The Brightest Star in the Sky Read online

  But the days of cleaners and wardrobes and a normal flatmate were in Lydia’s past . . . She stood before the bathroom mirror and poured large quantities of a serum designed to combat frizz on to her head. For no matter how impoverished her circumstances, she would never give up her hair. She would go hungry before she did without her serum. She and her wild springy curls were engaged in an ongoing battle of wills. Just because she was short of money was no excuse to simply give in and surrender, like many a lesser woman would have done. Lydia’s hair was not her master. No, she was the boss of it.

  Into the kitchen, where she heaped eight spoonfuls of instant coffee into a massive mug, which was called Lydia’s Mug, and filled it halfway with boiling water, then the rest with tap water. She swallowed it like medicine, gagging slightly on the last mouthful, abandoned the mug on the table, dressed quickly in jeans, trainers and a hoodie, then left.

  Down in the street, the morning was sunny but chilly and Lydia made her way to a taxi. A taxi? What kind of flashy minx spurns public transport?

  Well, what a surprise when she climbed into the driver’s seat! One could be forgiven for thinking she was proposing to hot-wire the vehicle, but when she shoved a key in the ignition it became clear that she owned it and that she was a taxi driver by trade!

  It was some sort of generic Toyota, not a good car. Not a bad one either, just one of those unexciting ones that taxi drivers seem to favor. But interestingly, given Lydia’s attitude to hygiene in the home, her car was clean and fragrant. She took evident pride in her charabanc.

  Amid much static noise, she got on her radio and received word of a fare: picking a man up from the Shelbourne and driving him to the airport.

  She did a screechy U-turn and headed toward town, the traffic lights changing to green just as she neared them. “Gdansk,” she said, with satisfaction, almost smacking her lips with the pleasure of saying it.

  The next lights were also green. “Gdansk.” She nodded her thanks at them.

  But when she pulled up outside the Shelbourne and the fare climbed into the back of her car, she saw him do a double-take. Irkutsk! she thought.

  “You’re a girl!” he declared.

  “Last time I checked,” she said stonily. Irkutsk! Irkutsk! Irkutsk!

  Why a chatty one? Why? When it was so early and she’d had only eight spoonfuls of coffee?

  “ What’s it like?” the fare asked eagerly. “Being a female taxi driver?” Her mouth tightened. What did he think it was like? It was exactly like being a male taxi driver, only with gobshites like him asking unanswerable questions at some ungodly hour in the morning.

  “How do you deal with trouble?” he asked. The question they all asked. “If someone won’t pay?”

  “Can I ask you a question?” she asked.

  “By all means!” He was delighted by the interplay with this springy-haired little stunner, still damp and fragrant from her early-morning shower.

  “Have you accepted Christ Jesus into your life as your lord and savior?”

  That shut him up. They drove the rest of the way in silence.

  Day 60 . . .

  Back at 66 Star Street, people were stirring. Andrei had been awake since 5:35 when Lydia had deliberately dropped something on the bathroom floor, with clattery force. Since she had moved in, he and Jan had been in a state of shock. They had never met a girl like her and the only good thing about her was that she was small. Small enough to fit into the tiny bed in the tiny room.

  Andrei stared wistfully into space, remembering the halcyon days with their previous tenant, a Ukrainian electrician-cum-accordion player named Oleksander. Life with him had been so harmonious—because he was never there. He’d spent every night at the much swankier digs of his girlfriend, Viktoriya, and his room at 66 Star Street functioned mostly as his wardrobe. Until Viktoriya had fallen for the charms of an Irishman, a civil servant who held a high-ranking post in the Department of Agriculture, and Oleksander was thrown back on his own resources. He’d endured a succession of sleepless nights with his legs extending six inches over the end of his narrow single bed. When he’d tried to remedy the shortfall by putting a chair there, to rest his heels on, the wooden footboard had cut into his calves, marking him with two livid purple weals which linger to this day. He successfully managed to remove said wooden footboard and the only downside was that the frame of the bed collapsed entirely. His next solution was to sleep with the mattress directly on the floor, but the lumbar region of his back set up a clamor of objections and after thirty-four days of excruciating pain, he told Andrei he could take no more.

  Lots of people, most of them Polish men, had come to view the room but without exception declared themselves too big to fit into the bed. They also enjoyed much mirth at the thought of Oleksander Shevchenko (who was a well-known figure; his busking outside Trinity had become almost a tourist landmark) trying to get some shut-eye in such doll-like quarters. So when Irish Lydia arrived, Andrei and Jan had been so dazzled by her suitably miniature proportions they entirely neglected to notice that she was an evil little pixie.

  Now they were paying the price.

  They had endless discussions, when they asked each other: Why? Why was she so unpleasant? So lazy? So cruel?

  Andrei warned Jan that they might never get answers. It would probably be best, he advised, if they accepted that her sour nature was a fact of life, as inevitable as the rain, like everything else in this damp unpleasant country.

  After washing and dressing, the boys descended to the street, where they extended the palms of their hands outwards and expressed lengthy and sarcastic surprise that it wasn’t pissing rain, before walking ten minutes to the Luas stop. There they went in different directions, Andrei east to an industrial estate and Jan north to a shopping mall.

  Jan liked to say he worked in IT, which in a way he did. He was employed in an enormous supermarket, filling the online orders. His days were spent toiling in the aisles, pushing a massive super-trolley device off which branched twelve baskets, representing twelve different customers, each with a separate grocery list. When he’d located every item on all twelve lists and put them into the correct baskets, he’d deposit the merchandise in the loading area, for the truck to spirit throughout Dublin, then he’d trudge to the printer to pick up another twelve lists, hook twelve new empty baskets to his super-trolley and commence the whole procedure again. He lost track of how many times a day he repeated this exercise.

  Andrei also worked in IT. Except that he really did. He drove around the city in a white van, fi xing broken computers for office workers. The van itself took up a lot of his thoughts. He was a pragmatic man and it irked him terribly that he was obliged to return it to base every evening, where it idled for fourteen useless hours in a parking lot, when it could be used for his own purposes—specifically, picking up Rosie. He fantasized about parking outside the house she shared with four other nurses, honking the horn and seeing her skipping down the steps, van-shaped admiration on her heart-shaped face. He had been dating Rosie (an Irish girl, but in all other respects entirely different from evil pixie Lydia) for two months and eight days and thus far she had refused from surrender her virginity to him. Andrei, with his muscles and astonishing blue-eyed good looks, was accustomed to getting his way with the girls but he was genuinely impressed by Rosie’s old-fashioned virtue and his initial lust had blossomed into something far more complex.

  Day 60 . . .

  On the ground floor of 66 Star Street, Matt and Maeve were roused gently from their slumber and welcomed into the day by a Zen alarm clock, a plinky-plonky affair, which sounded like Tibetan goat bells. It started off with isolated peaceful plinks, like an occasional tap on a xylophone, then over ten minutes it built up into a cacophony of delightful chimes. Not very Matt. He seemed more like a man who’d prefer an alarm that behaved like a defibrillator, issuing a cruel discordant BRRRING to make every nerve in his body stand on end and oust him instantly from the bed, to beat his chest in a
Tarzan roar. “Yaaaar! Watch out world, I’m coming to get you!”

  But Maeve wanted the chimes, so Maeve got the chimes. She also got a leisurely breakfast. Matt, I suspect, would have been happy to mindlessly scarf down a Snickers bar while rushing to work, but instead he made tea for Maeve, Maeve made porridge for him, then they sat at their kitchen counter, mirroring each other’s actions, checking that the other had honey, orange juice and other breakfast paraphernalia.

  On their kitchen windowsill, in a curlicued silver frame, was a photo of them on their wedding day. They glammed up well, the pair of them, I must say. Maeve, in particular. Judging from the picture, they’d gone for a traditional wedding, the full white monty. Maeve’s dress was one of those deceptively simple numbers: a slender unadorned fall of heavy satin, from an empire-line bodice. An off-the-shoulder neckline revealed a pair of pretty creamy-skinned shoulders, and a pearl headdress gathered her thick fair hair into a bun from which slinky ringlets escaped, framing her face. She looked like a girl from one of those Jane Austen novels she seemed so fond of reading. Matt, clutching onto Maeve and gazing at the camera with the expression of a man who has just won the lottery but is trying not to gloat about it, was kitted out in a dark, serious-looking suit. The kind of suit that people wear to sign peace treaties. Evidently, he had tracked down the most impressive rig-out he could find, to convey just how momentous his marriage was to him. (Without wishing to be unkind, there was considerably less of them three years ago, when this photo was taken. Both of them were a lot, well, narrower. Clearly, the trans-fat didn’t play so large—forgive the pun—a part in their lives back then.)

  Maeve swallowed the last of her orange juice, Matt clattered his spoon into his empty bowl, they each took their vitamin tablet, knocking it back with a shared glass of water, and—finally—left the flat and prepared to go to work. Matt had a car, polished shoes, a sharp suit and a sharp haircut. Maeve had a bicycle, flavorless chapstick and a pair of cords so unattractive (too big for her and a most unappealing shade of olive-green) that it seemed as if they had been chosen specially for their ugliness.

  They kissed and said goodbye. “Be careful,” Matt said.

  Of what? I wondered. Anyone foolhardy enough to negotiate a bicycle through rush-hour traffic could expect admonitions from their nearest and dearest, but, all the same, I knew that coming a cropper at the hand of a careless car was not what Maeve feared. Oh she was definitely scared, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t know what of; she was blocking me. All I could tell from looking at her was that she had no fear of being mocked for her crap clothes. Fascinating. Matt stared after Maeve until she was absorbed by the gridlock, then he thought about his car. It was parked so far away that he wondered if he should get a bus to it.

  Day 60 . . .

  In Jemima’s flat, the dog was suffering no ill effects from the dizzying he’d received the previous night. Jemima was trying to tempt him to the kitchen but he was playing hard to get. “Grudge, Grudge, my lovely Grudge.” So it seemed the beast really was called Grudge! How . . . well, how peculiar.

  Jemima had been washed and dressed since 6:15 a.m. She couldn’t abide slugabed behavior. She hunkered down, her knees cracking like pistol shots, until her face was level with Grudge’s sulky one. “Just because Fionn is coming doesn’t mean I’ll love you any less,” she said.

  All became clear: Grudge was sulking because he’d discovered that “The Fair One” was due to visit.

  “Come and be fed.”

  Within moments Grudge was dancing the Dance of Breakfast. A thin-skinned creature, slow to forgive, except when food was involved.

  I kept my distance from Jemima. I didn’t want to frighten her. Not unless I had to. Nonetheless, her thoughts reached me. She was pulsing on a strong, steady, strident vibration, which fought its way through the clutter of the flat and insisted on attention.

  She was thinking with great fondness about the word grudge. Such a splendid noun, she thought. So suitable for purpose: you couldn’t possibly utter it without your face contorting itself into a sour prune of grudgingness. Krompir was another word she savored; it was Serbian for potato and had a most satisfying chomping sound. Or bizarre, possibly her most favorite word of all, a festive, joyous sound, which always brought to mind the jangling of tambourines.

  Grudge was regarded by many as a strange name for a dog, but when people were crass enough to mention this, Jemima’s answer was that he had chosen it himself. They’d told her at the pound that his name was Declan but he was no more a Declan than she was. She believed that he should be trusted to make the best choice for himself, so when she got him home—where he wedged himself tightly into a corner and sat, low and mournful, on his paws—Jemima reeled out a long list of high-esteem dog names. Champion? Hero? Rebel? Prince? She watched carefully for a positive reaction but, after each suggestion, Declan growled, “GGGGRRRRR,” followed by a short little bark which sounded like “Udge.” Eventually, she heard him: Grudge it was.

  They’d warned her in the pound that he was a very damaged dog. There was a lot he couldn’t tolerate. Men in wigs. Folk singers. The color yellow. The smell of hairspray.

  But he could be soothed by the rustling of Crunchie wrappers. Girls with red hair. Yorkshire accents. The music of George Michael, though only the earlier stuff (and not Wham!—he abhorred Wham!).

  He was a highly strung, mercurial creature, who would require careful handling, but Jemima wasn’t daunted. Her philosophy, which she related to the man at the pound, was that a well-balanced dog would always get a home, but it was the poor damaged ones who really needed it.

  Entre nous, I’m wondering if I was too quick with my initial judgment of Jemima as a prickly old crone.

  His breakfast consumed, Grudge stared at Jemima with melting Malteser eyes, then flicked a few anxious sideways glances around the room. He was a wonderful dog, Jemima thought with pride. More intuitive than most humans. Which wouldn’t be difficult, seeing as the vast majority were walking about with their heads stuck up their own fundaments.

  “Yes, I feel it too,” Jemima told Grudge. “But we won’t be bowed!” She whirled around one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and planted her legs wide, like a warrior woman. “You hear me?” she said—nay, demanded—glaring hard (but into the wrong corner of the room, God love her). In ringing tones, she repeated, “We won’t be bowed!”

  Keep your pants on, Jemima. It’s not all about you.

  Day 60 . . .

  Matt liked to get his daily Act of Kindness out of the way early. As he drove to work, he scanned the streets looking for a chance to do good. At the upcoming bus stop a lone woman was waiting. It was clear that she’d just missed a bus because at this time of day usually dozens of people were gathered, watching each other like hawks, careful not to be left at the back of the melee when the bus eventually did show up.

  He opened the passenger window and called out, “Where are you going?”

  Startled, the woman looked up from her texting. A well-upholstered type, bundled into an orange jacket, she was aged roughly between thirty-seven and sixty-six. “What’s it to you?”

  “Would you like a lift?”

  “With you? I can’t get into a car with a strange man! Don’t you read the papers, son?”

  Ouff !

  “I’m not a strange man, I’m a nice man.”

  “Well, you’re hardly going to admit you’re an ax murderer.”

  “I’m married. I love my wife. I don’t own an ax.”

  “Kids?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’ve four.”

  “Hop in, you can tell me about them.”

  “Yeah and you can show me your ax.”

  “I sell software for a living.”

  “So did Jack the Ripper.”

  “He didn’t!”

  “Look.” She sighed. “You might be a lovely lad, in fairness you look like a lovely lad, but I can’t take the chance. My kids wouldn’t even be able to remember what
I was wearing to tell the police. And all the recent photographs of me are bad, very jowly. I couldn’t have them stuck to the lamp posts around the city. On your way, son.”

  Feck.

  Dispirited, Matt drove off. His daily Act of Kindness was like a millstone around his neck. It needled him all day long, like an eyelash trapped in his eye. And the days came round so fast, it felt like as soon he’d achieved one AOK, a brand-new day had dawned and it was time to do another. And woe betide him if he got home in the evening without having Acted Kindly At Least Once During The Day. He was unable to lie to Maeve, and guilt would bounce him back out into the world, forbidding him to return until the needful had been carried out.

  It was harder than you’d think to be kind. There were all these bloody rules (Maeve’s). Buying copies of The Big Issues didn’t count: it was too easy. Giving money to a busker didn’t count either—not unless you engaged them in chat, praised their playing, made a request and stood and listened to it while displaying bodily appreciation (foot-tapping or head-nodding was acceptable; if you forced yourself to dance, you’d actually have overdone it, although none of the excess could be carried over as credit toward the following day).

  The AOK had to cost emotionally. It had to be something he really didn’t want to do.

  However, going to work didn’t count. Funnily enough, Matt usually enjoyed his job at Edios (Easy Does It Office Systems). (He’d moved on from Goliath some time ago.) But this Bank of British Columbia thing was doing his head in. You could say it was his own fault, he acknowledged. The bank had been perfectly happy with their old software system. Perfectly happy, until Matt had started stalking them, trying to persuade them to change over to Edios. But what was he to do? It was his job to drum up new business. He’d cold-called the bank’s Irish office and when they told him to sling it, he dusted himself down and called again, then again, and eventually their procurement people had caved and wearily agreed to a meeting. Matt had been triumphant. A face-to-facer might look like merely the start of a process but, as far as he was concerned, it meant the deal was as good as done. That’s not to say it was ever easy. The effort of will required from Matt was always enormous, like single-handedly turning around a huge cruise ship. The amount of charm he’d expended selling software over the years would have brought peace to the Middle East. Nevertheless, he was accustomed to getting results.