Angels (20 page)

“She's worried about you and if it doesn't stop raining soon she's going to wind up in a mental hospital.”

“Nothing about me coming home?”

“Nothing.”

“Good.”

“So did Lara give you a suit for tomorrow?”

“Yes. Come on.” I picked a shirt up off the floor. “I'll help you hang up some of this stuff.”

“All right,” she sighed, grabbing a bundle of hangers. “Lara has a great apartment, hasn't she?”

“Yeah.” Then I thought of those porn-film titles again. “You know, Lara's the first lesbian I've ever met,” I admitted. “At least, knowingly.”

“Me too.”

“I wonder…” I trailed off.

“What they get up to in bed?”

“No!” Well, yes.

“Dildos, I imagine. Oral sex. Christ, I wouldn't be into it myself,”

Emily said with distaste.

I hung up a few more items, then I said, “But everyone is a little bit bi, aren't they? That's what scientists say.”

Emily paused in her hanging up and gave me a forbidding look.

“No,” she said firmly. “Don't even go there.”

WHEN THE REAL
rabbits had finally shown up, at least Garv hadn't pretended they were a present for me. I'd heard stories of men doing that—buying a kitten or a puppy that they'd really wanted for themselves and presenting it to their girl. Thus adding insult to injury, because it means the girl not only has to share her home with an unwanted animal but also has to feed and clean up after the little bastard.

Garv arrived home from work one evening carrying a cardboard box lined with straw, which he placed on the table.

“Maggie, look,” he whispered, clearly about to burst with excitement.

Torn between dread and curiosity, I looked in, to see two pairs of pink eyes looking up at me, two little noses twitching. “Funnylooking pizzas,” I said. He was supposed to have brought home our dinner.

“Sorry,” he said, full of good nature. “I forgot. I'll go back out.”

“They're rabbits,” I accused.

“Baby ones,” he grinned. A girl at work had been giving them away, he said.

“We don't have to keep them if you don't want to, but I'll do all the taking care of them,” he promised.

“But what about when we—”

“Go on holiday? Dermot will mind them.”

ANGELS / 155

Dermot was his younger brother. Like most younger brothers, he'd do anything for money.

“You've thought it all through.”

Instantly his glow began to fade. “I'm sorry, baby. I shouldn't have just landed them on you like that. I'll give them back tomorrow.”

Then I felt
awful
. Garv loved animals. He was affectionate and indulgent and he wasn't just saying he'd return them so that I'd relent. His contrition was genuine.

“Wait,” I said. “Let's not be hasty.”

And so began the year of the rabbit.

The black-and-white one was a boy and the pure white one was a girl.

“What'll we call them?” Garv asked, holding them both on his lap.

“I don't know.”
Bloody Nuisance
? “Hoppy? What else do rabbits do?”

“Eat carrots? Ride rings around each other?”

Eventually we decided that the girl would be Hoppy and the boy would be Rider.

I would have preferred not to have two (well, I would also have preferred not to have one), but Garv said it would be cruel to keep just one, that he'd be lonely. And because I didn't want them breeding like…well,
rabbits
, I insisted that they get done. The first of many visits to the vet.

Before we did anything else, though, we had to buy them a hutch.

“Can't we just keep them in the garden?” I asked. But apparently not. They'd burrow under the garden wall and into the next-door neighbors', and off out into the wide, blue yonder. So we bought a hutch, the biggest in the pet shop.

Most days, after work, Garv let them out for a run around the garden, to give them a taste of the wild. Although trying to catch them to put them back in the hutch was like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube. They were
impossible
. I remember standing at the kitchen window watching Garv belting around outside in his sober charcoal suit. Each time 156 / MARIAN KEYES

he'd almost caught up with them, they'd spring away from his outstretched arms and the chase would begin again. All we needed was the
Benny Hill Show
theme music and for someone to fling a sack of ball bearings on the ground. It was hilarious. Sort of.

Don't get me wrong, they were very cute in their way. And when they hopped over to see me when I got home from work, it was sweet. And Garv had a way of carrying them, with their heads over his shoulder, the way you'd burp a baby, that used to have me in convulsions. Especially, for some reason, when it was Hoppy: she did a great wide-eyed expression of surprise that was very funny.

We ascribed them personalities, the way we had with the slippers.

Hoppy was a mischievous flirt, Rider a smooth ladies' man with an arsenal of cheesy chat-up lines.

But on one of their turns around the garden, the little bastards ate my lupines, the lupines that I'd planted myself, with my bare hands (nearly) and I'm afraid I slightly took agin' them. I also resented having to shop for them—if we hadn't managed to get to the supermarket for ourselves, we could just get Indian takeout delivered. But we couldn't get away with ordering a couple of extra onion bhajis for them. Instead, we were obliged to make regular trips to the Bad Place for their bags of carrots, heads of parsley, and funny pellet things.

Then came the day when Garv marched in, waved something at me, and declared, “Present!”

I whipped it from his hand, tore off the paper bag…and stared.

“It's a bit of wood,” I said.

“To gnaw on,” he said, as if he thought he was making sense.

“To gnaw on,” I repeated.

He understood before I did, and couldn't stop laughing. “Not for you. For Rider!”

More presents followed: a ball, a mirror for the hutch, a baby-blue clutch bag (for me, so I wouldn't feel left out).

ANGELS / 157

And one day I got home from work to find half the garden dug up.

“What's going on? Have you murdered someone?”

But the truth wasn't much more palatable—Garv was making something called a run because he felt it was cruel to confine the boyos to a hutch.

In a way it was a relief that Garv had dug up the garden to make the run: at least we'd never have to worry about cutting the grass again. But in another way it wasn't relief at all. I thought he was getting too fond of Hoppy and Rider. But when I mentioned it to Donna, she told me to get a grip on myself. Who ever heard of anyone being jealous of a pair of rabbits?

Not long after, Hoppy got sick and Garv was clearly worried.

He took a morning off from work to take her to the vet, who diagnosed an infection due to—of all the weird things—misaligned teeth. It was no big deal: the vet clipped her teeth and prescribed a course of antibiotics. But a few days later we went out for dinner with Donna and Robbie, and Garv began telling them about Hoppy's bout. About how he'd known something was wrong because she was normally alert and reactive, but she wouldn't even gnaw on her new piece of wood. Donna and Robbie made sympathetic noises, and Garv went on about Hoppy's high temperature and how Rider had tried to tempt her to eat a bite or two of onion bhaji (one very busy week, when we hadn't had time to go to the supermarket, we'd discovered that they actually quite liked them).

As Garv went on, Donna's and Robbie's indulgent expressions faded and hardened and I had a tight place in my stomach that no amount of wine swallowing would dissolve.

“How's work?” Donna eventually interrupted.

“Work?” He sounded confused. “
My
work? But you never let me talk about my work, it's too boring.” As enlightenment dawned, he began to laugh. “Oh, right, I see, I'll shut up about them.”

Donna rang me early the next day and said, “Maggie, I 158 / MARIAN KEYES

think you might be right, he
is
a bit too devoted. Stick him on to me there, I'll tell him myself.”

The crunch came not long after when my sister Claire came to visit and remarked on the amount of rabbit paraphernalia lying around. Garv was putting them into their traveling baskets to take them to the vet for their shots.

“Shots?” Claire exclaimed. “It's almost as bad as having a child!”

SCENE: Sunny day. White clapboard house, with small front yard. Front door opens. Two women emerge. One, tall, carrying an empty folder and wearing a jacket that bags slightly in the chest area. The other, short, skinny, well-dressed, smoking manically.

Short girl
: I need to go to the bathroom again.

Tall girl
: No, Emily, you don't!

They cross the lawn just as the sprinklers spurt high jets of water from the ground, catching the short girl and extinguishing her cigarette. She shrieks. Like a reaction in a scientific experiment, her glossy, shiny hair immediately begins to fuzz and bulk.

Cue laughter
.

Oh, stop!

I couldn't stop thinking in screenplay speech. Emily had practiced on me long and hard into the night, and between appointments at the hairdresser's and the reiki practitioner's, through the morning also.

We were both in shreds.

I was
literally
having a bad-hair day. As usual, I woke up feeling as if it was the end of the world. And that was even before I went to the bathroom and saw my hair—what re 160 / MARIAN KEYES

mained of it. When I thought of all the hair I'd lost, the eight or nine inches that had dropped to the floor and been peremptorily swept away, I cried. Interestingly enough, I wasn't crying because my haircut was symbolic of the end of my marriage. I'm fairly sure I was crying because in all my excitement at Dino's, I'd gone and signed up for a high-maintenance cut and now it was too late.

Bloody hairdressers. It always looks great when you leave the salon. (Well, it doesn't, but let's not get into the times when we've been fighting back tears even while we've been shoving them a tip.

I'm talking about the rare occasions when we're actually happy with what they've done.)

Everything is dandy until the first time we wash it, and for love or money we cannot re-create that just-out-of-the-salon look. Despite all the hype, there is one way and one way only to create that just-out-of-a-salon look and that's when you're just out of a salon. Even now, all I'd done with my hair was sleep on it funny and already I'd lost control of it.

It took water, styling mousse, and a hair dryer at its highest setting before I could bring it to heel.

Emily had taken the precaution of taking her own hair to the hairdresser's. She returned briefly and walked around the house saying, “…camera pans over a pair of breasts in a T-shirt…” Then she went out again.

While she was gone, the sweet, squeaky girl from Mort Russell's office called for her.

“I'm afraid she's away from her desk right now.” She'd gone to her reiki—now I knew what
that
was—practitioner. “Can I help?”

This time she wanted to know, for identification purposes, what our DNA makeup was. Well, almost. She needed me to fax over copies of our driving licenses because she needed to see our photos.

“I'm sorry to bother you like this,” she said, “but we've got to be security conscious.”

I could well believe it. There was every chance that crazed scriptwriters, desperate for an appointment, could try ANGELS / 161

to break in, hold studio chiefs hostage, and force them to listen to their pitch.

“See you at three-thirty,” she said.

She'd been so lovely every time we'd spoken that, on impulse, I asked her her name.

“Flea,” she replied.

Instantly I realized my mistake. I'd been far too friendly. Crossed the professional boundaries. Stung, I mumbled a good-bye and hung up. Flea indeed! Oh, make fun of the poor Irish idiot just off the plane. And what's your surname, lovey? Pit? Bite? Bag?

“Camera pans over a pair of breasts,” I heard. Emily was back.

“My chakras were in a terrible state,” she announced. “Good thing I went.”

Then she started muttering to herself in the mirror. “The universe is benign, they will option my script, the universe is benign, they will option my script…” She varied this affirmation with, “The perfect pitch is twenty-five words or less, the perfect pitch is…”

“I thought you didn't believe in chakras,” I said. “And don't you hate all that New Age stuff?”

Her answer humbled me. “When you're desperate, you'll try anything.”

In the end I talked Emily into wearing her new outfit. She brushed her hair for the millionth time, put on the umpteenth layer of lip gloss, then we squared our shoulders and sallied forth. Just in time for the sprinklers to spring into sudden life and launch their jets directly at Emily. As her hair expanded like bubble bath, she almost had hysterics.

“It's a disaster,” she shrieked. “I'm going to have to cancel!”

“Quick, back to the hair dryer,” I suggested.

“We don't have time,” she wailed. “The only thing I can do is to keep combing it. But I've got to drive!”

“We'll take my car.”

162 / MARIAN KEYES

“We can't take your crappy rental car, what'll they think of us?”

“Actually, we can't take my crappy rental car because our parking space is allocated for your license-plate number,” I remembered.

“I'll drive, you comb,” ordered Emily.

We sped across L.A., Emily talking to herself, her face like flint, me combing energetically and doing my best to ignore the startled looks we were getting at stoplights.

The studio, like most of the studios, was in a place called the valley. From what I could gather, most people would rather live in a cardboard box in Santa Monica than in a five-bathroom mansion in the valley. Apparently, it was more embarrassing than liebfraumilch, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and mullet hairdos put together, and one of the worst insults you could level at anyone was “valley girl.”

After we'd been driving about forty-five minutes, Emily interrupted her affirmations. “This is the valley.”