Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes [73]
‘Close the door,’ he ordered.
I’m going to be sacked. She was in the horrors.
The door clicked behind her and instantly the room shrank – and darkened. Jack, with his dark hair, dark eyes, dark-blue suit and dark mood, tended to do that. To make matters worse, he wasn’t behind his desk, he was balanced on the front and there was very little space between the two of them. He made her so uncomfortable.
‘I wanted to give you this, without the rest of them seeing.’ She found herself leaning away from him, although there was nowhere to go. He thrust a plastic bag at her, which she accepted dumbly. Hazily, she noticed that it was a bit big for a letter of notice.
She just held it in her hands, and with an impatient laugh Jack said, ‘Look inside.’
Crumpling plastic, Ashling peered into the pearly light of the bag. To her surprise it contained a carton of two hundred Marlboro, with a red rosette stuck crookedly on the cellophane.
‘Because I kept bumming your cigarettes,’ Jack dead-eyed her. ‘I’m, er, sorry,’ he added. He didn’t sound it.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she mumbled, stunned by the reprieve – and the rosette.
For the first time since she’d met him, Jack Devine laughed properly. An honest-to-God, head-thrown-back, belly laugh. ‘Beautiful?’ he exclaimed, alight with mirth. ‘Sailing boats are beautiful, eight-foot waves are beautiful. But cigarettes beautiful? Actually, maybe you’re right.’
‘I thought you were going to sack me,’ Ashling blurted.
His face twisted with surprise. ‘Sack you?… But Little Miss Fix-it,’ he said, his voice suddenly soft, his eyes playful, ‘who else would keep us in plasters, Anadins, umbrellas, safety pins, what’s the thing for shock – remedy something…?’
‘Rescue remedy.’ She could do with some right now. She needed to get out. Just so she could breathe again.
‘What are you so scared of?’ he asked, even more softly. It seemed to her that his bulk moved closer.
‘Nothing!’ she squealed like a bus’s brakes.
With his arms folded, he considered her. Something in the way his mouth kinked up at the corners made her feel girlish and silly, like he was mocking her. Then, in an instant, he seemed to lose interest. ‘Go on,’ he sighed, moving back behind his desk. ‘Off you go… But don’t tell any of the others,’ he nodded at the bag. ‘Else they’ll all be wanting one.’
Ashling went back to her desk, her legs belonging to someone else. Hold the front page. Jack Devine in Not-Such-a-Miserable-Bastard-As-He’d-Originally-Seemed shock. But the oddest thing of all was that Ashling kind of thought that she preferred him the other way. Though later that day, it was business as usual.
Mercedes lurched into the office, and everyone nearly fell off their chairs when they saw that she was uncharacteristically displaying emotion. A lot of it. As per Lisa’s instructions she’d gone to try and interview mad Frieda Kiely. And even though Mercedes had spent the weekend in Donegal shooting a twelve-page spread of Frieda’s clothes, Frieda kept her waiting an hour and a half, then professed to have never heard of her or Colleen.
‘Who are you?’ she’d demanded. ‘Colleen? What the hell’s that? What is that?’
‘She’s a maniac. A mad bitch,’ Mercedes hissed, then fell into another fit of humiliated convulsions. ‘A mad fucking BITCH!’
‘A premenstrual psycho hoor from hell.’ Kelvin was very keen to get on the right side of Mercedes.
‘A schizoid slapper,’ Trix threw in.
‘And a right skinnymalinks,’ said Boring Bernard, who had no idea what she looked like but who liked a good bitch as much as the next mummy’s boy. ‘There’d be more meat on a tinker’s stick after a good row.’
Trix looked at him scornfully. ‘That’s a compliment, you gobshite. You haven’t a clue!’
Insult after insult was heaped upon Frieda Kiely, except from Ashling who had heard somewhere that she really was mad. Apparently she was mildly schizophrenic and disinclined to take her medication.
‘But,’ Ashling interrupted, feeling someone should defend her, ‘don’t you think before we give out about her, we should walk a mile in her