It Could Never Happen Here, page 6
Delaney
I heard some parents were annoyed.
Keating
There was a lot to be annoyed about. I’m sure you read the newspaper reports – they didn’t help either. But really, it was down to how the school handled things. You live here long enough, and you quickly learn: do not piss off the parents. The Cooney Welcoming Party is only ever one slow day away from becoming the Cooney Vigilante Party. And the photos, well, they pissed a lot of people off.
7
••••••
Beverley’s husband hadn’t had an affair. He’d said that when she found the photos, and she’d been repeating it to herself ever since. He’d handed her his phone so she could see the Audi he was planning to purchase, only her thumb slipped and she scrolled back too far. There were dozens of them: crude, unprofessional shots with terrible lighting and awkward angles. Beverley couldn’t understand how he found them arousing.
‘I never slept with her. It was only pics.’
Pics.
She’d never heard him utter that word before in his life.
Beverley had taken it in her stride, mainly. She wasn’t naïve; she knew men would be men. When she had the space to think about it rationally, she was able to feel sorry for him – which was a lot easier than feeling sorry for herself. The idea of Malachy standing naked somewhere – their bedroom? The bathroom? His office? – as he pointed the phone at his naked body was deeply pathetic. And saying ‘pics’ was almost as childish as taking them. He was nearly forty-one, for God’s sake.
Beverley came to a stop at the traffic lights beside the empty shop unit where a Starbucks had been for all of five minutes. The Keep Cooney Independent committee had formed a picket line and the multinational had slunk back to the city where it belonged. Lorna Farrell’s husband Bill was a recently elected councillor (something she didn’t let anyone forget) and he said an interiors studio specialising in louvre shutters was going in there now. Which was much more in keeping.
In the rear-view mirror, she watched her daughter rub at the last of the blue eyeshadow. A small mound of used cotton pads sat on her knee.
The light turned green, and Amelia looked up as Beverley returned her attention to the road. They hadn’t spoken since they’d left the house.
They drove on past the newsagents and Regan’s Chemist. Mrs Rodgers, who Beverley knew from the Tidy Towns committee, was heading into the pharmacy. She checked the mirror as the older woman disappeared inside, but it was hard to get an idea of what might be wrong with her. She hoped it was nothing serious. Mrs Rodgers had the most fabulous red roses; last year’s judges’ report had, quite rightly, singled them out.
She turned the car on to Franklin Avenue. Beverley was eight when she found out the meandering road that led from Main Street up to Glass Lake was named after Malachy’s family. She’d immediately set about gathering intelligence on the boy in the year above. She learned that the long navy car that collected him every afternoon was driven by an employee and that his mother sat in the back seat, pushing the door open for him, but never getting out. She heard that at his tenth birthday party, the same driver was sent into Cork city to collect McDonald’s and bring it back to Cooney, and that a woman who was not his mother had opened the door to the guests. As far as Malachy was concerned, Beverley knew nothing of him until they met at a local disco when they were sixteen. Even though she could have handed in a dossier by then.
Malachy had accompanied her to last year’s Southern Pharmaceuticals Christmas party. This was before she’d quit that multinational cesspit and made a career pivot into health food entrepreneurship. (She had not been fired. She had quit. And she could not be happier about it.) Malachy had been in a foul mood until Benny from advertising asked if he’d ever considered modelling.
Her husband had laughed self-deprecatingly and blamed the Yuletide Slammers Benny was knocking back. ‘I’m forty this month,’ he’d said, patting his non-existent belly. ‘I think I’ll leave the acting to my wife.’
‘Do you act, Beverley?’ Tamara from development had asked, dragging her gaze away from Malachy’s chest.
‘I used to. A long time ago.’
In Cooney, Beverley’s acting career was fundamental to her identity. She was the most famous person her friends knew, and she wasn’t even famous. But she’d never mentioned it at work. Those people made fun of soaps.
‘She was in Cork Life,’ Malachy supplied. ‘And she was phenomenal.’ He was always so generous when his ego had been sated.
Beverley had looked at him and seen what the others saw. Sparkling blue eyes, a weather-beaten ruggedness, and thick sandy hair carefully cut so it always flopped to the left. Nobody could tell he’d had a small area transplanted from the back of his head. He looked like he might work on a yacht, but also like he could own a yacht – so that no matter what kind of man you were attracted to, you were always attracted to Malachy.
Tamara from development had mouthed Wow at Beverley and a slightly drunk woman from research shouted: ‘The slutty babysitter! I knew I recognised you!’
‘Not slutty. Sexy,’ Malachy corrected, looking at Beverley in a way that said nothing – not even Tamara’s ample cleavage and too tight dress – could compete.
That night, they’d stayed in a hotel in the city and made love on the bed, by the window, in the bathroom. Beverley’s thighs throbbed and her heart soared. She’d instigated positions she wasn’t aware could be done, let alone by her, and almost a year later, even while on a mission to defend her daughter’s welfare, the memory still made her blush.
About ninety metres from Glass Lake, traffic ground to a halt. The Lakers had run a campaign to encourage parents to drop their kids off farther away from the school gates. It made little difference. Twice, she’d caught Fiona Murphy parking in the middle of the road, while she got Ciara out of the vehicle. What did they expect if they didn’t lead by example?
The other Lakers didn’t have the same loyalty to the school that Beverley had. Enrolling her at Glass Lake was the one great thing her parents had done for her – and even then, it was only because her mother had got a job in Cooney and the school was on the way. So much of her parents’ lives had been about getting by and not drawing attention, that there was no space for big dreams. Her acting ambitions were never taken seriously. But Glass Lake had opened her eyes to a better world. Learning about the Franklins had given her a defined goal, yes, but one way or another she’d been working towards this life since she was five.
Of course, her own mother’s life now was unrecognisable from the one she’d led when Beverley was small. As soon as Beverley’s youngest sibling had finished school, her mother had left her father and their West Cork home for a retreat in India. Having endured years of her husband deriding her appearance, specifically her weight, Beverley had assumed it was a boot camp – sort of Eat, Pray, Love without the Eat – but no. It had been a hippy sex retreat. Now her mother, who lived in Dublin and was sixty-six today, could talk of little else, and Beverley was embarrassed by her in a whole new way.
She had made the mistake of confiding in her mother about Malachy’s ‘pics’. That evening she’d received a one-line email – Take the time to heal your relationship with yourself. Mam x – and a link to female-friendly porn. (Her mother. Sixty-six! Was nobody capable of acting their age?)
It was 9 a.m. Amelia was now officially late for school, which meant everyone ahead of them was late too. At least Beverley had a valid excuse. She blasted the horn.
‘Mum!’
The car in front pulled into the right and she swerved around it, manoeuvring off Franklin Avenue and on to the short driveway that led up to Glass Lake.
When she read articles about the ubiquity of porn, she found herself wondering who all these viewers were. If it really was as prevalent as they said, then she must know a few of them. They couldn’t all be in Dublin. She tried to imagine if her friends might be among the masses.
Claire Keating lived a heavily timetabled life. Three sets of twins was surprising, generally, but not given Claire’s efficiency. Why do something six times when you could get the job done in half that? It was unlikely she saw sex as a leisure activity, and she certainly wouldn’t make time for anything as discretionary as watching other people have sex. Lorna Farrell was far too won’t-someone-think-of-the-children to be condoning smut. She couldn’t even bring herself to use the correct terminology for genitalia. She had recently sent a message to the WhatsApp group seeking a recommendation for a ‘good front bum doctor’. The only Laker who seemed a likely candidate was Fiona Murphy. Even if Fiona wasn’t watching porn, she’d be delighted to know someone thought she was.
Beverley had never seen any. The idea made her sad. All those people who’d started out dreaming of Academy Awards and luscious costumes and ended up with harsh lighting and polyester nurses’ outfits. Journalists wrote about it as if it was a foregone conclusion that the next generation – Amelia’s generation – would be reared on the stuff. But that kind of thinking was what was wrong with parents. You had to fight for what you wanted. Nothing good in life was just handed to you. Even the most blissful moments of Beverley’s life, when the midwife placed her daughters on to her chest, had been preceded by hours (days in Ella’s case) of horrific pain. Being wealthy meant, as she’d known it would, that there was less resistance – but you still had to fight.
She pulled into a staff parking space, right by the entrance. She popped a Rennie out of its blister pack, threw the carton back on the passenger seat, and undid her seatbelt.
‘Out. Now,’ she said.
When it came to her daughters, Beverley was prepared to kick and scream.
..................
Principal Nuala Patterson’s only child refused to speak to her. Her only husband had left her, and her only working ovary had finally ceased production, resulting in night sweats and insomnia. Yet nothing, but nothing, made Nuala as weary as arriving into work to find a note on her desk saying Beverley Franklin had phoned ahead and was on her way in.
Given the Franklins’ affluence, Nuala would argue that when Beverley lost her job at Southern Pharmaceuticals earlier in the year (the school grapevine said she’d been fired), it was actually her, as principal of Glass Lake, who had suffered the most. Before, it was phone calls; now Beverley came to see her every time she had an issue with Amelia’s test results or one of Seamus McGrath’s set designs.
Nuala dropped her bags on to her desk. She pulled out her heels, sat in her swivel chair and undid her runners. ‘Did Beverley mention what time she’d be in?’ she shouted through her open door.
‘Didn’t say,’ replied Mairead. The school secretary appeared at the office threshold, eating a particularly milky bowl of cereal. ‘But it sounded like she was phoning from the car.’
Nuala hooked her shoe strap at the last hole. (Dr Flynn was amazed by how she’d managed to experience almost every possible side effect of the menopause, from thinning hair right down to swollen ankles. Nuala was not surprised. It was the cherry on top of the worst year of her life.) ‘How did she sound?’
Mairead raised an eyebrow. ‘How does Beverley Franklin ever sound?’
When Nuala first came to Glass Lake – as a teacher, straight out of university, at the age of twenty-two – Beverley had been in second class. Nuala hadn’t taught her, but she remembered the happy, pretty, not particularly well-off child. Now Beverley was one of the wealthiest women in Cooney and while still objectively attractive (the grapevine reported she went to Dublin to get her work done), her face settled in a faintly pained expression, as if she’d constantly just bitten her tongue.
‘What else have we got on today?’
‘The social worker is calling at around eleven; we still need to sort out those forms to hire two more SNAs; and Claire Keating has an appointment to see you this afternoon. It’s about the sixth-class history curriculum; specifically, Edward Jenner.’
‘The smallpox guy?’
Mairead raised an eyebrow. ‘Claire has an issue with how the textbook describes his invention of the vaccine. She says it lacks balance.’
‘There is no balance. It’s facts.’
‘Not according to Claire. According to Claire, it’s big pharma propaganda.’
They were only seven weeks into the school year and already the parents, who had always been the hardest part of her job, were surpassing themselves. But then, everybody and everything was more irritating than it used to be. Nuala couldn’t seem to pass a car without the driver texting on their phone, and every café she went into was packed with diners watching videos and listening to music without a set of earphones between them. Maybe it was the menopause or maybe it was her family skedaddling off to the other side of the country, but every now and again she feared she would have to stop leaving the house, lest she go on a murderous rampage.
And then, just as quickly as the rage came on her, the apathy took over.
Nuala sighed.
The first school bell had yet to ring and she could easily have taken to the bed.
‘Ten minutes with Beverley then you knock on that door, okay? Any excuse will do. Someone’s got a pigtail caught in a pencil sharpener, the Minister for Education’s on the phone. Whatever. Just get her out of here.’
..................
Beverley was out of the Range Rover and pointing the fob at it when she noticed the white van parked two spaces down from her. The older Whitehead boy – Argo? Anglo? Some made-up name like that – was unlocking the back of it.
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Mum,’ pleaded Amelia, quickening her step to keep up. ‘Please! Don’t embarrass me.’
The older Whitehead boy was the one who’d been in the car when his drunken father got behind the wheel and killed Mike Roche Junior, not to mention leaving another minor disabled. He’d been in Ella’s year, they all had, which meant he’d graduated in the summer. Why he was still in Cooney was beyond her. And what was he doing in Glass Lake, of all places? Clearly none of the Whiteheads had an ounce of shame.
‘These parking spaces are for staff only,’ she snapped. ‘You’ve absolutely no right to park here.’
‘But, Mum, you’re not—’
Beverley yanked her daughter in closer, cutting her off. The boy continued to stand there, mouth open like a dead fish.
‘Well? Have you anything to say for yourself?’
‘I’m …’
Beverley put her free hand on her hip. Charlie Whitehead’s sons might have got his looks but neither had inherited his gift of the gab.
‘I’m working here,’ he said eventually.
Beverley guffawed. ‘At Glass Lake? I doubt that very much.’
‘Honestly, Mrs Franklin, I am.’
‘You’re telling me Nuala Patterson hired you? That’s a barefaced lie and you know it.’
‘Seamus McGrath hired me. I’m helping him out for a few days.’
‘Seamus?’ she echoed. The lad nodded dumbly. Yet another bone to pick with the school caretaker. Was a Yellow Brick Road really too much to ask for? Not bronze, not gold – yellow. She was asking the caretaker for a basic colour, not a utopian impossibility.
She peered into the van and saw a ladder and some buckets. The Whiteheads’ vehicle had been spotted on the road over from theirs a couple of times recently and when Beverley found out which of her neighbours was throwing work his way, she’d be making a swift cut to the Franklins’ Christmas card list.
‘You …’ she said, steadying herself. He began to wither under her stare. ‘… and your whole family …’
‘Mum,’ whined Amelia, tugging at her hand, ‘please.’
A scourge, that’s what the Whiteheads were. Beverley had graciously cast Woody in the school musical, and how had he repaid her? By exploiting her daughter, that was how. She could have swung for his brother. But Beverley did not do out of control. She did poised and enviable. This morning had been a blip. She did not enjoy feeling so feral.
Without another word, she yanked her daughter towards the heavy double doors that led to Glass Lake’s foyer.
8
••••••
Mrs Rodgers pretended she didn’t see the three people standing in line and walked straight up to the counter of Regan’s Chemist. She slumped her shoulders as she did so, to remind the other customers that she was old. She didn’t have as much time left for queuing as they did.
Gerry Regan looked from her to the small line and hesitated. She flashed her dodderiest smile, the one that exposed the upper right-hand side of her mouth, where she was missing a tooth. The other customers – who were all young and distracted by the phones in their hands – weren’t going to make a fuss, so neither was he.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Regan.’ The bruise on his face was at the early stages but there was no pretending she couldn’t see it. She allowed her smile to crumple into deep concern. She would permit two minutes for this exchange. ‘Oh no, Mr Regan. What has happened to your eye?’
‘Altercation with a lorry driver this morning, I’m afraid,’ he said, bringing his hand up to what promised to be a significant shiner. ‘I made some polite enquiries into the weight of his vehicle and whether it was permitted to be on Reilly’s Pass, which of course it was not, and he swung for me.’
‘That’s shocking. You poor creature. Did you get his licence plate number?’
‘I did. I was reciting it to myself, to ensure I remembered, when he hit me. I was on the bike, you see, no room for pen and paper in my cycling gear.’
‘Well, of course,’ said Mrs Rodgers, who had seen the pharmacist’s cycling gear. There wasn’t room for imagination, never mind a notebook.
‘If he thinks I have concussion, he can think again. I’ve already phoned it in. And I’ve started a petition.’ Mr Regan pushed the clipboard towards her. To live in Cooney was to be forever signing petitions.
