There's Been a Little Incident, page 6
Danny turned back to the stag. Any second now the broad-chested animal would move, and the moment would be lost. But instead, it was the sun that moved. It began to wash the stag in a weak yellow. Danny caught the animal’s eye again and for a few minutes the despair wasn’t swallowing him whole. He took a deep breath and tried to hold on to the brief respite as long as he possibly could.
9. LADY V
Dublin, March 19th 2019
People were always surprised to find out how much V loved Mike. Or maybe they weren’t surprised that she loved him, but they were surprised to discover that she showed it. When he had walked into the hospital yesterday, her whole body relaxed. Her shoulders released and she let go of a tiny bit of air she didn’t even know she was holding. His large frame enveloped her tiny one and she could see the nurses trying not to stare. Mike’s face had remained full of concern until he was allowed to wheel her to the door of the hospital and scoop her into the Land Rover. Being so well-minded had made the whole ordeal almost pleasant but the meds must have been strong too because when she woke this morning her ankle was on fire and she was in a foul humour. The only thing for it was to get to work.
V hadn’t thought through how to shower or wash her hair in the cast so the whole thing took over an hour. By the time she was up and ready it was already eight o’clock, two hours later than her usual departure time. She was grabbing her keys when Mike appeared at the top of the landing.
‘Where on earth do you think you are going?’
‘To the gym.’
‘To do what?’
‘Work.’
She was confused by the smile on Mike’s face as he walked slowly down the stairs. He was buttoning a white shirt over his greying chest hair. He smelt like sandalwood from the aftershave she had gotten him for his birthday. He was stocky with a tyre of fat around his middle, but somehow he pulled it off.
Last night he had asked exactly how she had broken her ankle and instead of telling him the embarrassing truth, she had managed to blame someone else: that stupid girl with the clogs who really did leave too much soap on the floor when she mopped. She just happened not to have been mopping anywhere near the treadmill at 5.45 when V tripped and fell.
It wasn’t even just a trip, it was like something you’d see on You’ve Been Framed. For some reason she’d lost her focus and then in a split second she’d lost her footing and done all the things that the signs – she herself had written – told you not to do. She desperately tried to grab at something, but the machine was running at level eight and it flung her across the room. She bashed backwards into dumbbells and landed with her ankle sticking out in all the wrong places like a scene from a gory horror movie. She lay there feeling something she hadn’t felt in a long time. Besides the acute pain of her most likely broken ankle, she felt frightened. She thought of what that fool in the top knot had said about her being past her prime and now here she was on the floor, unable to move, having fallen like an old woman. She couldn’t tell anyone. She had to find a way to downplay it. It was the girl in the clogs who’d found her. That’s what gave V the idea to blame her.
‘And how do you think you’ll get to work?’
Mike placed his hands on her hips. She had completely forgotten the nurse’s warning that she wouldn’t be able to drive in the hard cast. The nurse had mentioned a period of time so long that in her morphinesque state V had thought she was joking.
‘I can wait for you to drop me.’
Mike was still smiling as he kissed her forehead.
‘I will be doing no such thing, V.’
Being housebound wasn’t so bad at the beginning. She hung around while Mike got ready and humoured him as he tried to build her a pillow fortress on the couch, from which she immediately escaped after feeling a genuine pang of claustrophobia. Then the twins emerged.
Despite the pain and the impending boredom, she smiled as she watched them run for the bus, Liam admonishing Damon for delaying them and Damon serenely absorbing being yelled at while eating a cinnamon bun. Such was her joy at witnessing them grab their backpacks at nineteen just like when they were five, the thought occurred to her that maybe she should stay home more often. But that was at 10 a.m.
By 11 a.m. she had organized a painter to repaint the railings, paid the gas, electricity and next semester’s college fees, she had cleaned the fridge and done an online food shop. She spent the next hour devising a new Strength and Conditioning workout that weaved a course of burpees, box jumps, prowler, shuttle runs and squats. She sent it to the head trainers at every gym for their input. It was now midday and she was starving. But she avoided the kitchen because food was going to pose a problem.
Now that she couldn’t exercise, she would have to reduce her food intake drastically. This wasn’t new; she was used to starving herself. Before the twins, she’d never set foot in a gym, none of the models back then had. They had subsisted on cigarettes, gin and narcotics (but V likes to ignore that part of the 1990s). If she couldn’t exercise, she couldn’t eat, and if she couldn’t eat then she would need a plan for the next four weeks until she could get a soft cast and presumably at least do upper body exercises. She would need a distraction. A project. Something to count. Something to measure. Something that would give her the sense of achievement that she had enough self-awareness to know she was slightly addicted to.
She could call a friend. She had friends. Nicely contained friends who she had lunch with. They met once a month in a cocktail bar for a glass of Champagne before heading around the corner to Marcel’s for an entirely liquid lunch. The topics up for discussion were new kitchens, new cars and new husbands (in that order) and detailing anything awful that had happened to their nemeses that could be celebrated. Mike called them the Botox Bettys. But Liam said they were more like the Schadenfreude Sheilas.
Everything was fuelled by competition. Whose husband was more successful, whose children were most popular/sporty/good-looking/smart (the latter was less interesting). They each found wonderfully creative ways to boast. The secret was to wrap the boast up as a major catastrophe. At the last lunch Camilla had told the girls she was desperately worried about her daughter Afric; the entire Irish rugby team wanted to marry her; what would Camilla do?
They were so competitive that they’d each been known to postpone the lunch to coincide with major deals that the others would have to congratulate them on. Imelda had asked to meet the Saturday after her kitchen extension was featured in The Sunday Times. Camilla had moved the lunch to after her modelling agency got bought up by Elite. Jacqui had rescheduled for just after she’d opened a new boutique, and even V had postponed it until after she suspected she might win Business Woman of the Year last year (which she did). She wasn’t going to call them now that she was down. They’d phone each other behind her back and speculate on whether she’d fallen because she had an incurable brain tumour – or, worse, was ageing badly. It was a generational thing, she told herself. Her generation hadn’t known about non-competitive, vulnerable friendships the way girls now did and it was too late to start.
She hobbled into the living room and lay on the carpet. She did round after round of pelvic floor exercises. She might end up smelly and forgetful in a nursing home, but she wouldn’t be peeing herself and that was something. She stretched her arms over her head and counted as she pulsed her biceps. The day ahead seemed endless and she’d no concept of how to fill it.
Did she really spend this much time at the gym? And how could she possibly be this hungry? She figured she was only hungry most of the time because of all the exercise, but she couldn’t afford to be this hungry without being able to work off anything she ate. A flare of anxiety shot through her. She turned on the radio and tried to ignore a rising panic. When the house phone rang, she dived for the receiver.
‘Mike?’
‘No, Veronica, it’s John here. I was just looking for Mike. I’m terribly sorry to hear about your accident. That woman with the clogs sounds frightfully irresponsible. What was she doing wearing clogs in this weather anyway? As a shoe expert I can tell you they are wildly unsuitable for Ireland’s temperate maritime climate. You were very good not to fire her immediately. Wet floors are a LETHAL business. You could have DIED. But I digress. How ARE you?’
Usually V avoided John like glazed doughnuts but now his voice was oddly reassuring. She was comforted by his outrage on her behalf and almost felt outrage herself despite the fact that it was a complete fabrication.
‘Good, John, good. Look, I’ve been thinking. Do you need any help with this Molly thing?’
There was a silence uncharacteristic for any of the Blacks.
‘That’s why I was calling. Truth be told, Veronica, I’m very worried.’
V wasn’t prepared for this response. She’d brought it up on impulse, thinking that maybe she could ring around some of Molly’s friends, keep herself busy. She wanted a project, not a late middle-aged man to have a nervous breakdown on her watch. She waited for him to say more but he just breathed slowly at the other end of the line. Lord have mercy.
‘Look, John, leave it with me. I have a few ideas.’
‘Do you?’
‘I’m very good at stalking people on the internet. Let me see what I can do.’
V hung up the phone, her momentary pang of fondness for her brother-in-law already dwindling. The clan-like mentality of the Black family was oppressive. They lost the plot when one of them peeked beyond the pale. The girl had most likely shacked up with one of those bearded chaps who wore far too much gingham or fallen in love with some eejit in a bedsit in Brighton. V was already regretting volunteering for the task. It would draw her into a web of people and communication she’d rather do without. She had worked hard to live a life of clean lines, of functional relationships based on a perfectly calibrated level of distance, and the Black family had generally left her to it. Except Annabelle. Annabelle hadn’t known the meaning of the word distance. Even now, V got a strange feeling when she thought of Annabelle, ill at ease like she was out of her depth. Like Annabelle knew something about her that she didn’t know herself.
Jumping up to distract herself from this uncomfortable thought, V forgot her broken ankle and nearly tripped over herself. Pain shot up through her cast and she cursed all the expletives she could think of. She dragged herself into the kitchen and got a pen. At least now she had a project.
V would find Molly. Once she’d tracked her down in some depressing hellhole, V would fly to London. She would stay in Claridge’s, put her foot up, have Molly over for afternoon tea and give her a talking to about B moving in with this billionaire. She would tell her how unhealthy it was – being in love with a gay man. It was holding her back. They would get their nails done. Maybe a blow-dry. V would be the hero. She sat at the kitchen table and made a list of all the potential information sources she could use to track Molly. But in the end, it only took seconds. Ten days ago Molly had been tagged in a photo by someone called Ned Fortune. The location was so far from home it sent shivers down V’s spine.
10. JOHN
Dublin, March 19th 2019
There were plenty of stationery shops near Leopardstown but heading into town made John feel purposeful. Town was more professional. And the place on Baggot Street was a cut above the rest. They took stationery seriously. They allocated you a booth where a stationery specialist gave you a one-to-one consultation on your stationery needs. Today John’s needs were multi-fold. He took out his pen on the 46A and began to make a list.
He planned to buy thirteen mini-notebooks for each member of the family. Spiral bound at the short edge side would seem to make sense, but he would take the specialist’s advice on the best product in the small notebook range. The primary purpose of the notebook would be for everyone to jot down the last time they had heard from Molly but he’d also like them to note down anything they remembered her saying in the last few weeks. People she’d mentioned, parts of England she’d like to visit. He’d heard the Lake District was very nice, could she be there for instance, holed up reading some Jane Austen? Even John had to admit that seemed unlikely. Either way, John himself would trawl through the notes and collate anything of interest for the Guards.
The guards had been very sympathetic but not at all concerned. They kept repeating that Molly was a grown woman and that she had left a note. It turned out that people who were nearly thirty were allowed to run away. According to one sergeant, all the college-educated yuppies were climbing Machu Picchu – had they tried there? Climbing Machu Picchu was just what you did these days, he said, like in their day when you got a job.
John had probably popped down to the station one too many times and he could tell now that they thought he was a sad busybody with nothing better to do. But what about how she might have seen Sheena Griffith that night, he kept asking? Apparently, they had a new lead on that case and John hadn’t heard from the UK police since. When he’d been at the station yesterday the Guard at the desk hadn’t recognized him, so she’d asked him if he was Molly’s dad. After all these years, John still hated the moment when he had to say no.
He thought of it as a room. The room was filled with all the things that would have happened if they’d been able to have children. Not toys and clothes. More like the types of people they might have become. For instance, maybe he and Helen would look different. Maybe he would have gone bald from all the worry and Helen wouldn’t still have such a small waist. Maybe Helen would have given up teaching by now and maybe John wouldn’t have sold the shoe shop but had a daughter in there running the place.
He never pictured sons because his own father was so hell bent on them. Instead, he pictured a smart-as-a-button daughter who surprised them at every turn. A no-nonsense lawyer who threw her eyes up to heaven when he and Helen asked her about getting married. Or a sporty daughter who was always out practising something or other, coming home red-faced with strands of hair stuck to her cheeks. The sporty one would always be starving. And maybe because of that, because of them, John would have learnt to cook. And maybe on Sundays when the lawyer and the sports star came home John would be a different person, pulling shepherd’s pies out of the oven as the girls threw their arms around him for a hug.
It was best to keep it all in one room. To watch these thoughts come and let them into the room. Not locked away or shut up or anything as dramatic as that, just in the one place so that it didn’t hurt in multiple locations. And the truth was – he could be happy about that room. He often smiled imagining it. It wasn’t the end of the world to have these thoughts. It wasn’t tragic or morose. More often than not it was heart-warming. Maybe these girls existed in some parallel universe and when he thought of them it was like he was just paying them a visit.
Of course, now he wished they’d adopted when they’d been young enough to. People thought they hadn’t because they’d just kept hoping it would happen for them, and that was true, but the real reason was fear. His fear. Not Helen’s. John was terrified that the powers that be would look at his finances, at the business or even just at him, at his lack of education, at his background and find him wanting. He was terrified that a tight-lipped, well-educated man or woman from the government would arrive at their door or issue a letter confirming to John what he knew already – that he wasn’t good enough for the lawyer or the sports star.
So, it was his fault. And the thing about Helen was that she hadn’t a bone in her body that could hold it against him. She loved him so thoroughly that it was like it had been her decision too. And sometimes that made it worse. But mainly it just made him count his lucky stars that he was blessed to marry a woman as wonderful as Helen.
And as well as a happy marriage, he’d had his work. He’d made his way up from working as a clerk to buy the whole shoe shop. That wasn’t something to be sniffed at. He’d sold shoes to half of Dublin – and many celebrities. There was Claudia who did the traffic for the AA on the radio. She came in every October for a pair of brown leather boots. All the TDs for the local constituency knew not to bother knocking on doors if they weren’t wearing a pair of Black’s loafers and one time John even fitted a man who looked very like the man who might have murdered that woman in Mayo. He’d fitted many criminals actually. One quite distressing murderer who’d burnt his wife to a crisp but also some lovely minor criminals. Every year he sent a pair of smart loafers to an Englishman who’d fled to the Caribbean to avoid being arrested for tax fraud. He’d stolen millions from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, but Harold always paid for postage.
John looked out the window and saw that it was about to rain again. The country was just recovering from two weeks of battering. They’d been hit by storm after storm and John half wondered if the weather was what had stopped Molly from coming home in recent weeks. Maybe she’d wanted to, but flights had been cancelled because of the storms.
Since Molly had left that note, all he could think about was Christmas. It had always been a landmark. No matter how long Molly was away, at least they knew they’d see her at the end of the year. Inadvertently, John shook his head. It was his fault. His mother was deteriorating and taking up more of his time and he’d been caught up with stupid Proinsias Murtagh. He should have got onto Molly earlier, booked flights for her if she didn’t have the money.
He knew that she’d enjoyed being on her own and that she’d strolled all of London on a crisp Christmas Day – but still, he needed to lay eyes on her – they all did – just from time to time to make sure her small frame was managing to hold all that grief. He didn’t care that she was nearly thirty. Why did people keep telling him that? Danny was fifty-two and John would never not be looking in doorways, hoping against hope that passed-out heaps were not his baby brother.
