Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes [18]
But tonight she was calm and peaceful, alone but not lonely. Even though the only men who’d hit on her weren’t her type, she didn’t feel like a failure when she decided to go home.
At the door she met Mr Enthusiastic again. ‘Going already? Hold it a minute.’ He scribbled something on a piece of paper, then handed it to her.
She waited until she was outside before opening the twist of paper. It was a name – Marcus Valentine – a phone number and the instruction, ‘Beliez moi!’
It was the best laugh she’d had all night.
The walk home took ten minutes – at least the rain had stopped. When she reached the front-door of her block of flats, there was a man asleep in the doorway.
The same man who’d been there the other day. Except he was younger than she’d realized. Pale and slight, clutching tightly on to his thick grubby-orange blanket, he looked barely more than a child.
Rummaging in her rucksack she found a pound and placed it silently beside his head. But maybe it’d be nicked, she worried, so she moved it under his blanket. Then, stepping over him, she let herself in.
As the door clicked behind her, she heard, ‘Thanks,’ so faint and whispered she wasn’t sure if she’d imagined it.
While Ted was going down a storm in the Funny Farm, Jack Devine was opening his front-door in a bleak, sea-facing corner of Ringsend.
‘Why didn’t you call me?’ Mai demanded. ‘You never have enough time for me.’ She pushed past him and marched straight up the stairs. She was already unbuttoning her jeans.
Jack stared out at the sea, the nearly-black of the night-time water as impenetrable as his eyes. Then he closed the door and slowly followed her up the stairs.
At the same time, in a stylish, Edwardian, red-brick house in Donnybrook, Clodagh downed her fourth gin and braced herself. It had been twenty-nine days.
7
Ashling woke at twelve on Sunday, feeling rested and only mildly hungover. She lay on the couch and smoked cigarettes until The Dukes of Hazzard finished. Then she went out and bought bread, orange juice, cigarettes and newspapers – one scurrilous rag and one broadsheet to cancel out the rag.
After gorging herself to the point of mild disgust on overblown stories of infidelity, she decided to tidy her flat. This mostly consisted of carrying about twenty crumb-strewn plates and half-empty glasses of water from the bedroom to the kitchen sink, picking up an empty tub of Haagen Daz from where it had rolled under the couch and opening the windows. She drew the line at polishing, but she sprayed Mr Sheen around the room and the smell instantly made her feel virtuous. Cautiously she sniffed her bed-linen. Grand, it’d do for another week.
Then, even though she knew it couldn’t have gone anywhere, she checked that the suit she’d had dry-cleaned hadn’t been stolen. It was still hanging in her wardrobe, beside a clean top. Big day tomorrow. Very big day tomorrow. It wasn’t every Monday she started a new job. In fact it had been over eight years and she was horribly nervous. But excited too, she insisted, trying to ignore her fluttery stomach.
What now? Vacuuming, she decided, because if you did it right it was great exercise for the waist. Out came her magenta and lime-green Dyson. Even now she couldn’t believe she’d spent so much money on a household appliance. Money that she could just as easily have spent on handbags or bottles of wine. The only conclusion she could draw was that she was finally grown-up. Which was funny because in her head she was still sixteen and trying to decide what to do when she left school.
She flicked the switch and, energetically bending and twisting from the waist, worked her way across the hall floor.