This Year's For Me and You, page 3
In our second week a major scandal erupted when Hannah was rumoured to have kissed another house leader, Colm O Ríordán, who had a girlfriend back home; typically Hannah was blamed for it and it was the talk of the college. Her friends were standing by her, but there was another large faction all gossiping about her behind her back, as I found out one Friday evening when I was brushing my hair in the girls’ toilets during the weekly ceilidh dance.
‘Is there no shame on her?’ I heard one of the friends, a Mean Girl type, say as she fluffed out her long blonde mane and applied sticky lip gloss. She spoke in Irish as we all did; if you were heard speaking a single sentence of English you got a warning, and a second got you sent home. They continued talking about Hannah in very unflattering terms. I made a mental note to remember the word she used for shame but also thought the girl could have asked herself the same question; she was supposed to be Hannah’s friend.
‘Tusa,’ the other girl said to me, quite rudely I thought – you. ‘Are you not a leader? Is there any story at the meetings – about Hannah and Colm?’
I turned to face them. I knew what I wanted to say – ‘if I knew I wouldn’t tell you’ – but in the heat of the moment I couldn’t remember the right conditional tense. Instead I said, ‘There is no story at all. It’s all made upwards.’
I wasn’t even sure if that was true, any more than I knew the right word for ‘made up’, but it didn’t matter; I hated that kind of gossip. The girl raised her eyebrows, and muttered, ‘Take it easy’, before they all filed out, talking under their breath and then laughing loudly.
Minutes later one of the cubicles opened and – just like in a movie – Hannah herself came out. ‘Hi,’ she said, nodding to me. She didn’t look embarrassed, or indignant; she looked as calm and confident as ever, though I was shocked as I realized she must have overheard everything. She wasn’t gorgeous exactly, but she was very attractive, with long honey-blonde curls and a triangular, almost foxy face.
‘Hi!’ I replied. I stowed my hairbrush in my trusty JanSport backpack and was walking out, when behind me Hannah said, ‘Excuse me? Celeste?’
I turned round, surprised that she knew my name.
Hannah said, ‘I’m trying to write a new song for the concert. Would you give me a hand with it?’
‘I would,’ I said, intrigued and also a little bit flattered. It was a big challenge to write a new comic song for your house to perform at the end-of-camp concert; if it was any good, it would be passed down and sung by other students for years to come. I wasn’t sure what made Hannah think I would be any good at it, but I was happy to give it a try.
On Saturday we all went to the beach after lunch; Hannah came and found me and we went off to sit on a little rise of grass overlooking the breakers. There were teachers there, and I wasn’t expected to supervise the students in my house, but I found my eyes straying to them anyway out of habit.
‘Do you like being a house leader?’ Hannah asked me, following my gaze.
I hesitated, wondering if it was safe to admit that the answer was yes. It was no exaggeration to say that it had been the making of me: transforming me from a shy, mousy fifteen-year-old to a more confident, articulate Celeste. I loved the responsibility – teaching the younger kids the college songs, refereeing squabbles and helping with homesickness. I also loved the sense of being in the know, meeting the other leaders and hearing all the gossip first-hand, sometimes from the teachers themselves.
‘I do,’ I said. ‘Do you not?’
‘I used to, long ago, but not now. I had to report on someone last year for speaking English, and she was sent home. It was awful.’
I shivered at the idea. I had never had to do that, but I knew that I would have to if it came to it.
‘Why did you come back so?’ I asked curiously.
Hannah sighed. ‘I wanted to get out of the house, and this was the only trip that my parents would pay for.’ She added, ‘I’m taking French and Spanish for the Leaving. I thought maybe I could get a summer job in Paris or Madrid. But where did I end up? The Cuan.’ She laughed suddenly, and I joined in.
‘Hm,’ I said. ‘Maybe we could put that in the song.’
‘What do you mean?’
I sang her last words to the tune of an old song, ‘Only You’ by The Flying Pickets. ‘You won’t know it, I’m sure,’ I added, slightly embarrassed since 1980s music was very uncool. I only knew these songs because my older cousins had the original tapes of Now That’s What I Call Music, and I had played them over and over while staying at their house in Sligo one summer.
‘Yes, I know it! I have that tape! With “Radio Ga Ga” – and “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”!’ Hannah said. ‘I love it!’
So that was how we became friends. Not only did we discover a shared love of 1980s music, we also found a shared sense of humour, writing a song that we both thought was pure genius. It was set to the tune of ‘Only You’ and was a lament about being stuck in the rainy west of Ireland instead of sunny Europe. The chorus translated as: ‘All I wanted was to go to France/All I wanted was to go to Spain/But where did I end up? The Cuan.’ By the time we’d finished writing the whole thing, we had laughed so hard we could barely speak and we knew that we had a mega hit on our hands.
‘I did kiss him by the way,’ she said casually, as we were packing away our notebooks. ‘But I didn’t know he had a girlfriend.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said, not knowing quite what to say in either language. I added, ‘I’m not a gossip.’
She repeated the word I’d used for gossip – cúlchainteoir, literally ‘behind-talker’ – and asked me how you spelled it, before writing it down in her notebook. I noticed that she was left-handed and wrote with a beautiful slanting script. Her notebook was also covered with intricate drawings, flowers and leaves and stars, a cut above the usual doodles that most people did. Something else occurred to me, as I watched her write. I said, ‘He’s the one who has the girlfriend. Why is the blame not all on him?’
Hannah looked at me with an expression that I thought I would best describe as ‘interested’. She looked as if this hadn’t occurred to her – as indeed it had only just occurred to me.
‘Your Irish is very good,’ she said. ‘Are you from Dublin?’
‘Yes, I live in Mount Merrion. But my parents are from Sligo.’ I didn’t bother explaining that my dad was from just over the border in Mayo, knowing that the distinction would be lost on her, like on most Dubliners.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘I live in Dalkey, so not too far from you. Would you like to meet, when we have returned to Dublin?’
‘Of course,’ I said, though I couldn’t really imagine such a thing happening. But it had. We had met up twice for a mooch around the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre and now I was staring at a text inviting me to her party.
Hearing my mother’s key in the door, I slipped downstairs, wanting her company and to tell her about the invitation. She was taking off her smart camel coat and washing her hands thoroughly. Mum taught science in a girls’ school, thankfully not mine, and she was fanatical about not catching colds; she hated calling in sick and letting a substitute mess up her carefully laid lesson plans.
I stood for a minute to watch her, dressed in her brass-buttoned navy blazer and jeans, stepping into her Donegal-tweed slippers. One of her students had told me she was one of the most stylish teachers at her school, working a late Princess Diana look with lots of blazers and houndstooth, plus jeans, extremely daring at forty-eight. I felt a rush of affection and ran to give her a hug – something I rarely did any more.
‘What’s all this, pet?’ she asked mildly, as she hugged me back.
I hadn’t intended on telling her about the row with the girls, but it all came out and I wiped away a few tears as I told her what had happened. Mum shook her head. ‘I’ve always said that one would buy and sell you,’ she pronounced, referring to Bronagh. ‘And Fiona, she’s as bad. Those tight ponytails. Listen, Celeste. You’re about to start a whole new chapter in your life. You’ll meet dozens of new friends at university. Leave them to do what they want, and you do what you want. This way you can put in a few more hours on your study plan, and beat them in the long run. You can take New Year’s off – we’ll watch the TV together, they’re showing celebrations all over the world.’
‘Well, that’s the thing,’ I said, and explained about Hannah’s party.
‘That’s probably fine … Will her parents be there?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, thinking that from everything I knew about Hannah and her family, it sounded pretty unlikely.
I showed Mum the invitation on the screen of my phone, first translating it from text speak into English. Looking at her peer dubiously I realized, with a sinking heart, that she and my dad might well say they didn’t want me to go. They had never met Hannah and knew nothing about her, except that she lived on Ulverton Road in Dalkey. That was only a few miles as the crow flew, though it would be a bus and DART ride.
‘How would you get home? It’s such an awkward journey.’
‘I’m sure I could stay the night there,’ I said. I hadn’t asked Hannah about this but I couldn’t see her objecting; from what I understood it was mostly just her and her mum, who kept a bohemian open house. Which was very different from my parents. Sometimes I felt that they had used up their last ounce of adventure moving to Dublin in the 1980s. They had faced some terrible times when my dad’s travel company went bust and he was out of work for three years. Now they were new citizens of the Celtic Tiger age, with its spiralling house prices and luxuries such as Tropicana orange juice and CK One perfume. My teen years were so different to theirs; it was as if there were three generations between us instead of one. No wonder they wanted to be cautious with me. But Mum also had a fine sense of pride and I knew that the antics of Bronagh and Fiona would have got her back up. She didn’t want me to have to go back into school tamely in January saying that I had stayed in on my own, when I could boast about going to a party in my new friend’s house.
‘Go to the party, Celeste,’ she said. ‘And I tell you what, you can use my appointment at the Hair Box, on the thirtieth. You don’t want to be going to a New Year’s party looking streelish.’
I smiled at the word; one of those untranslatable ones that meant unkept, loose, messy. ‘Thanks, Mum,’ I said, giving her another hug.
‘Not at all. Put on the kettle there now and tell me. What are you going to wear?’
I did so, feeling madly excited; not just at the party but at the fact that Mum was talking to me more or less the way she would talk to one of her friends. I glanced back at the text, feeling that my real adult life, with college and jobs and independence, was about to begin. I could picture myself, years in the future, striding into a glossy office in a tower building, wearing a business suit and talking into my mobile. And it was all going to start with this party.
3
Some dreams do come true, and I do work in a glossy office in a tower building. Though my dreams didn’t include arriving in the dark or sitting all day at my desk with a sandwich for lunch. It’s 8 a.m. on the day of our Christmas party when I arrive at the offices of WBH Consulting, which is the third name it’s had since I joined as a graduate. So, even though I’ve worked for the same company for fourteen years, at least I’ve technically worked in three different places. And the location has changed too – from our original offices in St James, where we each had our own desks, to this glass tower in Liverpool Street. And I’ve changed too: from starry-eyed junior analyst to associate director, and hopefully, soon, to director.
I flash my lift pass and get the lift fifteen flights up to our floor, where I make a beeline for my usual desk. Hotdesking was introduced three years ago, but I outwit the system by booking the same desk a week in advance every Sunday evening. I have a morning full of meetings, so I put my earphones on to make the most of my hour-long lull to look over a report for a client that’s been drafted by Ahmed, one of the juniors. It has to go out by the end of the day, but he hasn’t done a proper job and it’s in a complete state. I’m very tempted to rewrite it for him, which would be quicker, but one of my targets for this year is to be better at delegating, so instead I write up areas for him to improve.
I want to check on Ahmed’s progress with the report but first I have a call with some clients, for which I use one of the meeting rooms. It takes less time than I’d scheduled, for once, leaving me with a few minutes to stare out of the window at the winter sunrise, illuminating everything with gold and red. I used to love the view from up here, but now it’s like I don’t even see it any more.
Suddenly I’m startled by the sound of my mobile, ringing loudly in the quiet room. Who on earth is calling me at this hour? I check the screen.
‘Hi, Vik,’ I say, answering it immediately. ‘How’s it going?’
I’ve seen him a few times since he moved to Suffolk back in the summer; I haven’t been to visit yet, but I’ve caught him on a few brief trips to London. The New Year’s party is still going ahead but I’ve told him I won’t be coming; I’ll be in Dublin instead. I feel a bit bad about this, but I know that I simply can’t face it. I’ve rarely dreaded anything more than this first New Year’s without Hannah, and the only way I can cope is just to ignore it. Maybe in a few years I’ll change my mind, but for now New Year’s is something that I no longer want to celebrate.
‘I’m very well,’ says Vik, sounding pretty cheerful, as he mostly does. ‘Can you talk?’
‘I mean, sure.’ I look at my watch. It’s 9.35 a.m., not exactly a great time for personal calls, but I’ll always make time for him.
‘So, I was just doing my big supermarket shop for New Year’s,’ he says, ‘and I thought I’d make one more attempt to persuade you to join us.’
I sigh, feeling desperately guilty. ‘I … I’m sorry. You’ve got lots of people coming, though, don’t you?’
‘Sure,’ he says. ‘But it won’t be the same without you.’
‘Who have you got confirmed?’ I ask, hoping nobody else has let him down.
‘Just a select few. Sibéal and Rishi – just them, not the kids. And Mel. With no Pablo obviously.’
‘What do you mean, no Pablo obviously?’ I ask.
I’m stunned when he replies, ‘They broke up – like, two months ago. Didn’t you hear?’
I had no idea. It’s true that I haven’t been in touch with Mel all that much since she moved to Cambridge with Pablo, but still. I feel terrible that I didn’t know.
‘And Patrick and his lady friend Angelika. And that’s it. Did you know Shib is expecting by the way?’
I did know that at least. I got the news via text recently and I texted back many heart emojis, though, I realize now, I haven’t actually spoken to her about it. I’ve avoided her in recent months because the last time we met I felt as if I’d been strong-armed into an unwilling therapy session. A party animal turned earth mother, with a sideline in sage healing, Sibéal is big on drunken 3 a.m. heart-to-hearts. ‘You’re so closed, Celeste,’ she slurred, before suggesting I try Reiki healing. I am really fond of Shib, who’s been our friend since university days, but I can’t handle stuff like that: another reason for staying away.
‘Anyway,’ says Vik, ‘I would really like you to be there. Is there any way we can persuade you? We’ll have board games. And walks.’ He clears his throat. ‘And we’ll make Kir royales,’ he adds, referring to Hannah’s favourite drink. ‘Come on. Join us?’
Suddenly I hear a loud buzzing above my head: it must be a fly. One of my quirks is that I can’t be in a room with a fly; it drives me nuts. I have to drop everything to get rid of it. I don’t want to leave Vik hanging but I also don’t have an answer for him; I want a minute to think before I can give him a proper excuse – or reason.
‘Vik, I’m so sorry. I have to dash, but I promise I will think about it. I’ll call you back, OK? Thanks for phoning.’ I hang up and focus on the source of the noise – way up high at the top of the floor-to-ceiling window. How on earth did it get here anyway? It’s at least ten floors to the nearest open window; it must have got the lift.
Wait a second. It’s not a fly, it’s a bee. I can hear the hum and see the stripes. It’s banging itself against the window hopelessly, as if it’s expecting the glass to melt into an escape hatch. Casting around for something, I grab an empty paper cup and a printout of a report. I hop up on my desk and reach as high as I can, which is quite high, as I’m five foot ten in heels.
Gemma, one of my colleagues, picks this moment to walk into the room. ‘Hey, Celeste, how is your diary? Do you think you could join in on the …’ Her voice trails off as she sees me towering two metres above her. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Just saving a bee. Wait a sec. Yes!’ I trap it between cup and paper with shaking hands, and feel the buzz reverberate in my hands, before it goes quiet. ‘Can you hold the door open? Thanks.’ I slip past her, knowing that she wants me to help her with a pitch or a new project.
A bee in the office. It’s pure coincidence, of course, but my heart is pounding and my hands are sweaty. Because bees are – were – Hannah’s thing.
Carrying my buzzing cargo carefully, I hurry to the lift and press the button with my elbow. Luckily it’s empty, and I reach the ground floor without stinging anyone to death. Luis, on reception, buzzes me through without asking any questions. I rush through the revolving doors and cautiously lift the cup, hoping my little passenger will still be alive.
It is. After a few seconds, it achieves lift-off and weaves drunkenly upwards. Soon it’s a speck high in the air, buzzing towards its unknown destination, oblivious to the passing cars, bikes, the human drones going in and out of their office buildings. I take a deep breath, wondering how on earth it got here, and where it’s going now. Shouldn’t bees be hibernating?
