Angels (17 page)

“
I
left
him
, you know.” My attempt at bravado didn't really convince. Especially when I tagged on, “Well, it was really a case of constructive dismissal.”

“Let's go out!” Emily suggested when she saw me looking longingly at the phone again. So we went to a movie. All 128 / MARIAN KEYES

of us except Desiree, who stayed in the house, wearing a long-suf-fering, stoical, I-forgive-you-my-tormentors, I'll-watch-it-when-it-comes-out-on-video face.

There seemed to be several hundred cinemas in Santa Monica, a bit like the way pubs are in Ireland. I sat between Justin and Troy, who tried to ply me with foodstuffs. I shook my head when Justin tilted a bucket of popcorn the size of a garbage can toward me and I waved away Troy's bumper crop of Twizzlers.

“No?” he whispered in surprise.

“No.”

“Gimme your wrist.” I extended my arm and he carefully tied a thick, red licorice lace around it.

“In case of emergency,” he said, and his teeth flashed in the dark of the cinema.

There was never any chance that I'd lose myself and forget my troubles in the film. Especially when it turned out to be a stylish, violent, highly complicated thriller, with bad cops and good villains double-crossing and even triple-crossing each other. I was too dazed to keep up with the myriad changes of allegiance. Unlike Troy, who seemed thoroughly immersed in it: when someone who'd been a baddie turned out to be a goodie, he laughed a delighted “Aha!”

and made me jump. On the other side of me, Justin's hand moved from his popcorn bucket to his mouth and back again in a regular rhythm that I found deeply soothing. He paused from this pattern only to whisper, when an innocent—and I must admit, quite plump—regular Joe got caught in the crossfire, “That should've been me!” Or when a goodie-turned-baddie's dog's ear got severed by a baddie-turned-goodie-turned-baddie, he confided, “Ew! Boy, am I glad Desiree isn't here to see
this
.”

As we all trooped out at the end, Troy asked, “Did we enjoy that?”

“I couldn't really follow it,” I admitted.

“Yeah,” he sighed, sympathetically. “Concentration shot to hell?”

ANGELS / 129

“I'm not sure that's the only reason,” I confessed. “To be honest, I can never really keep up with the twists and turns of that kind of movie.”

And I always got Garv to explain it to me at the end, I thought, but didn't say.

It's funny what strikes you, but what seemed terrible and final and wrenching was not that I'd lost my life companion, not that Garv and I would never have a baby, but that I'd have to go through the rest of my life not understanding thrillers.

That, and never getting the hang of exchange rates: Garv was like a calculator made human. “There's three of them to the pound,”

he'd explain, giving me a handful of foreign currency at the start of a vacation.

“Okay, so to find out what things really cost, I multiply by three.”

“No, you divide by three,” he'd say patiently.

So as well as not understanding thrillers, all I had to look forward to was an empty future being cheated by souk traders.

“You've got to talk about it,” Emily insisted, once we were home and everyone had gone. “I know you don't want to, but it'll help, I swear to you.”

You see, now that things were going well for Emily, she had renewed energy to focus on me and my drama.

“You Californians,” I scorned. “You talk about everything. Like it helps.”

“Better than putting a lid on things and trying to bury them.”

Emily knew me too well.

“What good will talking do?” I said helplessly. “Maybe I should never have married him.”

“Maybe you shouldn't,” she replied evenly.

She'd said it to me at the time. When I'd gotten engaged, instead of shrieking with excitement and making vulgar jokes about seeing my ring, she'd said soberly, “I'm afraid you're playing it safe by marrying Garv.”

130 / MARIAN KEYES

“I thought you liked him!” I'd said, wounded.

“I love him. Look, I just want you to be sure. Think about it.”

But I didn't think about it because I thought I knew what I wanted. In retrospect, I'd sometimes wondered if maybe she'd been right. Maybe I had settled, maybe I had played it too safe. But it hadn't all been bad…

“We had a lovely time together for years.” I could hear my voice shaking.

“So what happened?”

I was silent for too long.

“Go back to the beginning and talk it right through. Go on, it'll help to make sense of it all. Start with the rabbits,” she prompted.

“Come on, you've never told me fully.”

But I didn't want to talk about any of it. Especially not the rabbits. Because you can't really tell the rabbit story without people laughing and I was in no state to start making fun of the reasons my marriage had broken down.

It had begun, innocently enough, with a pair of slippers. What happened was, one Christmas someone gave me a pair of slippers that looked like black, furry rabbits. I was extremely fond of them.

Not only did they keep my feet warm but they were cute and cuddly without the shame of them actually being stuffed animals. In the event of any confusion, I could point out that they had a function and that I wasn't one of those women who crammed her bedroom windowsill with an army of fluffy dolphins, pastel donkeys, and squashy chickens who looked down, with their button eyes, on people visting the house and freaked the life out of them. Oh no.

I had a pair of slippers, that's all.

I think Garv had been reading
Anna Karenina
at the time, because when he gave them personalities, they were both Russian. Valya and Vladimir. I could never tell them apart: but Garv said that Vladimir had a funny ear and Valya's nose was shaped like a cross section of Toblerone. (Why he couldn't have just said triangular, I'll never know.)

Valya was a bit of a femme fatale and often said stuff like ANGELS / 131

“I hef hed menny, menny luffers.” Sometimes she gave me advice on what to wear.

Vladimir—who sounded almost identical to Valya—was a party apparatchik who'd been stripped of his privileges. He was very gloomy, but then so was Valya.

Garv began to conduct the occasional conversation through the medium of the slippers. He'd stick his hand inside and wiggle it about and say, “I em goink to the Vestern-style supermerket. I em queueink for menny, menny days. Vot vill I get for you?”

“Who'm I talking to? Valya or Vladimir?”

“Valya. Vladimir's the one with the funny ear and—”

“—Valya's nose looks like a cross section of Toblerone, I know.

We need pizzas, toothpaste, cheese…”

“Woadka?” Valya suggested hopefully. Valya had a bit of a problem. So, coincidentally, did Vladimir.

“No woadka, but you might as well get a couple of bottles of wine.”

“Bleck sea caviar?”

“No.”

“Bleck bread?”

“Actually, we
could
do with a loaf of bread.”

“I em helpink you.” Valya was pleased with herself.

I didn't mind. To be honest, I thought it was cute. Up to a point.

But perhaps I should never have indulged him because after that it was only a short step to the real rabbits.

As briefly as I could, I told Emily about the slippers. Then, ignoring her complaints that the story was only heating up, begged to be allowed to go to bed on the grounds that I'd scratched my arm so much it was bleeding.

THE PHONE WOKE
me. I was out of bed and into the front room before I realized it. In the wake of the previous day's phone calls, my nerves were like taut elastic. I was fully expecting someone like my first primary school teacher or the president of Ireland to call and tell me about Garv and The Girl.

“Hello,” I said suspiciously.

A sweet, squeaky voice rattled off, “Mort Russell's office calling for Emily O'Keeffe.”

“One moment, please.” I matched the girl's efficient tone.

But Emily was in the bathroom, and when I knocked on the door, she wailed, “Oh no. I'll have to call them back. I'm dehairing my legs and I'm at a vital point.”

When I returned to the phone, some instinct stopped me from sharing this with Mort Russell's office.

“I'm afraid she's away from her desk right now. Can I help?”

Could Emily call Mort? the sweet, squeaky girl requested.

I wrote down the number and said, “Thank you.”

“Thank
you
,” she replied, as sunny as you please.

Unlike me. I'd woken up at twenty past three, my heart pounding with an irresistible need to ring Garv. I'd tiptoed into the front room and, in the dark, dialed our home number. I just wanted to TALK to him. About what, I wasn't really sure. But there had been a time when he'd behaved as

ANGELS / 133

though he loved me more than anyone had ever loved anyone. I think I needed to know that even if he loved this new woman, he didn't love her as much as he'd once loved me.

With a click and a rush of static, the phone began to ring on another continent and agitatedly I gnawed at the Twizzler around my wrist. But there was no one at home: I'd done my math wrong.

Ireland was eight hours ahead, so Garv was at work. My desperation had already begun to cool by the time I dialed again and was put through to his desk, so when it transpired that he wasn't there and that all I could do was leave a message on his voice mail, it threw me:
Leave a message after the tone
.

I decided not to. I crept back to bed, finished the Twizzler, and wished I had several hundred more. I'd had some black times in my past, but I wasn't sure I had ever before felt so wretched. Would I ever get over it, would I ever feel normal again?

I seriously doubted it, even though I'd seen other people recover from terrible things. Look at Claire, her husband leaving her
the
same day
, the same day, she'd given birth to their first child. And she'd recovered. Other people got married and got divorced and got over it and got married again, and talked about “My first husband” in calm, easygoing tones. They sounded as if not one twinge of pain had ever been felt getting from then—when he was actually someone who mattered—to now, when he was just a walk-on part in your past. People adapted and moved on. But as I curled into a tight ball in the dark, I had a profound fear that I wouldn't. That I'd stay stuck, just becoming older and weirder. I'd stop getting my hair dyed and I'd end up moving back home to look after my aged parents until I was old myself. No one on our road would talk to us, and when children came to the house on Halloween, we'd pretend we weren't in. Or else pour buckets of cold water from an upstairs window onto their masked and sheeted finery. Our car would be twenty years old and in perfect condition and the three of us would wear hats when we went out for a drive—when Dad would

134 / MARIAN KEYES

insist on taking the wheel, even though he'd have shrunk so much that all the other drivers could see of him was the top of his hat peeping over the dash. People would talk about me: “She was married once. Used to be quite normal, they say. Hard to believe now, of course.”

The phone rang again, jolting me back to the present. Emily's agent, this time. Well, not actually David Crowe in person, of course, but some lackey who worked for him, setting up a lunchtime appointment.

Eventually Emily emerged from the bathroom. “Not a single hair remaining. Now where's his number?”

I handed her the piece of paper, which she kissed. “How many people would KILL to have Mort Russell's direct line?”

She made the call, got put straight through, and then laughed and said, “Thank you, and I totally love your work
too
,” a whole lot.

Then she hung up and declared, “Guess what?”

“He trooooly, trooooooly loves your script?”

“Yip.” Then she seemed to notice me.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said sadly.

“There was another call,” I said. “David Crowe's office. Will you have lunch with him at the Club House at one o'clock?”

“The Club House?” She clutched me, as if something terrible had happened. “He said the Club House?”

“It was a ‘she’ actually, but yes. What's the problem?”

“I'll tell you what the problem is,” she called out, disappearing and fast reappearing with a book. She flicked through the pages, then read, “‘The Club House. Power brokers' lunchtime haunt where Hollywood's main men break bread and cut deals. Good steaks and salads…’ Never mind that…But you heard what it said.

‘
Power brokers' lunchtime haunt
.’ And I'm going there!”

With that, she burst into tears, the way she had when she'd first found out Hothouse wanted her to pitch. When ANGELS / 135

the storm of tears passed, she surprised me by asking, “Would you like to come?”

“But I couldn't. It's a working lunch.”

“So what? Would you like to come?”

“Yeah, okay. But will he let you bring me?”

“Sure! This is the honeymoon period, when they can refuse me nothing. Might as well make the most of it. I was too clueless to capitalize on it the last time. We'll pretend you're my assistant.”

“Won't he think it's weird that I know almost nothing about Hollywood?”

“Well, then, don't ask any questions. Just laugh and nod a lot.

Please come.”

“Okay.”

A quick phone call later and the deal was done.

The weather had changed. Instead of blue skies, the sun shone through thick cloud cover, glaring at the world with a dirty mustard light. My first five days in L.A. seemed like a charmed time by contrast. Not only had the weather been benign, but so had my state of mind. At the time I'd thought I was unhappy, but I was far messier now. And to make matters worse, I could no longer get away with blaming any of my feelings of fear or alienation on jet lag. These were
mine
.

Emily and I drove along Santa Monica Boulevard toward Beverly Hills, and the filthy sky got worse the farther we drove inland.

Smog, I understood, with a sudden leap of near excitement.
So
L.A.

As iconic as palm trees and plastic surgery.