Be Careful What You Wish For, page 13
Helen slept heavily, although not tranquilly, until shortly after midnight, when she awoke lathered in sweat and with the tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth.
Must’ve taken only one after all, otherwise I’d still be asleep, she thought thickly, barking her shin as she stumbled to the bathroom. She knocked over a bottle of conditioner, groping for the pills, the orange liquid glooping out in pools, but fastidiousness declined to assert itself and she left it to coagulate on the floorboards. She staggered to the kitchen, located the pills by the sink and downed another. She was virtually comatose by the top of the stairs.
Next morning Helen awoke with a Red Bull and vodka hangover. She lay for a few minutes, watching the light glance off her framed print of waterlilies, in a state of some bewilderment. She eased her neck sideways – it appeared to be cast from concrete – and studied her alarm clock. There must be some mistake – it read 12.10 p.m. Panicked, she leaped from bed, thudding clumsily, and snatched up her watch. It was in on the 12.10 p.m. conspiracy, which meant she had slept through the alarm. She was never taking those pills again.
She slumped back on the bed, legs dangling over the side, exhausted by her adrenaline rush, and cradled a pillow. She knew she should ring work and tell them she’d been delayed but she hadn’t the energy. She nodded off again and woke at 2.25 p.m., gasping for water. Exigency coerced her lethargic legs downstairs and into the kitchen, where she gulped two glasses in succession from the tap and a third more slowly. There was no point in going into work at this stage; she’d ring and tell them there was a family emergency and she hadn’t had an opportunity to reach a phone until now. Helen never skived off; she was confident her boss would be understanding.
She filled the kettle and made a cafetiere of strong coffee, drinking it black as she leaned on the worktop. She must never, not ever, take three Mogadon again. One was her limit and even then it would have to be dire straits before she’d consider it. And after she’d taken the pill she’d lock the rest away where she’d never find them. Helen massaged her aching temples. The coffee seemed to be stripping away the cotton wool layers that cushioned her and allowing pain to trickle in.
She swallowed more coffee, then realised she might as well sit down to drink it, and crossed to the living room. En route she spotted a couple of envelopes on the mat by the front door and diverted to retrieve them. She assimilated her haul on the sofa: an Eircom bill and a postcard from her sister, Geraldine, already back in Galway a fortnight – Helen had declined to accompany her on that trip to Turkey; she and Geraldine always bickered on holiday. The third missive had no stamp and she recognised the handwriting with an accelerated pulse. It was from Patrick.
Helen opened it, ripping the single sheet of paper inside in her haste. Beneath a hotel letterhead it read:
Dear Helen,
I keep getting your answerphone or the engaged tone when I ring you. So I dropped by tonight – yes, I’m in Dublin again, Ryanair are making a fortune out of me – on the off chance you’d be at home. Maybe you’ve gone away for a few days to think over our last conversation. I’d appreciate hearing from you as soon as possible. I know this is probably turning your life upside down but it’s not exactly lending serenity to mine either. Please ring me at the hotel. Soon.
Yours, Patrick.
Afterwards Helen wondered, with the benefit of hindsight, whether the sleeping pills had warped her judgement; but she was acting on a visceral propulsion as she dialled the number and asked for his room.
Patrick wasted no time on civilities. ‘Where are you, can we meet?’
‘At home. I have a day off.’
‘Please let me come over, I’ll be there in half an hour.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, without pausing to consider she was unwashed, undressed and unpresentable.
The doorbell rang as she emerged, dripping, from the shower. She pulled on leggings and a loose shirt, left waiting on her Lloyd Loom bathroom stool, and was still rubbing at her hair with a towel as she opened the door. Without speaking, he took her in his arms, kicking the door shut behind him. When she surfaced from his embrace Helen found the damp towel draped on their feet where she’d let it slip from her hand.
Patrick stepped back to scan her face anxiously. ‘Are you ill? You sounded blurry on the phone, as though you were coming down with a cold.’
Helen told him about the sleeping tablets and his horrified reaction disconcerted her. He tried to dragoon her into promising never to touch them again and virtually demanded she reach them over so he could flush them away, which rendered her mutinously determined to hold on to them and she all but sprinted upstairs to secrete them into her bedside cabinet. But even after a shower she hadn’t the energy to break into a trot. And she still wasn’t hungry either, which made it nearly twenty hours since she’d last eaten. Better not tell Molly or she’d be chewing Mogadon as a diet supplement.
Patrick realised Helen was tense and spoke more moderately.
‘Listen, don’t feel I’m overreacting, it’s just that I’m concerned about you. I couldn’t live with myself if I thought the pressure I was exerting on you was the reason you started cramming pills into your system. It would be insupportable and –’
‘Three sleeping tablets won’t turn me into a junkie,’ interrupted Helen. ‘Come on, Patrick, you know I rarely take so much as paracetamol for a headache. I’m more inclined to walk it off or rustle up some herbal tea. Now could we drop this? My system is clamouring for more coffee. And don’t start implying that makes me a caffeine addict.’
Helen turned on her heel and headed for the kitchen, expecting Patrick to follow. When he didn’t she stuck her head out of the door and called to him. He was standing where she’d left him, uncertainty personified, and she saw again her brother as a teenager, cycling home from school, with his sheepdog, Prince, pounding along by his mudguards.
‘Patrick,’ her voice mellowed from its previous indignant pitch, ‘Patrick, won’t you come in and sit down?’
Relief flooded his face and he was almost immediately sprawled at her kitchen table. As she placed the cafetiere on a marble-effect placemat, Patrick produced a beribboned package from his breast pocket. He placed it wordlessly in front of her.
‘Is that for me?’ Nonplussed, she fingered the mole on her jawline just south of an ear.
He nodded.
‘Shall I open it?’
‘No, you can just sit there and admire the shiny paper.’
Helen laughed and lifted it, shook it and unpicked the knot in the mint-green bow.
‘There’s no need to bring me gifts, Patrick. You turned up with snowdrops the last time you called.’
‘It’s not about need. It’s about inclination.’
Beneath the embossed green paper was a bronze oval box a few inches in diameter and when she raised the lid, a silver apple brooch gleamed from its cushioned interior. Helen lifted it out, her mouth curved in an O of exclamation.
Watching her, Patrick quoted softly. ‘“And pluck till time and times are done/The silver apples of the moon,/The golden apples of the sun.”’
‘You remembered,’ she whispered, tears welling in her eyes.
‘I was so proud of you that day.’ He stretched out a hand and covered hers.
‘But you can’t have been more than six,’ objected Helen.
‘Sometimes incidents which happen at that age gleam more luminously in your memory than what comes later.’ His fingers were stroking the back of her hand now, moving across the knuckles, forward and back.
By one of those curious lateral leaps the mind sometimes takes, she thought of Paris and the golden apple he gave Aphrodite to win Helen of Troy. She’d always taken an interest in the Iliad because of her name; perhaps if she’d been called Joan it would have been Maid of Orléans stories that moved her. She recalled how Paris and Helen paid a price for love which neither could have envisaged. And a premonition gripped her so that she fumbled as she fastened her silver apple to her white linen shirt, just above the heart.
Patrick lifted a fold of material and finished the job, inadvertently brushing against her left breast. The nipple made an indentation against the cloth and she was acutely conscious of him looking at it.
She caught his eye and, to disguise the moment, he said: ‘Do you remember the poem?’
‘Swathes of it. It’s been a while since I took a stroll through “The Song of Wandering Aengus” but what you learn at nine stays with you.’
He dragged his chair closer and, one arm around her shoulder and the other clasping her waist, leaned his jaw against her temple and closed his eyes. Helen allowed her eyelids to drift downwards too, and her mind floated backwards to the local feis when she’d won a silver cup for her recitation of the Yeats poem and repeated her triumph at the winners’ grand finale.
Her father had bought tickets for the family and she remembered standing in the wings, shivering with anticipation at the knowledge that Geraldine, Patrick and her parents were in the belly of the auditorium, waiting to applaud her performance. It had been a gilded moment, one of those rare occasions when you experience happiness and realise it simultaneously instead of in retrospect. To celebrate, her father had brought them out for a meal afterwards and, stiff with solemnity, opened his wallet and placed a note in front of Helen’s place. She’d never owned more than coins before.
Helen is afraid to touch the money – wary of it being snatched back. It looks such a lot. Maybe it would be enough to buy her a baby doll that can cry and wet herself. Mammy says nine-year-olds are too grown-up for Tiny Tears dolls but Helen longs for one.
The note’s dog-eared dilapidation in no way diminishes its lustre for her. She plaits her hands under the table to stop herself reaching for it until she’s certain it’s allowed. The other children are equally fascinated by the money.
‘Pick it up, girl,’ says her father. ‘You’ve shown people around here the Sharkeys can amount to something.’ He scrapes his soup spoon along the bowl, unfamiliar in his good grey suit – and in the benign expression twinkling from his eyes. Helen checks her mother’s face; the woman nods her approval.
‘Can I spend it on anything I like, anything at all?’ she breathes, not daring to mention a baby doll. Doubt assails her. ‘Or must I put it in my piggy bank?’
Her mother purses her lips. ‘Of course it’s your money and you’ve earned it but I think you should save at least something.’
‘No.’ Her father’s tone is peremptory and his contradiction is delivered so swiftly that disappointment has no chance to pinch in Helen. It’s the first time that she can remember him speaking up for her. ‘Let the girl enjoy her money. Spend it however you please.’
Helen risks a glance at her mother, whose lips are folded over her teeth to stifle an incipient objection. Patrick diverts the woman, grabbing Helen’s bill and trailing it through his soup. She slaps him while her husband eats, unruffled.
Helen feels she might burst apart because so much joy is building up inside her. Everything would be different from now on. She’s made her father proud of her and she could do it again.
‘I deserve something too’, objects Geraldine. ‘I spent all my spare time coaching Helen – she’d never have won without me.’
‘Of course she wouldn’t, princess, you’re the star of the family.’ Pat Sharkey clinks his spoon into the empty bowl and reaches across a fistful of loose change to his eldest daughter, fingers closing over hers.
Helen’s heart withers within her.
Instead of a doll she’d bought a silver apple brooch from Roches Stores with the money. The trinket had tarnished after a few months and the marcasite stem of the apple lost its stones and blackened, but she’d worn it on the lapel of her Sunday coat until it disintegrated.
‘He loved me that day, I know he did,’ she murmured now against Patrick’s chest. His mouth brushed the top of her hair. But when he felt the splash of a tear on his hand he opened his eyes in alarm. Patrick lowered his face, seeking to press his cheek against hers and mop up the tears like a sponge, but she clung to him as to driftwood in a current. He lifted her onto his lap, wrapping his arms around her so fiercely that he imagined he might snap her in two with the slightest additional pressure. Her face burrowed into his neck. If she and Patrick never had another moment together she could not complain, for this was rapture unvitiated by another intruding emotion. She strained to prevent herself from moving, from breathing even – loath to break the spell woven around them.
Then of its own accord her body moulded against his and her lips sought his out. Thinking only to comfort, he was unprepared for the turbulence of her passion – or it could have been despair. He pushed away the fleeting analysis. But the pace of his ardour outstripped hers as, rough now in his heated state, he prised himself from her lips and pushed up her shirt. Helen stiffened as he fastened his mouth on a nipple, wrenched herself from his arms and retreated to the furthest corner of the room.
‘Come here, Helen, I’m not going to molest you,’ he beseeched.
She ignored the entreaty in his voice.
‘Go away,’ she intoned over and over, as though repetition could make it happen.
And it did. Anger and rejection jostled across his features, he snatched up his jacket and pulled the front door closed behind him.
Even when the coast was clear Helen remained where she was, wedged alongside the cooker, at a loss to know what had halted her headlong pelt into the oblivion of connecting her body with his. She’d been incapable of rational thought during those minutes in his arms, she realised that. But something had stopped her – a flicker of self-preservation, perhaps …
Helen needed help, she knew that incontrovertibly. Patrick was intruding on her life with the finesse of a wrecking ball. And she was crumbling before him.
‘I’m teetering on an abyss,’ she murmured, desolate. The apple brooch stabbed her breast, its pin unhooked, and physical pain reclaimed her to reality. She unclasped the trinket and held it in her hand, oblivious to the spot of blood that stained the material of her shirt.
‘I wish I were dead,’ said Helen. And meant it.
CHAPTER 11
Valentine’s night in Ricardo’s of Kildare Street where passion meets pasta – or so the squiggle across the cover of their menus alleged. There may have been something in it, for Molly was eyeing Fionn across the table with a frisson approaching desire. She knew she was a pushover if a man made all the right moves – and when it came to romancing a woman he had nothing to learn. He was off to a flying start when he insisted on collecting her from her apartment instead of meeting her in town; he’d be hurling his overcoat onto puddles for her to step across next. Fionn arrived on her doorstep brandishing a bouquet of roses bulked out with a proliferation of fern. When closer inspection revealed just five crimson blooms, Molly decided florists must be cutting corners (perish the thought it could be her suitor taking shortcuts). There was also a heart-shaped box of chocolates. Tacky under normal circumstances but tacky was allowed on 14 February. It might possibly be obligatory.
She planned to wear a dress he used to love, a silver lurex affair she called her tightrope act. Not alone owing to its circus gaudiness but because it took a fair amount of balancing to keep her cleavage inside. However it no longer fitted her across the hips so she brought on the substitute. Fanfare, please, for a scallop-hemmed fuchsia dress that flirted around her kneecaps and threatened to do a Seven Year Itch at the slightest draught of air. She wanted to look her best for Fionn, both to show him what he’d been missing all these years – all right, to rub his nose in it – and in gratitude for the Valentine’s card that had flopped through her letterbox. It tinkled the initial bars of Love Me Tender when she opened it – Molly had an inexplicable passion for Elvis, whether jailhouse punk or Graceland slob, and was gratified that Fionn remembered. She hadn’t bought him a card; she was unversed in the etiquette of Valentine’s declarations towards former lovers who were barely separated from their wives.
The meal was progressing reasonably well considering the distracting proximity of banks of tables-for-two occupied by lovers drooling at one another across candles. It was a wonder some of them didn’t splutter and extinguish, there was so much saliva dripping in the vicinity. Even more wince-worthy were the smirking waiters, who tiptoed up to herself and Fionn as though fearful of interrupting some Buzz Lightyear-style declaration of love to infinity and beyond. Still, cringing as it was to find herself trapped inside a Barbara Cartland novel, she’d be a sight more touchy if her Valentine’s night revolved around a Dunnes’ microwave dinner for one.
‘There’s no pleasing you,’ Barry at work had told her as she whined about going out to dinner on Valentine’s night with an ex when the world was bulging with new conquests if she could only get around to conquering them. She wondered who Hercules was romancing for Valentine’s Day. He hadn’t turned up for this week’s art lecture, although she’d been there early in new earrings for enhanced confidence. Everyone knew ear lobes did it for the thinking man; they galvanised him into action man. That’s what she’d told Barry anyhow; he’d looked dubious. He felt towering stilettos took a giant step in that direction and then had wobbled off at a tangent about fishnet stockings and push-up bras – the latter worked best for the people who didn’t need them, Molly had pointed out – but she’d been wasting her breath because by this stage a glazed expression had permeated his features. However, for belt and braces Molly had nipped out and bought a pair of tapering heels in addition to the new earrings. Hercules expressing an interest in Helen didn’t mean he was a lost cause, she’d reasoned, as she’d crossed her legs first one way and then the other to gauge maximum impact. Except Hercules’ no-show had meant her Chrysler Building-proportioned heels were squandered on the lecture crowd. Of course, new shoes were never completely wasted; as far as Molly was concerned they were among life’s essentials, up there with milk in the fridge and bread on the table. But she’d have preferred to unleash them on her Greek than on a classroom of art aficionados. Who didn’t look inclined to rate a Russell & Bromley’s exhibit alongside a Leech.
