Anybody Out There?

  Fact 1. I couldn’t deny that he’d severely disrupted my peace of mind; despite my insisting that we barely knew each other, privately I felt that we knew each other extremely well. In a good way.

  Fact 2. It was different from the way I’d felt about any man in a long, long time. I suspected—feared even—that I was badly in love with him.

  Fact 3. I valued loyalty and in many ways Aidan was extremely loyal: he embraced Jacqui, Rachel, even Luke and the Real Men, calling them “man” just to fit in. He celebrated my work victories and he’d hated Lauryn long before he met her.

  Fact 4. I wasn’t going to get sidetracked by the physical side of things, because you can fancy anyone. But, as it happened—and it’s really neither here nor there—we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.

  On paper so many of the boxes were ticked. The problem was Janie. I couldn’t forgive Aidan for dumping her.

  But when I took my woes to Jacqui, she said, “He dumped her for you!”

  “It still feels wrong. And he was with her for a thousand years, he only knows me five minutes.”

  “Listen,” she said earnestly. “Really listen to me. You often hear of people who go out with someone for years and years, then they break up and two days later they’re getting married to someone else. We’ve seen it, haven’t we? Remember Faith and Hal? She broke it off with him after eleven years and immediately—so it seemed—he married that Swedish girl and everyone said, ‘There goes the rebound kid,’ but they’re still together and they’ve three children and they seem happy. When people move that fast, everyone says, ‘I’ll give it a month,’ but often they’re wrong, often it works. And I’ve a feeling that’s what’s going on here. You don’t have to be with a person for a hundred years before you’re sure. Sometimes it happens in an instant. You’ve heard the saying: ‘When you know, you know.’”

  I nodded. Yes, I’d heard it.

  “So do you know?”

  “No.”

  She sighed heavily and muttered, “Christ.”

  In all the time I was with Janie,” Aidan said, “I never asked her to marry me. And she never asked me either.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “I’m freaked out enough, having such an intense relationship with you so quickly, but all this marriage stuff is really doing my head in.”

  “What are you so scared of?”

  “Oh, you know, all the obvious reasons: I’ll never be able to sleep with anyone else ever again, I don’t want to be part of a smug couple who finish each other’s sentences, etc., etc.”

  But my real fear was that it mightn’t work out, that he might run off with someone else—or more likely, go back to Janie—and I’d be absolutely destroyed. When you love someone as much as I suspected I loved Aidan, there was so much further to fall.

  “I’m afraid that it might all go horribly wrong,” I admitted. “That we’d end up hating each other and losing our trust in love and hope and all the good things. I couldn’t bear it. Then I’d become an over-made-up lush with big hair who drinks martinis for breakfast and tries to sleep with the pool boy.”

  “Anna, it won’t go wrong, I promise. This is good stuff, you and me, as good as it gets. You know that.”

  Sometimes I did. Which meant that—like the urge I got on the top of a tall building, to just jump off—my biggest fear of all was that I might say yes.

  “Okay, if you won’t marry me will you come on vacation with me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to ask Jacqui.”

  “Kill or cure” was Jacqui’s conclusion. “It could be a total disaster, trapped in a foreign country with nothing to say to each other. I’d say, go for it.”

  I said I’d go so long as he didn’t once ask me to marry him. “Done,” he said.

  I went to Ireland for Christmas, and when I got back, Aidan and I went to Mexico for six days.

  After the cold and drear of a New York winter, the white sands and blue skies were so dazzling, it almost hurt to look at them. But the best bit of all was having Aidan on tap twenty-four hours a day. It was sex, sex, and more sex. First thing in the morning, last thing at night, at all points in between…

  To make sure we got out of bed once in a while, we checked out the dusty local town and decided to do a beginners’ scuba-diving course, which was run by two expat Californian stoners. It was dirt cheap, and with the benefit of hindsight, maybe we should have been concerned. Also by the waiver form we had to sign, stating that in the event of death, mutilation, shark attacks, post-traumatic stress disorder, stubbed toes, broken nails, lost prosthetics, and whatever else, they were in no way, shape, or form responsible.

  But we didn’t give a damn, we were having a great time, crouched in the tiny practice pool with nine other beginners, making Os with our thumb and index fingers and sniggering and nudging, like we were back at school.

  On day three, we were taken out for our first dive in the sea, and although we were only twelve feet beneath the waves, we were transported to another world. A world of peace, where all you can hear is the sound of your own breathing and everything moves with slow grace. Swimming through blue water, it was like being suspended in blue light. The water was as clear as glass and sun rays filtered all the way to the bottom, to highlight the white sand on the ocean floor.

  Aidan and I were mesmerized. Holding hands, we slowly flapped past delicate coral and fish in every imaginable colorway: yellow with black spots, orange with white stripes, and funny, transparent ones with no color at all. Shoals of them in formation, moving silently past us, heading for somewhere else.

  Aidan pointed and I followed his finger. Sharks. Three of them, hanging around at the edge of the reef, looking mean and moody, like they were wearing leather jackets. Reef sharks aren’t dangerous. Usually. All the same, my heart beat a little faster.

  Then, just for a laugh, we took out our mouthpieces and used each other’s spare “octupus” air tube, becoming one unit, the way “lovairs” in films set in the 1930s link arms and drink champagne from each other’s glass (and they’re always those shallow champagne glasses with the ridiculously wide rims, so that the champagne spills everywhere and you’re barely able to drink any yourself, never mind your loved one, but what harm).

  “Wow, that was amazing,” Aidan raved afterward. “It was exactly like Finding Nemo. And you know what else it means, Anna? It means you and I have something in common. We have A Shared Interest.”

  I thought this was his cue to ask me to marry him again but I gave him a look and he said, “What?” and I said, “Nothing.”

  The last day was the big banana, the grand finale. They were taking all of us to deeper waters, which involved decompressing on our ascent. That meant hanging around for two minutes every fifteen feet while our air yoke resomethinged. We’d been practicing in shallower waters, but this time it would be for real.

  But on the boat taking us out, events turned pear-shaped: Aidan had developed a cold, and although he was pretending he was in the full of his health, the instructor noticed and nixed Aidan’s dive.

  “You won’t be able to equalize the pressure in your ears. Sorry, man, you can’t go.”

  Aidan was so disappointed that I decided I wouldn’t go either. “I’d rather go back to the cabana and have sex with you. We haven’t done it in over an hour.”

  “How about you go for your dive and then come back to the cabana and have sex with me? You can have both. Go on, Anna, you’ve been so excited about this dive and you can tell me all about it when you get back.”

  Because Aidan wasn’t coming, I had to get another “buddy”—even though I hate the word buddy. Except when it’s used as an insult. (Example: “What’s it to you, buddy?”)

  I got buddied with a man who’d been reading Codependent No More on the beach. He’d come on holiday on his own and had been buddied with the instructor for every other dive.

  Final instructions were called to us before we jumped off the side of the boat, the
n we splashed down into that silent other world. Mr. Codependent wouldn’t hold my hand, but that was fine because I didn’t want to hold his either. Swimming along, we’d been near the ocean floor for several minutes—it’s hard to keep track of time down there—when I realized that on my last two inhales, no air had come out of my tube. I took another suck just to make sure, and no, nothing was happening. It was like the surprise I get when a can of hair spray is used up; it’s something that I think is never going to happen. I press and press on the nozzle thinking, It can’t be empty, then realize it is and that I’d better stop unless I want the fecker to explode.

  My indicator said I still had twenty-five minutes of air left but nothing was coming out; my tube must be blocked. So I tried my octupus arm—my spare tube—and felt the first tickle of fear when nothing came out of that either.

  I stopped Mr. Codependent and signaled No air. (A slicing action at the neck that the Mafia use when they talk about “taking care” of people.) It was only when I went to grab his octopus and take a lovely mouthful of oxygen that I noticed there wasn’t one! No extra air tube! The gobshite! Even in my shock, I knew what had happened: he’d detached it in order to demonstrate his lack of codependence. In his head he’d probably been saying proudly, I walk alone; I depend on no one and no one depends on me.

  Well, that was just tough because, seeing as he’d abandoned his spare tube somewhere, he’d have to give me a go of his own mouthpiece. I pointed and signaled Give it to me, but as he went to take it out of his mouth, he panicked. Even through his mask, I could see it. It was like when Bilbo Baggins had to hand the Ring over to Master Frodo. He knew it had to be done, but when it came to actually doing it, he couldn’t.

  Codependent was too scared to leave himself without air for even a few seconds. One hand guarding his air tube, he jabbed toward the surface with the other: Go up. To my horror, he started swimming away from me, still protecting his air supply.

  The others had gone on ahead, I could see them disappearing into the distance. There was no one to help me. This isn’t happening, please God, let this not be happening.

  I was forty-five feet beneath the surface and I had no air. I felt the full weight of all that water pressing down on me. Up until now, it had been entirely weightless, but all of a sudden it might kill me.

  The terror was so bad I felt like I was dreaming. Surface, I thought. I’ve got to get to the surface. I stared upward. It looked a very long way away.

  Diving upward, my legs kicking, my lungs bursting, I raced up, up, up, breaking all the rules, thinking, I’m going to die and it’s all my own fault for going on a cut-price scuba course.

  Every fifteen feet I was supposed to hang around decompressing for two minutes; never mind two minutes, I didn’t have two seconds.

  I kicked past a surprised shoal of clown fish, praying to break the surface. My blood roared in my ears and images flitted into my head. Then I realized what was happening—my life was flashing before my eyes. Fuck, I thought, I’m definitely going to die.

  My life didn’t flash sequentially, but highlit unexpected stuff, things I hadn’t thought about for years—or ever. My mother had given birth to me and I thought, What a nice thing that was to do. What a generous act. Next person to appear in my head was Shane: I’d stayed with that bloke for far too long.

  Why did I have to die? Well, why not? There were six billion people in the world and I was as insignificant as everyone else. They were dying all the time, why shouldn’t I?

  Mind you, it was a shame because if I got another shot at my inconsequential little life, I’d…

  Just when I thought my head was going to burst, I broke the blue line that separates the two worlds. The noise and the glare hit me, a wave slapped me in the ear, and I was tearing the mask off my face, gulping in glorious oxygen, amazed not to be dead.

  The next thing I remember, I was lying on the deck of the boat, still heaving desperately for air, and Aidan was bending over me. His expression was a mixture of horror and relief. I made a monumental effort and managed to speak. “Okay,” I gasped. “I’ll marry you.”

  23

  In the darkness, I woke with a bump, my heart beating fast and hard. The light was switched on before I knew I had done it and I was superalert and awake. I was on the couch. I’d nodded off there in my work clothes because I’d kept postponing the moment when I had to go to bed alone.

  Something had woken me. What had I heard? The sound of a key in the door? Or had the front door actually opened and closed? All I knew was I wasn’t alone. You can tell when someone else is in your space; it feels different.

  It had to be Aidan. He’d come back. And although I was excited, I was also a bit freaked. Out of the corner of my eye, over by the window, I saw something move, something fast and shadowy. I whipped my head around but there was nothing there.

  I stood up. There was nobody in the living room, nobody in the kitchenette, so I’d better check the bedroom. As I pushed open the door, I was sweating. I reached for the light switch, almost paralyzed with terror that a hand might grab mine in the dark. What was that tall narrow shape over by the closet? Then I hit the switch and the room flooded with light and the dark, ominous shape revealed itself as our bookshelf.

  Hearing my own gaspy breathing, I turned on the bathroom light and pulled back the wave-patterned shower curtain with a violent swish. No one there either.

  So what had woken me?

  I realized I could smell him. The tiny space was filled with him. The panic was back and my eyes scudded around looking for—what? I was afraid to look in the mirror, in case I saw someone else looking at me. It was then that I saw that his wash bag had slipped off the crowded shelf on to the tiles. Things had tumbled out and a bottle of something had broken. I crouched down; it wasn’t Aidan I could smell, it was just his aftershave.

  Okay. So how had the wash bag fallen? These apartments were old and rickety; someone slamming their front door could generate enough shock waves to nudge an overhanging wash bag off a ledge onto the floor in someone else’s apartment. No mystery there.

  I went to get a brush to clean up the broken glass, but in the kitchenette another smell awaited me, something sweet and powdery and oppressive. Nervously I sniffed the air. It was some sort of fresh flower. I recognized the scent, I just couldn’t…and then I got it. It was lilies, a smell I hate—so heavy and musty, like death.

  I looked around fearfully. Where was it coming from? There were no fresh flowers in the apartment. But the smell was undeniable. I wasn’t imagining it. It was real, the air was thick and cloying.

  After I’d tidied the broken bottle away, I was afraid to go back to sleep, so I switched on the TV. After a trawl through all the lunatics on the cable channels, I found Knight Rider, an episode I hadn’t already seen. Eventually I drifted back into a half sleep, where I dreamed I was awake and Aidan opened the door and walked in.

  “Aidan, you came back! I knew you would.”

  “I can’t stay long, baby,” he said. “But I’ve something important to tell you.”

  “I know. So tell me, I can take it.”

  “Pay the rent, it’s overdue.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “But I thought…”

  “The bill is in the closet with all the other mail. I’m sorry; I know you don’t want to open any of it, but just find that one. Don’t lose our apartment. Be a hero, baby.”

  24

  Anna, where are you?” It was Rachel.

  “Work.”

  “It’s ten past eight on a Friday night! It’s your first week back, you should be building up slowly.”

  “I know, but I’ve so much to do and it’s taking me forever to do it.”

  Spending half the previous night watching Knight Rider, instead of being asleep, hadn’t helped. I’d been wiped all day—exhausted and slow-witted. Lauryn was piling stuff on me, Franklin was on at me to get my hair cut, and to add to my woes, a sma
ll, determined gang of EarthSource girls thought I was an alcoholic.

  One of them—Koo? Aroon? Some silly earthy name, anyway—came right up to my desk on Friday morning and invited me to a lunchtime meeting—that’s AA meeting, by the way—with some of the other “McArthur recovery babes.”

  My heart sank to the soles of my glittery, wedge-heeled sneakers. The weariness! “Thank you,” I managed. “That’s very nice of you…” I wanted to say her name, but wasn’t sure what it was, so had to make do with a mumbly, all-purpose “ooo” sound. “But I’m not an alcoholic.”

  “Still in denial?” A sad shake of her middle-parted, lank-haired head. “Surrender to win, Anna, surrender to win.”

  “Okay.” It was just easier to agree.

  “It works if you work it, so work it, you’re worth it. If you want to drink it’s your business, but if you wanna stop, it’s ours.”

  “Thank you. You’re lovely.” Now please piss off before Lauryn comes over.

  Rachel said, “Some of the Real Men are calling round to play Scrabble. It might be an easy way for you to start meeting people again. Could you face it?”

  Could I? I didn’t want to be alone. Mind you, I didn’t really want to be with anyone else either. Paradox as that was, it made sense: I simply wanted to be with Aidan.

  In the four days I’d been back in New York, I’d never had so many invitations in my life. Everyone had been fantastic, but, as yet, the only people I’d been up for were Jacqui and Rachel (who came as a job lot with Luke). There were loads of people I still had to get back to: Leon and Dana; Ornesto, our Jolly Boy upstairs neighbor; Aidan’s mother. Anyway, all in good time…

  I switched off my PC and jumped in a cab on Fifty-eighth Street—it was getting slightly easier to be in them. En route I called Jacqui and invited her along.

  “Scrabble with the Real Men? I’d rather set myself on fire, but thanks for asking.”