Chapter 1

Holly Christmas stared into her wardrobe and frowned. Then, as a sort of underline, she issued a deep sigh. The problem facing her was one of colour, or rather the lack of it. Looking into Holly’s wardrobe was like looking down a well in the dead of night. She knew that. She’d known it long before the first of approximately four thousand friends, acquaintances and virtual strangers had noted her fondness for black. If any of them had been present at that moment and had spotted the sudden slackening of her features, they might have concluded that she had finally come around to their point of view, that the scales had fallen from her eyes and, at long last, she had realised that she couldn’t go through life dressed like a ninja. They would have been wrong. Holly wasn’t frowning because she had nothing cheery to wear. She was frowning because the light in her bedroom was poor and the wardrobe was very deep; it was hard to tell what was what in there. If time had been against her, she would have grabbed a few things more or less at random and pulled them on as she hopped down the stairs, the theory being that Black Thing X couldn’t possibly clash with Black Thing Y. It was a risky strategy; even with the issue of colour neatly bypassed, some things just didn’t go together. There was one particular shirt and trouser combination that somehow managed to make her look both eight months pregnant and sixty-seven years of age.

In any event, time wasn’t against her now. She had an hour, more, before she had to leave the house, so there was no excuse for not dressing with some degree of care. Moaning softly, she reached into the bowels of the wardrobe and plucked out a few hangers. It was bad enough to have to work at putting together an outfit – an activity that Holly ranked somewhere between weeding the garden and cutting her toenails – but to have to do it for Kevin. She threw the clothes on to the bed and rested her hands on her hips.

There was one positive note in all of this, she supposed. For the first time ever, she would be the one doing the dumping.

Almost as soon as the taxi driver moved off into traffic, Holly knew she had made a mistake. She’d noticed the smell the very second she’d opened the door – it was unavoidable, really – but two factors had convinced her to climb in anyway. The first was the nature of the odour. It wasn’t quite a stink. There was chip fat in there for sure, together with a hint of body odour and something else, something medicinal; the words “Muscle Pain” flashed in her mind. Although the combination certainly wasn’t pleasant, it had seemed manageable. The second factor was personal. Holly had recently become concerned about the high percentage of her interactions with taxi drivers that ended in screaming matches and/or threats of litigation. If she told this one that she’d changed her mind, he might simply shrug and go on his merry way. On the other hand, like several of his colleagues before him, he might turn around and go for her. The upshot was that she’d taken a deep breath and climbed in. Now, mere seconds into the journey, she realised that the smell was one of those that worked its evil with a cunning subtlety. It wasn’t a hammer to the head; it was a stiletto between the ribs. As she looked around, she half-suspected that she could actually see it – a faint yellow mist, creeping through the air.

“Jesus Christ,” she said under her breath – but not quite as under her breath as she imagined.

The driver peered at her in the rear-view mirror. “Y’all right back there?”

Holly manufactured a small smile. “Yeah. Just . . . Traffic’s mental, isn’t it? Even at this time of night.”

“Dublin’s gone to hell,” he sniffed. “Don’t get me started.”

“Wasn’t trying to,” Holly replied, meaning it with all her heart.

“You know what else gets on my nerves?” he said.

She dug her fingernails into her thighs and made a noncommital noise. But he didn’t get a chance to elaborate. His attention was diverted by his ringing mobile. He groped around on the passenger seat until he found it and then held it in mid-air just over the gear stick. It had multicoloured lights all around the case that were flashing in time with the ringtone – a giggling baby, speeded up. He didn’t answer it; he just held it out there. The only explanation that Holly could come up with for this behaviour was that he was showing it to her. He was proud of it. Eventually, after what felt like several minutes, he jabbed at it with his thumb. “Yeah?” There was a long pause. Then: “I’m out working for a living, where do you think I am? What do you want? . . . Oh yeah? Go on then.” He was one of those mobile phone users who apparently had very little faith in the technology and thought you had to help it along by shouting. There was another pause while the caller said his piece. Holly knew it was a man because he too was a shouter. The voice was muffled but indisputably male. After a few seconds, the taxi driver had a heart attack. At least, that was how it looked and sounded. He collapsed over the wheel, then threw his body back into his seat, then slowly fell forward again, all the while making a noise like a partially blocked drain. The effect on his ability to steer was substantial but short-lived. Holly barely had time to start regretting all the things she hadn’t done with her life – would she really never see Rome? – before he regained control of the car. At that point, it became clear that he had been laughing, rather than dying.

“Brilliant!” he roared. “That’s a classic . . .Yeah? Go on, so . . . ”

After a brief hiatus, he repeated the heart-attack routine. This time it went on for a little longer; there were four cycles of the fall-forward/rock-back business. Apart from being annoying in itself, all that movement seemed to be stir up a lot of odour molecules. Holly was overwhelmed by the conviction that someone nearby was frying a sausage in a combination of human sweat and Deep Heat.

“All right,” the driver said when he had regained equilibrium. “One more . . . ”

This joke, apparently, was less hilarious than its predecessors. It prompted no rocking or wheezing, just a simple “Ha!”

Holly looked out the window at the pedestrians on the footpath. Despite the light rain that was drizzling down on them, they looked so happy, so carefree.

“You’re an awful bastard,” the driver said then. “But you’re a funny one, I’ll give you that. Right, I’m away. I’ll see you later. Good luck.” He hung up and placed his phone back on the passenger seat. “Jokes!” he said brightly to the rear-view mirror.

Holly nodded. “Yeah. So I gathered.”

“Helen Keller.”

“Excuse me?”

“Helen Keller. The jokes . . . Why was Helen Keller’s leg all yellow? Because her dog was blind too.”

He got the giggles again to such an extent that he didn’t seem to notice Holly’s silence. But he recovered soon enough. “How did Helen Keller’s parents punish her for swearing? They washed her hands with soap.” This time he registered her lack of response and shook his head. “Nah, I didn’t really like that one either. Try this one: what was Helen Keller’s favourite colour? Give up? D’ye give up? Corduroy.”

She maintained her stony silence. He regarded her in the mirror for a moment, a puzzled expression troubling his doughy features. Holly considered her options. They weren’t even a third of the way into town yet. And then there was that drizzle to consider . . . She decided not to go nuclear. The subtle approach, that was the way to go.

“Who’s Helen Keller?” she asked sweetly.

“Oh! Right. I was wondering. She was this deaf, dumb and blind woman. American, I think she was. They made a movie about her. It was always one of me ma’s favourites. All about how this other woman taught her to communicate. Imagine that. Deaf, dumb and blind. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“God, yeah. Imagine that. Must have been terrible. And her dog was blind too, was that it?”

“Sorry?”

“Her dog? You said she had a blind dog?”

“No, that’s the joke. Why was Helen Keller’s leg all yellow? Because her dog was blind too.”

“Right . . . ”

“D’ye not get it?”

“Um . . . No. Not really.”

“He pissed on it! The dog pissed on her leg!”

“Because he was blind?”

“Yes! He thought it was a tree or something.”

“Oh! Right! Yeah!” The simplest course, she decided, was to simply copy what the driver had done. So she rocked back and forth for a while, cackling insanely. “Oh . . . my . . . God,” she croaked then. “That’s brilliant. A blind woman, sorry, a deaf, dumb and blind woman is funny enough on its own, but a blind dog too . . . It’s nearly too much.”

“Yeah,” the driver said uncertainly.

“So the soap one? How does that work?”

Oops – had she gone too far? His suspicions were definitely aroused. He gave her a long look in the mirror, so long in fact that he almost rear-ended the van he was following.

“Shit!” he yelped, standing on the brakes.

“Careful,” Holly muttered.

“What are you telling me? You don’t get the soap one either?”

Holly looked down. “Sorry. I’m hopeless with jokes.”

“Jesus, you sure are. Right, well you know that old thing of getting your mouth washed out with soap? When you said a bad word?”

“Yeah. But you said Helen Keller couldn’t talk.”

“I know, but sign language – ”

Holly exploded. “Oh, I get it! I get it! They wash her hands, because, because . . .” She became hysterical. It was a tricky thing to judge, but she thought she pulled herself together again before it became too ridiculous. “Oh, that’s great,” she said, wiping away a non-existent tear. “That’s some funny friend you’ve got there.”

“Yeah. Now you get the other one, don’t you? The corduroy one?”

“Wait, gimme a second.”

She counted to twenty in her head, slowly. Before she had reached five, the driver had started to drum his fingers on the steering wheel. By ten, he was mumbling darkly to himself.

“Right,” Holly said eventually. “She can’t see, right? So she doesn’t know what a colour is?”

“Exactly. Well done.”

“So the joke is that corduroy’s her favourite colour because . . . it makes a noise if you scrape it? No, wait, crap, that can’t be it – she’s deaf too. I give up.”

“It’s a braille thing, fucking braille. She feels it with her fingers.”

Holly pulled a face. He had stopped looking at her in the mirror by now, but she thought it would help her stay in character. “Oh,” she said in a disappointed tone. “Right. Sorry, I don’t think that one’s very funny.”

He shook his head. “Whatever.”

She leaned forward and put her head between the front seats. “It’s weird, isn’t it, humour? You thought the soap one was no good and I thought the corduroy one was no good.”

“Yeah.”

“Still, I think we can both agree that there’s almost nothing as funny as profound physical disability. Right? Am I right?”

He made a noise, halfway between a snarl and a sigh, and she sat back again.

“I must tell wee Mrs Hickey the Helen Keller jokes,” she said. “That’s a neighbour of mine. She’s in her eighties now but she still lives on her own, blind and all as she is. She loves a laugh. And she always gets jokes, not like dopey old me.”

At last, the driver snapped. “Are you taking the piss out of me?” he barked.

“God, no!” Holly squealed. “What makes you say that?”

He made the noise again; evidently, it was his fall-back in times of uncertainty. The rest of the journey passed in delicious silence. When they reached the pub, Holly thanked him again for the jokes and gave him a tip of six cents. He stared at her for some time. She stared back. Then she got out and he drove away at some speed. She couldn’t help but be pleased with the way it had gone. There had been no screaming, at least.

The list of Kevin’s habits that Holly found annoying was long and varied but two of the entries near the very top were He has a fondness for humorous T-shirts and He’s always calling me “You”. When she took her seat beside him in the pub and noted the slogan Also Available in Sober emblazoned across his chest, her heart sank. When he leaned across, pecked her lips like a chicken who’d spotted a grain and intoned, “Hey, you, how’s it going?”, it sank a little further. Holly found her attitude to humorous T-shirts confusing. She liked humour as much as the next girl and had nothing specific against T-shirts (black ones, especially). And yet, somehow, the combination of the two made her want to scream. Kevin’s were particularly annoying because almost all of them – and he seemed to have a significant collection – featured jokes about alcohol. If Found, Please Return to Pub. Everyone Needs to Believe in Something – I Believe I’ll Have Another Beer. Take Me Drunk, I’m Home Again. Maybe the effect wouldn’t have been quite as grating if he had been a talented drinker, but he most certainly was not. Holly considered herself to be long past her prime, boozing-wise, but she could drink him under the table; had already done so, in fact, twice. On one of those occasions – their third date – his forlorn attempts to keep up had led to his being violently ill. She hadn’t witnessed the event first-hand, but she had no doubt that it had happened. He’d excused himself “to take a quick slash” – his exact words – but a certain desperation in his gait as he stumbled, crab-like, towards the Gents had given the game away. Besides, there’d had been nothing “quick” about it; he was absent for almost fifteen minutes.

The second time Holly had comprehensively out-drunk him was just a few days previously, at his cousin’s wedding in Offaly. Before they’d even left the church it had become apparent that they were both very nervous; they’d only been going out for three weeks and hadn’t spent more than a few hours in each other’s company. When the subject came up, Holly said it was good they were being honest about it and proposed the obvious solution. Sadly, Kevin took her excited whisper of “Let’s get squiffy and see if we can’t have a laugh” to mean “Let’s get absolutely stupefied and fall asleep on a table by the dance floor before eight thirty”. She found him in just that condition, face-down on his folded arms, when she came back from the loo. One of his shirtsleeves was rolled all the way up to the elbow while the other was still buttoned at the cuff. Evidently he had lost consciousness while halfway through the process of relaxing his dress. She left him to it and headed straight upstairs to her room (they had separate quarters; early days). There, she had a long bath before climbing into a fluffy robe and installing herself in the welcoming folds of her foot-thick duvet. Toy Story 2 was on TV and she let it wash over her in a warm wave. As sleep approached, she had a serious heart-to-heart with herself. The relationship had been doomed from the start, really. She’d only agreed to the first (blind) date with Kevin because she had recently started to panic. The turning point had been a questionnaire in a magazine; in response to the prompt Describe your love life in one sentence, Holly had scribbled Long periods of loneliness punctuated by brief, usually joyless affairs that are invariably terminated by the other party. On reflection, her relationship with Kevin had been less of a fling than a flail.

She woke up the next morning with her mind made up. Now, four days later, all that remained were the formalities.

“What’ll I get you to drink?” Kevin asked as she wriggled out of her jacket.

“Gin, please. And tonic, I suppose.”

He beckoned a passing member of the floor-staff and gave her the order.

“So!” he said then. “Did you have a good day?”

“Yeah. Not bad. Went into town, mooched around the shops a bit. Nothing too exciting. “

“Won’t be long now.”

“Sorry?”

“Until school starts. Back at it. You may make the most of it now.”

“Yeah. What about you? Good day?”

“It was all right. Had the meeting from hell, though. Two and a half frigging hours.”

Holly made fists. Please don’t tell me about it, she thought. Please. Please. Please.

“There was only three of us,” Kevin began, “so I thought it might be quick enough. You usually need a bit of a crowd in there before things get badly out of hand, y’know? But oh no, Pat had other ideas . . .”

Holly nodded and let his voice fade away into the background. She wasn’t at all clear on the specifics, but she knew that Kevin worked as a software engineer; something to do with the banking industry. When he first told her about it, he’d said with an embarrassed smile that it was all profoundly boring, which was certainly true. Holly had never been able to understand why, if he knew full well that it was a tedious subject, he seemed to relish talking about it at such length. It was part of a pattern with him. More than once he had started a joke by saying, “This isn’t funny, but I’ll tell you anyway . . .” The meeting from hell, predictably enough, spawned the anecdote from hell. Holly tried to tune back in a few times, but every time she did, she caught a phrase – “standardised procedures”, “client-centric approach” – that made her tune straight back out again. At one point, she caught herself wondering if it would be poor form to interrupt him mid-flow and give him the bad news slightly ahead of schedule. And then, at last, it was over.

“Sounds awful,” she said, quite sincerely. She’d finished her drink and Kevin’s pint had seen better days. “Same again?” she asked, pointing at his glass.

He made no reply. At first, she thought he hadn’t caught what she’d said. She was about to repeat the question when he exhaled and said, “No. No, I won’t. Listen . . . Holly . . . I’m not staying long.”

Me neither, she thought. And then the penny dropped. It was written all over his face.

“You’re joking me,” she gasped.

“I’m sorry. I really am.”

“I don’t believe it . . .” She struggled for air. The room seemed to be tilting first one way and then the other.

“It’s just not working out. But you’re a great kid –”

“Kid! I’m twenty-eight! You’re only a fucking year older than I am!”

“Don’t get upset, please.”

She took a calming breath. “I’m only upset,” she said, “because I was planning on saying the same thing. Tonight.”

Kevin’s features rearranged themselves into a smirk. “Holly . . . come on.”

She gritted her teeth. “It’s the truth.”

“All right, all right. If you say so.”

“Don’t give me that. Don’t give me ‘If you say so’.”

The smirk intensified. “All right then,” he said. “It seems that neither of us is happy with where this is going so why don’t we just –”

“What’s wrong with me?”

The words were out before she’d even realised that they were forming. She almost put her hand over her mouth like a child that had just heard herself swearing in front of Granny. Of all the terrible things that a person could possibly say while being dumped, she had somehow hit upon the very worst. Her mind reeled. If the look on his face was anything to go by, so did Kevin’s. She knew she should say something quickly, something funny if possible, or at least cute. But she couldn’t think of anything. It was as if the speech centre of her brain had decided to end its long and illustrious career with “What’s wrong with me?”

“Okay,” Kevin said and clasped his hands his hands together in front of him. “Let me see.”

She gaped at him. He was actually going to give her an answer?

“I’m not sure how to put this,” he said. “But you’re just not like other women. You’re so . . . sharp. And blunt.”

Holly blinked at him. “Sharp and blunt? What the f–”

“Maybe it’s your name,” he went on. “I suppose it gave me ideas about you. Ideas that turned out not to be true. Not by a long way.”

She found her voice again. “Ideas? Like what?”

He shrugged. “You know. ‘Holly Christmas’. It sounds so jolly. When I first heard it from Mark, I got this picture in my head. Cheery, chirpy, festive. Happy-go-lucky. You’re not . . . Well, you’re not any of those things, are you?”

Mark was Holly’s neighbour and a friend of a friend of Kevin’s. He was the one who had set them up.

“I’m not trying to be mean,” Kevin went on. “But you did ask.”

Holly considered going for an ironic explanation of the term “rhetorical question” but feared that doing so might make her look like even more of a buffoon than she already did. Instead, she countered with, “You don’t think I live up to my stupid bloody name? What kind of –”

“I’m just saying, that’s all. I had different expectations. That’s my own fault, fair enough. But it wouldn’t make any difference what you were called, really.”

“Right. If I was called Shitty McNasty, I wouldn’t be able to live up to that, even.”

He sighed long-sufferingly, in the manner of patient teacher who had been landed with a particularly dull child. “Look, forget about your name. It’s not your name. It’s your . . . it’s your attitude. You seem kind of, I don’t know, spiky or something. Always so sarcastic and smart-arsey. Like at the wedding.”

“The wedding you fell unconscious at?”

He ignored that. “I just couldn’t believe some of the stuff you were coming out with.”

“Stuff? What stuff? Give me a for instance.”

“Well, there was that business with the priest, for a start.”

“The priest, Kevin, was a complete tool. It was supposed to be a celebration. He didn’t have to start banging on about how they’d be there for each other when they were dying. And he certainly didn’t have to go into detail. Beeping machines and nurses and tubes and God knows what. He was upsetting people. Your aunt was mortified. I saw her face.”

“Maybe so, but you can’t start booing in a church, Holly. It just isn’t done.”

“I didn’t boo him, don’t exaggerate. I may have made a small noise of protest.”

“People were looking at you . . .”

“And smiling! And nodding! Everyone was thinking exactly the same thing, they were all talking about it afterwards!”

Kevin didn’t look convinced. “What about the bride’s mother? You had a go at her too.”

“I didn’t ‘have a go at her’, but she certainly deserved it. She was a snobby bitch. First thing she asked me was my name, second was where was I from and third was what did my father do. It was like something out of the nineteenth century. Nobody talks like that.”

“‘What does you father do?’ ‘Not a lot, he’s dead.’ Nobody talks like that, either.”

“I do. To people like her.”

“I meant nobody normal.”

Holly almost choked. “Nobody normal? Now I’m fucking abnormal?”

“You swear a lot, too,” Kevin added.

Holly sucked in a breath and slowly got to her feet. “But that’s all, right? If you think of anything else I need to change, you’ll be sure to let me know, won’t you?”

Kevin sat back in his seat. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out with us. I really did fancy you, honestly, as soon as I laid eyes on you.”

This, apparently, was his attempt to end on an amicable note. Holly wasn’t having it.

“You must have been very torn,” she said. “‘She’s sharp and blunt and abnormal and she swears a lot, but then again she’s got nice tits.’”

Kevin shook his head. “You see? There it is again. Norm– . . . most women don’t say that sort of thing.”

There didn’t seem to be much she could add. She grabbed her jacket and left.