Читать книгу Be Careful What You Wish For - Martina Devlin - Страница 9

Molly knew if she didn’t get up right now there’d be no lying in bed waking up gradually with a cup of coffee, no leisurely shower, no time to drink a second cup of coffee while she applied her makeup. She lay on ten more minutes: that meant slapping on the warpaint at the DART station again; another five minutes: she’d just traded in breakfast – what odds, the cereal was stale and the bread could probably crawl to the toaster of its own accord. She wrenched herself out of bed and made it to the bathroom, bouncing off walls, before she ran out of time to wash.

Minutes later she was at Blackrock station, waving a mascara wand, which could double as a threatening weapon, in the direction of her eyes, and debating whether to collect a chocolate chip muffin or a toasted cheese sandwich on her way into the office. She found herself ordering the sandwich; obviously the great nutritionist in the sky was on her case again. She even asked for a few slices of tomato to accompany the cheese as a nod to healthy eating.

It was quiet as she strode through the Chronicle’s newsroom, aiming for the seat furthest away from the newsdesk. Out of sight, out of mind. Hopefully it wouldn’t be a busy day; maybe extra advertisements would be booked and they’d drop a few news pages. She was two months behind with her expenses and tomorrow was the deadline. The paper’s expenses forms were demonic to fill out; if there wasn’t money in it you’d never persist. She barely had time to slide the wrapper off her breakfast when a 127-page report from the Department of Justice into drug abuse in prisons landed on her desk. Stephen Horan, the news editor, delivered a crocodile smile along with the depressing information that the security correspondent, who’d normally tackle this tome, was on holiday. Frank Dillon could reel off the difference between hepatitis B and C without looking it up while Molly wasn’t even sure how to spell it. Nevertheless she was stuck with making a page lead out of the report. May it be lashing with rain wherever Frank was. She hoped he’d spent a fortune jetting off in search of winter sunshine and wound up with freak monsoons. She studied the report’s index, quivering with distaste as she imagined all those bruised and prominent veins locked up together.

If only someone had explained to the prison junkies how many KitKats they could buy for a fix before they started down that road. Molly was a great believer in chocolate as the ultimate high. Her life was devoted to reading the backs of chocolate bars to assess cocoa solid content. White Toblerone was her all-time favourite, especially the massive surfboard version, but she was forever keen to track down and taste new chocolate sensations. Her handbag always contained a part-nibbled bar of something. Today it was Cadbury’s Bourneville. Sometimes she bought Wholenut for protein, but generally she believed the nuts used up valuable chocolate space.

‘Good weekend, Molloy?’ asked Barry Dalton, who tended to sit beside her when their shifts coincided and there was a free desk. News reporters worked four-day weeks, in varying shifts, and this system meant no one was in a position to claim a patch of Formica as their own. It was possible to go weeks without seeing some of your colleagues.

Molly hadn’t borrowed pens off Barry in at least a fortnight, and she was delighted to see him. As he needed even more caffeine than she did to make it through the day, she could always rely on him for mercy dashes to the canteen or Café Aroma.

‘Come for breakfast and tell me all about your endless hooleying since I saw you last,’ suggested Barry, convinced single people enjoyed fascinating social lives.

‘This is breakfast-a-go-go.’ Molly indicated her toasted sandwich and polystyrene cup.

‘Eat up and we’ll head off so.’ His sing-song Cork accent was as pronounced now as the day he’d first arrived in Dublin, hefting a portable typewriter for the novel he’d never finish and a miraculous medal from his mother, lost before it had a chance to work any miracles. Unless it was working them for whoever found it.

‘Barry Dalton, what sort of a porker do you take me for? Don’t answer that. But even I need a breather before tackling a second breakfast. You can bring me back another coffee if you’re headed for the canteen, though.’

‘I’ll give it a few minutes. It’ll be jammed with all the classified ads girlies shortly.’

‘Shame on you, you’re supposed to be a happily married man. Mind you, half the kerb crawlers in the city are happily married men.’

‘Did I intimate I’d be doing anything other than salivating, Ms Moral Majority? Obviously I operate on the noli me tangere basis. Besides, looking isn’t a crime. It only proves you’re a normal healthy male.’

‘And that, your honour, is the case for the defence.’ Molly fired her sandwich wrapper binwards and drained the coffee.

Barry passed her the serviette she was scrabbling for. ‘Normal healthy males have normal healthy urges which they don’t act on because, um, remind me why we ignore our normal healthy urges?’

‘You’re happily married. And because you’d have no chance with the classified girls anyway because you’re twice their age, podgy around the love-handles zone and you don’t wear your shirt outside your trousers like the lads they go out with.’

Barry rearranged his tie across his bulging midriff. ‘So my wife is lying when she says there’s more of me to love these days.’

Molly rolled her eyes. ‘Kay’s a martyr. Or the most deluded woman in the country. Did you do fatherly things with the girls at the weekend?’

He sighed theatrically. ‘I’m surrounded by a monstrous regiment of women. It’s petticoat power at every turn. I had to go shopping with Kay and the girls on Saturday afternoon. It was vicious – five-and-three-quarter hours of misery and only one coffee break. If I hadn’t been browbeaten into that vasectomy I might have a son by now who’d back me up against them.’

‘Vasectomies are reversible, Bar. Any time you find a young one who takes your fancy you can trot back to the doctor and go under the knife again. That’s if Kay doesn’t get to you first. Don’t expect me to shield you. Of course,’ mischief glittered from Molly’s eyes, ‘those nubile twenty-one-year-olds you’re drooling over are mad keen shoppers. Friday nights may be paradise but it’s purgatory all day Saturday as you lug carrier bags from shop to shop and debate the virtues of scoop necklines versus halter. Men with significantly younger wives don’t look euphoric. Try downright drained. Those chicks lend their men a just-basted glow for a short time, then exhaustion sets in. Whereas a plumply rounded hen of your own vintage is like a roast dinner – familiar and satisfying.’

Barry’s pointy face acquired a knife-edge aspect as he gazed into the future – and quaked. ‘Must you make straight for the farmyard at this hour of the morning?’ he objected.

‘It’s for your own good,’ Molly said. ‘La vida loca isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, Barry.’

He nodded. ‘Kay’s sticking the times rightly,’ he conceded. ‘She can still fit into the same size beautician’s uniform she wore when I first met her and there’s not many forty-one-year-old women you could say that for.’

‘She’s a gorgeous woman and I don’t know how you ever persuaded her to marry you. She obviously has an infinite capacity for pity. Now will I fetch the coffees or will you?’

Barry lurched to his feet, sending his chair clattering. ‘I’ll go. The girlies should be trooping out for their breaks around now. Expect me when you see me, Molloy. I may be some time.’

Molly returned to the Department of Justice report. Wouldn’t you imagine, she fumed, they’d have included a hand-out indicating which pages had the meat on them? She phoned Damien in the press office to complain. He insisted there had been a press release included in the package couriered to the paper but he’d email another. Molly cast an eye in the direction of the newsdesk and spied her press release. Typical, the news editor was using the hand-out that could have made her life ineffably easier to eat toast from. She glared at Stephen, scattering dollops of marmalade on the Department of Justice’s bullet points, and he winked.

‘Hung over from all the strumpet city exploits you single girls get up to at the weekend?’ he called down the room.

Another man convinced he’d voluntarily renounced Sodom and Gomorrah when he took the marriage path. To hear him now, you’d believe he’d been a heartbreaker. Instead of which he courted Clodagh from the age of eighteen and lived with his mammy until he’d saved enough for a deposit on their first house.

Molly surveyed the lack of talent in the office. Only four unmarried men in the entire pool of reporters, sub-editors and editors, while they had their choice of a bevy of stunning women. Four. Not that you’d actually want to go out with anyone from your floor – too close for comfort – but it would be pleasant to have somebody you could at least fancy from afar without having to listen to him describe the ecstasy of cutting his child’s umbilical cord or shake his head over the criminal cost of school uniforms. And as for the four who were still on the market – three had been well and truly picked over and Molly was convinced the fourth was a twelve-year-old masquerading as a grown-up.

Most of the married men were up for a snog, or more, after a few drinks. Even the ones who never trotted out those ‘I’m only with her for the sake of the children’ lines that made you want to shake them had the capacity to surprise you at Christmas parties. They seemed to think they were allowed a night off from being married, an amnesty courtesy of Santa Claus. You could sit at the turkey dinner beside a mouse of a man who spent the year scuttling out of your way if you met him in the corridor, safe in the knowledge that at least he wouldn’t make a pass. He’d be wearing a snowman tie to testify that he knew how to let his hair down and he’d show you the photos of his children he carried in his wallet. A few glasses of mulled wine later you’d be trying to extricate his tongue from your tonsils.

Sport was the only department with a concentration of single, reasonable-looking men. But then they’d only go and bore the ears off you talking about matches. Sporty types were obsessive. Molly dated a soccer writer briefly when she worked on the Evening Standard in London; she still hadn’t forgotten the way he monopolised the remote control belonging to her – repeat, her- television set to check scores. And she was convinced he kept an eye on the league tables while they courted on the sofa; he always arranged it so he was facing the TV set.

So what you have here, considered Molly, ruling out the sports department arbitrarily as she waited for Damien’s email, was a concentration of married men, some of whom may well be ill-matched with wives and biding their time until the children were grown up, but most of whom were bored, lying to themselves never mind the girls they eyed up, and ready for any bit of distraction they could lay their hands on. Especially the laying-on of hands part.

Barry returned in time to stop her sending out an abusive all-users message on the computer system telling her male colleagues precisely what she thought of them.

Molly twisted off the lid of her coffee and slurped. ‘No sugar, Barry.’

‘Couldn’t remember if you were taking it or not – you’re as changeable as the seasons, woman – so I brought some sachets.’ He scattered half a dozen on the desk in front of her. ‘I’m smitten. There’s a new recruit in advertising, she has the face of an angel.’

‘Admire her from afar, Bar. You don’t want the mystique spoiled by hearing her Dub accent or by discovering that she’s only a few years older than your daughters.’

Barry shrugged, then performed an exaggerated appraisal of his colleague. ‘Your hair is lovely today, Molly. Have you done something different with it?’

‘What’s your game?’

He radiated injury. ‘It’s a sad state of affairs when a man can’t pass an agreeable remark without it being misconstrued.’

‘Once again for the hard of hearing, what’s your game?’

‘I need to trade weekend duty with you. The outlaws are encroaching from Monaghan.’

‘But you’re off this weekend.’

‘Exactly. Be a pal and let me work Saturday and Sunday instead of you. I’ll go nuts if I’m stuck with Kay’s parents for forty-eight uninterrupted hours of close family living.’

Molly swapped – but not before she made him promise to do all the coffee runs that day.

She was debating whether there were any other concessions she could wrest from him when her phone rang. It was an old schoolfriend, Mary-P (to differentiate her from Mary-R and Mary-Mac in the classroom); excitement laced with triumph was sizzling down the phoneline. It could mean only one thing: another day out in an extravagant hat. Molly mentally added an extra lunch to her expenses claim to cheer herself up and prepared to sound delighted.

‘You’ll never guess what I’ll be doing in nine weeks’ time,’ said Mary-P.

‘Having a sex change,’ speculated Molly. ‘Paragliding over Uruguay. Forming a cult.’

‘Molly, you have the strangest notions. I’ll be saying “I do” in front of all our friends and family when Paul asks me to love, honour and cherish him all the days of our life. Even saying the words gives me butterflies.’

‘So he asked you to take out a joint mortgage with him at last,’ said Molly.

‘We’ve had one of those for two years. He asked me to marry him.’

‘And you told him you couldn’t because you weren’t a priest.’

There was a pause while Mary-P digested this and tinkled an uncertain laugh.

Meanwhile Molly decided she was being ungracious and launched into effusive congratulations.

‘It was so unexpected,’ burbled Mary-P, who worked as a physiotherapist in their home town of Derry. ‘He must have been planning it for weeks. We were in Donegal and he brought me to a picture-postcard waterfall just outside Ardara. I thought we’d stumbled across it but Paul had gone on a reconnaissance mission the previous week when he claimed he was visiting his parents and he decided it would make an ideal backdrop to a marriage proposal. We turned the corner and there it was, tumbling amid the heather. We stepped out of the car for a closer look and then he asked me. I must have looked a sight, the wind was gale force and my hair was plastered to my head but I said yes straight off, not a second’s hesitation, and then he told me he’d like us to be married as quickly as possible rather than linger with a protracted engagement and …’

Molly watched Barry send an email; she squinted to detect the identity of the recipient but drew a blank.

‘… so he rang my father, who hasn’t been asked his opinion in twenty years, never mind his permission, but Paul is so wonderfully correct, I adore an old-fashioned man …’

Just so long as she doesn’t ask me to be bridesmaid. Molly mentally ransacked her wardrobe and pondered whether she’d need a new outfit or could she wear the primrose coat and dress bought for the last wedding she’d attended. Nine weeks’ time was early April, perfect spring weather for the combination. Could she trot out the same clothes, though? It depended on whether there’d be a substantial number of guests common to both Mary-P’s and those other nasty nuptials. All she seemed to remember was sitting on a slice of the strawberry meringue confection they’d substituted for a wedding cake and being obliged to keep the coat on all evening to cover the stain. She wondered if Paul had any unattached friends likely to be at the bash. Then again, Paul was an anorak so there was a fair-to-middling chance his friends were anoraks too. She wasn’t that desperate.

‘What do you think, Molly?’

What did she think about what? She improvised. ‘It’s a tricky one,’ she hazarded.

‘Don’t I know it,’ said Mary-P. ‘But there must be some compromise. It’s not that I expect to be able to exchange vows by the waterfall – I understand it has to be in a church – but if we could even pledge our love in a public manner there it would add immeasurably to the occasion. I feel such an affinity with that waterfall; it’s our special place.’

Molly shelved the lemon outfit. Standing by a waterfall in the wilds of Donegal in April required thermals and waterproof clothing. Mary-P was back on her ‘Paul caught me totally unawares’ hobbyhorse. How unexpected could a marriage proposal be when she’d been courted by the man for eight years including living with him for two? Molly decided fifteen minutes of this blithe-spirit session were as much as anyone could be expected to endure – even if she did sit beside Mary-P for most of her secondary school days. Naturally she hoped she’d be ecstatically happy, of course she’d be at the wedding, now would she ever feck off and stop making her feel like a failure because nobody, not even a nerd such as Mary-P’s Paul Sheerin, wanted her hand in marriage? Or any other body part.

Molly pushed the phone away and contemplated notching up her blonde curls from streaks to an all-over peroxide. Say, a corkscrew version of the Marilyn Monroe look – subtlety was wasted on men.

‘Do you think I should go blonder?’ she asked Barry.

‘Will my answer alter your decision to swap weekend duty with me?’ His hazel eyes behind their John Lennon spectacles flickered anxiously.

‘No.’

‘Lash ahead if you fancy it.’

‘But will it have men swooning at my feet?’

‘Sure they do that already. So we’re definitely on for the weekend transfer then?’

‘Barry, I feel bound to tell you that your objectivity is under the microscope and not standing up to scrutiny. Now stop annoying me, I have to push on with this jail report.’

She managed to work her way through to page twenty-seven before Barry spoke again.

‘Call for you, Molly, on my line. Which extension are you on?’

‘It’s probably a reader.’ Molly shrank into her seat. Readers had a tendency to keep you talking for ages, suggesting an exposé on whatever little unnewsworthy – they were always unnewsworthy – obsession they’d latched on to. ‘You wouldn’t take a message, Barry? I’ll never wade through this tome before lunchtime if interruptions keep annoying me.’

‘Fine by me but it sounds like a personal call. I formed the impression he knows you. He asked for Molly, not Molly Molloy.’

She brightened. ‘He’ and ‘personal call’; the combination equalled promising.

‘Four-six-three-seven please, Bar.’

It was a very personal call; Molly’s pulse accelerated as soon as she heard his voice. It was Fionn McCullagh, her ex-almost-fiancé. Technically he’d never proposed but they’d lived together for a year and had gone out with each other for another year before that, and everyone had assumed they’d eventually marry. Molly knew it was only a matter of time, although Fionn had insisted from day one he didn’t believe in marriage and failed to see how it enhanced a relationship. ‘It brings nothing to the party’ were the words he’d used. You were with someone because you wanted to be and not because a piece of paper decreed it, that’s what he’d told her. She didn’t mind too much so long as they were together. She hadn’t started practising her wedding march at that stage.

Molly and Fionn had been a couple because they’d chosen to be. Because they’d been inseparable. Because everyone had said they were meant for one another. Because they’d laughed at the same jokes. Because they’d both liked Indian food. Because the weak Irish sunshine had warmed their backs when they’d felt it together. Because the rain mattered less when they’d shared an umbrella. Because they’d been in love.

Except a trial three-month separation (his idea) had intervened. And when they’d met again in the Westmoreland Street Bewley’s, à la An Affair to Remember, he was married to someone else. Already. In the space of three months. Some men can’t be trusted out of your sight. The fellow who told her marriage was an anachronism and the only vows he’d contemplate were mountaintop pledges in the presence of a druid – and even that would be only for the craic – had stood up in church and said ‘I do’. Wearing a cravat.

Hypocrite. Even now she tasted bile when she thought of Fionn married to someone else. It had happened four years ago and Molly could still feel the shock, the outrage and, above all, the grief coil in the pit of her stomach as though it were yesterday. He had sat opposite her in a corner seat – it took her fourteen months to set foot in that branch of Bewley’s – and she hadn’t noticed his wedding band. The shiny yellow ring. He’d waited until she’d taken a bite of her almond slice before telling her; she couldn’t smell almonds now, even in hand-cream, without her innards convulsing. Her eyes had been drawn to his left hand as he’d spoken and the proof had glinted at her. Molly had never seen a colder metal.

His wife was a Scandinavian-born American citizen and as far as Molly knew Fionn was living in Seattle, probably drinking better coffee than he’d been accustomed to in Ireland. Now he was obviously back on holiday and strapped for company, she decided, even as they meandered through the social niceties whereby former lovers pretend they’re great friends when one or both of them would much prefer the other to slide off the face of the planet.

Fionn. Taller than average but otherwise your standard Irishman. Medium face, medium voice, medium frame, medium fellow – at first glance. To Molly he was anything but medium. She’d never been able to establish to her own satisfaction how or why it was he colonised her affections, and seemingly effortlessly. There were other men around with fairer hair and bluer eyes but none of them looked at her in quite the way Fionn did. He’d fractured her heart, although she’d patched it up eventually, because you never knew when you might need your heart again.

‘So will we meet in Bewley’s for old times’ sake, Molly? I’ll buy you an almond slice.’

That doused her in reality; the sense of betrayal writhed inside her again.

‘Grand, tomorrow it is then. It’s about time you introduced Helga to that staple Dublin tradition, coffee and cake in Bewley’s.’

‘Olga –’ he emphasised the name – ‘is in Seattle. I’m home on my own, Molly. For good.’

Which meant the whirlwind romance had blown itself out. Which meant Fionn was on the market again. Which meant her heart could be broken again … or maybe not. She was four years older, four years wiser, four years better armoured against Fionn McCullagh. Anyway, chances were he was only being friendly; she shouldn’t read too much into coffee. It was hardly a declaration of passion. For all Molly knew he hadn’t thought of her once during his blissful years in blissful Seattle.

‘Molly.’ Fionn’s voice dipped to a whisper. ‘You’re my one regret in life.’

The connection was severed.