Erin
Jason started going to the gym three times a week, then every weekday, then every day.
She was happier, too. Calmer. Less anxious.
She’d accepted a promotion even though she didn’t particularly want the responsibilities that came with it and regularly worked overtime, so, while money was tight, the stretching it had to do to cover their outgoings now came with a little bit of give.
There was talk of the call centre’s biggest client outsourcing their customer service to India, but she’d decided not to worry about Jason losing his job until it actually happened.
Maybe life wasn’t about settling, but accepting.
What eventually became Shreddr came to life slowly, emerging over time.
At first, Thomas was the Guy at the Gym, then Jason’s Mate from the Gym, and then just Thomas or ‘T’, which made Erin think of Mr T from The A-Team.
Jason had always made friends at his various jobs, but then left them behind when he left, and the call-centre gang were so much younger than him.
She was happy he had someone to spend some of his newfound energy on, and she was especially grateful that he had someone to talk to about reps and protein intake and leg days because she wasn’t going to even pretend to listen to that shite.
At some point, Jason had told her about Thomas’s burning business idea, a company that would deliver ready-made healthy meals to your door, and she’d made the requisite listening noises.
But then, one evening, he sat her down and told her that the idea had morphed into a healthy fast-food joint, and that he and Thomas had decided to make it happen together.
They had a plan and Jason had a PowerPoint.
He made her sit next to him on the couch while he talked her through it.
They were going to start small – and mobile.
Thomas had some cash saved and he was going to spend it on a food truck.
They’d become friendly with the owner of their gym, who had multiple locations with car parks he was willing to let them set up in.
All Jason needed was some money of his own.
Seed capital, as he insisted on referring to it.
He had to match what Thomas was putting in, so they’d each own an equal share.
‘How much are we talking?’ Erin asked.
He hesitated. ‘Thirty grand.’
‘That’s not that bad.’
‘Each.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where are you going to get it?’
‘I was thinking …’ Here, Jason at least had the decency to look apologetic. ‘Maybe you could take out a loan?’
‘Me?’
‘You know they won’t give it to me.’
‘But if they give it to me, it’s my money,’ she said. ‘Then I’d be investing in the business, not you.’
‘I’d pay it back. That’s what I’m saying. You borrow, I repay.’
‘But when you take out a loan, you have to start paying it back immediately. Your first repayment will be in a month’s time.
You’re not going to be making money by then.
You won’t be making money for months. So where will you get those repayments?
If you miss even one, that affects me. Which affects us. ’
Jason reluctantly admitted she might have to cover the initial repayments but said he’d pay her back for those, too.
‘If this works,’ he said, ‘it could change our lives. And I mean you and me.’
Erin sighed. ‘I don’t know.’
‘This isn’t just some whim, you know. This is important to me.’
‘I understand, but it’s a lot of money – that you don’t have.’ And hadn’t they been here before? Not with an investment in a start-up, OK, but with something new and shiny that Jason had decided was definitely it. ‘I just don’t know …’
‘Thanks so much for the vote of confidence,’ he snapped, slamming the laptop closed. ‘I don’t know why I thought you’d support me on this, seeing as you never have.’
Erin’s jaw clenched.
‘Jason,’ she said evenly, ‘I pay the mortgage. I pay for all those chicken breasts and eggs you eat. I pay for the lights, the heat. I paid for that laptop and I even pay for the gym where you met the guy whose idea this is. All I do is support you.’
‘Oh, here we go.’ He stood up. ‘Here we fucking go. If I pay for everything, I’m just a husband. But you pay for some things for a while and—’
‘I pay for all the things. All of them. And I have done, for much longer than a while.’
They stared at one another for a long moment.
Then he suddenly dropped his anger, turning it off like a switch. Came and sat back down next to her. Took her hand in his.
‘Look, I can make this work,’ he said quietly, gently.
‘I just need some help to get going. I know I haven’t been pulling my weight around here – I know – but I have been trying to find a way to start.
And this is it. Do you think I want to ask you for money, when you’re already paying for so much?
Do you think that’s comfortable for me? Of course it isn’t.
It’s embarrassing. It makes me feel like even more of a failure than I already do. ’
He paused here and she knew that was her cue to say, ‘You’re not a failure.’
‘This is my chance to succeed,’ he said. ‘And it’s more important to me than my ego or my pride. So I’m asking you. I need this.’ He paused again. ‘I need you.’
It was almost a year to the day since he’d told her he’d been thinking about what his life might be like with someone else.
When he came home a week later and casually informed her that he’d quit his job – not, mind you, handed in his notice, but walked out that day after telling them he wouldn’t be back – her complete and utter shock, swiftly morphing into white-hot anger, was met with a stubborn insistence that he had told her about that part of the plan.
Definitely. She must have just not been listening.
There was no Plan B. If this didn’t work, Erin worried that they might lose everything. But luckily – miraculously – Shreddr took off like a rocket.
A food truck people rabidly followed around the city soon became a brick-and-mortar location, which quickly sprouted into three.
At the eighteen-month mark, Shreddr was opening its fifth branch: a restaurant and a to-go hatch on Mespil Road, near Baggott Street Bridge.
On the first day of operation they were forced to close early when they ran out of food.
Demand was insatiable; customers just couldn’t get enough.
No matter where they set up their stall, queues snaked down the street – and from the very start.
Jason was almost always working, at all hours of the day and night, but he was happy to.
He was excited, exhilarated. He said it didn’t feel like work.
Weekends ceased to mean anything except the two days when Erin didn’t have to grind away at her mundane, monotonous job – days she was, because of Jason’s workload, now mostly spending at home on her own.
He had, true to his word, paid her back and repaid the loan long ago, but still she felt a little short-changed, literally and figuratively.
Any profit Shreddr generated belonged to the company, which belonged to Thomas too, and they were ploughing most of it straight back into the business.
Jason was taking what he had told her was a nominal director’s pay, and it hadn’t escaped her notice that he had used a word instead of a figure.
But she didn’t push. He was paying his fair share now, covering half of everything.
But anytime she broached the subject of their financial status beyond that, she was told they’d have to wait for ‘things to settle’ before any big decisions could be made.
They still had separate bank accounts, a decision Erin had made to protect herself.
But now it was why she had no clue how much Jason was actually earning.
Property prices were rising again; they were no longer in negative equity.
She hated their claustrophobic, soulless house and wanted to move, but Jason said they were better off staying where they were for now and waiting until they could afford a forever home.
Why endure the stress of a move if they were only going to do it again a few years down the line?
That made sense, so she floated the idea of a big, blow-out holiday instead.
Something special, like two weeks in one of those overwater villas in the Maldives or a Route 66 road trip.
But Jason wasn’t comfortable taking time off work.
Not yet, anyway. He placated her with a car, giving her his former company vehicle, a Shreddr-branded Jeep with 150,000 kilometres on the clock and a gearstick with a mind of its own, when he upgraded to a brand-new one with no branding on it at all.
The day she drove hers for the first time, a bus with a Shreddr poster along its side pulled up next to her at a red light.
Not long afterwards, Jason’s voice came over the radio – he was live on Newstalk.
When she opened the boot she found a magazine with a cover story about The Caesars of Salad: ‘Healthy Fast Food’ Chain Shreddr’s Secrets to Success.
In the accompanying photo, Jason and Thomas were standing in the door of their newest location on Nassau Street, professionally styled and professionally shot.
Erin imagined other women looking at it and wondering if her husband loved someone.
Then she came home to an empty house and a message from him telling her that he had a very early breakfast meeting and was going to stay in the city.
Her husband was everywhere and nowhere, and it was starting to unsettle her.
Something else was bothering her, too. Whenever the guys did an interview with a business journalist in print or on the radio, or were on stage at an event, the story of how Shreddr came to be always came up.
And yet, she never did.
There was never any talk about how she had supported him financially when he lost his last good nine-to-five, or how she’d paid for the gym membership that had led him to cross paths with Thomas, or how she’d taken out the loan.
She was sure about this because she was waiting for it.
Jason had edited Shreddr’s origin story and left all her scenes on the cutting-room floor.
On the rare occasion she was invited to accompany him to an event or a ceremony, or once, to a Very Important Meeting with men who had flown in from Monaco, the introducing of her was always met with surprise. People had manners enough to cover it up quickly, but she caught what they were thinking.
I didn’t even know he had a wife.
Four years after Shreddr served its first salad, Thomas bought his first home, an apartment in Grand Canal Dock.
Late one Tuesday afternoon, Jason called to say they’d been invited to dinner that evening.
This was such a rare event that tonight would be Erin’s first time meeting Monica, Thomas’s American girlfriend of nearly nine months.
Thomas was very nice and very driven and obviously, now, very successful, but he wasn’t what Erin would have ever called conventionally attractive, despite his gym bulk.
He put her in mind of those six-week-abs experiments men’s magazines loved to run on soft, pasty journalists with bad posture who agreed to be starved, tortured with crunches and ultimately spray-tanned.
Their ‘after’ photos always ended up looking as if the subject’s head had been grafted on to someone else’s body, and that was sort of how Thomas looked to her.
So when Monica turned out to be a distractingly beautiful, charismatic blonde, it was just the first in a series of shocks the evening had in store.
Monica answered the door to them wearing a long, flowing silk dress splashed with a bright blue, abstract pattern and a deep red stain on her lips.
Erin, having presumed a midweek dinner with a two-hour warning would be a casual affair, was in jeans and a white shirt, and stood next to this ethereal creature, she felt not only older and plainer but as if she were in an active stage of decay.
Is that who they were now, Jason and Thomas?
Men who could attract women like that? As Erin watched her husband walking ahead of her on a tour of the apartment, she thought about how a woman who met him now would only ever know this version, the new and improved Jason O’Riordan 2.
0, and nothing of anything that had gone before.
The idea made her throat tighten with panic.
But she was soon distracted by the next shock: Thomas hadn’t merely bought an apartment, he’d bought a penthouse.
Ten floors up, glass everywhere, space to spare.
He had a terrace overlooking the multicoloured rings of the Convention Centre and the curve of the Samuel Beckett Bridge.
Each bedroom’s decor appeared to have been transferred here wholesale from a luxury hotel.
The lift opened directly into the apartment, which was something Erin thought only happened in the movies.
Right outside it, on the carpet, was a doormat that said Live, Laugh, Leave.
As the night progressed, it became clear that, actually, Jason knew Monica very well.
There were all these little comments, inside jokes, knowing looks.
Monica knew to put an ice cube in his white wine and that he liked to have a pint glass of water with his meal; she brought him both without asking.
She knew he was obsessed with a TV show called Narcos, which was news to Erin, who wondered when he’d had time to watch any television and where that activity had taken place, because it certainly hadn’t been at home with her.
The three of them talked about a time they’d all been in Doolin while Erin smiled and nodded while racking her brains for any memory of Jason even mentioning that he was going there.
Dinner was sushi, and she couldn’t help but watch her husband’s masterful deployment of chopsticks as if he’d suddenly developed the ability to shoot flames from his fingertips.
When had he learned to do that? When she asked for a fork, Monica laughed, assuming she was joking, then blushed as she realized she’d made a mistake.
She hurried off to get Erin a full set of cutlery.
When she reappeared, Erin caught Jason throwing Thomas an apologetic look.
It wasn’t that she suspected anything was going on; it was abundantly clear that Monica and Thomas only had eyes for each other.
It was more that this trio had clearly spent a lot of time together, without her.
An impartial observer would have surely concluded that Erin was the new girlfriend, meeting the other two for the first time.
The idea wouldn’t leave her and only solidified as the night went on.
By the time Erin woke the following morning, it had become a hard little knot in the pit of her stomach, and it was there to stay.