The Year I Met You (22 page)

Next, I’m supposed to connect the water pump to the piping, but I can’t. It is too complicated and frustrating and I’m mumbling and grumbling and cursing to myself when I hear a voice behind me.

‘Hi, Garden Girl.’

It is not you. I know that straight away. I jump and drop the scissors into the basin.

‘Shit. Monday. Hi. Sorry. You gave me a fright. I’m just. Feck. My scissors. I’ll just … there. This thing,’ I sigh, and wipe my sweaty face. ‘I’m trying to build a water fountain.’

I’m on the ground, in a hole, and from down here Monday is even more majestic than usual. He is in a navy-blue suit and instead of wearing his tie, he is wearing an amused expression on his face, one which is fixed and directed solely at me. I steal a quick glance over at you. I catch you looking away quickly, as if I haven’t caught you, and return to concentrating on varnishing the table with the kids in that cheery scout leader voice that you’ve managed to keep up for almost an hour now.

‘I called you a few times but you were in your own world,’ he says, smiling. He lowers himself to his haunches. ‘What have you got here?’

‘A great big mess.’ I show him what I’m supposed to be doing.

‘May I?’

‘Please.’

He reaches out his hand and I take it, and allow him to pull me up out of the hole I dug. Not a sign. Not even a symbol. An actual thing that’s happening. As soon as my skin touches his I don’t know if it’s just me but I feel it all over my body. He doesn’t step back from the edge of the hole and I’m pulled up close to his body, my nose touching the fabric of his shirt, able to see the flesh beneath the open buttons of his shirt. I would like to stay there for ever, feeling his hard body next to mine, but instead I clumsily move away, unable to look at him in case he sees how he’s flustered me. He takes off his jacket, and I bring it inside for him, taking the opportunity to clean myself up, fix my hair, my eyeliner, defluster myself. When I return, he has rolled up his shirtsleeves and he’s on his knees on the grass, brow furrowed in concentration as he works on connecting the water pump to the piping. I try to make small talk but he’s busy concentrating and I feel like a pest, so I watch him for a while, then feel wrong for admiring him in all the wrong ways, then sneakily steal looks at you and your children varnishing the table. Apart from Fionn, who has deserted the task and is sitting in one of the chairs playing on an iPad, the other two are having fun. You are animated, engaged, communicative, funny. You are a good father, and I’m sorry for saying that you weren’t. The cynical side of me wonders if this is all a show for me after what I said last night, but then I see the genuine looks and sounds of happiness and am ashamed of myself for thinking that once again it is all about me. I then have an argument with myself about feeling ashamed considering all that you have done in the past, how you have let Heather down and the fact you threw a glass at my head. The winner of that argument is me; you deserve me to mistrust you so.

Monday is looking at me and I snap out of my trance. He has obviously said something and is waiting for an answer. I wait for him to repeat it but instead I’m embarrassed to see him shift his gaze to follow mine. His eyes settle on you.

‘His voice is familiar. Is that Matt Marshall?’

‘Yes.’

Monday is neither impressed nor unimpressed, and I’m surprised by how I feel about that. I don’t want him jumping up and down declaring that he is a fan and running across the road for an autograph, but I ready myself in a nervous kind of way for his dislike of you, as if I’m ready to defend you. It’s a peculiar response, considering I’m supposed to despise you so much, particularly after the way you hurt Heather. If we were in a relationship I would have to leave you and move far far away. Which is what your wife did, come to think of it. Perhaps you have that effect on people.

‘This is going to take me a few minutes longer,’ Monday says, fixing me with a look that makes me smile.

‘You don’t have to do this.’

‘I know. But it might give you a few more minutes’ thinking time about the job. You’ve seemed to have needed a lot of that.’

I bite my lip. ‘Sorry. You said I had a month to decide.’

‘Tops. We can talk about it after I do this, if that’s okay.’

I look at the wires in his hand. ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’

‘I bought an old cottage in Skerries and did it up myself. New roof, new plumbing, new electrics. Took me a few years, but it’s habitable now. Don’t worry, I haven’t blown anything up. Yet.’

I try to picture him in his little cottage in the sleepy town of Skerries, wearing an Aran sweater and buying his fresh fish daily from a fisherman, but I can’t. All I can see is him, naked from the waist up, ripping up floorboards and stripping wallpaper with enormous power tools in his hands.

‘Do you have time to talk after?’ Registering my blank stare, he adds, ‘We had arranged to talk today …’

The penny drops. ‘Ah. I thought you meant over the phone, which is why I’m … we never actually agreed a time, but today is fine.’

He seems embarrassed that he has shown up unexpected on a Sunday, or is there something more to his awkwardness? If so, it is quickly covered up. Or perhaps I’m imagining it, kidding myself that I can see that vulnerable side of him, that he’s dropped by unannounced because he genuinely wants to see me. In the flash that passes between us I believe that is a possibility, but now it’s business as usual – or not quite, as he is destroying a perfectly good suit as he bends over a hole in my garden.

Thirty minutes later, as I have prepared tea for me and coffee for him, Monday and Heather are sitting at the kitchen table. Heather is telling him about her jobs. She is always proud of her work and finds it the easiest thing to talk about around strangers. I like that she does this, she is good at conversation, though I worry about her security. I don’t want her to tell random men about her weekly schedule in case they turn up where she is. I’m not worried about her telling Monday, obviously. Nor is she, because when she is finished, she asks him about his job.

‘I’m a headhunter,’ he says. ‘My job is to identify suitable candidates who are employed elsewhere to fill business positions.’

‘Isn’t that like cheating?’

‘Not really.’ He smiles. ‘I don’t like cheating. I see myself more as a problem-solver. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. I put the right people in the right places. Because sometimes people aren’t in the place that they should be.’

We catch each other’s eyes when he says that. He doesn’t speak slowly, as if she’s incapable of understanding, or loudly as though she is deaf, though she does wear a hearing aid. His sentences are short and simple, to the point.

Heather then starts to tell him about me, about my jobs – a simplified version, the version I’ve told her over the years. I’m confused as to what she’s doing, thinking she surely has misunderstood his job, but then I realise that she’s trying to sell me to him, which touches me so much I stop moving and can’t quite figure out what I’m doing. I’m completely transfixed, overwhelmed that Heather would do this for me, that she would
know
to do this for me. He is a person who gets people jobs and she is trying to get me a job. She lists my attributes and comes up with anecdotes to illustrate those attributes. It is something she has learned to do herself when attending a job interview and she has applied it to me.

She begins each sentence with ‘Jasmine is …’ The first sentence she completes with ‘kind’ and then gives an example of my kindness. She tells him I paid for her apartment.

‘Jasmine is smart,’ she says. ‘One day we were in the supermarket car park and Jasmine found twenty euro by the ticket machine. Beside it was an appointment card for somebody’s doctor appointment. So Jasmine posted the money and the appointment card to the doctor and told him that the person you have on this date at this time dropped their money in the car park on this date.’ She beams. ‘Isn’t that smart?’

‘That’s definitely very smart.’ He smiles.

I hope she’s finished now; it’s lovely but difficult to listen to praise. Instead she continues, ‘Jasmine is generous,’ and I shake my head and go back to what I was doing.

One peek at Monday shows me he’s touched. He is looking at her intently, fixated on her. He must sense that I’m watching because he looks over at me, smiles gently, then I have to start moving again. He doesn’t always understand her, he asks her to repeat some things; despite years of therapy, her speech isn’t so clear, but though I have understood everything, I stop myself from interrupting. She is not a child. She doesn’t need a translator.

‘Jasmine sounds like a great person,’ he says, eyes on me again. ‘And I agree. I think lots of people would be lucky to have her.’ I’m not looking at him but I can see him from the corner of my eye, the angle of his face on mine, and every single move I make is sloppy, while my heart bangs and my stomach flutters. I fumble with the milk carton, spill milk on the counter when trying to pour it into the jug.

‘She is,’ Heather agrees.

‘And you’re a great sister to say that about her.’

The next thing she says sends me into an emotional spin and catapults me out of the room so fast that even Monday has the brains to leave, and text me later – from his personal mobile – that he would like me to call him when I have the time.

‘I’m her big sister. When our mum died, she told me I’m the big sister and I have to look after Jasmine. I do all of these other things, but protecting Jasmine is my main job.’

18

First thing on Monday morning I’m woken by the sound of a lawnmower right outside my window. This hurts me on many levels. Firstly because it is just after eight a.m. and is generally an intrusive sound, and secondly because I had a bottle of red wine before going to bed. Perhaps I’m lying about the amount, it could have been more and it also could have been an entirely different spirit, but I’m feeling it today, the thud, thud, thud that penetrates my skull right to my brain cells, killing them as it does, and then drills back through to the back of my head where I feel it pulsating on the pillow. The thoughtless lawnmower user could be any of the four retired couples around us who work to their own schedule, avoiding any thought of others’, particularly as they know that I no longer have a job. It could be anyone, but already I know it is you. I know that it is before even lifting my head up from the pillow, because it goes on far too long. Nobody in the world has that much grass; only an inexperienced gardener would take that long. When I look outside it is as though you have been waiting for me to appear. You glance up immediately and give me a big fine wave. I see the sarcasm dripping from every pore. Then you turn the lawnmower off, as if you have succeeded in doing what you set out to do, and make your way across the road to my house.

I can’t move. I am too dizzy, I really need to lie down again, but you are at the door, pressing the bell, too loud, for too long, as though you have a finger on a bruise on my skin and are pushing it in short bursts of Morse code torture. I collapse on the bed, hoping that if I ignore you, you will go away, but apparently like every other problem, you do not, you only get worse. In the end it is not you that moves me, it is the sight of the bottle of vodka beside my bed that catapults me – at the pace of a snail – out the door.

I pull the front door open and daylight burns holes in my eyes. I grimace, and cower, retreat back into the safety of the darkened, curtain-closed room. You follow me in.

‘Yikes,’ you say at the sight of me, sounding too much like Dr Jameson. ‘Good morning.’ You are overly cheerful and loud, sprightly. Annoyingly so. If I didn’t know better, I would think you must have watched me drink myself into a drunken stupor, then deliberately got up early, the earliest I have known you to have risen, so you could make a racket outside my window. What’s more you have forced yourself to be cheerful, the most cheerful I have ever known you to be.

My intention is to say ‘hi’, but it comes out as a deep croak.

‘Wow,’ you say. ‘Rough night? All rock’n’roll over here at number three on a Sunday night.’

I grunt in response.

You walk around and start opening the curtains, and the window, which makes me shudder and reach for the cashmere blanket on the couch where I have collapsed. I wrap it around me and look on warily as you make your way to the kitchen, which is all open-plan – my entire downstairs is completely open-plan – and then you start rooting around in the cupboards.

‘The lemon bowl,’ I say weakly.

You stop. ‘What’s that?’

‘Your keys. In the lemon bowl.’

‘I’m not looking for my keys, I’m not locked out.’

‘Hallelujah.’

‘Why the lemon bowl?’

‘Glad you asked.’ I smile. ‘Because I think of you as a lemon.’

‘Isn’t it you that’s the bitter twisted one?’ you say, and my smile fades.

You continue to move around the kitchen. I hear cups, I hear paper rustle, I smell toast, I hear the kettle. I close my eyes and nod off.

When I wake you are holding a mug of tea and buttered toast towards me. My stomach heaves but I’m hungry.

‘Have that, it’ll help.’

‘From the expert,’ I say groggily, sitting up.

You sit in the armchair across from me, beside the window that is so bright I have to squint. You look almost angelic with the light cast on you, your right side seeming to blur at the edges as though you’re a hologram. You give a weary sigh, nothing saintly about that. The sigh, I realise, is not because you’re tired. You look rejuvenated somehow, flushed from the fresh early morning air, your clothes smelling of cut grass. You’re weary because of me.

‘Thanks,’ I say, remembering my manners.

‘About the other night …’ you begin.

I grunt and wave my hand dismissively at you, and sip my tea. It is sweet, sweeter than how I usually take it, but I like it. It is good for now. It is not vodka and for that my body says thank you. I don’t want to talk about the other night, about what happened between me and you.

‘I’m sorry I threw the glass at you.’