Three Wise Men, page 20
‘He’s not my little Ronan,’ protests Eimear. ‘He belongs to a model, as it happens.’
‘It was your idea to run off with a young one,’ Kate points out.
‘It was nothing of the sort, you gave me a straight choice between Ronan Keating and Antonio Banderas and I said, if pushed, I’d take the Keating lad.’
‘You turned down Should-Be-Banned-Eras for Ronan Keating?’ Gloria looks animated for the first time since being collected from the Rotunda.
Eimear is apologetic. ‘I just thought he’d be more reliable.’
Gloria falls back against her pillows. ‘I need a drink,’ she croaks.
‘It’ll have to be tea – think of your embryos,’ says Kate, lifting the Elvis mug that flashes The King Lives around the rim when hot water is added to it.
Eimear decides it’s time to move away from beautiful boys and on to bouncing babies.
‘How are the babas, do you think they’ve made themselves at home? Do you feel pregnant yet?’
‘I don’t want to talk about them,’ says Gloria, tugging moodily at the hairband she’s taken to wearing in an effort to grow her fringe out.
‘The golden rule is no teenagers: we have to remember we want to be seducers, not criminals,’ Kate contributes.
Is she still harking on about toyboys, the woman’s obsessing. Eimear shakes her head in despair. ‘And where are we supposed to find them?’ Her tone is sarcastic. ‘You can’t just wander into Dunnes Stores, eye up the lads stacking the shelves and say, “They’ll do nicely, I’ll take half a dozen assorted.”’
Kate’s eyes glaze over. ‘When Cher spots a likely lad she commands, “Have him stripped, washed and taken to my tent.”’
‘Cher invents her own rules,’ says Gloria. Wistfully, as it happens.
Kate obviously detects the same note and adopts a brisk tone. ‘What we need is a Girls’ Night Out to take our minds off our miseries. We need flings.’
Eimear nods meaningfully in Gloria’s direction and Kate adds a caveat: ‘Not Gloria, of course. You can just have a mental fling to show willing; you have to concentrate on reproduction not seduction. Mulligan and I will do the flinging for the three of us.’
Gloria is uncooperative. ‘I have to spend the next week in bed – a Girls’ Night Out is the West Cork, the South Pole, the ocean floor on my list of priorities. Couldn’t you just write a letter to Santa for a Beautiful Boy?’
‘Too long to wait, it’s only August. Anyway we want to pick our own toys, not let some hairy fellow in a signature suit do it for us,’ says Kate. ‘Hey, we can make it a combined birthday celebration next month, that’ll give you long enough to let the eggs take root, Glo, and it’ll give me long enough to scout around and establish which nightclub Beautiful Boys go to … I’m a little out of touch.’
‘I want mine to be called something cute with a “y” on the end like Nicky or Ricky,’ says Gloria.
‘You aren’t having one,’ Eimear points out. ‘You’re having a baby instead.’
‘I want one who still remembers how to blush,’ says Kate. ‘And he’ll be too young to have chest hair. What about you, Mulligan?’
Eimear would like one who’s a student of her husband’s so he knows how it feels to have your nose rubbed in it but she keeps this to herself. Instead she adopts a Sphinx-like demeanour and says, That’s for me to know and you to guess.’
‘She’s being faithful to Ronan,’ deduces Kate.
As Gloria and Kate start gossiping about the latest episode of Coronation Street, Eimear tunes out and considers the Beautiful Boys option. Maybe Kate’s on to something, adoration from a younger man might be extremely gratifying. The only trouble is you have to go to ear-bleeding disco bars to meet them.
Something weird happens when you turn twenty-nine: you don’t like loud music as much as you used to. You wake up one morning and realise conversations can be quite agreeable in pubs and so can occasional silences. But inflicting GBH on the eardrums might be worth it in the interest of meeting Beautiful Boys. She fantasises about lying on the patio with a magazine while one wanders around in jeans with his shirt off, weeding the flowerbeds.
The trouble with nightclubs is they all have bouncers (they call themselves door supervisors now) who seem to think it’s clever to refuse people admittance for no proper reason.
‘I’ve never seen you before, feck off.’
‘You come here too often, feck off.’
‘I don’t fancy you, feck off.’
Imagine if they said: ‘You’re too old, feck off.’ Eimear makes a mental note to fit in plenty of early nights before they hit the town.
‘If we’re going to pull we need to avoid the tarty look,’ she tells Gloria and Kate. ‘Beautiful Boys can get that from their own age group and we can’t compete. So no Lycra and no cleavages. We’re women, not chicks – the London derrière is restricted to two wiggles per minute, Kate. We want to look cultured, refined, cosmopolitan – not available.’
‘But we are available,’ Kate protests.
‘Of course we are but we don’t have to advertise it. We want to look unattainable so they can’t believe their luck when we deign to notice them.’
‘It’s a ploy, it could work,’ Kate ruminates.
Eimear sweeps on. ‘We must remember that the chances of both of us scoring are low – don’t look so hurt, Glo, the only result you want’s from a pregnancy tester – so we have to forget about the usual rules where women are meant to be too loyal to dump their friends if one of them gets off with a man. This “all for one and one for all” notion can fall by the wayside when we’re sharking. The chances of bumping into a brace of BBs on the same night are slight to zero.’
‘BBs sounds like babies,’ says Gloria moumfully.
‘Maybe you shouldn’t come with us,’ Eimear tells her. ‘You might be too maternal for this caper.’
‘Please let me, I won’t mention babies once in the nightclub,’ she promises.
‘All right,’ concedes Eimear. ‘Now remember, it’s down to business for the seducer who scores a bullseye and taxi time for the others – with the promise that every sordid detail will be recounted over a glass of vodka veritas at the earliest opportunity.’
Kate rumples her red hair exuberantly.
‘My God, I’ve created a monster,’ she exclaims. ‘You’ve latched on to this big time, Mulligan. Let’s go for it, girls.’
Eimear drops Kate off on the corner of St Stephen’s Green. ‘I must check my flat has all the vital components for Operation BBs,’ winks Kate.
‘Like a bottle of champagne?’
‘He never replaced that,’ she frowns. ‘Tight git.’ She pauses, then adds: ‘Sorry Eimear, this must be painful for you.’
‘Water under the bridge,’ she assures Kate. ‘Strictly speaking he’s not tight, just distracted. His mind tends to be on higher things. Like fornication.’
Kate squirms beside Eimear in the car.
‘Are you having trouble with the door? Let me open it for you.’ Eimear leans across and fiddles with the catch, to put her out of her misery – and to put herself out of her own. No more thoughts of Jack.
I’m completely over him, Eimear thinks as she drives home past the National Concert Hall. Jack won’t cross her mind once when she’s frolicking with the young bucks of Dublin. She’ll be too busy thinking how delectable it is to have a firm twenty-year-old body to grapple with instead of a nearly middle-aged one, even if it was in fine fettle. She may just happen to have a drink with one of these Beautiful Boys in Jack’s local but it will only be a quick one, she doesn’t need to parade the fact that she’s an attractive woman in her prime whom many men find attractive. Even if he doesn’t.
CHAPTER 25
Eimear lies in bed thinking about Kate. Her sleeping pattern’s banjaxed since Jack left – actually it was constructive dismissal – and she’s developed a succession of tactics that occasionally fool her body into thinking it’s ready to go comatose. They include warm milk, hot-water bottles and a stack of sizzling page-turners but the heat treatment isn’t working tonight. She resists switching the lamp on and curls around her pillow in darkness, contemplating Kate.
Although she’s forgiven her, she didn’t do it effortlessly – it was the toughest decision of her life. But no pain, no gain, isn’t that what they say in keep-fit classes. Eimear’s mind wanders restlessly. Forgiving means to be merciful; she remembers the first line of a speech she was forced to learn in third year from The Merchant Of Venice: ‘The quality of mercy is not strained.’ What did Portia the Prig know, the quality of mercy is extremely bloody strained. It’s strained to screaming point. But what’s she to do, lose her husband and a best friend in one fell swoop?
Eimear’s being merciful to all three of them by forgiving Kate: to Kate, because she loves her, whether she deserves it or not; to Gloria because she was suffering, trying to accommodate both of them and in danger of pleasing neither; and to herself because she looks magnanimous and keeps a friend she doesn’t want to forfeit, even if she failed her at the crunch.
She’s known Kate more than quarter of a century, if she turns her back on her now she’ll be nudging sixty by the time she builds up another friendship as long-lasting. Besides, she doesn’t befriend people readily.
At first when Kate claimed Jack landed one on her, Eimear thought she was slandering him to winkle her way back into her good graces. No dice, sister, I don’t buy it, she decided. Then Eimear realised she was starting to sound like something out of a gangster film. The stress was obviously getting to her – she’d wake up one of these days and discover she’d taken to wearing tight sweaters over push-up bras, like Lauren Bacall, and asking men if they knew how to whistle. Just put your lips together and blow. Still, a girl could have a worse role model.
Their slap without the tickle didn’t ring true to Eimear. ‘Jack’s a lover, not a fighter,’ she told Gloria. ‘He couldn’t even tell me face-to-face he was leaving me, he’s no giant-killer.’
But Glo insisted he really had punched Kate and Eimear wasn’t sorry, though she knew she should be. What pleased her most was that he’d cheated on Kate too, the castor oil remedy for both of them.
‘So,’ she told Gloria when she relayed the news, ‘the great love affair is liquidated. Our very own answer to Dermot and Grainne, to Helellil and Hildebrand, to Rick and Ilse …’
‘Who?’
‘The lovers from Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, you sap.’ ‘Right,’ Gloria nodded.
‘To Liz Taylor and Richard Burton,’ Eimear continued, ‘to Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester – oh, to hell with the analogies, so the lovers aren’t very loving any more. Well, don’t ask me to send a sympathy card.’
Eimear punches her pillow and rolls over on to her back. Her eyes stray to the clock. Nearly 2 a.m. and she has work tomorrow. What on earth was Kate thinking of, luring away her husband – even if he is the most easily tempted man in the cosmos? If friendship is supposed to stand for anything, surely it’s for incorruptibility in the face of husbands propositioning you.
But … oh boy, does Eimear have the whip hand now.
‘You abandoned me,’ she told Kate, who acquiesced in an extremely satisfying manner.
‘You’ve turned the unthinkable into the unmentionable,’ Eimear accused her.
Kate bowed her head humbly.
Sometimes there’s a flash of what – mutiny?
‘I’ve wronged you,’ Kate struck a silent-movie era pose. ‘Let me devote myself to soothing your sting.’
‘Try first-degree burns,’ Eimear retorted, and Kate was silenced.
Eimear pads out of bed and across the room to the bedroom curtains. The moon is a slice off being full, by tomorrow it’ll be Dean Martin’s big pizza pie. Everyone imagines she forgave Kate because she’s magnanimous, thinks Eimear, as she wraps her arms around herself and hugs tight.
Wrong, she did it because she’s a manipulative cow who knows she’ll always have a hold over Kate. This will rear its head between them while they have breath in their bodies. Kate will be doing penance till the end of her days. She’ll be doing penance into the afterlife, if there is one. She’ll be doing penance if they’re reincarnated. She may as well carry a bell and chant, ‘Unclean, unclean.’
One of the ways Eimear punishes Kate is by forcing her to recount explicit details of their lovemaking. Of course she punishes herself too, in listening, but she’s driven to it, she has a compulsion to hear of her husband’s adultery and her friend’s perfidy.
Did they remove all their clothes or only some? Did she always orgasm? Did he brush her hair afterwards? Did he call her baby girl?
Kate hates answering Eimear’s questions but she’s always able to make her, she can’t refuse Eimear anything. ‘Aren’t I the happy camper,’ says Eimear.
What she hates most is the thought of them kissing. Who invented kissing, anyway? It seems such a strange way of signalling sexual desire. It’s caught on big time, that’s for sure, although the Eskimos seem to manage very nicely thank you without it. She imagines the reception for the first person in a loincloth who latched on to a snog.
‘Listen, lads, I’ve found this great way of passing the time. You fasten your face on to a woman’s and then you suck till the saliva banks up or you run out of breath.’
Eimear giggles as she visualises the catcalls.
But then she sees Kate and Jack kissing in her mind’s eye. The image incenses her; sleep is out of the question, she may as well go downstairs and brew up some camomile tea.
Time to put Kate’s new-minted loyalty to the test.
‘Read these poems,’ Eimear orders, presenting her with a sheaf of her scribbles.
Kate scans the first couple, eyebrows disappearing into her hairline.
‘Your own work?’ she ventures.
‘Every last verse,’ Eimear smiles beatifically. ‘Tell me truly what you think of them, you know how I value your opinion.’
Kate falters.
‘I’m thinking of offering them for publication,’ Eimear continues, with just a hint of wickedness. ‘You could be my legal representative and help me haggle with the publishing houses for the best deal.’
Kate is horrified. ‘I deal with conveyancing, I don’t know that I’d be much good to you when it comes to bargaining with publishers, Eimear.’
‘Nonsense,’ she chuckles. ‘You were superb in the souk that time we went to Morocco – remember how you had the prayer-mat salesman on his knees to Allah while you bartered him down.’
‘Holiday souvenirs,’ she remonstrates, ‘it’s hardly in the same league as book deals. I know nothing of the publishing world, apart from the fact that poets don’t tend to make a lot of money. Most of them have day jobs, which isn’t a sign that the world is heaping them with earthly gain.’
‘True, but my poetry is very marketable, wouldn’t you say? Graphic imagery, topical material like child molestation, impotence, date rape. And then, I’d make excellent copy for the interviewers, we could talk about Jack’s priapic tendencies, source of my inspiration, the reviewers will revere me.’
‘Eimear, the poetry’s abysmal,’ Kate says with a hunted look on her face.
‘So it is. But why should that be any barrier to success?’
Kate laughs. ‘You never fail to amaze me, Mulligan. Maybe your verses will bring you fame and fortune, no one deserves it more. When were you thinking of sending them off?’
‘I already have. To Bitchin’ Babes Press, they’ve invited me in for a chat – I think they’re interested.’
‘That’s a stroke of luck.’ She’s impressed.
‘Good luck, bad luck, who knows?’ jokes Eimear. ‘I may end up a laughing stock, I may be sacked from my nice safe job at nice safe Rathmines Library for writing poetry with profanities in it.’
‘Where were the profanities, I missed them.’ Kate flicks through the pages. ‘Hey, you’ve rhymed penis with genius here, the guys will love you for that.’
‘Not if they read on. I also rhyme bum fluff with dandruff in “Teenagers Never Buy Shampoo But They Sometimes Borrow Yours”.’
‘You should pen an ode about sharking Beautiful Boys, it might give us some inspiration for our night on the town,’ she suggests.
Eimear sucks in her cheeks. ‘They make too much noise, those Beautiful Boys/But there are compensations for their loud exclamations/And I could sing hymns to their gilded limbs,’ she recites.
‘Mulligan, you invented that off the top of your head.’ Kate is astonished. ‘What will you call it?’
‘Paean To Pain,’ she pronounces.
‘But it’s pleasure, not pain,’ complains Kate. ‘Beautiful Boys are about playtime for grown-up girls.’
‘Pleasure has a price above punts and pence,’ Eimear tells her.
‘That’s not another poem, is it?’ she asks suspiciously.
‘No, just some of my homespun wisdom – or ‘Gloria’s, in fact.’
‘You’re suggesting we’ll go off and fall in love with one of these cherubs and end up broken-hearted,’ Kate protests. ‘Of course that won’t happen – we’ll be flinging flungs with our eyes wide open, it’ll be fun on the run and no expectations.’
‘Have it your own way,’ Eimear shrugs. ‘Do you fancy coming to the publisher’s with me? I’ll ring Gloria and see if she wants to be part of the gang too. Bitchin’ Babes Press will love me, going everywhere with my gal-pals.
‘We’ll have to work that into the biography for the back of the book. “Eimear O’Brien, who quit librarianship after she won the Nobel Prize for Literature and married the Hollywood star Aidan Quinn, is inseparable from her two dearest friends.’”
