Angels (23 page)

All night I was aware of Kirsty talking to Troy. Even when I couldn't see them, I could sense their closeness and it didn't make me happy.

So the high point of my evening was that they didn't leave together.

She left around midnight and I was hard put not to stand in the middle of the road, roaring after her car, “You can't be in
that
good shape, now can you?”

Troy stayed quite a bit longer and when he finally left, I guess I expected a special good-bye. But he kissed Emily and said, “Baby girl, we'll talk”; then he kissed me in exactly the same friendly way and said, “‘Night, Irish.”

Bit by bit, the crowds drained away until it was nearly just Emily and me left. While we were arranging all the bottles to be recycled, sweeping the splinters off the coffee table, wrapping broken glasses in newspaper, I blurted out—the liquor talking—“I have a confession to make. I have a…crush.” Yes, that was the right word. “Troy. I find him attractive.”

“Take a number and get in line.”

“Oh. It's like that.”

She pointed her finger, winked, and said in an Elvis-type voice,

“Don't fall in love with me, baby, 'cause I'll only break your heart.”

“Don't tell me he said that!”

“Not as such.” She seemed amused. “It's just the way he acts.

You'd swear everyone's crazy about him.

“Although,” said with less certainly, “maybe they are.”

“But he has a big nose,” I protested.

“Don't seem to bother the ladies none.”

“What ladies?”

“With Troy there are always ladies.”

ANGELS / 179

“Are you talking about Kirsty?”

“Sure.”

“But do you know for a fact that there's something going on with them?”

“
Intuitively
, I know for a fact.”

Then I got it. “Has anything ever happened with
you
and Troy?”

“Me and Troy?” She began to laugh. It started as a quite normal chuckle, then progressed to where she was leaning on the kitchen counter. “Sorry,” she said, her face contorted with hysterics, “It's just…the idea of it. Me and Troy!”

She was off again. I picked up a garbage bag and started flinging cans into it.

Later, in bed, I thought about Troy. I'd been surprised, indeed almost put out, when he'd touched my leg. But now I thought about it differently. I savored the memory, replaying it again and again.

The heat of his hand running up my bare skin, the leap of desire at the moment his finger had reached the top of my thigh and turned inward. Again. His finger reaching the top of my thigh and turned inward, his finger reaching the top of my thigh and turning inward…

A dreamy weakness began to steal through me. I'll take my chances, I thought. I've played it safe for too long. I
will
fall in love with him and he's
welcome
to break my heart.

In that halfway state between waking and sleeping, I had a second where my defenses were gone and in rushed thoughts of Garv and The Girl and their public displays of affection. Immediately I made myself think of Troy.

“Ha!” I said to myself with sleepy defiance.

IT MUST HAVE
been all that talk of falling in love because that night I had The Dream. I'd had it on and off since I'd been eighteen; maybe once a year, perhaps not even that often, and it was nearly always the same. I'd spot Shay Delaney in a crowded street and I'd start running and pushing, trying to catch up with him.

Above the January sales throng, I'd see the back of his head, moving farther and faster away from me, and I'd try to go more quickly but more and more people would get in the way, tangling themselves in my legs, tripping me up, blocking my path, until he was gone.

I used to wake up swollen with longing, dreamy with remembered love, irritable and snappy with Garv. For the entire day following the dream, the feelings would wrap themselves around me, like a hangover, and it was only once they'd worn off that I worried about them. I hardly thought about Shay from one end of the year to the next, but did these dreams mean that I still loved him? That I didn't love Garv?

Consolation came via an unexpected route: a science program I watched one bored Sunday evening, maybe eight or nine years ago.

It was about the earth's relationship with the sun. The commentary said that even in the depths of winter, when our side of the earth is facing away from the sun, its draw is so powerful that we're still pulled to it. Once in a while the cold side of the earth gets its way, which is why we

ANGELS / 181

sometimes get days of bizarre warmth and sunniness in the middle of February.

Maybe I'd misheard it, because when I thought about it properly, it didn't really make much sense. But it still operated as a consolation: a weight lifted from me and I understood that of course I loved Garv, but that there were times when I'd still be drawn back to Shay. It didn't mean anything.

But this night the dream was different because when it started it was Shay I was running after, but at some stage he became Garv.

I ran as hard after Garv as I ever had after Shay. It was so important to catch up with him, I was tender,
sore
, with love for him, that giddy, lifting wonder of when we'd first fallen in love. I
remembered
, I felt it with such clarity. But he slipped through the crowds and my legs wouldn't go fast enough; then he was gone.

And I awoke with tears on my lashes, carrying years' worth of loss.

In the sunny kitchen Emily was already up and hyper with it. “I've been awake since six,” she announced. “Waiting for that phone to ring!”

Oh, right, news of her pitch. The dream was still with me so that I was finding it hard to be present in the here and now. I was like a badly tuned radio that was picking up two frequencies. One in the foreground, another more ghostly one fading in and out in the background.

“But it's only nine now” seemed to be the right thing to say.

“They're hardly likely to be at work yet.”

“Lazy, LAZY bastards! Anyway, Mort has David's home number, he could have called him last night or early this morning, if he was very eager. Every second that passes without news is another nail in the coffin.”

“You're being overly dramatic. Is there any coffee?”

Two mugs of muscular coffee managed to shake away some of the wraiths that were wrapped around my mood and life came into a clearer focus.

182 / MARIAN KEYES

“This place doesn't look bad, considering that we had thirty people here last night, drinking their heads off. You'd hardly know.”

“Yeah,” said Emily. “Apart from the souvenir on our couch.”

Oh cripes! A cigarette burn? Or had someone puked? Had anyone been that drunk? Could have been a bulimic, mind you.

“It's Ethan.” Emily said. “I don't know how we missed him last night. I've already tried waking him up and he growled at me like a dog. Little prick.”

Sure enough, Ethan was curled up on the couch, clutching his penknife between his pawlike hands, five o'clock shadow bristling on his skull. In slumber his goateed, bemetaled face was sweet.

“That boy needs to get home to shave his head. Give him a kick,”

Emily urged.

“Couldn't we just shake him?”

“More fun to kick him.?”

“Okay.” I tried a tentative one to his shin, but he shifted and muttered something about nailing my motherfucking head to the table.

I looked inquiringly at Emily. “Best leave him for a while,” we agreed overenthusiastically. “A young man needs his sleep. More coffee.” We headed back to the kitchen.

On top of the fridge was an open bottle of white wine that we'd missed in last night's cleanup. Then I noticed that a cork was still wound around the corkscrew. That could be used to seal the bottle for later. “Pass me the sesame,” I said to Emily.

A long stare from Emily and a bottle of sesame oil arrived in front of me. I looked at it, realized what I'd done, and saw that she was already subjecting me to an are-you-quite-sane examination.

“What d'you want sesame oil for? To stir-fry your raisin bran?”

“Ah, no, I meant can you pass me the corkscrew.”

ANGELS / 183

“That's not what you said. You said ‘sesame.’ Unless I'm going mad, and I'm really not in the mood for that.”

I contemplated lying—it'd be easy enough to convince her she was halfway around the bend—but saw how unkind that would be. “It's just a word. That Garv and I used to say,” I explained awkwardly. “When we opened a bottle of wine, we'd say, ‘Open, sesame.’ So the corkscrew got called ‘sesame.’ I'm sorry, I forgot.”

“Is that why you keep putting my toothpaste on my toothbrush for me every night? It's something you and Garv did?”

“Wh-at?” I stuttered.

“Every night since you've gotten here,” she said patiently, “after you've gone to bed, I've gone to the bathroom and my toothbrush is waiting, with toothpaste on it. If you're not doing it, then who is?”

I had to admit it. “It is me. I hadn't realized I was doing it. I can't believe it.”

“And it's something you and Garv did?”

“Yeah. Whichever one of us went to bed first would get the toothbrush ready for the other person.”

“That's the sweetest thing I ever heard,” Emily said, glowing, then quickly quenched it when she saw my face.

The grief I'd felt when I'd woken up was back. I carried the full weight of the lost language and all the rituals that would mean nothing to anyone else, but were part of whatever had bound Garv and me together. And there were loads of them: when he made my dinner and put it on the table, I had to rush into the room and declare, “I came as soon as I heard!” And if I forgot, he'd withhold the food and prompt me, “Say it. Go on, ‘I came as soon as I heard!’”

Trying to explain why that was funny or comforting would be like trying to describe color to a blind person. Not that I'd ever have to, because now it was all gone. An entire way of life.

Clearly I was pumping out waves of regret because Emily urged,

“It's okay to say it.”

“Say what?”

184 / MARIAN KEYES

“That you miss him. Even
I
miss him.”

“Okay,” I sighed. “I miss him.”

But I missed more than him. I missed me. I missed the way it used to be, when I didn't have to pretend to be anything other than me. Now there were all these people around, and I was tired of having to act. Even with Emily I wasn't as fully me as I once was with Garv. And it showed up in the smallest of things, like the telly being on too loud. With Garv I'd just let out a roar at him and he'd turn it down, but with Emily I had to keep my mouth shut and burn holes in the lining of my stomach instead.

“I had a dream,” I announced. I sounded like Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Tell me,” Emily said, then thought to add, “Marty.”

“Well, you know the plot already.”

“Is this the Shay Delaney dream?”

“Yes, and it started with me running after Shay, but he turned into Garv.” I described the frantic running, the desperate need to catch up with him, the terror as he slipped farther and farther away, the bereft grief when I understood that he was gone.

“So, go on,” I ended with, “make me feel better.”

Emily's very good at that sort of thing.

“We process things in our dreams that we're not able to in our waking hours,” she said. “You were married for nine years, of course you feel shitty. The end of any relationship is a wrench. I mean, even after I've been going with someone for only three months, I feel suicidal when it's over. Unless I ditch them. Then I'm over the moon.”

I was beginning to feel a good deal more normal; then Emily ruined it all by asking, “Is there any chance, though, that maybe you and Garv could try again?”

The room seemed to darken.

“I know he's had an affair,” Emily said.

“Having,” I corrected. “He's
having
an affair.”

“It could be over, for all you know.”

ANGELS / 185

“I don't care. The damage is done. I'd never be able to trust him again.”

“But it could be worked out, other people have done it.”

“I don't want to. Since February…I can't describe it, Emily. It was like…like being locked in a car trunk with him.”

“Jesus!” she said, startled by my imagery. I was quite startled myself, to be honest. I'm not normally good at that sort of thing.

“A car trunk that was shrinking,” I added, just to outdo myself.

Emily gasped, her hands to her throat. “I can't breathe!”

“That's exactly how I felt,” I said thoughtfully. “Anyway, I'm just having a bad day.

“Another one,” I added.

“Let it go, man,” a dopey voice interrupted. It was Ethan, leaning against the door frame, clearly enthralled. “If it don't come back, it was never yours. If it comes back, it's yours to keep.”

“Out!” Emily ordered, her arm straight, her finger pointing.

“We've got enough armchair philosophers around here.”

As he loped to the door, Emily checked the time again and picked up the phone. “David has
got
to be at his desk by now!”

And he was—but he couldn't really tell her anything. As was his way, he made positive noises. “They really loved you!” But she wanted hard news. A yes or a no. Are they in or are they out? And he couldn't tell her.

“He's scared,” she surmised, hanging up the phone.

“Why would he be scared?” I forced joviality.

“Cause this town runs on fear. If Hothouse passes, it'll reflect badly on him and his lousy judgment in backing a loser. Makes him a loser by association.”

Food for thought. I'd always thought of agents as a kind of impartial catalyst. Middlemen who brought people to 186 / MARIAN KEYES

gether but who remained unaffected by the process. I'd been wrong.

“And Mort Russell is probably scared that if he buys it, the head of the studio might not like it,” she continued gloomily. “And scared that if he
doesn't
buy it, someone else might and make a hit of it.

Meanwhile, I'm fucking terrified that
no one
will buy it. How do you feel, Maggie?”

I checked my anxiety levels. Same as they always were. “Scared stiff.”