‘And I’d advise you to do the same,’ she said, pushing two hot ports towards Molly.
‘I must admit, my alcohol consumption has gone through the roof since I found out about Jack,’ Molly admitted, taking a slug of her drink. ‘I hardly touched the stuff before.’
‘What about your friends?’ Sheila asked.
‘My best friend Jess was one of Jack’s concuquests,’ Molly said, getting slightly confused. ‘Cubines. Quests. Conquests! And I guess the rest of my friends were Jack’s friends, when I thought about it. I feel like I wasn’t really paying attention when I was with Jack. I just wanted to get married and have babies and live in a nice house and cook beautiful food.’
‘I know this is hard to believe,’ Sheila said seriously, ‘but it does get better. It really does. Six months ago I couldn’t get out of my bed for crying my heart out and wishing everything was different. If it wasn’t for Dervla I’d probably still be there. She stuck with me even when I was being a complete pain in the arse.’
She looked fondly over at Dervla, who was now sitting in another man’s lap, still talking into her mobile phone, and smoking as well.
‘Do you know what you need, Molly?’
Molly looked nervous.
‘Hey, girls,’ Sheila said, getting her crew’s attention. ‘Do you know what Molly needs? It’s Friday night … I’m thinking something sweeeeeeeet.’
‘The Sugar Club!’ the girls cried as one. ‘Salsa night!’ said Rose, downing her drink and pulling on her winter woollies in one single motion.
Before she knew what was happening, Molly was being pulled out into the cold and herded up Grafton Street.
‘Come on, Derv. Sugar Club!’ Sheila shouted across the pub as Dervla slipped off her current lap, stubbed out her fag and gravitated towards them.
Staggering around the streets of Dublin behind Sheila’s gaggle of girlfriends, Molly caught up on the details of Sheila’s sad tale.
‘His name was Luke and we were high-school sweethearts,’ she said. ‘I loved him to bits. God help me, I’d never so much as looked at another man! We went to college together, we started work at the same time, we’ve been living together for five years. Where’s Dervla? Can you see her?’
‘She’s back there talking on the phone — should we wait?’
‘Derv! Come on. Salsa!’ Sheila shouted drunkenly, before clutching Molly’s arm and staggering forward. ‘If I waited for her to finish on the phone I’d never get anywhere,’ she said.
‘Who’s she talking to?’
‘I don’t know, I never ask,’ Sheila said. ‘Anyway, so Luke asks me to marry him and of course I say yes because I always thought we would at some stage, it was just a matter of time. I’m quite keen for something quiet and small because my parents are quite religious and they don’t really understand that I’m not but Luke went off the deep end.’
‘Come with me, gorgeous, I’ll show you a good time.’ A drunken lout staggering towards them leered at Sheila.
‘I will in me hole, you knacker, now fuck off,’ she said, barely drawing breath from her tale-telling. ‘He had the big church organised and all the fancy cars and the reception at the Shelbourne was costing him a fortune. I didn’t mind, I suppose I just went along with it, really. I had a John Rocha wedding dress which was gorgeous,’ she said, tugging at Molly’s arm, ‘but I couldn’t have worn it every day like yours. Anyway, so on the morning of the wedding Dervla and Rose and Louise come over to my parents’ place where I was staying the night to help me get ready. Dervla had a case of champagne — a case, can you believe it? — and Rose had some grass she got off her brother Donal but they’d really only just got in the door when the phone rang.’
‘So he only told you then?’ Molly said, astounded.
‘Not at all,’ said Sheila, stopping to get a stone out of her shoe. ‘He didn’t tell me at all, he told my brother Mark.’
‘He didn’t have the balls to speak to you himself?’
‘Molly, he’s never had the balls to speak to me again ever. He just told Mark that he had gone to Hong Kong because he didn’t love me and was too scared to tell me and he was sorry.’
‘Didn’t you try and talk to him?’
‘Try? I couldn’t find the fucker. His family didn’t know where he was. His old job didn’t know the new job he’d gone to. I certainly didn’t know anybody in Hong Kong who could help track him down. My father and Mark wanted to go out there and find him but after about a week I realised that if he didn’t want to be found, what was the point?’
‘Didn’t you want to kill him?’ Molly asked.
‘Him, or myself, or anybody who did manage to get married, or couples holding hands or complete strangers kissing on street corners. It’s fair to say I was pretty murderous there for a while, all right, but I got over it. And how would it have worked out if we had got married? The bollocks didn’t love me so it would have been a mess anyway. It was just a matter of timing.’
Up ahead, Sheila’s friends turned around and waved excitedly before disappearing through a door. Sheila turned around to make sure Dervla was still in the frame, and dragged Molly into the nightclub. As they burst through a second door the wave of music from a bank of speakers just about knocked Molly off her feet.
The club had obviously once been a cinema or a theatre because the seats and tables were on big steps retreating up an incline towards the back of the room. The dance floor was at the bottom, in front of where the screen must once have been.
Anne-Marie, Kate and Rose had already dumped their bags and coats at two narrow curvy tables halfway up the auditorium and were making their way back down to the floor, swaying their hips, clicking their fingers and yahooing as they went. Louise and Lorna were at the bar at the very back and Molly could see Dervla just coming in the door.
They made their way to their tables and sat down, Sheila’s eyes shining as she checked out the action below.
Either there had been half-price salsa classes going on in the vicinity or there were a hell of a lot of South Americans in Dublin because the bodies on that floor were all moving in the most amazing directions, mostly together.
‘Shots,’ Lorna announced, setting down a tray of tequilas. Sheila knocked back two immediately, and Molly closed her eyes and downed one. Next thing she knew she was on the dance floor too, swirling and swaying, not altogether intentionally, and being whipped around the room by the dervish-like Sheila.
The pure salsa had given way to a mixture of Ricky Martin and Enrique Iglesias, music she knew the words to, and she shook herself free of Sheila and danced on her own, something she never would have done at home. Never would have had to, she tried to stop herself from thinking.
Molly was tall and had big feet and suffered from appalling clumsiness but out there on the Latin dance floor everything for once came together. With her eyes closed, the music pulsing loudly through her spine and completely oblivious to everyone around her, she lost herself in her own little world.
Nobody in the Sugar Club could miss the tall brunette in the unlikely get-up grooving to her own beat.
After a few more tracks she was brought back to the real world by Sheila, offering her another shot, which she accepted. Hey, but tequila made a girl feel like dancing!
She moved over to where Sheila was dancing with the now phoneless Dervla and the two parted to let Molly join them as the babp-babp-babp of the salsa beat picked up.
Suddenly a tall good-looking man with a shaved head wearing a white T-shirt twirled Molly around by her shoulder and grabbed her to him, whirling them both around the dance floor with breath-taking skill. His hips crunched into hers, his thighs burnt holes in her dress, he leaned down and she could feel his breath on her neck, melting her.
Opening her eyes, she felt as though she were floating on a cloud. Her body was completely relaxed and fluid and she let him do with it what he wanted, only just noticing out of the corner of her eye that Dervla and Sheila now seemed to be slow-danc
ing together on their own.
‘Do you like it?’ her partner whispered in her ear as the music became more frenzied and Molly felt the strength of his hand radiate in the small of her back. ‘Do you want more?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered, melting into his arms.
‘What was that?’
‘Yes!’ she said, louder, as he twisted and turned her, pushed her away from him and pulled her back.
‘Say it again!’
‘Yes!’ she screamed as he thrust her forcefully away, twirled and then pulled her back into his chest …
The dip came so quickly Molly’s head was still spinning from her last twirl. Instead of relaxing into the handsome stranger’s arms, she tried to spring up again, knocking him slightly off balance and then losing her own footing as she stumbled, still bent over backwards, over someone else’s feet and, as if in slow motion, her face twisted around to see the floor coming towards her as she fell.
The moment she hit the floor she knew she had done some damage and she rolled over onto her side, moaning.
After a flurry of shouting and scuffling the music was turned down, the lights turned on and someone was asking Molly if she was okay.
It was the man in the white T-shirt, looking sweaty and overly-porous in the strong light as he dithered over her.
‘Get out of the way,’ Sheila said, muscling in next to him and kneeling down to look at Molly, concerned.
‘I thought she could dance,’ the white T-shirt said.
‘Oh, fuck off!’ Sheila dismissed him. ‘You could have held on to her, you know. Men! Could you all stand back,’ she yelled at the collection of legs and faces clustered around Molly’s prone form. ‘The woman can hardly breathe. Are you okay, Molly?’
Moaning slightly, Molly tried to sit up but couldn’t.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she said, bursting into tears. ‘I think I’ve broken my arm.’
Chapter 18
1969
Mary Monaghan and Paddy O’Riordan lay looking at each other.
‘I love you, Mary,’ said Paddy simply. ‘I think I always have.’
Mary took in every crag of his weatherbeaten face, every fleck in his eyes, every wayward whisker in his eyebrows and knew that she felt the same way. She thought she always had.
‘You with all your fancy talk, Paddy O’Riordan,’ she scoffed, but they both knew the words she really wanted to say were too tender to be aired and it wasn’t quite her style.
‘I can’t leave Maeve,’ Paddy said, looking Mary straight in the eyes. ‘I’ve made her miserable enough as it is. I couldn’t walk away from her, Mary. Do you understand that?’
‘Well, a man with your fervent religious convictions, Paddy, I’d expect nothing less,’ the widow said tersely, but Paddy knew she was hurting. He loved her all the more for it. Oh, how he understood this woman.
‘Please,’ he whispered, reaching for her hand under the sheets. ‘Please, Mary.’
And when she lifted her eyes to look at him, he was weeping.
‘Thirty-odd years ago I made a mistake,’ he said to her, his voice breaking. ‘I made a mistake and there’s not one single day goes by that I don’t regret it, Mary, with all my heart I regret it. But I’ve lived with it, with myself, with Maeve,’ he said, closing his eyes as he whispered his wife’s name. ‘I’ve lived with it all these years because it was my mistake and a decent man sticks by what he’s done.’
He fought to control his emotions. ‘But I can’t do it any more, Mary,’ he said, still looking into her eyes, his own overflowing. ‘I can’t do it any more without you. I know I’ve not got much to offer you but can’t you see that we both deserve some happiness? With each other? Without you my heart is just a black, black hole, Mary, and I’ve lived all these years knowing that but still — I don’t want to die like that.’
And with that, the strong, broad shoulders of Paddy O’Riordan, as if finally crumbling under the weight of their enormous burden, shook and shook and shook as his grown-man tears fell onto the 47-year-old breast of the widow Mary Monaghan and he sobbed.
Was there ever such a good man, she wondered, as she stroked his tear-stained face and comforted him, trying to ease his humiliation at laying himself so open to her. Big, strong, silent Paddy O’Riordan with his sad eyes and wicked smile. Caught in a loveless marriage and here, at nearly 50 years of age, begging, crying for her love.
She’d known the first time she let him in for a cup of tea — what was it? Two years ago now — that one day they would be lying here, having a conversation like this. But the way she’d imagined it, she would have given the so-and-so his marching orders the moment he’d done his business, telling him to come back when there wasn’t a miserable little wife to take into account and she’d take it from there.
If she was completely honest with herself, she hadn’t really counted on the bedding process taking quite so long but what she had come to realise was that more than anything else, Paddy O’Riordan needed a friend. Someone to talk to. Someone to listen to. And how he seemed to love her sharp wit, her quick tongue, her sense of humour.
Strange, really, she thought, when it was her mouth that had always been to blame for all the trouble with Frank, God rest his miserable soul. She thought back to all the times that a thoughtless aside, an unwitting jibe, a wrong word in the wrong place, had seen her husband’s hand sending her halfway across the floor, his boot in her stomach as she lay bleeding on the ground.
Now, lying next to her, was a man she’d loved since she was a girl, who was broken and battered, in one way or another, just as she was. A man who had just made love to her so gently, so beautifully, so lovingly that everything inside her that she had long given up for dead — joy, tears, ecstasy — was back and begging her for more.
She’d lived all these years without true happiness and never had she felt the emptiness of her life more than at that moment.
But who said she had to live the rest of her life in misery? Who said she couldn’t laugh and love and feel the strong, callused hands of a hard-working man on her flesh?
Before Paddy had arrived she had spent 20 minutes just staring at herself in the mirror. Brown hair, more than flecked with grey. Blue eyes. Pale skin but soft and smooth and not too inhabited by the wrinkle clan just yet.
She’d stepped back then and let her robe fall to the floor. For years she’d avoided mirrors, not wanting to be reminded of the battle scars of her brutal marriage.
She stood naked and stared.
Large breasts not getting any closer to her face, sure, but not in bad shape all the same. A flat stomach and narrow hips. Thighs that were rounded but firm and stocky, and shapely legs.
Was it her imagination or was it a body crying out for attention?
Now she looked at Paddy O’Riordan, drying his eyes and looking embarrassed at breaking down in front of her, the eejit.
Couldn’t he tell she needed him just as much as he needed her?
If having sex with him once made her feel like this, she could barely imagine how having sex with him a hundred times would make her feel.
And if the price she had to pay to find out was getting love in short doses from behind closed doors with a man who belonged to someone else, by God in Heaven, she would pay it.
‘Well, you might not to have a lot to offer,’ she said gently, pulling his face towards her so he was looking right into her eyes, ‘but a little fish goes a long way, don’t you know.’
Chapter 19
Saturday, 20 February 1999
The distant beep and honk of Dublin city traffic finally brought Molly out of her comatose state.
Slowly opening her eyes, she winced at the pain in her head being caused by the light. She tried to lick her lips but her mouth was as dry as a chip.
And there was something else, too. Another pain. But that had been a dream, hadn’t it? Or rather, a nightmare. Lifting her head carefully off the pillow, Molly looked down at the bedcovers.
‘Aa
aaarrrggghhhh!’ she groaned, her head collapsing back down into the spongy softness behind it. ‘No! Please. No.’
Slowly she lifted her left arm up so that she could see it from her recumbent position. Sure enough, there it was, covered in pristine white plaster from knuckles to elbow.
So it wasn’t a nightmare. She had broken her wrist in a salsa dancing episode.
Flashes of the night before started running through her brain.
Molly and Sheila in a taxi looking for a hospital.
The cabby saying the government had gone fooking mad and closed them all down.
The long drive to — where was it? — Tallaght?
The cabby telling them he’d been five days in Tallaght Hospital having his prostate attended to before his wife could find him.
The search for an ATM machine, Molly forgetting Jack’s PIN number.
The cabby yelling at them he’d sooner run them over than drive them all this way without a fare.
Credit cards flashing, Molly crying with the pain.
The hideous concrete labyrinth of a hospital, a doctor with a ponytail, some vomiting, an X-ray, some more vomiting, a nurse putting her arm in plaster, some more vomiting, another taxi ride home.
She had no recollection of what had happened to Sheila or how she herself had got back to the hotel and up to her bed.
She felt sick as a dog, her arm was throbbing and she had to get up and go to Cork with her aunt. In a bus. Today. Now, probably.
She leaned over towards the bedside phone, picking up the receiver with her broken arm and dialling reception with the other.
‘It’s Molly Brown here in room, um …’ She didn’t know the room number.
‘That’s right, Miss Brown, we have a message here from your aunt. She’ll see you down here at reception at half-eleven.’
‘What’s the time now?’ Molly croaked.