Goodwill

NOTHING CAN CONVINCE me to have a bath the next morning, nor am I able to wear a seat-belt on the way into work. I confuse left turns with right, indicate and go straight on. It is only by a miracle that I get there at all. Or, to be accurate, it is only by the absence of a miracle that I get there at all. I get there on the astonishing web of the ordinary that keeps the wheels on cars, the nails out of tyres and the sun swinging in the sky. I drive into work through the astonishing map of the ordinary, indicating fiercely all the way and when I get there Marcus is standing by the door, a little nub of flesh, soft and under used.

‘You’re looking well,’ he says.

‘Sorry?’

‘No you are. You’re really looking well,’ he says, checking me up and down. I look at him more blankly than he knows.

‘It’s the skirt. Is that a new skirt?’

‘No.’

‘Suits you,’ he says, failingly.

There is no way to get my balance. All day, things fall to the floor, slip out of my hands, the phone is a mess of wrong numbers. I say things like ‘I think that’s the breast option, don’t you?’ and people look at me.

The Monday meeting is real enough. Everyone looks at the LoveWagon’s hands and keeps their own counsel. Everyone, that is, except Marcus, who stares out the window at the spring day as if he knows too much to be bothered. I sit and yearn, mutely, for my mother, among other things. The LoveWagon is talking about the importance of the last show, for us, for Ireland, for the future of broadcasting. She is ironic and paranoid at the same time. She makes jokes.

‘How about it?’ she says. I realise that she is talking to me. I realise that Marcus has turned from the window and behind him is a wide, clean spring day.

‘Certainly,’ I say.

Frank snorts.

‘Well that’s that,’ says the LoveWagon.

I seem to have agreed, in my lopsided state, that the last show of the season can, indeed should, be transmitted live. Frank looks like his liver has fallen out on the floor. I have just agreed that nothing is impossible, that goodwill is stronger than death, that pigs would fly if only we could get them on the payroll. We are going out live, like the Mass goes out live, because you can’t pre-record a miracle.

‘It can’t be done,’ says Frank, but he is on his own.

‘A few accommodations, a few changes,’ I say. ‘We’ll pull out all the stops.’ And the LoveWagon retires with a smile.

Marcus is confused. He looks like a man who is winning, whichever way he looks at it. He smiles at me because I have just sealed my own fate and he smiles at my skirt because he likes it without knowing why. I smile at him because my body is in a state of sweet, sick desire, though the rest of me is fit to kill. With the week underway he leaves me a note. He says he wants to have a drink. This is the worst of all possible signs. Notes imply an ending of sorts. Notes make me think of Marcus weighing up his life and deciding that it is about time he started sending notes.

I leave him a note. I ask to meet on Wednesday after he has finished viewing. He leaves me a note saying that he won’t be finished on Wednesday until ten, how about Tuesday? I say that Tuesday is my studio preparation. What about Thursday? He says he is editing late on Thursday how about Saturday? I say I am on the ferry to Brittany on Saturday and even if I wasn’t, Saturday was the weekend. What’s wrong with Thursday?

‘What’s wrong with Tuesday?’

So by the time we meet it is too late, which is just the way I wanted it. I don’t want to sit there and sympathise with Marcus for shafting me. I don’t want to advise him that shafting me is his best possible, his only option. Besides, by Thursday I might have my nipple back.

No such luck. We go to a local pub. We could have met in town, but that might have looked suspicious. Marcus goes up to the bar and buys a drink. Blood money.

I sit and watch him at the bar. He puts one foot on the brass rail and catches the barman’s eye. Then he catches his own eye in the mirror behind the glasses and the optics. What a good catch he is, with his casual shirt and his job in the media. He puts my drink on the table in a courteous way. If I brought him home to my mother, she might even cry.

The show is not going to be axed. It is going to be doubled.

‘Game show one night, date show the next,’ says Marcus.

‘Same set?’

‘New set. Two new sets.’

‘There’s posh. And after that, twice as much for their money.’ When I get angry, my breast starts to itch. It feels like someone trying to get out from under a sheet a mile wide.

‘One and a half,’ he says.

‘Like fuck. We’ll be going live in half the time,’ I say, ‘because I’m a fucking eejit.’ Marcus looks at me out of his green eye, then out of his brown.

‘We have to stick together on this one,’ he says.

‘Why?’

I have a vision of Marcus in charge, trying to make it all real. I can see him in the kitchen at a party, backing a researcher into the counter, while he tells her how traumatic it is to go bald at twenty-four. I see him writing memos he never sends because he can’t make up his mind if it is better to keep your head down or make a noise. I can see him putting it on the balance sheet of his life with a little gold star. I do not want to be around.

‘What are you telling me for?’ I say. ‘I’m being hung out to dry.’

‘You want it just as much as I do,’ he said.

‘What is there that I should want? It’ll kill us.’

‘Don’t tell me you don’t want it.’

‘I have two days off a fortnight. I don’t want it.’

‘You want it all right.’

‘You don’t know what I want.’ We could go on all night.

Because neither of us really believe and so we can’t let go. There is no end to the fighting when you are trying to believe in something. All we know is that none of it makes sense, so you might as well win. Besides, it hurts.

‘One show each.’

‘No,’ I say. And the night deteriorates as we both knew it would.