A big, pink, crackly ‘Welcome Home’ sign looped across the top of the stainless-steel living-room door. Balloons and paper streamers were Sellotaped to original paintings, Japanese lamps and the industrial-style tallboy. Get well cards lined the Philippe Starck shelves. There were fresh flowers in every room.
Dazed, Fintan sat on the tan leather sofa they’d had specially made and imported from New York, while Sandro fussed around like an old woman, fiddling with the flowers, plumping leather cushions, straightening the original seventies Formica coffee table. He approached with a tartan rug, which he attempted to tuck in around Fintan’s knees. ‘I bought this specially. Your mother told me tartan rugs are good for sick people.’
‘Get it off me.’ Petulantly Fintan tore the rug from him and flung it away.
‘Oh. But JaneAnn said you would like it.’
‘I’m thirty-two. Not eighty-two. And never likely to be,’ he added bitterly.
‘Er, I will listen to the answering-machine.’ Sandro backed from the room.
‘Isn’t it great that you’re home?’ Tara asked nervously.
‘Is it? What goddamn difference does it make? And can we lose the bloody flowers? It feels like a hospital in here.’
‘Um, Katherine has some hot news for you.’ It was up to Katherine to tell Fintan about Joe Roth and the apology but Tara was desperate to lighten the atmosphere. ‘Yesterday, she apologized to the Joe Roth bloke!’
A dismissive pout.
Sandro returned and listed proudly, ‘You have had telephone calls from Ethan, Frederick, Claude, Didier, Neville, Julia and Stephanie. Everyone wants to come and visit, but I say, no, they must wait. Fintan will call when he is ready and good.’
‘No call from Carmella Garcia offering me my job back?’
Sandro looked stricken.
‘That’s the only phone call I’m interested in. Do you know what I want?’
‘What?’ Already Sandro had his feet on the starter’s blocks.
‘I want to get twisted drunk.’
‘You can’t do that!’ Tara was dumbfounded. ‘You’re sick. You need to get better.’
‘I’m not going to get better.’
‘Of course you are. You’ve got to think positive.’ Tara insisted. That was the message the nurses repeatedly pressed home. People with a good attitude stood a better chance of recovery.
‘Think positive?’ Fintan barked with joyless laughter. ‘I haven’t the energy.’
‘I have things for you to eat,’ Sandro tempted. ‘All your favourites. Strawberries? Pork pies? Petit Filous? Sugar Puffs? Toffee Pops?’
‘I don’t want anything.’
‘But, bambino, you have to eat.’
‘I don’t want anything,’ Fintan suddenly roared. ‘I keep telling you, everything tastes horrible. And you know I’m only supposed to eat raw, unprocessed food in any case!’
Letting a sob burst forth, Sandro rushed dramatically into the kitchen. Torn, Tara followed, and found him bent over the Icelandic lava-stone worktop, crying his eyes out next to an (unused) pale-green Alessi juicer.
‘Everything I do is wrong.’
‘He’s not well. He can’t help it. If you hadn’t done anything, that would annoy him too.’
‘He’s a different person, so angry and nasty. Not my Fintan.’
‘It’s so hard for him,’ Tara consoled.
‘But it’s hard for me too.’
‘Come on.’ Tara led him back to the front room, where they sat in uncomfortable silence waiting for Katherine to return from shopping with JaneAnn and Timothy.
‘I’m going to have a shower. I haven’t had one in weeks.’ Fintan announced.
‘But you can barely stand.’
‘I’ll manage.’ He glared.
Sandro and Tara sat with knots in their stomachs wondering how all the triumph of Fintan’s homecoming had managed to trickle away.
Suddenly they became aware of a strange, high-pitched yelping noise coming from the bathroom. They looked in confusion at each other for a split second, then they were on their feet and through the door.
Fintan was out of the shower, crouching on the tiles, water sluicing off his naked, Belsen-thin body. He was gibbering, his expression a rictus of revulsion.
Something was different about him, Tara thought. He didn’t look quite like Fintan.
Then she realized what it was.
He was bald.
There were locks of hair draped on his shoulders and chest. But almost none on his head.
They looked where he was jabbing his finger. At the floor of the shower. They followed three frothy, frilly tidemarks of shower gel as far as the plug-hole. Which was blocked.
With hair.
So much of it. Black, heavy and wet-shiny. Rainbow iridescence twinkling from shampoo he hadn’t managed to rinse before the hair was swept from his scalp.
‘My hair,’ he managed.
Tara wanted to weep. ‘Your hair,’ she confirmed.
‘I’m bald.’
‘It will grow back when you’re better.’ Sandro’s voice trembled with shock.
‘They told you this would probably happen, didn’t they?’ Tara asked gently.
‘Yes, but I didn’t think it would happen to me… I mean, I didn’t think it would be like this… all my hair,’ he stuttered. ‘Look at it. It’s like a horror film.’
‘Come away.’ Sandro pulled a big towel from the rack and began to tenderly dry Fintan, as a mother would a child. His hands, his arms, his underarms, his chest.
‘Lift your foot.’ Sandro crouched on the floor, drying between Fintan’s toes, as Fintan wobbled and held on to the wall. ‘Other one.’
Her heart breaking, Tara gathered up the sopping hair into her hands. This was the worst. Truly the worst.
Fintan wrapped a towel in a turban around his head, then went to the bedroom, threw himself on the bed and began to cry. For half an hour he bawled like a baby, while Tara and Sandro imploded with helplessness.
‘I’m grisly looking,’ he wept, gasping between syllables. ‘I’m. Griz. Lee. Look. Ing.’
‘You’re not, you’re not.’
‘I am, I am.’ A fresh wave of sorrow overtook him. ‘I’m. Griz. Lee. Look. Ing. I’m. Griz. Lee. Look. Ing.’
‘It’ll grow back when you’re better.’
‘I’ll never be better.’
After some time he sat up and went to the mirror. Slowly, painfully, he peeled off the towel and forced himself to check out his new appearance, initially only looking at his profile.
‘Jesus Christ.’ He winced when he finally did the full frontal. ‘I’d take the night’s sleep off myself.’ He ran his hand over his smooth pate in bitter, irremediable regret. ‘My crowning glory. All gone. All gone. I’m dog-ugly without it.’
‘You’re not, you’re not!’
‘Holy Jesus.’ Fintan noticed something, then buried his face in his hands. ‘One of my ears is higher than the other.’
‘It’s not.’
‘It is. Have a look.’
It was.
‘I never knew my head was so lumpy. Oh, God, the ugliness! And this is just the beginning, you know. My eyelashes are next. And eyebrows. And my you-know-where.’
‘You can get a wig.’ Tara was weighed with depression. ‘Perhaps not for your you-know-where, but you can for your head.
‘Hey,’ she forced herself to sound jolly, ‘you’re a gay man. For shame if you don’t already have several!’
‘Actually,’ Fintan rallied, ‘now that you mention it, I have my Pamela Anderson one.’
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have taken a shower.’ Sandro lamented. ‘Maybe you could have kept your hair.’
‘It was just hanging on by the skin of its teeth,’ Fintan admitted. ‘Though it looked like I still had hair, it was already gone. It was simply a matter of time before it was all over. I just didn’t want to face it.’
Now, what did that remind Tara of?
Meanwhile K
atherine was having a rough afternoon of her own. The consensus had been that it mightn’t be good to overwhelm Fintan the minute he returned home, so she had been elected to keep JaneAnn and Timothy out of the way for a while. Milo would have loved to help but unfortunately he was tied up.
Literally.
Liv was a terrible woman.
Because JaneAnn and Timothy were going home the following day and wanted to buy presents for Ambrose and Jerome and all the neighbours who’d helped run the farms while they were away, Katherine took them shopping. She decided on Harrods because that was what tourists usually seemed to want, but it was a mistake.
JaneAnn went on and on about how expensive everything was and how immoral it was to charge those kinds of prices, and Katherine was hard put to humour her because her head was full of the enormity of having to go to work on Monday and face Joe Roth – oh, the shame! As JaneAnn wondered loudly how they could ask twenty-five pounds for a bread-knife when she knew for a fact that you could get a fine one in Tully’s Hardware, Main Street, Knockavoy for four pounds fifty, Katherine was facing into the nightmare of what if, once Joe had ‘thought about it’, he decided he didn’t want to go for a drink with her?
‘And if it goes blunt on you, Curly Tully will sharpen it again at no extra cost.’ JaneAnn got her attention once more. ‘I can’t see them doing that here, Katherine. I’ve a good mind to tell her,’ JaneAnn indicated a young girl on the pay desk, ‘and maybe she could mention it to her father.’
‘No, don’t,’ Katherine said wearily. ‘She only works here. I don’t think she’s actually part of the Harrods family.’
Timothy was keen to buy his wife Esther a present. ‘Keep JaneAnn talking,’ he muttered to Katherine, ‘and point me towards the linger-ee.’
Fifteen minutes later Timothy returned, trying to hide a bagful of red and black underwear that Esther would wear once to humour him, then pretend had been stolen.
They left Harrods and JaneAnn went to a street stall and purchased two ‘My mother went to London and all I got was this lousy T-shirt’ T-shirts, three ‘My mother-in-law went to London and all I got was this lousy T-shirt’ T-shirts and seven ‘My neighbour went to London and all I got was this lousy T-shirt’ T-shirts, bargaining the trader down from seven pounds fifty per shirt to sixty pounds for the twelve. Leaving him reeling and not at all sure that he hadn’t actually sold at a loss, they got a taxi to Sandro and Fintan’s flat.
To be greeted by a strange creature that had Fintan’s face, but waist-length blond hair.
On Sunday afternoon they went in convoy to Heathrow to put JaneAnn and Timothy on the plane home. JaneAnn had only agreed to leave Fintan behind because of the high quality of medical care he was getting.
There was a time when she would have scorned drugs and trusted solely in the power of prayer, especially when it was someone else’s relation who was sick. Countless times she’d stood on Main Street, Knockavoy mouthing sanctimoniously, ‘The doctors can only do so much, but the true healer is the power of prayer. The power of prayer can work miracles!’
Now it was a belt-and-braces-type scenario. She wanted to talk to Sandro about taking Fintan to Lourdes (or Knock, if funds didn’t run to France), but she was also keen that Fintan get every drug available. JaneAnn thanked Katherine effusively for having them. ‘I got you a little something.’ Discreetly she handed over a small, heavy bundle. ‘It’s a statue of the Child of Prague. Don’t worry if the head falls off. It’s good luck.’ She thrust her face into Katherine’s. ‘You’ll mind Fintan, won’t you? You’ll ring me regularly, won’t you? And we’ll see ye all at Christmas.’ She lunged even closer to Katherine. ‘And you’ll do your best to get off with the boy from your work?’ she urged. ‘Love makes the world go round, you know. Sure, look how happy Milo and Liv are together.’
‘I’m trying my best,’ Katherine muttered.
JaneAnn moved on to Tara, extracting a promise that Tara would guard Fintan with her life. ‘And you’ll tell your young man we’re sorry we didn’t get to meet him?’
Sharp, sudden rage stabbed Tara. She was deeply ashamed of Thomas’s rudeness. ‘He was very busy, you know.’
‘Sure I do, of course, and him a schoolmaster. It’s a highly responsible job. Well, maybe he’ll come home with you at Christmas? Unless,’ she added, mildly, ‘you do that thing that Fintan wants. I don’t suppose we’d meet him then.’
Tara shifted unhappily. She didn’t think JaneAnn would meet him either way.
51
Katherine slunk into work on Monday morning, nervy with anxiety and braced for shame. How could she face Joe Roth? Worse still, what if he didn’t respond to her blatant come-on? She’d die.
She’d actually contemplated not coming in at all. Having to decide between wearing lots of make-up, to give a mask of brazen indifference, or wearing none at all, in the hope that her pale little face would disappear into invisibility, had nearly been too much for her. She tried to be positive. After she’d returned from the airport, she’d had an emotional reunion with her remote control. And Fintan was home from hospital. This was good news, was it not? Even if he was sour and bad-tempered – when she’d told him the whole sorry story of her mortifying apology to Joe Roth, he’d barely grunted in response.
Despite her best intentions to not look directly at Joe, as she took off her coat there was a flicker of eye-contact with him. She nearly slipped a disc in her neck with the speed that she ducked her head. She couldn’t avoid noticing that he’d been smiling at her. Smiling? her paranoid head asked. Or laughing?
She’d prayed over the weekend and she prayed now that he’d erase her humiliation in one fell swoop by asking her out. She yearned for him to lounge over to her with his easy grace, perch himself on the edge of her desk and say, with an emphasis that only the two of them would understand, ‘That project you mentioned to me on Friday? Why don’t we discuss it over lunch?’
But he didn’t. He stayed resolutely at his desk, and as the morning passed, she downgraded her hopes. It didn’t have to be lunch. A drink would be fine. Then she decided it needn’t be a drink. Just a walk with no offer of any refreshments would do. And he didn’t have to ask her personally. A phone call was acceptable. Or an e-mail. Or an internal memo. By one o’clock she’d have been delighted with anything. A paper plane emblazoned with ‘Fancy a shag?’ would have done nicely.
But nothing. Nor did he approach her in the afternoon, while she went into a loop trying to justify it. Perhaps he was going out with Angie – although she’d nearly discounted that. Wouldn’t Joe have just said, ‘I have a girlfriend,’ instead of ‘I’ll think about it’? But if Angie wasn’t the obstacle, that meant he simply didn’t want Katherine, which was far too unpleasant to contemplate. So, quick as a flash, she wondered if it was because of Angie. But wouldn’t Joe have just said, ‘I have a girlfriend’? Round and round she went, like a rat on a wheel, until going-home time. Trying to exude, I have a life, I always had one, she left and went to Fintan’s.
On Tuesday she got up and did it all over again while Tara rang almost hourly to monitor the non-existent progress. ‘Is he being unpleasant?’ she asked.
‘No. He seems friendly enough whenever I catch his eye. Which isn’t often,’ Katherine admitted. ‘My eyes are glued to the floor.’
‘It’s nice that he’s friendly,’ Tara consoled.
‘It’s not friendship I want from him. I have enough friends!’
On Wednesday, Katherine finally admitted it wasn’t going to happen. She’d given Joe long enough, extending and stretching the appropriate time span to its furthest reach. The last piece of hope evaporated. He had rejected her – it was official. He’d ‘thought about it’ and decided he wasn’t interested.
She waited for the slump. A disappointment with a man usually moved her one step closer to death. Doused her joy in living a tiny bit more. But oddly enough, the plummet didn’t happen. Why? she wondered. Because she had other things on her mind, namely Finta
n? But her worry about Fintan hadn’t stopped her getting her knickers in a twist about Joe Roth in the first place.
Whatever the reason, she had a strange faith that life would go on and she would survive. With untimely hope, she knew she had some sort of future. Joe Roth didn’t want her, but while she was alive anything could happen.
That evening she went tap-dancing for the first time in six weeks, then to All Bar One with Tara, Liv and Milo – Sandro had requested an evening alone with Fintan.
In the bar they gathered around a table and Katherine was surprised by the thrill of well-being that lunged at her. She was excited to be out, looking forward to some fun. Not only had the nervy anxiety about Joe Roth lifted but so had the worry for Fintan that she’d been dragging like a bag of rocks.
Milo was unrecognizable from the rough-hewn eejit who’d arrived in London less than a month before. His hair had been shaped and tidied so that it no longer looked like he’d trimmed it with a chain-saw, and he was decked out in shiny-new gear, the trendy, design-conscious hand of Liv apparent in every thread. He was astonishingly handsome, all bulk and black curls and navy-blue eyes. ‘Look at them.’ He laughed, pointing at the pair of peculiar, asymmetrical shoes he was wearing. ‘Aren’t they the gassest things you ever clapped eyes on? They’re from some mad place. Reds under the Bed, or something.’ He looked at Liv for guidance.
‘Red or Dead,’ she murmured. It made a change being the person who corrected rather than the one who was corrected. She loved it.
Milo and Liv were still in the first, antisocial flush of love and while they made half-hearted efforts to speak to Tara and Katherine, they kept whispering and giggling to each other, touching fingertips, brushing kisses. Milo muttered something into Liv’s ear, and Liv lowered her eyes, smiled broadly, nudged Milo in his Diesel-clad ribs and murmured with put-on reluctance, ‘Stop.’
Milo muttered something else. Obviously even more suggestive, because Liv’s smile widened further and again she whispered, with a little giggle and an elbow, ‘Staw-hop.’