Again, Rachel, page 6
Eventually she exhaled and let herself speak. ‘Caleb.’
Her ex-husband. He’d left her about a year ago. I’d texted, emailed and called, trying to persuade him to come in to confront her, but all I’d got was a deafening silence. He was probably trying to move on with his life – who could blame him?
However, two of her friends had shown up and their colourful, exhaustive accounts of her drunken capers had horrified her into seeing she wasn’t just a party girl but an actual alcoholic.
‘Other than Simon, how are you?’ I asked.
‘Peachy, Rachel. Yourself?’
I waited.
‘I only came in here to learn how to drink normally.’ Her voice wobbled; I wasn’t sure if it was with grief or fury. ‘But according to you, I can never drink again. My life is over and I’m only twenty-nine.’
‘What about Tegan?’ I asked. ‘What if she’d had the chance to stop drinking?’
‘Stop trying to guilt me!’
Gently, I reminded her, ‘Tegan died. From alcohol poisoning.’ Tegan had been one of her closest friends. After her death, Harlie’s parents and friends had done an intervention, so that Harlie wouldn’t be the next casualty.
‘If Tegan had been given the choice between dying or getting sober, which do you think she’d have taken?’
‘I don’t know.’
She did know. But right now, it was too painful for her to accept.
After she’d left, I opened the file on the newbie who was arriving tomorrow. Ella Black, aged twenty-eight, her particular poison apparently prescription sleeping tablets. She’d been persuaded she needed rehab after she’d taken her boyfriend’s car for a drive at 3 a.m. and crashed it into the front window of a house. Despite breaking her collarbone, she’d climbed out, walked home, gone back to bed and woken up with no memory of what had taken place.
There had also been a few late-night Facebook incidents. She worked as a social media content provider for an airline – a high-status, well-paid job, according to her boyfriend Jonah, the owner of the crashed car.
Twice in the past seven weeks, Ella had posted odd stuff on the company account – a mad-sounding conspiracy theory about the US government and a wildly libellous claim about the ‘real’ father of Prince Louis. If it hadn’t been for Ella’s boss – someone called Boyd – taking them down before they’d gained any traction, she’d definitely have been fired.
It was always a rush when a new person came into my care; the chance to help them change their lives was exciting. The potential, the possibility of it – of them. Sometimes, of course, it didn’t work out. They didn’t think they really were addicts, or they weren’t ready just yet to give up their best friend.
Frequently, they reappeared in the Cloisters a year or two later, a lot more battered, much more humble.
I started sending emails and making calls to the significant people in Ella’s life, trying to establish as much detail as possible. As well as Jonah, there was her best friend Naaz, plus her parents and two brothers. In here, clients gave only the most sanitized, tragic version of themselves. To get the full picture, you had to talk to everyone who knew them. It was a little like investigating a crime.
Speaking of which – Dennis! Although I had several written testimonies on his shenanigans, it was proving difficult to get actual human beings in here, to confront him.
His wife Juliet had blackmailed him into rehab by threatening to leave him. But the few times we’d spoken since, it was clear she’d burnt up all of her energy getting her husband as far as us. What she wanted now was some magical transformation and for Dennis to be delivered back, all fixed. But it wouldn’t take place without her input, so I rang her again.
‘I don’t know, Rachel,’ she said. ‘This coming week is bad …’
‘What about your daughters?’
‘They don’t want to. It was hard enough for them to write those testimonials.’
I’d already been spurned by Dennis’s GP and his best friend and two men he worked with on the local council. They were scared, all of them, and this was far from unusual. Outing a loved one as an addict or alcoholic was usually a painful, protracted process. Because you loved them, you wanted them to get help, but you also wanted to avoid confrontation.
Sometimes a friend or family member arrived here, blazing with righteous fury, all set to tear the addict a new one. But just as often, people were tangled up with guilt and confusion.
‘Juliet, you need to come. Otherwise, you’re wasting your money.’
‘Maybe the week after next. What about …?’ Her voice lightened. ‘You could try his brother, Patch. I’ll text him your number, tell him to call you.’
‘But –’ She was gone.
My trainers had arrived!
‘Three pairs?’ Brianna asked.
‘Different sizes.’
She slid me a knowing glance. ‘That right?’
HemHEM, it’s not healthy to lie, even about the small stuff …
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘They were all beautiful and I couldn’t decide and, as I was paying for one delivery, I might as well take a look at the others …’
‘Other stuff came.’ She pointed a pen at a neat stack of parcels. ‘If I was a betting woman’ – she passed me a small square parcel – ‘I’d guess it was a Pomegranate Noir candle.’
It actually was. Then I read the card. ‘How nice! From – remember Fiona Headley?’
‘Sex addiction? About fourteen months ago? She’s obviously still okay, if she’s sending thank-you candles.’
‘Yep.’
‘I help them too!’ Brianna said. ‘I do all their paperwork perfectly. But I never get sent fancy candles.’
‘Have it.’ I thrust it at her. ‘Seriously, you more than deserve it. I insist!’
‘Okay, thank you, I accept!’
‘Pass me that other package. What is it?’ I read the sender’s details and exclaimed, ‘It’s my planting trowel!’
‘Open it!’
Like me, Brianna ‘dabbled’ in gardening.
Pulling the stainless-steel implement from its packaging, I bounced it in my hands. ‘Feel how light it is!’
She took it from me. ‘Even though the handle is cherrywood.’ We marvelled at such ergo-dynamic efficiency.
‘You can never have too many trowels,’ I said.
‘Or watering cans.’
‘Or hoes.’
‘Or shears.’
And it was the truth. Once you started down the path of buying gardening tools, there was always going to be something fancier, stronger, lighter, in a better metal, or in a nicer colour.
Like I said, I could get addicted to anything.
7
In the staff room, Carey-Jane was microwaving her revolting minestrone soup. The smell would stay on my clothes for the next seventy years. Hell is other people’s food. Trying to numb myself to the different stenches doing battle – Priya’s tuna bap, Yasmine’s beetroot salad – I ate my own (civic-minded, stench-free) hummus and crackers and zoned out for a while, thinking about Luke.
I’d see him tomorrow. Which was almost unimaginable. A wash of gratitude for Quin hit me.
Granted, my feelings for him weren’t what I’d felt for Luke. But how could they be? Quin wasn’t Luke. And I wasn’t the starry-eyed hopeful who’d fallen in love with Luke, but someone older and wiser.
Sometimes, when I considered that things with Quin might not have happened, I went cold.
The relief I’d felt during the LovingKindness exercise at the meditation weekend had been real – but in the twenty-four hours afterwards, I’d wondered if, actually, it had had anything to do with Quin? Perhaps it had just finally been time for me to forgive myself and Quin had appeared as a catalyst? ‘When the pupil is ready, the master will appear.’ (That’s the kind of thing we say in ‘personal-growth’ circles. Nola says it, Anna says it, even Brianna says it occasionally and she believes in nothing unless it can be signed for or filed.)
Less than two days after we’d met, Quin texted, then rang. ‘So. We should meet. Properly.’
His self-assurance was impressive. Entertaining, almost. But to say I was out of the habit with men was a giant understatement. In the previous year I’d gone on a couple of dates, once with a cousin of Brianna’s and another time with a colleague of Claire’s – but only because Brianna and Claire made me. It was no surprise that nothing further had ensued.
‘Let’s do an escape room,’ Quin said. ‘If things go south and we’ve nothing to say to each other, at least we’ll have fun trying to unlock the puzzle.’
‘Hold on there, mister, what if we can’t? Unlock it, I mean? Are we stuck there forever?’
‘Haha, no, they let us out after an hour. You’ve never done one? Okay, wear comfortable clothes, like, no high heels or tight dresses.’
Tight dresses? I thought. You’d be lucky!
‘Is it maths and stuff?’ I asked. ‘Because I’m terrible at that. I don’t want to be responsible for us losing.’
‘Not maths. Basic cop on, mostly. And I’m really competitive; we’ll definitely win.’
Well? I asked the voice in my head. Should I go?
But that day, she remained frustratingly silent.
So I ran the whole thing by my sisters.
‘What age is he?’ Claire asked.
‘Same as me? Maybe a bit younger?’
‘Kids? Ex-wife? Job?’ Margaret asked.
‘I don’t know. But by the law of averages, he’s likely to tick some of the boxes.’
‘And you’re okay if there are kids and an ex-wife?’ Claire asked. ‘Like, you’d better be. At your age, everyone has baggage.’
‘Is he a Feathery Stroker?’ Helen asked. ‘Has to be if he was trying meditation.’
The term ‘Feathery Stroker’ originated years ago in New York after Anna’s friend Jacqui slept with a kind, respectful man who’d spent most of the night stroking her body with featherlight pressure. Unbearable, she’d said. Being flung across a bed and ravaged was much more her thing.
To be fair, many people would adore a session of feathery stroking but the phrase caught on and spread to condemn all straight men who were a bit, I suppose, earnest. Perhaps slightly humourless and pompously right-on: men who pontificated about their homemade tamarind marinade with its secret ingredient (which was always tabasco); who defended public breastfeeding even when there had been no objections; who sought your opinion about putting their cat on Valium or who pronounced ‘artisanal’ in a nonexistent French-meets-Dutch accent (‘oar-tijj-in-owwl’).
I, personally, wouldn’t have been keen on actual feathery stroking but more and more blameless men came to be written off as the circles of definition expanded: those who habitually used the word ‘groceries’; had opinions on fabric softener; spent more than thirty seconds going down on you; or had no reservations about eating a mango in the street.
If any of those misfortunates fancied one of my sisters or their friends, they were laughed out of it. And if you liked a man, the very last thing you wanted was for him to be categorized as a Feathery Stroker.
As Quin had done a meditation weekend, he was about to be written off and – surprising myself – I said, ‘He’s not a Feathery Stroker. He looks like he does triathlons and might bore on about clothes that wick away sweat.’ Hastily I added, ‘But he might not, either.’ (Boring on about clothes that wick away sweat was also suspect.)
Helen groaned. ‘Christ, one of them. Betcha he has a spork.’
And I was in the clear! ‘Might own a spork’ was a different kind of insult.
A quick survey revealed that I was the only one of my sisters who’d never done an escape room.
‘Honestly, it’s such fun!’ Margaret declared. ‘Garv and I did one with the kids. The clock is ticking down and you’re trying to decipher the clues and when you beat the clock – we escaped with like ten seconds to spare – you feel a million dollars!’
‘They’re the most stupid fucking things ever invented,’ Helen said. I took this to mean that she had not beaten the clock.
‘Angelo and I adore them.’ Anna, starry-eyed, was on one of her many visits home to Ireland. She dropped in every six weeks or so, for a weekend. ‘It’s like being a kid again. If you go to a high-spec one, it can blow your mind. We went to a zombie hunt in a deserted mall; it was amazing!’
‘This is Dublin,’ Helen reminded her. ‘We don’t do high spec. Or low spec. Or any spec at all. We’re shit.’
‘Not always,’ Margaret said. ‘Our one was in a science lab. A virus had escaped and we were –’
‘Oh yeah,’ Claire said vaguely. ‘I was at that one. Team-building exercise for the volunteers.’
‘You?’ Margaret said. ‘And did you do all the stuff?’
‘Me? In Simone Rocha? On my knees slithering through a crawl space? Not bloody likely.’
‘Who’s on their knees?’ Mum had come into the sitting room for the first time in this conversation.
‘Rachel’s going on a date,’ Helen volunteered. ‘He’s taking her to an escape room.’
Mum’s face filled with outraged colour. ‘A Shades of Grey thing?’
‘WHAT?’
‘He ties her up and whacks her with a riding crop? She has a ping-pong ball in her mouth and tries to escape? I heard about it on Liveline.’
‘Hashtag for fuck’s sake.’ Helen sighed.
Quin’s escape room was in an industrial park of anonymous grey warehouses beyond the M50.
He had offered to pick me up, but I’d declined. ‘What if things – as you said – go south? Then you had to drive me home? Sitting side by side in your car for forty-five minutes would take ten years off my life.’
‘Mine too. See you there.’
I got to the place on time and there was no sign of Quin. I stared at my phone and watched the numbers click into two minutes late, then three … When he was six minutes late, a car roared into the car park and, with a screech of brakes, pulled up beside me. It was Quin, this time in a jeep.
Late? Two flashy cars? I was having serious doubts.
He jumped out. ‘Sorry I’m late. My son couldn’t find his inhaler.’
A son? Okay, so he has at least one child. ‘Maybe you could have texted?’
‘I did.’ There was an edge to his voice.
A quick look at my phone showed that he had. ‘Why didn’t I see it?’
‘Spotty coverage out here.’ He softened. ‘But, yeah, sorry.’
I needed to know about his kids. ‘Have you just the one child?’
‘Two. A boy of eleven, a girl of thirteen. They’re great. I’m forty-two, been divorced for five years. My ex-wife and I get on.’ Seeming slightly entertained, he said, ‘Anything else you’d like to know before we start?’
I shook my head.
‘Over this way.’ All business, he walked us into one of the giant warehouses. ‘I know it doesn’t look promising,’ he said, ‘but trust me, these guys are great at this.’
Giving me a once-over, he said, ‘You look good.’ At first I thought it was a compliment; then he said, ‘Sensible clothes.’
His gear was the stuff from my memory – dark, sleek athleisure wear.
Setting off down a long, empty corridor, we passed an endless sequence of shuttered rooms, until Quin stopped at a door. ‘Here.’
In a small but fancy reception area, a neatly combed man, wearing black tie and tails, was holding a little round tray that served no obvious purpose. He looked like a butler. Flanking him was a woman wearing the black dress and white apron of a Downton Abbey-style domestic.
‘Mr Quinlivan? Ms Walsh?’ Butler-man asked. ‘Thank goodness you’re here! I am Smythe, purser of the Queen Anne ocean liner. A pair of diamond earrings has disappeared from the stateroom of Lady Glenrother. Suspicion has fallen on young Mabel here, Lady Glenrother’s personal maid.’
At this point Mabel curtsied.
Unsure of the etiquette, I half curtsied back.
‘I know Mabel to be an honest soul,’ Smythe said. ‘She is entirely innocent. But if you do not locate the missing jewels, Mabel will be sent for trial and found guilty.’
‘You’re my only hope,’ Mabel said. ‘Do you accept your mission?’
‘I accept,’ Quin said.
Then they were all looking at me.
Oh God. I didn’t do well with that sort of pressure. ‘Okay, I accept too.’ Jesus, could we not just have gone for ice-cream? Ice-cream dates had become an actual thing and I was so there.
Smythe relieved us of our coats and phones, then declared, ‘You have one hour to find the jewels and save Mabel. The clock starts ticking … now!’ Next thing, we’d been ushered through a doorway and the lock had clicked behind us.
We were in a small, dim room, perhaps an old-timey office. A jacket and official-looking cap hung from a dusty coat-rack. A still-smoking tortoiseshell pipe lay abandoned on a heavy wooden desk, over which a bare yellow bulb was suspended.
In a corner, a heap of vintage leather suitcases and trunks were piled high. On one wall, a noticeboard showed the times of the tides and a sepia photograph of a military man with a luxuriant moustache glared down at us. Another wall was almost entirely covered with leather-bound ledgers.
It was surprisingly un-shit.
‘So we’re looking for keys, switches, weird stuff in paintings, anything.’ Quin was already pulling at the locked drawers in the desk.
‘Like this?’ I held up a heavy brass key.
‘Where d’you get that?’
‘I put my hand into the jacket pocket.’ I indicated the coat-rack.
‘Wow.’ His grey eyes glittered.
Sweeping my gaze around the small room, I homed in on a tray in a corner, bearing a teapot and two china containers. I just knew something was hidden in there. The first container was full of tea leaves, I gave it a good shake, rearranging the leaves and sure enough, a small laminated card saying ‘67’ appeared.
I held it up to Quin.
‘Jesus, you’re a natural!’
I could actually see his respect for me expanding.
‘Hold onto it,’ he said. ‘But first we should try opening this desk with your key.’
