‘I’m very sorry.’ She sounded suddenly teary. ‘And I’m sorry I didn’t understand when you said you’d left him. If there’s anything I can do…’
Abruptly I remembered how, a couple of times, I’d had the urge to phone him; I was transported with insane gladness that I hadn’t. Could you imagine if she’d been there? If she’d answered? I’d have been so humiliated.
‘Did you recognize her?’
‘No, no I didn’t.’
When I emerged, Troy observed, ‘Your mom? Good news travels fast.’
Emily squeezed my trembling hands, trying to stop the tremors, while a flurry of comforting platitudes rained down on top of me. I’d get over it. The pain would pass. It was horrible now, but it would get better…
The phone rang again. We all looked at each other. What now?
‘Helen,’ Emily said, giving me the phone. ‘Her sister,’ she explained to the others.
Once again I found myself in my bedroom. ‘Helen?’
She sounded uncharacteristically halting. ‘You’re probably wondering why I’m ringing and, in a way, so am I. Something has happened and Mum and Dad said that under no circumstances was I to tell you, but I reckon you should know. It’s that prick you were married to. I know I’ve made things up about him before, but I’m telling the truth this time.’
‘Go on.’
‘We saw him in town tonight. He was with a girl and he was all over her like a dose of scabies.’
‘In what way?’ I was curious to know what they’d been up to.
‘He had his hand on her waist.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Well, lower down, actually,’ she admitted. ‘Sort of on her arse. He was squeezing it and she was giggling.’
I closed my eyes. Too much information. Yet I wanted more.
‘What was she like?’
‘Disfigured.’
‘Really?’
‘Well no, but I can arrange it.’
‘For God’s sake, Helen, it’s not her fault.’
‘OK, him then. I can get someone to hurt him badly. It could be my birthday present to you. Or I’ll swap it for your hand-bag.’
‘No. Please.’
‘We could burn his house down.’
‘Don’t do that. It’s half mine.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘Promise me you won’t do anything. I can live with it, I swear.’
‘I’m very sorry,’ she said, sounding it. I was touched. ‘You could at least let me organize to have his legs broken,’ she added.
Within seconds of me putting the phone down, it rang again. Anna.
‘Another sister,’ I heard Emily say to the assembled listeners as, for the third time in ten minutes, I closed the bedroom door behind me.
‘Hi Anna,’ I said briskly, keen to preempt her pity and awkwardness – I’d had enough of it. ‘Thank you for ringing, but I know all about Garv and his new girlfriend.’
‘What?’
‘I know all about Garv and the girl. Mum, Dad and Helen have all rung me separately about it. What took you so long?’
‘Garv has a new GIRLFRIEND?’ She sounded appalled.
‘You didn’t know?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’ I suppose she’d never been the sharpest knife in the drawer. ‘So why were you ringing?’
Big long pause, then an audible gulp. ‘I crashed your car.’
Another big long pause, then an audible sigh. ‘Badly?’
‘What does “badly” mean?’
‘Did you kill anyone?’
‘No. I drove into a wall, no one else was involved. The front is a bit mashed but the back hasn’t a scratch on it.’
I took time to digest all this. I should care, but I didn’t, it was only a car.
‘But, Anna, what were you doing.’
‘Uh,’ she sounded confused, ‘driving.’
After a few expensive seconds of cross-continental silence I said, ‘Are you hurt?’
‘Yes.’
Concern half-heartedly flared in me. ‘Is something broken?’
‘Yes.’
‘What?’
‘My heart.’
Right. Shane. But much as I loved Anna, I’d no comfort to give, I was too messed up myself. Time for a platitude. Luckily I had several to hand, as a result of my own circumstances. ‘Just hang on in there, it’ll get better,’ I lied. ‘And with the car, I’ve insurance. Can you sort it out?’
‘Yes, yes, I will. Thank you, sorry, I won’t do it again. I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s OK.’
This sort of serious situation called for more of a response than that, but the best I could manage was, ‘Anna, you’re twenty-eight.’
‘I know,’ she said wretchedly. ‘I know.’
12
The news about Garv had devastated me, there was no getting away from it. And the others wouldn’t let me ring him.
‘Not when you re sore,’ Emily said firmly.
A bit wild in myself, I wanted answers. How had this happened? Where had it all gone wrong?
‘Had you any idea about this other girl?’ Lara asked.
‘Yes.’
‘But you hoped it would burn out and you two’d get back together?’ Troy suggested.
‘No.’ In all honesty, I hadn’t been holding out for a reunion – but there was a big difference between a strong suspicion that something was going on and knowing for definite. And knowing for definite meant that I was destroyed, distracted, lost to myself. I began reconstructing my last visit to the house – when I’d been picking up clothes and stuff for Los Angeles. I hadn’t noticed any evidence of torrid carry-on. Mind you, I’d told Garv I’d be coming, so he would have had time to clean the Häagen –Dazs stains off the sheets. ‘I left him, you know.’ My attempt at bravado didn’t really convince. Especially when I tagged on, ‘Well, it was really a case of constructive dismissal.’
‘Let’s go out!’ Emily suggested, when she saw me looking longingly at the phone again. So we went to a movie. All of us except Desiree, who stayed in the house, wearing a long suffering, stoical, ‘I’ll-watch-it-when-it-comes-out-on-video face.
There seemed to be several hundred cinemas in Santa Monica, a bit like the way pubs are in Ireland. I sat between Justin and Troy, who tried to ply me with foodstuffs. I shook my head when Justin tilted a bucket of popcorn the size of a dustbin towards me and I waved away Troy’s bumper pack of twizzlers.
‘No?’ he whispered in surprise.
‘No.’
‘Gimme your wrist.’
I extended my arm and carefully he tied a thick, red liquorice lace around it. ‘In case of emergency,’ and his teeth flashed in the dark of the cinema.
There was never any chance that I’d lose myself and forget my troubles in the film. Especially when it turned out to be a stylish, violent, highly complicated thriller, with bad cops and good villains double-crossing and even triple-crossing each other. I was too dazed to keep up with the myriad changes of allegiance. Unlike Troy, who seemed thoroughly immersed in it: when someone who’d been a baddy turned out to be a goody, he laughed a delighted ‘Aha!’ and made me jump. On the other side of me, Justin’s hand moved from his popcorn bucket to his mouth and back again in a regular rhythm which I found deeply soothing. He only paused from this pattern to whisper, when an innocent – and I must admit, quite plump – ‘regular Joe’ got caught in crossfire, ‘That should’ve been me!’ Or when a goody-turned-baddy’s dog’s ear got severed by a baddy-turned-goody-turned-baddy, he confided, ‘Ew! Boy, am I glad Desiree isn’t here to see this.’
As we all trooped out at the end, Troy asked, ‘Did we enjoy that?’
‘I couldn’t really follow it,’ I admitted.
‘Yeah,’ he sighed sympathetically. ‘Concentration shot to hell?’
‘I’m not sure that’s the only reason,’ I confessed. ‘To be honest, I can never really keep up with the twists and turns of that kind of movie.’ And I
always got Garv to explain it to me at the end, I thought, but didn’t say.
It’s funny what strikes you, but what seemed terrible and final and wrenching was not that I’d lost my life companion, not that Garv and I would never have a baby, but that I’d have to go through the rest of my life not understanding thrillers. That, and never getting the hang of exchange rates: Garv was like a calculator made human. ‘There’s three of them to the pound,’ he’d explain, giving me a load of foreign currency at the start of a holiday.
‘OK, so to find out what things really cost I multiply by three.’
‘No, you divide by three,’ he’d say patiently.
So as well as not understanding thrillers, all I had to look forward to was an empty future being swizzed by souk traders.
‘You’ve got to talk about it,’ Emily insisted, once we were home and everyone had gone. ‘I know you don’t want to but it’ll help, I swear to you.’
You see, now that things were going well for Emily, she had renewed energy to focus on me and my drama.
‘You Californians,’ I scorned. ‘You talk about everything. Like it helps.’
‘Better than putting a lid on things and trying to bury them.’ Emily knew me too well.
‘What good will talking do?’ I said helplessly. ‘Maybe I should never have married him.’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t,’ she replied evenly.
She’d said it at the time to me. When I’d got engaged, instead of shrieking with excitement and making vulgar jokes about seeing my ring, she’d said soberly, ‘I’m afraid you’re playing it safe by marrying Garv.’
‘I thought you liked him!’ I’d said, wounded.
‘I love him. Look, I just want you to be sure. Think about it.’
But I didn’t think about it because I thought I knew what I wanted. In retrospect, I’d sometimes wondered if maybe she’d been right. Maybe I had settled, maybe I had played it too safe. But it hadn’t all been bad…
‘We had a lovely time together for years.’ I could hear my voice shaking.
‘So what happened?’
I was silent for too long.
‘Go back to the beginning and talk it right through. Go on, it’ll help to make sense of it all. Start with the rabbits,’ she prompted. ‘Come on, you’ve never told me fully.’
But I didn’t want to talk about any of it. Especially not the rabbits. Because you can’t really tell the rabbit story without people laughing, and I was in no state to start making fun of the reasons why my marriage had broken down.
It had begun, innocently enough, with a pair of slippers. What happened was, one Christmas someone gave me a pair of slippers which looked like black furry rabbits. I was extremely fond of them. Not only did they keep my feet warm, but they were cute and cuddly without the shame of them actually being cuddly toys. In the event of any confusion, I could point out that they had a function and that I wasn’t one of those women who crammed her bedroom window-sill with an army of fluffy dolphins, pastel donkeys and squashy chickens, who looked down with their button eyes on people calling to the house and freaked the life out of them. Oh no. I had a pair of slippers, that’s all. They were made of fake astrakhan, and when Garv gave them personalities, he was obviously influenced by the astrakhan because they were both Russian. Valya and Vladimir. I could never tell them apart, but Garv said that Vladimir had a funny ear and Valya’s nose was shaped like a cross-section of a bit of Toblerone. (Why he just couldn’t have said triangular, I’ll never know.) Valya was a bit of a femme fatale and often said stuff like, ‘I hef hed menny, menny luffers.’ Sometimes she gave me advice on what to wear. Vladimir – who sounded almost identical to Valya – was a Party apparatchik who’d been stripped of his privileges. He was very gloomy, but then so was Valya.
Garv began to conduct the occasional conversation through the medium of the astrakhan slippers. He’d stick his hand inside and wiggle it about and say, ‘I em goink to the Vestern-style supermarket. I em queueink for menny, menny days. Vot vill I get for you?’
‘Who’m I talking to? Valya or Vladimir?’
‘Valya. Vladimir’s the one with the funny ear and –’
‘– Valya’s nose looks like a cross-section of a Toblerone, I know. We need pizzas, toothpaste, cheese…’
‘Woadka?’ Valya suggested hopefully. Valya had a bit of a problem. So, coincidentally, did Vladimir.
‘No woadka, but you might as well get a couple of bottles of wine.’
‘Bleck-Sea caviar?’
‘No.’
‘Bleck bread?’
‘Actually, we could do with a loaf of bread.’
‘I em helpink you.’ Valya was pleased with herself.
I didn’t mind. To be honest, I thought it was cute. Up to a point. But perhaps I should never have indulged him, because after that it was only a short step to the real rabbits.
As briefly as I could, I told Emily about the slippers. Then, ignoring her complaints that the story was only hotting up, I begged to be allowed to go to bed, on the grounds that I’d scratched my arm so much it was bleeding.
13
The phone woke me. I was out of bed and into the living-room before I realized it. In the wake of the previous day’s phone calls my nerves were like taut elastic – I was waiting for someone like my first primary-school teacher or the president of Ireland to ring, to tell me about Garv and The Girl.
‘Hello,’ I said suspiciously.
A sweet, squeaky voice rattled off, ‘Mort Russell’s office calling for Emily O’Keeffe.’
‘One moment please.’ I matched the girl’s efficient tone.
But Emily was in the bathroom, and when I knocked on the door she wailed, ‘Oh no. I’ll have to call them back. I’m dehair-ing my legs and I’m at a vital point.’
When I returned to the phone, some instinct stopped me from sharing this with Mort Russell’s office. ‘I’m afraid she’s away from her desk right now. Can I help?’
‘Could Emily call Mort?’ the sweet, squeaky girl requested.
I wrote down the number and said, ‘Thank you.’
‘Thank you,’ she replied, sunny as you please.
Unlike me. I’d woken at twenty past three, my heart pounding with an irresistible need to ring Garv. I’d tiptoed into the living-room and, in the dark, dialled our home number. I just wanted to TALK to him. About what, I wasn’t really sure. But there had been a time when he’d behaved as though he loved me more than anyone had ever loved anyone. I think I needed to know that even if he loved this new woman, it wasn’t as much as he’d once loved me.
With a click and a rush of static, the phone began to ring on another continent, and agitatedly I gnawed at the twizzler around my wrist. But there was no one at home: I’d done my sums wrong. Ireland was eight hours ahead, so Garv was at work. My desperation had already begun to cool by the time I was put through to his desk, so when it transpired that he wasn’t there and that all I could do was leave a message on his voicemail, it threw me. Leave a message after the tone.
I decided not to. I crept back to bed, finished the twizzler and wished I had several hundred more. I’d had some black times in my past, but I wasn’t sure I had ever before felt so wretched. Would I ever get over it, would I ever feel normal again?
I seriously doubted it, even though I’d seen other people recover from terrible things. Look at Claire: her husband leaving her the same day, the same day, that she’d given birth to their child. And she’d recovered. Other people got married and got divorced and got over it and got married again, and talked about ‘My first husband’ in calm, easy-going tones, as if not one twinge of pain had ever been felt getting from then – when he was actually someone who mattered – to now, when he was just a walk-on part from your past. People adapted and moved on. But as I curled into a tight ball in the dark, I had a profound fear that I wouldn’t. That I’d stay stuck, just becoming older and weirder. I’d stop getting my hair dyed and I’d end up moving back home to look afte
r my aged parents until I was old myself. No one on our road would talk to us, and when children called to the house on Hallowe’en we’d pretend we weren’t in. Or else pour buckets of cold water from an upstairs window on to their masked and sheeted finery. Our car would be twenty years old and in perfect condition and the three of us would wear hats when we went out for a drive – when Dad would insist on taking the wheel, even though he’d have shrunk so much that all the other drivers would be able to see of him would be the top of his hat peeping over the dash. People would talk about me: ‘She was married once. Used to be quite normal, they say. Hard to believe now, of course.’
The phone rang again, jolting me back to the present. Emily’s agent, this time. Well, not actually David Crowe in person, of course, but some lackey who worked for him, setting up a lunch-time appointment.
Eventually, Emily emerged from the bathroom. ‘Not a single hair remaining. Now where’s his number?’
I handed her the piece of paper, which she kissed. ‘How many people would KILL to have Mort Russell’s direct line?’
She made the call, got put straight through, laughed and said, ‘Thank you, and I totally love your work too,’ a whole lot.
Then she hung up and declared, ‘Guess what?’
‘He trooooly, trooooooly loves your script?’
‘Yip.’ Then she seemed to notice me. ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ she said, sadly.
‘There was another call,’ I said. ‘David Crowe’s office. Will you have lunch with him at the Club House at one o’clock?’
‘The Club House?’ She clutched me, as though something terrible had happened. ‘He said the Club House?’
‘It was a “she” actually, but yes. What’s the problem?’
‘I’ll tell you what the problem is,’ she called, disappearing and fast reappearing with a book. She flicked through the pages, then read, ‘“The Club House. Power-brokers’ lunch-time haunt where Hollywood’s main men break bread and cut deals. Good steaks and salads…” Never mind that – but you heard what it said. “Power-brokers’ lunch-time haunt”. And I’m going there!’
With that, she burst into tears, the way she had when she’d first found out Hothouse wanted her to pitch. When the storm of tears passed, she surprised me by asking, ‘Would you like to come?’