Be Careful What You Wish For, page 22
‘A tea party,’ said Fionn as she lugged a laden tray through to the coffee table.
‘Thanks, gallant of you to notice how heavy it is, but I can manage,’ she snapped. There’d been an incipient sneer in his voice and she wasn’t having it. Barry snatched his moment to shine by ripping the tray from her hand, jeopardising an unremarkable blue-and-white teapot she was devoted to, and carrying it the remaining eight inches.
Humiliation: she had no biscuits. Molly was incapable of serving up unaccompanied tea, even when her guests were gatecrashers. She was obliged to open her box of real fruit jellies, sugar-drenched globules approximating in shape but not taste to the fruit they were intended to represent. She was saving them for a rainy day, which is what she had now, except she envisaged storm clouds plus a roaring fire (metaphorical, she was not equipped with a fireplace), a glossy magazine and, pivotal to the success of the operation, no one to share the jellies with. They had actual fruit juice in them, she needed the vitamins.
‘I should have some Toffeypops behind one of those “in case of emergency break glass” windows,’ she announced to a bemused audience. ‘If anyone takes sugar in their tea they’ll have to go to the all-night garage two streets away because the jar’s empty. Or –’ she ripped the packaging off her jellies, spewing stray granules of sugar underfoot – ‘they could always tap a spoonful out of the bottom of this box.’
‘A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, in the most delinquent way,’ warbled Barry, sounding more like Mary McAleese than Mary Poppins.
Even he seemed to realise he’d lost ground and subsided onto the sofa. Fionn took up position on the other sofa and both visitors waited expectantly to see whom she’d sit beside. Molly spurned both and kneeled by the table, geisha fashion, to pour tea.
‘Nobody’s allowed the purple jellies,’ she instructed, handing the box round. They each treated it as a joke and selected a blackcurrant-flavoured blob apiece.
When Barry was in the bathroom, and he’d put his bladder under serious pressure with an attenuated ignoring of its exigencies because he didn’t want to leave the other two alone, Fionn mumbled at Molly: ‘Lose the gooseberry.’
She resented his squatters’ rights manner. ‘The only gooseberries are the green sweets in my box and I notice everybody’s left them until last.’
‘But I want us to spend time on our own,’ he protested.
‘Barry’s a friend.’ She erased from her memory banks his bid to significantly alter the relationship; pragmatic measures held infinite appeal for Molly.
‘And what am I?’
‘The jury’s out. We know what you used to be, we know what you’d like to be, we still haven’t decided what you are.’
‘But we made love last night.’ Fionn’s hair, by now dry, was flicking into ‘stroke me’ waves.
Molly averted her eyes. ‘And your point is?’
The silence was throttling.
‘I’ll get dressed then,’ said Fionn. He passed Barry at the door.
‘Couldn’t help overhearing,’ smirked Barry. He helped himself to another jelly, not a green one, and added: ‘Glad to see you’re taking my dumping advice.’
‘Says who? I just don’t want him slapping a sold sticker on my front. Sleeping with someone doesn’t mean you have to move in together and become a couple. There can be sex followed by more sex with no commitment. And no ditching either.’
‘Courtship has changed since I tried my hand at it,’ muttered Barry.
‘And nobody calls it courtship any more; it smacks of honourable intentions. Personally I’ve always preferred the dishonourable variety.’
Molly airbrushed out her hankering for a white wedding. Or any colour of a wedding.
‘I can see you’re overwrought,’ said Barry. ‘I’ll head off now and catch up with you tomorrow. When your man’s been dropped from a great height. I’d recommend Liberty Hall.’
‘I’m on a day off tomorrow. And I’d sooner sign up for a frontal lobotomy than darken the newsroom door on a day off. Stephen would lasso me and have me covering some nondescript story or other. “I’m not rostered to work today” does not compute with him.’
Fionn, who had spent so long dressing himself Molly started to wonder if he needed someone to tie his shoelaces, stalked out of the bathroom just as Barry had his coat on.
‘Can I give you a lift? Are you headed northside or southside?’ Barry was breezy.
‘I have my own car, thanks.’ Fionn was equally breezy.
Molly didn’t elaborate it was actually his father’s. No point in kicking a man when he was down unless you actively wanted to commit grievous bodily harm. Now that both were leaving she felt kindly disposed towards them. She patted Barry’s shoulder, steeling herself not to cringe from his lips as he kissed her cheek, then she kissed Fionn’s cheek – noticing he seemed to be cringing from her lips.
Alone at last. Bliss. Molly ran a bath and switched her mobile off. The landline rang as she slipped on the bathrobe so recently vacated by Fionn it encased her in his body heat. Would she or wouldn’t she answer it? She counted seven rings and then lifted the receiver. It was Helen.
‘Just letting you know I’m back in the heaving metropolis.’
‘It should be heaving even more right about now because I’ve just hoisted a right pair back out into it,’ replied Molly. She wasn’t going to mention Helen’s tantrum on Monday night if her friend insisted on playing the speak-no-evil monkey.
‘Any reprobates I know?’
‘Fionn McCullagh and Barry Dalton. Don’t ask.’
‘Fionn McCullagh? Rewind there, Molly, the last I heard he was married and living in Seattle. So how come he’s in your apartment – have you been holding out on me?’
‘It’s complicated.’ Even Molly realised she sounded evasive but she needed a rebuke like she needed a parking ticket. Barry had just given her his ‘make the beast with two backs and then back off’ credo; she couldn’t face Helen’s polar opposite mantra. ‘I’ll explain when I see you, Helen.’
Helen was not so readily fobbed off. ‘Fionn McCullagh – you must have taken leave of your wits and your memory if he’s back on the scene. No wonder I can never catch up with you when I ring, the pair of you used to be permanently horizontal.’ Her voice, already deprecatory, adopted a yet more hostile note. ‘Before he left you high – although not dry. I seem to recall an ocean of tears.’
Molly slumped on the sofa, switched her brain to neutral and allowed Helen the prolonged reprimand to which, she conceded, her friend was entitled. When Helen wound down she grasped the opportunity to change the subject and discovered she’d been to Galway to visit her sister.
‘And how is the gorgeous Geraldine?’ enquired Molly. (No more talk of Fionn please.)
Helen was wrongfooted. ‘Is she gorgeous? I’ve never noticed. She seems to have a couple of boyfriends on the horizon, an inadequate marker but a marker none the less.’
‘All you Sharkeys are gorgeous, especially the fleeting glimpse I had of your brother at that funeral a few weeks back. But you hustled him away from me in a most possessive fashion.’
‘I didn’t.’ Helen was defensive. ‘I barely had a chance to talk to him myself that day. There were second cousins and uncles by marriage and assorted relatives everywhere you turned. Anyway, he lives in London; he’s not exactly on the doorstep.’
‘There’s a walloping big key in your back which is far too easy to wind up,’ said Molly. ‘Besides he’s way too old for me. I’ve decided I like my men very young and very grateful.’
‘How young?’ Helen was relieved to be off the hook so painlessly. ‘Are we talking Mrs Robinson?’
‘Dustin Hoffman’s age in The Graduate is probably bang on, although I’ll have you know I’m no Anne Bancroft yet.’
‘Patrick’s twenty-nine so he’s off limits on the grounds of decrepitude, is that it?’
‘Well …’ Molly pretended to ponder. ‘I might give him houseroom for a one-night stand but nothing more because he wouldn’t have the stamina for me. Borderline thirty, he’s on the turn. I’ve decided my cut-off from here in should be twenty-five, maximising gratitude and prowess in one fell swoop. Stop cackling, Helen. Mockery ill becomes you. I’ve given this subject extensive consideration. I could manage a dissertation on it – or anyway a one-thousand-word feature in the lifestyle section – and this is the optimum melding of my needs and his.’
‘Do you have a particular his in mind? I hope it’s not Fionn McCullagh.’
‘That old fogey. I’ll have you know there are other, considerably younger males in my circle of admirers. Discretion prevents me from revealing identities.’
‘It’s not like you to be demure.’ Helen was laughing so much the exhaustion from her drive home from Galway had started to ebb.
‘Demure! Now I’m insulted. It’s Hercules, if you must know.’
‘And would I be correct in deducing that he sneaks into the aged twenty-five cut-off zone.’
‘By the skin of his teeth. Helen, we had another coffee-drinking session and I’m truly smitten. Cupid feck off, your work is done.’
‘Excellent.’
‘Not excellent at all.’ Molly was rueful. ‘He fits the age profile but not the appreciation-for-services-rendered one. He’s manifesting a disconcerting tendency to treat me like one of his sisters.’
‘Show him the error of his ways.’
‘I wish I could, Helen. You’ve no idea how much I wish it.’ Molly recollected herself. ‘My bath’s going to be sub-zero by now. Unlike my blood, which is revved up with all this talk of Greek stallions.’
‘Bulls.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The Greeks went in for bulls – remember the Minotaur?’ said Helen. ‘Think athletic Cretan damsels and lads playing leapfrog across bulls’ horns. Think primitive world potency symbol.’
‘Now I’m getting even more het up. I need a cold shower and not a bath at all. I’ll give you a shout in a day or two, bring you up to speed on the Fionn, Barry and Hercules situation.’
‘So many men, so little time.’
The glow that one of their jocular conversations always induced in Helen stayed with her while she pottered about watering plants and leaving out her binbag for the next day’s collection. But, later in bed, agitatedly anticipating sleep, she wished she could be more like Molly: regard life as a vehicle for fun instead of visualising tragedy on every corner. Talk about what was on her mind, as Molly did with Hercules, instead of dip it in quick-setting concrete and then roll the ungainly ball into a corner of the back yard.
‘Molly’s not the only one making wishes,’ she addressed the alarm clock. ‘I could use a lamp in need of a shine and a genie to emerge from it too. I wouldn’t even need three wishes. One would do.’
CHAPTER 17
The early hours of Wednesday morning and it looked like she was condemned to yet another sleepless night. Helen had had a surfeit of them since returning from Sligo last week. Her days had passed in a blur of lapsed concentration at work, with a few phone conversations with Molly at night her only respite from anxiety. Geraldine had rung once, to Helen’s surprise, but she’d missed the call and lacked the energy to return it. Still, it was some comfort to know lines of communication were opening more easily between the sisters. From Patrick she’d heard nothing. And yet he was continually in her thoughts – a harpoon dragging Helen after him.
This was exhausting – she should get up rather than lie in bed swamped by the contradictions of her feelings for Patrick.
Divert yourself, that’s what the manuals advised. She retreated downstairs and filled a mug with milk. While she was waiting for the microwave to ping she wandered out to the bookcase in the living room and her eye landed on the dark blue hardback outline of her Philip’s Modern School Atlas. Inside the cover was a pair of photographs taken by NASA: the land block of the Indian peninsula, and Sinai peninsula with the Jordanian desert to one side and the Egyptian coast to the other. The world looked messily drawn from space, as though the creator’s artistic skills leaned towards the slapdash. The Sinai peninsula picture always reminded her of a lump of burned fish, probably skate.
As ever the atlas fell open at pages 98 and 99: South America. Ecuador was on page 98, she found it immediately – a strip of purple which meant it was extremely high above sea level according to the colour chart on the side. Helen read the place names aloud, her tongue easily tickling the awkward words by dint of practice. Guayaquil, Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, Cuenca. So many k sounds. Her eyes travelled southwards to Bolivia and she thought of Che Guevara’s last days in the jungle; they veered north to Venezuela and she chuckled to see Caracas, for ever fixed in her memory as a place where women outnumbered men by a massive differential. Or so two lascivious schoolboys claimed in Gregory’s Girl.
She was drawn back to Ecuador. As a teenager her feet steered her automatically towards Eason’s whenever she was in the bright lights of Kilkenny – Ballydoyle was too insignificant for its own branch. She’d head straight for the travel guides section and read up on Ecuador. She knew it was acceptable to spit in public but not to burp there and that the unit of currency was sucre, which, disappointingly, had nothing to do with sugar-cubes doubling as cash. She knew that adventurous travellers could go on hair-raising bus journeys through the mountains, sharing a seat with an Indian peasant who’d have a basket of live chickens at his feet. She knew the Galapagos were within reach of Quito where tourists could swim with giant turtles and stroll on the beach sidestepping puffins and iguanas which hadn’t learned to fear humans.
That was the part of the guide she liked best: which hadn’t learned to fear humans. No fear. Helen quaked at the liberation of it. And then one day it dawned on her that fear and fear were spelled the same: the English word for heart-hammering cold sweats and the Irish word for man. If she believed in patterns in the universe she might devise a theory to rationalise that coincidence. But she told herself that not everything could be explained. Nor should it be.
‘If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.’ Her mother was fond of quoting that at Helen to slap her down when she expressed an ambitious wish. And where is the use in tame ones? asked the adult Helen. Why wish for an ice-cream cone when you could wish for the moon? But the unformed Helen was more readily subdued by her mother.
Ecuador was where Helen longed to run away to; in her early teens she’d thought it might be just about far enough. At thirty-two she wasn’t convinced but she remained captivated by its associations: a country which was an oasis in her teenage years could never be downgraded to arid desert. She’d contemplated visiting it for a holiday when money became more plentiful after graduation but something always deterred her. The year she’d flown to Singapore instead of Quito she’d finally realised why she was so reluctant: Shangrila shouldn’t be taken out of its bubblewrap. She might start popping the bubbles. And while that was cheaper than therapy, in what protective covering would she then sheathe her land of milk and honey?
Speaking of which, Helen remembered the milk. She turned back to the kitchen and discovered the milk had frothed a lace pattern over the glass floor of the microwave. It was only a notion anyway; she didn’t fancy hot milk. A tot of sherry would be considerably more effective. It might chase her dragons away. Her dragon. She only had the one. Safely back in London, though it made no difference: out of sight out of mind didn’t apply in her circumstances. At least he was beyond turning up on her doorstep and rocketing all her resolutions into orbit.
Helen scrubbed at the congealed milk stain, incapable of leaving it until morning, and debated taking the sherry bottle as well as a glass to bed but decided that constituted a slope so slippery she’d need skis to negotiate it. She poured herself a couple of inches and tucked the atlas under her arm. If alcohol didn’t lull her to sleep maybe maps would.
Buttering toast later that morning she heard the post bellyflop on the doormat. She sucked at a patch of butter on her thumb and lifted the sole item of mail, a postcard showing Gustav Klimt’s lovers kissing. She flipped it over without so much as a premonition but her stomach churned as she read: ‘Helen, I’m booked on to the first flight from Stansted to Dublin on Saturday morning. If this ends it has to be by mutual consent, not because one of us bolts. Patrick.’
Helen was exasperated: he was flying backwards and forwards so often her head was spinning. Behind the irritation lay trepidation: she could procrastinate no longer. Molly’s advice was indispensable, and the days of ‘I have a friend with a problem’ were long past. She had to be completely honest even if she emerged as a freak. Perhaps if she wrote to Molly …
As she collected her briefcase from the foot of the stairs and abandoned her toast uneaten, her eye fell on a trinket Molly had bought her. It was a snowglobe showing two laughing girls playing ring-a-rosy. ‘I never liked that game – everyone falls down,’ Helen had remarked. ‘But they help each other to their feet again,’ Molly had countered.
Helen lifted the snowglobe and shook it, watching the children sway amid the vortex of flakes. By the time they settled, she’d reached a decision: she’d speak to Molly face-to-face. Worst case scenario: she’d lose a friend. Best case scenario: she’d lose a problem.
Helen activated her burglar alarm and walked towards the DART station with a lighter heart than she could have believed possible. The taciturn man in the ticket office who once accused her of littering (a tissue had blown out of her bag while she’d ransacked it for coins) stared after her, wondering why he’d never noticed before what a winsome smile she had.
