‘We’ve created a fucking monster!’ Bicycle Billy whispered to Archie Archer (real name Brian O’Toole).
‘I’ve been Ted Mullins, a comedian who tells a load of oul’ jokes. Or should I say owl jokes?’ Ted twinkled. ‘And you’ve been an owl audience!’
Amid hysterical cheers, whistles, foot-stamping and thunderous applause, he took his leave.
Later, as everyone beat their way out, Ashling overheard person after person talking about Ted.
‘What’s yellow and wise? I thought I’d end myself laughing.’
‘That Ted was fantastic. Sexy too.’
‘I liked the way he lifted his –’
‘– T-shirt. Yeah, so did I’
‘D’you think he has a girlfriend?’
‘Bound to.’
The party was in a modern block along the quays. As it was Mark Dignan’s flat, and loads of the other guests were also comedians, Ashling had expected to be kept in hysterics all night. But though the room was crowded and noisy, a bizarre atmosphere of gloom pervaded.
‘They’re all keeping shtum in case anyone steals their lines or ideas,’ explained Joy, a veteran of such knees-ups. ‘Without a paying audience you wouldn’t get these fellas being funny to save their lives. Now Where is he?’
Joy went on a Half-man-half-badger walkabout and Ashling poured herself a glass of wine in the galley kitchen where Bicycle Billy was rolling a spliff. As he was short and troll-like, she was able to smile at him and say, ‘You were very funny tonight. You must get great satisfaction from what you do.’
‘Ah, not really,’ he said tetchily. ‘I’m writing a novel, you see. That’s what I really want to do with my life.’
‘Lovely,’ Ashling encouraged.
‘Oh no, it’s not,’ Billy was keen to emphasize. ‘It’s very truthful, very depressing. Very grim. Ah, where’s my lighter?’
‘Allow me,’ Ashling flared a match and lit his spliff. Seemed to her like he needed it.
Through the crowds in the sitting-room, she saw Ted enthroned on an armchair, an orderly queue of interested girls shuffling forward to make their case. Staring out the window into the oil-black waters of the Liffey was a broody figure, a thick stripe of grey through the front of his long, black hair. Aha, thought Ashling. International half-man-half-badger of mystery, I presume. Joy was nearby, energetically ignoring him.
Under the half-man-half-badger circumstances, Ashling decided to let her alone. Hanging around, swigging her wine, she spotted Mark Dignan. As he was almost seven-foot tall and had the poppiest eyes she’d ever seen on someone who hadn’t recently been strangled, she was able to have a little chat with him too.
But he dismissed her praise of his act with a cranky wave of his hand. ‘It’ll do until my novel is published.’
‘Ah, you’re writing a novel too. So, um… what’s it about?’
‘It’s about a man who sees the world in all its rottenness.’ Mark’s eyes bulged even further. They’d fall out on to the carpet soon if he wasn’t careful, Ashling thought anxiously. ‘It’s very depressing,’ Mark boasted. ‘Like, unbelievably depressing. He hates life more than life itself.’
Mark realized he’d said something vaguely witty and flicked an anxious glance to make sure no one had heard.
‘Er, the best of luck.’ Miserable bastard. Ashling moved away, and was buttonholed by an enthusiastic, bright-eyed man who insisted that Ted was a comedic anarchist, an ironic post-modern deconstructionist of the entire genre. ‘He’s taken the basic gag and completely subverted it. Challenging our expectations of what’s funny. Anyway, d’you want to dance?’
‘What? Here?’ Ashling was completely thrown. It was a long time since a strange man had asked her to dance. Especially in someone’s sitting-room. Although now that she looked, people – all female, of course – were kind of flinging themselves around to Fat Boy Slim. ‘Ah, no thanks,’ she apologized. ‘It’s too early in the night, I’m still too inhibited.’
‘OK, I’ll ask you again in an hour.’
‘Great!’ she exclaimed hollowly, taking in his eager face. An hour wouldn’t get her drunk enough. A lifetime wouldn’t suffice.
Some time later, to her delight, she spotted Joy kissing the face off Half-man-half-badger.
She hung around a little longer. Though it was a fairly crappy party, she was surprised to find she was happy to be with a crowd and happy to be on its edges. Such contentment was rare: all Ashling knew was that she almost never felt whole. Even at her most fulfilled, something remained forever absent, right at her very core. Like the tiny, pinprick dot that remained in the wash of black when the telly used to shut down for the night.
But tonight she was calm and peaceful, alone but not lonely. Even though the only men who’d hit on her weren’t her type, she didn’t feel like a failure when she decided to go home.
At the door she met Mr Enthusiastic again. ‘Going already? Hold it a minute.’ He scribbled something on a piece of paper, then handed it to her.
She waited until she was outside before opening the twist of paper. It was a name – Marcus Valentine – a phone number and the instruction, ‘Beliez moi!’
It was the best laugh she’d had all night.
The walk home took ten minutes – at least the rain had stopped. When she reached the front-door of her block of flats, there was a man asleep in the doorway.
The same man who’d been there the other day. Except he was younger than she’d realized. Pale and slight, clutching tightly on to his thick grubby-orange blanket, he looked barely more than a child.
Rummaging in her rucksack she found a pound and placed it silently beside his head. But maybe it’d be nicked, she worried, so she moved it under his blanket. Then, stepping over him, she let herself in.
As the door clicked behind her, she heard, ‘Thanks,’ so faint and whispered she wasn’t sure if she’d imagined it.
While Ted was going down a storm in the Funny Farm, Jack Devine was opening his front-door in a bleak, sea-facing corner of Ringsend.
‘Why didn’t you call me?’ Mai demanded. ‘You never have enough time for me.’ She pushed past him and marched straight up the stairs. She was already unbuttoning her jeans.
Jack stared out at the sea, the nearly-black of the night-time water as impenetrable as his eyes. Then he closed the door and slowly followed her up the stairs.
At the same time, in a stylish, Edwardian, red-brick house in Donnybrook, Clodagh downed her fourth gin and braced herself. It had been twenty-nine days.
7
Ashling woke at twelve on Sunday, feeling rested and only mildly hungover. She lay on the couch and smoked cigarettes until The Dukes of Hazzard finished. Then she went out and bought bread, orange juice, cigarettes and newspapers – one scurrilous rag and one broadsheet to cancel out the rag.
After gorging herself to the point of mild disgust on overblown stories of infidelity, she decided to tidy her flat. This mostly consisted of carrying about twenty crumb-strewn plates and half-empty glasses of water from the bedroom to the kitchen sink, picking up an empty tub of Haagen Daz from where it had rolled under the couch and opening the windows. She drew the line at polishing, but she sprayed Mr Sheen around the room and the smell instantly made her feel virtuous. Cautiously she sniffed her bed-linen. Grand, it’d do for another week.
Then, even though she knew it couldn’t have gone anywhere, she checked that the suit she’d had dry-cleaned hadn’t been stolen. It was still hanging in her wardrobe, beside a clean top. Big day tomorrow. Very big day tomorrow. It wasn’t every Monday she started a new job. In fact it had been over eight years and she was horribly nervous. But excited too, she insisted, trying to ignore her fluttery stomach.
What now? Vacuuming, she decided, because if you did it right it was great exercise for the waist. Out came her magenta and lime-green Dyson. Even now she couldn’t believe she’d spent so much money on a household appliance. Money that she could just as easily have spent on handbags or bottles of wine. Th
e only conclusion she could draw was that she was finally grown-up. Which was funny because in her head she was still sixteen and trying to decide what to do when she left school.
She flicked the switch and, energetically bending and twisting from the waist, worked her way across the hall floor. Much to the relief of her very hungover neighbour in the flat below (Joy) it didn’t take long – Ashling’s flat was ludicrously small.
But how she loved it. The biggest fear about losing her job was that she wouldn’t be able to meet her mortgage payments. She’d bought the flat three years previously, when she’d finally understood that Phelim and she wouldn’t be applying together to purchase a cottage with roses round the door. There had been an element of brinkmanship to it – naturally she’d hoped that Phelim would hurtle in as the credits were rolling and breathlessly agree to sign up for the regulatory three-bedroom semi in a distant suburb. But to her heavy-hearted disappointment he didn’t and the purchase went ahead. At the time it had seemed like an admission of failure. But not now. This flat was her haven, her nest and her first real home. She’d lived in rented hovels since she was seventeen, sleeping in other people’s beds, sitting on lumpy sofas that landlords had bought for cheapness, not comfort.
She hadn’t had a stick of furniture when she’d moved in. Apart from the essentials like an iron and a pile of threadbare towels, mismatched sheets and pillowcases, everything had to be bought from scratch. Which caused Ashling to throw a rare tantrum. She fumed with seething resentment at the thought of diverting month after month of clothes money to buy all sorts of stupid things. Like chairs.
‘But we can’t sit on the floor,’ Phelim had yelled.
‘I know,’ Ashling admitted. ‘I just didn’t realize it would be like this…’
‘But you’re mind-blowingly organized.’ He was baffled. ‘I thought you’d be great at this sort of thing. Whatjacallit? Home-making.’
She looked so lost and bleak that Phelim said softly, ‘Oh baby, let me help. I’ll buy you some furniture.’
‘A bed, I bet,’ Ashling said scornfully.
‘Well, now that you mention it…’ Phelim was fond of having sex with Ashling. Buying a bed for her was no hardship. ‘Can I afford it?’
Ashling considered. Now that she’d reorganized Phelim’s finances, he was a lot better off. ‘I suppose,’ she said sulkily. ‘If you do it on your credit card.’
Bitterly, irritably she applied for a bank loan, then bought herself a couch, a table, a wardrobe and a couple of chairs. And that, she resolved, would be that. For over a year she refused to buy blinds. ‘I’ll just not wash the windows,’ she said. ‘That way no one can see in.’ And she only got herself a shower curtain when the daily puddles on her bathroom floor began to leak through to Joy’s. But somewhere along the line her priorities had changed. Though she wasn’t anything like the Ninja-decorator that Clodagh was, she certainly cared. To the point where she owned not just one but a grand total of two sets of bed linen (a funky denim-look set and a crisp white Zen ensemble with a waffle throw). Recently she’d shelled out forty quid on a mirror that she didn’t even need, just because she thought it was pretty. Granted she’d been premenstrual and not in her right mind, but still. And the sea change was obviously complete the day she’d handed over two hundred quid for a dust-sucker.
There was a knock at the door. Joy, white as a ghost, sidled in.
‘Sorry, I got a bit carried away with the cleaning,’ Ashling realized. ‘Did I wake you?’
‘It’s OK. I’ve to go out to Howth to see my mammy.’ Joy made an anguished face. ‘I can’t cancel again, I’ve done it for the past four Sundays. But how will I cope? She’ll have made a huge roast dinner which she’ll try to force-feed me and she’ll spend all afternoon quizzing me, trying to establish if I’m happy. You know what mothers are like.’
Well, yes and no, Ashling thought. She was familiar with the ‘Are you happy?’ questions. Only thing was, it was Ashling who used to monitor her mother’s happiness levels, not the other way round.
‘If only she’d have Sunday lunch at a more civilized time,’ Joy complained.
‘Like Tuesday evening,’ Ashling grinned. ‘Now, I suppose you haven’t seen Ted so far today?’
‘Not yet. I presume he got lucky last night and is refusing to leave the poor girl’s bedroom.’
‘He really was surprisingly excellent last night. So, are you going to tell me what happened with Half-man-half-badger or do I have to beat it out of you?’
Joy instantly lightened. ‘He spent the night with me. We didn’t actually have sex but I gave him a b-j and he said he’ll call. I wonder if he will.’
‘One swallow doesn’t make a relationship,’ Ashling warned, with the wisdom of experience.
‘Who are you telling? Give me them –’ Joy leant over to the pack of tarot cards, ‘– till I see what they say. The Empress? What does that mean?’
‘Fertility. Mind you keep taking your pill.’
‘Cripes. How did you get on last night? Meet anyone nice?’
‘No.’
‘You’ll just have to try harder. You’re thirty-one, all the good men will be gone soon.’
I don’t need a mother, Ashling realized. Not with Joy around.
‘You’re twenty-eight,’ Ashling retorted.
‘Yeah, and I sleep with tons of men.’ More gently, Joy enquired, ‘Don’t you get lonely?’
‘I’m just out of a five-year relationship – it takes a while to get over something like that.’
Phelim hadn’t been a cruel person, but his inability to commit had had the effect of a scorched-earth policy on Ashling’s attitude to love. Since he’d gone, loneliness had whistled through her like a bleak wind, but she was in no way equipped to get involved with a new man. Not that she’d been exactly inundated with offers, mind.
‘It’s nearly a year, you’re well over Phelim now. New job, new beginnings. I read somewhere that a hundred and fifty per cent of people meet their partners at work. Did you see any sexy men when you had your interview?’
Immediately Ashling thought of Jack Devine. A handful. A skilled nerve-shredder.
‘No.’
‘Pick a card,’ Joy urged.
Ashling split the deck and held a card up.
‘The Eight of Swords, what does that mean?’ Joy asked.
‘Change,’ Ashling reluctantly admitted. ‘Disturbance.’
‘Good, it’s long overdue. Right, I’d better go. I’m just going to rub the lucky Buddha to make sure I don’t puke on the bus… Actually, feck the Buddha. Loan us money for a taxi?’
Ashling handed Joy a tenner and two big plastic bags of rubbish, which seemed to do an embarrassing amount of clinking. ‘Stick them down the chute for me, thanks.’
Quarter of a mile away in Malone’s Aparthotel, Sunday was hanging heavy on Lisa’s hands. She’d read the Irish papers – well, the social pages anyway. And they were pants! They seemed to consist of nothing but pictures of fat, broken-veined politicians, oozing bonhomie and backhanders. Well, they wouldn’t be getting into her magazine.
She lit yet another cigarette and scuffed moodily about the room. What did people do when they weren’t working? They saw their mates, they went to the pub, or the gym, or shopping, or decorating, or they hung out with their blokes. She remembered that much.
She longed for a sympathetic ear and thought about ringing Fifi, the closest thing she had to a best friend. They’d been juniors together on Sweet Sixteen many years ago. When Lisa moved to Features on Girl, she wangled Fifi the job of assistant beauty editor. When Fifi got the job of Senior Features writer on Chic, she tipped Lisa off when they were looking for an assistant editor. When Lisa had left to become assistant editor of Femme, Fifi took over Lisa’s position of assistant editor of Chic. Ten months after Lisa became editor of Femme, Fifi became editor of Chic. Lisa had always been able to moan to Fifi – she understood the perils and plights of their so-called glamorous jobs, when everyone e
lse was ugly with envy.
But something was stopping Lisa from picking up the phone. She was embarrassed, she realized. And something like resentful. Though their careers had run almost parallel, Lisa had always been further down the track. Fifi’s career had been a struggle but Lisa had risen without trace through the ranks. She’d been made an editor nearly a year before Fifi was, and though Chic and Femme were in almost direct competition, Femme’s circulation was well over a hundred thousand more. Lisa had blithely assumed that the promotion to Manhattan would propel her so far in front she’d be beyond catching altogether. But instead she was shunted to Dublin and Fifi was suddenly, by default, top-dog.
Oliver, Lisa gasped, happiness suddenly slotting into place. I’ll ring him. But the warm honey-tide of good feeling immediately turned to acid. She’d forgotten for a moment. I don’t miss him, she tutored herself. I’m just bored and fed up.
In the end, she rang her mum – probably because it was a Sunday and therefore traditional – but she felt like shit after wards. Especially because Pauline Edwards was desperate to know why Oliver had rung her looking for Lisa’s number in Dublin.
‘We’ve split up.’ Lisa’s stomach snarled into a tight walnut of emotion. She didn’t want to talk about this – and why hadn’t her mum phoned her if she was that concerned? Why did she always have to ring her?
‘But why have you split up, love?’
Lisa still wasn’t exactly sure. ‘It happens,’ she said snippily, desperate to get this dealt with.
‘Have you tried that counselling thingummy?’ Pauline asked tentatively, reluctant to bring the ire of Lisa down on her head.
‘’Course.’ Said with terse impatience. Well, they’d gone for one session, but Lisa had been too busy to go to any more.
‘Will you be getting divorced?’
‘I should think so.’ In fact, Lisa didn’t know. Apart from what they’d yelled at each other in the heat of anger – ‘I’m divorcing you!’ ‘No, you can’t because I’m divorcing you!’ – nothing specific had been discussed. In fact, she and Oliver had barely spoken since the split but, inexplicably, she wanted to hurt her mother by saying it.