No Way to Say Goodbye - Anna McPartlin [46]
“That must have been some party,” Bridget said, with a sneer.
“You’ve no idea,” Penny said, her cheeks threatening to shatter under the strain of her fake smile.
“You have a thick neck!” Bridget said, passing so close they almost touched.
Penny faced her but Bridget walked on. “Excuse me?” She didn’t need to take this crap from a woman who had once been one of the town’s biggest sluts.
Bridget turned back to look her up and down with contempt. “You heard, you callous bitch!”
“Hey, Bridget, guess what?”
“What?”
“Your husband recently fathered a child in Sneem.” She watched Bridget’s face fall. “Is that callous enough for you?” she asked.
Bridget was momentarily stunned, and immediately Penny realized the depths to which she had sunk. She might have apologized but the moment passed, and so did Bridget’s shock.
“What did you say?” she screamed.
A little panicked, Penny shut her boot, still half full of bottles, and walked around to the driver’s seat.
“What did you say, you bitch?” Bridget said, thundering towards her.
Penny opened the car door quickly, knowing that the other was on her way to launch a well-deserved punch at her face.
She locked the doors just in time and backed out of the recycling centre with a screaming and red-faced Bridget pounding on the roof of her car.
Once she’d made her getaway, she broke into laughter born of mild hysteria and tears quickly followed. Oh, God, what did I just do? Revealing a husband’s secret love-child was brutal, petty and maybe even despicable. An internal debate followed in which she reasoned that, although she had done something terrible, Bridget was a horrible human being who had often revelled in the misery of others. She silently accused Bridget of being the kind of person who liked to lord it over others and was only too happy to judge all and sundry. She still felt a little sick until she remembered that Bridget and her husband had been known as the town bikes for years. It had been bound to come out sooner or later. By the time she’d driven halfway home, she’d decided that Bridget deserved it.
The truth was she didn’t deserve it, and if Penny hadn’t been bitter, broken-hearted and hung-over she would never have torn apart anyone, even someone of Bridget Browne’s bad temperament. She dried her eyes and decided to forget her verbal assault by buying a bottle of her favourite red wine – she was off the hard stuff but wine never hurt anybody.
Penny had decided to throw herself back into work and, by coincidence, the next morning the Cork correspondent was forced to take a sudden leave of absence. Penny had a fluff piece about an obese cow in north Kerry and was covering the opening of a restaurant in Dingle but, despite time constraints and impending deadlines, she readily agreed to cover his story. She worried briefly that her decision to help out a colleague was based on Cork being Adam’s new home, but concluded that it most certainly was not. She reminded herself that Adam had made his choice. Furthermore he hadn’t even told her where he would be working or whispered his address – not that she wanted to know either. That ship had sailed and she was moving on, except of course that she wasn’t. Instead she was drowning. The emptiness made her insides ache but she wasn’t about to ask Mary or Ivan for information on Adam’s exact co-ordinates because then they would know that she was desperate to see him, even though she had almost convinced herself that she wasn’t. In any case, if he’d wanted to see her he would have called and he hadn’t, not that she was waiting for him to call. In fact, she probably wouldn’t have taken his call, so determined was she to start afresh.
However, upon arriving into Cork City she found she wanted to explore it more than she had in previous years. She might even have walked around the city centre for a few hours paying