Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes [72]
More crackles and breathing. Then, ‘What’ll I do now? Just hang up? I don’t have to press a button or anything?’
Abruptly the connection was severed.
Ashling stewed in guilt and resentment, Marcus Valentine completely forgotten. She could feel the pressure for a visit to Cork coming on. At the very least she’d have to call them. Especially if her younger sister Janet managed to circumvent the eight-hour time difference to ring from California, and her brother Owen could get a letter to them from the Amazon Basin.
She flicked a glance at the photo she kept on top of her telly. It had been there so long that she was usually blind to it. But the emotions stirred up by the phone call made her take it and stare at it, as if looking for clues.
It hit home, as it always did, that Mike Kennedy had been a good-looking man. Bold and tall, he laughed out at the camera, all early-seventies sideburns and hair curling on his patterned shirt collar. It was funny because on the one hand he was her dad. But on the other, he looked like the kind of bad man you’d see at a party and be drawn to, but whom your self-preservation would warn you well away from.
Mike had his arm around Janet, aged four. She was bent at the waist and had her fist shoved between her legs – she’d wanted to go to the toilet, the camera had always had that effect on her. Leaning against Mike, holding the three-year-old Owen in her pucci-swirled polyestered arms, was Monica. She was smiling happily, looking unfeasibly young, her hair smooth and set, her mascara Priscilla Presley glam. And stage centre, wedged between the two adults, her six-year-old’s eyes crossed comically, was Ashling.
Lucifer, Before the Fall, she always thought when she inspected this picture. They looked like such a perfect little family. But she often wondered if, even then, the rot had already set in.
Replacing the photo, she came back to the present. It had been about three weeks since the last time she’d rung her mum and dad. It wasn’t that she’d forgotten to since – she thought about it a lot, but could nearly always think of excuses not to.
However, she was never really at peace with her lack of communication. She was aware that Clodagh rang her own mother daily. Although Brian and Maureen Nugent were very different from Mike and Monica Kennedy. Maybe if Brian and Maureen had been her parents she’d be better at keeping in touch.
22
Monday morning. Traditionally, the bleakest of all mornings. (Except following a bank holiday, when Tuesday morning gets a go.) Nevertheless, it perked Lisa up no end. The thought of going into the office made her feel in control – at least she’d be doing something to help herself. Then she tried to have a shower and the water was stone cold.
But she temporarily shelved the notion of collaring Jack about the timer on her boiler when Mrs Morley let slip that he’d been working over the weekend, sorting out irate electricians and hard-done-by cameramen. He looked exhausted and black of mood.
Ashling, grey and late, was also finding the day hard. Even more so when Jack Devine stuck his head out of his office and said, curtly, ‘Miss Fix-it?’
‘Mr Devine?’
‘A word?’
Alarmed, she stood up far too quickly and had to wait for her blood supply to catch up and restore her sight.
‘Either you’re in big trouble or else you’re riding him,’ Trix whispered gleefully. ‘What’s going on?’
Ashling was in no mood for Trix and her antics. She hadn’t a clue why Jack Devine wanted to speak to her in private. With a presentiment of