Be Careful What You Wish For, page 15
Furthermore, tomorrow was Saturday so there was no work. She could sit up half the night drinking and flirting if she chose. Alternatively she could cut to the chase. Allowing him to think he was the one doing the chasing, naturally. Choices were wonderful commodities. Molly was so enchanted with herself she forgot to suggest they stop off at McDaid’s off-licence to buy the champagne, thereby establishing whether Hercules was on a Valentine’s date and if not – please God not – showing him she was.
Halfway down the bottle opened in her living room, they decided to finish it in bed. Except they forgot to empty it. Fionn had brought an excessive number of condoms with him – another sign of his conceit but Molly was too grateful for his forward planning to feel resentful. They never did reach bottoms up with the bubbly, even later, after fumble-unclasp-slither-plunge gave way to floating cheek to shoulder in one another’s arms. Just as she caught sight of the discarded bottle and contemplated jiggling it to measure the contents, Fionn distracted her by behaving as though the condoms’ use-by date was looming. Later, towards dawn, swimming between sleep and a languorous consciousness, he seemed inclined to repeat the exercise a third time.
‘You must be wrecked,’ said Molly.
‘Certainly I’m erect,’ he flashed back, and she tittered herself awake.
Subsiding, she felt an irrational spasm of irritation. Who was this man to play fast and loose with her heart and then imagine he could make up for it with bedroom games? Anyway she was tired. She felt like telling him tomorrow was another day, except she thought he was overconfident enough, without suggesting they’d be doing this again in the future. He probably imagined they were an item again just because her hair was tangled through his on a pillow.
Molly twisted her neck and studied the face grinning so hard there was a danger its ears might plop off. It was impossible to resist smiling back. Fionn propped his arms under his head, eyes roving the room.
‘I recognise him.’ He gesticulated towards Nelson, snout down on the floor. ‘It’s Napoleon.’
‘Nelson.’ She rescued him and positioned the teddy on sentry duty at the foot of the bed. Belated sentry duty since he’d already let one intruder in … unless Fionn knew the password.
‘And I remember those too.’ Now he was indicating a set of wind chimes in the shape of shooting stars.
She followed his eyeline. He’d bought her the trinket during a holiday in Morocco. There was a lot to be said for never retracing your steps where boyfriends were concerned: you weren’t blasted with a history lesson.
‘I’m wide awake, fancy some herbal tea to help us sleep?’ she asked.
‘I’ll make it.’ Before the words evacuated his lips he was out of bed and groping for boxer shorts. At least Helga hadn’t switched him to Y-fronts. Molly debated whether or not to follow him to the kitchen because he wouldn’t know where to find the camomile tea or mugs. Feck it, let him wait on her hand and foot if he insisted – he’d just have to fling open cupboard doors until happenstance intervened.
Fionn returned with a china mug in each hand. Both had heart-shaped handles: one mug was adorned with a Cupid whose bottom was particularly flabby, the other featured a cross-eyed Cupid fitting an arrow to his bow. He would choose them.
‘Remember the day you bought these?’
‘No,’ Molly lied.
Fionn looked wounded.
‘Oh, all right, it was the day you first told me you loved me and I said I loved you back,’ she grumped.
Fionn beamed. ‘You said you wanted something to remind you of our special day. Naturally that required a shopping expedition. We trailed around every store in Dublin until you settled for these mugs. You joked we were turning into a his ’n’ hers couple and we’d be wearing matching sweaters next.’
Molly’s post-orgasmic glow was fading by the nanosecond. If Fionn were determined to prove he’d once been a linchpin in her life he was going the right way about it. But he was also reminding her that he’d been a linchpin which was removed – and the edifice had come within a hair’s-breadth of tumbling down.
She contemplated sending him back to the kitchen for the Valentine’s chocolates stashed in her fridge but couldn’t stomach another caper down memory lane if he imagined he recognised a pint of milk. So Molly drank tea while Fionn made a nest for her against his chest and she wondered how to dismiss a lover politely once he’d done the business and you hadn’t much use for him. You could learn a lot from men. They preferred jiggery pokery in the woman’s bed and it wasn’t only because her sheets were cleaner. Departure time was your decision and it was infinitely less complicated to dress and slope home afterwards. Molly abandoned her tea and slid off Fionn’s chest and into the pillow. All that lovemaking had sobered her up – but if she didn’t manage a few hours’ sleep she’d have an exhaustion hangover instead of a champagne one.
CHAPTER 12
Next morning Fionn seemed inclined to play cosy couples and devise plans for the day. Molly couldn’t manage to make toast, let alone a plan, until after a coffee. It had been enough of a struggle to dig out a dressing gown in view of the fact she had company. She was obliged, in the interests of self-respect, to produce a rust-coloured Chinese silk affair instead of her usual motley bathrobe, its colour so faded she couldn’t remember the original shade. As she tugged it on Fionn retrieved her cream lace pants from the floor where he’d sent them sailing last night and inserted his finger in the label.
‘This reads “Secrets, size 14,”’ he remarked. ‘But they don’t look big enough to hold any size of a secret.’
Molly’s mouth twisted sourly. She wished he’d take his wit and post it special delivery to Seattle, where Helga might appreciate it. She staggered kitchenwards to service caffeine requirements without answering.
He followed, unfazed by her trademark morning surliness, and sprawled at the kitchen table while she sleepwalked through the process of filling mugs with coffee. After several gulps she noticed he was lolling in his boxer shorts and last night’s dark blue shirt, which he hadn’t bothered to button. Probably because he knew how well it looked against his tan.
The coffee revived her sufficiently to contemplate checking for mascara smears under her eyes but not enough to remind her to offer Fionn anything more substantial than a share in her liquid intake for breakfast.
‘If I had to choose between coffee and alcohol I’d be sorely tempted to turn teetotal,’ she remarked, trying and failing to assess the state of her appearance in the chrome kettle on the worktop. Of course, she hadn’t mustered enough energy to put her contact lens in yet, so even if the kettle were polished her vision would still be blurred. She abandoned squinting and returned to coffee. ‘Especially if I could drink nothing but Jamaican Blue Mountain,’ she added.
‘Since when did you become a coffee connoisseur?’ Fionn tipped backwards on his chair, resting his bare feet on the table supports. ‘When I knew you, as long as it was hot you’d no complaints.’
‘You don’t know me any more.’ Her tone was more glacial than she’d intended. His expression registered hurt and she felt obliged to add, ‘No more than I know you. Four years can bring a lot of changes.’
He nodded.
She continued, ‘Barry tells me –’
‘Who’s Barry? Is he your boyfriend?’
‘No.’ Molly was gratified he’d jumped to this conclusion although the idea of Barry as her boyfriend was anything but gratifying. Still, no point in letting Fionn off the hook too readily.
‘Barry’s a close friend of mine. I’m very attached to him. He’s as devoted to coffee as myself although he tried to persuade me once that I wasn’t drinking it for the narcotic high, I was drinking it to reverse the sluggishness prompted by my previous cup of coffee. Caffeine isn’t a pick-you-up, he maintains, it simply reverses the fatigue-inducing symptoms of previous caffeine intake. Barry reads science magazines; he’s always spouting theories.’
‘Is he married?’ Fionn ignored the theories and homed straight to practicalities.
Molly felt positively benign: a man hadn’t bristled with jealousy over her in centuries and it was a most rewarding sensation.
‘Barry doesn’t believe in marriage. He says it can’t possibly add anything to a relationship.’ She relished Fionn’s wince as his own words were rehashed, diced and served up to him. ‘But he has a long-standing girlfriend,’ she added, in case she was too heavy-handed with the cattle prod.
‘How about,’ said Fionn, changing the subject with the delicacy of a JCB operator, ‘we have a lightning wash apiece and I buy you brunch in that café near the DART station? Maybe we could take in a walk on Dun Laoghaire pier afterwards. I saw a seal there once. It looked directly at me, a mesmerising sensation.’
Molly had nothing better to do and Fionn hadn’t outstayed his welcome yet – despite borderline oscillations – so she allowed him first turn at the bathroom while she ferried used condoms and torn purple wrappers from the bedroom floor to the kitchen bin. Surely etiquette demanded the man dispose of his detritus, or did the person who owned the bed also take charge of the mop-up operation? Ground rules should be formulated and adhered to; it was as crucial as knowing what time to arrive at a party and when to decorate your Christmas tree.
The phone rang as Fionn emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel.
‘Let the answerphone pick it up,’ he said.
It sounded more like a command than a suggestion. She’d been intending to do just that but his tone caused affront.
‘Might be work.’ She reached for the receiver, although Saturday was the one day the newsdesk never bothered her because the Sunday paper was a separate operation.
It was Barry, who had last phoned her at home several centuries ago to ask her to swap shifts and had promptly rung off once she’d agreed. He didn’t believe in social chitchat on the telephone. His voice sounded frail today, like someone dealing with bereavement.
‘I need to see you, Molly. It’s an emergency. Kay’s thrown me out. I spent last night walking on Dollymount Strand and then I slept for an hour or so in the car – I didn’t know where to go; I hadn’t the sense to check into a hotel. Can we meet? I must talk to someone. I’m at my wits’ end.’
‘Do you still have my address?’ Molly didn’t waste time trying to elicit details on the phone. Time enough for that when Barry was upon her with a face that matched his voice. ‘It’s the block of flats right beside Blackrock DART station. I’m number sixteen, on the second floor. Come straight over.’
Molly experienced a backwash of relief that she’d been offered a bona fide excuse for cancelling quality time ambling around the neighbourhood with Fionn. Quality time was all very well, but she preferred it in the bedroom rather than on the pier. She didn’t want to be catapulted into coupledom with Fionn – before she knew it they’d be pricing three-piece suites together in Meadows and Byrne. And while she had no objection to that in principle, especially if she and her co-shopper also looked at iced brilliance in the form of engagement rings, it would be a waste of energy doing it with Fionn because he was married already and in no position to become imminently unshackled.
So it was with considerable difficulty that she restrained her satisfaction as she told Fionn she had a friend with an emergency arriving at any moment, helped him into his coat and suggested a couple of coffee shops where he could count on a superb all-day breakfast. To be eaten alone.
‘Perhaps I could ring you later and see if you’re free to take in a film? Your friend’s Mayday can’t last indefinitely,’ he suggested.
‘Impossible to predict.’ Molly’s tone was brisk. ‘I make it a rule never to prophesy, especially about the future.’
Barry looked utterly wretched as he slumped on her doorstep half an hour later. It had given Molly enough time to shower, change the sheets, load her washing machine, steep her dishes and deposit the third-full bottle of (probably flat) champagne in the fridge with a teaspoon in its neck in case there were any bubbles left to keep in detention. Which was as much housework as she felt willing to pencil into her schedule this weekend.
She ushered him into the kitchen, where a full pot of coffee was waiting to be plunged. She lifted the heart-handled china from the draining rack, reconsidered in view of Barry’s domestic situation and replaced them with an orange spotted mug and an equally virulent yellow and green checked one.
‘Drink this.’ She pushed coffee into his hand and he cupped it automatically but didn’t bend his lips to it. Nor did he speak. He gazed at the framed print of a higgledy-piggledy wooden dresser, complete with hen roosting, on the wall behind Molly, with the concentration of a man who’d shortly be ordered at gunpoint to describe every detail of the picture.
Molly saw the plump brown hen reflected in his spectacles as she sipped her coffee in silence. There was no rush, he could confide in her when he was ready. In the meantime his face was grey with exhaustion and she debated suggesting he lie down for a few hours.
Barry pre-empted her by lurching forward to gulp coffee like a drowning man swallowing sea water; he spilled it down his navy polo shirt and disgorged words with equal dispatch.
‘She said I repulsed her. She said she faked every orgasm she’d had with me. She said I’d be bald by fifty. She said living with me was purgatory and she didn’t hold with suffering now to be happy in a hereafter because she didn’t believe there was one. She said if I were footwear I’d be carpet slippers and if I were trousers I’d be fawn slacks. She said I was nondescript. She said she wanted a divorce.’
Molly cringed at the unguarded misery in his hazel eyes, murky needle-points behind their oval windows. Barry had a rash on his neck which his hand kept agitating towards. She waited. But he was waiting too.
‘Barry, this is a row – couples have them all the time, then they kiss and make up. Kay’s probably beside herself with worry. Have you spoken to her since last night? You haven’t? Ring from here and tell her you’re safe and sound.’
He shook his head. ‘This wasn’t a row, it was Armageddon. She was spitting with rage. She despises me and it was written all over her. Vitriol banked up for years bubbled to the surface – and I was just as cruel. I said shamefully wounding things, Molly. I told her she was middle-aged before her time, that there was more to life than shopping for kitchen worktops which didn’t even need replacing and that not everyone washed down their front doors on a nightly basis before bed. Some people didn’t care what the postman thought of the state of their doors, I suggested. We were completely off the leash, it was obscene. My only consolation is that at least the girls were staying overnight with friends and didn’t have to witness their parents savaging one another.’
Molly tried and failed to imagine trim, petite Kay Dalton with her helmet of hairsprayed chestnut hair and her too-carefully made-up baby blue eyes savaging Barry. She’d been to their home once, a 1930s semi that acted as a backdrop to their collections of Belleek china and Waterford glass. There were display cases everywhere. Molly was convinced Barry eyed up the classified dollies because work was the only fun in his life – days off were spent dusting vases.
‘She said she couldn’t bear to be in the same room as me any more because I’m dull and predictable.’ Barry’s voice was shuttling towards incoherence. Molly decided remedial action was required to stave off tears.
‘Of course she isn’t planning to divorce you, Barry. Dull and predictable aren’t an adequate basis. Grounds for dumping a boyfriend, yes; grounds for exiting a fifteen-year marriage, absolutely not. If that were the case there’d scarcely be a solid marriage the length and breadth of the country.’
Barry was advancing ever more maudlin. ‘She’s the best wife a man could hope for and I’m a brute who doesn’t deserve her. I know I ogle the advertising girlies occasionally but it’s only for fun. I’d never actually do anything to risk my marriage. It’s the most important part of my life.’
He subsided into his coffee, Molly braced herself for a soggy interlude, but he rallied as he studied her for the first time since arriving.
‘Don’t often see you in specs – they make you look almost prudish.’
Molly fingered the legs of her glasses self-consciously. ‘Couldn’t be bothered fiddling with the contacts: too much to drink last night.’
Barry lost interest again, consumed by his plight. ‘Kay’s right, I will be bald by fifty, while she doesn’t look a day older than when I first met her at the Four Seasons in Monaghan. She was there with her sister Breda and I was staying for the weekend with my friend Michael Lemass from Castleblayney and we all turned up at the hotel for a Big Tom dance. She was an eyecatcher then and she’s still an eyecatcher.’
Molly wondered about furtively popping her head into the fridge and glugging flat champagne. This was turning into The Long Bad Saturday. And it wasn’t anywhere near three p.m. yet.
By now self-pity had a quicksand grip on Barry. His head capsized onto his hands and he howled about spending the rest of his life in a bedsit, with his daughters crossing the street to avoid him because they blamed him for leaving home. He’d lose his job, wind up as a petrol pump attendant and be crucified with colds every winter because of being stuck out in the elements with his bald head.
‘You could always apologise,’ suggested Molly.
‘What for? I don’t know what I did wrong,’ he moaned.
‘That’s irrelevant,’ said Molly.
‘Tell me what to apologise for.’ The torment of the damned had nothing on Barry’s wail.
‘Anything. Everything. Apologise for the Famine, the sinking of the Titanic, the Hiroshima bomb, the Cuban blockade, Cork beating Monaghan in the All-Ireland hurling semi-final, falling off your bicycle and ripping your First Holy Communion trousers when you were seven, being born a week premature and spoiling your father’s plans to go fishing. Just grovel – the details are unimportant. Women like an apology. It assuages them.’
