Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes [46]
Clodagh and Dylan had made a decision never to hit their children. But when Molly started kicking her, while continuing to screech, Clodagh found herself yanking the child off the floor and administering a smart smack to her bare leg. It seemed as if the whole of Dublin gasped. Suddenly all the slab-faced child beaters had melted away, and instead Clodagh was assailed by pair after pair of accusing eyes. Everyone around her looked like they worked for ChildLine.
A wave of crimson shame slapped her in the face. What was she doing, assaulting a defenceless little girl? What was wrong with her?
‘Come on.’ Hastily she tugged the roaring Molly away, appalled by the mark of her hand on Molly’s tender leg. To atone for her guilt, Clodagh immediately bought Molly the ice-cream that had prompted the ructions in the first place, and expected peace for precisely the length of time it took Molly to eat it.
Except the ice-cream started to melt and Clodagh was asked to leave a fabric shop after Molly rubbed her cone carefully along a bolt of curtain muslin, patterning it with a thick white trail. The morning had soured and, wiping a Father Christmas beard of ice-cream from Molly’s chin, Clodagh couldn’t help feeling that life seemed to have had more of a sparkle to it once, a kind of yellow glow. She’d always rushed forward to greet her future, blithely confident that what it delivered would be good. And it hadn’t ever let her down.
Her requests of life had never been overly ambitious and she’d always got what she wanted. On paper everything was perfect – she had two healthy children, a good husband, no money worries. But lately everything felt like unrelenting drudgery. Had done for quite a while, actually. She tried to remember when it had started, and when she couldn’t, fear squeezed perspiration through her pores. The thought of this mind-set crystallizing into anything like permanence was terrifying. By nature she was a happy, uncomplicated person – this she could see by comparing herself with poor Ashling who tied herself in knots about almost everything.
But something had changed. Not so long ago she was fuelled by anticipation and optimism. What was different, what had gone wrong?
14
‘Diet Lilt or Purdeys?’ Ashling mused. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, make your mind up,’ Trix urged, her pen poised over her spiral-bound notebook. ‘The shop’ll be closed if you don’t hurry.’
Though the Colleen team had been working together less than two weeks, already they had a routine. A shop run was done twice a day, morning and afternoon. This was separate from the lunch run and the hangover-cure run.
‘Uh-oh,’ Trix observed. ‘Here’s Heathcliff.’
Jack Devine strode into the office, all tumbled hair and troubled face.
‘I just can’t make my mind up,’ Ashling lamented, agonizing between drinks.
‘Of course you can’t,’ Jack said nastily, without breaking stride. ‘After all, you’re a woman?’
His office door slammed behind him and heads were shaken in sympathy.
‘The reunion lunch with Mai obviously wasn’t,’ Kelvin observed, wagging a beringed finger.
‘What a tormented man.’ Shauna Griffin looked up from proof-reading this Summer’s Gaelic Knitting, her voice trembling. ‘So handsome, yet so unreachable, so unhappy.’
Shauna Griffin was a large, fair woman who bore an uncanny resemblance to the Honey Monster. She regularly exceeded the recommended dosage of Mills & Boons.
‘Unhappy?’ Ashling asked scornfully. ‘JD? He’s just bad-tempered.’
‘That’s the first bitchy thing I’ve ever heard you say about anyone,’ Trix exclaimed hoarsely. ‘Congratulations. I knew you had it in you! You see what you can achieve when you put your mind to it.’
‘Diet Lilt,’ Ashling replied drolly. ‘And a bag of buttons.’
‘White or brown?’
‘White.’
‘Money.’
Ashling handed over a pound, Trix wrote it all down on her list and moved on to the next person.
‘Lisa?’ Trix asked, adoringly. ‘Anything?’
‘Hmmm?’ Lisa jumped.