Chapter 15
15
“Far as I know the parish hall’s empty tomorrow night,” Courtney said.
But tomorrow night seemed too soon. News spread quickly here, that was obvious, but was twenty-four hours enough time to let everyone know? More to the point, I wasn’t ready. I’d got no real sense of the place yet. “Monday would be better.”
“It’s Zumba on Monday. Tuesday is Living Well with Dementia. AA on Wednesday. Thursday is usually free but we’ve the Paddy’s Day stuff starting then.”
“What about here? In the hotel? You’ve a function room?”
“And a meeting room.” Courtney paused. “Not telling you how to do your job, but the function room would be too big. A get-together about Kearney’s Farm, you’d be looking at fifty or sixty people. I’ve a lovely space for you. All geared up with microphones and a dais. We could do biscuits, tea and coffee. It’s often booked for funerals of townspeople who weren’t highly regarded.”
I had no choice but to trust her. She seemed to know more about my business than I did and she certainly knew more about Maumtully.
“And the cost?”
“Don’t worry about that,” she said. “Mr Joseph Armstrong’s credit card will cover it.”
Something about the way she kept referring to Joey and his line of credit made me ask, “Have you met him?”
“I have.” She smirked. “He’s quite the go-boy.”
Go-boy . I didn’t know that phrase.
“Monday night it is,” I said. “What time?”
“Seven thirty. So you’ll want to get the word out?” She was ahead of me at every step. “Write something on your laptop and I’ll put it on the socials. If you want, I’ll print you out a bundle of flyers. You can distribute them before half-eleven mass tomorrow.”
“Okay! Thanks.”
In the deserted lounge, I had a toasted sandwich and another gin and tonic and tried to compose a notice, using phrases like: “Everyone welcome,” “Refreshments provided,” “No concern too small.”
Terrified of coming across as patronizing, I agonized over the wording, typing, deleting, then staring motionless at the screen.
Courtney looked over my shoulder. “Don’t make a meal of it. Just say it out straight and I’ll stick it up on Facebook.”
My phone rang—Mum. “Have you arrived?” she asked. “Is the hotel nice? I hear Narky Joey’s paying for it. If we come down for the weekend, can we bunk in with you?”
“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked. Then, “ No . I’m working. And I’m leaving Saturday.”
“Myself and Helen. Maybe Regan. Your father, if you think there’s space. And maybe Margaret. We’re thinking of staying till Monday. They’ve a funfair and a ceili.”
“Mum,” I said. “I’m begging you. Please don’t come.” I hung up and rang Helen. “Do you know about Mum coming here for the weekend?”
“Yeah! Me, Mum, Dad, Regan, Artie and My Best Friend Bella Devlin.”
Artie was Helen’s partner and Bella Devlin was his twenty-year-old daughter with his ex-wife.
“Margaret, Garv, Holly and JJ are also in!”
“Helen, no. Absolutely not. I’m here to work.” Frustration made me loud. “And you cannot bunk in with me, my room is tiny .”
“Hardly tiny.” Courtney just happened to be breezing past. “You got a free upgrade to a double deluxe. Remind me to show you a classic single, if it’s tiny you want to see.”
After a muffled shriek, Mum’s voice was in my ear. “I heard all that, I’m here with Helen. So there’s plenty of space for us in the room that Joey is paying for? But you’d deprive your impoverished mother of a weekend in the west?”
“You have more money than Jeff Bezos,” I said. “Pay for your own mini-break. But please don’t come.”
As soon as I hung up, I signalled the barman for another drink, then looked up “go-boy.” According to the Urban Dictionary, he was: “Generally, a swagged-out gentleman that gets all the bitches, has hella benjamins & wears the best clothes.”
Benjamins were hundred-dollar bills. Right, so that was Joey these days.
Courtney was back, with a cardboard box, a roll of Sellotape and a pair of scissors. “Some will be too shy to say their worries out loud in the meeting, so we’ll make a suggestion box and stick it on the counter out front.”
“It’s nearly nine o’clock,” I realized. “Are you staying late just to help me out?”
“My shift ended at eight, but we might as well finish the job.”
“Should I put my phone number on the flyer?” I was halfway through my latest drink and feeling increasingly cheerful.
“Do.” Courtney was thoughtful. “If you want every man within a fifty-mile radius to bombard you with pictures of their mickey.”
That made me laugh far, far too much. I decided I might be in love with Courtney. Or mildly drunk.
“Give them an email address. Like…[email protected]?”
Yes! Hadn’t I suggested the very same thing to Brigit? Courtney and I were clearly twin flames.
“But shouldn’t it be [email protected]?”
“Hah! If you put Dolphin Cove no one would have a clue what you were on about. Stick with Kearney’s Farm. Go on, add it to the flyer and I’ll print out a hundred of them.”
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“Shur, go on.” She called up the underworked barman. “Glass of Merlot.”
Because we were literally the only people there, it arrived almost immediately. “Good man, Emilien,” she said. “Anna, this is Emilien. He’s from Mauritius. God alone knows what he’s doing in this fecking place.”
“Lovely to meet you,” I exclaimed, to the kind, kind man who’d been looking after me. “You remind me of my dad!”
With a sharp look, Courtney asked, “How many drinks have you had?”
“But much younger,” I told Emilien, realizing he was barely thirty. “Sorry if I offended you.”
“Ah, you’re fine.”
“Poor divil came one summer for the work,” Courtney said. “Then fell in love with Aoife Gallowglass from out the Shore Road. They’re married now, so he’s stuck here.”
“Yep. My life is ruined.”
Courtney took a sip of her wine. “God, that’s lovely.” She focused on me. “Tell me to hump off and mind my own business and sorry for being personal but what happened to your face?”
You see, this was how it should be done. No suffocating build-up of unasked and unanswered questions.
“Car crash. It was a long time ago.” Because she’d been so obliging, she deserved the full story. “I got off lightly. My husband died. Aidan. We’d been married less than a year.”
Her shock seemed sincere. “That’s a terrible thing. A terrible, terrible loss.”
“It was sixteen years ago.”
“My mother is dead nineteen years and I still miss her. Again, tell me to mind my own business but has it got easier for you?”
For a long time I couldn’t have said that: losing Aidan had destroyed me. Looking back, it was clear that during the three or so years afterwards, I’d been off my rocker—dogged by guilt that I had survived and he had died. Torn between wanting to grab every bit of living available and feeling that I should have died too.
I’d been told that when enough healing had happened I’d be able to let Aidan go. Instead, I held him more tightly. So close that along the way he became part of me, absorbed into my cells.
A morning came when he wasn’t my first thought when I woke up. His loss remained an ever-present noise, but slowly it dialed down until eventually the inconceivable happened and entire days passed without thinking about him.
Although it was still enormous, his death had stopped being the defining event of my life. Time had set me free.
“He’s always with me.” Momentarily I considered confiding in her about the butterfly, then stopped myself. “The memories don’t hurt now. I just feel bad for him that his life was cut short.”
I was also able to acknowledge that Aidan and I could have gone the way so many other couples had: ten, maybe twelve good years before things went off the rails.
He could have turned into your run-of-the-mill cheater. Or I could have. Perhaps we could have done a lockdown curdle, the way Angelo and I had? There were many ways our story could have played out, not all of them happy.
Courtney gestured to Emilien. “Another, good man.” Then, to me, “And…ah, did you ever meet someone else? Was it as good?”
I’d thought the real me had died when Aidan had. That if I ever cared about another man, it would be a pale imitation of love, assembled from the broken bits of me that remained.
But I no longer thought I was living a consolation life: this was the one I’d always been meant to live.
“I met another man—Angelo—and we fell in love. We had our ups and downs but we were very happy.” It was miraculous really. “But we broke up during lockdown.”
Courtney nodded with sympathy. “Ah, shur. That’s a shame.” Then, “Before I forget, breakfast’s between eight and ten. No room service, because it’s the offseason. But you can come down in your PJs, take whatever you want and bring it back to the room. And stick a couple of bananas in your pocket for your lunch, no one minds. Tell me, is that your real hair or is it extensions?”
“Extensions?! How many drinks have you had? The state of my hair.”
She leant back to inspect me. “It’s lovely, you madwoman. Don’t you mind it being long?”
It was only long because I’d been too depressed to get it cut. Or colored. The chestnut-colored gloss I favored was a distant memory.
Courtney said, “I used to have hair down to my waist. Well, not my waist . You hear that a lot: ‘hair down to my waist.’ It wasn’t. But it was below my shoulder blades. The upkeep was like a second job. Day I got it all cut off was a great one.” She smacked her lips together. “So you were out on the site earlier? Who was there?”
“Apart from the Kearneys, you mean? The foreman Tipper Mahon, his brother—was it Hal? And another man.”
“Declan Erskine? Nice quiet fella. Couldn’t say the same about poor Hal.”
“He seemed a little… lively ?”
“Wild out. Some unasked-for advice, Anna: if Hal invites you for a drink, and chances are he will, make an excuse. Before you know it you’ll be dancing in your pelt in a thunderstorm above on the cliffs, swigging magnums of port.” Her look was assessing. “Unless that’s your idea of a good time, in which case, work away. There’s no badness in Hal, not at all, he’s just a bit…what was your word? Lively. Easily led. He should probably be on tablets, poor divil. Anyway, I heard you met Ike Blakely today.”
“Who told you?”
“The barman in McMunn’s? He’s my dad.”
Who? The gleeful one?
“I know. His nickname is Grinner McGee. He’s not as delighted as he looks, that’s just the way his face is, he has a condition. Poor Dad,” Courtney said. “Anyway, what did you think of Ike?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what to make of him.”
She clenched her jaw. “I know what I’d make of him, if I was given the chance.”
That started me laughing again.
“He’s a snack,” she said.
“He’s too big to be a snack, more like a four-course dinner.”
“That works for me.”
In the midst of our bonding laughter I wondered if she’d help me get an appointment?
“Is it illegal?” she asked. “Whatever it is you’re going to ask me?”
“…No. I just want—Any chance you could get me an appointment with a local doctor?”
“Is that all? I was afraid you wanted to break into Ben’s mansion. The number of Portal obsessives who turn up here to pester him…The poor man. He makes a film, it wins an Oscar—to be honest, it was too convoluted for me, multiverses aren’t my thing—”
“I adored it. The multiverses aren’t the point, it’s a love story…Have you—”
“Met him? Bitch, I run this town.”
I snort-laughed and Courtney grinned. “There’s only one man in this town I fancy more than Ike Blakely and that’s Ben Mendoza. Beautiful eyes and he comes across as normal. You’d never know all that stuff went on in his head. Tell me, what’s wrong with your GP in Dublin?”
“I don’t have one. I lived in New York until October. I’ve tried to register with a GP but they’re all full. Thousands of them resigned after the pandemic.”
“And what ails you?”
“The menopause.”
Shocked, she inhaled sharply, then glanced around the lounge.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Nothing terrible happens if the word is said out loud. To be accurate, Courtney, it’s the perimenopause that ails me but no one seems to know what that is. ‘Menopause’ gives the gist.”
“It sure does. But you don’t look like you’re about to break every plate in the place.”
“Because I’m on HRT. Well, I was, but it’s nearly all gone, I’ve been on reduced rations for the past couple of months and the situation is defcon two. Any day now I won’t be able to remember my own name. Is there a woman doctor in town?”
“Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can do.”