Eleven

Being busy was what saved Kate’s life for the next week. It saved her. Absolutely. If it hadn’t been for work, she was – dead.

After Hamlet, which she hardly even saw, she had fled from the theatre, just fled, not even staying for the reception, insisting on getting home as fast as she possibly could (a taxi would have been comforting but, unfortunately, walking was quicker to where she lived, and even in the very worst extremities of distress Kate’s pragmatism did not abandon her). She had to, absolutely had to, get away from Vincy. Not to mention Anna. What she did not know was that Anna was also rushing out of the Abbey, walking briskly to Eden Quay to flag down a cab and dash off home to hers. They might have met as they escaped, both running away from the same man, ohmygod, and would something, anything, everything, then have taken another turn? But they did not meet, so everything took the turn it took.

Being busy saved Kate.

As always in the office there was loads to do. Dozens of phone calls to make and emails to respond to and many many complicated arrangements to be made, unmade, remade, patched up. That was her work, an infinity of communications with an infinity of individuals, like herself, a universe of people who arranged things. Her job demanded two hundred per cent twenty-four seven and that was what saved her. She couldn’t mope while doing this. Nobody could. Absolutely no way. Cheerfulness was essential. She was an expert at pasting cheerfulness onto her face in the mornings, along with her make-up. Whatever was going on underneath, inside her body or her mind, had to take care of itself while she chirped and chatted, always sounding as if life were a happy game, one long party where everyone enjoyed themselves and nobody misbehaved or suffered any disappointment of any kind. The merry-go-round went round and round, and Kate was one of the people who led it. She was masked like a clown in the circus – and a clown’s mask is not a bad thing to have, if your heart is broken. For some people it is enough to see them through the healing time, to the other side, when their heart is whole again. Kate was not one of those people, but she didn’t know that. Not on the day after the play. Not for several days in fact.

Lauren was, not that it matters, since she was peripheral to everything – although perhaps that is not entirely true. Perhaps if she had been different, things would have taken another course. But she was not different and things took the turn they took.

Lauren always wore a mask. If one were cruel, one might say that she was a fucking mask. But that would be not just cruel. It would be glib. It would be, undoubtedly, inaccurate. Nobody is a mask. There is always something underneath. However little.

So. She wore a mask. All the time. Twenty-four seven.

So she did not mention the night at the theatre, or Vincy, at all. At all. Not a word. The night at the theatre had never happened in the world according to Lauren.

This was the ethos of the business: unpleasantness was dismissed as if it had never happened; uncomfortable situations were not supposed to occur and if they did, they were erased, forgotten immediately, in case they would clog the smooth running of the business in which cheerfulness was essential, just as petrol is essential to a car. Kate hated all this silence, all this refusal to bring up the subject, although she would have behaved in exactly the same way herself had the shoe been on the other foot, although she recognised that Lauren was doing the right thing, the easiest thing – the right thing was the easiest thing, usually, she had found out in her career – once you found that out, life was so much easier. Usually, but not this time. Not when her life was in total chaos, not when the worst thing that could happen to a girl had happened to her. Ohmygod, this was worse than if she had got … smallpox. Than if she had woken up and found she had transmogrified into a bowler overnight, than if she weighed fourteen stone.

How could Lauren just act as if it had never happened?

And as the week wore on to its conclusion Kate became more and more resentful instead of less. It was just awful. She would have liked to talk about the whole thing to someone. To Lauren, obviously, since she had been there, a witness, since she was supposed to be a friend as well as a colleague. But as time wore on talking became less and less possible. The masks got tougher and the underneath got weaker.

And the thing was, of course, that the person she would really have liked to talk to was Vincy. But he was incommunicado too; he didn’t contact her. She knew the relationship was over; it was not that she expected him to ask to see her again or anything like that. (Her dearest wish; it was not that she expected her dream to come true. Not after what happened at Hamlet.) But couldn’t he have called just to see how she was? He must have noticed how upset she had been. And she could not believe that he, like Lauren, would be the sort of person who would brush everything awkward under the carpet and move swiftly on, like a robot pretending to be human. He was, she knew, what she called a caring person. That was why she had fallen in love with him. That he was a caring person, as well as being all the other things that he was.

But he wasn’t all that caring, apparently. Not caring enough to ring up and ask ‘Well, how are you? Are you ok?’ Not even to email and say ‘?’.

The week moved on. Kate moved on with it, or on it, as if she were a little seabird floating on a wave. She got busier and busier, chirpier and chirpier, as day followed day. She filled the time with talk and emails and work, every minute. She had barely time to sleep seven hours a night, then she was up and into the bathroom, washing her hair, drying it, straightening it, doing her skin and her clothes and her make-up and then off, at a rush, trotting like a pony, to the office. Feeling lurked beneath the surface but she kept it there, in its place.

Then came the weekend.

You could come into the office at the weekend - she had a key - but there was no point. Nobody would answer the telephone, nobody would answer the emails. The urgency that affected every single thing you did during the week would have vanished, and if you came in at the weekend you might suspect, fatally, that none of it mattered all that much. All the perpetrators of the urgency were at home in bed, or even abroad in bed, or sitting in cafés, or walking around, as if nothing in the world of work was all that important, as if everything could be put on hold. Until Monday. It wasn’t twenty-four seven when it came right down to it; it was twenty-four five, and for twenty-four two you were on your own. All those people who needed you so desperately all week vanished into thin air and forgot that you existed.

Going in to work would solve nothing.

So she did not go in.

So she had to stay at hers.

Hers. A dangerous place when you had forty-eight hours to call your own, forty-eight hours to get through on your own.

Especially if you had no friends.

Like Kate.

Kate had no friends.

Colleagues, whom she called friends, like Lauren, or Vincy, she had, but no real friends, because there was no time in her life for them. It wasn’t her fault. She had had friends, of course she had, when she was at school and college. She’d been popular, well, not unpopular anyway. But none of them had meant that much to her. She’d never had a close friend, someone special, like other girls had, and the three or four she used to go for a drink with or whatever hadn’t really been her type. It’s not that she was using them, she’d never use anybody, that’s so disgusting, but when they went their separate ways, she wasn’t all that sorry. It’s not that they weren’t very nice people in their own ways. It was just that they weren’t for her. In time she’d find replacements, meet people she really … felt she’d something in common with.

It hadn’t happened yet, though.

Most of the time that was just fine. Her job demanded two hundred per cent and that was fine by her. And like all people who are in a very challenging, interesting job, her weekends were also very challenging. She had to use the time to do all the things she hadn’t had time to do during the week. Domestic stuff and shopping and going to the cleaners and going to see her family (she had a family, quite a complicated one too, don’t go there … but she did go there, as a rule, on Sundays, for lunch – the dutiful daughter).

On Saturday morning when she could have slept in, or out, some people say, when she could have slept off her disappointment at losing something she had never had anyway, or at half losing the man she had half had, Kate had set her alarm for 7a.m. and got up to give her apartment a really thorough going over. Not that it was not very clean and neat already. But she had high standards and the apartment was worth it. I mean to say, it was her biggest investment, it was her only investment. It was only right that she should take care of it.

God, she was lucky to have the bloody apartment; and it wasn’t that she had got in before the prices went up. Before the prices went up she had been ten years old and unluckily her parents had not foreseen the property boom, had not bought when the prices were low, for their two daughters. But then, look on the bright side, they had helped out when the prices were high. Gave Olwen a deposit, and, Kate suspected, helped her out with the mortgage repayments more than occasionally too, when that ne’er-do-well husband of hers squandered his salary on booze and flooze. They’d paid Kate’s deposit too. All she had to do was pay the mortgage repayments. Yeah, all! Oh well. The mortgage for the one-bedroom apartment on Gardiner Street, a street that had been a no-go area for decades, a street that had passed into urban mythology as the location for unknown legends about muggings and car theft, cost seventy per cent of her salary at the moment. Leaving thirty per cent for everything else. No point in complaining, grin and bear it, that’s life, and she was damned lucky to have it. Most girls of her age were renting. Lauren, who had a wardrobe to die for, would probably never own her own place. A lovely girl, she really was. Bright. But … she didn’t own her own apartment and she couldn’t save to save her life.

Cleaning this costly little apartment took Kate the better part of the morning. It was not possible to spend more than half an hour hoovering and dusting the two rooms, but she did much more than that. She cleaned out the kitchen cupboards, scrutinising cartons and tins to make sure they were not past their sell-by date, a job most people never did or hated but one that Kate enjoyed. She went through the contents of her wardrobe and weeded out a few blouses that she had not worn in a year. They went into a plastic bag for the Oxfam shop on Henry Street.

When all this was done, it was still not lunchtime.

On Saturday afternoons, Kate often drifted into town and wandered about, getting ideas for interior decor and clothes, rather than actually buying anything. Today she could not face that. Her interest in clothes and furniture had vanished and she did not want to see her reflection in a thousand mirrors and plate-glass windows. But staying in the apartment was equally unbearable.

A walk. She felt bloated from being indoors – her lunch had been toast and scrambled egg, not a lot of food, but it made her feel thick and uncomfortable. A walk was what she needed to walk off that horrible feeling.

Going for a walk from Gardiner Street was not so easy, especially if you wanted to avoid shops. Almost every way you went led either to a city-centre shopping street or to some complex of old, menacing corporation flats, where the washing hung on balconies and the streets were littered with broken glass, and where you expected gangs of scangers to pounce on you at every turn. People who lived in places like Kate’s apartment block said that it was all very safe, that these old slum areas had lost their teeth, that the rough stuff had all grown up and mellowed years and years ago. But the balconies, where old women with sharp, mean tongues stared contemptuously at the likes of Kate, and the broken glass, told a story of some sort of anger that had not been assuaged overnight by the expedient of building expensive apartments next door to the old slums. Kate was afraid of most places outside her front door. She could not walk east, for fear of those dangerous territories, and she could not walk west, for fear of shops and mirrors, and she could not walk north, because there was a mixture of the two, of the shops and the outlaws. She walked south, down to the river, and then along the banks on the boardwalks as far as they stretched, and up the whole way to Heuston Bridge and down the other side. A walk lasting almost two hours.

She followed that with a visit to the gym; her gym was on her own street, one of its new concessions to its new inhabitants.

It was only six o’clock when all that was over. What to do? A film in the Savoy, alone. Not a good idea, because the Savoy was a cinema that was full of couples on a Saturday night and where you felt weird if you were on your own. The film was crap too; she stuck it out to the bitter end and then struggled home down the dark little streets that were so empty, once you left O’Connell Street, so menacing, on a Saturday night.

Totally knackered.

When she got home, she took out a little tin of cocaine she had stored away in a bottom drawer for special occasions.

Kate didn’t do drugs socially. If she was at something and the lines came out, she usually just shook her head – there were always a few refusals, it was never an issue. But she kept some, for her own use, when she needed it.

Like now.

She spread a thin white line on top of the tin and rolled a one hundred euro note – she always used a one hundred euro note for this ritual, the same note, which she kept with the tin – and sniffed it.

Then she went to bed.

Didn’t get up till Monday really. Normally she visited the gaff in Foxrock for lunch, but she couldn’t face her folks. In fact, she couldn’t face anyone, even the man who sold newspapers in the little old shop that had survived against all the odds in an old tenement house next to the apartments.

There had not been much going on between her and Vincy. Admit it. Zilch really. But they had had three formal ‘dates’ over the past fortnight, not including the Abbey debacle. Two in a fortnight wouldn’t have meant a huge amount – two in a fortnight might mean he was testing the water. But three was significant. Doubly significant, triply significant, when you took into account his busy twenty-four-seven schedule, not to mention her busy twenty-four-seven schedule. Yes, on balance, and without prejudice, and looking at the issue in a cool calm and collected manner, three in a fortnight meant something. Three in a fortnight meant he was more than casually interested.

He had seemed genuinely delighted to accept her invitation to the opening of Hamlet. And he had definitely been pleased to see her. From the minute they all met in the bar upstairs she had been absolutely certain that the relationship would be firmed up in some way that night. Until Anna Kelly Sweeney had walked into the bar and in one moment shattered all her dreams. As soon as she appeared, dressed in that dark velvet and exuding something mysterious, which retrospectively Kate decided was raw sexual energy, what did they call them, that sweat some women exuded like cats in heat, pheromones or something. Gross, although at the time it had seemed like some magical quality, some otherworldly beauty that had been as painful to see as it had been resistant to description. In that moment the mood of the evening had changed from one of joy to the complete opposite. Oh yes, she and Vincy had exchanged a few friendly words and he had gone through the motions of being warm and friendly. But a barrier had gone down between them. After that, even though he smiled and talked, his eyes did not meet hers and when she drew too close, as she did, in one of those stupid acts of desperation people who know they are losing someone practise, he pulled away from her as if she were dangerous, or repulsive, although earlier in the evening he had been drawing closer to her. When they were seated in their row, he made sure their arms never touched.

Not once.

By the time the long Sunday was over her speculation was taking yet another turn. Maybe she had been wrong about Anna and Vincy? Maybe he was attracted to her, but she was a married woman, after all. Her husband was important; his place on the invitation lists was much much higher up than Vincy’s; it was always considered a coup if he turned up at a social event; he had a reputation for making himself scarce, which added to his lustre. As well as having a significant position, everyone knew he was wealthy and that his wealth was well-gotten, there was no rumour of corruption tarnishing it, although of course he had his ear to the ground and was close to those who knew about money, and property, and so on. Kate, ensconced in the small world of ‘the arts’, obsessed with its machinations, was barely aware of the other social groups that constituted Irish society, most of them more powerful and influential than the circle she considered so crucial to the flow of life. That there were circles which even the brightest stars in the artistic firmament would never penetrate was something she vaguely suspected, but she had little idea of how those other groups functioned, where they assembled, who belonged to them. But anyone could observe that the group to which she belonged included very few rich people. A handful of writers and artists in Ireland had broken into the international Anglophone literary world, where real money could be made by books or pictures. And those artists were the ones who kept themselves to themselves, rarely attending the innumerable events Kate organised. In general, in Ireland money was owned by others who did not come to the opening nights and the launches. But Alex was an exception. He had a foot in both camps, the public camp of the well-known and the more exclusive and hidden camp of the well-off. And Anna, by extension, belonged to both those worlds too.

She was not likely to want to give that up for Vincy, who was promising, likely to be very successful, but poor. He might do well but he would always be poor by comparison with Alex Sweeney.

On Monday Kate dragged herself out of bed and went right back to work. And back there in the office it was all so normal, so calming in its frenetic busyness, that she began to wonder if there were not hope for her relationship with Vincy, after all. The strong feelings of the night at Hamlet receded. That look across the foyer? Had it been in her imagination? Possibly she had also imagined his distancing himself from her, his pulling back, the uneasy looks in his eyes? What was not fantasy, what was a fact, was her crazy flight from the Abbey. She had almost run out with hardly a goodbye. Anyone would have taken offence. Anyone would have thought she was strange, slightly touched.

Of course he would not phone her. He was probably waiting for her to contact him and offer an apology. He was probably really really worried, not knowing what he should do. The ball was not in his court at all, as she had been deluding herself, but firmly in hers, waiting for her to do something with it.

Late on Monday afternoon she sent him an email.

Emailing was so great when you thought about it. It was so much easier than telephoning and actually talking to someone. If he didn’t want to reply, there would be no harm done. In the etiquette of emails, not responding was one way of indicating your lack of interest in whatever had been proposed – it was a method Kate frequently employed herself in the course of her duties, briskly deleting queries or communications that were awkward or unwanted. She did not consider this unmannerly, whereas not responding to a telephone message, or a letter sent in the post, was something she would never do. Email etiquette was different, not subject to the rules of the older ways of corresponding. There was an ambiguity involved in communication by email that gave both sides of the correspondence a certain amount of leeway. You were never absolutely certain if your addressee had actually received your email – some got blocked, some were not opened for one reason or another. If a person did not reply, you could decide that some such accident had occurred, while simultaneously knowing, deep down, that they had not replied because they were not interested in you or your message. Emotions engendered by emails, however, were as shallow and swift as the technology itself. Within minutes of receiving or not receiving one, all feeling connected with the transaction would have been deleted and sent to trash. You would move swiftly on to the next communication, or event, or crisis, or emotion of your life. As communications and their concomitant emotions speeded up, so did their quality dilute.

Understanding all this intuitively, rather than laboriously explaining it to herself – she did not indulge in laborious explanations of anything, it was not her way, there wasn’t time – she sent a neutral email that did not even refer to the play. After all, it had happened four days ago and was by now consigned to history (especially since it had got a bad review – Kate was careful to eliminate failed events from her conversation lest they contaminate her and her organisation). She just asked Vincy if he would like to come to a party she was organising in a week’s time, to announce the launch of a new poetry prize.

He replied by return, and said, just as neutrally, that he would be busy next week and regretted he could not come. He asked her how she was and signed off without a salutation. Which was normal, on emails. You didn’t even have to worry about the possible implications of ‘Love’ or ‘Luv’ or ‘Cheers’ or ‘All the best’, as you did on letters or cards. If you didn’t want to, all you had to do was type your name, or even just an initial, or even, if you were rushed or annoyed, nothing at all.

Nothing at all was what he sent to her.

Nothing nothing nothing at all.