The Other Side of the Story Read online

  Marian Keyes

  * * *

  THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY

  Contents

  Part One

  GEMMA

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  JOJO

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  LILY

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  PART TWO

  GEMMA

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  JOJO

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  LILY

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  PART THREE

  Jojo

  Lily

  Jojo

  Gemma

  Lily

  Gemma

  Jojo

  Lily

  Jojo

  Gemma

  Jojo

  Gemma

  Lily

  Gemma

  Jojo

  Lily

  Jojo

  Lily

  Gemma

  Lily

  Gemma

  Jojo

  Lily

  Gemma

  Lily

  Gemma

  Lily

  Jojo

  Gemma

  Jojo

  Lily

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Marian Keyes is the international bestselling author of Watermelon, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, Rachel’s Holiday, Last Chance Saloon, Sushi for Beginners, Angels, and most recently The Other Side of the Story, a Sunday Times Number One Bestseller. She is published in twenty-nine different languages. A collection of her journalism, called Under the Duvet, is also available in Penguin. Marian lives in Dublin with her husband.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY

  Praise for The Other Side of the Story

  ‘A delectable treat for Keyes’s many fans’ Sunday Times

  ‘Another chart-topping blockbuster from publishing goddess Marian Keyes… packed with sound writing, wit and common sense’ Guardian

  ‘Quick and witty, this is Keyes at her best. Don’t go on holiday without it’ Company

  ‘There’s a laugh in almost every line and Keyes’s dialogue is as sparky and as sparkly as ever’ Irish Times

  ‘This is scalpel-sharp comic writing’ Ireland on Sunday

  ‘Another stunner… funny, fallible female characters are like new best friends’ Kathy Lette, InStyle

  ‘Warm, funny and utterly compulsive’ Essentials

  ‘An empowering read’ Glamour

  ‘648 stonking pages of warmth and wit’ Eve

  ‘An absorbing, moving and very funny novel’ Metro

  ‘If we could have given it more stars, we would have’ Heat

  Praise for Marian Keyes

  ‘Keyes is a rare writer in the popular fiction genre in that most of her characters are as strong as her plot lines and the dialogue sparkles and rings true’ Irish Times

  ‘Keyes has taken over Binchy’s crown as the Queen of Irish Fiction. [She] is a superior storyteller who seamlessly combines style and substance, humour and pathos, and thoroughly deserves her best-selling status. [This] book is filled with wonderful warm characters and dialogue that leaps off the pages’ Irish Independent

  ‘Her writing sparkles and the world is a better place for her books’ Irish Tatler

  ‘One of the most successful writers of contemporary fiction’ Express

  ‘Snappy writing and Keyes’ sharp eye for the absurdities of life make cracking entertainment’ Woman & Home

  ‘Marian Keyes is the queen of feel-good fiction. Her hip, heart-warming comedies have made her the hottest young female writer in Britain and the voice of a generation’ Daily Mirror

  ‘Keyes’s light touch conceals both depth and compassion; she’s sassy yet subtle; and she has a real gift for dialogue and accents’ Ireland on Sunday

  ‘She is a talented comic writer… laden with plot, twists, jokey asides and nicely turned bits of zeitgeisty observational humour… energetic, well-constructed prose delivers life and people in satisfyingly various shades of grey’ Guardian

  ‘[She] gives popular fiction a good name, no easy feat in a field dominated by overpaid imitators and charlatans’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘Reading a new novel by Marian Keyes is like sitting at the kitchen table with your nicest, most confiding friend, while she fills you in on her recent life and loves’ Daily Mail

  ‘Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents,

  and everyone is writing a book.’

  Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman,

  orator and writer (106-43 BC)

  ‘There are three sides to every story.

  Your side, their side, and the truth.’

  Anon

  For Niall Ljiljana, Ema and Luka Keyes

  Part One

  * * *

  GEMMA

  1

  TO: [email protected]

  FROM: Gemma [email protected]

  SUBJECT: runaway dad

  Susan, you wanted news. Well, I’ve got news. Although you might be sorry you asked for it. It looks like my dad has left my mam. I’m not sure how serious it is. More as and when.

  Gemma xxx

  When I first got the call, I thought he’d died. Two reasons. One: I’ve been to a worrying number of funerals over the past while – friends of my parents and worse again, parents of my friends. Two: Mam had called me on my mobile; the first time she’d ever done that because she’d always persisted in the belief that you can only call a mobile from a mobile, like they’re CB radios or something. So when I put my phone to my ear and heard her choke, ‘He’s gone,’ who could blame me for thinking that Dad had kicked the bucket and that now it was only her and me.

  ‘He just packed a bag and left.’

  ‘He packed a…?’ It was then that I realized that Dad mightn’t actually be dead.

  ‘Come home,’ she said.

  �
��Right…’ But I was at work. And not just in the office, but in a hotel ballroom overseeing the finishing touches to a medical conference (Seeing the Back of Backache). It was an enormous deal which had taken weeks to pull together; I’d been there until twelve-thirty the previous night coordinating the arrival of hundreds of delegates and sorting out their problems. (Relocating those in non-smoking rooms who had slipped and gone back on the fags in between booking their room and showing up for it, that sort of thing.) Today was finally Day Zero and in less than an hour’s time, two hundred chiropractors would be flooding in, each expecting

  a name-badge and chair

  coffee and two biscuits (one plain, one fancy) at 11 a.m.

  lunch, three courses (including vegetarian option) at 12.45 p.m.

  coffee and two biscuits (both plain) at 3.30 p.m.

  evening cocktails followed by a gala dinner, with party favours, dancing and snogging (optional).

  In fact when I’d answered the mobile I thought it was the screen hire guy, reassuring me he was on his way. With – this is the important bit – the screens.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ I asked Mam, torn as I was between conflicting duties. I can’t leave here…

  ‘I’ll tell you when you get home. Hurry. I’m in an awful state, God only knows what I’ll do.’

  That did it. I snapped my phone closed and looked at Andrea, who’d obviously figured out something was up.

  ‘Everything OK?’ she murmured.

  ‘It’s my dad.’

  I could see on her face that she too thought that my father had bucked the kickit (as he himself used to say). (There I am talking like he actually is dead.)

  ‘Oh, my God… is it… is he…?’

  ‘Oh no,’ I corrected, ‘he’s still alive.’

  ‘Go, go, get going!’ She pushed me towards the exit, clearly visualizing a deathbed farewell.

  ‘I can’t. What about all of this?’ I indicated the ballroom.

  ‘Me and Moses’ll do it and I’ll call the office and get Ruth over to help. Look, you’ve done so much work on this, what can go wrong?’

  The correct answer is, of course: Just About Anything. I’ve been Organizing Events for seven years and in that time I’ve seen everything from over-refreshed speakers toppling off the stage to professors fighting over the fancy biscuits.

  ‘Yes, but…’ I’d threatened Andrea and Moses that even if they were dead they were to show up this morning. And here I was proposing to abandon the scene – for what exactly?

  What a day. It had barely started and so many things had already gone wrong. Beginning with my hair. I hadn’t had time to get it cut in ages and, in a mad fit, I’d cut the front of it myself. I’d only meant to trim it, but once I started I couldn’t stop, and ended up with a ridiculously short fringe.

  People sometimes said I looked a little like Liza Minnelli in Cabaret but when I arrived at the hotel this morning, Moses had greeted me with, ‘Live long and prosper,’ and given me the Vulcan split-fingered salute. Then, when I told him to ring the screen guy again he said solemnly, ‘That would be illogical, Captain.’ No longer Liza Minnelli in Cabaret but Spock from Star Trek, it seemed. (Quick note: Moses is not a beardy biblical pensioner in a dusty dress and child-molester sandals but a hip, sharp-suited blade of Nigerian origin.)

  ‘Go!’ Andrea gave me another little push door-wards. ‘Take care and let us know if we can do anything.’

  Those are the kinds of words that people use when someone has died. And so I found myself out in the car park. The bone-cold January fog wound itself around me, serving as a reminder that I’d left my coat behind in the hotel. I didn’t bother to go back for it, it didn’t seem important.

  When I got into my car a man whistled – at the car, not me. It’s a Toyota MR2, a sporty little (very little, lucky I’m only five foot two) number. Not my chice – F&F Dignan had insisted. It would look good, they said, a woman in my position. Oh yes, and their son was selling it cheap. Ish.

  Men have a very conflicted response to it. In the daytime they’re all whistles and winks. But at night time, when they’re coming home pissed from the pub, it’s a different story; they take a penknife to my soft-top or hurl a brick through the window. They never actually try to steal the car, just to mortally wound it and it’s spent more time at the dentist than on the road. In the hope of currying sympathy with these bitter mystery men, my back window sticker says, ‘My other car’s a banjaxed ‘89 Cortina.’ (Anton made it specially for me; maybe I should have taken it down when he left, but now wasn’t the time to think about that.)

  The road to my parents’ house was almost car-free; all the heavy traffic was going in the opposite direction, into the centre of Dublin. Moving through the fog that swirled like dry-ice, the empty road had me feeling like I was dreaming.

  Five minutes ago it had been a normal Tuesday morning. I’d been in First Day of Conference mode. Anxious, naturally – there’s always a last-minute hitch – but nothing had prepared me for this.

  I’d no idea what to expect when I got to my parents’ house. Obviously, something was wrong, even if it was just Mam going loola. I didn’t think she was the type, but who can ever tell with these things? ‘He just packed a bag…’ That in itself was as unlikely as pigs flying. Mam always packs Dad’s bag for him, whether he’s off to a sales conference or only on a golf outing. There and then I knew Mam was wrong. Which meant that either she had gone look or Dad really was dead. A surge of panic had me pressing my foot even harder on the accelerator.

  I parked, very badly, outside the house. (Modest sixties semi-d.) Dad’s car was gone. Dead men don’t drive cars.

  But my rush of relief kept on going until it had circled back and become dread once more. Dad never drove to work, he always got the bus; the missing car gave me a very bad feeling.

  Mam had opened the front door before I was even out of the car. She was in a peach candlewick dressing-gown and wore an orange curler in her fringe.

  ‘He’s gone!’

  I hurried in and made for the kitchen. I felt the need to sit down. Mad though it was, I was nursing a wish that Dad would be sitting there, saying in bemusement, ‘I keep telling her I haven’t left, but she won’t listen.’ But there was nothing but cold toast, buttery knives and other breakfast-style paraphernalia.

  ‘Did something happen? Did you have a fight?’

  ‘No, nothing. He ate his breakfast as normal. Porridge. That I made. See.’ She pointed to a bowl which displayed the remnants of porridge. Not much remained. He should have had the decency to have his gullet choked with shame.

  ‘Then he said he wanted to talk to me. I thought he was going to tell me I could have my conservatory. But he said he wasn’t happy, that things weren’t working out and that he was leaving.’

  ‘“That things weren’t working out”? But you’ve been married thirty-five years! Maybe… maybe he’s having a midlife crisis.’

  ‘The man is nearly sixty, he’s too old for a mid-life crisis.’

  She was right. Dad had had his chance for a mid-life crisis a good fifteen years ago, when no one would have minded, when we’d been quite looking forward to it, actually, but instead he’d just carried on losing his hair and being vague and kindly.

  ‘Then he got a suitcase and put stuff into it.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. Like, what did he pack? How did he know how to?’

  Mam was starting to look a little uncertain, so to prove it to me – and probably to herself – we went upstairs and she pointed out the space in the spare room cupboard where a suitcase used to be. (One of a set they’d got with tokens from buying petrol.) Then she took me into their room and demonstrated the gaps in his wardrobe. He’d taken his top coat, his anorak and his good suit. And left behind a staggering quantity of colouredy, knitted jumpers and trousers that could only ever be described as ‘slacks’. Fawn of colour and nasty of shape, cut and fabric. I’d have left them behind too.

  ‘He’ll have
to come back for his clothes,’ she said.

  I wouldn’t have counted on it.

  ‘I thought he’d been a bit distracted for the last while,’ Mam said. ‘I said it to you.’

  And between us we’d wondered if maybe he had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s. All at once, I understood. He did have Alzheimer’s. He wasn’t in his right mind. He was driving around somewhere, stone mad, convinced he was Princess Anastasia of Russia. We had to alert the police.

  ‘What’s his car reg?’

  Mam looked surprised. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why should I? I only sit in the thing, I don’t drive it.’

  ‘We’ll have to look it up, because I don’t know it either.’

  ‘Why do we need it?’

  ‘We can’t just tell the peelers to look for a blue Nissan Sunny bearing a fifty-nine-year-old man, who might think he’s the last of the Romanovs. Where do you keep the documents and stuff?’

  ‘On the shelves in the dining room.’

  But after a quick scout in Dad’s ‘office’ I couldn’t find any car info and Mam was no help.

  ‘It’s a company car, isn’t it?’

  ‘Er, I think so.’

  ‘I’ll ring his work and someone there, his secretary or someone, should be able to help.’

  Even as I rang Dad’s direct line I knew he wouldn’t answer, that wherever he was, it wasn’t at work. Hand over the speaker, I instructed Mam to look up the number for the Kilmacud peelers. But before she’d even got off her chair, someone answered Dad’s phone. Dad.

  ‘Da-ad? Is that you?’

  ‘Gemma?’ he said warily. This in itself was nothing unusual; he always answered the phone to me warily. With good reason – because I only ever rang him

  to say that my telly was broken and would he come with his toolbox

  to say that my grass needed cutting and could he come with his lawnmower

  to say that my front room needed painting and would he come with his dust sheets, rollers, brushes, masking tape and a large bag of assorted chocolate bars.

  ‘Dad, you’re at work.’ Indisputable.

  ‘Yes, I –’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Look, I was going to ring you later, but things went a bit mad here.’ He was breathing hard. ‘The prototype plans must’ve been leaked, the oppo are going to issue a press release – new product, nearly identical, industrial espio –’