On day five the yearning got too bad and she rang him, but it went straight to message service. He was out, she deduced, having a good time, living the life she used to live. Full of irritating desolation, she hung up, too raw to leave a message.
She should have known he wouldn’t get in touch. It was over, they both knew it, and once his mind was made up, it stayed that way. Subdued and distracted, she couldn’t stop dwelling on questions that she should have considered six months, nine months, a year previously. What had happened to her marriage? What went wrong? Like so many relationships, theirs had foundered on the issue of children. But this time there was a twist. He wanted them, she didn’t.
She’d thought she wanted them. There was a spate when absolutely anyone who was anyone was up the duff: various Spice Girls; a plethora of models; several actresses. A bump was as much of a style statement as a pashmina or a Gucci handbag, and pregnancy was hot. She’d even included it in a list – Pregnancy was ‘Hot’ and Precious Stones were ‘Not’.
Shortly after that, the in-thing was to be seen wheeling a tiny little baba in a black jogging buggy – don’t leave home without it. Lisa, her gimlet eye registering the infinitesimal rise and fall of all things trendy, took in these developments.
‘I want a baby,’ she told Oliver.
Oliver wasn’t so keen. He liked their stylish, sociable life, and knew that a baby would put the brakes on it. No more partying until dawn, no more white sofas, no more spontaneous, last-minute trips to Milan. Or Vegas. Or even Brighton. Sleepless nights would no longer be courtesy of high-grade cocaine, but of a screaming child instead. All disposable income would be diverted away from Dolce & Gabbana jeans and reapplied to mountains of disposable nappies.
But Lisa got to work, and slowly she convinced him. Appealing to his macho pride, ‘Don’t you want your genes to be carried on?’
‘No.’
And then one day, lying in bed he said, ‘OK.’
‘OK, what?’
‘OK, we’ll have a baby.’ Before Lisa could exclaim with pleasure he had plucked her foil card of pills from the bedside shelf and ceremoniously flushed them down the loo.
‘No safety net, babes.’
In her fantasies, Lisa was already sporting a delicious coffee-coloured baby on her slender hip. ‘It’s not a doll,’ Fifi pointed out to her. ‘It’s a human being and they’re a lot of hard work.’
‘I know that,’ Lisa had snapped. But she didn’t really.
Then someone at work got pregnant. Arabella, a sharp, slightly dangerous woman, who was as smart as a whip and always immaculately turned out. Overnight she became as sick as a dog. One day she even puked into the wastepaper bin. When she wasn’t in the ladies’ either weeing or throwing up, she was slumped at her desk, queasily nibbling ginger, too exhausted to work. And the food! Despite her ever-present nausea, she ate mountains. ‘The only thing that settles my stomach is food,’ she mumbled, shoving another Cornish pasty down the hatch. In no time she looked as if she’d been buried up to her neck in a sandpit. It got worse. Her once-glistening hair became unaccountably frizzy and suddenly she was very prone to cold sores. Her skin yielded flaky patches of psoriasis and her nails split and broke. To Lisa’s supercritical eye she looked more like a plague victim than a pregnant woman.
Most disturbing of all, Arabella’s concentration disappeared. Mid-interview she forgot Nicole Kidman’s name, and could only come up with the office nickname for her: Nicole Skidmark. She couldn’t remember if her wraparound John Rocha velcro skirt was last season’s or the one before. And these things were elementary, Lisa noted in mounting alarm. The day came when Arabella’s ability to make a decision between a White Magnum and a Classic Magnum just went west on her. ‘Whi- No, Classi- No, no, wait. White. Definitely White. No, Classic…’ She could have dithered for England. ‘I’ve become lime-jelly-brain girl,’ she moaned.
Thoroughly spooked, Lisa went to see another woman who’d had a baby. Eloïse, features editor at Chic Girly.
‘How are you?’ Lisa asked.
‘Psychotic from sleep deprivation,’ Eloïse answered.
It got worse. Though it was six months since Eloïse had had her baby, she still looked as though she’d been buried up to her neck in a sandpit.
And something else. She no longer cared, she’d lost her hardness. This was the editor formerly known as Attila. She sacked without fear – or at least she used to. But now she was afflicted with a faint but unmissable air of goo.
Lisa began back-pedalling like there was no tomorrow. She didn’t want a baby, they destroyed your life. It was easy for models and Spice Girls. They had teams of nannies to ensure you got your sleep, personal trainers to insist you regained your figure, private hairdressers to comb your hair when you hadn’t the energy to.
But by then Oliver was well into the idea. And the thing about Oliver was that once he’d decided on something, it was very hard to make him change his mind.
Secretly she began taking the Pill again. No way was she destroying her precious career.
Ah yes, Lisa’s career. Oliver had objected to that too, hadn’t he?
‘You’re a workaholic,’ he accused, over and over, with mounting frustration and anger.
‘Men always say that about successful women.’
‘No, I don’t just mean that you work too hard, although you do. Babes, you’re obsessed. All you talk about is office politics or circulation figures, or how the competition is doing. “At least we get more in advertising… We did that article six months ago… Ally Benn is out to get me.” ’
‘Well, she is.’
‘No, she isn’t.’
Mad with the irritation of being misunderstood, Lisa glared at him. ‘You’ve no idea what it’s like, they all want to be me, all those twenty-year-olds. They’d stitch me up and stab me in the back, given half a chance.’
‘Just because you think that way doesn’t mean everyone else does. You’re paranoid.’
‘I’m not, I’m telling it like it is. Their only loyalty is to themselves.’
‘Just like you, babes. You’ve got so hard, you’ve sacked too many people. You shouldn’t have sacked Kelly, she was sweet, and on your side.’
Shame flickered for the tiniest moment. ‘She couldn’t hack it, she wasn’t tough enough. I need a features writer who isn’t afraid of doing hatchet jobs. Nice people like Kelly hold the magazine back.’ She rounded on Oliver. ‘I didn’t enjoy sacking her, if that’s what you’re thinking. I thought she was all right, but I’d no choice.’
‘Lisa, I think you’re the business. I always did. I…’ he paused as he searched for the right word. ‘I admire you, I respect you…’
‘But?’ Lisa questioned sharply.
‘But there’s more to life than being the best.’
A scornful laugh. ‘No there isn’t.’
‘But you are the best. You’re so young and successful, why isn’t it enough?’
‘That’s the trouble with success,’ Lisa muttered. ‘You’ve got to keep doing better.’
How could she explain that the more she got, the more she wanted? Every coup left her empty, chasing the next one in the hope that perhaps then she’d feel like she’d arrived. Satisfaction was fleeting and elusive and success simply whetted her appetite for more and more and more.
‘Why does it matter so much?’ Oliver had asked in despair. ‘It’s only a job.’
Lisa flinched at that. Oh, he was so wrong. ‘It’s not. It’s… everything.’
‘You’ll change your mind when you get pregnant.’
Instantly, terror bathed her in sweat. She wouldn’t be getting pregnant. She had to tell him. But she’d tried and he’d totally stonewalled her.
‘Let’s go away this weekend, babes,’ Oliver suggested with a brightness that he didn’t feel. ‘Just you and me, hanging out, the way it used to be.’
‘I’ve got to pop into the office on Saturday for a couple of hours. Got to check the layout before it g
oes to the printers…’
‘Ally could do that.’
‘No way! She’d screw it up on purpose just to show me up.’
‘See what I mean?’ he said bitterly. ‘You’re obsessed and I never get to see you, except at work bashes… And you’re no fun any more.’
There continued a steady, bitter accretion of let-downs and disappointments, a mounting litany of resentments and blame, of withdrawal and isolation from each other. Two people who had blurred into one gradually became two again, sharply defined and separate.
Something had to give and eventually it did.
On New Year’s Day Oliver found a packet of the Pill in Lisa’s handbag. After a savage and lengthy exchange of words, they lapsed into silence. Oliver packed his bags (and one of Lisa’s) and left.
44
‘who’s doing the lunch run today?’ Lisa asked.
‘Me,’ Trix replied quickly. Too quickly.
Trix loved doing the lunch run, not because she wished to be of service to her colleagues, but because it ensured she got two lunch-hours. It took four minutes to walk to the sandwich shop, another six to order, pay for and collect the sandwiches. Which left forty-five minutes to wander around the shops of Temple Bar before returning to the office and shriekingly condemning the indecisive crowds ahead of her in the sandwich queue, the gobshites who worked there who couldn’t tell the difference between chicken and avocado, the man who’d had a heart attack so that she had to loosen his clothing and wait with him until the ambulance came…
Even though everyone was snowed under by work, with just over a month to go before the launch of Colleen, nevertheless they found themselves looking forward to her progressively more outrageous excuses.
Then she would sit and spend fifteen minutes eating her sandwich, before looking at the clock and announcing, ‘One fifty-seven, I’m going on lunch, see you all at two fifty-seven.’
‘I’d like something a little bit different for my lunch today,’ Lisa told Trix.
‘Ah, Burger King.’ Trix understood.
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘There’s more to lunch than sandwiches and burgers.’
Trix’s look was baffled.
‘Is it fruit you want?’ Her over-made-up forehead puckered in confusion. She knew that Lisa sometimes ate apples and grapes and that kind of gear. Trix never ate fruit. Absolutely never. She prided herself on it.
‘I’d like sushi.’
The suggestion was such a revolting one that Trix briefly lost the power of speech. ‘Sushi?’ she eventually spat in horror. ‘Do you mean raw fish?’
Over the weekend Lisa had read that a sushi emporium had come to Dublin and she hoped that sampling their merchandise might lift her out of her Oliver-triggered depression. But she’d hoped the comedy gig on Saturday night would do the trick too, and it hadn’t: although Jack had showed up and had talked to her for a lot of the night – when he hadn’t been talking to that pain-in-the-arse Clodagh, that is.
‘Some of your best friends are fish,’ Lisa said wearily.
‘How many times do I have to tell you that there are never any fish in the van when I’m in it!’
‘Here, I’ve drawn you a little map,’ Lisa said. ‘Just ask for a bento box.’
‘A bento box? Are you making that up?’ Trix snarled, terrified of being made a fool of.
‘No, that’s how takeaway sushi is packaged. They’ll know in the shop what you’re talking about.’
‘A bento box,’ Trix repeated suspiciously.
‘Who’s getting a bento box?’ Jack had appeared in the office.
‘She is,’ Trix whined, at the same time as Lisa said, ‘I am.’
Trix launched into a noisy condemnation of Lisa, how she was forcing her to buy and transport disgusting raw fish across the city, how the very thought made her feel like vomiting…
‘Someone else can do the lunch run if you’d prefer,’ Jack suggested mildly.
‘No, it’s OK,’ Trix said sulkily – but speedily.
Then, to everyone’s surprise, Jack said, ‘Here, get me one too.’
Open-mouthed, Lisa watched him root around in his trouser pocket for money, his shoulder against his chin as his hand rummaged. For some reason she’d pegged Jack for a meat-n’-two-veg man, the kind of person who’d say, ‘If I can’t pronounce it, I won’t eat it.’ But he had lived in the States…
Jack’s hand emerged with a car-park ticket and he looked at it sadly. ‘That won’t do.’ He recommenced the search, this time locating a fiver that had seen better days and handing it to Trix.
‘They mightn’t take this,’ Trix complained. ‘What’ve you done to it? It looks like it’s been on a tour-of-duty in some war.’
‘That must be the one that got washed,’ Jack said. ‘I left it in my shirt pocket.’
Trix was disgusted. How could anyone forget that money had been left in a pocket? She knew exactly how much cash she had at any given time, to the nearest ten pence. It was too precious to leave in a shirt pocket.
Jack returned to his office, and Kelvin arrived, in for the first time that day. He’d been at a press do.
‘Guess what?’ he gasped.
‘What?’
‘It’s all off with Jack and Mai.’
‘No shit, Sherlock.’ Trix’s scorn was corrosive.
‘No, I mean it. Really, really off. Not Who’s-Afraid-of-Virginia-Woolf off. Proper over, no more fighting, haven’t-seen-each-other-in-more-than-a-week off’
‘How do you know?’
‘I, er, met Mai at the weekend. At the Globe. Believe me,’ he nodded with heavy emphasis around the office, ‘it’s off’
‘God, you’re pathetic,’ Trix scoffed. ‘Trying to pretend you slept with her.’
‘No, I – Oh, OK, I am. But it’s still all off.’
‘Why?’ Ashling asked.
Kelvin shrugged. ‘It just ran its course.’
Lisa was amazed at the transformation this news effected on her. Things didn’t seem so bleak all of a sudden. Jack was available and she knew she was in with a chance. He’d always liked the look of her, but something had changed on the day last week when she’d cried in his office. Her vulnerability and his tenderness had edged them closer.
And she realized something else. She liked him. Not the way she had when she’d first arrived in Dublin, in that hard, aggressive, I-always-get-what-I-want manner. Back then she’d liked his looks and his job and pursuing him had just been a project to take her mind off her misery.
When he came out to use the photocopier, she sidled up to him and said, her eyes dancing, ‘I’d never have thought it.’
‘Thought what?’
‘You. A sushi socialist,’ she teased, swinging her hair.
His pupils dilated, instantly turning his eyes almost black, and a look sparked between them.
Fifty minutes later, Trix clumped back into the office, dangling the handle of the sushi bag on her little finger, holding it as far away from her body as she could manage.
‘What happened to you today?’ Jack asked. ‘Taken hostage in a bank raid? Kidnapped by aliens?’
‘No,’ Trix complained. ‘I had to stop off at O’Neill’s for a good puke. Here.’ She just about threw the bag at Lisa, then put as much distance as possible between it and herself. ‘Ugh,’ she shuddered elaborately.
Lisa hoped that Jack would suggest that they ate the sushi behind closed doors in his office. She had ambitious visions of them feeding each other, sharing more than just raw fish. Instead, he pulled up a chair to Lisa’s desk and she watched his big, sure hands remove chopsticks, napkins and plastic boxes from the depths of the paper bag. Placing a bento box before Lisa, he popped the crackling plastic lid, presenting the rows of pretty sushi with a flourish. ‘Madam’s lunch,’ he said, high-spiritedly. ‘Mind you don’t puke!’
She couldn’t exactly identify the emotions generated by his actions, they shot away when she tried to put names on them. But
they were good ones: she felt safe, special, in a circle of belonging. Watched by the rest of the office. Lisa and Jack ate their sushi, like grown-ups.
Ashling, in particular, was appalled, but couldn’t keep away. She kept sneaking looks at them, the way you would at a terrible road accident, then wincing as she saw something she wished she hadn’t.
From what she could see, it wasn’t just raw fish. There were tiny parcels of rice with the raw fish in the middle, accompanied by an elaborate ritual. A green paste was dissolved into what must be soy sauce, into which the underside of the sushi was dipped. Ashling watched fascinated as, with his chopsticks, Jack delicately lifted a pink see-through sliver and laid it expertly along the shiny rice-and-fish package.
The words were out before she could stop herself. ‘What’s that?’
‘Pickled ginger.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s nice.’
Ashling watched for a few more intrigued seconds, before blurting out, ‘What’s it like? All of it?’
‘Delicious. You have the piquancy of the ginger, the heat of the wasabi – that’s the green stuff – and the sweetness of the fish,’ Jack explained. ‘It’s a taste like no other, but it’s addictive.’
Curiosity stirred Ashling’s soul. A part of her yearned to taste it, to try it, but, honestly, raw fish… I mean, raw. Fish!
‘Try this.’ Jack extended his chopsticks towards her, the sushi he’d prepared balanced between them.
An immediate body-swerve from Ashling and hot, high colour spilled across her face. ‘Urn, no. No thanks.’
‘Why not?’ His dark eyes were laughing at her. Again.
‘Because it’s raw.’
‘But you eat smoked salmon?’ Jack enquired, unable to hide his amusement.
‘I don’t,’ Trix interrupted mulishly, from the safety of the far side of the office. ‘I’d rather stick needles in my eyes.’