Anybody Out There? Page 5

  “Mr. Coaster, sir,” I interrupted politely. “On my way in here, I bumped into a gentleman, which resulted in him spilling his coffee. I’d like the opportunity to apologize before I leave. I didn’t get his name but I can describe him.” I spoke quickly. “He’s tall, at least I think he is, although I’m so short everyone looks tall to me. Even you.”

  Shite.

  Mr. Coaster’s expression went instantly very stony. But I pressed on, I had to. How to describe my mystery man? “He’s kind of pale, but not in a bad way, not like he’s sick. His hair is light brown now, but you can tell he was blond as a baby. And his eyes, I think they might be green…”

  Coaster’s stony face remained stony. He could have given those statues on Easter Island a run for their money. He cut in on me. “’Fraid I can’t help.” And with lightning speed, I found myself outside his office, with the door shut firmly behind me.

  Nita was studying herself in a compact; she looked like she’d tried on every single product simultaneously, like a little girl who’d gone berserk in her mother’s makeup drawer.

  “Nita, can you help me.”

  “Anna, I am totally in love with this gloss—”

  “I’m looking for a man.”

  “Welcome to New York City.” She didn’t even look up from the mirror. “Eight-minute dating. Like speed dating, but slower. You get eight minutes instead of three. It’s totally great, I got four matches last time.”

  “Not just any man. He works here. He’s quite tall and…and…” There was no other way round this, I had to say it. “And, um, beautiful. He has a tiny scar on his eyebrow and he sounds like he might be from Boston.”

  Suddenly I had her interest. She jerked her head up. “Totally giving Denis Leary? But, like, younger?”

  “Yesss!”

  “Aidan Maddox. In IT, further along this floor. Make a left, then another, two rights, then you’ll see his pod.”

  “Thank you. Just one other thing. Is he married?”

  “Aidan Maddox? Oh my God. No, he’s not married.” She gave a little chuckle that said, And he’s never likely to be either.

  I found him and stood by his cubicle, looking at his back, willing him to turn around. “Hey,” I said affably.

  He swiveled around very quickly, like he was frightened. “Oh,” he said. “Hey. It’s you. How’s your hand?”

  I extended it for him to have a look. “I called my lawyer, the writ is on its way. Hey, would you like to go for a drink sometime?”

  He looked like he’d been hit by a train. “You’re asking me out for a drink?”

  “Yes,” I said firmly. “Yes, I am.”

  After a pause, he said, sounding perplexed, “But what if I said no?”

  “What’s the worst that can happen? You’ve already scalded me with boiling coffee.”

  He looked at me with an expression curiously akin to despair and the silence stretched too long. My confidence burst with a bang and suddenly I was desperate to leave.

  “Do you have a card?” he asked.

  “Sure!” I knew a rejection when I heard one.

  I fumbled in my wallet and passed over a neon-pink rectangle with CANDY GRRRL in red wet-look type, followed in smaller writing by Anna Walsh, public-relations superstar. In the top right-hand corner was the famous growling-girl logo—an illustration of a winking girl, her teeth bared in a “grrr.”

  We both looked at it. Suddenly I saw it through his eyes.

  “Cute,” he said. Once again he sounded confused.

  “Yes, it really gives the impression of gravitas,” I said. “Well, er, sayonara.”

  I’d never before in my life said “sayonara.”

  “Yeah, okay, sayonara,” he replied. Still sounding baffled.

  And off I went.

  So, you win some, you lose some, and plenty more where he came from. Anyway, I tended to like Italian and Jewish men; dark and short was more my thing.

  But that night I woke up at 3:15 A.M., thinking about this Aidan. I’d really thought we’d connected.

  But I’d had other intense, and ultimately meaningless, encounters in New York. Like the time the man on the subway had started talking to me about the book I was reading. (Paulo Coelho, which I so did not get.) We had a great chat all the way to Riverdale; I told him all kinds of things about myself, like my teenage preoccupation with mysticism, which I was now mortified by, and he told me about his nighttime cleaning job and the two women in his life whom he was unable to choose between.

  And there was the girl I’d met at Shakespeare in the Park—we’d both been stood up, so we talked to each other while we waited and she told me everything about her two Burmese cats, who she said had helped her depression so much that she’d reduced her dose of Cipramil from forty milligrams right down to ten.

  It’s a New York thing: you meet, tell each other absolutely everything about yourself, you genuinely connect, then you never see each other again. It’s very nice. Usually.

  But I didn’t want my encounter with this Aidan to be a one-off and for the following few days I was a little expectant in every ringing-phone and incoming-e-mail situation, but nada.

  6

  Helen was clattering away at the ancient Amstrad, which lived in the hall, on top of the hostess trolley, and if you wanted to sit down to send an e-mail, you had to open the trolley doors and sit on a low stool, with your knees in the hot shelves.

  “Who are you e-mailing?” I called.

  She stuck her head around the door, winced at the sight of the tassels, and said, “No one, I’m writing a thing, you know, a telly script. About a detective.”

  I was speechless. Helen claimed—proudly—to be practically illiterate.

  “I might as well,” she said. “I’ve plenty of material. It’s actually very good, I’ll print it off for you.”

  The ancient printer screeched and squeaked for about ten minutes, then Helen proudly ripped off a single page and gave it to me. Still speechless, I read it.

  Lucky Star

  By and about Helen Walsh

  Scene One: small proud Dublin detective agency. Two women, one young, beautiful (me). Other old (Mum). Young woman, feet on desk. Old woman, feet not on desk because of arthritis in knees. Slow day. Quiet. Bored. Clock ticking. Car parks outside. Man comes in. Good-looking. Big feet.

  Me: What can I do you for?

  Man: I’m looking for a woman.

  Me: This isn’t a knocking shop.

  Man: No, I mean, I’m looking for my girl friend. She’s gone missing.

  Me: Have you spoken to the boys in blue?

  Man: Yes, but they won’t do anything until she’s been gone twenty-four hours. Anyway, they just think we’ve had a row.

  Me (whipping feet off desk, narrowing eyes, leaning forward): And have you?

  Man (morto): Yes.

  Me: About what? Another man? Someone she works with?

  Man (still morto): Yes.

  Me: She working late a lot recently? Spending too much time with her colleague?

  Man: Yes.

  Me: It’s not looking good for you, but it’s your dime. We can try and find her. Give all the details to the old woman over there.

  “Excellent, isn’t it?” Helen said. “Especially the line about the knocking shop? And about it being his dime. Hard-boiled, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, very good.”

  “I’ll do more tomorrow, maybe we could even act it out. Right, I better get ready for work.”

  At about 10 P.M. she reappeared at my door; she was dressed for surveillance work. (Dark, close-fitting clothes that are meant to be waterproof but aren’t.)

  “You need fresh air,” she said.

  “I got fresh air earlier.” No way was I going to sit in a wet hedge for eleven hours while she tried to catch photos of unfaithful men leaving their girlfriends’ apartments.

  “But I want you to come with me.”

  Even though it would have been hard for Helen and me to be more differ
ent, we were close: maybe it was because we were the two youngest. Whatever the reason, Helen treated me like an extension of herself, the part that got up to bring her glasses of water in the middle of the night. I was her playmate/toy/slave/best friend, and needless to say, everything I owned was automatically hers.

  “I can’t come,” I said. “I’m injured.”

  “Boo hoo,” she said. “Boo bloody hoo.”

  It wasn’t that she was trying to be cruel, it’s just that my family doesn’t believe in oversentimentality. They think it makes you more upset. Brusque chivvying, making no allowances—that’s their modus operandi.

  Mum appeared and Helen turned to her in complaint. “She won’t come with me. It’ll have to be you.”

  “I can’t,” Mum said. Dramatically she flicked her eyes in my direction, like I was mentally ill—and blind. “I’d better stick around here.”

  “Oh, ding-dong,” Helen griped. “I’m off to spend the whole night sitting in a wet hedge and none of you care.”

  “Of course we care.” Mum produced something from a pocket and gave it to Helen. “Vitamin-C sucky sweets; it might stop you getting those sore throats.”

  “No.” Helen squirmed away and this confirmed something I’d suspected—she actually enjoyed the sore throats, they were an excuse to stay in bed, eat ice cream, and be horrible to people.

  “Take the vitamin C.”

  “No.”

  “Take the vitamin C.”

  “No.”

  “TAKE THE FECKING VITAMIN C!”

  “Christ, don’t have a cow. All right, then. But it won’t work.”

  After she’d slammed out of the house, Mum got her sheet of paper and administered my final dose of pills for the day.

  “Good night,” she said. “Sleep tight.” Anxiously, she said, “I don’t like leaving you stuck down here on your own, with the rest of us all upstairs.”

  “It’s okay, Mum. I mean, with my busted knee, it’s easier for me to be downstairs.”

  “I blame myself,” she burst out, with sudden emotion.

  She did? Now, how did she figure that one?

  “If only we lived in a bungalow! Then we could all be together. We looked at one, you know, your father and I, before you were all born. A bungalow. But it was too far from his work. And it smelled a bit funny. But now I regret it!”

  This was twice in the one day I’d seen Mum upset. Normally, she was as tough as the steaks she used to make until we begged her to stop.

  “Mum, I’m fine, don’t blame yourself, don’t feel guilty.”

  “I’m a mother, it’s my job to feel guilty.” In another burst of anxiety, she asked, “You’re not having nightmares?”

  “No nightmares, Mum, I don’t dream about anything.” It must be the pills.

  She frowned. “That’s not right,” she said. “You should be having nightmares.”

  “I’ll try,” I promised.

  “Good girl.” She kissed me on the forehead and turned off the light.

  “You were always a good girl,” she called affectionately from the doorway. “A bit odd at times, but good.”

  7

  Actually, I’m not really that odd at all—well, no more than anyone is; I’m just not like the rest of them.

  All four of my sisters are noisy and volatile and—they’d be the first to admit it—they love a good row. Or a bad row. Any kind of row, really—they’ve always seen bickering as a perfectly legitimate means of communication. I spent my life watching them like a mouse watches a cat, curled up small and quiet, like a tiny, fringey-skirted sand mite, hoping that if they didn’t realize I was there, they couldn’t start a fight with me.

  My eldest three sisters—Claire, Maggie, and Rachel—were like Mum: tall, fabulous women with cast-iron opinions. They seemed like a different race from me and I made sure never to get into disagreements with them, because any puny thing I said got dashed on the rocks of their robust, shouty certainty.

  Claire, the firstborn, recently turned forty. Despite this, she remains a strong-willed, upbeat type who “really knows how to enjoy herself.” (Euphemism for “unbridled party animal.”) Back in the distant past, her life had a little hiccup, when her husband, patronizing James, left her on the same day she gave birth to their first child. This meant that she had the stuffing knocked out of her—for oh, close on half an hour—then she got over it. She met another bloke, Adam, and she had the good sense to make sure he was younger than her and easy to scare into submission. Mind you, she also had the good sense to make sure he was a dark, handsome hunk with lovely, broad shoulders and—according to Helen (don’t ask)—a fine, big mickey. As well as Kate, the “abandoned child,” Adam and Claire have two other children and they live in London.

  Second sister: Maggie, the lickarse. Three years younger than Claire, Maggie distinguishes herself by refusing to be deliberately obstructive. But—and it’s a big but—she’s well able to stand up for herself, and when she gets an idea into her head, she can be as stubborn as a mule. Maggie lives in Dublin, less than a mile from Mum and Dad. (See, lickarse.)

  Then comes Rachel, a year younger than Maggie and the middle of the five of us. Even before Rachel began being accompanied everywhere by Luke, she used to cause a bit of a stir—she was sexy, fun, a bit wild, and her little hiccup was quite a big one, really. Probably the worst of the lot—at least, until mine. Several years ago, while she’d first been living in New York, she’d developed a fondness for the devil’s dandruff (cocaine). Things got very messy, and after a dramatic suicide attempt, she landed in an expensive Irish rehab.

  Very expensive. Mum still goes on about how she and Dad could have gone on the Orient Express to Venice and stayed in a suite at the Cipriani for a month for the same money, then she always adds quickly, but not entirely convincingly, that you can’t put a price on your children’s happiness.

  But it’s fair to say that Rachel is also probably the Walsh family’s biggest success story. A year or so after rehab, she went to college, got a degree in psychology, then an MA in addiction studies, and she now works in a rehab place in New York.

  After the years she’d spent coked out of her head, it was very important for Rachel to be “real”; a laudable ambition. The only downside was that she could be a bit earnest. She often talked—approvingly—about people having “done work” on themselves. And when she was with her “recovery” friends, they sometimes joked about people who’d never been to therapy: “What? You mean, she still has the personality her parents gave her?” That was a joke, see. But if you scratch away at Rachel’s earnestness, you don’t have to try too hard before you’ve uncovered a version of the old person, who is lots of fun.

  Next in line is me—I’m three and a half years younger than Rachel.

  Then, bringing up the rear, is Helen and she’s a law unto herself. People love her and fear her. She’s a true original—fearless, undiplomatic, and willfully contrary. For example, when she set up her agency (Lucky Star Investigations) she could have had her office in a lovely suite on Dawson Street, with a concierge and a shared receptionist, but instead she situated herself in an estate of graffiti-covered flats, where all the shops had their shutters down permanently, and dodgy-looking youths in hoodies whizzed around on bikes, delivering screwed-up bits of white paper.

  It’s unspeakably bleak and depressing but Helen loves it.

  Even though I don’t understand her, Helen is like my twin, my dark twin. She’s the shameless, courageous version of me. And even though she’s always made fun of me (nothing personal, she does it to everyone), she’s loyal to the point of fisticuffs.

  In fact all my sisters are loyal to the point of fisticuffs—while it’s okay for them to slag each other, they’d kill anyone else who tried it.

  And yes, okay, they used to say that I was away with the fairies and “Earth calling, Anna” and that sort of thing, but to be fair, there were reasons: it was obvious I wasn’t too keen on reality. Why would anyone be, I
used to wonder, it never seemed that pleasant a place. Any opportunity for escape I was given, I took—reading, sleeping, falling in love, designing houses in my head, where I had my own bedroom and didn’t have to share with Helen—and I was not the most practical person you could meet.

  And then, of course, there were the fringey skirts.

  It’s mortifying to admit, but from my late teens onward I owned several long, hippie-type fringey skirts, some even with—oh God!—bits of mirrors on them. Why, why? I was young, I was foolish, but really. I know we all have our youthful fashion shame, the badly dressed skeletons in our closets, but my time in the fashion wilderness lasted the best part of a decade.

  And I gave up going to the hairdressers when I was fifteen after they sent me out with a Cyndi Lauper. (The eighties, I can’t blame them, they knew no better.) But the fringey mirrored skirts and messy hair were mere bagatelles compared to the shock waves of the compliment-slip story…

  The compliment-slip story

  If you haven’t heard it already, and you probably have, because the world and his granny seems to know about it, here it is. After I left school, Dad swung me a job in a construction office—someone had owed him a favor and the consensus was that it must have been a pretty large favor.

  But anyway, there I am, working away, doing my best, being nice to the builders who come in for petty cash, and one day Mr. Sheridan, the big boss, throws a check on the desk and says, “Send that to Bill Prescott, stick a compliment slip in the envelope.”

  In my defense, I was nineteen, I knew nothing of the language of administration, and luckily the check was intercepted before it went out in the post with my accompanying note: Dear Mr. Prescott, although I have never met you, I believe you are a very nice man. All the builders speak highly of you.