Her heart was pumping hard, the hand around her glass was instantly sweaty and everything felt super-real. He mouthed something at her: ‘Wait.’ Then, ‘Please.’ Then he turned his shoulder and began pushing through the people, moving in her direction.
‘He’s coming over,’ Becky hissed. ‘Run!’
‘No.’ This had to be done. There could only be one first time for them to meet again, it might as well be now.
He disappeared from view and then reappeared, hacking his way through a nearby thicket of Young Turks. Becky melted into the background.
And there he was, right in front of her.
‘Jojo?’ It sounded like an inquiry, as if he was checking she was real.
‘Mark.’ Even saying his name felt like a relief.
‘You look –’ he sought a good enough word – ‘great.’
‘That’s me,’ she quipped. He lit up with delight and for a moment it was like old times. Until Jojo asked, ‘How’re Cassie and the kids?’
Warily he answered, ‘OΚ.’
‘You and Cassie are still together?’
He hesitated. ‘She found out about, you know, us.’
‘Shit. How?’
‘After you left it was obvious that something was wrong.’ He half-laughed. ‘I went to pieces.’
She hadn’t exactly been, like, on cloud nine herself. ‘Had she known?’
‘She’d guessed there was somebody. She didn’t know it was you.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry to hurt her.’
‘She says – I mean, who knows? – but she says it was a relief to finally find out. She says pretending not to notice that I was never there was doing her in. For the past few months we’ve been trying to patch things up.’
‘Having a big party to renew your wedding vows?’
He managed a smile. ‘No. But going for counselling. We’re doing our best,’ he stopped. ‘But I still think about you all the time.’
She’d been moving closer, reeled in by him. Straightening her shoulders, she shifted away – too scared of catching even a hint of how he smelt, that would be the undoing of her.
‘Could we meet some time?’ he asked. ‘Just for a drink?’
‘You know we couldn’t.’
Suddenly he blurted, ‘Even now, every day, I can’t believe I got it so wrong. I was so selfish, thinking about us instead of you. If I could have that hour in that meeting again – ’
‘Stop. I’ve been thinking about it too. It wasn’t just the partnership thing. The guilt and stuff about Cassie and your kids – when it came down to it, I think I couldn’t do it. Close, but no cigar. And you know what? I don’t buy much into psychotherapy stuff, but I guess you couldn’t go through with it either. That’s why you stitched me up.’
‘No,’ he protested. ‘No way.’
‘Way,’ she said firmly.
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Whatever. Just a theory.’ She wouldn’t persist with this. It didn’t matter enough.
People were looking at them, their intimacy all too obvious.
‘Mark, I have to go now.’
‘Do you? But –’
She pushed her way through the crowds, knowing everyone, smiling, smiling, smiling her way to the door.
Once outside, she walked at speed, Becky skipping in her wake, trying to keep up. When they were at a safe distance, she abruptly stopped in a doorway and jack-knifed over, clutching her stomach, her hair streaming towards the ground.
‘Are you going to throw up?’ Becky whispered, circling her hand on her back.
‘No,’ she answered, thickly. ‘But it hurts.’
They stood for several minutes, Jojo making funny whimpery noises that Becky found unendurable, then Jojo straightened up, tossed her hair back and said, ‘Kleenex.’
Becky found one in her bag and passed it over. ‘You could get back with him, you know.’
‘That will never happen. It is so over.’
‘How can it be? You miss him terribly.’
‘So what? I’ll get over him, hey, I’m nearly there already. And if I want, I’ll meet someone else sometime. I mean, look at me – I run my own business, I’ve got all my own teeth and hair, I can fix bikes –’
‘You look like Jessica Rabbit.’
‘I’m a cryptic crossword ninja.’
‘You do a brilliant Donald Duck impersonation.’
‘Exactly. I’m fabulous.’
Lily
Anton’s phone rang once. It rang twice. My heart was pounding, my hands were slippery, I was mouthing, ‘Please God.’ It rang three times. Four times. Five times. Six times.
Shit…
On the seventh ring, there was a click, a burst of pub-like chatter and laughter, then someone – Anton – said, ‘Lily?’
Joy rendered me light-headed. (Though I must admit, I had called him on his mobile. I had not taken any chances.) And before I had uttered a word he had known it was me! Another sign! (Or else he had caller display.)
‘Anton? Can I see you?’
‘When? Now?’
‘Yes. Where are you?’
‘Wardour Street.’
‘Meet me at St John’s Wood tube station.’
‘I’ll leave now. I’ll be with you in fifteen, twenty minutes at the latest.’
Infused with wild energy, I ran to the mirror and pulled a brush through my hair. I rummaged through my make-up bag but I didn’t need any, I already looked transformed. Nevertheless, I quickly rubbed on blusher and lipgloss, because it couldn’t hurt. And mascara. And some weird brow-bone highlighter stuff that Irina had forced upon me. Then I made myself stop – I was starting to obsess – and went to ask Irina to watch Ema. ‘I’m popping out for a while.’
She asked, ‘Why?’
‘I’m going to do something rash.’
‘Vit Anton? Good. But you kennot go looking like that. You need pore-minimizer.’ She reached for her crate of cosmetics but I fled.
I had to leave the apartment. Although Anton would not yet have arrived at the station, I had far too much nervous energy to be contained within walls.
Dusk was falling, the light was navy blue and at the speed I was walking, it took me less than five minutes to walk to the station.
The vision of my future I had had when I was in the numb stage of grieving for Anton returned with force; I had been convinced that a new life was waiting for me, full of feelings and laughter and colour and with an entirely new cast of people to its current one. I had not stopped believing in that vision, but some of the cast were the same. Anton was still the leading man, he had made the part his own.
I rounded the corner to do the last stretch and, through the gloom, fixed my eyes on the station entrance, the magical portal that would deliver him to me.
Then I noticed that a rangy figure outside the station was watching me. Although it was too dark to see properly and very soon for Anton to have arrived already from central London, I knew instantly that it was him. I knew it was him.
I did not physically stumble but I felt as if I had. It was like seeing him for the first time.
My footsteps slowed; I knew what was going to happen. Once I was beside him, that would be it. There would be no talking; we would be fixed, fused, forever.
I could have stopped. I could have turned back and erased the future, but I continued putting one foot in front of the other, as if an invisible thread led me directly to him.
Each breath I took echoed loud and slow as if I was scuba diving and as I got closer, I had to stop looking at him. So I focused on the pavement – a Fortnum and Mason carrier bag, a champagne cork, posh rubbish, after all this was St John’s Wood – until I was next to him.
His first words to me were, ‘I saw you from miles away.’ He picked up a strand of my hair.
I moved closer to his height, his beauty, his Anton-ness and into the light of his presence. ‘I saw you too.’
While people hurried in and out of the station like characters
in a speeded-up movie, Anton and I remained motionless as statues, his eyes on mine, his hands on my arms, completing the magic circle. And I said what I had always known, ‘As soon as I saw you I knew it was you.’
Epilogue
Almost nine months to the day that Owen broke it off with me, he and Lorna had a little girl and called her – wait for it! – Agnes Lana May. Nothing that could remotely be construed as ‘Gemma’. They didn’t ask me to be her godmother. Currently, there are no plans to go to the Dordogne together.
My book came out in the middle of May and it bombed. They blamed the cover, the title and the atrocious reviews. The general tone was, ‘… escapist pap. The abandoned wife undergoes a serious make-over, picks up a much younger man and within six months she’s running her own business. This makes a mockery of the situation of real women who’ve been abandoned after years of loyal service. Naturally, the husband returns at the end of the book, worn out from demands for sex from his mistress and finds his wife won’t have him…’
It was horrifically humiliating. The only nice reviews were in crappy magazines that print a lot of ‘I stole my daughter’s husband’ type stories. One of them called it Revenge Literature and clearly this was something they approved of.
But even that wasn’t enough to sell any books and I must admit I didn’t help: just before the book came out, Dad asked me not to do publicity where I told the real story behind the book, and something must have softened in me because I took pity on him and agreed. (It didn’t make me very popular with Dalkin Emery’s publicity department. They’d all kinds of things lined up where me and Mam would go on daytime telly and trash Dad. But Mam had backed out of it as soon as Dad came home.)
There won’t be a second book; I have no imagination and nothing bad has happened to me – apart from my first book getting horrible reviews and not being able to write a second book, but that’s all a little post-modern. The fact is my life is too nice and there are worse complaints.
At the moment I limit my artistic endeavours to making up stories for abandoned women about their runaway boyfriends. I’m very good at it and, within my circle, I have quite a reputation. It’ll do me. I still have most of the advance money (they didn’t make me give it back even though the book sold almost nothing) and maybe one day in the misty future I’ll set up on my own. Not as easy as it sounds, we’re not all Jojo Harvey, who now has fabulous coloured-glass offices in Soho and four people working for her, including her old assistant Manoj. Not only am I a cringing coward by comparison but I’m under contract not to take any clients with me.
Lily’s career goes from strength to strength. She wrote a new book called A Charmed Life, which was like another Mimi’s Remedies and sold in its millions. Then Crystal Clear, the book that nearly broke Dalkin Emery, surprised everyone by getting short-listed for the Orange Prize and that also sold in its millions. Apparently she’s writing something new, they’re all very excited.
I actually met Anton and Lily at a publishing do, shortly after Chasing Rainbows came out and my publishers were still talking to me. I was moving through the throng, trying to find the ladies’ and suddenly me and Lily ended up standing before each other.
‘Gemma?’ Lily croaked. She looked absolutely terrified.
And after all the fantasies I’d entertained over the years –splashing a glass of red wine in her face, zapping her with death stares, shouting out to the roomful of her peers about what an evil bitch she was – I watched myself take her hand, hold it and say with a certain amount of sincerity, ‘I enjoyed Mimi’s Remedies, and so did my mother.’
‘Thank you, thank you so much, Gemma. And I loved Chasing Rainbows.’ She did her sweet-girl smile, then Anton appeared and that was fine too. We made a few moments of innocuous chitchat, and as they left Anton tried to hold Lily’s hand, but she wouldn’t and I heard her say, ‘Have some consideration.’ Meaning, I think, for me.
And yes, I felt sad then. That sort of gesture was Lily all over; she was very mindful of other people’s feelings. It was a pity we couldn’t be friends because (apart from that one boyfriend-stealing incident) she was a lovely person. I’d been so fond of her.
But onwards and upwards.
When Mam met Johnny the Scrip for the first time, she took in his broad shoulders, his air of kindness and the twinkle in his eye that is a permanent feature now that he’s no longer working around the clock, and she leant over to me and murmured, ‘Looks like the professionals have arrived.’
She likes him. Shite.
But even that wasn’t enough to put me off him.
Colette wasn’t on her own for long. She met someone else – a friend of a friend of Trevor’s brother’s brother-in-law – and because of Dublin being so small, I found out. From what I gather the new bloke is a much better bet than Dad. (At least he doesn’t wear a vest.)
As for Mam and Dad… well, he does the crossword and plays golf, she buys clothes and makes him guess the price, they watch murder-mysteries and go for drives. Apart from the fact that I’ve had a book published and we have access to all the surgical gauze we can eat, you’d swear he’d never been away…
Acknowledgements
Thanks to all at Penguin, especially Louise Moore, and all at Curtis Brown, especially Jonathan Lloyd.
I required a lot of expert advice while writing this book and everyone I asked gave generously of their time and knowledge – any mistakes are entirely mine.
Thanks to the New York Fire Department, with special gratitude to Chris O’Brien and the firefighters at 1215 Intervale Ave. (Sometimes I just love my job.) Thanks to officers Anthony Torres, Daniel Hui, Charlie Perry and Kevin Perry of the NYPD; to Kathleen, Natalie, Clare and Shane Perry; to Viv Gaine of Visible Gain Event Management; to Orlaith McCarthy, Michelle Ní Longain and Eileen Prendergast of BCM Hanby Wallace; to John and Shirley Baines; and to Tom and Ann Heritage of Church Farm, Oxhill.
Thanks to the ‘Able ladies’: Orlaith Brennan, Maria Creed, Gwen Hollings worth, Celia Houlihan, Sinead O’Sullivan and Aideen Kenny.
For encouragement, reading half-written chapters and general hand-holding, thank you Suzanne Benson, Jenny Boland, Susie Burgin, Ailish Connolly, Gai Griffin, Jonathan ‘Jojo’ Harvey, Suzanne Power, Anne-Marie Scanlon, Kate Thompson, Louise Voss and the entire Keyes family. Because this book took a long time to write, I’ve a horrible feeling that I’ve forgotten to thank someone who helped me in its early days. If that person is you, I can only apologize and point the finger at my gammy memory.
Finally, as always, there aren’t words to thank Tony enough for his phenomenal generosity, patience, insight, kindness, hard work, resourcefulness and all-round fabulousness. I’m not messing when I say this book wouldn’t have happened without him.
Friday, 30 May
14.49
You know, if you glanced up at my window right now, you’d think to yourself, ‘Look at that woman. Look at the diligent way she’s sitting upright at her desk. Look at the assiduous way her hands are poised over her keyboard. She’s obviously working very hard … hold on … is that Stella Sweeney?! Back in Ireland? Writing a new book?! I’d heard she was all washed up!’
Yes, I am Stella Sweeney. Yes, I am (much to my disappointment, but we won’t get into it now) back in Ireland. Yes, I am writing a new book. Yes, I am all washed up.
But I won’t be all washed up for long. No indeed. Because I’m working. You only have to look at me here at my desk! Yes, I’m working.
… Except I’m not. Looking like you’re working isn’t quite the same thing as actually working. I haven’t typed a single word. I can think of nothing to say.
A small smile plays about my lips, though. Just in case you’re looking in. Being in the public eye does that to a person. You have to look smiley and act nice all the time, or else people will say, ‘The fame went to her head. And it’s not like she was any good in the first place.’
I’ll have to get curtains, I decide. I won’t be able to sustain this smi
ling business. Already my face is hurting and I’ve only been sitting here for fifteen minutes. Twelve, actually. How slow the time is going!
I type one word. ‘Arse.’ It doesn’t further my case, but it feels nice to write something.
‘Begin at the beginning,’ Phyllis had told me, that terrible day in her office in New York, a few months ago. ‘Do an introduction. Remind people of who you are.’
‘Have they forgotten already?’
‘Sure.’
I’d never liked Phyllis – she was a terrifying little bulldog of a creature. But I wasn’t supposed to like her – she was my agent, not my friend.
The first time I’d met her she’d waved my book in the air and said, ‘We could go a long ways with this. Drop ten pounds and you’ve got yourself an agent.’
I’d cut out the carbs and dropped five of the stipulated ten pounds, then there was a sit-down where she was persuaded to settle for seven pounds and me wearing Spanx whenever I was on TV.
And Phyllis was right: we did go a long way with that book. A long way up, then a long way sideways, then a long way off the map. So far off the map that I’m sitting here at a desk in my small house in the Dublin suburb of Ferrytown, which I thought I’d escaped for ever, trying to write another book.
Okay, I’ll write my introduction.
Name: Stella Sweeney.
Age: forty-one and a quarter.
Height: average.
Hair: long, curly and blonde-ish.
Recent life events: dramatic.
No, that won’t do; it’s too bare. It needs to be more chatty, more lyrical. I’ll try again.
Hello, there! Stella Sweeney here. Slim, thirty-eight-year-old Stella Sweeney. I know you need no reminding of who I am but, just in case, I wrote the international best-selling inspirational book One Blink at a Time. I was on talk shows and everything. They worked me to the bone on several book tours that took in thirty-four US cities (if you count Minneapolis–St Paul as two places). I flew in a private plane (once). Everything was lovely I, absolutely lovely, except for the bits that were horrible. Living the dream, I was! Except for when I wasn’t … But the wheel of fate has turned again and I find myself in very different, more humbling circumstances. Adjusting to the latest twist my life has taken has been painful but ultimately rewarding. Inspired by my new wisdom, not to mention the fact that I’m skint.