Better Together (14 page)

‘Well, now.’ DJ sat behind the desk and cleared a space with a wave of his enormous hand. ‘Sheridan Gray. Here in Ardbawn. We’re honoured.’

She couldn’t be sure if he was being sarcastic or not.

‘Thanks for giving me the chance to come,’ she said. She glanced towards the desk where the thin man was still engrossed in his work and ignoring them.

‘It’s not often we get high-profile reporters looking to fill in with us,’ said DJ.

Sheridan gave him a rueful smile. ‘I guess the local papers are doing better than the high-profile ones at the moment,’ she said. ‘And Paudie O’Malley owns a hundred per cent of the
Central News
, not just twenty-five per cent.’

DJ laughed. It was a deep, belly laugh that made his entire frame shake.

‘You’re not so bad after all,’ he said. ‘I was thinking that you’d come here with notions about yourself.’

‘How can I have notions?’ asked Sheridan. ‘I’m the one who’s looking for a job.’

DJ laughed his belly laugh again, and Sheridan felt herself relax a little.

‘So, lookit,’ he said. ‘I’ve read your stuff. I liked the piece you did about the All-Ireland last year. Very good. And your soccer coverage is excellent. Even the article you did about the Brazil girls’ football was interesting. But the thing is, sweetheart, I don’t need a sports reporter. I have one of those.’

Sheridan glanced towards the man working at the other desk again.

‘Not Seamus,’ he said. ‘Shimmy – as he’s known to his nearest and dearest, which we are of course – is our ads man. That means he’s the most important person here. He sells space in the paper. He doubles up as our IT person, which makes him practically indispensable. He keeps our website up and running. We couldn’t function without him.’

Seamus looked up and grinned so that he no longer looked stern, forbidding and just a little scary. ‘I’ll remind you of that next time you’re trying to cut my wages,’ he observed.

‘Don’t mind him,’ said DJ. ‘He loves a joke. So, OK, Shimmy is the powerhouse, I’m the managing editor and Myra is the admin person.’

‘Who does the sports?’ asked Sheridan.

‘Des Browne,’ replied DJ. ‘He’s been with us for years. Freelance, that’s all we need, because most of our sports stuff is local. We get the big reports from syndicates.’

‘Right.’

‘Which means we don’t honestly need your particular talents.’

‘I can do more than sports journalism,’ she told him. ‘That happens to be what I’ve concentrated on for the past few years, but it’s not the only writing I’m able to do.’

‘Maybe. All the same, you’re probably too specialised for us.’

‘Why did you ask me here then?’

‘Because you were pushy on the phone,’ he said. ‘I liked that.’

‘If you’re not going to treat me as a serious candidate for the job, you’ve wasted my time in getting me to come here on a pig of a day,’ said Sheridan.

‘Feisty, which I like as well.’

‘Look, I’m not here for you to like me,’ she told him. ‘I’m here to interview for the job of . . . well . . . some kind of reporter, I thought. But if Myra only does admin, and she’s the person you’re replacing . . .’ Her voice faltered. She wasn’t great on admin. But she still wanted the job. She wanted the chance to prove herself. And, she reminded herself, the chance to investigate Paudie O’Malley.

‘Myra does everything,’ DJ said. ‘She writes stuff, she edits the bits we get in from the locals – a lot of our reporting is stuff sent in from the locals; we just tidy it up. She makes sure we have our regular features and the girlie things like hair and beauty and recipes and horoscopes and all that blather. Which is why I’m not sure you’d be good at it.’ He looked at her appraisingly and Sheridan felt her cheeks redden. She wished she’d thought more about her appearance for the interview. She was perfectly neat and presentable, with her hair drawn back and wearing a white shirt and black trousers, but perhaps she didn’t look like the sort of person who would be good with horoscopes and beauty treatments. Or recipes. Not that they were things she was traditionally good at, or even interested in. But she had to make DJ believe that she was.

‘I know absolutely loads about beauty and fashion,’ she told him firmly. ‘I’m totally up to speed on it. I shared an apartment with the
City Scope
’s fashion editor and I’ve been to loads of fashion shows. I’ve even been to Milan.’ She didn’t say that this was for a girls’ weekend with Talia and some of her mates, and not for Fashion Week. The way she looked at it, it was impossible not to soak up fashion in Milan anyway.

‘Really?’

She stayed calm even with the astonished expression on DJ’s face.

‘I’m completely clued into the latest looks and . . . and face creams and . . . stuff like that,’ she finished.

‘It’s not just about the writing.’ DJ had regained his equilibrium. ‘Myra gets all the womany stuff together from different sources but she also goes out and meets people. We do reports on local school events and the amateur dramatic society and the various social groups and committees . . .’

‘No trouble at all to me,’ said Sheridan.

She wanted this job now. Not because it was an opportunity for her to add to her CV, or because it might give her the chance to do a bit of quiet snooping on the man who’d made her redundant, but because she couldn’t bear the idea of being turned down. The competitive gene that she always thought had passed her by had suddenly flared into life inside her. She wanted to be able to phone her mother and say that she’d got the first job she’d interviewed for. Besides, she thought, she deserved it. There was nobody better than her at getting copy together, and she’d often had to edit reports sent in by various sporting groups about their events. Cutting a piece about the local flower show down to size would be child’s play to her.

‘We’re a small organisation and the job is temporary,’ said DJ. ‘Myra hasn’t finalised her plans yet. Obviously she could take up to a year off, but she’s very keen on coming back well before then, perhaps even after three or four months. That being the case, I’m not sure it’s what you really want.’

‘What I really want is to be a sports writer on a major newspaper again.’ Sheridan decided to be completely candid
with him. ‘I can’t lie about that. But working here will give me a great deal of experience that I wouldn’t otherwise get, and hopefully you’ll find that my experience is helpful to you too.’

‘I have someone else to interview,’ said DJ as he stood up. ‘So I’ll let you know.’

‘You haven’t interviewed me yet.’ Sheridan remained in her seat.

‘Ah, I only had to hear you talk,’ DJ told her. ‘I’ve read your stuff.’

Sheridan couldn’t help feeling that she was being shortchanged. It had taken her an hour and a half to get to Ardbawn and she was being dismissed after less than ten minutes.

‘We’re a close-knit bunch here,’ added DJ. ‘Everybody gets on with everybody else.’

She wasn’t sure if he meant the town or the newspaper. She stood up too.

‘Thanks for seeing me,’ she said.

‘You’re sure you could do fashion and beauty?’ He scratched the back of his head as he looked at her appraisingly.

‘Absolutely,’ she assured him. ‘And the horoscopes and recipes too. No bother at all.’

‘Right so. I’ll be in touch.’

‘Thanks.’ She smiled at him and stretched out her hand. As he crushed it again, she rather wished she hadn’t.

It was still raining when she got into the car and edged back on to the main road. Heavier if anything now, and once again the wipers swiped across the windscreen in a mild frenzy. She
was driving cautiously over the bridge when the bright red umbrella of a woman who’d been crossing the road ahead of her was jerked out of her hand by the wind and whirled into the air towards the car. The woman stopped in the middle of the road. Sheridan jammed on the brakes and aquaplaned to a halt, narrowly avoiding both the pedestrain and a signpost saying ‘Bawnee River’, where the umbrella had ended up.

Her hands were shaking as the woman finished crossing the road. When she reached the pavement she shrugged apologetically before hurrying along the main street. All Sheridan had time to see was her huge dark eyes in her paper-white face. The driver of the car behind honked his horn, because the Beetle was now blocking the road. Sheridan restarted the engine with trembling fingers and drove as far as the plaza, where, spotting a vacant space, she parked the car and released a relieved sigh.

When the car had skidded on the wet surface, she’d been terrified that she wouldn’t be able to avoid the woman in front of her. It wouldn’t have been her fault – if the woman hadn’t stopped so suddenly in the middle of the road there wouldn’t have been any chance of hitting her – but she reckoned that it wouldn’t have done her chances of a job with the
Central News
any good if on her first visit to Ardbawn she’d killed one of the locals.

She was feeling too shaky to drive, so she got out of the car and sprinted across the plaza (which she could now see was called The Square – a name she felt could have done with some editorial input) to a small café with a blue facade and bedraggled flower baskets handing outside.

The café was warm and steamy and three of the eight
tables were occupied by women chatting. A lone man sat at the fourth, reading a magazine with a picture of a large green tractor on the cover. Sheridan ordered a cappuccino and a doughnut and picked up a copy of the
Central News
that had been left on the table.

Before coming for her so-called interview, she’d checked the paper’s website (a professional-looking job she’d had to admit, so Shimmy was clearly good at what he did) and had eventually managed to get hold of the previous week’s print edition. Now she browsed through the most recent paper, noting that – as with the one she’d seen – almost all of the stories had a bias towards Carlow, Kilkenny and Ardbawn, with most of them being about issues affecting Ardbawn itself. This week the paper focused on the preparations for the town’s Spring Festival, the issue of unfinished houses on the estate near the Dublin road, a medal for local girl Jacinta Halpin in an Irish dancing competition and the designation of new no-parking areas near St Raphaela’s school. The sports pages were almost exclusively about Ardbawn events, while the fashion and beauty section was bland: a new miracle diet (Sheridan loved her food too much to ever last more than two days on any diet), the latest raincoats (timely, she reckoned), the top six waterproof mascaras (equally timely) and a foolproof way of doing your own French manicure.

Horoscopes were near the back and written by someone called Phaedra. Hers told her that it was time to take the plunge. She glanced out of the window at the rain-sodden streets and wondered if the astrologer was talking practically or metaphorically.

The remainder of the paper was devoted to advertisements, with a double-page spread for O’Malley’s print works and
more for other O’Malley companies. Sheridan had done some additional digging on Paudie O’Malley’s business empire over the last few days and discovered that it was more extensive than she’d realised. It was amazing to think that someone like him was holed up in a backwater like Ardbawn. But maybe he had his reasons. And perhaps she could blow the lid on them. She suddenly felt as enthusiastic and empowered as she had at the beginning of her redundancy, optimistic about possibilities instead of broken by realities.

She’d just got back into her car when her mobile rang.

‘Is that Sheridan?’

‘Yes.’

‘DJ Hart here.’

‘Hi, DJ.’

‘Listen to me, love, I’ve talked to the other candidate.’

She glanced at her watch. It was nearly one thirty. ‘That was quick.’

‘Yeah, well, it was all set up and I knew it wasn’t going to take much time. So here’s the thing . . .’

She didn’t care that she wasn’t going to get a job in Ardbawn. It was a pity, but it didn’t matter. She felt good about herself again. She’d get something, somewhere. She wouldn’t mind what it was.

‘I want you to come and work for us, pet. You’re by far the most suitable person.’

It took her a second to realise he was offering her the job.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure. For God’s sake, none of the other feckers who applied have a qualification at all. They’re just looking for a bit of work experience. And the thing is that I need someone who knows what they’re doing. You mightn’t
have thought so because you’re used to a big organisation, but we’re a busy office. There’s lots going on. At least you know how it works. And sure, we need the woman’s touch anyway.’

Sheridan was pretty certain that any employment tribunal would be horrified at the idea that DJ wanted her to work for them to bring a woman’s touch.

‘Myra keeps the whole show on the road,’ said DJ. ‘I know you can do that too.’

‘You hardly spoke to me,’ Sheridan pointed out.

‘You said enough.’

‘I’m still in Ardbawn,’ she said. ‘Should I come back and talk some more?’

‘Sure. We can get it all done and dusted today.’

‘I’ll be there in a few minutes,’ she said.

Taking the plunge, she said to herself as she switched on the wipers and headed back towards the commercial centre. Fulfilling my destiny. Getting a job, at last.

Having her umbrella ripped out of her hand by the wind and almost freezing with terror in front of a moving car hadn’t done Nina’s nerves much good. Her mind had been totally fixed on the letter from Sean’s solicitor when she’d stepped out on to the main street, her view of the oncoming traffic partly obscured by the umbrella that was now being carried downstream by the fast-running river. She’d been lucky that the driver of the car had reacted so quickly. Nina felt a wave of sympathy for the woman, who, she was sure, had received just as much of a fright as she’d done herself. She’d walked home quickly, alert for oncoming traffic, although the road to the guesthouse was relatively quiet. As a method for sorting out her jumbled thoughts, the walk hadn’t been very successful, but at least her tiredness was now of the physical rather than the mental kind.