The Brightest Star in the Sky Read online

  Day 60 . . .

  Fionn was about a hundred miles away in the stony gray soil of County Monaghan but there was such a strong cord of connection between Jemima and him that all you’d have to do was hook onto it, like a cable car on a wire, and whiz through the ether. He was to be found in a low white house, on a small rocky plot of land, two miles outside a medium-sized town called Pokey. A place of heartbreaking, back-breaking beauty. A mist had snaked around his house, but the sun was also in evidence, shining furiously, trying to counteract the mist, so his home looked like it was wearing a halo.

  And my word, the vibrations coming off the man himself! So powerful, they were colored: golden notes of charm, chocolate-brown earthiness—and something else . . . a silver-gray mercurial strand, only visible when it wasn’t being looked at directly.

  I admit it. I couldn’t get a proper read on him. Not yet anyway.

  But I could tell you this much: his hair could probably have done with a wash. So could his jeans. So could his kitchen counters. Not filthy, no, not that bad, just a little less than pristine. Fionn, it seemed, distrusted hygiene. Subconsciously, he suspected it was an artificial concept, the invention of Proctor & Gamble, to scare people into buying unnecessary chemicals like Shake’n Vac. A few germs wouldn’t kill you, he often said. (Except, of course, for those that would.)

  He was cramming spoonfuls of muesilix into his mouth at the same time as pulling on his socks at the same time as slurping tea from a mug. Five past two and he was late for work. Fionn had more customers than he could handle; most of them were women, dotted around the townland of Pokey like little red lights pulsing on a map.

  Fionn lived alone—you only had to look at the place. His sheets were a polyester mix, his pillows were so old they were almost flat and his couch lacked bounce. Everything was functional, bare, almost sad.

  He gulped down the last spoonful of muesilix then he held the bowl above his face and tipped the dregs of the milk into his mouth. Signaling the grand finale of his breakfast, he wiped milk off his chin with his sleeve, then slung on his jacket and a pair of Chelsea boots—a very impractical choice for a gardener—and headed outside.

  In his garden he tramped down a muddy ditch, grabbed a handful of long green fronds and hoicked five fat, orange carrots from the ground. All the land around his house had been given over to growing food. There were tomatoes under glass, raspberries growing up stakes and a large potato patch. He shook the worst of the dirt from the carrots, dropped them on the passenger seat of his very old (thirteen years) car and headed toward the town.

  Day 60 . . .

  Katie had slept until midday and woke alone in Conall’s magnificent bed in Conall’s beautiful bedroom in Conall’s enormous house. The magic duvet, which felt stuffed with the softest marshmallows, wrapped itself around her with profound love. All is well, it whispered, all is well. The facing wall, in a delicate washed-out shade called Dusty Plum, smiled at her. The lofty ceiling gazed benignly down, telling her, It is my honor to act as your ceiling. The heavy fall of silk curtains rustled and swished, asking if she was ready to have shiny daylight admitted. This bedroom was divine. When she and Conall came to an end—as everyone confidently predicted they would—it was one of the things she would miss most.

  That and the “pleasuring.”

  All the women she knew (with the exception of her mother) hungered for detailed descriptions of how Conall performed between his delightfully textured sheets.

  “Good,” Katie always said. “Nice.”

  “Good? Nice? Not out-of-this-world?”

  “Good, nice.”

  “But he’s so good-looking, so powerful, so moody . . . I thought it would be amazing.”

  “At the end of the day—” Katie had mastered a wonderfully carefree shrug to accompany this sentence—“he’s just a man.”

  No one enjoyed hearing this. But, as Katie thought, if every person in her life gave well-meant advice that she should hold a certain amount of herself back from Conall, they couldn’t very well object when she did. (Or at least pretended she did. Yes, she was careful not to be overwhelmed by Conall’s forceful personality and supersized mattress but the pleasuring was the one area where she surrendered completely. She was thirty-nine—well, okay, nearly forty now—she was a woman in her sexual prime!)

  Out on the landing, the naked floorboards felt splintery and rough against her bare feet, and the dusty walls looked like open wounds. Bored one weekend, Conall had decided to strip the wallpaper, but quickly abandoned the job when he discovered about seven or eight different layers of paper beneath the one he was tearing off. On the floor of the hall, paintings were carelessly stacked up against each other and several packing crates were still unopened. Apart from the bedroom and bathroom, the whole house was exactly as it was when Conall had moved in, nearly three years earlier. The beautiful bedroom was courtesy of Katie’s predecessor, a girl called Saffron, who clearly had wonderful taste; but, sadly, Conall had broken up with her before she’d brought her skill to bear on any of the other rooms. (The bathroom was thanks to Kym, the girl before Saffron, but in Katie’s opinion Kym didn’t have Saffron’s gifts.)

  The kitchen was the worst room, a riot of geometric-patterned orange and yellow linoleum and mustard-colored cabinets that were falling to bits. Scattered over the never-used table were brochures from German companies, makers of sleek, gorgeous kitchens, and samples of marble, stone and different woods that Conall had ordered but never got around to making a decision on. Sometimes Katie’s gaze snagged on these—especially the wide-planked limed oak—and she almost jack-knifed with longing and frustration. She could make this place so lovely! Well, in fairness, anyone with access to Conall’s money could.

  She turned away from the beautiful wood because she was on the hunt for food. There wouldn’t be anything proper to eat in any of Conall’s cupboards, but there was always chocolate, bars and bars of it, and bag after bag of jelly sweets, and she could absolutely depend on finding a dazzling choice of ice cream in the freezer. Her usual ritual was to wrench open the freezer door and gaze adoringly at the selection—pint tubs of Ben & Jerry’s, perhaps two or even three of them, all in different flavors, and an imaginative selection of six or seven individual bars: Galaxy Swirls and Icebergers and Maltesers and Cornettos and, the ultimate prize, Green & Black’s Double Chocolate. All full-sized, of course. None of this fun-sized stuff for Conall Hathaway. Katie agreed: an ice-cream that was gone after two bites—where was the fun in that?

  But the next time she’d be in his kitchen—and it mightn’t be long afterward, perhaps less than a week—all that ice cream would have disappeared, and been replaced with an entirely different, but equally impressive, selection.

  Sugar, Conall seemed to live on the stuff. He was the only man she knew who ate dessert. But thanks to his man metabolism, sugar didn’t extract the same price from him as it did from her. His thighs were hard and muscled, not a bit of wobbliness anywhere, unlike her own wretched pair. God, she envied him.

  But today she didn’t get as far as the freezer. Laid out on the ugly, knife-scored counter was a series of gifts for her. A bottle of champagne with a Post-it saying “Drink me,” a kilo box of Godiva chocolates saying “Eat me,” a huge bunch of roses saying “Smell me,” and a pink beribboned box of wispy underwear saying “Wear me.”

  She gathered them in her arms and took them back to bed, sad that Conall wasn’t there to share them with her. She wondered how the Finns were getting on, whether Conall had slashed loads of them already.

  She still remembered when the slashings in Apex had begun in earnest . . .

  Conall had started on the ground floor, eventually wiping out a fifth of Sales, and steadily worked his way up the building. On the first floor, a quarter of Accounts were cast into the outer darkness. Next would be Legal on the second floor. Meanwhile, on the third floor, at the top of the house, Publicity and Marketing crouched, anxious and white-faced, waiting for the fall of the ex
ecutioner’s ax.

  The building had been overrun with what Danno called orcs—underlings provided by Sony—who grabbed a desk wherever they could, poring over contracts, making feasibility assessments to Conall Hathaway, with whom the buck stopped ultimately.

  “He is Shiva, destroyer of worlds,” Danno said and, for once, Katie didn’t think he was exaggerating. It wasn’t just employees who were being axed; the plug was being pulled on many of the label’s less successful acts. Countless lives were being destroyed because of one man’s decisions.

  “What must that job do to a person’s soul?” Katie wondered.

  “Soul?” Danno scoffed. “Conall Hathaway has no soul.”

  “He sold his soul to the devil,” Lila-May said.

  “Kih!” Danno said. “You mean, the devil sold his soul to him. Then Conall streamlined the bejayzus out of it and sold it on for a filthy profit. Anyway, Katie Richmond, what are you worried about? You’re the one person who’ll still have a job when this is all over.”

  Bizarre as it was, Conall seemed to be fascinated by Katie. Nobody believed it at first, then people believed it but didn’t understand it. Why Katie, when there were so many younger, sexier girls on site?

  But Conall evinced no interest in them. Although he was meant to be rationalizing Apex’s entire European operations, he was spending a disproportionate time on the Dublin office and kept appearing on unscheduled, unsettling roams before homing in on Katie with some spurious question that one of the orcs could just as easily have asked. By acting as a draw to Conall, Katie was deeply resented by her colleagues.

  “I was on the phone to my mate in Calgary,” Lila-May said, “when I looked up and saw Slasher Hathaway standing right next to me. He was supposed to be in Amsterdam. My heart nearly stopped! Just because he wanted his hourly look at Katie’s knockers.”

  Lila-May, a vixen-like little beauty, wasn’t comfortable being overshadowed by Katie. Neither was Tamsin. Audrey, however, didn’t mind.

  “I’m Conall Hathaway and I always get what I want!” Danno leaped to his feet and began swaggering about the office. He grabbed Katie, tipped her backward into his left arm, placed his lips close to hers and risked putting his free hand on her left breast. “I must have you,” he growled. “I will have you.”

  “Stop it, Danno!” Katie fought her way out of his grip. “For God’s sake, stop doing that.”

  “Why you?” Lila-May mused, assessing Katie with a gaze like an X-ray. “I mean . . . why you?”

  Katie was as baffled as everyone else. Men like Conall, with their obvious suits and their obvious watches and their obvious air of power, would have obvious girlfriends. She was too old, too bruised by life, too thigh-y, for the likes of him.

  “I don’t know but when you live long enough, nothing surprises,” she said.

  “You’re not that old,” Danno said.

  “So why are you all acting like I am?”

  “Will you sleep with him to save our jobs?” George asked.

  “That won’t save our jobs.”

  “Aha! So you are thinking of sleeping with him!”

  Well, of course she was. Did they think she was stupid as well as ancient?

  But Conall Hathaway was going round sacking people in droves—her colleagues, probably even Katie herself in a couple of days. It would be tantamount to collaboration.

  “She is! She is!” Danno crowed. “But you despise him.”

  Yes, she did despise him and his job, but, interestingly, since he’d made it so clear how attractive he found her, she despised him less. Not because she was a blank canvas, one of those women who automatically fancied a man just because he fancied her, but because he’d surprised her. As her colleagues were so fond of pointing out, Conall could have hit on young, lush Lila-May, or young, almost-as-lush Tamsin, or young, not-really-lush-at-all-but-still-more-lush-than-Katie Audrey. But he’d spurned all of them and gravitated straight for the older woman. How could anyone fail to be impressed by that?

  And no matter what Danno said, Conall Hathaway didn’t have the cold dead eyes of a killer. Certainly not all of the time. There were times when his eyes made her—

  “You’d better be careful,” Danno warned. “You’re a parched forest floor that hasn’t seen a drop of rain for a year. If you let Conall Hathaway light your fire it could ignite an inferno big enough to destroy us all.”

  Annoying though Danno was, he spoke the truth. It was a year since she’d had sex. (Zerogamy, her friend Sinead called it.) It was important, nay vital, that she didn’t behave like a middle-aged spinster desperate for the touch of a man.

  Because she wasn’t.

  Day 60 . . .

  Fionn drove one-handed and too fast. Within ten minutes, he’d pulled into the driveway of a large, ranch-style house—a hideous Southfork-type residence—and sauntered around to the rear, casually swinging his bunch of carrots.

  “Jill,” he called, rapping on the glass of the back door. “It’s Fionn.”

  ( Jill, a fraught woman with energies so given over to others—her four children, her husband, her elderly mother—that there was almost none left for herself. Apart from a thin line of pulsing fear, her life force was so depleted that for a short time I thought she was dead.)

  At the sound of Fionn’s voice, she flared with an infusion of energy. Fionn was her gift to herself, part of a secret internal deal she’d made so that she wouldn’t go round the bend. Her one pleasure used to be a nightly sleeping tablet, which delivered seven hours of merciful nothingness, until Tandy, her fifteen-year-old daughter, stole the prescription and took an overdose. Tandy immediately told everyone what she’d done so there was plenty of time for stomach-pumping, but it marked the end of the sleeping tablets for Jill. You could have nothing with a teenage daughter in the house, not mascara, not ankle boots, not breadknives, not sedatives; they took everything, selfish little bitches! As soon as Tandy came home from hospital, she ferried the breadknife off to her bedroom and tried a couple of experimental grazes on her forearm—she’d read about self-harm in Take a Break and it appealed to her—but to her astonishment it was horribly painful. The girl in the magazine had said she’d felt nothing, that she was totally numb. While Tandy cast around, looking for another dramatic way to get attention, thinking that maybe she should get pregnant, Jill had to soldier on with a life devoid of sleeping tablets, of that promise of oblivion at the end of every day.

  But then she met Fionn and no one could take him away from her. Except perhaps Fionn himself. He was so much in demand that he could abandon her for another whenever the humor took him.

  He was forty minutes late today—he was never on time and she’d been thinking that this might be the day that he wouldn’t come at all—but in the rush of his presence, her terror faded to nothing.

  “Come in.” She closed her eyes to the clods of mud he distributed across her clean wooden floor.

  Fionn slung the carrots onto the kitchen table. “Out of the ground not ten minutes ago.”

  “Carrots!” Jill received the gift with the same wonder and delight as if they were diamonds. “With pieces of your garden still attached!”

  “Lovely and sweet,” he said, with a twinkly smile. “Not unlike yourself. Now, I’ve a bit of news. I’m away to Dublin for a while.”

  “Is it . . . that TV thing?” Jill held her breath.

  Everyone in Pokey had heard what had happened when Carmine Butcher’s sister Grainne, the one who “worked in television,” had come for Carmine junior’s christening; how she’d met Fionn and decided that he might have enough star quality to have his own gardening show; how a silver BMW had appeared a few days later outside Fionn’s small white house and ferried him away to Dublin, where he was subjected to screen tests, autocue skills, interviews with the production company and no end of other things.

  “It’s the TV thing,” Fionn confirmed. “Bad time of year to go, the most growthy time of year for the gardens, but might as well give it a stab
and see what happens.”

  “Oh . . .” Jill was bereft, but there was undeniable kudos in your gardener having his own television show. “You’ll be brilliant, everyone thinks.”

  “Would you stop.” He twisted awkwardly.

  “You’d better remember me when you’re the big star.”

  “I won’t be a big star. It’s just a gardening show. And I’ll only be gone a month or so.”

  “They’ll have to put you up in a hotel.”

  “Ah no. I’ll stay with Jemima.”

  “Would they not fork out for it?” Already Jill’s awe was receding.

  “They would. But I’d prefer to be with Jemima.”

  “You would?” Jill was disappointed. Nothing against Jemima, she was nice enough for a do-goodery Protestant, but Jill was obsessed with hotels. Her favorite fantasy was that her Southfork house had fallen into a hole, it was the builder’s fault so there was insurance money, and while it was being straightened up she had to live in a hotel. She adored hotels. You could make shit of the place, absolute shit—abandon towels on the floor, get make-up on the sheets, spill ketchup on the carpet, even break wine glasses—and it was all someone else’s problem. (Sometimes, on bad days, the fantasy included the subplot that her four children, her husband and her mother were trapped in the up-ended house. She entertained no ill will toward them, she simply didn’t want them in the hotel with her, so they were alive and well, playing lots of Monopoly and subsisting on canned foods.)

  “I’ll get on.” Fionn gestured at the garden through the window. “The whole place has done a lot of growing since I was last here.”

  “Don’t be gone too long. The garden will miss you,” Jill said. “And so will I,” she added, daringly.