The Woman Who Stole My Life Read online

  Six months after our big opening, I gave birth to Jeffrey and Karen – very reluctantly – agreed to me taking four weeks’ maternity leave. ‘This really isn’t a good time,’ she’d said.

  When I returned, I was so stunned and exhausted from caring for two infants that I had to use the morning dead zone between ten and twelve to lie on the sunbed and catch up on some sleep. Meanwhile, Karen went out leafleting to generate new business.

  She kept abreast of the latest beauty innovations not by reading sales brochures but by studying the pictures in Hello!. Every month we featured a shockingly cheap special offer because, as Karen said, ‘All I need is for someone to come through that door.’ You wouldn’t believe how persuasive she was – people would come in for an eyebrow shape and they’d leave with eyelash extensions, acrylic nails and an entirely bald body.

  In Karen’s world, the word ‘no’ didn’t exist. If someone wanted to go on the sunbed at seven thirty in the morning, she opened up specially for them, and we worked seven days a week, often until nine at night. If someone rang and asked for a treatment she had never heard of she’d say, with great confidence, ‘That’s coming soon. I’ll call you back.’ Then she’d track it down.

  She was a ruthless negotiator and established a complex barter system with half of Ferrytown, where she never paid cash for anything.

  Nor had she any problem asking for discounts – if she got one, she was blithe and if she didn’t get one, she was just as blithe. ‘Worth a try, eh?’

  I was the opposite. I’d rather go barefoot and sleep in a ditch than smile into someone’s face and say, ‘Knock a tenner off that and we’ll call ourselves friends!’ I was a hopeless haggler and Ryan was just as bad. Which was why, even when he ended up running a successful business, we stayed skint. I suppose everyone has a talent – some people are great at telling jokes and some people are brilliant bakers and some, like Karen, simply never pay the going rate.

  Not once, with Honey Day Spa, did Karen take her eye off the ball. When she noticed that our waxing business had decreased – and no spreadsheet analysis was necessary, she knew intuitively – she discovered that it was because everyone had moved to lasering. So it was time for us to move to lasering.

  But the laser company wouldn’t sell us their equipment until we’d done an expensive training course with them. So Karen did a ton of research and eventually bought a lasering machine, sight unseen, from China and ‘trained’ on her friends and family. In the same way she also mastered two-week manicures, eyebrow tattoos and vajazzling.

  When the injectables craze went mainstream, Karen ignored the fact that she wasn’t medically qualified and began doing cut-price treatments. As always, she did her training on friends and family. ‘We live and learn,’ she’d say, sending Enda off to work with a face that was lopsided and half-paralysed. ‘Don’t worry! They say it lasts three months but you’d be lucky to get six weeks out of it.’

  Nothing was too much trouble: she gave loyalty discounts, she’d run down to the street to feed a customer’s parking meter, and at the weekends the place was always crammed with girls, some with appointments, some with emergencies (like a split nail), some just hanging out.

  Honey Beauty Salon became a Ferrytown institution. Many other beauty salons opened and closed their doors during the nineteen years after Karen and I began. Most started their lives saddled with debt from jade tiles and a plinky-plonk sound system, but not our place – which became Honey Day Spa in 1999 (when all that changed was the sign). Apart from the occasional paint job, Karen has never invested a penny in prettifying the premises.

  Even though we were joint owners, it was always Karen’s salon.

  ‘So are you coming in?’ Karen asks impatiently.

  ‘No, I …’

  … don’t want to. I don’t want to go into that mushroomy place. I thought I’d left all that behind me.

  ‘I’ll stay in the car.’

  ‘Grand. Something to think about while you’re sitting there – you need to start exercising.’

  ‘I do exercise.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘I do!’ Until recently I was one of those people who, no matter what else was going on in her life, exercised.

  ‘Only saying.’

  Karen departs and I sit in her car, feeling misunderstood and wounded: I do exercise. Well, I used to. And I was very disciplined. Very!

  Day in, day out, I used to go at it hard. I remembered one particular morning – I don’t know why this one stood out because so many of them were almost identical – when Gilda came into my hotel bedroom, turned on the light and said, firmly but kindly, ‘Stella, sweetie, time to get up.’

  I’d had no idea what hour it was, the actual numbers on the clock were immaterial; all that mattered was that if I was being told to get up, then it was time to get up.

  I remember being very, very tired. I didn’t know how many hours’ sleep I’d had. It might have been six. It might have been three and a half. But not more than six. It was never more than six.

  Gilda handed me a beaker and said, ‘Drink this.’

  I hadn’t a clue what it was, it might have been green tea, it might have been a kale smoothie. All that mattered was if Gilda told me to drink it, then I drank it.

  I gulped it down and Gilda handed me my running gear. She was already in hers. ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  Outside the hotel, the sun hadn’t risen yet. We did our warm-ups and stretches, then we ran through the empty streets. Gilda set the pace and she was fast. I thought I was going to wheeze my lungs right out of my chest, but there was no point asking her to slow down. This was for my own good; this was what I had agreed to.

  Sometime later, when we got back to the hotel, we stopped to do our stretches, and she said, ‘You did really well.’

  I gasped, ‘How much did we do?’

  ‘Four miles.’

  It had felt more like forty.

  ‘We’re in Denver,’ Gilda said. ‘High altitude. Harder on the lungs.’

  I had just learned two useful pieces of information!

  1) High altitudes make it harder to run fast.

  2) I was in Denver.

  I’d known it was one of those places – Dallas, Detroit, Des Moines. Definitely one of the Ds. It had been very late when we’d arrived last night from … from … another place. A city beginning with … T? Baltimore, that was it. Okay, it didn’t begin with T, but I could be forgiven seeing as I’d been in three cities the day before. I’d woken in Chicago, where I did countless interviews, a mid-morning bookshop event, then given the keynote speech at a charity lunch. As soon as that was over, we raced to the airport, where we caught a plane to Baltimore, where I did more media and an evening reading where only fourteen people showed up. Then it was back to the airport for the flight to Denver. I was criss-crossing so many time zones that I’d given up trying to keep track of the hours I was gaining and losing.

  But no matter where I was, no matter how few hours’ sleep I’d had, I exercised.

  For all the good it had done me.

  ‘Stay alive. Sometimes there’s nothing else you can do, but you must do it.’

  Extract from One Blink at a Time

  The day after he’d first shown up, Narky Range Rover Man breezed into my cubicle. ‘I’m back.’

  So you are.

  ‘Mannix Taylor, your neurologist.’

  I know your name. I know what you do.

  ‘I can see you’re delighted.’ He laughed. He had lovely teeth. Rich person’s teeth, I thought contemptuously. Neurologist’s teeth.

  He pulled a chair to my bedside and lifted my chart from the end of the bed. ‘Let’s see how you slept. Oh, an “excellent” night’s sleep, it says here. Not just good, but actually excellent.’ He looked at me. ‘Would you agree?’

  I looked dumbly at him and refused to blink.

  ‘Not talking to me? Okay, I’ll just get on with my job. Ten minutes, same as yesterday.’ He gave me a s
udden sharp look. ‘Montgomery did tell you I’d be coming every day?’

  I hadn’t seen Dr Montgomery for almost a week.

  I blinked my left eye.

  ‘He didn’t tell you? Or he hasn’t been to see you? Well, what about that goofy kid who follows him around like a puppy?’

  He was referring to Dr Montgomery’s intern, a Dr de Groot, who visited sporadically and who seemed utterly terrified of ICU. His eyes were as big as hard-boiled eggs and he stuttered as he spoke. He always made a point of checking that my ventilator was plugged in, then he ran away. I felt strongly that he’d be more fulfilled in another line of work. Perhaps plug-checking.

  ‘He didn’t tell you either?’ Mannix Taylor closed his eyes and muttered something. ‘Okay, well, I’ll be seeing you five days a week for the moment. Myelin sheaths grow at about half an inch a month. In the meantime we need to keep the circulation on your extremities moving. But you know all this.’

  I knew nothing. Since I’d been told I’d caught one of the rarest syndromes going, no one had told me anything, except to stay alive. (‘Keep her going there, Patsy!’) But this Mannix Taylor had just given me my first hard fact – that myelin sheaths grew at half an inch a month. How many inches did they need to grow? Were they growing already?

  ‘Today,’ Mannix Taylor said, ‘I’m going to work on your feet.’

  I almost levitated in shock. Not the feet! Anything but the feet!

  Thanks to a lifetime of high heels, I had the worst feet in the world – bunions, corns and misshapen toes – and since I’d come into hospital, no one had even cut my toenails.

  No, no, no, Mr Narky Range Rover Man. Back away from the feet.

  But he was loosening the blankets and out came my right foot. He sprayed something onto it – some sort of disinfectant, I was hoping for his sake – and then he had taken my foot in his hands, the heel of his thumb pressing into the tender arch. He held it still for a moment, the pressure warm and firm, then he began to move his fingers in slow confident circles, pressing and pulling the tendons beneath the skin in a way that was almost but not quite painful.

  I closed my eyes. Thrills of electricity moved through me. My lips felt numb and tingly and my scalp crawled with delight.

  Placing the flat of his palm against the sole of my foot, he pressed hard so that every muscle stretched and the bones cracked in joyful relief.

  With his thumbnail, he bit little nips of pleasure along the top of my big toe. The movements were tiny, a delicious sort of agony.

  I didn’t care about my bunions, about my hard skin, about the funny lump on my small toe that might be a chilblain. All I wanted was to stay with these beautiful feelings for ever.

  I felt myself getting warmer, then I realized that it wasn’t me, it was him.

  He wiggled his finger between the big toe and the second toe and when it slotted into the space, a jolt of sensation zipped straight to my lady-centre. In shock, my eyes flew open. He was staring right at me and he looked surprised. He dropped my foot onto the bed with unexpected haste and tucked it back under the blanket. ‘We’ll leave it there for today.’

  18.11

  Karen drops me home. I let myself into the empty house and I’m hit by a slap of agonizing loneliness which my new lady chinos do nothing to assuage.

  What can I do to make myself feel better? I could ring Zoe, but I feel sort of poisoned every time I talk to her. I could watch Nurse Jackie and eat biscuits, but in my current bellied-up state, I’m going to have to knock off the biscuits. My biscuit days are over. I’ll have to go back to that high-protein, carb-free misery, where I ate salmon for breakfast and told myself that doughnuts were like unicorns: mythical things that only existed in fairy tales.

  I was once able to live like that. I should be able for it again. But I had had Gilda to make me do it, to oversee my meals and say encouraging things like, ‘Delicious cottage cheese! With delicious prawns. Remember, nothing tastes as good as skinny feels!’

  I’d depended on her entirely and she’d taken such wonderful care of me; there was no way I could recreate that support on my own.

  And maybe I’m too old to be thin. I know forty-one is the new eighteen, but tell that to my metabolism.

  I’ve been brave for the last twelve weeks, I’ve ploughed blindly forward, but, all of a sudden, I feel like giving up.

  If only I could talk to him … I live in a state of perpetual longing for him – I still feel like nothing has really ‘happened’ until I’ve told him.

  I stare at my phone, trying to hold onto the facts, reminding myself of my reality. Ringing him would achieve nothing. It would probably make me feel worse.

  My life is over, I realize. I accept it, but there are still so many years to live. Unless something intervenes, I’ll probably live until I’m at least eighty. How am I going to fill the time?

  Maybe I should take my cue from the clothes in the shops and disappear for twenty years. I could eat whatever I wanted and watch an endless amount of telly and re-emerge when I’m sixty-one. I’d meet some man who’d been a widower for about ten minutes – they go fast, bereaved men, snapped up quickly, according to Zoe – and he could be my boyfriend. We’d go on a mini-break to Florence to look at paintings – by then I’d have developed an interest in art (it would kick in around the same time that I started to lose control of my bladder – nature’s barter system). Myself and the widower – Clive? – would never have any fights. No sex, either, but that was okay.

  Of course, his daughters would hate me. They’d hiss, ‘I’ll never call you Mum!’ Gently I’d reply, ‘Your mum was a wonderful woman. I know I can never replace her.’ Then they’d like me and we would all celebrate Christmas together, but secretly, just to spite the bitchy daughters, I’d whisper to the grandchildren, ‘I’m your granny now.’

  I tell myself that someday in my future I’ll be happy again. A different sort of happy to the one I’ve just lost. A far duller sort.

  But it’s not going to happen for a long time, so I’d better bunker down and get used to the loneliness.

  I contemplate having a glass of wine, but it’s a bit early for that. Wearily I abandon my new purchases in the hall and climb the stairs and, still in my clothes, get into bed.

  I’m a strong person, I tell myself miserably, as I pull the duvet over my head. I’ve survived hardship – emotional, physical and financial. It’s just a question of being positive, of looking forward. Of never looking back. Of adjusting to the new normal, the present reality, of riding the roller coaster of life, as I believe I said myself in my first book. Accepting all that is given to me and all that is taken away. Recognizing that even loss and pain are gifts.

  … Did I really write that shit? And people actually believed it? In fact I think I even believed it myself at the time.

  I’d always thought that you grew out of heartbreak, that the older you got, the less it hurt, until it entirely stopped having any impact. But I’ve discovered the hard way that heartbreak is just as bad when you’re old. The pain is still awful. Worse, if anything, because of – Zoe explained this to me – the accumulator-effect: the loss stacks up on every previous one and you feel the full weight of them all.

  But wailing and streeling around being heartbroken is a lot less dignified at my age. Once you pass forty, you’re expected to be wise, to be philosophical, to calmly settle yourself in your Eileen Fisher coordinating separates and say, ‘Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Camomile tea, anyone?’

  ‘Not everyone can find a cure for cancer. Someone has to make the dinners and sort the socks.’

  Extract from One Blink at a Time

  ‘I know you must be blaming yourself for getting this disease,’ Betsy said, with great earnestness. ‘Just remember, Mom, you may have done bad things, but that doesn’t make you a bad person.’

  … Don’t!

  ‘You probably wish you’d never been born. But –’ she squeezed my hand fiercely – ‘y
ou must never think that. Life is a precious gift!’

  … Er …

  ‘I know you and Dad have your issues …’

  Do we? For a moment I was wildly irritated. It was all so intense and serious with her; everything had to be analysed and found wanting and eventually resolved.

  ‘But you being paralysed and him having to drive us to school will bring you closer together.’ She smiled a horribly euphoric smile. ‘You simply need to have faith.’

  She must be going to that holy youth club, she must be! I could almost see the creepy group leaders, a man and a woman, both in their early twenties – the man would have longish hair and strange flared jeans and the woman would wear a tartan tabard over a white skinny-knit polo-neck jumper. It was only a matter of time before they came in here with their guitars and tambourines and sang ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore’ and got me into big trouble with the nurses.

  Ryan needed to protect Betsy from these people, but how could I tell him?

  I had an uprush of unbearable frustration. Look at the state of Betsy – her school shirt wasn’t ironed and her blazer had a strange yellow stain on the lapel. And why was her chin a cluster of spots? Was it simply because she was fifteen? Or because she was living on complete rubbish?

  I hadn’t a clue what the household were eating – no one told me and I couldn’t ask – but there wasn’t much chance that Ryan was cooking healthy meals. He could barely open a jar.

  It was no good being cross with him; that end of things had always been my responsibility. The unspoken agreement was that Ryan was the talent and I was the second-in-command.