The Secret Life of Beatrice Alright

Chapter 12

TWELVE

My head bangs and for a moment I blame the wine, before I realise the noise is outside my brain and coming from my front door.

‘Bea! It’s Cora. You there?’

I rub my eyes and sit up. The knocking on the door has stopped but my head is still banging.

‘Bea!’

‘I’m here. I’m here,’ I say in a throaty gargle.

‘Let me in. It’s freezing out here. Don’t they ever turn on the heat in this bloody place?’

The door to Ellie’s bedroom is ajar and I can make out her small body curled up and sleeping under the duvet. I check my watch. It’s barely seven a.m. and still dark outside, as streetlamps shine through the curtains and bathe the living area in an orange hue. Despite the warm glow, the apartment is freezing. My morning breath dances in the air in front of me and I grab a blanket from the couch and drape it over my shoulders like a cape.

‘Bea!’ Cora calls again, loudly.

‘Sorry. Sorry. Coming.’

I swing open the door and find Cora holding three takeaway cups tucked in a paper tray and a brown paper bag in her other hand. I’m stepping aside to let her in when the door across the hall opens and the sound of dogs barking fills the corridor. Cora jumps, but thankfully no coffee spills.

‘Good morning,’ MrsJohnson says, struggling to keep hold of her boisterous dogs’ leashes. The dogs yap and try to get close to Cora. Her expression is hilarious, sitting somewhere between I’m a cat person and I haven’t had any coffee yet.

‘Desperately cold, isn’t it?’ MrsJohnson says, as she locks her door.

‘Very,’ I say, sounding as if I am shocked by chilly conditions in December.

‘Is the heating broken out here?’

‘Not sure,’ I say.

‘It’s freezing,’ Cora reiterates.

‘Must be broken again,’ MrsJohnson says. ‘We had awful trouble with it a few years back too. Before you moved in. Declan was living with that blond girl at the time. Do you know her? Pretty, slim girl. I wasn’t sure if she was his daughter or his girlfriend,’ she adds, and I think she’s actually asking me if I know Declan’s ex.

‘Ellie is Declan’s only daughter,’ I say, my voice cracking. A week ago, I would have said Ellie was his only child.

‘Right. Right. Lovely girl.’

‘Yes. You said.’

Her dogs bark again, playfighting with each other, and Cora pushes closer to me.

‘Anyway, could you ask Declan to call the landlord? He got the heating sorted out last time so quickly, it’s probably best if he takes care of it again.’

I nod. ‘Sure.’

Cora looks at me wide-eyed and I stare back. I’m confident she won’t say anything but my stomach still flips.

‘Great. Thank you,’ she says, growing distracted as she tries to pull her dogs apart. They bark and bark and I can’t wait to close the door.

‘See you later,’ I say.

Finally, Cora steps inside and I close the door behind us with a sigh. I can still hear the dogs, the whole way down the corridor.

‘She doesn’t know?’ Cora says, placing the cups and bag on the kitchen countertop just inside the door.

‘No. I didn’t get a chance to go across the hall, knock on her door and say, Hey, guess what? Turns out Declan is already married. And I’m just his bit on the side. Who knew. ’

‘Oh, Bea, I’m sorry,’ she says, taking the cups out of the tray with care not to slosh coffee through the small hole in the lid. ‘I didn’t mean…I just meant, I’m sure it’s hard.’

The hardest part is that I don’t actually have anyone to tell. Aside from Cora, the only other confidant in my life was Declan.

‘It’s fine. I’m sure she’ll figure it out when the apartment is empty soon,’ I say.

‘Yeah. I guess she will.’

There’s a moment where we both look around the apartment. Cora has joked more than once that I’m the posh friend. Declan’s and my apartment is more than twice the size of Cora and Finton’s. It’s in a quiet residential area overlooking the Phoenix Park, but still within walking distance of the city. Cora and Finton are in the suburbs and regularly get caught in morning traffic on their way to work. Declan and I enjoyed date nights in exclusive restaurants, while Cora and Finton favour takeaway and Netflix while they save for a bigger place.

‘I’ll miss it here,’ I say at last.

Cora looks at me with heartbreak-heavy eyes. She knows I’m not talking about the four walls, or the great location. I will miss the life I was supposed to have. The life I so desperately wanted to give my daughter.

Ellie appears at her bedroom door and her crazy bed hair makes Cora laugh immediately.

‘Someone had a good sleep,’ she says, hurrying over to scoop Ellie into her arms.

Ellie squeals with delight, surprised to see Cora. She drops her head onto her shoulder and they share a cuddle.

‘I brought you some brekkie,’ Cora says. ‘How does hot chocolate and a cookie sound?’

‘How does sugar and more sugar sound?’ I say.

Cora looks concerned for a moment before she realises I’m teasing. ‘Eh, you can’t talk. I thought you were going to turn into a pop tart when we were in college. It was literally all you ate for three years.’

‘The strawberry ones are still my favourite.’

‘Mine too.’

Cora places Ellie on a stool at the breakfast bar and passes her one of the cups and a cookie.

‘Be careful, it might be hot,’ I jump in.

Cora jams her hands on her hips. ‘Well, she needs something to heat her up. Is the heating broken in here too? It’s Baltic.’

‘I haven’t turned it on in a while,’ I say. ‘Declan usually takes care of the bills and since, well…’

I trail off, not quite sure what point I’m trying to make, but Cora continues to look at me as if she’s looking for an explanation as to why Ellie and I have practically been living in a freezer since Declan left.

‘I know he’ll pay the bill when it comes in. But it’s killing me that I need him to, you know?

‘But it’s December. It’s bloody freezing,’ she says.

‘I know!’ It’s my turn to jam my hands on my hips. ‘But I don’t want his damn money, okay. I can look after myself. I hate that I ever let him pay for anything. I hate that I can’t afford this place on my own. That I have to move because without him I have bloody nothing. I hate that I let myself get into this position.’

Ellie looks up at me with a mouthful of cookie and round eyes that look as if they might start to cry at any moment.

‘Mammy?’

I pull her close to me and kiss the top of her head. ‘I’m sorry, chickpea. I didn’t mean to shout. I’m just tired.’

Her little body stiffens and she doesn’t seem convinced.

‘You finish your cookie, okay? Everything is okay.’

When I pull away from her Cora passes me the coffee and croissant that’s been waiting on the countertop. She smiles with a look that tells me she naively believes everything will be okay.

‘I love that coffee shop downstairs,’ she says, as casually as if we’ve just been talking about the weather or fashion and not my life completely falling apart.

She runs her finger along the café logo on the paper bag. ‘Such a nice little place. And it opens at six. How brilliant is that? Nowhere opens before work. I mean, shift workers are people too. Right? We need morning coffee too. Right? God, if I lived here, I would be in there every day.’ She takes a mouthful of her coffee. ‘Mmm. Heaven.’

I’ve only been in the café below the apartment block a handful of times, with Declan and Ellie. The coffee is expensive and the cookies are outright extortion. Ellie knows it’s somewhere we go when her daddy is home, but not somewhere we go on our own. I wonder if some day, when she’s all grown up, she’ll look back and realise why.

I sip on the coffee. Cora is right, it is incredibly good.

‘Everything will be all right, you know,’ Cora says, after a few minutes of everyone being lost in their own thoughts.

‘Yeah.’ I say, but I know I’m not convincing her and I’m certainly not fooling myself.

‘I’ve taken the day off.’

I make a face. ‘You didn’t have to do that.’

She shrugs casually. ‘Swapped shifts. It’s no big deal, one of the girls owed me a favour anyway. We’re going to get you packed up and ready to go. You’ll feel better when you’ve made a fresh start.’

‘I’m not sure your couch counts as a fresh start?’

Cora sets her coffee down, folds her arms and looks at me like a school principal about to give a troubled but brilliant pupil a stern talking-to. ‘You’re leaving this apartment behind you and you are starting over. It’s as fresh as it gets. And it’s my couch now, but that’s just a start. You’ve got this, Bea. I know you do.’

The coffee swirls in my otherwise empty stomach. Maybe Cora is right. I just need to sleep on her couch until my next payday. Then I should have enough to start looking for a flatshare again. I just have to make it through Christmas.

‘Right,’ she says, with a commanding clap of her hands that makes Ellie jump. ‘Where are your black sacks? Let’s get packing.’

I don’t have black sacks but there are some Tesco plastic bags under the sink. Cora turns on her Spotify and Ellie requests Taylor Swift on full volume. Then, before the sun is up, we dance around my apartment as if we haven’t a care in the world.

‘My poor neighbours,’ I shout. Certain that, although ‘Bad Blood’ is one of my favourite songs, no one wants to wake up to it blaring through their ceiling.

‘Give them something to remember you by.’ Cora laughs, twerking and encouraging Ellie to copy her.

I hope when Ellie is older she forgets the coffee shop downstairs and, instead, remembers this moment. The day we danced our cares away.