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Sisters and Lies Page 10


  ‘So, is it serious?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far, but there’s definitely great chemistry.’

  ‘Thanks for sharing,’ Artie said, kicking my leg.

  ‘You’re welcome.’ I smiled, kicking him back. ‘The only problem is, he’s terribly handsome and successful.’

  ‘God, that’s an awful problem, all right.’

  ‘No, really,’ I muttered. ‘I’m not sure I can measure up.’

  For a moment, Artie’s face lost its playful expression. ‘Jesus, Evie, are you still going on with that aul’ nonsense?’ He sounded annoyed.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘The self-loathing thing. I thought you might have grown out of it.’

  I was too taken aback to answer.

  But then, quick as a shot, he reached over and gently placed a hand on mine. ‘Christ, Evie, that was a terrible thing to say. I’ve obviously had too much to drink.’

  For a moment we just stared at each other and in that instant a surge of electricity ripped through me, nearly knocking me off my chair. But if Artie felt it too, he didn’t show it. Instead he silently removed his hand and averted his gaze.

  Soon after, he stood up and said, ‘I should probably get going.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ I pleaded. ‘We haven’t seen each other in six years. Plus you just mortally offended me back there.’

  He looked at me, his eyes unsure. Unsettled.

  ‘Just one more drink,’ I said. ‘Then I promise to release you back to your fiancée unharmed, and with a full pardon.’ To defuse the tension, I cast him a big goofy grin.

  Still he stood there.

  ‘Artie, seriously, relax! I’m not mortally offended, I promise. I’m just glad to have bumped into an old friend.’

  It was only then that Artie’s face appeared to soften, the word ‘friend’ seeming to have clinched things. He sat down again and, as he did so, he cast me a smile – so small and beautiful it made me ache. It reminded me of when we’d been together, young and in love. It reminded me of hope. Of beauty.

  It reminded me of dawn rising over the Leitrim hills.

  I had been a virgin the first time with Artie.

  Obviously.

  We’d met on an evening course in Leitrim, painting with watercolours, a subject in which Artie had approximately zero interest but reckoned he’d meet loads of women through. He did, except that all the women were about fifty-five, and then there was me. Just gone twenty-one and recovering from a botched suicide attempt. I’d lost most of the weight by that stage and got rid of the glasses and mousy hair, but the old nose still loomed, large as ever.

  Not that Artie was a perfect specimen himself. In fact, I’d go as far as to say he was the dorkiest man I’d ever seen: all limbs and angles and curly hair.

  ‘What the hell is evening primrose oil?’ he’d whispered, during the second class, as we’d stood mixing colours.

  ‘What?’ I said, trying to ignore him.

  ‘All the women keep talking about it. They’re all on it. Is it E for old people?’

  I couldn’t help laughing. ‘No, you madzer. It’s for the menopause. E for old people! You’re such an eejit.’

  This was how it went with Artie. I laughed about ninety per cent of the time I was with him, which was ninety per cent more than I’d laughed in my previous existence.

  He kissed me one night after he’d cajoled me to go for a coffee with him and I nearly jumped out of my skin. ‘Christ alive, what was that for?’

  ‘It wasn’t for anything,’ he said. ‘I like you.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, and promptly ran away from him up the road, like he’d attempted to remove my chastity belt.

  I stuck with the watercolours class, though, and by the tenth session I’d even managed to stand still while we kissed. I didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to be doing and, to be honest, I don’t think Artie did either. We just made it up as we went along.

  It took us ages even to contemplate the possibility of sex, and fair play to Artie, he never pushed me. But sometimes I could feel his frustration that I was so slow-moving.

  ‘Did you have a bad experience?’ he asked, after I’d slapped his hand away from ‘down there’ for the fortieth time.

  ‘No, not really. Kind of,’ I mumbled, thinking of Donnagh – of what he’d said and done. In particular, of what he’d done.

  ‘You know I don’t want to hurt you, Evie,’ Artie had murmured, and I’d dropped my head onto his shoulder, breathing in the warm smell of his skin. ‘And there are people you can talk to if it was, you know, assault or abuse or anything.’

  I looked up at him and shook my head. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ I said. Because it wasn’t. ‘It was just unpleasant. Nasty. It left me feeling ashamed of myself.’

  Artie had tilted my face up very gently. ‘Evie, I never want you to feel shame when you’re with me. Can’t you see that I love you?’

  I’d smiled at him then, a huge throb of happiness bursting in my brain and in my heart. It still took me ages to open myself up to him fully. And ages again before I could finally enjoy sex. But when I eventually did, oh, my.

  We shared a very beautiful year together. There was a lot of sex but also a lot of other things. Dog-walking (Artie had a dog called Mutt), sitting by lakes, driving lessons in Artie’s battered Toyota Corolla as he attempted to teach me the rudiments of motoring.

  My mother adored him. ‘Artie, you’ll take a piece of my apple tart home with you.’

  ‘Ah, now, Mrs Darcy, I can’t be robbing your baking every time I come here.’ Then he’d drop his voice: ‘Even if it is the best cake this side of the Shannon.’

  And she’d smile and give him the entire cake and say, ‘I’ll bake another one. It’s for you, Artie. Take it. Take it.’

  It was all very sweet, really.

  Even when she got sick he was amazing: making sure I passed my driving test, so I could bring Mammy to her hospital appointments; cutting the lawn; fixing taps. All the practical things. He was even there at the end, when it was just me and Rachel. Mammy had called him in on his own, and when he came back out he was crying, big child-tears.

  He wouldn’t tell me what she’d said, claimed it was a ‘secret between Kay and me’. But I partly guessed. Something about taking care of me, I imagined.

  She needn’t have worried. I knew Artie would always take care of me. I knew it in my bones.

  We had now finished the second drink and I was well up for more but Artie insisted he had to get home. ‘No, really, Evie. I told Shannon I’d be back by half nine. I genuinely have to go.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said, disappointment surging through me. The longer I spent with Artie, the less time I spent thinking about Donnagh.

  But it was more than that. Being with Artie was like a homecoming. We talked about Leitrim; we talked about people we knew and what they were doing now.

  ‘Tommy the Whale got married to a girl from Thailand,’ Artie said. ‘Sheena Reilly built a new house overlooking the Dolmen – you know, that lovely patch of land we used to go and pick blackberries in, remember?’

  Of course I did. And how we fed them to each other and gave each other big black mouths. I missed it all so much.

  ‘It’s been so great seeing you,’ he said, giving me a careful hug, handing over his business card. ‘Sure, maybe we could do this again some time. I’ll bring Shannon and you can meet her. Or you could come over to ours for dinner.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said, looking down at the card. We both knew I was never meeting Shannon.

  We stood in silence, the London throngs surging past us on the pavement.

  ‘Well, sure, I’ll be off, then,’ Artie said, giving me one final kiss on the cheek. Then he dug his hands into his jacket and marched off.

  ‘Have a nice life,’ I whispered after him, as I watched him walk away. It wasn’t long before he was just a speck among the crowd, and soon he had vanished completely.

  20.
>
  Rachel: day six, 7.30 a.m.

  In the end I allowed Donnagh to stay. Yes, he was my sister’s bully, but he was also her boyfriend. The relationship between them was clearly a lot more complex than I’d previously imagined. And, in any case, having him in the apartment suited my own ends. I wanted to find out more about Evie. About her movements in the lead-up to the crash.

  Even though DI Ainsworth seemed convinced Evie had been trying to commit suicide, I wasn’t so sure. The pictures Donnagh had taken in Paris showed a happy, smiling woman. If she was so ecstatic why would she want to end her life? Why would she be in a relationship at all?

  ‘Are you absolutely sure?’ Donnagh said, as if surprised by my about-turn. ‘I really don’t want to stay here if there’s going to be bad blood between us.’

  ‘No, I want you to stay,’ I said, meaning it. ‘But you have to promise me one thing – that when Evie gets through all this, you won’t blame her for concealing her identity. That you’ll apologize for what you did to her as a teenager …’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, bowing his head.

  Neither of us dared bring up the elephant in the room: if she gets through this.

  Before he left for work, I questioned him on the one thing that had been on my mind for ages: Evie’s relationship with drugs.

  Between spoonfuls of granola, Donnagh confirmed that, yes, she had used drugs, but he didn’t seem to think it was a major problem. ‘We smoked weed together at the weekend, and maybe I saw her doing coke once or twice, but I didn’t think she was out of control. She was just letting off steam.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I muttered. ‘Her best friend – well, her former best friend – Janet, thinks she had a serious problem.’

  Donnagh glanced at me. ‘Not that I could see. She didn’t seem so much different from any other young woman in London. She held down a job, she did a bit of class As. But everyone does. I’m sure you have.’

  ‘Of course,’ I muttered. I’d taken everything under the sun at one stage in my life. ‘But I didn’t crash into a wall and land in a coma.’

  ‘True,’ said Donnagh. ‘But who said the two things were linked? Didn’t the policeman say she was sober at the time of the accident?’

  ‘He did, yes.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  I wanted to believe him. I desperately, desperately did. Because the guilt I felt for neglecting Evie was eating away at me. Corroding me like acid.

  To distract myself, I decided to swerve off my normal route to the hospital and buy a new mobile. Janet was right: my current phone was a complete relic, plus this way I could check my emails without feeling pressured to write long, complicated responses.

  ‘Apple, Samsung. Or I can offer you one with a Windows operating system …’ the salesman – more salesboy – said, as he reeled off my options.

  ‘Yeah, anything that’s easy to operate. Plus I need to be able to use my Irish SIM card.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘For that you’re going to need an unlocked phone, which we can do. It’s going to cost you a lot in roaming charges, though.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said. Next, he guided me towards a swish display. ‘Your best bet is the iPhone 6. It’s simple to use. Totally idiot-proof.’

  ‘Are you saying I’m an idiot?’ I said, trying to make a joke. And failing.

  ‘Um, well, er …’ he stammered, colour flooding his cheeks.

  ‘Oh, listen, I didn’t mean … Look, I’ll take it,’ I babbled, thrusting my credit card in his direction.

  An hour later, ensconced in the corner of a café, I fiddled with my new gadget, relieved that the idiot-proof description seemed accurate. The man-boy in the mobile-phone shop had set up my gmail account, and for the first time since Evie’s crash, I clicked into my email. It was mostly junk – erectile dysfunction ads and numerous Groupon deals – plus some fan emails, too, redirected from my website. Normally I loved getting reader messages – the sense of connection I felt to people I’d never met still astonished me – but today I combed each message forensically for any mention of Evie’s accident. It could be only a matter of time before somebody heard something about it on the grapevine and leaked it to the press. Not that I was particularly famous – I was a writer, after all, not Beyoncé – but I had appeared on TV a couple of times, and I frequently wrote columns for some of the broadsheets. Frankly, it felt like a minor miracle that nobody at the hospital had blabbed.

  As I continued to scroll through, I spotted the link Janet had sent me about Donnagh, plus an email from Jacob, apologizing profusely for what I’d seen in Sandycove, begging me to return his calls. I stared at it for ages, my fingers hovering over the keypad. It would be so easy to type a few lines and re-establish contact. Forget everything that had gone before. But then I thought about the half-naked woman, about Jacob desperately wanting a child, and reached the same conclusion: we needed to end it. For good.

  As I was thinking about this, my eyes fell on another email, just arrived, with the words ‘So sad!’ in the title box. Something about it unsettled me, but I clicked into it anyway, curious to know what it was all about.

  Dear Rachel,

  Such a shame, what happened to your sister. So beautiful. So much to live for. I’ll be watching over you, just to make sure you’re okay. Watching your lovely body.

  TBM

  I read it a few times, confused. Who was this? And what did TBM stand for? Unable to resist, I clicked a link at the bottom of the page, and found myself redirected to a new website – something called The Better Misogynist. The homepage was slick and monochrome, featuring what I could only presume was our eponymous hero, a handsome, dark-haired man in profile smoking a cigar. The tagline was short and to the point: ‘For the discerning woman-hater’.

  I scanned the page quickly, trying to find out the real name of this TBM guy, but when nothing was forthcoming, I homed in on his blog posts. The most recent one was entitled ‘Fuck you, Feminazi’, and when I read it, I was shocked to discover it was about me: a long, bitter piece referencing Evie’s accident and claiming karma was getting its own back for my ‘anti-man’ stance. To top it off, TBM had created some kind of meme: my head superimposed on the body of a porn star, getting shagged from behind by a guy in Nazi uniform.

  For a moment I felt overcome with nausea, a sudden desire to smash my new phone against the wall. But I forced myself to breathe, to catch hold of my anger. So much for keeping Evie’s accident under the radar, this bastard would put paid to that. But who the hell was he? And, more importantly, what did he want?

  A few minutes later, as I packed up my things to leave, I noticed that my hands were trembling. ‘For fuck sake, Rachel, cop yourself on.’

  It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. In the past I’d received lots of sexually explicit stuff from men – it went with the territory, if you were a writer who wrote about feminist issues, as I did.

  But something about this seemed different.

  Thoughts of Jacob came back to me again. If only we were still together, he’d reassure me about this nut-job. Tell me he’d protect me. I looked at my phone again, tempted to reopen gmail and contact him. Then logic swooped in. Jacob and I had ended things. It was done. There was no point in breaking the scab. It would just be more painful next time round.

  ‘Keep moving forward,’ I whispered, as the noise and din of the café swirled around me. Wasn’t that my golden rule? The rule I lived my life by? Do not dwell, Rachel. That way madness lies. All you have is the moment. The current moment. Everything else is gone.

  21.

  That night, at Janet’s insistence, I went around to her house for the evening.

  ‘Hey, hen,’ she said, hugging me and taking my coat. ‘You okay? You look pale.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ I nodded. ‘Just tired.’

  The truth was, I’d found it hard to get that stupid email out of my head. But there was no way I was going to tell Janet abo
ut it. She’d blow it out of proportion, think it meant more than it did. I just needed to forget about it. Forget I’d ever seen it.

  A tall West Indian man came up behind Janet, and introduced himself. ‘Nice to meet you, Rachel,’ he said. ‘I’m Patrick. I was so sorry to hear about Evie.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, choosing not to bring up Evie’s attempted seduction of him just a few months previously.

  ‘Any change?’ Janet said quietly.

  ‘No,’ I said, shaking my head.

  Janet had gone to the trouble of cooking dinner (‘Mince and tatties, sweetheart, don’t get too excited’), and though my appetite had shrunk to almost non-existent, I did my best to get through some of it.

  Sensing my low mood, the two did their best to cheer me up – Janet by telling me outrageous stories from the secondary school where she taught, and Patrick explaining what it was like being of West Indian origin in England – ‘They think I should be able to play cricket. Personally I like darts.’

  At the end of the night, when I’d said goodbye to Patrick, and Janet was walking me towards the door, she finally brought the conversation around to Evie again. ‘Have the doctors said anything positive?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Just that most people wake up between two weeks and a month.’

  ‘Well, it’s only been, what, less than a week?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I shrugged. ‘There’s still time.’

  ‘And what about Donnagh? Have you seen him again?’

  ‘I’m living with him.’

  Janet rocked back a little. ‘You’re what?’

  ‘We’re sharing Evie’s flat. I told you, didn’t I?’

  ‘No, you damn well didn’t,’ she said. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said, placing my hand on her shoulder. ‘Stop freaking out.’

  ‘He’s a stranger, Rachel. He could be a psychopath.’

  ‘Don’t be so melodramatic! He’s my sister’s boyfriend. He’s from Leitrim.’

  ‘A fact he didn’t tell you,’ she put in.

  ‘No, but then again he thought Evie was from Clare.’