The Woman Who Stole My Life Read online

  I go back upstairs and wish I could tweet ‘#Working #MyHole’ but some of his friends follow me on Twitter. Besides, any time I send a tweet, it reminds people that I’m nobody now and that it’s time to unfollow me. That is a true measurable fact which I sometimes test, just in case I’m not feeling like enough of a loser.

  In fairness, I was never Lady Gaga with her millions and millions of followers, but, in my own small way, I was once a Twitter presence.

  Denied an outlet for my gloom, I remove a brick from my Jaffa Cake wall and lie on my bed and eat many of the little round discs of chocolate-and-orange happiness. So many that I can’t tell you because I made a deliberate decision to not count. Plenty, though. Rest assured of that.

  Tomorrow will be different, I tell myself. Tomorrow will have to be different. There will be lots of writing and lots of productivity and no Jaffa Cakes. I will not be a woman who lies on her bed, her chest covered with spongy crumbs.

  An hour and a half later, still a dinner-free woman, I hear a car door slam and feel someone hurrying up our little path. In this cardboard house, you can not just hear, but you can feel everything that happens within a fifty-metre radius.

  ‘Dad’s here.’ There is alarm in Jeffrey’s voice. ‘He looks a bit mental.’

  The doorbell begins to ring frantically. I hurry down the stairs and open the door and there is Ryan. Jeffrey is right: he does look a bit mental.

  Ryan pushes past me into the hall and, with zeal that borders on the manic, says, ‘Stella, Jeffrey, I’ve got some fantastic news!’

  Let me tell you about my ex-husband, Ryan. He might put things differently, which he’s welcome to do, but as this is my story, you’re getting my version.

  We got together when I was nineteen and he was twenty-one and he had notions about being an artist. Because he was very good at drawing dogs and because I knew nothing about art, I thought he was highly talented. He was accepted into art college where, to our mutual dismay, he showed no signs of being the breakout star of his generation. We used to have long talks, late into the night, where he’d tell me all the different ways his tutors were cretins and I’d stroke his hands and agree with him.

  After four years he graduated with a mediocre degree and began painting for a living. But no one bought his canvases, so he decided that painting was over. He played around with different media – film, graffiti, dead budgies in formaldehyde – but a year passed and nothing took off. Ultimately a pragmatic man, Ryan faced facts: he didn’t like being perpetually penniless. He wasn’t cut out for this starving-in-a-garret business that seems to be the stock-in-trade of most artists. Besides, he had acquired a wife (me) and a young daughter, Betsy. He needed to get a job. But not just any old job. After all, he was, despite everything, an artist.

  Around this time, my dad’s glamorous sister, Auntie Jeanette, came into a few quid and decided to spend it on something she’d coveted since she was a little girl – a beautiful bathroom. She wanted something – said with an airy wave of her hand – ‘fabulous’. Jeanette’s poor husband, Uncle Peter, who had spent the previous twenty years desperately trying to provide the glamour that Jeanette so clearly craved, asked, ‘What sort of fabulous?’ But Jeanette couldn’t actually say. ‘… Just, you know, fabulous.’

  Peter (he later admitted this to my dad) had a dreadful moment when he thought he might start sobbing and never stop, then he was saved from such humiliation by a brainwave. ‘Why don’t we ask Stella to ask Ryan?’ he said. ‘He’s artistic.’

  Ryan was mortified to be consulted on such a mundane project and he told me to tell Auntie Jeanette that she could feck off, that he was an artist and that artists didn’t ‘bother their barney’ on the placement of wash-hand basins. But I hate confrontation and I was afraid of causing a family rift, so I couched Ryan’s refusal in vaguer terms. So vague that an armload of bathroom brochures were dropped off for Ryan’s perusal.

  They sat on our small kitchen table for over a week. Now and again I’d pick one up and say, ‘God, that’s gorgeous,’ and, ‘Would you look at that? So imaginative.’

  You see, I was keeping our little family afloat by working as a beautician, and I’d have been very grateful if Ryan had started bringing in some money. But Ryan refused to take the bait. Until one night he began to leaf through the pages and suddenly he was engaged. He picked up a pencil and some graph paper and within no time he was applying himself with vigour. ‘She wants fabulous,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll give her fabulous.’

  Over the following days and weeks he laboured on layout, he spent hours scouring Buy and Sell (these were pre-eBay days) and he jumped out of bed in the middle of the night, his artistic head fizzing with artistic ideas.

  News of Ryan’s diligence began to spread through my family and people were impressed. My dad, who had never been keen on Ryan, reluctantly began to revise his opinion. He stopped saying, ‘Ryan Sweeney an artist? Piss-artist, more like!’

  The result – and everyone was agreed on this, even Dad, a sceptical, working-class man – was indeed fabulous: Ryan had created a mini Studio 54. As he’d been born in Dublin in 1971, he’d never had the honour of visiting the iconic nightclub, so he had to base his design on photos and anecdotal evidence. He even wrote to Bianca Jagger. (She didn’t reply but, still, it shows the lengths he was prepared to go to.)

  As soon as you put a foot into the bathroom, the floor lit up and Donna Summer’s ‘Love to Love You, Baby’ began to play softly. Natural light was banished and replaced with an ambient gold glow. The cabinets – and there were plenty of them because Auntie Jeanette had a lot of stuff – were coated with glitter. Andy Warhol’s Marilyn was recreated in eight thousand tiny mosaic tiles and covered an entire wall. The bath was egg-shaped and black. The toilet was housed off in an adorable little black lacquer cubicle. The make-up station had enough theatrical-style light bulbs to power the whole of Ferrytown (Jeanette had stipulated ‘brutal’ lighting; she was proud of her skill in blending foundations and concealer but she couldn’t do it in poor visibility).

  When, with a final flourish, Ryan hung a small glitter ball from the ceiling, he knew that the masterpiece was complete.

  It could have been tacky, it skirted within a millimetre of being kitsch, but it was – as stipulated in the brief – ‘fabulous’. Auntie Jeanette issued invitations to family and friends for the Grand Opening and the dress code was Disco. As a little joke, Ryan purchased a one-ounce bag of fenugreek from the Ferrytown health-food shop and chopped it into lines on the elegant hand basin. Everyone thought that was ‘gas’. (Except Dad. ‘There’s nothing funny about drugs. Even pretend ones.’)

  The mood was festive. Everyone, young and old, in their disco-est of clothes, crowded in and danced on the small flashing floor. I, overjoyed that a) a family rift had been averted and b) that Ryan had done some paying work, was probably the happiest person there. I wore a pair of vintage Pucci palazzo pants and a matching tunic that I’d found in the Help the Aged shop and had washed seven times, and my hair was blow-dried into a Farrah flick by a hairdresser pal in exchange for a manicure. ‘You look beautiful,’ Ryan told me. ‘So do you,’ I replied, perky as you please. I meant it too because, let’s face it, suddenly becoming a wage-earner would add lustre to the most ordinary-looking of men. (Not that Ryan was ordinary-looking. If he’d washed his hair more often, he could have been dangerous.) All in all, it was a very happy day.

  Suddenly Ryan had a career. Not the one he’d wanted, no, but one he was very good at. He followed his Studio 54 triumph by going in a different direction – he created a bathroom that was a green-filtered, peaceful, forest-style retreat. Mosaics of trees covered three walls and real ferns climbed the fourth. The window was replaced with green glass and the soundtrack was of birdcalls. For the final reveal to the client Ryan scattered pine cones around the place. (His original plan had been to source a squirrel but, despite Caleb his electrician and Drugi his tiler spending most of a morning shaking nuts and shouting, �
��Here, squirrely!’ in Crone Woods, they weren’t able to catch one.)

  Hot on the heels of the forest bathroom came the project that got Ryan his first magazine coverage – the Jewel Box. It was a wonderland of mirrors, Swarovski tiles and claret-coloured velvet-effect (but water-resistant) wallpaper. The cabinet knobs were Bohemian crystal, the bath was made of silver-flecked glass and a Murano chandelier hung from the ceiling. The soundtrack (Ryan’s music was fast becoming his USP) was the ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ and every time you turned the taps on, a tiny mechanical ballerina rotated gracefully.

  Working with a small, trusted team, Ryan Sweeney became the go-to man for amazing bathrooms. He was imaginative, painstaking and ferociously expensive.

  Life was good. There was the odd hiccup – when Betsy was three months old, I got pregnant with Jeffrey. But, thanks to Ryan’s success, we were able to buy a newly built, three-bedroomed house, big enough for the four of us.

  Time passed. Ryan made money, he made beautiful bathrooms, he made people – mostly women – happy. At the end of every project, Ryan’s client exclaimed, ‘You’re an artist!’ They meant it and Ryan knew it, but he was the wrong sort of artist: he wanted to be Damien Hirst. He wanted to be famous and notorious, he wanted people on late-night arty-discussion shows to shout at each other about him, he wanted some people to say he was a fake. Well, he didn’t. He wanted everyone to say he was a genius, but the best sort of genius generates controversy so he was prepared to put up with the occasional slagging.

  Nevertheless, all was well until one day in 2010, when a tragedy befell him. Strictly speaking, the tragedy was mine. But artists, even unfulfilled ones, have a habit of making everything about themselves. The tragedy, a long-running one, didn’t bring everyone together, because life isn’t a soap opera. The tragedy ended with Ryan and me splitting up.

  Almost immediately, strange, exciting things began to happen to me – which we’ll get to. All you need to know for now is that Betsy, Jeffrey and I moved to live in New York.

  Ryan stayed in Dublin in the house which we’d bought as an investment in the mid-noughties when everyone in Ireland was tying up their futures in second properties. (I got our original starter home in the divorce. Even when I was living in a ten-room duplex on the Upper West Side, I hung on to it – I never trusted that my new circumstances would last. I was always afraid of boomeranging back to poverty.)

  Ryan had girlfriends – once he’d started washing his hair more regularly, there was no shortage. He had his work, he had a nice car and a motorbike – he wanted for nothing. But he wanted for everything: he never felt fulfilled. The gnawing pain of incompleteness sometimes went underground but it always returned.

  And now here he is, standing wild-eyed in my hall, myself and Jeffrey looking at him in alarm. ‘It’s happened, it’s finally happened!’ Ryan says. ‘My big artistic idea!’

  ‘Come in and sit down,’ I say. ‘Jeffrey, put the kettle on.’

  Babbling unstoppably, Ryan follows me into the front room, telling me what has happened. ‘It started about a year ago …’

  We sit facing each other while Ryan describes his breakthrough. A stirring had started deep down in him and, over the course of a year, swam its way upwards to consciousness. It visited him in vague forms in his dreams, in flash-seconds between thoughts, and, this very afternoon, his brilliant idea finally broke the surface. It had taken nearly twenty years of toiling with high-grade Italian sanitaryware for his genius to burst into bloom but finally it had.

  ‘And?’ I prompt.

  ‘I’m calling it Project Karma: I’m going to give away everything I own. Every single thing. My CDs, my clothes, all my money. Every television, every grain of rice, every holiday photograph. My car, my motorbike, my house –’

  Jeffrey stares in disgust. ‘You stupid asshole.’

  All credit to him, Jeffrey seems to hate Ryan as much as he hates me. He’s an equal opportunities hater. He could have done that thing that children of separated couples sometimes do, of playing the parents against each other, of pretending to have favourites, but in all honesty you’d have been hard-pressed to know which one of us he hated the most.

  ‘You’ll have nowhere to live!’ Jeffrey says.

  ‘Wrong!’ Ryan’s eyes are sparkling (but the wrong sort of sparkling, a scary form). ‘Karma will see me right.’

  ‘But what if it doesn’t?’ I feel horribly uneasy. I don’t trust karma, not any more. Once upon a time, something very bad happened to me. As a direct result of that very bad thing, something very, very good happened. I was a big believer in karma at that point. However, as a direct result of that very, very good thing, a very bad thing happened. Then another bad thing. I am currently due an upswing in my karma cycle, but it doesn’t seem to be happening. Frankly, I’ve had it with karma.

  And on a more practical level, I am afraid that if Ryan has no money I’ll have to give him some and I have almost none myself.

  ‘I will prove that karma exists,’ Ryan says. ‘I’m creating Spiritual Art.’

  ‘Can I have your house?’ Jeffrey asks.

  Ryan seems startled. He hasn’t considered such a request. ‘… Ah, no. No.’ As he speaks, he becomes more convinced. ‘Definitely not. If I gave it to you, it might look like I wasn’t doing it for real.’

  ‘Can I have your car?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can I have anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fuck you very much.’

  ‘Jeffrey, don’t,’ I say.

  Ryan is so excited he barely notices Jeffrey’s contempt. ‘I’ll blog about it, day by day, second by second. It’ll be an artistic triumph.’

  ‘I think this sort of thing has already been done.’ A memory of something, somewhere, is flickering.

  ‘Don’t,’ Ryan says. ‘Stella, don’t undermine me. You’ve had your fifteen minutes, let me have mine.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘No, Stella.’ He’s all but shouting. ‘It should have been me. I’m the one who’s meant to be famous. Not you – me! You’re the woman who stole my life!’

  This is a familiar conversational theme; Ryan refers to it almost daily.

  Jeffrey is clicking away on his phone. ‘It has been done. I’m getting loads here. Listen to this: “The man who gave away everything he possessed.” Here’s another one, “An Austrian millionaire is planning to give away all his money and possessions.”’

  ‘Ryan,’ I say, tentatively, keen to avoid triggering another rant from him. ‘Could you be … depressed?’

  ‘Do I seem depressed?’

  ‘You seem insane.’

  Even before he speaks, I know he’s going to say, ‘I’ve never been saner.’ Sure enough, Ryan obliges.

  ‘I need you to help me, Stella,’ he says. ‘I need publicity.’

  ‘You’re never out of the magazines.’

  ‘Home decor magazines.’ Ryan dismisses them with contempt. ‘They’re no good. You’re matey with the mainstream media.’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘… Ah, you are. A lot of residual affection for you. Even if it’s all gone to shit.’

  ‘How are you going to make money from this?’ Jeffrey asks.

  ‘Art isn’t about making money.’

  Jeffrey mutters something. I catch the word ‘knobhead’.

  After Ryan leaves, Jeffrey and I look at each other.

  ‘Say something,’ Jeffrey says.

  ‘He won’t go through with it.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I think.’

  22.00

  Jeffrey and I are sitting in front of the telly eating our pepper, pineapple and sausage stew. I’m trying hard to force down a few mouthfuls – these dinners of Jeffrey count as Cruel and Unusual Punishment – and Jeffrey has his face in his phone. Suddenly he says, ‘Fuck.’ It’s the first word we’ve exchanged in a while.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dad. He’s issued a Mission Statement … a
nd …’ Speedy clicking. ‘… his first video blog. And he’s started a countdown to Day Zero. It’s Monday week, ten days’ time.’

  Project Karma is a go.

  ‘Keep breathing.’

  Extract from One Blink at a Time

  Let me tell you about the tragedy that befell me nearly four years ago. There I was, being thirty-seven and the mother of a fifteen-year-old girl and a fourteen-year-old boy and the wife of a successful but creatively unfulfilled bathroom designer. I was working with my younger sister, Karen (but really for my younger sister, Karen), and generally I was being very normal – life was having its ups and downs but nothing to get excited about – when, one evening, the tips of the fingers on my left hand started to tingle. By bedtime, my right hand was also tingling. Maybe it’s a sign of how dull everything was that I found it pleasant, like having space-dust popping under my skin.

  Sometime during the night, I half-woke and noticed that now my feet were tingling as well. Lovely, I thought, dreamily, space-dust feet too. Maybe in the morning I’d be tingling everywhere and wouldn’t that be nice.

  When the alarm went off at 7 a.m., I felt knackered, but that was par for the course. I felt knackered every morning – after all, I was very normal. But this particular morning, it was a different sort of tiredness: a bad, heavy, made-of-lead tiredness.

  ‘Get up,’ I said to Ryan, then I stumbled down the stairs – and in retrospect, I probably really was stumbling – and started boiling kettles and throwing boxes of cereal onto the table, then I went upstairs to rouse (i.e. shout at) my children.

  I went back downstairs and took a swig of tea, but to my surprise it tasted strange and metallic. I stared accusingly at the stainless-steel kettle – clearly bits of it had infiltrated my tea. It had been such a good friend all these years, why had it suddenly turned on me?

  Giving it another wounded look, I started on Jeffrey’s special toast, which was simply ordinary toast without the butter – he had a ‘thing’ about butter, he said it was slimy – but my hands felt fumbly and numb, and the enjoyable tingling had stopped.