As I rectify my mistakes on this oddly calm day, I feel a stillness coming over me. I forget about everything that has riled me up so much over the past few days and weeks, and devote all my concentration to the job in hand. Distraction. My mind quietens as I continue the process for a few hours, covering the area in a brickwork pattern. I’m about to turn my attention to the sides, trimming the edges with a straight-edged board and a half-moon cutting tool, both of which I have bought for the purpose, when a car drives past the house. I don’t recognise the driver as one of my neighbours, but this happens a lot on weekends when people take drives along the coast and then explore the surrounding residential streets. I am used to seeing cars passing by, the back seats filled to the brim with kids, their faces pressed up against the glass for a gawk and older couples having a browse on their slow Sunday drives. We have the perfect cul de sac for window-shopping: it is pretty, welcoming, the kind of place people like to imagine themselves living in.
The driver has to do a three-point turn as it’s only a short road. I watch him checking the numbers on the houses, which is not an easy task as everybody has chosen to display them differently in different places. You have a black plaque with pretty pink flowers to display your number, Dr Jameson has a goose in flight and next door has a garden gnome with one hand holding up a 2, the other hand is holding up his trousers, which have dropped to display enormous red-and-white heart boxer shorts. Mine is the least exciting of all: a black letter box attached to the wall with 3 on it.
He parks outside my house and gets out. I am positive he can’t be looking for me, so I continue my gardening, but I’m unable to concentrate knowing he is looking around. Then I’m conscious of the fact his eyes have settled on me. I hear footsteps as he comes closer.
‘Excuse me, I’m looking for Jasmine Butler.’
I look up, wipe sweat from my grimy forehead. He’s tall, brown-skinned, with chiselled high cheekbones. His eyes are a striking green, which jar with his skin tone, and his Afro rises and then descends down over his eyes in tiny tight corkscrew curls. He is wearing a black suit, white shirt, green tie, shiny black shoes. He makes me remind myself to breathe.
From the way I’m looking at him dumbly, he thinks I haven’t heard him.
‘Are you Jasmine Butler?’
He is remarkably familiar but I haven’t seen him before, I would remember that. And then I realise it’s his voice I recognise. The telephone salesman.
‘Or perhaps you’re Penelope Paddington,’ he says, and as he purses his lips together to hide his smile, two enormous dimples appear on his cheeks.
I smile, knowing I’m caught out. ‘I’m Jasmine,’ I say, my voice coming out in a croak. I clear it.
‘My name is Monday O’Hara. I called you a few times on the phone during the last couple of weeks.’
‘You didn’t leave your name or contact details,’ I say, wondering if I heard his name correctly.
‘True. It’s a private matter. I wanted to talk to you myself, and not … your housekeeper.’
I continue to look at him. So far he hasn’t given me enough to get off the grass for, or even welcome him into my home.
‘I work for Diversified Search International. I’ve been hired by DavidGordonWhite to find suitable candidates for a new position, and I think you more than meet the requirements they are looking for.’
I feel myself floating as he continues.
‘I called your office quite a few times but couldn’t reach you. I didn’t leave any messages there, don’t worry. I didn’t want to raise a red flag so I told them it was a personal matter. But they were stronger gatekeepers than I assumed they’d be; you may or may not be happy to hear that.’
I struggle with how to respond to that. It was clear when we spoke on the phone that he doesn’t know I’ve been fired. I am unsure as to why nobody told him that, perhaps because technically I haven’t been fired, I am still contractually tied to them even though they won’t let me past the front door.
‘You’re a difficult woman to find,’ he says, with a smile, which is a beautiful thing to behold. Two definite dimples and a tiny chip in his front tooth: even his imperfection is perfectly perfect. In my humble opinion.
My house is a mess. I haven’t got around to cleaning the muck I trampled into the floor during my rampage last night and my dirty knickers are in a pile on the kitchen floor in front of the washing machine, waiting for my towels to finish their cycle. I cannot bring him into the house.
‘I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday, but I find out-of-work hours are the best time to deal with people. I’m very conscious of the need to keep your office from finding out about our contact.’
I’m still thinking about the state of the house, a long pause that he mistakes for mistrust, so he apologises and digs in his pockets and retrieves a business card. He hands it to me. He has to lean his long arms across the grass to reach me; he knows not to step on the grass and I like that. I examine the card. Monday O’Hara. Headhunter. Diversified Search International. The whole thing makes me smile.
‘We don’t have to talk now, I just wanted to make contact first and—’
‘No, no, now is perfect. Well, not right now …’ I run my hand through my scraped-back dirty hair and find a crusty leaf in it. ‘Would you mind if I took twenty minutes to quickly change? We could meet at the Marine Hotel around the corner?’
‘Perfect.’ There’s a flash of that gorgeous smile, but then it’s all locked away in a very square jaw and he nods, business-like, at me and makes his way back to his car. I have to work hard not to dance into my house.
I sit in on an oversized couch in the Marine Hotel lobby, feeling refreshed and looking more human, while Monday heads off in search of a waiter. I feel nervously excited about what’s to come. At long last, something that feels like a step forward. He has no idea that I’ve been fired, and I still haven’t told him, or even let on that I’m no longer working there, and if it does slip out, he doesn’t need to know that it wasn’t my decision to leave. I know exactly why I’m keeping it to myself: because I want to play. I want to play along, feel like the desired woman with two companies fighting over her, instead of the loser, fired from her job and with nothing on the horizon. Or maybe, just maybe, in an embarrassing bout of ego and weakness, I don’t want the handsome man to see me as the fired failure that I currently feel like.
A woman and a little girl, her daughter, around four years old, sit at the table in front of me. The little girl picks up her spoon and lightly taps on the glass.
‘I’d like to make toast,’ she says, and her mother howls with laughter.
‘A toast, Lily.’
‘Oh,’ she giggles. ‘I’d like to make a toast.’ She clinks the glass again, stretches her neck and puts on a posh, serious face.
Her mother cracks up laughing again.
The little girl is funny, but it is her mother’s reaction that makes me join in the laughter. She is laughing so hard, she’s crying and patting at the corners of her eyes to stop it.
‘So what’s your toast about?’
‘The toast would like to thank,’ Lily says in a deep, posh voice, ‘the butter and the jam.’
Her mother rolls over on the couch, laughing.
‘And the egg, for making it into soldiers.’
Lily sees me listening and stops, embarrassed.
‘Don’t let me stop you,’ I call. ‘You’re doing a great job.’
‘Oh,’ her mother sits up and wipes her eyes, trying to catch her breath. ‘You crack me up, Lily.’
Lily makes a few more speeches, which have me laughing to myself. I sit still as can be while they are busy together, but I will not be still and alone for long. My headhunter returns. This man has hunted me, it feels animalistic. I feel myself blush and I try to put a stop to the ridiculous antics in my head. I fix all my attention on Monday, all thoughts of the little girl gone from my mind.
‘I ordered you a green tea,’ he says, checking.
‘Perfect. Thanks. So, your name is Monday. I’ve never heard that before.’
He leans over, placing his elbows on his knees. This brings him quite close, but to sit back would be rude so I get lost in his face and then try to remember that I shouldn’t be, that I should be concentrating on the words coming through his chipped white tooth and out of his sumptuous mouth and why I am here. Because he has found me, sought me out, and thinks I’m a highly qualified, wonderful person. Or something like that.
I can tell he is completely at ease with my question, and has no doubt been asked it a thousand times.
‘My mother is nuts,’ he says with an air of finality, and I laugh.
‘I was hoping for more than that.’
‘Me too,’ he replies, and we smile. ‘She used to be a cellist with the National Symphony Orchestra. Now she gives lessons in a caravan in Connemara, in the garden of a house that she refuses to live in because she’s convinced she saw the ghost of her dad. She named me Monday because I was born on a Monday. My middle name is Leo because I was born in late July. O’Hara is her surname, not my father’s.’ He smiles and his eyes move from mine to my hair. ‘Her hair is as red as yours, though I didn’t inherit that. Just her freckles.’
It’s true, he has a beautiful smattering of freckles across his nose and the tips of his cheeks. I picture a red-haired woman with freckles and pale skin in a field in Galway with a cello between her thighs. It’s a bit racy.
My turn. ‘My granddad brought my mum a bunch of winter jasmine from his garden when she was in hospital after I was born. So she named me Jasmine.’
He seems surprised. ‘People rarely reciprocate my name story.’
‘If you have a name story, you have to tell it,’ I say.
‘I don’t usually have a choice,’ he says. ‘A mere introduction requires explanation. It’s the same for my sister, Thursday.’
‘You do not have a sister called Thursday!’
‘No.’ He laughs, enjoying my reaction.
‘Well, I do have a sister. My granddad brought a bunch of heather to my mum after she was born. So she called her Heather.’
‘That’s a bit predictable,’ he teases, curling his lip.
‘I suppose. My brother Weed lucked out.’
He narrows his eyes suspiciously, then laughs.
‘Where’s your dad from?’
‘Spanish sailor.’
‘You don’t look Spanish.’
‘I’m joking. The Snapper? Anyway. No, it’s my mother’s equivalent – a travelling salesman, apparently. Never met him, no idea who he is, she’s never told anyone. Though my friends and I used to guess it was every black man that we saw when I was growing up, which there obviously weren’t many of in Galway. It used to be a game. Guess who Monday’s dad is. There was a busker on Quay Street who played the saxophone; my friends used to joke that it was him. When I was twelve I asked him.’ He laughs. ‘It wasn’t him, but he said he’d meet my mum if I wanted.’
It’s sad but we both laugh, and then he suddenly snaps out of it and into business mode. ‘So. The job.’ He lifts a leather folder on the table and unzips it. ‘I have been hired by DavidGordonWhite – are you familiar with them? If not, here you go.’
He places a business folder down before me. Very corporate, very serious, very expensive-looking: a photo of a man and a woman in pinstripe suits in front of a glass building, both of them looking into the sky over the camera as if a meteor is headed at them but they are not in the least bothered. My heart sings. They want me. They need me. They think that I am highly qualified and wonderful. They think that I am necessary, that I am an asset. They want to pay me to distract me from the world and real worldly issues. I am beaming and I can’t help it.
‘They’re a tax advisory company,’ I say.
‘Top ten in the world. Correct. You are aware that corporations such as these have corporate social responsibility programmes?’
‘PR exercises,’ I say.
‘You might not want to mention that in the interview.’ He grins, then the professional face is back. ‘If it were just a PR exercise then it wouldn’t qualify as a charity, which is what they have in mind: the DavidGordonWhite Foundation, a charity campaigning for climate justice – human rights and climate change. They want you to work for them …’ He pauses, obviously waiting to see whether I will ask a question or if he should continue. I am so disappointed I don’t know what to say. It’s not a proper job; they want me to work for a charity. ‘I’ll keep talking about everything, you stop me if you have any questions, okay?’
I nod. I am annoyed. At DavidGordonWhite. At him, for fooling me with his handsomeness and flattery, making me think I was being offered a proper job. I feel my cheeks flush. He talks and talks and talks about the job. Nothing in what he says piques my interest.
Eventually he stops and looks at me. ‘Shall I continue?’
I want to say no. I want to say more than that, I’m feeling hot-headed, but I mustn’t take out my personal frustrations on this man, handsome as he is.
‘I’m confused as to why I’m in the running for this,’ I tell him. ‘I have never worked with or for a charity. I create start-ups, I make them into brilliant successes, and then I sell them on for as much money as possible.’
Even I know that that is an awful way to describe what I do. In fact it sounds like something Larry has barked at me in the past, when in reality I am incredibly passionate about what I do. There is more involved than what I have said, but I want to make it sound as far away from a charity as possible. He has got it wrong. How did my name pop up in the system when he typed in ‘charity’, apart from the fact I’m starting to feel like a charity case.
He seems a little surprised by my outburst but takes a mature moment to choose his next words, fixing me with his caring, green-eyed, I-understand-where-you’re-coming-from look. ‘You would be responsible for the general control and management of the charity. It is a business like any other and it’s starting from scratch.’ He can see the uncertainty on my face and he is trying to sell it to me.
He goes on to talk about what I’ve done in all of my businesses, as though I don’t know myself, but it is clever, it is an ego boost and he has researched me well. He openly admires me, praises my decisions and good work, and I am feeling mightily flattered and as though there is no one cleverer than me. I am being reeled in. He tells me that while he was asking around for the best candidate my name came up on a few different occasions. His handsomeness helps, because I want to please him, because I want him to think that I am talented and clever and all of those things; he is the perfect hire for a headhunter, able to fill people with self-belief, convince them that there is something out there greater for them than what they are currently doing. He almost has me. I mean, he has me, but the job … not so much. My gut isn’t jumping up and down the way it usually does when I have an idea for a new project, or come across someone else’s idea that I can improve on.
He looks at me, hopefully.
My green tea arrives. As the waiter places it before me I have time to think. This job is not for me, but there is nothing else on offer. I’m torn between expressing interest and being honest. And I like him, which should be an aside, and it really is, but at the same time it’s inescapable. Being fired has knocked the confidence out of me, has made me question the how, what and why of every decision I make. Do I wait for the right thing, or do I grab the first thing, just in case?
He studies me, intensely, those hazel green eyes gazing deep into mine, and I feel as if I’m falling into them, being sucked in. Then I feel like an idiot because all he is doing is looking at me and I’m the one reacting. I break our stare, though he continues to watch me. I’m convinced he knows, that he is seeing deep into my soul. I can’t do it, I can’t lie to him, this one person who is offering sunshine in the middle of the longest of my winters.
‘Actually, Monday, I’m sorry …’ I rub my face, ashamed. ‘There seems to b
e a misunderstanding. I no longer work at the Idea Factory. I lost my job over two months ago. A disagreement between me and the co-founder.’ I feel my eyes spark as I talk. ‘So, I don’t have a job at the moment.’ I don’t know what else to say. Feeling my cheeks flush, I take a sip of the green tea just to give me something to do. It burns my tongue and all the way down my throat and it’s all I can do not to react, but at least it’s headed off the tears that were about to come.
‘Okay,’ he says, quietly, his posture relaxing and changing to a different mode. ‘Well, that’s good, right? They don’t have to steal you away from another job. You are actively looking, I assume?’
I try to look bright-eyed and wonder whether to explain the gardening leave. I can’t do it. I can’t watch the only opportunity I’ve had for a new job fall by the wayside by admitting my dirty little secret: that I’m on Larry’s payroll for another ten months, preventing me from working. Nor can I not tell him, a headhunter. He makes my mind up for me by filling in the silence.
‘I’m going to leave this with you …’ He slides the folder across the coffee table. ‘It’s information about the position. You can read up on it then give me a call. We can meet again, discuss any questions you might have.’