Hello, Heartbreak Page 9

  ‘I’d get that cough to the doctor, if I were you, Eve, sounds nasty.’

  ‘What cough? I don’t have a cough!’

  ‘Oh, sorry, were you laughing?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  I looked back at my computer screen to see that I had spent the last five minutes typing ‘jfdiauijfdnife djifoaius fdkj hguyrb hi hiyeyhl uihb jdiryttjhdjjhfuid jfkdfiafguighje htbbwpojan HUHAUEHH oiroejkmkppwo23jji***&&%$ ieooiej’.

  ‘By the way,’ Eve sneered, ‘you spelt committee wrong in your notes. It has two ms, two ts and two es.’

  ‘Tell me, Eve,’ I asked her sweetly, ‘how many ms, ts and es are there in Complete and Utter Pain in the Hole?’

  Torture.

  I think I’d rather spend five years in the Bangkok Hilton listening to Abba remixes than have to sit here day in, day out beside Eve, listening to her whine on ad nauseam about nothing. My nose tingled again. Another sneeze coming on.

  Fantastic! I’d sneeze right at her, not covering my mouth or nose. Brilliant! Quite gross, but brilliant. I poured every bit of energy I could muster into making it the biggest sneeze I had ever sneezed in my entire life. I inhaled a steady stream of air until my chest had expanded to its full capacity and waited. Ready for action, my eyes scrunched tightly shut – ‘AaaaaCHOOOOOOO!’

  ‘You filthy mutant!’ Eve shrieked, as I shrugged my shoulders helplessly, pointing towards the incense sticks that stood on her desk releasing plumes of smoke. ‘No, sorry, not you, Mr Breen – hello? Are you still there? You think I may have deafened your right ear? Hello, can you hear me now? Hello? If you can hear me, I’m so sorry… Give me a sign that you can hear me. Press three if you’re not deaf,’ she pleaded down the phone to whoever she’d been speaking to. I think Mr Breen was one of the head honchos at BCM Films. Ha, ha!

  I got back to the task in hand and deleted the garbage I’d spewed onto my screen during my heated exchange with Eve. What time was it? Nearly eleven thirty! For the first time in my life I wanted it to be nine o’clock again. Lovely, clean, fresh, unpanicky nine o’clock. Not shit-yourself-only-an-hour-and-half-left-until-lunch eleven thirty.

  Lunchtime meant briefing my boss about practically everything to do with Snog Me Now, You Dublin Whore – shoot dates, castings, location managers, costume departments, catering, wage deals. Lunchtime also meant no lunchtime. No nice deli-made sandwiches with melted cheese, sundried tomatoes and red onion. Just my own handmade ones, which were always gross, limp, squished and over-buttered. I’d known when I was getting ready for work this morning that I wouldn’t have time to leave the office for lunch so I’d come prepared with a sandwich and a soft, wrinkled apple for one of my five-a-day. Somehow I can convince myself it counts even if I don’t eat it.

  I stole a quick glance at the office clock. Were the ticks getting louder? Eleven forty! This was awful. It was like a real-life version of one of those horrible Leaving Cert dreams I get when I’m stressed. You know the ones I mean: you’re there with only seven minutes left to finish five questions, all the instructions seem to be written in Greek, the ink in your pen has just run out and your claw-like writing hand has knotted itself into a spasmodic cramp. I was in exam hell. Only worse. I had approximately three months’ work to do in one hour and twenty minutes.

  ‘Isobel?’

  ‘Yes, what – what, yes?’ I looked up from the computer to see Fintan’s expectant face glaring at me.

  ‘How’s the brief coming along?’

  ‘Well,’ I joked, ‘it’s brief.’

  Nothing. Not even a charity chuckle.

  ‘Right, Mr Cunningham from BCM will be coming in at lunchtime to go through all the facts and figures with us, so just make sure the presentation is up to scratch. We know how important BCM Films are to us, don’t we? Yes, we do.’ He winked, did some crazy hand charade and was gone.

  If it hadn’t been highly inappropriate, not to mention absolutely disgusting, I might have pissed myself there and then. Someone from BCM was coming in? Here? To go through the presentation? Presentation?

  Looking down at my desk, I wanted to cry. Grubby little yellow Post-its littered every square inch of the surface. Underneath them bulged mountains of random A4 pages. I looked at the computer screen – blank, apart from the little cursor at the top left-hand corner that blinked incessantly at me. Someone from BCM was coming in? Leaving Cert double hell. Like the minister for education reading out your exam answers on national television.

  BCM was basically the patron saint of Lights! Camera! Action!. If anyone should so much as mention its name in our office, a chorus of angels could be heard singing an accompanying ‘Aaaaaaah’. The day Fintan found out that BCM had accepted a deal to co-produce Snog Me Now, You Dublin Whore, he brought us all out to dinner and even ordered champagne. (Well, it was only cava, but I like to pretend sometimes that I’m living the dream.) The kitchen was also stocked with Kimberley biscuits for an entire week, courtesy of himself. That’s how important it was.

  Eleven fifty-five! How in God’s name had that happened? The computer cursor continued to blink expectantly at me.

  The next time I raised my head it was exactly seventeen minutes past one. I had somehow managed to arrange random names, dates, figures and estimates into what just might pass as a ‘presentation’. I even had a cute smiley face with its lips pursed printed next to the Snog Me Now, You Dublin Whore title. I stood over the printer and watched with blurred vision as my efforts were spat out in efficient-seeming blurbs.

  ‘Isobel? Could you let Mr Cunningham in? He’s down at the front door,’ Fintan called from his office. I longed for the cool authority of buzzing someone in but, no, we had to leg it down the narrow, winding staircase past the cluttered filing cabinets. It was like an office-furniture assault course.

  The rug was wedged under the front door and for the life of me I couldn’t shift it to let Mr Cunningham in.

  ‘Hang on, I’ll just give it another tug,’ I called, through the letterbox.

  ‘Do you want me to push the door from out here?’ he answered.

  The hallway was as narrow as Victoria Beckham’s waist, so I was afraid he might kill me if he pushed too hard.

  ‘Here, I’ll try and squeeze round it,’ he offered, and a leg appeared through the gap between the door and its frame. The poor man. I winced as I watched him try to wedge himself through.

  Nice shoes, I thought. Well, shoe. I assumed he was wearing a matching pair and that the other one was equally nice. Hmm, impressive expensive trouser leg and, hang on, a lovely muscly thigh to fill it! Was this Mr Cunningham going to be young and handsome? No way! Never! I’d pictured him as a clone of my dad’s friend Ned Hogan, just a regular middle-aged balding man with a sleazy moustache.

  Another excruciating shove and in came his torso, lovely and toned through his white shirt. This was like unwrapping the best Christmas present ever! The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to reveal tanned forearms and strong, manly hands.

  ‘Nearly there!’ he called, as I stayed motionless on my hunkers, clutching the rug with bated breath. Please, please, please let him be good-looking…

  With one last heave he was through the door.

  I froze. Then I dropped the rug, let out an embarrassingly audible yelp and stared up at him in a complete, shock-induced stupor.

  ‘Hi, Isobel,’ he purred.

  ‘Hi… Jonathan,’ I squeaked.

  Holy shit!

  ‘How have you been?’

  ‘Stupendous!’

  Did I just use the word ‘stupendous’? Yes, I believe I did.

  His brown eyes hovered over me as he smiled and offered his hand. As he pulled me to my feet, he whispered teasingly, in my right ear, ‘I think I’ve done this for you before.’

  My cheeks were burning. To disguise the emissions of radioactive waves from my face, I headed for the stairs. ‘We’d better go up or he’ll think we’ve got ourselves into some kind of trouble.’

  ‘Oh, what kind of troub
le?’

  ‘No. I think – we – seriously, I think we should just be serious,’ I replied completely deadpan, like the talking clock. What was I doing? Here was my chance to be smart, witty and outrageously flirty, but all I could muster was the voice of an automated answering service. I tried to redeem myself. ‘It’s jusht that we’re to be very busy with the whore from Dublin. Ha ha. Ha.’ I sounded pissed.

  As we walked up the stairs in an awkward silence, I tried to figure out how Mr Cunningham from BCM was that absolute ride from the dinner party. Images of myself hovering over the toilet with my jeans around my ankles, horrific grey knickers on show, then falling drunkenly into the bath mushroomed in my mind. I felt like Lois when she discovered Clark Kent and Superman were one and the same person.

  All of a sudden I became acutely aware that my arse was directly in front of his face as we trudged up the narrowest staircase ever fashioned by the hand of man. He was looking at it – he had to be! It was right in front of him! It suddenly felt huge – no, gigantic, so horrifically enormous I was afraid it was about to get stuck between the wall and the handrail.

  After what felt like a month of Arse Watch, we reached the top of the stairs. I held open the office door for him without facing him; I couldn’t bear to.

  ‘Thanks,’ he murmured. As soon as he’d disappeared into Fintan’s office, I twisted my head over my shoulder to see if my arse had indeed mutated into the size of a small country in the time it had taken me to get up from my desk and answer the front door. Thank God, it appeared to have stayed the usual size.

  ‘I wasn’t going to say it, but you’ve obviously noticed it now yourself. You have serious VPL in those trousers,’ Eve said, as she blew on her steaming mug of green tea.

  That was the least of my worries. To hell with VPL: I was more concerned with the acute FES I was suffering from – Feckin’ Eejit Syndrome. The man must think I’m mentally impaired, not to mention socially inept, I mused. I bet he thinks I’m here doing work experience on a community outreach programme designed by the Department of Social Services to help integrate mentally impaired and socially inept individuals into society. How could I convince him I was reasonably sane? The thought of what lay ahead of me for the next hour was enough to make me and my oversized backside want to turn and run all the way to Dun Laoghaire, jump on a ferry, sail to Wales and hide there for the rest of my life under the assumed name of Gladys Cllewenyllwyn.

  That would be a rash and foolish decision. I had nothing packed or organized for emigration. I was stuck here, whether I liked it or not. And now I had to go and sit in a confined space in front of the incredibly good-looking random stranger and try to convince him of the advantages of Section 481 of the government tax incentives with regard to indigenous film-making. And not to have me fired when he discovered my presentation looked like an eight-year-old’s homework. Oh, and to fancy me.

  Leaving Cert triple hell! Like going in to do your Irish oral only to discover that the examiner is the guy you have secretly been in love with for the last three years. And it turns out that it’s not a secret at all. In fact, it’s on the syllabus. And you have to discuss your love of him with him for an entire hour in Irish.

  ‘Isobel?’ Fintan called. ‘Can you come in so we can get started?’

  13

  What was that smell? Oh, yeah. Tuesday Night Smell. Keelin’s experimental cuisine night. I dumped my keys on the hall table and rifled through the mail. As usual, there was nothing of interest. Still I always held on to the tiniest glimmer of hope that I’d find a handwritten letter hidden in the bundle. From whom, I wasn’t sure. My Finnish pen-pal still hadn’t replied to my last letter. And, okay, I’d sent it in March 1994, but I hadn’t entirely given up hope.

  At least my credit-card bill hadn’t surfaced. My stomach lurched at the thought of what I might owe this month – on second thoughts maybe I felt a bit off because of the pungent fumes of fried penguin or roasted walrus wafting to me from the kitchen. I glanced down at my pink sparkly wedges and cut-off white jeans. Were they worth such abject guilt? Yes, actually, they were. And they were kind of free because I hadn’t gone out at weekends for so long that the money I would have spent had been clawed back into my wardrobe. To think that one of my tutors at college had had the cheek to fail me in my financial management assignment!

  I’ll admit that the bag had, perhaps, been slightly excessive, but it had really cute dancing elephants on it. And the only reason I hadn’t brought back the seriously overpriced giant pink glitterball was because that cute little boutique in Sandy-mount only offered store credit on returns. And then I’d only buy something silly instead. Once more, practical financial management.

  Penguin or no penguin, I was starving. A mixture of a two-hour-long presentation meeting plus the shock I’d suffered at discovering Mr Cunningham from BCM was in fact Jonathan Ride Cunningham from the party meant that I’d dumped my sandwich in the bin. Forget dieting! Excessive stress was where it was at.

  ‘Izzy? Come and check this out. Someone’s about to wake up,’ Susie called from the sitting room.

  ‘On my way,’ I replied. I had no interest in Big Brother.

  ‘Oh, no… Wait… he was just turning over. Yep, he’s still asleep. False alarm!’

  I was afraid of what might happen if Susie started watching regular TV again. The excitement could kill her.

  ‘What’s Keelin cooking?’

  ‘Rainbow trout stuffed with peanuts, coriander and pineapple. It’s Malaysian, I think.’

  No mention of chocolate. Disappointing. I really felt like chocolate this evening. It sounds vile, but Keelin had once made chocolate soup and it was amazing.

  I pushed open the sitting-room door and was even more disappointed: Aidan.

  ‘All right?’ he said, without having the grace to look up from the television.

  ‘Hi, Aidan. You staying for dinner?’

  ‘Smells fuckin’ shit. I got stuff from the chipper.’

  ‘Fair enough. What’s going on in Big Brother?’

  ‘Dunno. It’s fuckin shit.’ At least we had that in common.

  ‘Izzy, come and sit down,’ said Susie.

  ‘Have yiz got ketchup?’ he asked, in his put-on northside accent. I wondered how Mr and Mrs Costello, Aidan’s golf-playing, Spanish-villa-owning, Lexus-jeep-driving, Dalkey-residing parents felt about his preferred choice of Dublin accent. Probably none too chuffed I’d say after his three-thousand-euro-a-term private education.

  ‘I’ll get some for you now,’ Susie said obediently, and got up to go to the kitchen. Lazy bollocks.

  We passed a few moments watching a Big Brother contestant yawning and scratching his private parts.

  ‘So, you ridin’ anyone at the moment?’ Aidan asked, as he shoved a fistful of greasy chips into his mouth.

  ‘Em, no,’ I responded, slightly mortified. I felt as if I was back in junior school and someone had just said ‘willy’.

  ‘Why? You still obsessed with that Cian bloke or something?’

  ‘What? No! I… I’m just happy to be single at the moment.’ Rude bollocks.

  ‘You not dyin’ for a ride?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Why? You got a shit sex drive?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘So you’ve got a high sex drive, do ya, ya dirty bitch? Love to be lashin’ the fellas out of it, do ya?’

  ‘Here we go. Ketchup,’ Susie chirped, as she came back in and plonked herself down beside him.

  I was so stunned by what Aidan had said that I couldn’t even tell her that that particular bottle of ketchup had been sitting around since I’d last heard from my pen-pal.

  ‘This ketchup’s a load of shite.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, I’ll open a new bottle.’ She raced back into the kitchen. Lazy prick.

  ‘So you and that Cian fella? Ridin’ every fuckin’ hour, were yiz?’

  Should I say yes or no? Which answer was worse?

  ‘No? No fuckin’ surprise the poor
fucker dumped ya so!’

  ‘Any auditions coming up for you, Aidan?’ I asked, cutting across him.

  ‘No. Me agent isn’t gettin’ me any at the moment. Is there anything in the film you’re workin’ on for me?’

  ‘No, unfortunately. Our film is about people who’ve lived very hard-knock lives and come from a very raw underbelly of society.’

  ‘Eh? Are you jokin’? Hello?’ he says, pointing at himself.

  ‘Oh, sorry, Aidan, I’m confused… are you not from Dalkey? Your folks have a place in Soto Grande right?’

  ‘Brand new bottle of ketchup – there you go.’

  ‘Nice one. You’re a fuckin’ legend.’ He pulled her down to him and kissed her, his greasy hands all over her. Images of Susie’s mum rocking back and forth in a strait-jacket, whimpering, ‘Aidan. His name is Aidan,’ flooded my mind, as they always did when he was around. He let her go and she giggled as she sat down beside him again. He turned to me and winked without her noticing. ‘Fuckin’ love a bit of that, wouldn’ ya?’ He grinned.

  ‘Huh?’ Susie asked.

  ‘I’m talking ’bout me chips, babe, you’d love some, wouldn’ ya?’

  Lying bollocks.

  ‘No, thanks, I’m grand. I’ll wait for the trout.’

  ‘Here, Suz, whaddya reckon we try and set Izzy up with Redzer or Buzzer or one of the lads? I reckon she’s dyin’ for it.’

  More images of mothers poured through my mind, this time Redzer and Buzzer’s. ‘Three thousand euro a term!’ I heard them wail. ‘A term!’ I could never remember whether Aidan’s crew were actual scumbags or just pretend ones, like Guy Ritchie. Either way, I’d rather have had to live with Greg, have little ginger children and exist on a diet of mints for the rest of my life than hook up with any of Aidan’s skanger mates. The one thing Aidan had going for him was good looks – the others looked like a pack of anaemic ferrets.

  ‘Em, I don’t know. Eh… what do you reckon, Izzy? They’re really sound – they’re coming over in a while to watch the match so you can have a look for yourself.’