Be Careful What You Wish For, page 2
‘Blackrock, what street did you want, love?’
The taxi-driver curtailed Molly’s fantasy. I’m not finished with you yet, she instructed it, as she fished out her purse and advised the driver where to pull over. She debated withholding a tip in protest at his unreconstructed views on asylum seekers, hadn’t the courage, and compromised by rounding up the fare by a minimal amount.
However, the interruption returned her attention to Helen. Helen, who not only never wanted to marry but seemed disinclined for a little light relief in the jiggery pokery stakes too. Her last boyfriend had been booted into touch eighteen months ago, by Molly’s reckoning, the Daniel O’Donnell lookalike she’d dubbed Kitten Hips because he practised a panther walk. He had to practise it, reasoned Molly; nobody swayed naturally like that. Anyway, he went the way of all flesh that came into contact with Helen: namely she dumped him after four months when he turned serious, although her definition of too intense was his suggestion they should plant sunflowers in the 10-foot square of back garden where she used to live. His subtext: I intend to be around next year to see them flower. Her reaction: Pervert. What manner of man wants to make a commitment like that?
So for Helen to fall head over neat Cuban heels for someone off limits was a manifestation of natural justice. And while Molly was sorry for her friend’s palpable grief, she couldn’t help thinking: Cupid’s got you sorted, love, in one of those streetwise accents they use on television cop shows to portray gritty reality. Besides which, she was convinced Helen was overreacting. Too much red wine had blurred Molly’s recollection of the wan face weeping against her shoulder and the dejection in tones that described how life seemed to have dimmed from colour to monochrome. Molly wasn’t unsympathetic, she simply needed convincing the script was as unremittingly dire as Helen read it.
‘We’ll sort her out tomorrow night, Nelson,’ she told her teddy bear, named because he’d spent twenty-five years in a cupboard before being liberated (she’d been frightened of him as a child for no logical reason). ‘We’ll canter her out in the showing ring and she’ll be fighting them off with a broom handle. That’ll take her mind off the fellow she can’t have. And if it doesn’t, at least she might tell me some more about him. I’m agog to sneak a peek at the man who can send Helen Sharkey’s pulse ricocheting. Doesn’t the whole of Dublin know she’s the next best thing to celibate, barring lapses every eighteen months or so?’
As Molly was slinging Nelson onto the floor and climbing into bed without taking off her makeup – but remembering to collect a tumbler of water from the kitchen because Merlot furred her tongue – Helen was washing the wine glasses and bowls she’d filled with nibbles for her perpetually peckish friend. She sat on for the longest time after Molly left, her light-hearted reassurance warming the air behind her – ‘Chin up, Helen, we’ll all be dead in sixty years’ time.’ But now that she was alone again the temperature had plummeted and the solitary allure of her terraced cottage in Sandycove, just ten minutes’ walk from the seafront, seemed less acceptable – indeed, it was insupportable. She wallowed for a while, wondering why some malign fate had earmarked her for turmoil. Why couldn’t she have settled for Kitten Hips or the Black and Tan, or one of the other men who’d flitted through her life? They’d have stayed if she’d allowed them but she wouldn’t give them houseroom. Helen wasn’t a ‘settling for’ type of woman, however. And her mind had been made up about love a lifetime previously.
Movement, that’s what she needed. If she were busy she wouldn’t be able to dwell on him. She couldn’t even allow herself to think his name, although sometimes she said it aloud for the sheer pleasure of shaping her mouth around the syllables. Helen loved his name, the pattern of the K sounds in his Christian name and surname, the evenness of the double syllables in both. One time she’d been driving through Balbriggan and thought she was hallucinating because she’d passed a hardware shop and there was his name above the door. She’d had to retrace her steps to check whether there was actually a shop painted yellow and green on the corner of the main street with the name of the man she loved above it. There was. And it had made her laugh aloud with pleasure. She’d gone inside and felt herself suffused with joy as her eyes drifted along the shelves stacked with colour charts and tools whose purpose she couldn’t begin to fathom. Helen had bought a paintscraper to prolong the euphoria and kept it, unused, in a kitchen drawer alongside spare batteries and scissors.
But there wasn’t much gladness in her heart now as she dropped two red wine bottles into her recycling bin and recorked a third with only a glass or so eked from it. Although her feet were leaden, she knew there’d be little enough sleep that night.
‘Bring some hot chocolate to bed and read the new Maison Belle interiors magazine you’ve been saving for a treat,’ she urged herself. ‘That’ll make you feel better.’
Molly, who renamed everything, called it the Maison Smelly magazine, partly because Helen loved to lower her nose to the pristine scent of its unopened pages. Also because it inevitably offered free samples of potpourri refresher or fabric conditioner. Helen willed herself to believe that Maison Belle and a bedtime drink would reverse the decline in her flagging spirits. She knew all the tactics to manipulate a slump in mood – it was essential she did. Imagine if he contacted her on a day when she was feeling vulnerable and she succumbed to temptation and … Helen’s face crash-landed on her hands. She wished. She hardly knew what she wished for. Careful, don’t even think it, don’t let the narrowest scintilla of possibility edge around your mind. She leaped up and washed and wiped, perfecting her home; she’d as soon wedge the front door open with an All Burglars Welcome Here neon sign as retire to bed leaving dishes on the worktop or CDs separated from their holders.
At the bottom of the stairs, magazine under an arm and mug in hand, she cast an eye back over her immaculate domain. At least some aspects of life were under her control. Control. It was what rendered existence manageable. When she reached the top stair the phone rang. She counted as its bells pealed twelve times. Her fingers itched to lift it but she willed them to cup her drinking chocolate, breathing suspended as she waited for the jangling to cease. When all was silent she walked into the bedroom and pressed a button to read the confirmation – he was calling. The magazine slipped to the floor and she placed the drinking chocolate sightlessly on her bedside table, toppling the alarm clock. Her uncharacteristic clumsiness flung tongues of milky liquid from the mug but Helen didn’t notice the pool’s inching progress towards the table’s edge, or the way it dribbled onto her chrysanthemum-embroidered duvet cover. She curled, foetal fashion, with a pillow clutched to her cheek, too distressed to weep. Longing washed over her. And remembering.
CHAPTER 2
He throws himself onto the ground and subsides against a tree trunk, mute with misery. Sweating from his headlong pelt, he tugs open his shirt buttons to create a current of air against his torso. His pain is so intense she reaches out instinctively, chafing his inert hand. Helen searches for words of comfort – lies or truth, no matter so long as they soothe – but can find none. Every angular line of his body exudes desolation and it gashes her to witness it almost as much as it wounded her to watch the scene five minutes earlier between the boy and his rabid father.
Impulsively she slides onto her knees in front of him, the leaves crackling on impact, and takes his face between her hands. He’s no longer sprawling, disconsolate, but watching her now, mesmerised, as she edges ever closer, bridging the gap between their bodies. Helen’s unaware of what she’s about to do until it happens. Her pulse is erratic, her body curves forward of its own accord; her lips sink onto his and cling there for the space of a heartbeat. There’s a momentary hesitation, then she feels his lips move under hers, warm and moist.
Pinpricks of perspiration flare around the pulse-point map of Helen’s body. She’s tingling and the intensity of her reaction causes her to waver – she pulls back and looks at him, leaning on one hand to steady herself. An indefinable gleam in his expression touches her immeasurably. She subsides towards his mouth, even as he moves towards hers. Their lips collide, his chin rubs against hers and she experiences surprise at the grating of his stubble, then has no further conscious thought.
The two are subsumed by sentience, mouths softening into one another, captivated by the delirium of pleasure. Her hand cradling his head scrapes against the abrasive texture of the tree trunk but the pain does not register. She presses against him, winding her arms around his neck, and her body against his incites a change of mood for his mouth is no longer whispers; there’s urgency in his serrated breathing and in kisses that clash teeth against teeth.
She disengages and rests her face in the hollow of his shoulder. A smattering of hairs clump in the sternum hollow between the salmon-pink nipples and her own hair tickles him as she kisses her way along his chest until she arrives at the downy belly button. And stops. She’s paralysed by a mole an inch to the left of his navel which she recognises as the twin to one she has on her own body. He pulls her to him, attempting to reignite her fire with his, but it’s too late. Reality has doused her and she’s dripping from it. She pushes him away and runs as though flight alone can promise expiation.
‘It didn’t happen,’ she moans, grinding to a halt. But the sensations whirling through her body are a contradiction.
‘Ready to come out and play?’
It was Molly on the doorstep, encased in a calf-length black Afghan coat, collar pulled high against the wind.
‘You look like Snow White in that collar,’ said Helen. ‘I thought we were meeting in the Life Bar. Anyway, we’re not supposed to be there for another forty-five minutes.’
‘I used to be Snow White but then I drifted.’ Molly’s hip-jutting Mae West impersonation backed Helen directly into the living room of her house – the hallway was knocked down to maximise space – and she kicked the door shut behind her with ankle-strapped heels so spindly Helen was amazed she could stand upright, let alone manoeuvre in them.
‘I can tell from those shoes you’re aiming for slut appeal tonight,’ remarked Helen. Only half-critically.
She was still in her bathrobe, although she’d invented a face and drawn it on and her dark Cleopatra bob was blow-dried into symmetrical perfection. Throwing on clothes was always the shortest component in the exercise, providing the brain-squeezing decision about what to wear had been reached. She’d solved that conundrum lying in the bath in her seaweed solution, bought on a weekend trip to Enniscrone when she’d luxuriated in the seaweed baths that had been a tourist attraction in the seaside town since Victorian times. It had taken a few minutes to overcome her repugnance when initially she’d seen the massive cast-iron bath really was packed with seaweed; somehow she’d imagined a sanitised version. But after a while she’d stopped noticing she was sharing the water with an excess of vegetation – and it had velvet-coated her skin like no other softening agent. Helen had balked, however, at obeying the notice which invited her to empty out her seaweed into the bucket provided. It was repugnant enough floating alongside slithery black-green vines, she couldn’t reconcile herself to handling them too. Skulking out, in case she were called back to clear away her detritus from the tub, she’d nevertheless paused to buy a jar of powdered seaweed because of the mermaid undulating across the front and because it promised to caress her skin.
‘That’s the only kind of stroking I can expect,’ she’d remarked, selecting the family-sized container.
But back to Molly, beaming as she produced a half-bottle of champagne from inside Afghan folds with the flourish of a magician conjuring up a dove. ‘The Lifer at eight was a serviceable plan A but it was elbowed aside by plan B. We can share a cab into town. In the meantime this will start us on the right foot, oh Helen of Athboy.’
‘You know I’m from Kilkenny not Meath,’ objected Helen, extracting champagne flutes from the narrow cherrywood sideboard in her living room. ‘Is it cold enough?’ Her tongue was already mentally capturing and splatting the bubbles and savouring their scratchy descent at the back of her throat.
‘Does my granny go to confession?’ responded Molly. ‘Wouldn’t hand over the cash until the Greek god in the off-licence immersed it in his four-and-a-half-minute cooler machine.’
‘And did he chat you up during the waiting game?’
‘Didn’t even remark on the weather.’ Molly’s face epitomised mournfulness. ‘His customer relations skills are non-existent.’
‘Maybe he had a rush on.’
‘One other person came in and bought a few cans of lager.’
‘So you stood there reading wine labels and being ignored for four and a half minutes? Poor Molly, this will wash those bitter dregs away.’ Helen reached her a frothing glass.
‘He didn’t even pretend to be stocktaking. He presented his flawless profile and stared out of the window. Impassive throughout. I might as well have been a nun buying communion wine instead of a gorgeous blonde teetering provocatively on skyscraper heels and handing over my credit card – so at least he’d know my name – for champagne.’
It looked as though Molly were fated to sin with the Greek only in her fevered imagination – ‘Thought crimes again this week, Father.’
Still, there was always alcohol. She rallied, clinking glasses with Helen. ‘Death in Ireland. But not just yet.’
It was her St Augustine toast. She’d acquired it during her two years working in London and still nursed a fondness for it. All the expats chanted it; some even meant it.
As she followed Helen upstairs, Molly sighed. It was just her luck to have a crush on the one Greek in the country who didn’t flirt, didn’t notice women and wouldn’t recognise he was being given the glad eye if he found it giftwrapped in his Christmas stocking. Call himself a Mediterranean – he must have Cidona pumping through his veins.
‘He probably wears a vest. All those fellows from hot countries do, for sweat containment,’ consoled Helen.
‘Checked again tonight: no telltale lines,’ said Molly. ‘Hercules’ body is a vest-free zone.’
She still didn’t know his name but she’d christened him Hercules because he was the strong, silent type. She was sure those capable hands of his could strangle serpents, no bother to them. But he was sturdy rather than large, her usual preference in men. Heck, here she was bending the rules for him and he still wasn’t interested. She had leaned against his counter in rock-chick shoes complete with peep toes on a January night cold enough for snow drifts and he hadn’t so much as looked let alone leered. It was disheartening. It was insulting. It was enough to make a woman throw away her high heels and buy desert boots. Where was the point in shimmying into a man’s shop in black shoes with red heels that added at least four inches to your leg length if he didn’t betray a flicker of lust? It was downright unnatural. But no one with a glass of champagne in her hand could be truly woebegone. Molly knocked it back.
‘Drink it while the bubbles are still smiling at you, Helen.’
She felt the familiar rush as it hit her blood stream at warp speed and added, ‘He’s probably too young for me anyway; he can’t be more than mid-twenties. Now, never mind my legendary Greek, make some room in your glass for the rest of the champagne and show me what you’re wearing. The image we’re aiming for is strumpet with a soupçon of class.’
Helen, who never left anything to chance, already had the clothes laid out on the bed. Molly eyed them disapprovingly.
‘Dear me no, these won’t do at all. These don’t spell “unattainable Jezebel”. There’s nothing that says look but you can’t afford to touch. Moleskin trousers, matching waistcoat and Chelsea boots are all very well if you’re going to the pub for a few drinks and want to be left in peace but that’s not what we’re after at all tonight. Our mission is to have the lads fretting into their pints because we’re so distracting.’
Helen stroked her charcoal-grey waistcoat. ‘And how does a “Come, woo me, woo me” T-shirt strike that quintessential note which puts us beyond their grasp?’
‘Abandoned that idea. I decided to shuffle the deck and bring on the ace – the little black number.’ Molly opened her coat to reveal a dress that chastely covered everything from neck to wrist to knee but clung for dear life to each square inch of flesh between, undulating over hips and breasts with a brazenness that drew the eye, pinioned it and ridiculed the concept of allowing it time off for good behaviour.
‘Janey Mac, I’d fancy you myself if I were a man,’ said Helen. ‘Are you sure the rabble are ready for that?’
‘Ready or not, here I come. Now let’s throw comfort to the wind and drape you in something equally alluring.’
‘I don’t have anything in that category,’ protested Helen, but Molly was already rummaging in her wardrobe.
She produced a gold slip-dress, discarded its modest surcoat and handed it to Helen.
‘You’re a demon in female form, Molly. I can’t wear a bra with that, which means my nipples will show through.’ She held her champagne flute before her like a talisman.
‘You’re flat-chested, it doesn’t matter. But your legs aren’t bad,’ Molly added kindly, ‘and that slit up the side will show one of them off, depending on –’ she swivelled the silk dress on the hanger – ‘which way around you wear it. I can’t tell the back from the front on this, Sharkey. Shouldn’t there be a label?’
‘I’m not. Wearing. A gold dress. To the pub.’ Helen drained her glass defiantly. ‘Since you’re determined to make a harlot of me, I’ll put this on.’ She produced a wispy dark blue dress. ‘I’ve had it by for an emergency. But there’s no need to break the glass,’ she added, as Molly flung herself on the bed, kicking over her empty flute.
