Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes [12]
‘I can’t even remember where I met him,’ Clodagh admitted. ‘Oh no, of course I do. You brought him to Lochlan Hegarty’s twenty-first, remember? God, it seems like a lifetime ago.’
‘You have to work at keeping things fresh,’ Ashling quoted. ‘Go out for romantic meals, maybe even go away for the weekend. I’ll babysit any time you like.’ She experienced a surge of alarm at this rash promise.
‘I wanted to get married.’ Clodagh seemed to be talking to herself. ‘Dylan and I seemed right for each other.’
‘That’s putting it mildly.’ Ashling remembered the frisson that had passed through the party when Clodagh and Dylan first clapped eyes on each other. Dylan was the most good-looking man in the group that he hung around with, Clodagh was undeniably the best-looking girl in her gang and people always gravitate towards their equals. When Dylan and Clodagh exchanged that fatal eye-meet, Ashling was actually on a date with Dylan – her first and, as it transpired, her last. With that one look she was toast. Not that she held it against either of them. They were meant to be together, she might as well be a good sport about it.
Clodagh gave a tired chuckle. ‘Everything is fine, really. Or at least it will be when I’ve changed the colour scheme in the front-room.’
‘More decorating!’ It seemed no time since Clodagh had got her new kitchen in. In fact, it didn’t seem much longer than that since she’d done her front-room.
In the afternoon, on the way home from Clodagh’s, Ashling ducked into Tesco to buy food. She flung packet after packet of microwaveable popcorn into the basket, then went to pay.
The woman ahead of her in the queue had such a laquered, stylish look about her that Ashling found herself leaning back, all the better to admire her. Like Ashling, she wore sweatpants, trainers and a little cardigan, but unlike Ashling, everything looked touchable and lustrous. The way things are before they’re washed for the first time and lose their sheen of perfect newness.
Her trainers were pink Nike ones that Ashling had seen in a magazine, but that you couldn’t get in Ireland yet. Her pink, parachute-silk rucksack matched the pink gel in the heel of the trainers. And her hair was lovely – shiny and swingy, thick and glossy – in the way that you could never achieve yourself.
In fascination Ashling checked out the contents of the woman’s basket. Seven cans of strawberry Slimfast, seven baking potatoes, seven apples and four… five… six… seven individually wrapped little squares of chocolate from the pick’n’mix. She hadn’t even put the chocolate into a bag, she looked as if she was treating them as seven individual purchases.
Some irresistible instinct told Ashling that this paltry basketful constituted the woman’s weekly shop. Either that or she was providing a safe house for Grumpy, Sneezy, Dopey, Happy and whatever the other three were called.
5
It was pouring with rain when Lisa’s plane landed at Dublin airport early on Saturday afternoon. When she’d taken off from London, she’d foolishly assumed that she couldn’t possibly feel worse, but one look at the rain-soaked view of Dublin made her see the error of her ways.
Dermot, her taxi-driver to the city-centre, only added to her grief. He was chatty and amiable and Lisa didn’t want chatty and amiable. She thought with longing of the psychotic, uzi-carrying madman who might have been driving her taxi, if only she was in New York.
‘Have you family here?’ Dermot asked.
‘No.’
‘A boyfriend, so?’
‘No.’
When she wouldn’t talk about herself, he talked instead. ‘I love driving,’ he confided.
‘Whoop-de-doo,’ Lisa said nastily.
‘Do you know what I do on my day off?’
Lisa ignored him.
‘I go for a drive! That’s what I do. And not just down to Wicklow, either, but a long one. Up to Belfast, over to Galway, or across to Limerick. One day I made it as far as Letterkenny, that’s in Donegal, you know… I love my job.’
On and on he went, as they inched through the wet, greasy streets. When they got to the hotel in Harcourt Street, he helped her with her several bags