The Brightest Star in the Sky Read online

  Except that the Bank of British Columbia was leading him a merry dance. Over the course of the last eight months, they’d flirted and teased and enjoyed innumerable outings at Edios’s expense—a seven-hour dinner in one of Dublin’s most expensive restaurants, a movie premier, a day at the races. Now they were making noises about Wimbledon tickets—Wimbledon tickets were like gold dust!—and they still had given no indication whether or not they were going to buy the system. Matt knew the names of everyone’s wives, girlfriends, children and dogs but, unusually for him, he had no instinct on which way they’d jump.

  The bank had requested a meeting, yet another one, for this morning and Matt couldn’t think why. He and his team had done five dazzling presentations; every query and question had been answered satisfactorily; he had personally fielded calls at all hours of the day and night during which he’d promised the earth in terms of modifications, backup and speedy implementation. What more could they want?

  Center Court tickets, probably.

  He brooded resentfully for four seconds until his attention was caught by the radio and he snapped out of it. (Resentful brooding wasn’t natural to him and he couldn’t ever sustain it for long.) Boulders of ice had started to fall mysteriously out of the sky across Europe. One, the size of an armchair, had crashed through the windscreen of a parked car in Madrid. A week later, another, just as big, had burst through the roof of a house in Amsterdam, and only a day later, yet another had shot to earth in Berlin, toppling a statue of some military bloke off its plinth and into the street. Experts had been brought in to examine the phenomenon but, to date, no one could say definitively what was causing the lumps of ice. Or where the next one might land.

  Matt listened with enjoyment. He liked this sort of thing. It was in the same vein as alien landings.

  He was so caught up in the story that he didn’t notice that he’d got through two green lights in a row. Then three. It was only when the fourth light was in his favor that he saw what had happened. Four green lights in a row! During rush hour! Could that count as one of today’s Trio of Blessings? He didn’t think Maeve would buy it; she wouldn’t accept a parking space right outside their flat as a blessing, so she was hardly going to approve four green lights in a row. But it felt like a blessing to him.

  For a moment he mused on how unexpectedly his life had turned out, with Acts of Kindness and Trios of Blessings and suchlike. All down to Maeve, to the fact that she’d spilled her money around the floor of the Dart four and a quarter years ago and he’d realized: Christ, I’m in love. And it’s not with my girlfriend.

  He tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. He couldn’t be in love with Maeve because he and Natalie were perfect. Natalie with her elegant neck and her beautiful brown eyes and her quick wit. He’d been going out with Natalie for almost a year, but Maeve kept taking up space in his head. She was his first thought every morning, and all day, every day, he was tormented by malign ghostly whispers: You’re living in the wrong life.

  He was so frightened that he completely lost his appetite. He’d never had to make such a grown-up decision before and it was obvious that he’d have to hurt Natalie, he’d have to cause upheaval and distress.

  And he suddenly woke up to the Maeve and David love story. Beady-eyed surveillance revealed that they were very much an item. Did Maeve love David? Matt concluded that she probably did because she wasn’t the type to toy with people’s affections. But even if she didn’t, surely there wasn’t a man alive who wouldn’t want her for himself? He’d have to do battle with each and every one of them. Which he was willing to do. But a girl as worthy as Maeve probably despised him and his suit-wearing, car-driving, non-Galwegian lifestyle. He’d never even been tear-gassed!

  What if he failed to win her heart? How could he live?

  Then his essential optimism reasserted itself. He had as much chance with Maeve as the next man, surely? He was a decent bloke, he’d never knowingly done anyone any harm and while he’d never been passionate about any causes, that was probably because he just hadn’t found the right one yet. Dolphins! He liked dolphins! Maybe he should get a Save the Dolphins T-shirt and wear it to work. Unless . . . could he be wrong . . . maybe dolphins weren’t endangered? Well, something was. It could be turtles . . . but this was the sort of problem you ran into when you tried to be someone you weren’t. He was Matt Geary, decent bloke. Maybe that would be enough for Maeve. And, of course, he could always change a little, meet Maeve halfway, as it were. Like . . . look at Brad Pitt, one minute he’s a shallow pretty-boy, doing mad diets with Jennifer Aniston, the next he’s a worthy man, adopting children left, right and center with the lovely Angelina on his arm.

  As subtly as possible, Matt set about gathering information on Maeve. She was an only child, he learned, a beloved daughter who was born late in life to parents who had thought they would never be blessed. She had an honors degree in economics from Galway university. After she’d left university, she’d gone to Australia—with a boyfriend—and lived in Melbourne for two years, until her visa ran out. Then she spent a year traveling through Asia and South America—not with the boyfriend; they’d obviously split up—before washing back up in Ireland and starting at Goliath.

  Matt hoarded these little gems of knowledge about Maeve, always hungry for more—then he’d come to his senses. What the hell was he at?

  He tried to talk himself into being the person he’d been before that fateful Dart journey. He was in agony, so haunted and conflicted he was surprised that no one had noticed.

  There were moments when he knew with certainty that he and Natalie were done for and other times when he was just as sure that they were still rock solid and that it was only a matter of time before they moved in together.

  In an attempt to make it less difficult to extricate himself, Matt tried to find fault with Natalie, but all he could come up with was that she plucked her eyebrows too much. Sometimes there were little beads of blood on her socket bone. Sore-looking. What kind of woman would do that to herself? What kind of woman would mutilate her own body?

  Ten days after Matt’s first inkling, he was lying on Natalie’s bed, watching her getting ready to go out.

  She tried on a pair of jeans and considered herself in the mirror, but whatever she saw she didn’t like because she tore the jeans off and pulled on another pair. Those didn’t meet with her approval either, so she put on another pair. Soon they too were lying on the floor and eventually Matt asked, “How many pairs of jeans do you own?”

  “I don’t know.”

  If she didn’t know, that was already too many! “Guess,” he urged. “Five?”

  “More.”

  “Ten?”

  “More.”

  “More?”

  She paused to add things up in her head. “About sixteen,” she concluded. “But, obviously, I don’t wear them all.”

  “Obviously?”

  “Because boot-cut is over. I’ll never wear them again. I should just give them to Oxfam.”

  “I thought boot-cut was back.”

  “Different kind of boot-cut.”

  “How many pairs of jeans do you think Maeve owns?” Matt asked. This was a daring question. Would Natalie wonder why he was talking about Maeve?

  But Nat had also fallen for Maeve, she thought she was the cutest thing ever, and Matt had a wild moment when he wondered if perhaps the three of them could set up home together.

  “Maeve? I don’t know. Two?”

  Two. Yes, the correct number of jeans for one human being. You wear one pair while the other is in the wash. Any number over two was grotesque, consumption gone mad. Then Matt remembered that he owned at least six pairs himself. But all that would change, he vowed silently, all that would change when . . . No! No, he couldn’t think about it. It wasn’t going to happen. Nothing was going to change. He and Natalie would be together forever.

  Natalie was ready. She stood before him, slender-limbed and smooththroated, in one of her sixteen pa
irs of jeans.

  “You look beautiful,” he said.

  But with a plunge of fear, he knew it wasn’t enough.

  Day 60 . . .

  At 5:35 a.m., in Conall’s obscenely comfortable bed, Katie had been woken by Conall leaning over her to kiss her goodbye. He was shaved and suited and fragranced with something sharp and citrusy. “I’ll ring,” he said.

  “ ’Kay,” she mumbled, tumbling back down into sleep. She’d taken the day off work. Not a fake sickie, when she rang and put on a deep groany voice and said, “I think it’s food poisoning,” but a genuine day of her annual leave, which she’d booked in advance because she’d wanted to be able to drink as much as she liked at her birthday dinner without having to worry about going to work today, exhausted and fighting the desire to vomit. Of course, in a perfect world, no one would celebrate their birthday on a Monday night—and in fact it wasn’t her actual birthday until Friday—but it had to be Monday night because Conall had to go to Helsinki this morning, to slash jobs and plant terror in the hearts of some misfortunate Finns, just like he’d done to everyone in Apex Entertainment Ireland ten months ago . . .

  The morning after Katie’s epiphany about her crisis being her opportunity to go to India, Danno greeted her by saying, “The night of the long knives. Half of Sales have been sacked. I hear Slasher Hathaway sold their desks on eBay overnight.”

  “How much of that is true?” Katie asked. She was more focused on getting Knight Ryders out of Ireland. Once they passed into German airspace they were no longer her responsibility.

  “He’s sacked five of Sales,” Danno said, a little sulkily.

  Katie checked her emails: the plane to take the entourage to Germany had landed at Dublin airport . . .

  “Out of how many?”

  “Thirty-seven.”

  ... Lila-May was at the Four Seasons, picking up Elijah and the boys . . .

  “Not exactly half, is it?” Nonetheless, a thrill of fear ran through her. People were being sacked. It was happening. “Did he really sell their desks?”

  “Indeed he did.” Danno believed that when caught out in a lie, one should never lose face. “He got fifteen euro for the lot. They’ve been bought by a Spanish company who make wooden trains. Toy ones. And doll’s houses. And—”

  Katie’s phone rang and she had a moment of prescience: she should not answer this call. It would ruin her life.

  It was Lila-May. “Elijah Knight’s gone AWOL.”

  Katie’s first thought was: Will I be blamed? And then she thought: I’m going to be sacked anyway, who cares?

  Elijah might have gone out to buy socks, but it was unlikely. Especially when Lila-May said, “He hit the guard on the head with the heel of his cowboy boot and ran away. Your man will need stitches.”

  Katie pressed her hand over her eyes. Living legends were such hard bloody work.

  “Okay, get them to search the hotel. Check all the bars.” She hung up and called out, “Everyone, stop whatever you’re doing. Elijah’s run off.”

  Appalled yelps rose into the air, some even from members of Marketing, which was decent of them because this was PR’s problem.

  Danno grabbed a thick black marker and began inhaling it as discreetly as possible, to ready himself for the drama ahead.

  “George!” Katie said. “Ring every journalist you know, every contact you have on gossip desks, in case people have rung in with sightings.”

  (George’s vibration was frothy and insubstantial; only a cold steely seam of bitchiness kept him from dissolving into absolute nothingness. He enjoyed great popularity with journalists, who regarded him as a true gossip hound.)

  “We shouldn’t try to contain this?” Audrey asked anxiously.

  “No, we’ve no time.” In the midst of her panic, Katie noticed that a man—he had to be the lean and hungry Barbarian—had appeared in the office. “Splash it everywhere, we’ll find him quicker.”

  He was at her desk now. “I’m Conall Hathaway,” he said. “And you are?”

  “Katie Richmond.”

  He nodded, as if he was filing away the knowledge for when he needed to sack her, she couldn’t help but think.

  “What’s going on?” He gestured around the room, at the panic that was almost visible.

  “We’ve lost a lead singer. Elijah Knight.” With a sarcasm that was uncharacteristic, she added, “He’s with Knight Ryders, a metal band who are signed to Apex—”

  “I know who they are.”

  Her phone rang, interrupting their exchange. It was the tour manager, who wanted to know how long he should hold the plane. Katie clutched the front of her head and squeezed hard, seeking the right decision. Stay or go? Go or stay? The crew needed at least five hours to assemble the set. But what use was a stage without a singer? Then again, what use was a singer without a stage?

  “Katie . . .?”

  “Go now.” Her digestive system clenched with fear that she’d called it wrong. “Get the crew to Berlin—they need the time to get set up for tonight. If I can’t get Elijah on a scheduled flight later, I’ll sort out a private charter.”

  I’m the one who gave the order for Elijah’s plane to fl y off without him. What if I can’t get him on another fl ight? It’ll be embarrassing enough to make the newspapers.

  Conall Hathaway was still there, his eyes like gravel. He was looking speculatively at her mug, planning to sell it on eBay, no doubt. She put a protective arm around it.

  I hate my job. I hate this anxiety. I hate that the consequences of my decisions affect so many people.

  “If you’re here to sack me,” she said to Conall, too fearful to be careful, “it’ll have to wait.” She whistled to Danno like she would to a faithful hound. “You. Here. With me. And you too, Audrey.” To Conall Hathaway she said, “Because I’m going out to look for Elijah.”

  “What happens if he can’t be found?”

  “He must be found. They’re playing to eighty thousand people tonight in Berlin.” The thought of it!

  “Where will you look?”

  “We’ll start in pubs.”

  “And if you can’t find him there?”

  “There are some ladies of the night . . .”

  “And what if he’s not with them?”

  “I suppose . . . ah . . . I suppose—” Katie stared into the middle distance and began to feel the full weight of her sleepless night, her adrenal burnout, her crisis/opportunity conundrum, and heard herself say—“I suppose it’ll have to be an instrumental version tonight in Berlin. The fans will probably riot, eighty thousand dreams will be dashed, millions of euro will be lost and . . .”

  “And?”

  “And . . .” She shrugged her shoulders and smiled with relief because, for a moment, everything was clear. “And I suppose one day we’ll all be dead and none of this will matter.”

  As it happened, it all worked out. Following a tip-off from a helpful member of the public, Elijah had been discovered, completely soused and sentimental, in a snug in Neary’s. Katie and Danno had bundled him onto a plane, flown with him to Berlin, deposited him with the German publicist, then flown straight back to Dublin. Elijah went on to sing as usual and no harm was done. But aftershocks from the debacle were still plaguing Katie a day later: what if they hadn’t found Elijah? Or what if he’d been too drunk to perform? Of course, if she was going to be made redundant anyway, what did it matter? At lunchtime, looking for comfort, she decided to go to the local stationery shop. She liked to browse through the pens and notebooks, finding their colorful beauty had a healing effect on her bruised soul. She came across a journal which had dried pansies pressed into the paper. Beautiful. Admittedly, the pages were probably too lumpy to be of any practical use, but she didn’t care, she liked it and she was going to buy it for herself and . . . Curses! Brooding by the colored Post-its and unenthusiastically feeding square after square of Cadbury Fruit & Nut bar into his mouth was none other than Slasher Hathaway.

  Why did he have to b
e here in her sanctuary?

  Instantly, she began to retreat. She’d go to a drugstore instead; she enjoyed them just as much as stationery shops. She could lose hours browsing among the blister plasters, homeopathic remedies and hair bobbles. A drugstore was a cornucopia of delight, a force for good, a beacon of light in a world that was frequently dark . . . Too late! Conall Hathaway had spotted her! Their eyes connected, he crushed the chocolate paper into a small ball and quickly wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Katie. Hello.” His Adam’s apple leaped as the last piece of chocolate was forced down his esophagus. “How are you?”

  “Fine.” A silence opened up and with the reflex politeness of someone who worked in PR she asked, “How’s things?”

  Conall shrugged helplessly. “I’m not exactly flavor of the month in Apex.”

  The nerve of the man! So very . . . what was the word? Yes, she had it! Disingenuous.

  She turned a bland face to him and thought to herself: You are disingenuous. I am behind my face here, thinking you’re disingenuous and you don’t know it. You’re probably going to slash my job but I can still think you’re disingenuous and there’s nothing, oho nothing, you can do about it.

  It was very enjoyable. So enjoyable that she said, “Maybe you should have gone into a different line of work.” Then she elaborated, “If it’s love you’re looking for.” Did I really say that? To her further astonishment she added, “The priesthood, maybe?”

  India, she thought, looking into his startled face. India. Nothing he could do could hurt her. The worst travail he could visit upon her was to make her redundant and then she’d be off to India. Where she would be enlightened. Also, hopefully, where she would contract a water-borne digestive-tract infection and lose tons of weight. It didn’t have to be tons. Not even a stone. A ten-pound loss would be gratefully received, and would make all the difference really. The problem was food; if only she wasn’t so very fond of it. But India would take care of all of that. India, she thought. India.