Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes [185]
‘Still no reply?’ Joy asked sympathetically as she and Ted clustered on Ashling’s smelly bed.
‘No. God, I wish he would. I’d just like some answers.’
‘He’s a dirty coward. Call around to his work. Hassle him at gigs. That’d be good, actually,’ Joy said fiercely. ‘In the guise of heckling, you could really wreck his head. Shouting up at him that he’s hopeless in bed and that his mickey’s
‘– really small,’ Ashling finished wearily for her.
‘Really freckly, I was going to say,’ Joy said. ‘But I’ll accept “small”.’
‘No. No way. To either of them.’
‘OK, forget the heckling. But why don’t you call around to him? If you want him back you should fight for him.’
‘I don’t know if I want him back. Anyway, I don’t stand a chance. Not against Clodagh.’
‘She’s not that beautiful,’ Joy said savagely.
Automatically they both turned to Ted, who blushed. ‘Not at all,’ he lied atrociously.
‘See?’ Ashling flung at Joy. ‘He thinks she is.’
In the awkward silence that lowered on to them, Ashling took a dispassionate look around. She’d been in this room since Friday afternoon. It was now Monday evening and she’d left her bed only for brief visits to the bathroom. Her intention had been to have a sleep to get over the shock, then find Marcus and see what she could salvage. But somehow she’d never managed to get back out of bed. She liked it here now, she thought she might stay.
Her empty stare alighted on a bundle of tissues. All unused. Why wasn’t she crying? With the weight of sadness she was carrying she felt she should be in perpetual convulsions. But she remained resolutely dry-eyed. Not even a hint – no catch to her voice, no achey swelling in her throat, no fullness in her face bones.
Not that she was numb. Oh, if only.
She spoke slowly, more to herself than the other two. ‘I keep wondering what I did wrong, and I don’t think it’s my fault. I let him try out new material all the time. I went to all his gigs. Well, nearly.’ Look at what happened the one time she didn’t go. He’d picked up her best friend. ‘I agreed with him ten times a day that he was the best and that all the other comedians were crap.’
‘Even me?’ Ted asked uncertainly. ‘Did he think I was crap?’
‘No,’ Ashling lied. The first night she’d met Marcus he’d enthused madly about Ted, but only – she realized with hindsight – because he didn’t take him seriously. When it became clear that Ted had garnered a small but devoted following, Marcus began subtly to slag him off. Smart enough to know that Ashling wouldn’t permit full-blown insults, he contented himself with remarks like, ‘Good on Ted Mullins. We need one or two lightweights in this game.’ By the time Ashling noticed that he was actually denigrating Ted, she was too set in her helpmeet role to object.
‘It was all about Marcus Valentine,’ Joy observed. ‘He sounds like a selfish fucker.’
‘It wasn’t like that. It was fun helping him. We were close, we were pals.’ That was what hurt so much. But he’d met someone he liked better, it happened all the time.
‘Did you sense that something was going on?’ Joy asked. ‘Has he been behaving any differently?’
It was painful to think of the recent past in the light of her discoveries, but Ashling had to admit, ‘The last few weeks, while I’ve been so busy, he’s been narky. I thought it was just because he missed me. Imagine!’
‘Did the, um –’ Joy was making a half-hearted attempt to frame the question delicately and realized she couldn’t. ‘Did the riding continue as normal?’
Ted put his hands over his ears.
‘No,’ Ashling sighed. ‘It slowed down a lot. Again I thought it was my fault. But we did have sex since I was in Cork. So for a time he was doing us both.
‘Why did Clodagh stand for it?’ she wondered, as if she was talking about a character in a soap opera.
‘Maybe she didn’t know,’ Joy suggested. ‘He could have lied to her. Or maybe he was