Chapter 48
48
“Can you invite Joey up to your room?” Rachel was calling from the Fassbender Not-Suite. “We don’t want him left on his own. Luke and I will be with you all…in a while.”
“What’s keeping you and Luke?” I could hazard a guess. And good on them! I was in excellent form, having slept away the whole afternoon. I’d probably have slept for longer except Mum and the rest arrived back, bearing bags of chips and a dozen rainbow doughnuts, keen to tell me how wonderfully atrocious Darby O’Gill and the Little People had been.
To the room at large I called, “Can Joey be here while we get ready?”
“Will he be spying on me in my slip?” Mum asked.
“If you want.” I rang his room. “Come up here. We’ve rainbow doughnuts and coffee. Mum says you’re to spy on her in her slip.”
“I did not!”
“Nah, you’ll all be getting changed,” he said. “I’ll sit this one out.”
“We’ll do it in the bedroom. ’mon, Joey, don’t be on your own.”
Moments later, he was at the door, looking indecently handsome. “What the hell?” I cried. “What have you done?”
“What do you mean? Where can I put these?” A slab of green macaroons was in his hands.
“Is it your hair? What’s different?”
“Nothing. Why?”
“You look…” in no way like a man who’d sworn off sex. Had he had his teeth whitened? Done a sheet-mask?
“Joe-boy!” Regan summoned him.
“Regan!” Joey pawned the macaroons off on me.
“Eye-drops,” I called after him. “To whiten your eyes? You put some in. Yes?”
“No,” he said. “Okay, yeah, sure. Anything to make you happy.” He sat next to Regan.
“Are you going to Ben’s birthday party?” Regan asked him.
“Ah, yeah, I am. Are you?”
“I’m too young. Francesca and Lenehan are ‘hanging out’ with me.”
Lenehan? And Francesca? Well, well, well.
“But that just means they’re babysitting me,” Regan said.
“Aw, Regan. But it’s not a birthday party.” Joey was earnest. “Just an adults’ party. I think you might be bored.”
“No balloons? Or cake?”
“Nope. Seriously, you’ll have a better time here. So what we gonna read?”
“ Where the Wild Things Are. ”
“Never gets old! Let’s go.”
In the overcrowded bedroom, I discovered that Margaret, star that she was, had brought along a bag of my going-out makeup—primers, smokey shadows, vampy lipsticks, contouring tools, the works.
With Mum, Claire and Helen also doing their faces, I had to kneel at the window, peering into the tiny mirror in one of the palettes. But I went for it, totally larding it on.
Margaret had also packed my favorite outfit: a leather midi-skirt and an off-the-shoulder top. When I finally managed to get near the full-length mirror, I looked good, at least from the front. From the side, I could have been thirteen weeks pregnant. Did I care? No. This was the age I was. This was the body I had. I wasn’t going to deny myself a night with a sexy man just because my stomach stuck out.
I said a quick prayer that my period would continue to taper off and not make a dazzling comeback in a few hours. The thought gave me a brief wobble, reminding me that I knew almost nothing about Ike Blakely. What if we had no chemistry? What if we discovered we didn’t even like each other? Well, only one way to find out.
Margaret’s bag of goodies included my black boots, their height made manageable by a platform sole. The thing was, I hadn’t worn them since a bunion had appeared from nowhere on my left foot during lockdown; forty minutes was all I could take before the agony got too bad. But maybe the bunion had shrunk? Maybe I felt like living dangerously? Maybe the period cramps would cancel out the torture?
Courtesy of my age, I needed to sit down to put them on. “Excuse me,” I said to Joey and Regan, taking the only spare chair left, pulling on a sock and sliding my misshapen foot into the boot. Okay. No pain so far. Whipping the zip to my knee, I put on the other one and stood up, declaring, “I haven’t been this tall in a year!”
Joey widened his eyes.
“Quite the transformation, right?” I couldn’t stop smiling.
“You’re cute,” he stated, very matter-of-fact.
“Thank you.” Look at how comfortable we’d become with each other! Was that a knock at the door? For a split second I didn’t know the stunningly attractive woman, in a bandage dress and high shoes, standing outside.
“Let me in.” She was impatient.
“Courtney!” For it was she. “You look sensational .”
“Teagan did me,” she said. “She doesn’t know when to stop. I’m wiping half of it off.”
“No!!!!” I drank in her glossy pout, long lashes and cropped hair, slicked sideways and secured with a diamanté barrette that read SO BORED.
“ Courtney? ” Joey asked. “You look—”
“Different. Ya, I know.”
“Not the word. You look great.”
The excitement had brought the others tumbling out from the bedroom and bathroom.
“We’d better up our game.” Claire stared in astonishment. “Courtney has just shifted the paradigm.”
“I hear I missed some show at the karaoke last night!” Courtney pointed at Joey. “D’you know who told me they’d give him a bed for the night if he was stuck? Dr Muireann! And her the most sensible woman I’ve ever met.”
“You should ‘hook up’ with her,” Mum said. “Always handy to have a doctor in the family.”
“Are you…blushing?” Courtney frowned at Joey. “Is the go-boy blushing?”
“Leave him alone,” I said. “Can I do a quick survey on my hair?” Using a chignon pin, I piled it on my head, aiming for a “sexy” falling-down up-do. “Up? Or down?”
“Up!” The room was in agreement.
Except for Joey. “Down,” he said. “Definitely down.”
“Up it is.” Ike could remove the clips later. That might be…nice.
“Good to know you respect my opinion so much,” Joey murmured.
“Always.” I smirked at him.
Rachel and Luke arrived and fell on the macaroons. “Where did these come from?” Rachel was full of wonder.
“Rose made them,” Joey said.
“Rose?” I’d just remembered Helen’s jaunt up to her ladyship’s manor and was torn between two separate streams of information. “Where did you meet her?”
“Tinder.” At my shock, Joey laughed. “The poor woman cleans my room. How else? We’ve been having the chats. She does the macaroons every year. So I ordered a batch.”
I couldn’t imagine “having the chats’ with Rose, but sure, okay. “Helen, Mum, did you go to her ladyship’s house? What was it like?”
“Anna.” Helen pretended to swoon. “Regan, tell them about the big house.”
“The witch’s castle?” Regan looked up from her book. “It was like a witch’s castle.”
“Scary?” Joey asked her.
Thoughtfully, she said, “…Nice scary.”
“It was the worst house I ever saw,” Mum squawked.
Ignoring her, Helen said, “The gate was locked but we got into the grounds where the wall had collapsed. There was a swimming pool!”
“You mean a cesspit!” This from Mum. “Filthy green water…and frogspawn .”
“Such beautiful tiles . Fleur-de-lis pattern. Formal gardens—”
“You’d need a chain-saw to get through the weeds—”
“As for the house itself.” Helen groaned. “Huge, gray, high, pointy, gorgeous .”
“But.” Regan was suddenly solemn. “If they don’t fix it quickly, it will fall down on all our heads .”
“Right, as always,” Helen said. “If they took away that scaffolding, the whole thing would collapse.”
“It’s awful.” Mum looked distressed. “Definitely haunted. The windows! Long, gloomy oul’ yokes watching us. I never thought I’d say this about a house but it’s far too big.”
“I’ve literally just bought a Lotto ticket,” Helen said. “That’s how much I want it.”
“She’d sell it to you for a fiver,” Courtney said.
“Nah, I need, like, forty million euro.”
“A fiver,” Courtney repeated.
“Yeah, but…” Helen paused, then began to speak very quickly. “Imma tell yous my vision and you’re not to laugh: a haunted hotel. Permanent Hallowe’en.” Her face was aglow. “We could make a show called Goth Island there. Like Love Island but with pale emos roaming around in black overcoats, reading Emily Dickinson, catching pleurisy, swapping vials of their own blood.”
“Applying right now,” Francesca said.
“It wouldn’t be an actual island, though,” Margaret said.
“Love Island isn’t an island either!” Helen was irritated. “It’s just a house. You…parade-rainer!”
“I want no part of it,” Mum said.
But the rest of us, including Courtney, were in.
“So all we need is forty million euro,” Helen said.
“Job for Joey Armstrong.” Luke laughed. “He knows people with money.”
“Raising forty million for Goth Island ?” Joey said. “Should be a breeze.”
Quietly, Regan asked, “Joe-boy, was that a joke?”
Joey nodded and she seemed relieved.