Chapter 32
He shook his head. ‘Looks better on you than me.’
‘Anyone for a Sandycove Sling?’ It was Cormac and Ellie, both carrying large jugs of the cocktail I’d had before. Cormac poured out the drinks, before reaching inside his jacket pocket and producing a few packets of nuts which he opened and laid out in front of us.
‘So, everyone, tell me who is going out with whom? I couldn’t work it out.’ Cormac grinned at us.
‘Cormac, don’t be an eejit,’ said Jules. ‘Honestly, I can’t bring him anywhere.’
‘Henry and I are cousins,’ said Lucy.
‘We’re all just good friends,’ said Henry.
‘I’m taken,’ said Ellie. ‘Well, when I say taken, I mean, taken off the market. Not interested. I was on the apps and they just about finished me off.’
‘Me too!’ said Cormac. ‘I thought it was just London, but Dublin’s bad too?’
‘Awful,’ she said. ‘The worst. Everyone lies. Height. Age. Job. You turn up expecting a six-foot, thirty-five-year-old who runs his own company, and waiting for you is someone who definitely does not live up to their biog. So, I’ve decided not to bother any more. Just get on with my life.’
‘I’m still looking,’ said Ellie. ‘Still optimistic.’
‘What about you, Kerry-Anne?’ asked Jules. ‘Is there anyone back in Boston?’
‘No. There was Milhouse…’
There was a moment’s silence, and a few confused glances.
‘Milhouse? Is that a nickname?’ said Ellie. ‘Or his surname?’
‘His first name,’ I said. ‘Lots of people in his family are called Milhouse. I called him Mil.’
‘Not much better, to be honest,’ said Cormac.
‘It’s a good name for a building,’ said Jules.
‘Or a cartoon mouse,’ said Lucy.
‘Milhouse actually loves his name,’ I said.
‘You said was?’ said Henry. ‘There was a Milhouse. Past tense.’
‘Yes, very much so,’ I said.
‘Good,’ said Lucy. ‘He sounded insufferable.’
‘He really did.’ Henry nodded. ‘Those rules!’
‘What rules?’ asked Ellie.
‘He wanted me to change my name to his,’ I said.
‘Feck that!’ she said.
‘And he would have his own place and I would live with any children we might have.’
Everyone suddenly laughed. ‘He sounds like a dream,’ giggled Ellie, making me laugh too. And everyone carried on laughing, as though the thought of Milhouse and his rules were the most hilarious thing they’d ever heard.
‘He said it would mean he wouldn’t have any secrets from me,’ I went on, still laughing.
It was the drink, obviously, but it was also the absurdity of Milhouse, the breathtaking arrogance, the utter shameless self-confidence.
And to think I nearly fell for it. But that was me a week ago.
A vulnerable shadow version of me. Now I was back, big time.
I wiped my eyes and tried to sober up. ‘And he’d had an affair with a Bloomingdale’s buyer. ’
And for some reason, this new revelation just made everyone laugh even harder.
When eventually we stopped, breathing deeply before collapsing into giggles again, I said, ‘To think I was actually considering going along with it all. I nearly married him.’
‘You’ve been grieving,’ said Lucy, loyally. ‘You’ve had a lot going on.’
‘You know, it happened to me, too,’ said Cormac. ‘Hard to believe, I know, me being so devastatingly gorgeous.’
Ellie giggled and Cormac smiled at her.
‘But, it’s true,’ he went on, ‘I was seeing this very nice woman, thought we were getting somewhere, we’d been on… I don’t know… three dates? And we were having dinner in Sheeky’s in Soho. Know it?’
We all shook our heads.
‘Anyway, it’s nice. Posh. So there we were. Me and Belinda. And she turns to me, just after ordering a crème br?lée and an Amaretto, and says, “Kodak…”’
‘Kodak?’ said Jules.
‘She kept getting my name wrong. Which was a red flag, I now know. So she said, “Kojak…”’
We all laughed.
‘“Kazhak, I am just not feeling it, are you? You’re nice and everything, but I’m just not that into you.
” Anyway, I wasn’t so much flabbergasted because women are allowed not to be into me, but it was the fact that she waited until she’d worked her way through the menu.
I had to be polite and everything and say no problem and thank you for letting me know and that I appreciated her honesty and all that craic.
Then when she’d had her second Amaretto, she let it slip that her ex-boyfriend was back in town.
And she was taking a taxi to his. So, just to say, it happens to us all. ’
‘I’m sure you recovered quickly,’ said Ellie.
‘I was a little bruised,’ said Cormac. ‘But you can’t be down for too long. You can be on the ropes, but you gotta come back fighting.’
‘Rocky Balboa is his hero,’ explained Jules. ‘He lives by the code of Rocky.’
‘I do,’ said Cormac, earnestly. ‘He’s my spirit guide.’
‘Mine is a puffin,’ said Ellie. ‘When they find a mate, they don’t ever leave them. They live on a cliff ledge together for the rest of their lives.’
Cormac seemed quite taken with this idea. ‘I would like to live on a ledge with my fellow puffin.’
‘They are the Mahatma Gandhi of the animal world,’ said Ellie. ‘Not the Rocky Balboa.’
‘Lovers not fighters?’ said Cormac.
‘That’s right.’ Ellie smiled at him and he smiled back.
Henry was on his feet. ‘I’ll get some more in. What’s everyone having? Same again?’
‘I’ll have the same again,’ said Lucy. ‘Whatever the same is, as long as it quells the old anxiety.’
‘I’ll give you a hand.’ I got to my feet and joined Henry. ‘Don’t want you carrying all the drinks by yourself. Anyway, it’s my round.’
‘You can help carry them,’ he said. ‘But I’m paying.’
At the bar, we stood for a moment in the throng of people waiting to be served. ‘Would you like to be a puffin?’ I asked him.
He laughed. ‘Of all the seabirds, they are definitely the sweetest. Not like seagulls who would gouge out your eye if they thought it might taste nice. What about you?’
‘Definitely a puffin,’ I said. ‘Being on a cliff with the love of your life sounds like a happy ending. Roll credits. Cue swooping music. Sunset.’
We grinned at each other.
‘But you’re rushing to find the ending,’ said Henry.
‘I’m not ready for my happy ending. Hopefully I will be old and will look back at all the moments in my life, the happy ones and the awful, soul-crushing moments, and the sad times and miserable.
The rain. The sleet. The days when the boiler is on the blink… ’
‘Whatever that means.’
He laughed. ‘No heating. Or… I don’t know. When you are a puffin and in love with a cormorant…’
‘Those relationships never work,’ I said. ‘I’ve had a few cormorants…’
‘It’s just part of life, the good, the bad, and the ugly…’
‘I’ve had those as well,’ I said, making him laugh.
‘But we all have to go through it,’ he said. ‘Until we find our fellow puffin. Even Uncle Eddie had his heart broken. His first love abandoned him.’
‘Oh no, poor Eddie!’
‘I know. He never got over her. I mean, he has, now. And he’s had a few other romances but nothing serious. His heart was so badly broken and he never managed to fix it properly. He told me about it once over a bottle of whiskey.’
‘How long ago was it?’
‘I don’t know, he was young. Not even twenty, I don’t think.’ He smiled again. ‘Ah, the poor thing. They all used to sail together and then there was that terrible accident when Lolly DeCourcey drowned.’
‘I heard that. It’s so sad. Her poor mother.’
We had shuffled close to the front of the queue and Henry called over our order.
‘You know when Matty mentioned you looked like someone,’ said Henry, ‘and then he and Eddie went quiet? Well, I think they think you look like Lolly.’
‘Like Lolly? The girl who died?’
He nodded. ‘It was the way they went quiet. They always do when it comes up.’
‘Was Lolly the one who broke his heart?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Henry. ‘He was just really sad about it and it struck me that you don’t get over things, not really. You just get used to the pain.’
A fresh jug of Sandycove Slings was placed on a tray along with glasses and bowls of olives and almonds, and we carried them back to the rest of the gang and we poured them out and told more stories and made each other laugh.
Cormac showed me how to Irish dance as he had been a junior champion as a child and his mother ran a dancing school.
Jules joined in but could only breakdance and did the worm on the stone ground.
Ellie and Lucy stood up and performed their routine which they’d last done when they were fifteen to ‘Proud Mary’, and then when everyone was sitting down again, Henry turned to me. ‘We need a party piece,’ he said.
‘I don’t have one.’
‘Ah, go on. You have to have one.’
‘Well… my friend Caitlin and I used to sing “Island In The Stream”. She was always Dolly. And I was Kenny.’
‘Well, come on…’ Henry stood up and held out his hand for mine. ‘You can be Dolly this time.’
Cormac was already finding an instrumental version on his phone and then there was no going back.
And so we began, Henry perfectly embodying Kenny Rogers and me singing along as Dolly Parton.
And, you know, back in Boston I would never have let my hair down like that in mixed company.
I mean, I would, with close friends like Caitlin and Tara, but if there was anyone else around, I would have remained seated.
But we were all laughing so much and it was a world away from home and the past and the last two years, and yet it brought Caitlin right back, in a good way.
She would have enjoyed this as much as anyone.
She would have loved to sing a duet with someone as gorgeous and charming as Henry.
Wait. Gorgeous and charming? Henry? He was kind of goofy and gawky, but as I looked at him singing into an invisible microphone, he was possibly one of the most attractive men I’d ever met. Unless, of course, it was the Sandycove Slings talking. Or singing.
‘You really have fitted in here,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s not easy to infiltrate a place like Sandycove so easily but you seem to have.’