The Valentine's Card (8 page)

Fairy looked irritated.

Then another smaller woman came over, made to the same basic design as the first, but … Oh Jesus.
She
was the fairy! Not her friend, no wonder I’d been blanked. Fairy was soft, and she was blazingly pale, and she was all woman and she made me think that things might be simple and people might be kind.

Turns out she was with her sister Caitlin over from New York (NOTE TO SELF: ask C if she knows any agents in NY). ‘I wrote my number on this bastard’s arm,’ she says to her, right there in front of me, ‘and he hasn’t found a gap in his busy schedule to call me in two whole months.’

Orla was in bed, correcting coursework, but memories were making it hard to concentrate. She took off her glasses.

‘Truth please. No bullshit,’ she’d said to Sim at that crappy party in that manky club when he’d sworn he had a good excuse for not calling her.

He told her later her ‘no bullshit’ had stopped him in his tracks. He’d ditched, so he said, the usual guff and plumped for a simple,
I washed your number off
.

Orla had shrugged, told him she couldn’t care less, but secretly she’d hoped he’d stick around. He had. The less encouragement
she gave him, the more he followed her. It was a powerful feeling, having this magnificent lump of maleness tail her all evening, desperately trying to get back in her good books.

He’d had her at hello, as the quote goes.

Why didn’t I ever tell him that?

Caitlin had been disapproving but Sim had persevered, and when Caitlin was safely on the last bus back to Ma’s, Orla had agreed to a coffee. She was wearing the most hideous bobble hat in the history of hideous bobble hats and decided if
that
didn’t put him off, perhaps they were on to something. ‘Come to mine,’ he’d said. ‘I’m on Fitzwilliam Square.’

‘Aren’t actors traditionally poor if they’re not famous?’

That winded him. He was accustomed to women going weak-kneed at his flashy address. He’d been disappointed, too, with her reaction to discovering his father was a senator.

‘Ah,’ she’d said wonderingly. ‘You’re one of
those
Quinns.’

‘Nothing,’ Sim told her a few months later, ‘about the way you said it suggested you were a fan of Dad’s.’

Inside his flat, Orla maintained a strict six-feet rule. She sat on the far end of the sofa, and when Sim inched closer, she stood and relocated to an armchair.

‘You honk when you laugh,’ he told her, and she honked at that.

The coffee never appeared: wine, a good bottle, was poured instead.

‘As we’re on the subject,’ Orla told him. ‘You have a
great
laugh.’

‘That’s my real laugh. The one my agent tells me never to use. The one that shows my back teeth and makes me look, and I quote, “like a masturbating baboon
”
. You make me laugh, Fairy.’

Orla relaxed the six-feet rule.

Frustrating, then, to discover that
Sim was implementing it on her behalf. He hadn’t wanted to conquer or compromise her. A personal first.

About two in the morning the chat dried up. They were both tired, and looked it.

In Ladbroke Grove, a changed and wiser woman, Orla closed her eyes and lay back beneath the juggernaut of memory as she recalled the next part in vivid, comprehensive detail. She had put her glass down, closed the six feet between them, straddled him on the sofa and kissed him.

There followed, in Sim’s words, ‘the most amazing sex ever to occur in this postal district.’ Fast, hungry, Orla tore at his shirt and he pulled her Lurex top over her head. She peeled off his jeans and he lifted her out of her little cord skirt. Joined at the lip, they kissed the whole time, as if wary of a heavy fine for persons caught not kissing.

It was good. It was filthy. It was wholesome. They sighed, sated, and wrapped themselves around each other like kittens. Falling into a dazed sleep, Orla had felt able to say, into Sim’s chest, ‘Something real is happening, isn’t it?’ She couldn’t help but sound amazed.

Dazed, Sim had agreed. ‘I rather think I’ve sealed my fate.’

Chapter Seven

‘Settle down, everybody. Including
you, Fabio. In fact, especially you, Fabio.’

The class laughed. A fortnight in and cliques had formed, characters emerged. Orla was proud of their progress, and she had her pets already, the shyer ones: a gangly Chinese boy, a bruise-eyed Russian girl.

‘Who’s up for a bit of role play? OK. Fabio, seeing as you’re so chatty, you’re taking a pair of trousers back to a shop. They don’t fit. Ning, you’re the shop assistant.’

Ning looked bemused.

‘The shop worker. The person who works in the shop.’

‘Ah!’ Ning grinned.

‘I return this trouser,’ said Fabio. His narrow eyes slid back over to Teacher. ‘They are too small for my girlfriend’s bottom.’

The class laughed again. The hive mind had decreed it was too sunny to study.

‘Concentrate, people!’ Orla surreptitiously clocked her reflection in the glazed book cupboard. The grief diet had erased her pound by pound with frightening speed, but now she saw her bottom was back, and she was glad.

‘Ning! Remember your pleases and thank yous.’

Turning away food had been a denial, one that bound her to Sim who would
never eat again. It was something she could do for him. Orla appreciated the faulty logic, yet couldn’t quell the prickle of guilt that she was able to eat again.

‘Sick, I know.’

‘Not at all, darling.’ Maude was setting the shop to rights. ‘A strange fancy, yes, but understandable. I’m just relieved your appetite has returned. The leftovers made me weep when you first arrived.’

Helping out with Wednesday’s late closing had become a ritual. Maude always anticipated a rush. None ever came, and tonight was no exception.

Orla gathered together some Irish playwrights to make a window display. ‘I’m one of your lame ducks, aren’t I?’

‘Don’t know what you mean.’ Maude was brisk as she repositioned the standard lamp. Ambience was important in the shop
.
Her conceit was that it should feel like a comfortable sitting room, tempting the customer to lounge on the sofa with Will Self or Jackie Collins.

‘You collect us. I’ve seen you giving Sheraz’s hopeless son pep talks when he delivers the shopping. You’re letting that girl with the frizzy hair pay for those amazing books on the impressionists in instalments, even though she’s always behind.’

‘She’s an art student. She’s had a difficult life and her hair is curly, not frizzy.’ Maude switched off the lamp. ‘It doesn’t feel right here,’ she murmured and lugged it across the white floorboards.

‘Here. Let me.’ Orla took the lamp. Everybody jumped to help Maude, despite her spindly strength. Five foot nothing, with arthritic fingers, this woman had
deftly remoulded Orla into something resembling a human again in the past weeks. ‘Don’t make another duck of the student who’s coming for a job interview with you tomorrow, Maudie-pops. She’s far from lame.’ Bogna, with her pointy nose, straightened hair and smart mouth, did not fit the rich kid profile of her fellow summer schoolers. ‘She’s a little toughie.’

‘Good. Women need to stand up for themselves.’ Maude shook her head, irritated, as Orla placed the lamp. ‘To the left. More.’

‘Do you really need an assistant?’

‘Don’t rehash old conversations, Orla dear. I know my business. Try it nearer the counter.’

‘Like this?’

‘Yes. Right there. The light is kinder. And now,’ smiled Maude, ‘switch it off.’ She turned the handwritten sign on the door to SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED and moved gently around the shop, patting a book here, righting a rug there.

Outside was London-dark, a milky navy that never approached the dense ink of a Tobercree night. The busy street had a different ebb and flow by night than it did by day. Orla looked out on it, and felt, tentatively, that she was starting to belong.

She’d been resuscitated. This feeling of rebirth had circled for a while, teetering on the edge of her consciousness, but each time the thought had begun to take shape, Orla had batted it away: to flourish was disloyal. It was not the behaviour of a woman in love, nor a woman in mourning. Five months ago, Orla had wanted to leap on Sim’s funeral pyre yet now here she was, in a new job in a new home with a new friend. Listing her
small accomplishments – her little acts of bravery – made Orla want to take the stairs three at a time and press the valentine to her chest.

Two years ago – or was it more? – as they’d walked back to his place with the makings of an omelette, he’d asked her about marriage.

‘Are you horribly feminist about marriage? Do you think it’s patriarchal shit? Or do you think you might marry me some day?’

What she’d thought was:
you mean you want to marry me? Me? The actual me married to the actual you?
What she’d done was take the bait, home in on his deliberate misreading of feminist attitudes to marriage, and explain that, ‘If some chap I loved
madly
wanted to enter into a contract with me and call it marriage then I’d join him.’

Orla cursed her priggish younger self. Couldn’t she have allowed herself a little soppiness? Given him something more?

‘You look tired.’ Maude had crept stealthily to her side. ‘There are lovely little lines gathering under your eyes, like cracks in the ice.’

Only Maude could romanticise wrinkles.

‘Mmm, I’m knackered.’

‘You Irish and your poetry …’

Orla laughed good naturedly. ‘I didn’t sleep well. This morning, the five-second horrors came back.’

‘Oh
Orla
.’ The word was steeped in empathy. ‘I thought we’d done with them.’

‘Apparently not.’

Early in Orla’s tenancy, she’d described for Maude how she felt at the start of each day. How she awoke underneath the duvet, limbs all warm
and heavy, senses shaky, and how, for five whole seconds, Sim wasn’t dead and everything was more or less right with the world before the room’s edges shifted and firmed up and Sim would disappear, leaving her alone all over again. The five-second horrors.

And then one day – no terrors. Then another day without them, then the terrors again; then three days off. This halting progress had continued until Orla had dared to believe she was cured.

‘It’s a one-off, dear.’ Maude sounded confident as she tucked a pen into the cottage loaf of her hair. ‘No wonder you’re looking a little washed out. That new job of yours is demanding.’

‘But I love the demands.’ Being needed was one of the things she missed most. ‘Most of my class plan to live here, get a job, so they need to brush up their language skills double quick. One of the Russian girls – Jaysus, what’s her name? Tasha, I think, she’s from Georgia – is struggling. I stayed behind, gave her a leg up. Because not everybody has a Maude to look out for them.’

Deep in the lower strata of Orla’s bag, her mobile cheeped. They exchanged glances.

‘Wednesday night,’ Maude checked her delicate gold wristwatch, ‘eight p.m. Bang on time.’

‘I’ll see you up there.’ Orla wandered to the back of the darkened shop, digging out her phone.

‘I’ll have the wine open.’ Maude retreated.

‘Orla? It’s Ma. Can you talk?

‘Ma. Howaya?’

‘I’m grand. Mustn’t complain. Awful quiet here today. I was just thinking of how
you used to drop in some days on your way home from work. But, sure, amn’t I an old, old woman and haven’t you youngsters lives of your own?’

‘Deirdre texted me this morning.’

‘She did, did she? Oh, she’s gone
very
technological since she got that new Blackcurrant.’

‘She texted me just after she left your house. She said she passed Hugh on the doorstep.’

‘He painted me shed. A horrible colour, but what can you do?’

‘Not so lonely after all, for an old, old forgotten woman, eh, Ma?’

‘You’d make a grand detective. For your information I
am
lonely for my youngest child. When are you coming home?’

‘Soon.’

‘Still on the trail of the long-lost journal?’

‘I’ve more or less given up. Unless he plastered it into the walls, it’s not here.’

‘They won’t keep your job at the school open forever.’

‘Ma, I feel bad enough about leaving my class to end the school year without me, don’t pile on the guilt. There’s a bigger picture. Sim’s death threw all the cards in the air. I love Tobercree Primary but now … Anyway, they’ve given me one more month to decide.’

‘What’s to decide? You were only meant to be gone for two feckin’ days! It’s time to get back to normal life. I don’t want you to screw your life up because you’re upset over Sim.’

‘I’m not
upset
, Ma. I’m altered. Listen, any goss?’

‘Hasn’t her next door got herself a new fella? And him a big bald bastard with a beer gut you could trampoline on!’

‘Ma!’

‘Musha?’

‘I do miss you, you know.’

‘She’s wrong about
screwing my life up,’ Orla told the valentine as she towelled herself off after her shower. ‘And yes, before you say it, Ma’s wrong about a lot of things. She was right about you, though.’

Ma Cassidy had developed a soft spot for Sim. She’d sat him down in her dead husband’s chair, plied him with sweet tea and homemade cake, cackled like waterfowl at his every joke.
Quality
, she’d pronounced him, marvelling that a senator’s son should be sitting in her conservatory eating her éclairs just like a normal fella.

‘You always said I was too close to Ma. She feels threatened by my independence, I guess. Hey, Sim, lookie here. My bum’s back!’ Orla dropped the towel to show off her newly reclaimed asset. She wiggled it. The valentine remained silent.

‘Please yourself.’ Orla pulled on a pair of large white knickers that Sim would have reviled. ‘I know, I know; Bridget Jones pants. But men have no idea how excruciating thongs are.’

Padding up the stairs, Orla wondered if she’d simply exchanged one old lady for another. Maude’s point of view was more worldly, less Tobercree-centric than Ma’s. Perhaps that was why Orla had listened when Maude had exhorted her to stay all those months ago.