Only We Know (3 page)

‘This country has always punched above
its weight,’ he said. ‘In terms of international standing, in terms of
international aid, we have never turned our backs on those whose need is greater than
ours. Generations of Irish people have given to help the poor of other countries – from
the Trocaire boxes during Lent, to Live Aid, and well before that. When it comes to
putting our hands in our pockets to help our fellow man, this country has not been found
wanting. But now the storm clouds have
gathered, and the bogeymen are here, the IMF, the Troika, and all we talk about is
austerity, budget cuts, mortgage arrears, job losses. Fear has taken hold of Ireland.
All around me I see people turning in on themselves. And the worst thing about the fear
is what it does to us as a nation. It makes us insular. We no longer look out, we seek
to protect ourselves, batten down the hatches and hold on to what we’ve got. To
hell with everyone else. The fear extinguishes our generosity, it suppresses our
collective conscience, it makes us hard, mean and grasping and that, to my mind, is not
who we are. That is not who the Irish are.’

On and on he went. The host and some of the
others on the panel interjected with talk of job losses and creeping poverty, but Luke
would not be silenced.

‘Jaysus, he’s getting a bit
worked up,’ someone said.

And it was true. I could see the colour
rising in his face as he leaned forward in the seat, barely able to contain himself.
Where had it come from, his passion, his social conscience? Like those around me,
I’d had no inkling he held such strong principles or beliefs. As I watched, I
noticed something else. Everyone had fallen silent. The whole pub was watching: pints
were left untouched, each drinker’s attention arrested by the man on the screen,
with his smart suit and his media-friendly features, pounding the table and berating us
for our failings, urging us not to allow this depression to change our fundamental
values, not to allow our human decency to crack under the strain. The studio audience
had fallen silent, too, and I had a sudden flash of memory: Luke as a boy, waist deep in
the river, vines hanging down from the trees overhead. I felt it then
as I watched him up there on the screen – the tightening
about my throat – which was strange, because we hardly knew each other now, not
really.

He finished what he was saying and there was
a pause. Into the brief silence, a man at the bar raised his pint to the telly.
‘Hear, hear.’ As the studio audience broke into applause, people around me
raised their glasses, nodding, and for the rest of the night, it was all anyone could
talk about.

The next day, the airwaves were clogged with
news of Luke and his
Late Late Show
performance. The papers were full of it.
Unlike some stories that have a brief moment, then fade from the public consciousness,
this one seemed to stick. It was no surprise when word came down from the
editor-in-chief that someone had to write a profile of Luke for the paper. I just
hadn’t realized the job would fall to me.

I finish my drink, pick up my bag and go out
into the afternoon sun. The rain has cleared and I have the half-formed intention of
taking a walk along the canal, knowing that the fresh air and exercise will help clear
my thoughts. Instead I sit at a picnic table outside the Barge and email the office,
telling them I’ve gone home, sick. After that I switch off my phone and spend the
afternoon sipping Coronas and eavesdropping on the conversation at the next table, until
the shadows start to lengthen and the air grows chilly. Reggae drifts down from an open
window nearby, with traffic noise rising from the streets beyond.

This time yesterday I was applying make-up
and pinning up my hair, a red dress laid out on the bed, with an evening bag containing
my invitation. A fund-raiser at the
Morrison.
Not something I desperately wanted to go to, but Luke would be there, with some others I
was supposed to be researching. It was out of duty more than pleasure that I headed into
the city.

By the time I arrived the party was in full
flow, well-dressed and -groomed bodies pressing against each other, imbibing champagne,
waitresses in starched white shirts and aprons passing among them with trays of canapés.
All of us crammed together in a room on the top floor of a hotel, the windows giving
onto the roofs, spires and cranes that punctuated the city’s skyline. Luke and
Julia Yates, the glamorous couple, were in the midst of the throng, and I watched them
from afar: their practised smiles, the way they worked the room together, in a carefully
choreographed routine, their sheen of confidence and privilege. I felt a creeping sense
of envy. No, not envy. Rather, it was as though I was confronted with a mirror
reflection of myself: a thirty-seven-year-old woman with nothing of permanence in her
life. No husband, no children, no home of her own. An apartment she rents – just another
in a long list of places she has tried and failed to make into a home. Her job the one
constant in her life that keeps her tethered to the earth. There have been times lately
when she’s felt that sense of displacement nudging into her work. Even in the
office, where she feels safe, she is still in danger of slipping off.

I kept my smile bright, and made my way
through the crowd, escaping onto the terrace for air, to suck oxygen back into my body
and try to calm the shaking in my hands. I sipped my champagne and felt fury curdle
within me, fury at myself. Why had I come to this party? How on
earth did I think I might fit in here? At this stage of my
life I should know by now when to leave well enough alone.

‘Penny for your thoughts.’

I turned. He was standing outside the glass
doors. He closed them behind him so that the noise of the party was contained, and I
watched as he came towards me, grinning. My heart was beating fast as he approached.
Neat and unruffled in his black tuxedo, hair smoothed off his handsome face, he had a
glass of champagne in each hand and offered one to me. ‘Looks like you’re
running dry.’

The air had done nothing to dispel my
unease. Luke smiled but I couldn’t make out whether it was genuine or just that he
was better than me at covering up his discomfort.

‘I was waiting for you to come and say
hello,’ he added.

‘You could have come over to
me,’ I said, defensive.

‘True.’ He stood alongside me
and looked out across the city.

‘I had the feeling we were studiously
avoiding one another, Katie.’

‘I don’t know what you
mean.’

And yet I felt the pull between us, and knew
he felt it too, just as I knew he was equally aware of the past, which threatened every
contact between us. Even the most casual encounter seemed charged with fear, regret or
some other elusive emotion.

‘I didn’t think you’d be
here,’ he said. ‘After our last conversation, I thought you’d keep
your distance.’

His tone, initially jokey, had softened. We
were standing together as the last of the sunset cast the roofs of Dublin
in a soft glow. I saw the glint of gold on
his finger, and watched his hand move to cover my own.

He left it where it was and I made no
attempt to move mine. Further down the terrace, a group of smokers were sharing a joke.
Their laughter reached us as we stood on the balcony, the shadows deepening in the
streets below.

‘It sounded like it might be
fun.’

‘You don’t look like
you’re having fun, Katie.’

‘But what about you?’ I said,
slipping my hand out from under his. ‘The golden boy. The man of the
moment.’

A flash of disappointment crossed his face.
Then he laughed and made a swatting gesture, as if to bat my words away. It was hard to
fathom. At one moment he was a businessman who’d had a couple of lucky breaks. At
the next he had been catapulted into an exalted position – man of the people, champion
of the masses, his finger on the public pulse. All it had taken was one high-profile
interview on national television. The right words spoken at the right time.

‘So where will it all lead?’ I
asked, watching him over the rim of my champagne flute. ‘Leinster House? A seat in
government? Or how about the presidency? You know, I can see you and Julia settling into
life in the Phoenix Park.’

I was joking, of course: there was too much
in Luke’s past for him to pull off a successful political career.

‘Jesus, Katie, come off it!’ He
laughed. ‘Politics isn’t my bag, you know that.’

But there was something in the way he said
it that made me look closely at him. Faint shadows under his eyes, tension in the way he
held himself. I wondered whether he
had bitten
off more than he could chew. But before I could ask him about it, he said, ‘I
heard from Nick.’

His brother.

‘Oh?’

‘He rang a few days ago, out of the
blue.’

Anxiety stirred in the pit of my
stomach.

‘Is he still in Nairobi?’

‘Yes.’ He nodded, then said,
‘Did you know he’s getting married?’

My mouth went dry.

‘An American he met over there,
apparently. Another hippie drop-out by the sound of it. They’ve known each other
about five minutes.’ He drank some champagne. ‘The wedding is
tomorrow.’

Before I could answer, there was movement
behind us. The glass door opened and someone came out. Luke instantly drew away from
me.

‘Christ, it’s hot in
there,’ the man exclaimed, coming towards us and giving Luke a friendly slap on
the shoulder. I recognized him at once – Damien Rourke, a self-made multi-millionaire
who still resembled a rumpled grocer. He had taken a white hankie from his pocket and
was mopping his brow with it, before turning his attention to me. ‘You, is
it?’ he asked, in an unfriendly way.

I had once penned a not, entirely,
flattering piece about him. ‘In the flesh.’

‘Still writing for that rag, are
you?’ he asked, with a grin.

‘A girl’s gotta make a living
somehow.’

He snorted, and the conversation moved on.
For a while, we talked about politics and the economics of the European crisis. A ribbon
of grey cloud hung above the
horizon as the
sun dipped low. I tried not to glance too much at Luke, conscious of his quiet
confidence and the contours of his handsome face.
Nick’s getting married.
Nick: dark hair falling over his forehead, that introspective gaze and the shy smile, as
if something funny or touching had just occurred to him that he didn’t wish to
share.

I smiled and nodded along with the
conversation, sipped from my glass, all the while feeling numb and telling myself there
was no reason why this news of Nick should get to me in this way.

Now, as I sit drinking another Corona,
watching the swans gliding along the canal, I think of Nick and try to imagine him
waiting at the top of the aisle for some nameless, faceless woman. There had been a bond
between us once, Nick and me – I have the scar to prove it. Yet we’re strangers
now. I have the urge to text him, to tell him that I’m happy for him, though that
doesn’t come anywhere close to describing the emotion passing through me.

Get a grip, I tell myself sternly.
Don’t indulge yourself with this maudlin bullshit. I get up from my seat and leave
my half-empty beer bottle. Walking briskly back towards the city, I pull my jacket about
me, crossing my arms over my chest, as if a cold wind is blowing, even though it’s
still warm and, although night has fallen, there’s barely the whisper of a breeze
coming off the canal.

I climb into bed and fall into a sleep that
feels like oblivion.

When I wake to the sound of someone banging
on my apartment’s front door, it feels like the middle of the night. I get up and
go to open it, my head still swimming with
fatigue. Reilly’s familiar bulk stands under the halo
of light cast by the bare bulb above his head.

‘Reilly? What is it? What are you
doing here?’

‘I tried calling but your phone is
switched off.’

‘It’s the middle of the night,
for Chrissakes!’

‘It’s eight a.m., Katie,’
he says, a wrinkle of concern in his voice. ‘Are you okay? I can’t say you
look it.’

‘I’m fine,’ I reply,
embarrassed now, pulling my robe tight around me.

‘You didn’t come back to the
office yesterday.’

‘I was sick.’

I turn away and let him follow me into the
flat, hear him closing the door, before he joins me in the kitchen. I flick on the
coffee machine, then rest my head on the counter, feeling the ache that stretches from
my temples to the small of my back.

I can feel him watching me, so I straighten
and busy myself with making coffee because, even though I like him, it feels strange to
have Reilly in my kitchen. He’s unlike most of the men who have witnessed me
making morning coffee in my bathrobe. Thick hair the colour of oatmeal, a reddish tinge
to his beard, which fails to hide the deep lines on either side of his mouth, or the
amusement that animates his face. Black leather jacket, grey shirt, faded blue jeans –
the hack’s uniform: all of it out of place on him, somehow. I like to imagine that
when Reilly goes home, he dons a smoking jacket and velvet slippers.

He accepts a mug of coffee, then casts his
eyes around my apartment. It’s all pitiful enough – two rooms painted in pastel
shades, a galley kitchen and a bathroom the size of a cupboard, books stacked
precariously against the wall
and house-plants
at different stages of decay. This has been home to me for the past four months, two
rooms in a three-storey Edwardian red-brick villa, its façade tired and unloved, in the
heart of Dublin.

‘When did you start doing house-calls,
Reilly?’

‘You’re my first
patient.’

‘Lucky me.’

‘I was worried, Katie. The way you
left yesterday –’

‘I was sick …’

He fixes me with a look that reminds me
suddenly and painfully of my father.