.
Poor Ma and Dad were showing the strain and it was sad to see because Christmas usually energized Dad. He had a conspiracy theory which got a great airing every year, kicking off in early December. He would rant and rage at anyone who would listen that the Christian churches were in cahoots with big business, compelling people to spend shedloads of money on novelty socks and cranberry sauce and bottles of Advocaat.
In other homes, you know it’s Christmas when the decorations come down from the attic. In ours, Dad’s first conspiracy-theory rant declared the season open.
But this year, apart from a half-hearted tirade on the uselessness of pot pourri, he barely bothered.
Marnie came to Ireland – without the kids, of course – and passed through the ‘celebrations’ like a whey-faced sleepwalker. Up to that point I’d been able to prevent Ma and Dad from knowing about the drinking but if Marnie decided to go on a bout, there would be no way of keeping it from them. The carry-on of her was so bad, she could end up on the six o’clock news.
Perplexingly, though, she didn’t drink. Mind you, she didn’t eat or sleep or speak either.
But I was tentatively hopeful. Perhaps she had finally come to the end. Perhaps the shock of Nick leaving her had finally done it.
It was Damien who suggested that I ring Nick to apprise him of the progress – but Nick was nothing like as pleased as I was. ‘Ten days without a drink? Not good enough. Needs to be a lot longer than that.’
‘But Nick, if she had your support –’
‘No, Grace, I can’t do it to the girls.’
‘But –’
‘No.’
I didn’t like it but I sort of understood it.
I decided that when Marnie returned to London on 30 December, I would go with her to get her over the hump of New Year’s Eve. ‘In fairness,’ I said, ‘New Year’s Eve is enough to turn even the Dalai Lama into a pisshead.’
Damien offered to come with us and I was tempted. I wanted to be with him – it felt as though I’d barely seen him in weeks, even though I had; after all I lived with him – but having forced him to give up cigarettes because of one member of my family, I thought it was pushing my luck to ask him to babysit another of them. And on New Year’s Eve.
‘Go out,’ I urged. ‘Have fun. I’ll be back in two days.’
‘I’ve had enough so-called fun to last me the rest of my life,’ he said gloomily. ‘Certainly enough seasonal cheer.’
His siblings were great ones for Christmas and threw a variety of bashes. Mid-December, Christine and Richard had a glamorous White Russian ball where the invitation ordered you to wear white. ‘Or what?’ Damien had asked the little rectangle of stiff cardboard. ‘Or we’ll be sent to Siberia?’
Two days before Christmas itself, there was a three-line whip from Deirdre. ‘A family dinner,’ she’d said. ‘As we’ll all be with our own families on the day itself.’ She’d created a Christmas grotto in her dining room, the floor strewn with pine needles, sconces flickering, and she served a full-on traditional dinner to twelve adults and ten children, without her smile ever once faltering.
On Christmas Eve, the cousins who were aged around nine to eleven put on a ‘Christmas revue’ with puppets they’d made themselves. In a way this wasn’t the worst of the gatherings because conversation had to be minimal in order to hear the puppets’ dialogue. But in another way it was strangely depressing. These weird children. Shouldn’t they be out nicking lipglosses from Boots?
There were also any number of ‘impromptu’ ‘get-togethers’, from ‘potluck suppers’ to ‘We’ll be in the Dropping Well from 9.30. Do come.’
Damien and I had to show our faces at a couple of the events because if we didn’t – we’d learnt this from previous years – his mum rang us and said everyone was worried about us.
‘Christmas is the pits,’ Damien mused. ‘I know we say it every year, but let’s go away next year, Grace. To Syria or someplace Muslim where they don’t have it.’
‘Grand.’ I’d have gone this year if it hadn’t been for Bid. And Marnie.
‘But bad as Christmas is,’ he said, ‘New Year’s Eve is worse. I hate it.’
‘Who doesn’t? But whatever you get up to, it’s got to be better than sitting in Marnie’s mausoleum drinking Appletise.’
‘Juno’s having a party,’ he said.
My heart was suddenly heavy. It felt like Juno had us bombarded with invitations. Since the night Damien and I had had dinner with her, she’d tried to lure us along to hundreds of different affairs. (In fact, once I focused on the exact number, it turned out to be only three, which I found amazing, it felt like so many more.)
Damien had persuaded me to go to one of them, on the Friday before Christmas, an afternoon, mulled-wine thing. I’d only gone because I was carrying around a suspicion that Juno and her husband must have split up. Why else would Juno have got in touch with Damien so unexpectedly?
But as we arrived, standing on the front steps, smoking a cigarette, was a stout, red-faced man who squashed my hand with drunken bonhomie and introduced himself as, ‘Warner Buchanan. Juno’s husband, the bloody husband, for my sins!’
Then he recognized Damien and, I swear to God – I wasn’t being paranoid
– his expression became wary. ‘You’re the first one! First husband.’
Damien politely admitted that he was indeed and Warner’s face fell – it really did, I wasn’t just imagining it. It sank down into jowly discontent, and beside Damien’s handsome good looks, Warner looked dishevelled and, actually, a little pitiful – and it occurred to me that if I was comparing Damien and Warner and finding Warner a bit lacking, what was to say that Juno wouldn’t also?
Warner slapped an arm around Damien’s shoulders and led him into the house. ‘You and I should swap war stories,’ he roared, but I wasn’t convinced by his display of camaraderie. Too little, too late, is what I would have said had anyone asked me. But they didn’t – no one was interested in me. Juno – as if alerted by a sixth sense to our arrival – swooped out into the hall and yelled at Warner, ‘Get your fat hands off my lovely Damien!’
She kissed Damien – again, on the lips – then me, but not on the lips.
‘Grace!??
? she said. ‘Aren’t you at work?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I’ve mastered the cunning art of bilocation.’
No one laughed. Because no one was listening.
‘There’re loads of people here that you know from school,’ Juno said to Damien. ‘Let’s get you a drink.’
It was the kind of party where they absolutely pour drink into you, where people end up falling into walls and passing out spreadeagled on the bathroom floor and having to be put to bed in the spare room. Much as I wanted to join in the seasonalgood cheer and imbibe enough to end up comatose, I was driving.
I found a seat and nursed a hot Ribena as Juno squired a flush-faced, fluthered Damien around the room. ‘My first husband,’ I kept hearing her say. ‘Isn’t he gorgeous? Look at the cut of Warner next to him. Isn’t he an absolute bloody fright?’
She must be really drunk to talk about her husband that way, I decided. But she didn’t look drunk. In a slinky, beaded, champagne-coloured dress – no foul rugby jersey with the collar turned up today – and her blonde hair twinkling in the light from the chandelier, she was radiant and pretty.
Actually I’ll tell you what she was. She was dazzling.
As I drove him home, Damien declared himself delighted that he’d attended and expressed his drunken appreciation that I’d accompanied him. (The next morning, however, was a different story. We were meant to be braving the scrum, shopping for Christmas presents for his enormous bloody family, but he felt so queasy that he refused to get out of bed.)
‘So Juno’s having a New Year’s Eve party,’ I said. ‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me? Does she do anything other than throw parties?’
‘I won’t go if you don’t want,’ Damien said. ‘I hate New Year’s Eve. And I hate parties!’
I had to laugh – in order to pretend I wasn’t a possessive bunny-boiler.
But I couldn’t sustain it. I burst out, ‘What’s Juno up to? Why has she suddenly emerged from nowhere with her fecking DVD? Why is she so mad keen to be friends with you? What’s her game?’
‘There’s no game.’
It was a short, simple sentence, three to four words. So how had Damien infused it with such defiance? Or perhaps he hadn’t.