The Brightest Star in the Sky Read online

  I must admit to a little relief.

  The only problem with Matt falling in love with Maeve four and a quarter years ago was that Matt already had a girlfriend . . .

  Yes, the lovely Natalie. And she really was lovely. Of all the beautiful, brainy girls at Goliath—and there were more than two hundred youthful employees so there were many to choose from—Natalie was the most beautiful, the most brainy of all: smooth brown skin; long, lean thighs; a defiant question mark in her eye; a great facility for her job. (A Belgian national, she was a wonderful advertisement for her famously dull country.)

  Matt—smiling, lovable Matt, with the widely acknowledged conviction that he would Go Far—was a partner worthy of the lovely Natalie.

  Matt and Nat each headed up a sales team and, lovers though they were, they were also rivals. They competed against each other, gloating (with great good humor, of course) every time they closed a sale of one of Goliath’s software packages. “One less for you, bud.”

  So when Maeve joined as a trainee, it was no surprise that Matt, with his glossy girlfriend and his demanding job, barely noticed her. Mind you, Goliath being what it was (a company enjoying exponential growth), new people were appearing round the clock—on the same day that Maeve had started, so had Tarik from Pakistan and Yen-way from Taiwan—so there were always fresh faces enjoying a brainstorming game of ping-pong in the chill room or queueing to partake of the free breakfast granola. It was hard to keep up.

  Maeve, friendly and positive, with a musical, rounded accent, was popular among her colleagues, but she still hadn’t registered as a meaningful presence on Matt’s radar until one night when Matt and Nat were leaving work. They clicked quickly down the shiny marble hallway, black leather footwear flashing, serious tailoring flying, the storm troopers of Sales. Moving in harmony, they powered through Goliath’s massive double doors—taking a door each—passing Maeve who was crouched low, unlocking her bike.

  “Goodnight, lads,” she said.

  With perfect synchronicity, Matt and Nat swung their smooth, perfectly shaped heads to see who had spoken and—as one—exploded into uncontrollable laughter.

  “What?” Maeve asked. Realization dawned and a smile spread across her face. “Is it my hat?”

  “Yes!”

  Maeve’s hat was an orange and pink Inca-patterned knitted helmet. A triangle of yarn covered each ear, woolen plaits fell to her chest and the top came to a sharp point, on which an orange pompom was perched.

  “Is it very bad?” Maeve was still smiling.

  “Very bad,” Nat said.

  “But it’s all the rage on the Machu Picchu trail and it keeps my ears warm.” This made all three of them laugh even harder. Then, with a rough rush of metal, Maeve liberated her bike from its chain, hopped on to the saddle and, moving fluidly, freewheeled out into the traffic.

  “She’s so sweet.” Nat sighed. “What do you think about her and David? Is it the real thing?”

  Matt hadn’t a clue. He’d barely noticed Maeve until five minutes ago, much less known that she was going out with David.

  “So much in common.” Nat smiled fondly. “Seeing as they’re both Galwegians.”

  (David was actually from Manchester—it wasn’t necessary to come from Galway to qualify for Galwegian status. It was an umbrella term that implied fondness for falafels, frizzy sweaters and festivals—music, obviously, but comedy, poetry, beer . . . anything would do. If it involved mud and pints, it was perfect. If the festival could be combined with a protest march, then so much the better. Indeed, the ideal weekend, a veritable utopia for a Galwegian, was to get caught up in an antiglobalism riot, cracked on the skull with a truncheon and thrown into a police cell for twenty-four hours with a trio of hard-core protesters from Genoa. Galwegians were hardy; they slept like babies on their friends’ cold hard floors. Galwegians were proud of being Irish—even when they weren’t actually Irish—and they dropped many Irish words into conversation. Much of Goliath’s multicultural staff spoke basic Galwegian. A popular phrase was “Egg choct egg oal?” It meant “Coming for a drink?’)

  The funny thing was that at the time, Matt coveted David far more than he coveted Maeve.

  “I’d love to get David on my team,” he said wistfully.

  “You and me both,” Natalie replied.

  David was on Godric’s team and was Godric’s most valuable asset. He was super-brainy, a mathematics whiz, and he could disentangle the knottiest implementation problems. He just kept plugging away, trying things this way, trying things that way, until he’d unlocked and ordered things into a way that worked.

  “David could be a team leader himself if he wanted to,” Matt said.

  David was probably older than almost everyone else in Goliath, only by a few years, but enough to make him a natural leader. Nevertheless, he resisted all attempts to be steered in the direction of management.

  “What do you think the story is?” Matt asked Nat.

  “Doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed, he said.”

  David had packed an awful lot already into his thirty years. He’d traveled all over and done an impressive variety of jobs from teaching physics in Guyana to being a nanny for three children in a progressive-thinking family in Vancouver.

  “Doesn’t want a “career path,” he told me.” Nat shook her head and laughed. She couldn’t understand people who didn’t have the same ambition that she did.

  “Very noble of him.”

  “Maybe he’s a little too noble?”

  “Mmmm.”

  They were both remembering the incident the previous week when David—always passionate about injustice—became so enraged by pro-Russian coverage of the ongoing war in Chechnya that he printed out the offending article from the Reuters site and gathered several acolytes around his desk while he ceremoniously burned the page. It had set off all the smoke alarms.

  “And lucky the sprinklers didn’t start,” Matt said.

  “He could have destroyed all our machines,” Nat said.

  “And he didn’t care. Said the principle was more important.”

  “Principle.” Nat rolled her eyes. “For God’s sake.”

  After the laughing-at-the-hat incident, Matt knew who Maeve was and a week or so later, when he was driving to work and saw an orange pompom bobbing above the traffic, he was able to say to himself: It’s that Maeve girl, the one with the hat.

  On her bike, she wove in and out of lanes until she disappeared from view, then the lights changed and Matt took off and caught up with her. While he was once again stalled in a sea of cars, she was diligently working her way away from him and into the distance, then the lights changed and he lurched forward, closing the gap. It became a pattern. She’d get ahead of him, he’d chase after her, searching for the jaunty orange pompom, then she’d put some distance between them while he clenched his hands on the steering wheel, waiting for the chance to move.

  Although she knew nothing about it, he felt they were in a race. His journey to work had never been more fun.

  As he approached the busy intersection of Hanlon’s Corner he was in the lead. The lights were green, but anxiety that he’d get too far ahead of Maeve made him slow down and the lights obliged by changing to yellow. Just as the lights turned red, Maeve whizzed up the inside lane to the head of the traffic and stopped for the briefest moment while making a series of high-speed calculations. Matt could actually feel her judging her speed, the length of time available to her and the distance of the drivers who were gunning their engines, ready for their green light, now that the opposite lights had gone red. Then she shot out into the empty space, looking small and astonishingly brave, like a student squaring up to an army tank. All eyes were on the orange pompom as she raced through the danger zone, and when she reached the safety of the other side Matt was buoyed up with relief and admiration.

  The episode made such an impression that when he got in to work he made a special visit to the crowded cube she shared with the other trai
nees.

  “Morning, Miss Maeve. Has anyone ever told you you’re an excellent breaker of red lights? So calm, so daring?”

  She looked up from her screen, her eyes dancing with amusement. “Has anyone ever told you you’re full of guff?”

  “Guff?”

  “You know, chat, blather, blarney.”

  “Right.” Some Galwegian word, obviously. “I saw you on the way to work. Crossing Hanlon’s Corner when the lights were against you. Nerves of steel.”

  “I believe in taking my chances.”

  “You’re lucky you weren’t killed.”

  “Fortune favors the bold.”

  “You wouldn’t catch me cycling in this city.”

  “You should try it. It ennobles the soul.”

  “My soul is noble enough.”

  “Is it now?” she asked, looking at him, her expression amused.

  “Stop it!”

  “What?”

  “Looking at me like you know something about me that I don’t.”

  “Me?” She laughed. “I know nothing.”

  Matt didn’t tell Natalie about the morning he’d raced Maeve to work. There was no need, it was no biggie. The funny thing was that Natalie was just as fond of Maeve as he was and together they’d claimed a sort of ownership of her the way you would an adorable, harmless puppy. At Friday-night drinks in the pub, they made sure they were sitting near her, listening to her melodic accent and the strange words she used. “Ganzey” when she meant sweater—that type of thing.

  One Friday evening, Nat swung by Matt’s desk. “You ready?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “See you in the pub. Make sure Maeve’s there.” And she was gone.

  Matt knew better than to ask Nat to wait for him. Nat never wasted time.

  When he’d finished, he made his way to Maeve’s cube. “Coming for a drink?”

  “A drink?” Maeve gazed at nothing as she considered. She seemed to disappear inside her head. After a short pause she smiled and said, “No, not tonight, Matt.”

  “Why not, Farmgirl?” He felt, well, he felt quite . . . rejected. “Off out with your boyfriend?”

  “And what if I am?” Her tone was light-hearted.

  “Nothing.” Matt was assailed by a sudden stab of intense dislike for David. He was so right-on and decent, always supporting causes and organizing charity things and being so caring.

  “I’m on the bike,” Maeve said.

  Matt looked blank.

  “I can’t have more than one drink if I’m on the bike,” she explained. “I’d rather have none than one.”

  Instantly, Matt shifted his dislike from David to Maeve’s bike, like it was a chaperone keeping him from her.

  “Well, I’m going for a drink,” Matt said, with defiance that he didn’t really understand.

  “More power to you.”

  “Yes, more power to me.”

  In the pub, Nat asked, “Where’s Maeve?”

  “Not coming.”

  “She’s not?” Nat seemed disproportionately disappointed.

  Matt looked at her warily. “What’s up?”

  “Maeve’s finishing her training next week.”

  “Already?”

  “Two weeks early. It’s a secret. She’s done really well. I want her on my team.”

  But I want her.

  “And she wants to be on Team Nat?”

  “I haven’t asked her. I was going to float it tonight.”

  “So she doesn’t know anything about it yet?”

  “No.”

  I’ ll get to her first.

  When Matt persuaded Pong from Thailand to leave his team for Nat’s and took Maeve for himself, Nat seemed a little shaken by Matt’s treachery. Nevertheless, she raised a glass and declared him “a worthy adversary.”

  In the following weeks, Matt started saying “guff ” and “more power to you” and sometimes “more power to your elbow.”

  “More power to my elbow?” Nat laughed. “My little Galwegian boy.”

  It was her joke. As if she, the lovely Natalie, would ever go out with a Galwegian.

  Day 61 . . .

  By 11:30 p.m. Star Street had fallen silent. I’d been waiting for Katie to come home and I realized she wasn’t going to. I located her across the city, entering a large Victorian house, about to receive a birthday pleasuring from potent Conall.

  She was very chatty. The result of large quantities of champagne. Conall was trying, with admirable good humor, to unlock his front door and simultaneously keep Katie upright.

  “Who’d beat who in a fight?” Katie was asking. “Hedge-fund manager or you?”

  “Me.” Conall’s tone of voice gave me to understand that this line of questioning had been going on for some time.

  His fingers circled her arm, as he led them into the house and disabled the alarm.

  Katie leaned against a light switch and exclaimed in drunken delight as half the house lit up. “I do that? Let there be light! No need to hold on to me, I won’t fall over.”

  “Fall over if you like. It’s your birthday.”

  “I drank a lot of champagne.” She nodded her head seriously. “Bit pissed. Could happen.”

  Conall steered her to the staircase and together, very slowly, they ascended, Katie having to take frequent pauses to laugh for no reason.

  On step four she refused to budge. “This is a good one! Conall, who’d beat who in a fight? President of the World Bank or you?”

  “Me.”

  “It’s nice to just lean back, you know? Like this.” She allowed all her weight to fall against the arm Conall had around her waist. “You won’t let me fall. Used to do it at school, see how much we trusted someone.”

  “Ups-a-daisy. We’ll keep moving.”

  On the ninth step she stopped again. “Who’d beat who in a fight? The CEO of Jasmine Foods or you?”

  “Me. With both hands tied behind my back.”

  That made her laugh long and wheezily, and all progress halted. “Can’t walk and laugh at same time.”

  Finally, they reached the landing and he opened the bedroom door. Katie toppled in, made it as far as the bed, lay on her back and stuck one leg up in the air. “Take off my boots.”

  “No, leave them on.”

  “Oh? Ooh. Okay. Who’d beat who in a—”

  He covered her mouth with his and, after a moment, she ceased her questioning. She would never know who would beat who in a fight, the head of the International Monetary Fund or Conall, but suddenly it no longer seemed important. The birthday pleasuring had begun.

  In her wardrobe in Star Street, I compressed myself into a red-soled, peep-toe shoe and accessed some of her memories.

  How Katie met Conall . . .

  Well, just like Matt and Maeve’s story, this too happened at work. Katie was head publicist at Apex Entertainment Ireland. They called themselves Apex Entertainment, because they wanted to seem twenty-first-century and multimedia, but basically they were a record company, the Irish outpost of a much bigger multinational. Katie had been there for five years, welcoming visiting rock stars to Ireland, organizing their interviews, hanging around backstage wearing a laminated pass, then—the most important part of her job as far as she could see—taking them drinking. It was harder than it sounded, because she was the one who had to remain sober and coherent enough to sign for all the bottles of Cristal, get the artistes home to bed, then show up at her desk at ten o’clock the following morning after four hours’ sleep.

  If you met her at a christening, you’d probably never guess she worked for a record company. Admittedly, she always wore high heels and sometimes tight jeans but she didn’t take cocaine and her thighs were wider than her knees. Despite these impediments, Katie was popular with the visiting rock stars, who referred to her as “Auntie Katie,” which she didn’t mind too much. Or “Mum,” which she did. Artistes returning to Ireland greeted her like an old friend and sometimes, late at night, they tried to wrestl
e her and her thighs into bed, but she knew their heart was never really in it, it was just an instinctive reaction, something they’d been programmed to do in the presence of any woman. She almost always turned them down.

  So yes, Katie was working away, not exactly happy but not exactly unhappy either, when a rumor started doing the rounds that the European arm of Apex was going to be cut free from their U.S. owners and sold to the highest bidder, who would promptly sack everyone. But that particular rumor regularly did the rounds, so Katie decided not to bother worrying. She didn’t have the same energy she used to have and over the years she’d wasted too much adrenaline and anxiety on disasters that had never had the decency to occur.

  Then it really happened. A press release announced that they’d been bought by Sony, who planned to keep Apex as a separate label. The relief engendered by this was short-lived because the next sentence said that Apex would be “rationalized” by Morehampton Green.

  “Who are they?” Tamsin asked. (Low-grade frequency. Not too bright. Wore white lipstick. Long legs, large breasts. Popular with visiting artistes.)

  “Who cares?” Katie said. Her frequency had gone haywire, quivering with fear. It wasn’t as though she loved her job but now that there was a chance she might lose it . . .

  “Vultures,” Danno said, with contempt. (Danno, aged twenty-three. Shrill, fast-vibrating frequency. Needed very little sleep. Always wore black. Could consume copious amounts of cocaine without any apparent ill effects. Also popular with visiting artistes.)

  “Morehampton Green descend on companies that are underperforming,” Danno explained. “Strip them of their assets, sack most of the staff and leave nothing in their wake but shock and awe.”