How to Fall in Love
Cecelia Ahern

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013

This edition published by Harper 2016

Copyright © Cecelia Ahern 2013

Cover design by Heike Schüssler © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Cecelia Ahern asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007350513

Ebook Edition © May 2016 ISBN: 9780007483907

Version: 2017-08-14

Praise for Cecelia Ahern

‘Cecelia Ahern’s novels are like a box of emeralds … they are, one and all, dazzling gems’

Adriana Trigiani, author of The Shoemaker’s Wife

‘Beautiful and unexpected … both thought-provoking and life-affirming’

Sunday Express

‘Intricate and emotional … really completely lovely’

Grazia

‘A wry, dark drama’

Daily Mail

‘Life-affirming, warm and wise’

Good Housekeeping

‘Cecelia Ahern is an undisputed master when it comes to writing about relationships … Moving, real and exquisitely crafted.’

Heat

‘Exceptional … both heartbreaking and uplifting’

Daily Express

‘Both moving and thought-provoking’

Irish Independent

‘An exquisitely crafted and poignant tale about finding the beauty that lies within the ordinary. Make space for it in your life’

Heat

‘An unusual and satisfying novel’

Woman

‘Ahern cleverly and thoughtfully turns the tables, providing thought-provoking life lessons.’

Sunday Express

‘An intriguing, heartfelt novel, which makes you think about the value of life’

Glamour

‘Insightful and true’

Irish Independent

‘Ahern demonstrates a sure and subtle understanding of the human condition and the pleasures and pains in relationships’

Barry Forshaw

‘Utterly irresistible … I devoured it in one sitting’

Marian Keyes

‘The legendary Ahern will keep you guessing … a classic’

Company

Dedication

For David, who taught me how to fall in love

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Cecelia Ahern

Dedication

1. How to Talk a Man Down

2. How to Leave Your Husband (Without Hurting Him)

3. How to Recognise a Miracle and What to Do When You Have

4. How to Hold on for Dear Life

5. How to Take Your Relationship to the Next Level

6. How to Quiet Your Mind and Get Some Sleep

7. How to Build Friendships and Develop Trust

8. How to Sincerely Apologise When You Realise You Have Hurt Someone

9. How to Enjoy Your Life in Thirty Simple Ways

10. How to Make an Omelette Without Breaking Eggs

11. How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found

12. How to Solve a Problem Like Maria

13. How to Recognise and Appreciate the People in Your Life Today

14. How to Have Your Cake and Eat It

15. How to Reap What You Sow

16. How to Organise and Simplify Your Life

17. How to Stand Out from the Crowd

18. How to Make Absolutely Everything Okay Again

19. How to Pick Yourself Up and Dust Yourself Off

20. How to Stand Up and Be Counted

21. How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the World

22. How to Solve Will and Inheritance Disputes in Eight Easy Ways

23. How to Prepare Yourself for a Goodbye

24. How to Wallow in Your Despair in One Easy Way

25. How to Ask for Help Without Losing Face

26. How to Find the Positive in a Catch-22

27. How to Celebrate Your Achievements

Acknowledgements

Q & A

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Cecelia Ahern

About the Publisher

1
How to Talk a Man Down

They say lightning never strikes twice. Untrue. Well, it’s true that people say it; it’s just untrue as a fact.

NASA-funded scientists discovered that cloud-to-ground lightning frequently strikes the ground in two or more places and that the chances of being struck are about forty-five per cent higher than what people assume. But what people mostly mean to say is that lightning never strikes the same location on more than one occasion, which is also untrue as a fact. Though the odds of being hit by lightning are one in three thousand, between 1942 and 1977 Roy Cleveland Sullivan, a Park Ranger in Virginia, was hit by lightning on seven different occasions. Roy survived all the lightning strikes, but he killed himself when he was seventy-one, shooting himself in the stomach over what was rumoured to be unrequited love. If people dispensed with the lightning metaphor and instead just said what they meant, it would be that the same highly unlikely thing never happens to the same person twice. Untrue. If the reason behind Roy’s death is true, heartbreak carries its own unique brand of sorrow and Roy would have known better than anyone that it was highly likely that this highly unlikely misfortune could occur again. Which brings me to the point of my story: the first of my two highly unlikely events.

It was eleven p.m. on a freezing cold December night in Dublin and I found myself somewhere I had never been before. It is not a metaphor for my psychological state, though it would be apt; what I mean is that I literally had never geographically been to the area before. An ice-cold wind blew through the abandoned Southside housing development, causing an unearthly tune to play through broken windows and flapping scaffolding materials. There were gaping black holes where there should have been windows, unfinished surfaces with menacing potholes and upturned flagstones, pipework-cluttered balconies and exit routes, wires and tubing that began randomly and ended nowhere, the place a stage set for tragedy. The sight alone, nothing to do with the minus-degree temperature, made me shudder. The estate should have been filled with sleeping families, lights out and curtains drawn; instead, the development was lifeless, evacuated by owners who had been left to live in ticking time-bombs with fire-safety concerns as long as the list of lies they were told by builders who failed to deliver on the promise of luxury living at boom-time prices.

I shouldn’t have been there. I was trespassing, but that wasn’t what should have concerned me: it was dangerous. To the conventional ordinary person it was unwelcoming; I should have turned around and gone back the way I came. I knew all these things and yet I ploughed on, debating with my gut. I went inside.

Forty-five minutes later I stood outside again, shivering, trembling and waiting for the gardaí as the 999 operator had instructed me to do. I saw the ambulance lights in the distance, which were quickly followed by the unmarked garda car. Out leapt Detective Maguire, unshaven, messy-haired, rugged if not haggard, whom I’ve since learned to be an emotionally hassled, pent-up jack-in-the-box ready to explode at any moment. Though his general appearance might have been a cool look for a member of a rock band, he was a forty-seven-year-old detective on duty, which took the stylish away from him and highlighted the seriousness of the situation I’d found myself in. After directing them to Simon’s apartment, I returned outside to wait to relay my story.

I told Detective Maguire about Simon Conway, the thirty-six-year-old man I’d met inside the building who, along with fifty other families, had been evacuated from the estate for safety reasons. Simon had talked mostly about money, about the pressure of having to pay the mortgage on the apartment he wasn’t allowed to live in, and the council, which had a case pending to stop paying for his replacement accommodation, and the fact that he had just lost his job. I relayed my conversation with Simon to Detective Maguire, what I’d said exactly already fuzzy, and I jumped between what I thought I’d said and what I realise I should have said.

You see, Simon Conway was holding a gun when I came across him. I think I was more surprised to see him than he was about my sudden appearance in his abandoned home. He seemed to assume I’d been sent there by the police to talk to him, and I didn’t tell him that wasn’t the case. I wanted him to think I’d an army of people in the next room while he held that black weapon in his hand, waving it around as he talked while I fought hard not to duck, dive and, at times, run from the room. While panic and fear welled inside me, I tried to coax him, soothe him into putting the gun down. We talked about his children, I did my best to show him a light in his darkness, and I managed to successfully talk Simon into putting the gun down on the kitchen counter so I could call the gardaí for help, which I did. When I hung up, something happened. My words, though innocent – and which I know now I should have left unsaid at that point – triggered something.

Simon looked at me, and I knew he wasn’t seeing me. His face had changed. Alarm bells rang in my head but before I had a chance to say or do anything else, Simon picked up the gun and held it to his head. The gun went off.

2
How to Leave Your Husband (Without Hurting Him)

Sometimes, when you see or experience something really real, it makes you want to stop pretending. You feel like an idiot, a charlatan. It makes you want to get away from everything that is fake, whether it is innocently and harmlessly so, or something more serious – like your marriage. This happened to me.

When a person finds themself jealous of marriages that are ending, that person must know that theirs is in trouble. That’s where I had found myself for the past few months, in the unusual way when you can know something but not really know it at the same time. Once it had ended I realised that I’d always known the marriage wasn’t right. When I was in the midst of it, I had felt moments of happiness and a general sense of hope. And while positivity is the seed of many a great thing, wishful thinking alone does not make a good foundation for marriage. But the event, the Simon Conway experience, as I was calling it, helped to open my eyes. I’d witnessed one of the most real things in my life and it made me want to stop pretending; it made me want to be real and for everything in my life to be true and honest.

My sister Brenda believed my marriage break-up was due to a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder and pleaded with me to talk to someone about it. I informed her I was already talking to someone, the internal conversation had begun quite some time ago. And it had, in a way; Simon just hastened the eventual epiphany. This of course was not the response Brenda had in mind; she meant a conversation with someone professionally trained, not a drunken ramble over a bottle of wine in her kitchen at midnight, midweek.

My husband, Barry, had been understanding and supportive in my hour of need. He too believed that the sudden decision was a part of some ripple effect from the gun blast. But when he realised – as I packed my belongings and left our home – that I was serious, he was quick to call me the most vile things. I didn’t blame him, though I wasn’t fat and never had been, and was intrigued to learn I was much fonder of his mother than he believed. I understood everyone’s confusion and inability to believe me. It had a lot to do with how well I had hidden my unhappiness and it had everything to do with my timing.

On the night of the Simon Conway experience, after I’d realised the bloodcurdling scream had come from my own mouth, and after I’d called the police for the second time and statements had been taken for reports to be filed, after the Styrofoam cup of milky tea from the local EuroSpar, I’d driven home and done four things. First, I had a shower in an effort to cleanse myself of the scene; second, I thumbed my well-read copy of How to Leave Your Husband (Without Hurting Him); third, I woke him with a coffee and a slice of toast to tell him that our marriage was over; and fourth, when probed, I told him that I had witnessed a man shoot himself. In retrospect, Barry had more detailed questions about the shooting than about the end of our marriage.

His behaviour since then has surprised me, and my own astonishment equally shocked me, because I thought I was well-read on such matters. I had studied before this great big life test, I had read up on how we both would and could be feeling if I ever decided to end the marriage – just to prepare, to be aware, to figure out if it was the right decision. I’ve had friends whose marriages have ended, I’ve spent many late nights listening to both sides. Yet it never occurred to me that my husband would turn out to be the kind of man he became, that he would have a complete personality transplant, become as cold and vicious, as bitter and malicious as he has become. The apartment, which was ours, was now his; he would not let me step one foot inside it. The car which was ours was now his; he would not let me share it. And anything else that was ours, he was going to do everything in his power to keep. Even the things he didn’t want. And that was a direct quote. If we’d had kids he would have kept them and never let me see them. He was specific about the coffee machine, possessive about the espresso cups, quite frantic about the toaster and had a rant about the kettle. I allowed him to flip out in the kitchen, as I did in the living room, the bedroom, and even when he followed me into the toilet to shout at me while I peed. I tried to remain as patient and as understanding as I possibly could. I was always a good listener, I could hear him out; what I wasn’t so good at doing was explaining and I was surprised I needed to as much as he required. I was sure that deep down he felt the same about our marriage, but he was so hurt about it happening to him that he had forgotten how there were moments we both felt trapped in something that had been wrong from the beginning. But he was angry, and anger often deafens the ears to reality; his did, anyway, so I waited out the fits of rage and hoped that at some point we could talk about it honestly.

I knew that my reasons were right but I could barely live with the pain I felt in my heart over what I’d done to him. So I had that, and the fact I had failed to stop a man from shooting himself, weighing heavily on my shoulders. It had been months since I’d slept properly, now it felt as though I hadn’t slept at all in weeks.

‘Oscar,’ I said to the client sitting in the armchair across from my desk. ‘The bus driver does not want to kill you.’

‘He does. He hates me. And you wouldn’t know because you haven’t seen him or the way that he looks at me.’

‘And why do you think that the bus driver feels this way about you?’

He shrugged. ‘As soon as the bus stops, he opens the doors then glares at me.’

‘Does he say anything to you?’

‘When I get on, nothing. When I don’t, he kind of grumbles at me.’

‘There are times when you don’t get on?’

He rolled his eyes and looked at his fingers. ‘Sometimes my seat isn’t free.’

‘Your seat? This is new. What seat?’

He sighed, knowing he’d been found out, and confessed. ‘Look, everyone on the bus stares, okay? I’m the only one who gets on at that stop and they all look at me. So because they all stare I sit in the seat behind the driver. You know, the sideways one that faces the window? It’s like a window seat, all tucked away from the rest of the bus.’

‘You feel safe there.’

‘It’s perfect. I could sit in that seat all the way into the city. But sometimes there’s this girl sitting there, this special needs girl; she listens to her iPod and sings Steps for the entire bus to hear. If she’s there, I can’t get on and not just because special needs people make me nervous but because it’s my seat, you know? And I can’t see if she’s on it until the bus stops. So I check the seat to see if it’s free, then I get off if she’s there. The bus driver hates me.’

‘How long has this been going on?’

‘I don’t know, a few weeks?’

‘Oscar, you know what this means. We’re going to have to start this again.’

‘Ah man.’ He buried his face in his hands and slumped right down. ‘But I was halfway into the city.’

‘Be careful not to project your real anxiety onto another future fear. Let’s knock this on the head straight away. So, tomorrow you are going to get on the bus. You are going to sit anywhere there is a free seat on the bus and you are going to sit on it for one stop. Then you can get off and walk home. The next day, Wednesday, you will get on the bus, sitting anywhere, and you will stay on it for two stops and then walk home. On Thursday you will stay on for three stops, and on Friday for four stops, do you understand? You have to take it bit by bit. Small steps and you will eventually get there.’

I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince. Him or me.

Oscar slowly lifted his face up. It had drained of all colour.

‘You can do this,’ I said gently.

‘You make it sound so easy.’

‘And it’s not easy for you, I understand that. Work on the breathing techniques. Soon it won’t be so difficult. You will be able to stay on the bus all the way into the city, and that feeling of fear will be replaced by euphoria. Your worst times will soon become your happiest because you will be overcoming huge challenges.’

He looked unsure.

‘Trust me.’

‘I do, but I just don’t feel brave.’

‘The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.’

‘One of your books?’ He nodded at the packed shelves of self-help books in my office.

‘Nelson Mandela.’ I smiled.

‘Pity you’re in recruitment, you would make a good psychologist,’ he said, pulling himself up from the chair.

‘Yeah, well, I’m doing this for both of us. If you can manage to sit on the bus for more than four stops, it will broaden your job opportunities.’ I tried to hide the tension from my voice. Oscar was a highly qualified whizz-kid scientist who I could easily get a job for – in fact I had, three times already – but due to his travel issues, his job opportunities were limited. I was trying to help him overcome his fears so I could finally place him in a job that he would show up to every day. He was afraid to learn how to drive and I couldn’t stretch myself to becoming a driving instructor, but he had agreed to beat his public transport fear at least. I glanced at the clock over his shoulder. ‘Okay, make an appointment for next week with Gemma, and I look forward to hearing about how you got on.’

As soon as the door closed behind him I dropped my smile and scoured the bookshelf for one of my ‘How to …’ collections. Clients marvelled at the amount of books I kept, and I believed I alone kept my friend Amelia’s small bookshop open. The books were my bibles, my go-to fix-it helpers when I was personally lost or needed solutions for troubled clients. I’d been dreaming of writing one for the past ten years but had never gotten any further than sitting at my desk and turning the computer on, ready, wired to tell my story, only to end up staring at the white screen and the flashing icon, the blankness before me mirroring my creative flow.

My sister Brenda said I was more interested in the idea of writing a book than actually writing it, because if I really wanted to write, I just would, every day, by myself, for myself, whether it was a book or not. She said a writer felt compelled to write whether they had an idea or not, whether they had a computer or not, whether they had a pen and paper or not. Their desire wasn’t determined by a specific pen brand or colour or whether their latte had enough sugar in it or not – things that were distractions and obstacles to my creative process whenever I sat down to write. Brenda often came out with pathetic insights but I feared that for once her observation of me might be true. I wanted to write, I just didn’t know if I could, and if I ever made a start I was afraid I’d discover that I couldn’t. I’d slept with How to Write a Successful Novel by my bed for months but I hadn’t opened the pages once, afraid that not being able to follow the tips would mean I could never write a book, so I hid it in the bedside locker instead, parking that particular dream until the time was right.

I finally found what I was looking for on the shelf. Six Tips on How to Fire an Employee (With Pictures).

I’m not sure the pictures helped, but I’d had a go at standing in front of the bathroom mirror and trying to emulate the concerned look on the employer’s face. I studied the notes I’d made on a Post-it inside the front page, unsure whether I was going to be able to do this. My company, Rose Recruitment, had been in operation for four years and was a small practice of four people, and our secretary, Gemma, helped us function. I didn’t want to let her go, but due to increasing personal financial pressures I was having to consider it. I was reading my notes when there was a knock on the door, quickly followed by Gemma’s entry.

‘Gemma,’ I squeaked, fumbling guiltily with the book in an effort to hide it from her. As I was stuffing it into an already crammed shelf, I lost my grip and sent it plummeting to the floor, where it landed at Gemma’s feet.

Gemma giggled and bent down to pick up the book. Noting the title, she flushed. She looked at me, surprise, dread, confusion and hurt all passing on her face. I opened and closed my mouth, no words coming out, trying to remember which order the book had told me to break the news, the correct phrasing, the correct facial expressions, the tips, clarity, empathy, not too emotional, communicate with candour or without candour? But it took me too long and by then she already knew.

‘Well, finally one of your stupid books worked,’ Gemma said, her eyes filling as she dumped the book in my arms and turned, grabbed her bag and stormed out of the office.

Mortified, I couldn’t help but be insulted by the emphasis on finally. I lived by these books. They worked.

‘Maguire,’ the unwelcoming voice barked down the phone.

‘Detective Maguire, it’s Christine Rose.’ I put a finger in my free ear to block the sound of the ringing phone wailing through the wall from reception. Gemma still hadn’t returned after storming out, and as I hadn’t been able to bring everybody together to work out how to share Gemma’s duties, my colleagues Peter and Paul were refusing to do the job of someone who had been unfairly dismissed. It was everyone against me, regardless of how many times I told them it had been a mistake. ‘I didn’t mean to fire her … today’ was not a good defence.

It was quite simply a disastrous morning. But although it was obvious I needed to keep Gemma on – something I was sure Gemma was trying to prove – my bank balance disagreed. I still had to pay half the mortgage on the home Barry and I owned together, and from that month on I would have to fork out an extra six hundred euro to rent a one-bedroom apartment while I waited for us to sort it all out. Considering we’d have to sell an apartment that nobody wanted, for an eventual price that neither of us could really survive on, I imagined I would be digging into my savings for a very long time. And even in the event desperate times called for desperate measures, Barry had already waged a war on my jewellery collection, taking every piece he had ever given me and keeping it for himself. That was the voicemail I’d woken up to that morning.

‘Yeah?’ was Maguire’s response, far from ecstatic to hear from me, though I was surprised he remembered my name.

‘I’ve been calling you for two weeks. I’ve left you messages.’

‘I got them all right, they clogged up my voicemail. There’s no need to panic. You’re not in any trouble.’

That knocked me off. It hadn’t crossed my mind that I would be in any trouble. ‘That’s not why I was calling.’

‘No?’ He feigned surprise. ‘Because you still haven’t explained to me what you were doing in a deserted apartment block on private property at eleven o’clock at night.’

I was silent as I mulled this over. Almost everybody I knew had asked me the same thing – those who hadn’t were clearly wondering about it – and I hadn’t given anybody an answer. I needed to change the subject quickly before he tried to pin me down on it again.

‘I had been calling to ask for further details on Simon Conway. I wanted to know the funeral arrangements. I couldn’t find anything in the papers. But that was two weeks ago, so I’ve missed it.’ I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. I was calling him for more information; Simon had left an enormous hole in my life and endless questions in my head. I couldn’t rest without knowing everything that had happened and had been said after that day. I wanted his family’s details so I could tell them all the beautiful things he’d said about them, how he loved them so much and how his actions had nothing to do with them. I wanted to look them in the eye and tell them I had done all that I could. To ease their pain or ease my guilt? What was wrong with wanting both? I didn’t want to sound so desperate as to ask Maguire those exact questions, and I knew he wouldn’t tell me anyway, but I couldn’t just draw a line under what I had experienced. I wanted, I needed more.

‘Two things. Firstly, you shouldn’t get so involved with any victim. I’ve been in this game a long time and—’

‘Game? I watched a man shoot himself in the head right before my very eyes. This is not a game to me.’ My voice cracked, which I took as a hint to stop.

There was silence. I cringed and covered my face. I’d blown it. I gathered myself and cleared my throat. ‘Hello?’

I waited for a smart response, something cynical and cold, but it didn’t come. Instead his voice was soft, the background wherever he was had gone quiet and I was worried everyone had stopped to listen to me.

‘You know we have people in here to talk to after an event like this,’ he said, gently for once. ‘I told you that night. I gave you a card. Do you still have it?’

‘I don’t need to talk to anyone,’ I said angrily.

‘Sure.’ He dropped the nice-guy act. ‘Look, as I was saying before you interrupted me, there are no funeral details. There was no funeral. I don’t know where you got your information but they’ve been telling you porkies.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Porky pies, lies.’

‘No, what do you mean, there was no funeral?’

He sounded exasperated at having to explain something that was glaringly obvious to him. ‘He didn’t die. Yet, anyway. He’s in hospital. I’ll find out where. I’ll put a call through to them to let them know you’re able to see him. He’s in a coma though, won’t be doing much talking.’

I froze, speechless.

There was a long silence.

‘Is there anything else?’ He was on the move again; I heard a door bang and then he was back in the room with the loud voices.

I struggled to formulate a single thought as I slowly sank into my armchair.

And sometimes when you witness a miracle it makes you believe that anything is possible.

3
How to Recognise a Miracle and What to Do When You Have

The room was still and quiet, the only sounds the steady beeping of Simon’s heart monitor and the whoosh of the ventilator as it assisted his breathing. Simon was the polar opposite of how I’d last seen him. Now he looked peaceful, the right side of his face and head bandaged, the left side serene and smooth as if nothing had happened. I chose to sit on his left side.

‘I saw him shoot himself,’ I whispered to Angela, the nurse on call. ‘He held a gun up right here,’ I gestured, ‘and pulled the trigger. I saw his – everything – go everywhere … How did he survive?’

Angela smiled, a sad smile, not really a smile at all, just muscles working around her lips. ‘A miracle?’

‘What kind of a miracle is that?’ I continued to whisper, not wanting Simon to hear me. ‘I keep going over it, over and over in my head.’ I’d been reading books about suicide and what I should have said, and they say that if you can get a person threatening suicide to think rationally, if they actually think about the realities of suicide and its aftermath, then they could, they might abort the decision. What they’re looking for is a quick fix to end the emotional pain, not to end their lives, so if you can help them see another way to ease the pain then maybe you could help. ‘I think, considering I had no experience, that I did okay, I think I really got through to him. I think he really responded to me. For a moment, anyway. I mean, he put the gun down. He let me call the guards. I just don’t know what it was that sent him back into that head space.’

Angela frowned as though hearing or seeing something she didn’t like. ‘You know this isn’t your fault, don’t you?’

‘Yeah, I know.’ I shrugged it off.

She studied me, thoughtful, and I concentrated on the right wheel of the hospital bed, how it caused a black scuff mark when it was moved each time, lots of scuff marks back and forth, and I tried to count how many times it had been moved. Dozens, at least.

‘You know there are people you can talk to about this kind of thing. It would be a good idea to get your concerns out.’

‘Why does everyone keep saying that?’ I laughed, trying to sound carefree but deep down feeling the anger burning in my chest. I was tired of being analysed, tired of people treating me as though I was someone who needed to be handled. ‘I’m fine.’

‘I’ll leave you with him for a while.’ Angela stepped away, her white shoes silent on the floor as if she was floating.

Now that I had come, I didn’t quite know what to do. I reached out for his hand but then stopped myself. If he was aware, perhaps he would not want me to touch him, maybe he blamed me for what had happened. It had been my job to stop him and I hadn’t. Perhaps he had wanted me to change his mind, he had been willing me to say the right words, but I’d failed him. I cleared my throat, looked around to make sure no one was listening and I leaned in closer to his left ear but not so close as to startle him.

‘Hi, Simon,’ I whispered.

I watched him for a reaction. Nothing.

‘My name is Christine Rose, I’m the woman you spoke to on the night of … the incident. I hope you don’t mind my sitting with you for a while.’

I listened for something, anything, and studied his face and hands for signs that he was upset by my presence. I didn’t want to cause him any more pain. When all on the surface remained as it was, calm and still, I sat back in the chair and got comfortable. I wasn’t waiting for him to wake up, I didn’t have anything I wanted to say to him, I just liked being there, in the silence, by his side. Because when I was by his side I wouldn’t be anywhere else, wondering about him.

At nine p.m., after visiting hours, I still hadn’t been asked to leave. I guessed regular hours didn’t count for someone in a condition such as Simon’s. He was in a coma, on a life-support machine, and his condition wasn’t improving. I spent the time thinking about my life and Simon’s and how our coming together had irrevocably changed both of our lives. It had only been a few weeks since Simon’s attempted suicide, but it had sent my life spiralling in another direction. I wondered if it was pure coincidence or if me being in that random place had been fate.

‘What were you doing there?’ Barry had asked me, confused, sleepy, sitting up in bed with his scrunched-up face, his tiny eyes enormous after he’d reached for his black-rimmed glasses on the bedside chest and put them on. I hadn’t known how to answer him then; I wouldn’t know how to answer him now. To say it out loud would be embarrassing, it would highlight how ludicrously lost I had found myself – the irony of that statement not lost on me.

Aside from what I was doing there, the fact I’d chosen to engage with a man with a gun in a deserted building was enough to cause me to question myself. I liked to help people but I wasn’t sure it was just about that. I saw myself as a problem-solver and I applied that thinking to most aspects of life. If something couldn’t be fixed, it could at least be changed, particularly behaviour. My belief system was born of having a father who was a fixer. It was in his nature to ask the problem and then set about fixing it as he did for his three girls growing up without their mother. Because he lacked Mum’s instinct to know if things were right with us or not and he had no one else to discuss it with, he would question us, listen to the answer, then seek out the solution. It was his way and it was what he felt he could do for us. Left with three children under the age of ten, the youngest only four years of age, a father does what he can to protect his children.

I run my own recruitment agency, which sounds basic enough, only I prefer to think of myself as a matchmaker, finding the right person for the right job. It’s important to bring the right energy for the right company, and vice versa, what the company can do for a person. Sometimes it’s just mathematics, an available job for an available person with the appropriate skills; other times, when I get to know the person, like Oscar, I really go beyond the call of duty when it comes to placing them. The people I deal with have different emotions about their goals, some because they’ve lost their jobs and are under great stress, others simply fancy a career change and are anxious but full of happy expectation, and then there are the ones who are stepping into the workplace for the first time, excited about new beginnings. Regardless, everyone’s on a journey, and I’m in the middle of that. I’ve always felt the same responsibility for each of them – to help them find the right place in the world. And yet, using that philosophy, my words had landed Simon Conway in this room.

I didn’t want to leave him alone, and returning to a borrowed flat with no television and nothing to do but stare at the four walls did not appeal to me. I had many friends who I could have stayed with, but as they were mutual friends of mine and Barry’s, they were slow to offer, reluctant to get in the middle of the mess, to be seen to be taking sides, especially when it was me who was coming out looking like the bad one, the big bad wolf who’d broken Barry’s heart. It was better for me not to put them through that stress. Brenda had invited me to come and stay with her, but I couldn’t put up with my sister fretting about my supposed post-traumatic stress disorder. I needed to come and go as I pleased without any questions being asked, especially ones about my sanity. I wanted to feel free – that’s why I’d left my marriage in the first place. The fact that I felt more at home in an intensive care unit than I did anywhere else said a lot.

So here was the thing I couldn’t tell Detective Maguire, or Barry, or my dad and two sisters, or anybody, really. There was a specific place I was trying to find to make me feel better about myself. I learned this from a book: How to Live in Your Happy Place. The idea was to choose a place that made you feel uplifted. It could be somewhere you connected with a memory that enriched your soul or simply a place where you liked the light, or a place that made you feel content for a reason you couldn’t recognise on a conscious level. Once you found that place, the book offered exercises to help you summon the same happy feeling you associated with that place absolutely any time and anywhere your heart desired, but it would only work if you had found the right place. I’d been looking. It’s what I was doing on the building site the night I met Simon Conway. It wasn’t the building site I was looking for, it was what used to be there before it became a building site. I had a happy memory there on that land.

It was a cricket match, Clontarf versus Saggart. I was five years old and Mum had died only a few months before and I remember it was a sunny day, the first after a long, dark, cold winter, and me and my sisters were there to watch Dad play. The entire cricket club was outside, I remember the smell of beer, and I can taste the saltiness on my lips from the packets of peanuts I was consuming one after another. Dad was bowling and it was close to the end of the match; I could see the intense look on his face, the look we’d been seeing every day for the past few weeks, the dark look with his eyes practically lost beneath his eyebrows. He went for his third bowl and the guy batting completely misjudged his swing and missed. The ball hit the wicket and the guy was out. Dad yelled so loudly and punched the air with such ferocity, everyone around us erupted in cheers. It frightened me at first, watching the mass hysteria, like they’d all caught some weird virus that I’d seen in a zombie movie and I was the only one who hadn’t been affected, but then as I watched Dad’s face I knew that it was okay. He was wearing the biggest smile, and I remember the looks on my sisters’ faces. They weren’t too bothered about cricket either – in fact, they’d moaned the entire way over in the car because they were being taken away from playing with their friends on the road – but they were watching him celebrating, being lifted onto his team mates’ shoulders, and they were smiling and I remember that was the moment I thought, We’re going to be okay.

I went to the development to get that feeling again, but when I got there I saw a ghost estate and I met Simon.

When I left Simon at the hospital that night I continued on my quest to find places that uplifted me. I’d been doing it for about six weeks by that stage and I’d already been to my old primary school, a basketball court where I’d kissed a boy I believed was way out of my league, my college, my grandparents’ house, the garden centre I used to go to with my grandparents, the local park, the tennis club where I spent my summers, and various other haunts that had been the location of good memories. I’d randomly dropped in on an old primary school friend’s house and proceeded to have the most awkward conversation I’d ever had, and immediately wished I hadn’t bothered going. I had visited her because when I was passing I had a sudden memory: the warm, sweet smell of baking in her kitchen. Every time I played there, her mother seemed to be baking. Twenty-four years on, the baking smell was gone, so was her mother, and in its place were my exhausted old friend’s two children, who were using her as a climbing frame and wouldn’t give us a second to talk, which was a blessing as we had nothing to say to one another anyway above the silent question on her lips: Why the hell did you come here? We weren’t even that close. Assuming I was going through something, she was polite enough not to say it out loud.

For the first few weeks, not finding my place didn’t bother me, the searching was a way of passing my time, but after three weeks my inability to find my place started to prey on my mind. Instead of re-energising me, it was in fact undoing the good memories that I had.

After that hospital visit, I was even more intent on finding a place. I needed a lift and knew that returning home to the magnolia-walled rental was not going to offer me any solace.

This was what I was doing the moment the highly unlikely event occurred for the second time in the same month to the same person.

4
How to Hold on for Dear Life

The streets of Dublin city were quiet on a Sunday night in December and it was bitterly cold as I made my way to the Ha’penny Bridge from Wellington Quay. Snow was threatened, but hadn’t come yet. The Ha’penny Bridge, officially known as Liffey Bridge, the charming old footbridge with its cast-iron railings spans the river, connecting the north of the city to the south. It came to be known as the Ha’penny because that was the toll when it was constructed in 1816. One of the most recognisable sights of Dublin, it’s especially pretty at night when the three decorative lamps are lit. I had chosen this place because as a part of my college degree, Business and Spanish, I had to live in Spain for one year. I don’t remember how close we were as a family before Mum died, but I most certainly remember us tightening our bonds afterwards and then, as the years went on, it seemed unfathomable that any of us would ever leave the fold. Going into my college course I knew that the Erasmus placement was an inevitable, unavoidable reality and at that stage I felt the overwhelming desire to sever those bonds and stretch my wings. As soon as I got there I knew it was a mistake; I cried all the time, couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, could barely concentrate on my studies. It felt as though my heart had been ripped from my chest and left at home with my family. My dad wrote to me every day, witty musings of his and my sisters’ daily life, which attempted to lift my spirits but only fuelled the homesickness even more. But there was one postcard in particular that helped me snap out of the chronic homesickness. Or rather, the homesickness was still there, but I was able to function. That postcard had been of the Ha’penny Bridge, at night time, with the Dublin skyline lit up in the background and all the colourful lights reflecting in the Liffey below. I had been enchanted by the image; I’d looked at the pixellated people and I’d tried to give them names and stories, places they were going, places they were coming from, familiar names going to and from locations I knew. I pinned it to my wall when I slept and carried it around in my college journal during the day. I felt like it was a part of home with me at all times.

I wasn’t stupid enough to think that this exact feeling would be replicated the moment I saw the bridge, because I saw the bridge almost every week. By this point I was well seasoned at searching for my happy place and knew it wouldn’t be instant, but I was hoping I could stand there and at least recall the emotion, the experience, the feelings. It was night, the skyline was lit up in the background, and although the new buildings along the docks created a different image from my old postcard, the reflection of the lights in the dark river still seemed the same. It had all the right elements of the postcard.

Apart from one thing.

A lone man, dressed in black, clinging to the outside of the bridge while he looked down into the cold river that ran swift and treacherous beneath him.

On the steps of the Wellington Quay entrance a small crowd had gathered. They were standing looking at the man on the bridge. I joined them in their shock, wondering if that was how Roy Cleveland Sullivan had felt when he was struck by lightning for the second time: Not again.

Someone had called the police and they were discussing how long it would take them to arrive, and how they might not get there on time. They were all debating what to do. I couldn’t help but see Simon’s face before he pulled the trigger and then afterwards, in intensive care, replaying the way his face had changed in his apartment before he picked up the gun. Something had triggered that moment. Could it have been what I said to him? I couldn’t remember the words I’d spoken; maybe it was my fault. I thought about his two little girls, waiting for their daddy to wake up, wondering why he wouldn’t wake up like he always did. Then I looked at the man on the bridge and thought about the countless lives that would be impacted by his need to end his pain, his inability to see another way out.

Suddenly, adrenalin pumped through my body and there was no other decision that I could make. I had no choice: I had to save the man on the bridge.

This time, I would do it differently. Since Simon Conway I had read a few books, trying to figure out what I’d done wrong, how I could have talked him round. The first step would be to focus on the man, ignore the commotion around me. The three people beside me were starting to argue about what to do, and that wasn’t going to help anyone. I put my foot on the step. I could do this, I told myself, feeling confident and in control.

The icy wind hit me like a slap across the face, telling me, ‘Wake up! Be ready!’ My ears were already aching from the cold and my nose was numb and starting to run. The tide was high in the Liffey, the water black, murky, malevolent, uninviting. I detached myself from the people waiting expectantly behind me, and tried to forget that every word I said and every shaky breath I took could be carried on the breeze to the spectators’ ears. My view of him grew clearer: a man in black, standing on the wrong side of the railings, his feet on the narrow ridge above the water, his hands clutching the balustrade. It was too late to go back now.

‘Hello,’ I called gently, not wanting to give him a fright and send him into the water. Despite trying to be heard above the breeze, I kept my voice calm and clear with an even tone and soft expression, remembering what I’d read: avoid sharp tones and maintain eye contact. ‘Please don’t be alarmed, I’m not going to touch you.’

He turned to look at me, then his eyes went straight back down to the river again, staring intently at the water. It was clear that I had barely penetrated the thoughts running through his mind; he was too lost in his head to notice.

‘My name is Christine,’ I said, taking slow, steady steps towards him. I stayed near the edge of the bridge, wanting to be able to see his face while I spoke.

‘Don’t come any closer!’ he shouted, his voice revealing his panic.

I stopped, happy with the distance; he was an arm’s length away. If I absolutely had to, I could grab him.

‘Okay, okay, I’m staying here.’

He turned to see how far I was from him.

‘Keep focus, I don’t want you to fall.’

‘Fall?’ He looked up at me quickly and then down again, then back up at me and our eyes locked. He was in his thirties, chiselled jaw, his hair hidden beneath a black woollen hat. His blue eyes stared back at me, big and terrified, pupils so large they almost took over his eyes, and I wondered whether he was on something or drunk. ‘Are you for real?’ he said. ‘Do you think I care if I fall? Do you think I got here by accident?’ He tried to zone me out again and concentrate on the river.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Leave me alone,’ he snapped, then added gently, ‘Please.’

Even in distress, he was polite.

‘I’m concerned. I can see you’re distressed. I’m here to help you.’

‘I don’t need your help.’ He blocked me out and focused on the water again. I watched his knuckles, wrapped around the iron, going from white to red as he tightened and loosened his grip. My heart hammered each time his grip loosened and I dreaded them letting go completely. I didn’t have much time.

‘I’d like to talk to you.’ I moved a tiny bit closer.

‘Please go away. I want to be on my own. I didn’t want any of this, I didn’t want a scene, I just want to do this. On my own. I just … I didn’t think it would take so long.’ He swallowed again.

‘Look, nobody is going to come near you unless I say so. So there’s no panic, no rush, you don’t need to do anything without thinking it through. We have a lot of time. All I ask is for you to talk to me.’

He was silent. More gentle questions led to no answers. I was ready to listen, ready to say all the right things, but my questions were being met by silence. On the other hand, he hadn’t jumped yet, at least there was that.

‘I’d like to know your name,’ I said.

There was nothing from him.

I pictured Simon’s face as he looked me in the eye and pulled the trigger. A wave of emotion rushed through me and I wanted to cry, I wanted to break down and cry. I wasn’t able for this. Panic welled inside me. I was on the verge of giving up and returning to the small crowd of spectators to tell them I couldn’t do it, that I didn’t want to be responsible for another victim, when he spoke.

‘Adam.’

‘Okay,’ I said, relieved he was engaging with me. I remembered a line in one of the books that said the person attempting suicide needed to be reminded that there were others thinking of him, loving him, whether he felt it or not, but I was afraid it would send him in the opposite direction. What if he was here because of them or because he felt he was a burden on them? My mind raced as I tried to figure out what to do; there were so many rules, and all I wanted was to help.

‘I want to help you, Adam,’ I said finally.

‘There’s no point.’

‘I’d like to hear what you have to say,’ I told him, remaining positive. Listen thoughtfully, don’t say ‘don’t’, don’t say ‘can’t’. I ran through everything I’d read. I couldn’t get it wrong. Not one single word.

‘You can’t talk me out of it.’

‘Give me a chance to show you that even though it may feel like this is the only option, there are many more. Your mind is so tired now – let me help you down. Then we can look at the choices. They may be hard to see at the moment, but they do exist. For the time being though, let’s get off the bridge, let me help you to safety.’

He didn’t answer. Instead he looked up at me. I knew that look, that familiar look. Simon had worn that expression too. ‘Sorry.’ His fingers loosened on the iron bars, his body leaned forward, away from the railings.

‘Adam!’ I dashed forward, pushed my arms through the wide railings and wrapped them tight around his chest, pulling him back so hard that he slammed into the railings. My body was pressed so close to the railings that his back was tight against my front. I buried my face in his woolly hat, squeezed my eyes shut and held on tight. I waited for him to pull away, wondered how I would keep my grip on him, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to for long if he used his strength to resist me. I waited for a spectator to come running and take over, hoped that the gardaí were nearby so that the professionals could step in. I was out of my depth – what did I think I was doing? I squeezed my eyes shut, rested my head on the back of his head; he smelled of aftershave, clean, like he’d just taken a shower. He smelled alive, like someone who was on his way somewhere, not someone who had been planning to jump off a bridge. He felt strong and full of life too; I could barely wrap my arms around his chest he was so broad. I held on to him, determined never to let go.

‘What are you doing?’ he panted, his chest heaving up and down.

I finally looked up and checked on the crowd behind me. There was no sign of garda lights, no sign of anyone coming to help me. My legs were trembling as if it was me that was staring down at the depths of the Liffey’s darkness.

‘Don’t do it,’ I whispered, starting to cry. ‘Please don’t do it.’

He tried to turn around and see me, but I was directly behind and he couldn’t see my face.

‘Are you … are you crying?’

‘Yes,’ I sniffed. ‘Please don’t do it.’

‘Jesus,’ he tried again to turn and look at me.

I was crying harder now, sobbing uncontrollably, my shoulders jumping up and down, my arms still wrapped around his chest, holding on for dear life.

‘What the hell?’ He moved some more, shuffled his feet along the edge of the ledge so he could turn his head and see my face.

Our eyes locked together.

‘Are you … are you okay?’ He softened a little, coming out of whatever trance-like state he had been in.

‘No.’ I tried to stop crying. I wanted to dry my nose, which was running like a tap, but I was afraid to let go of him.

‘Do I know you?’ he asked, confused, searching my face, wondering why I cared so much.

‘No,’ I said, sniffing again. I squeezed him tighter, hugging him like I hadn’t hugged anyone for years, not since I was a child, not since my mother held me.

He was looking at me like I was crazy, like he was the sane one and I had lost it. We were practically nose-to-nose as he studied my face, as if looking for far more than what he could see.

The spell between us was broken when some idiot watching from the quays shouted ‘Jump!’ The man in black started trying to wriggle out of my grip with a renewed anger.

‘Get your hands off me,’ he said, struggling to shake me off.

‘No,’ I shook my head. ‘Please, listen …’ I tried to compose myself before continuing: ‘It’s not what you think it’s going to be in there,’ I said, looking down and imagining how it would feel for him, staring into that darkness, wanting to end it all; how bad things must be for him to want that. He was studying me intently again. ‘You don’t want to end your life, you want to end your pain, the pain you’re feeling right now, the pain that I’m sure you wake up with and go to bed at night with. Maybe no one around you understands that, but I do, believe me.’ I saw that his eyes were filling, I was getting through to him. ‘But you don’t want to end it all the time, do you? Just sometimes it passes through your mind, probably more often lately than before. It’s like a habit, trying to think of different ways to end it all. But it passes, doesn’t it?’

He looked at me carefully, taking every word in.

‘It’s a moment, that’s all. And moments pass. If you hang in there, this moment will pass and you won’t want to end your life. You probably think that no one cares, or that they’ll get over you. Maybe you think they want you to do this. They don’t. No one wants this for anyone. It might feel as if there are no options, but there are – you can come through this. Get down and let’s talk about it. Whatever is going on, you can get through it. It’s a moment, that’s all,’ I whispered, tears running down my cheeks.

I took a sidelong glance at him. He swallowed hard. He was looking down now, thinking about it, weighing up his options. Live or die. Surreptitiously I scanned the bridge entrances on Bachelors Walk and Wellington Quay; still no gardaí, still no members of the public to help me. I was glad of that at this stage; I had managed to engage with him, I didn’t want anybody else to distract him, panic him, bring him back to that place again. I thought about what to say next, something that would make the time pass until professional help arrived, something positive that wouldn’t trigger any anger in him. But in the end I didn’t have to say anything because he spoke first.

‘I read about a guy who jumped in the river last year. He was drunk and decided to go swimming, only he got stuck under a shopping trolley and the currents swept him away. He couldn’t get out,’ he said, his voice cracking with emotion.

‘And you liked the sound of that?’

‘No. But then it will be over. After all that, it will be over.’

‘Or it will be the beginning of a new kind of pain. As soon as you’re in that water, no matter how much you want it, you’ll panic. You’ll fight it. You’ll struggle to take in oxygen and your lungs will fill with water because, even though you think you don’t want to live, your instinct will be to stay alive. It’s in you to want to stay alive. As soon as the water is drawn into your larynx, another natural instinct is for you to swallow it. Water will fill your lungs, which will weigh down your body, and if you change your mind and decide you want to live and try to get to the surface, you won’t be able to. And the thing is, there are so many people around you right now, they’re ready to dive in and rescue you – and do you know what? You think it’ll be too late, but it won’t be. Even after you lose consciousness, the heart will carry on beating. They can give you mouth-to-mouth and pump out the water and fill your lungs with air again. They could save you.’

His body was shaking and not just from the cold. I felt him go limp beneath my arms. ‘I want it to end.’ His voice shook as he spoke. ‘It hurts.’

‘What hurts?’

‘Specifically? Living.’ He laughed weakly. ‘Waking up is the worst part of my day. Has been for a long time.’

‘Why don’t we talk about this somewhere else?’ I said, concerned, as his body went rigid again. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to talk about his problems while he was hanging off the side of a bridge. ‘I want to hear everything you have to say, so let’s get down now.’

‘It’s too much.’ He closed his eyes and spoke more to himself. ‘I can’t change things now. It’s too late,’ he said quietly, leaning his head back so that it rested by my cheek. We were oddly close for two strangers.

‘It’s never too late. Believe me, it’s possible for your life to change. You can change it. I can help you,’ I said, my voice little more than a whisper. There was no reason for me to project; his ear was right there, at the tip of my lips.

He looked me in the eyes and I couldn’t look away, I felt locked in. He seemed so lost.

‘And what happens if it doesn’t work? If everything doesn’t change like you say it will?’

‘It will.’

‘But if it doesn’t?’

‘I’m telling you, it will.’ Get him off the bridge, Christine!

He studied me, his jaw hardening as he mulled it over. ‘And if it doesn’t, I swear I’ll do this again,’ he threatened. ‘Not here, but I’ll find a way, because I’m not going back to that.’

I didn’t want him dwelling on the negative, on whatever it was that had sent him here. ‘Fine,’ I said confidently. ‘If your life doesn’t change, it’s your decision what you do. But I’m telling you that it can. I’ll show you. You and me, we’ll do it together, we’ll see how wonderful life can be. I promise you.’

‘It’s a deal,’ he near whispered.

Dread immediately flooded my body. A deal? I hadn’t intended on making a deal with him, but I wasn’t going to discuss it now. I was tired. I just wanted him off the bridge. I wanted to be in bed, wrapped up, with all of this behind me.

‘You need to let go of me so I can climb over,’ he said.

‘I’m not letting you go. No way,’ I said sternly.

He half laughed, a tiny one, but it was there. ‘Look, I’m trying to get back on the bridge and now you won’t let me.’

I took in the height of the bars he needed to climb, then the drop below. This was going to be dangerous. ‘Let me call for help,’ I said.

Slowly I removed one hand from his chest, not totally trusting that he was going to keep his word.

‘I got here by myself, I can get back on the bridge by myself,’ he said.

‘I don’t like the idea of this. Let me ask someone to help.’ But he ignored me and I watched him trying to turn around, his large feet on the narrow ledge. He moved his right hand to a bar further away and shuffled his feet so that he could turn to face the bridge. My heart pounded as I watched, feeling helpless. I wanted to shout to the spectators to help, but shouting at that point would have given him a fright and sent him into the water. Suddenly the wind felt stronger, the air seemed colder and I was even more aware of the danger he was in after our brief respite. He angled his body to the right, twisting from his waist and preparing to swing his left foot over the water and turn to face the bars, but as he pivoted his weight on his right foot, it slipped off the narrow ledge. Somehow his left hand managed to grab the bar he had been reaching for just in time, leaving him hanging on with one arm. I heard the collective intake of breath from the spectators as I reached for his flailing right hand and clinging on tightly, used all my strength to pull him up. In that moment it was the fear in his eyes which terrified me the most, but on reflection it was that look that gave me strength, because the man who only moments ago had wanted to end his life was now fighting to live.

I helped pull him up, and he clung to the bars, eyes closed, taking deep breaths. I was still trying to compose myself when Detective Maguire came rushing towards us with a thunderous look on his face.

‘He wants to get back on the bridge,’ I said weakly.

‘I can see that.’ He pushed me aside and I had to look away while they manoeuvred Adam to safety. As soon as he landed on the bridge, we both sat down hard on the ground, all our energy spent.

Adam sat with his back pressed up against the railings; I sat opposite him on the other side, trying to stop my head from spinning. I tucked my head between my legs and took deep breaths.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked, concerned.

‘Yeah.’ I closed my eyes. ‘Thanks,’ I added.

‘What for?’

‘For not jumping.’

He grimaced, the exhaustion showing in his face and body. ‘Always happy to oblige. Seemed like it meant more to you than to me.’

‘Well, I appreciate it.’ I gave him a shaky smile.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’

‘Christine.’

‘Adam.’

He reached across and held out his hand. I moved from the railings to reach and as I took his hand in mine he held on tightly and looked me in the eye.

‘I look forward to you convincing me that this was a good idea, Christine. I think my birthday would be a good deadline.’

Deadline? I froze, my hand still wrapped in his. He’d said it softly, but it felt like a warning. Suddenly I felt faint, not to mention foolish, at the thought of the deal I’d agreed to. What had I done?

Despite wanting to take it all back, I nodded nervously. He shook my hand once, a firm single shake, in the centre of the bridge, and then he let go.

5
How to Take Your Relationship to the Next Level

‘What the hell were you doing there?’ Detective Maguire growled, pushing his face close to mine.

‘Trying to help.’

‘How do you know him?’ Meaning: him as well?

‘I don’t.’

‘So what happened here?’

‘I was just walking by and saw that he was in trouble. We were concerned you wouldn’t get here on time, so I thought I’d talk to him.’

‘Because your talking did so well the first time,’ he vented, then appeared to regret saying that. ‘Seriously, Christine, do you expect me to believe that story? You were “just walking by”? Twice in one month? Do you expect me to believe it was a coincidence? If you’re playing at being some caped crusader—’

‘I’m not. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I thought I could help.’ Getting angry at my treatment, I added: ‘And I did, didn’t I? I got him back on the bridge.’

‘Barely,’ he fumed. He paced before me.

From afar I could see Adam watching me with concern. I gave him a weak smile.

‘I don’t think this is funny.’

‘I’m not laughing.’

He studied me, trying to figure out what to do with me. ‘You can tell me about this from start to finish at the station.’

‘But I didn’t do anything wrong!’

‘You’re not under arrest, Christine. I need to file a report.’ He walked away, expecting me to follow him to the car.

‘You can’t take her too,’ Adam protested. He looked and sounded exhausted.

‘Don’t you worry about what we’re doing with her.’ Maguire adopted a different, much softer voice for Adam’s benefit, one I didn’t know existed within him.

‘Really, I’m fine,’ Adam objected as Maguire started helping him to the car. ‘It was a moment of madness. I’m fine now. I just want to go home.’

Maguire murmured supportive words but accompanied him to the car all the same, disregarding his wishes. While Adam was taken in one car, I was taken in another to Pearse Street station, where I was asked to tell my story again. It was obvious that Maguire wasn’t entirely convinced that I was telling the truth. The fact is, I was holding back and he knew it. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what I was really doing on the bridge or at the housing development. And I couldn’t tell it to the nice lady who came into the room after him, wanting to chat to me about my experience.

After an hour Detective Maguire told me I was free to leave.

‘What about Adam?’

‘Adam isn’t your concern now.’

‘But where is he?’

‘Being assessed by a psychologist.’

‘So when can I see him?’

‘Christine …’ he warned, trying to get rid of me.

‘What?’

‘What did I tell you about getting involved? There are taxis outside. Go home. Get some sleep. Try to stay out of trouble.’

So I left the garda station. It was midnight on a Sunday and the cold went straight to my bones; the streets were empty of traffic, apart from the odd taxi. The all-seeing Trinity College stood dark and empty before me. I don’t know how long I was standing there, trying to figure everything out, the shock finally sinking in, when the door behind me opened and I felt Maguire’s presence before I heard him.

‘You’re still here.’

I didn’t know what to say to that so I simply looked at him.

‘He’s been asking for you.’

My heart lifted.

‘He’ll be spending the night away. Can I give him your number?’

I nodded.

‘Get in a taxi, Christine,’ Maguire said, and threw me a look so threatening that I found myself hailing the nearest cab.

I went home.

Unsurprisingly I didn’t sleep. I sat up, my coffee machine keeping me company as I watched my phone and wondered if Detective Maguire had given Adam the correct number. When seven a.m. arrived and I heard cars on the road, I started to nod off. Fifteen minutes later my alarm clock woke me for work. Adam didn’t call me all day, then at six p.m. when I was turning off my computer, my phone rang.

We arranged to meet at the Ha’penny Bridge, which seemed right at the time as it was our only link to one another, but once we were both there, twenty-four hours after the incident, it felt inappropriate. He wasn’t on the bridge but standing beside it on Bachelors Walk, looking down at the water. I would have given anything to know what he was thinking.

‘Adam.’

At the sound of my voice, he turned. He was wearing the same black duffle coat and black woollen hat from the previous night, his hands shoved deep into his pockets.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, sure.’ He sounded shell-shocked. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Where did they take you last night?’

‘A few questions at the station, then St John of Gods for a psychological assessment. I passed with flying colours,’ he joked. ‘Anyway I called you because I wanted to thank you, in person.’ He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. ‘So, thank you.’

‘Okay. Well, you’re welcome,’ I replied, awkwardly, not knowing whether to shake his hand or give him a hug. All the signs indicated I should leave him alone.

He nodded then and turned to cross the road to Lower Liffey Street. He wasn’t looking where he was going and a car honked angrily as it narrowly missed running him over. He barely registered the sound and kept on walking.

‘Adam!’

He turned around. ‘Accident. Promise.’

I knew then that I would have to follow him. The hospital may have believed him, but there was no way I would leave him alone after what he’d been through. I pressed the pedestrian button for the lights to change but they were too slow; afraid I’d lose him, I waited for a gap in the traffic and ran across the road. Another car honked. I ran to get close to him and then slowed down, deciding I could make sure he was safe from afar. He turned right onto Middle Abbey Street and when he was around the corner and out of sight, I sprinted to catch up. When I rounded the corner, he was gone, as if he’d vanished into thin air. At that hour there were no businesses open for him to have disappeared into. I searched the deserted, dark street ahead and cursed myself for losing him, wishing I’d at least gotten his phone number.

‘Boo,’ he said suddenly, deadpan, as he stepped out of the shadows.

I jumped. ‘Jesus, Adam. Are you trying to give me a heart attack?’

He smiled at me, amused. ‘Stop pulling your Cagney and Lacey tricks on me.’

I felt my face redden in the dark. ‘I wanted to make sure you’re okay. I didn’t want to be in your face.’

‘I told you, I’m fine.’

‘I don’t think that you are.’

He looked away, blinking repeatedly as his eyes started filling again. I could see them sparkling under the lamplight.

‘I need to know that you’re going to be okay. I can’t just leave you. Are you going to get some help?’ I asked.

‘And how will all this amazing talking that people want to do with me fix anything? It won’t change what’s happening.’

‘What is happening?’

He backed away.

‘Okay, you don’t have to tell me. But are you at least relieved? That you didn’t jump?’

‘Sure. It was a big mistake. I regret going to the bridge.’

I smiled. ‘You see? That’s good – steps forward already.’

‘I should have gone up there,’ he said, lifting his gaze to Liberty Hall, the sixteen-storey building which was the tallest in Dublin’s city centre.

‘When’s your birthday?’ I said, remembering our deal.

He actually laughed.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked, running to catch up with him as he strode along O’Connell Street. My feet and hands were numb, so I was hoping we hadn’t far to go. He seemed to be walking aimlessly, without a destination in mind, which made me wonder whether death by frostbite was to be his next suicide method.

‘I’m staying in the Gresham Hotel.’ He looked up at the Spire. ‘Or I could have skydived and landed on that. It might have speared me right through the stomach. Or better yet, my heart.’

‘Okay, I’m starting to understand your humour. And it’s a bit sick.’

‘Thankfully the hospital didn’t think so.’

‘How did you get out of there?’

‘Charmed them with my boyish joy and wonder,’ he said, still straight-faced.

‘You lied to them,’ I accused. Adam shrugged. ‘Where do you live?’

He hesitated. ‘These days? Tipperary.’

‘And did you come to Dublin especially to …?’

‘Jump from the Ha’penny Bridge?’ He looked at me, amused again. ‘You Dubs are so arrogant. There are perfectly good bridges in the rest of the country, you know. No, I was here to see someone.’ We reached the Gresham Hotel and Adam turned to me. ‘Well, thank you. Again. For saving my life. Should I, I don’t know, give you an awkward kiss or a hug or … I know—’ He held up his hand in the air and I rolled my eyes before giving him a high-five.

And then I really didn’t know what to say next. Good luck? Enjoy your life?

He had no idea either, so the sarcastic comments continued to flow.

‘I should give you a gold star,’ he said. ‘Or a badge.’

‘I’d really prefer not to leave you right now.’

‘My birthday is in two weeks. Not that much can change in two weeks, but I appreciate you lying for me.’

‘It’s do-able,’ I said, more confidently than I felt. Two weeks? I’d been hoping that it was an entire year away, but if that’s what I had to work with, so be it. ‘I’ll use up my annual leave, then I can see you every day. It’s definitely possible,’ I said optimistically.

He gave me that same amused smile. ‘I’d really rather be alone now.’

‘So you can kill yourself?’

‘Can you keep your voice down,’ he hissed as a couple walked by and glanced suspiciously at us. ‘Again, thank you,’ he said, with less gusto. Then, leaving me on the pavement, he disappeared through the revolving doors. I watched him cross the lobby, then I followed him in. He was going to have a hard time shaking me off. He stepped into the elevator and, waiting until the last possible moment before the doors closed, I rushed forward and joined him. He looked at me blankly. Then he pressed the button.

We got out on the top floor and I followed him to the penthouse suite named the Grace Kelly Suite. As we entered the living room I could smell flowers. The door to the bedroom was open and I could see a bed sprinkled with rose petals, and a bottle of champagne sitting in a silver bucket at the end of the bed with two flutes criss-crossed. Adam glanced in at the bed, then away again as if the very sight of it offended him. He walked straight to the bureau and picked up a piece of paper.

I followed him. ‘Is that your suicide note?’

He winced. ‘Do you have to use that word?’

‘What would you rather I say?’

‘“Goodbye, Adam, it was nice meeting you”?’ He shrugged off his coat and threw it on the floor, then pulled off his hat and tossed it in the air. It narrowly avoided landing in the real fire which was smouldering in the marble fireplace. He collapsed on the couch, exhausted.

I was taken aback: I hadn’t expected to see a head of thick blond hair under the woollen hat.

‘What?’ he asked, and I realised I was staring at his beauty.

Sitting down on the couch opposite him, I took off my coat and gloves and hoped the fire would thaw me out quickly. ‘Can I read it?’

‘No.’ He moved it closer to his chest and folded it.

‘Why don’t you rip it up?’

‘Because.’ He placed it in his pocket. ‘It’s a memento. Of my trip to Dublin.’

‘You’re not very funny.’

‘Another thing to add to my list of things I’m not good at.’

I looked around at the set-up and tried to figure him out. ‘Were you expecting someone here tonight?’

‘Of course. I always arrange champagne and roses for pretty ladies who talk me off bridges.’

It was wrong and I knew it was wrong, but I celebrated inside that he’d called me pretty. ‘No, it must have been last night,’ I said, watching him. Despite the jokes and self-assurance, he was fidgeting. I reckoned those jokes were the only thing stopping him collapsing in a heap right there and then.

He got up and made his way over to the TV unit, opening the cupboard below to reveal a mini-bar.

‘I don’t think alcohol is such a good idea.’

‘I might be getting a soft drink.’ He gave me a wounded look and I felt guilty. He retrieved a Jack Daniel’s then threw me a cheeky look as he brought it back to the couch.

I didn’t comment but noticed that as he poured it into the glass his hands were trembling. I sat and watched him for a while and then, unable to take it any longer, I got one for myself, only I mixed mine with a soft drink. I’d made a pact with a man who tried to kill himself, then followed him to his hotel room, so why not get drunk with him too? If there was such a thing as a rulebook on moral integrity and responsible citizenship, I’d pretty much stamped all over it, so why not finish the job and throw it out the window? Besides, I was freezing to my bones and needed something to help thaw me out. I took a sip; it burned my throat all the way to my stomach and it felt good.

‘My girlfriend,’ he said out of nowhere, interrupting my thoughts.

‘What about her?’

‘That’s who I was expecting. I came to Dublin to surprise her. She’d said that I hadn’t been very attentive lately. Not present in her company, or whatever.’ He rubbed his face roughly. ‘She said we were in trouble. “In danger”, that was the expression she used.’

‘So you came to Dublin to rescue your relationship,’ I said, happy to finally be learning about him. ‘What happened?’

‘She was with another fella,’ he said, jaw tightening again. ‘In Milano’s. She said she was going there with the girls. We live in an apartment there on the quays, only I’ve been in Tipperary a while … Anyway, she wasn’t with the girls,’ he said bitterly, staring at the contents of his glass.

‘How do you know they weren’t just friends?’

‘Ah, they were friends, all right. I introduced them. My best friend Sean. They were holding hands across the table. They didn’t even see me walk in the restaurant. She wasn’t expecting me to arrive, I was supposed to be in Tipperary still. I confronted them. They didn’t deny it.’ He shrugged.

‘What did you do?’

‘What could I do? I left the place looking like a complete eejit.’

‘You didn’t want to hit Sean?’

‘Nah.’ He sat back, defeated. ‘I knew what I had to do.’

‘Attempt suicide?’

‘Will you stop using that word?’

I was silent.

‘Anyway what good would hitting him have done? Made a scene? Made me look an even bigger gobshite?’

‘It would have alleviated the tension.’

‘So violence is good now?’ He shook his head. ‘If I had hit him, you would have asked why didn’t I take a walk to cool down.’

‘Boxing your so-called friend, who clearly deserved it, is better than suicide. It wins hands down every time.’

‘Will you stop saying that word,’ he said quietly. ‘Jesus.’

‘That’s what you tried to do, Adam.’

‘And I’ll do it again if you don’t keep your side of the deal,’ he shouted.

His anger took me by surprise. He got up and made his way to the glass door leading out onto a balcony overlooking O’Connell Street and the rooftops of the Northside.

I was sure there was a lot more to Adam’s story than wanting to end his life because his girlfriend was cheating on him. That was probably the trigger to an already troubled mind, but it didn’t seem the right time to probe. He was tensing up again and we were both tired, we needed sleep.

Evidently he agreed. Keeping his back to me, he said, ‘You can sleep in the bedroom, I’ll take the couch.’ When I didn’t answer, he turned to face me. ‘I assume you want to stay.’

‘You don’t mind?’

He thought about it. ‘I think it might be a good idea.’ Then he turned back to look out over the city.

There was so much I could say to him to sum up the day, give him positive words of encouragement. I’d read enough self-help books: pick-me-up phrases were a dime a dozen. But none of them seemed appropriate now. If I was going to help him out of this, I would have to figure out not just what to say but when to say it.

‘Goodnight,’ I said. I left the bedroom door ajar, not liking that he was in the room with access to the balcony. I watched him through the gap as he took off his jumper, revealing a tight T-shirt beneath. I couldn’t help but look a little longer than necessary, trying to convince myself that I was doing it for his safety in case he suffocated himself with his own jumper. He sat down on the couch and put his feet up. He was too tall for it; he had to rest his feet on the arm, which made me feel guilty about taking the bed. I was about to say so when he spoke.

‘Enjoying the show?’ he asked, his eyes closed and his arms folded beneath his head.

Cheeks blazing, I rolled my eyes and moved away from the door. I sat on the four-poster bed, the glasses clinking beside me, the melted ice in the bucket tipping over and spilling on the bed. I placed it on the desk and I was reaching for a chocolate-coated strawberry when I noticed the notecard beside the display. It read, For my beautiful Fiancée, Love Adam. So he had come to Dublin to propose. Certain that I was only scratching the surface, I resolved to get my hands on that suicide note.

I had thought that the night I watched Simon Conway shoot himself, the night I left my husband, and every night since then had been the longest.

I was wrong.

6
How to Quiet Your Mind and Get Some Sleep

I couldn’t sleep. That wasn’t unusual, I’d practically been an insomniac for the last four months, ever since it had occurred to me that I wanted my marriage to end. It wasn’t a helpful thought. I had been searching for ways to find happiness, fulfilment, feelings of positivity, ways in which to rescue my marriage – not ways out. But as soon as I had the thought Escape, it wouldn’t go away, especially at night when I didn’t have anybody else’s problems to distract me from my own. Usually I ended up following my nightstand read, 42 Tips on How to Beat Insomnia, and as a result I’d tried soaking in warm baths, cleaning out my fridge, painting my nails, doing yoga – sometimes doing two or three simultaneously – at all hours of the morning, in hope of finding respite. Other times I’d settle for simply reading the book until my eyes got too sore and had to close. I never seemed to drift away as the book declared I’d be able to do; there was no such thing as the lightless and feathery feeling of drifting. I was either awake frustrated and exhausted, or I was asleep frustrated and exhausted, and I’d yet to experience that pleasant glide from one world to the next.

Though I had realised I wanted my marriage to end I never thought about actually ending it. For a long time I spent my nights worrying how I was going to live with my unhappiness, until eventually it occurred to me that I didn’t have to; the advice I gave to friends could actually apply to me. After that, I spent countless nights fantasising about a life with somebody else, somebody I truly loved, someone who truly loved me; we’d be one of those couples who seemed to have electricity sparking between them with every look and touch. Then I fantasised about me and just about every man I was attracted to, which became most men that were in any way kind to me. Including Leo Arnold – a client whose appointments I particularly enjoyed. Leo had become the subject of many of my fantasies, which caused me to become rosy-cheeked every time he stepped into my office.

Beneath it all, I recognise now, there was an underlying panic; panic that it was all too much for me to deal with, but now that I’d acknowledged it there was no making it go away. Each little problem between us was magnified till it became one more sign that we were doomed. Like when he finished before me in bed, again; when he slept with his socks on because his feet were always cold; and when he left his toenail clippings in a small bowl in the bathroom and never remembered to empty it in the bin. The way we barely kissed any more; those once-full kisses had been reduced to familiar pecks on the cheek. How bored I’d become with his stories, fed up with listening to him retell the same old rugby tales. If I were to judge my life in colours, which I’d learned to do from a book, our relationship had gone from a vibrant hue – at least, that’s how it was for a while, when we were dating – to a dull, monotonous grey. I wasn’t stupid enough to think that the flame would for ever burn brightly in a marriage, but I did think there should be at least a flicker remaining after less than a year of married life. Looking back, I think I fell in love with being in love. And now my love affair with the dream was over.

That night as I lay awake in the penthouse of the Gresham Hotel, all my worries started to pile up. The worry of having left Barry; the money woes that followed; what people thought of me; the fear of never meeting anyone ever again and being lonely for the rest of my life; Simon Conway … and now Adam, whose surname I didn’t know, who twenty-four hours ago had attempted to take his own life and was lying in the room next to mine on the couch beside a balcony with an impressive drop, beside a full mini-bar, and who was waiting for me to deliver on my promise of fixing his life before his thirty-fifth birthday in two weeks’ time or else he’d attempt to kill himself again.

Feeling nauseous at the prospect, I got out of bed and checked on him again. The TV was muted and the colours flickered and changed and danced through the room. I could see his chest lifting up and down. There were a number of options available to me, according to 42 Tips, to quiet my mind and get some sleep, but all I could manage while listening out for Adam was to drink camomile tea. I flicked the switch on the kettle for the fourth time.

‘Jesus, do you never sleep?’ he called.

‘Sorry, am I disturbing you?’

‘No, but the steam engine in there with you is.’

I pushed the door open. ‘You want a cuppa? Oh. I see you have enough to drink.’ Three small empty bottles of Jack Daniel’s sat on the coffee table.

‘I wouldn’t say enough,’ he said. ‘You can’t watch me twenty-four hours a day. Sooner or later you’re going to have to sleep.’ He finally opened his eyes and looked up at me. He didn’t look remotely tired. Or drunk. Merely beautiful. Perfect.

I didn’t want to tell him the real reason, or reasons, for my insomnia.

‘I’d prefer it if I could sleep in here with you,’ I said.

‘Cosy. But it’s a bit too soon after my break-up, so if you don’t mind, I’ll pass.’

I sat down on the couch anyway.

‘I’m not going to jump off the balcony,’ he said.

‘But you’ve thought about it?’

‘Of course. I’ve thought about the plethora of ways I could kill myself in this room. It’s what I do. I could have set myself on fire.’

‘There’s a fire extinguisher, I’d have put you out.’

‘I could have used my razor in the bathroom.’

‘I hid it.’

‘Drowned in the bath, or taken a bath with the hairdryer.’

‘I’d watch you in the bath, and nobody can find hairdryers in hotels.’

‘I’d have used the kettle.’

‘It can barely heat water, it couldn’t electrocute a mouse. It’s all noise and no action.’

He laughed lightly.

‘And that cutlery can barely cut through an apple, never mind a vein,’ I said.

He looked at the cutlery beside the fruit bowl. ‘Thought I’d keep that one to myself.’

‘You think about killing yourself a lot?’ I tucked my legs up under me and snuggled into the corner of the couch.

He dropped the act. ‘I can’t seem to stop myself. You were right, what you said on the bridge: it’s become like a really sick hobby.’

‘I didn’t quite say that. But you know there’s probably nothing wrong with you thinking about it, as long as you don’t act on it.’

‘Thank you. At least you won’t take my thoughts away from me.’

‘Thinking about it comforts you, it’s your crutch. I’m not going to take your crutch away, but it shouldn’t be your only way of coping. Did you ever talk to anyone about it?’

‘Yeah, sure, it’s the number one topic for speed-dating. What do you think?’

‘Have you thought about therapy?’

‘I’ve just had a night and day of it.’

‘I think you could do with more than a night and day.’

‘Therapy’s not for me.’

‘It’s probably the way to go at the moment.’

‘I thought you were the way to go.’ He looked at me. ‘Isn’t that what you said? Stick with me and I’ll show you how wonderful life can be?’

Again panic rose that he was placing all this trust in me.

‘And I’ll do that. I just wondered …’ I swallowed. ‘Did your girlfriend know how you were feeling?’

‘Maria? I don’t know. She kept saying I’d changed. I was distracted. Withdrawn. I wasn’t the same. But no, I never told her what I was thinking.’

‘You’ve been depressed.’

‘If that’s what you call it. It doesn’t help when you’re trying your best to be jolly and someone keeps saying you’re not the same, you’re down, you’re not exciting, you’re not spontaneous. Jesus, I mean, what else could I do? I was trying to keep my own bloody head above water.’ He sighed. ‘She thought it was to do with my father. And the job.’

‘It wasn’t those things?’

‘Ah, I don’t know.’

‘But they haven’t helped?’ I offered.

‘No. They haven’t.’

‘So tell me about the job that’s worrying you.’

‘This feels like a therapy session, me lying here, you sitting there.’ He stared up at the ceiling. ‘I was given leave by my job to go and help run my father’s company while he was sick. I hate it, but it was fine because it was temporary. Then Father got sicker, so I had to stay longer. It was hard to convince my job to extend the leave and now the doctor says Father’s not getting any better. It’s terminal. Then I found out last week that work are letting me go: they can’t afford for me to spend any more time away.’

‘So you lose your dad and your job. And your girlfriend. And your best friend,’ I summarised for him. ‘All in one week.’

‘Why, thank you so much for saying that all out loud for me.’

‘I have fourteen days to fix you, I don’t have time for tiptoeing,’ I said lightly.

‘Actually, it’s thirteen.’

‘When your dad passes away, you’re not expected to keep the position, are you?’

‘That’s the problem: it’s a family business. My grandfather left the company to my father, next it falls to me, and so on and so on.’

The tension was building just talking about it. Realising I needed to tread carefully, I asked, ‘Have you spoken to your father about not wanting the job?’

He laughed lightly, bitterly. ‘You clearly don’t know my family. It doesn’t matter what I tell him; the job is mine whether I like it or not. My grandfather’s will states that the company is my father’s for life, then it falls to my father’s children, and if I don’t join the business, then it reverts to my uncle’s son and his family inherit it.’

‘Surely that saves you.’

He buried his head in his hands and rubbed his eyes with frustration. ‘It screws me even more. Look, I appreciate you trying, but you don’t understand the situation. It’s too complicated for me to explain, but let’s just say it involves years and years of family shit and I’m smack bang in the middle of it.’

His fingers were trembling. He rubbed them on his jeans, up and down, up and down. He probably wasn’t even aware that he was doing it. Time to lift the mood.

‘Tell me about your job, the job you love.’

He looked at me, a rare playful look in his eye. ‘What do you think it is that I do?’

I studied him. ‘A model?’

He swung his legs off the couch and sat up. It was so quick I thought he was going to dive on me; instead he looked at me in shock. ‘Are you kidding?’

‘You’re not a model?’

‘Why the hell would you say that?’

‘Because …’

‘Because what?’

He was flabbergasted. It was the first time I’d seen him so animated.

‘Don’t tell me no one has ever said that to you before?’

He shook his head. ‘No. No way.’

‘Oh. Even your girlfriend?’

‘No!’ He laughed quickly, and it was beautiful, a beautiful sound that I wanted to hear again. ‘You’re pulling my leg.’ Then he laid down again, feet up, the smile and the laugh gone.

‘I’m not. You happen to be the most handsome man I’ve ever seen and so I thought you might be a model,’ I explained rationally. ‘I wasn’t making it up!’

He looked at me then, his face softer, a little embarrassed, as he tried to figure out whether I was joking. But I wasn’t joking. If anything, I was mortified; I hadn’t meant it to come out like that. I had meant to say he was handsome, but it came out wrong because it came out right.

‘So what do you do?’ I changed the subject, picking imaginary fluff from my jeans to avoid looking at him.

‘You’ll enjoy this.’

‘Go on.’

‘A stripogram. One of those Chippendales. Because I’m so handsome and all.’

I rolled my eyes and sat back.

‘Ah, I’m only messing. I’m a helicopter pilot for the Irish Coast Guard.’

My mouth dropped.

‘See, I told you you’d enjoy it.’ He studied me.

‘You rescue people,’ I said.

‘We have so much in common, you and I.’

There was no way Adam could go back to that job with him being in this frame of mind. I wouldn’t let him, I couldn’t let him, they wouldn’t let him.

‘You said the family company falls to your father’s children after his death. Do you have any siblings?’

‘I have an older sister. She’s next in line, but she moved to Boston. She had to leg it over there when it came out that her husband had stolen millions from his friends in a Ponzi scheme. He was supposed to invest it for them but spent it instead. Took quite a bit from me too. Took a whole lot from my dad.’

‘Your poor sister.’

‘Lavinia? She was probably the brains behind it. It’s not just that, there are other complications. The company should have passed to my uncle, who was the eldest brother, but he’s a selfish prick and my grandfather knew he’d run the company into the ground if it was left to him, so instead it went to Father. As a result, the family was split between those who sympathised with Uncle Liam and those who took my father’s side. So if I don’t take over and it falls to my cousin … It’s difficult to explain to someone who isn’t part of the family. You can’t know how hard it is to turn your back on something, even though you despise it, because there’s loyalty involved.’

‘I left my husband last week,’ I blurted out. Just like that, I said it. My heart was hammering in my chest; it must have been the first time I’d said it to anyone, out loud. For so long I’d wanted to leave him, but couldn’t because I wanted to be the loyal wife who followed through on my vows. I knew exactly the loyalty Adam was talking about.

He looked at me, surprised. For a moment he studied me, as if questioning whether my claim was authentic. ‘What did he do?’

‘He’s an electrician, why?’

‘No. Why did you leave him? What did he do wrong?’

I swallowed, examined my nails. ‘He didn’t do anything wrong really. He … I wasn’t happy.’

He blew air out of his nose, unamused. ‘So you find your own happiness at his expense.’

I knew he was thinking about his girlfriend.

‘It’s not a philosophy I like to preach.’

‘But you practise it.’

‘You can’t know how hard it is to leave someone,’ I echoed his earlier words.

‘Touché.’

‘You have to weigh up the risks,’ I said. ‘Together we would have both been miserable for the rest of our lives. He’ll get over me. He’ll get over me a lot quicker than he thinks.’

‘And what if he doesn’t?’

I didn’t know how to respond. The thought had never occurred to me. I was sure Barry would get over me. He would have to.

Adam disappeared after that. He stayed in the room but vanished into his mind, no doubt pondering the future for him and his girlfriend. Getting over her wasn’t an option; he wanted her back. And if his girlfriend felt for Adam the way I felt for Barry, they hadn’t a hope in hell.

‘So what do you do?’ he asked, as if suddenly realising he knew nothing about the woman who was intent on saving his life.

‘What do you think I do?’ I played his game.

He didn’t think for very long. ‘Work in a charity shop?’

I had to laugh. ‘That’s random.’ I looked down at my clothes, wondering if he thought my jeans, denim shirt and Converse trainers had come from a charity shop. They may have been casual but they were all brand new, and double denim was back in.

He smiled. ‘I don’t mean your clothes. It’s more … you seem the caring type. Maybe a vet, or something to do with rescued animals?’ He shrugged. ‘Am I close?’

I cleared my throat. ‘I’m in recruitment.’

His smile faded. His disappointment was palpable, his concern even more so. And he didn’t try to cover it up.

In a few hours I would have twelve days left. And so far I had achieved nothing.

7
How to Build Friendships and Develop Trust

I would have sworn to anyone who’d listen that I hadn’t slept all night, because I was sure I hadn’t, but instead of the realisation that morning had finally come upon me, it was the sound of running water that forced me out of sleep mode. Confused that I’d been asleep, it took me a moment to remember where I was. I was wide awake and immediately alert; I didn’t do groggy. When I discovered the couch where Adam had been lying was empty I immediately jumped up, rushed into the bedroom, banging my knee on the coffee table and my elbow on the doorframe, not fully thinking things through, and barged into the bathroom where I was faced with a bare, very pert and muscular bottom which hadn’t seen the sun for a long time. Adam twisted his upper body around, his blond curls flattened and darkened and dripping down along his face. I couldn’t stop staring.

‘Don’t worry, I’m alive,’ he said, amused again.

I quickly backed out of the bathroom, closed the door suppressing an awkward giggle, and hurried to the guest toilet to make myself look presentable after a night in double denim. When I emerged from the living room, the water continued to fall in the bathroom. After ten minutes it was still falling. I paced the bedroom wondering what to do. Walking in on him once was a mistake, a second time would be plain creepy but I wasn’t sure I could afford to be worried about my integrity when two nights ago he had attempted to kill himself, though apart from shrinking himself to death I wasn’t sure he could harm himself in there. I had removed the glasses from the sink area so he couldn’t hurt himself and I hadn’t heard any mirrors smash. I was about to push the bathroom door open again when I heard the sound. It was quiet at first, then it sounded choked, so full of hurt, so deep and longing I let go of the handle and rested my head against the door, wanting so much to comfort him. Feeling helpless, I listened to his sobs.

Then I remembered the suicide note. If I didn’t get my hands on it before he got out of the shower, I’d never see it. I looked around the room and saw his clothes discarded in the corner, his jeans strewn on top of his travel bag. I felt my way around each pocket and finally found the folded piece of paper. I opened it, hoping to gain more insight into the reasons for his attempted suicide, but instead found a series of scribbles, some crossed out, others underlined and I quickly learned that it wasn’t a suicide note at all; it was his proposal to Maria, practised over and over, rewritten until it was perfect.

A vibration from Adam’s phone stole my attention away. It was beside the fresh clothes he’d laid out to wear that day. The phone stopped ringing and the screen revealed seventeen missed calls. It rang again. Maria. I made a quick decision, one that didn’t involve much thinking through. I answered it.

I was mid-conversation with her when I realised the shower had stopped running; in fact, I hadn’t heard it in a while. I turned around, his phone still to my ear. Adam was standing at the bathroom door, as if he’d been there for a while, towel wrapped around his waist, his skin bone dry, anger on his face. I quickly made my excuses and ended the call. I spoke before he had the chance to attack me.

‘You had seventeen missed calls on your phone. I thought it might be important so I answered. Also, if this is going to work between us, then I need total access to your life. No holds barred. No secrets.’

I stopped to make sure he understood. He didn’t object.

‘That was Maria. She was worried about you. She was afraid you’d hurt yourself after last night, or worse. She’s been worried about you for a year now, extremely worried for nine months. She felt she wasn’t getting through to you so she went to Sean for help, so they could figure out what to do. She fought how she felt for him, but she fell for Sean. They didn’t want to hurt you. They’ve been together for six weeks. She didn’t know how to tell you. She thought your behaviour was down to your sister leaving Ireland, then you having to leave your job, and your father being sick. She said every time she wanted to talk to you, something bad happened. She wanted to tell you about her and Sean, but then the news about your father’s illness being terminal came. She said she’d arranged to meet with you last week to tell you finally, and instead you told her about being let go from your job. She wished you hadn’t found out the way you did.’

I watched as he took all of this in. He was seething, the anger bubbling beneath his skin, but I could see the hurt too. He was really so fragile, so delicate, so heartbroken, a whisper away from breaking.

I continued: ‘She seemed put out that I answered the phone, upset, almost angry with me that she didn’t know who I was. She said in the six years you were together she thought she knew all of your friends. She was jealous.’

The anger seemed to lessen then, with thoughts of her jealousy of him and another woman like water over his burning rage.

I felt hesitant about adding the rest but took a gamble that I thought would pay off. ‘She said she doesn’t recognise you any more. That you used to be fun – funny and spontaneous. She said you’ve lost your spark.’

His eyes filled a little and he coughed and shook his head, macho man back.

‘We’re going to get you back to that way again, Adam, I promise. Who knows, maybe she’ll recognise the man she fell in love with and she’ll fall in love with him all over again. We’ll rediscover your spark.’

I gave him space to think about that and waited in the living room, nervously biting my nails. Twenty long minutes later he appeared in the doorway, fully dressed, eyes clear and hiding any proof of his despair.

‘Breakfast?’

The dining-room buffet had quite an array of food to choose from and customers went back and forth several times to avail of the all-you-can-eat menu. We sat with our backs to the display with cups of black coffee and empty placemats.

‘So you don’t eat, you don’t really sleep and we both like to rescue people. What else do we have in common?’ Adam said.

I had lost my appetite three months ago, the same time I’d realised I was not happy in my marriage. As a result of losing my appetite, I’d lost a lot of weight, though I was working on it through my How to Get Your Appetite Back One Bite at a Time book.

‘Broken relationships,’ I offered.

‘You left yours. I was left. Doesn’t count.’

‘Don’t take my leaving my husband personally.’

‘I can if I want.’

I sighed. ‘So tell me about you. Maria said you’d lost your spark over a year ago, which was a comment that has really stayed with me.’

‘Yeah, that has stayed with me too,’ he interrupted, with false animation. ‘I’m wondering if she’d realised that before or after she fucked my best friend, or perhaps it was during. Now wouldn’t that be a fine thing?’

I didn’t respond to that, allowed him to have his moment. ‘What were you like when your mother passed away? How did you behave?’

Maria had also revealed that detail over the phone, disclosing much of Adam’s life and his problems as though I was a long and trusted friend who knew all of this information anyway. I’m sure she would have been far more careful with her words had she known the real situation, but she didn’t, it wasn’t her business, and so I’d let her talk; her rant an attempt to justify her actions and also a way for me to be enlightened on aspects of Adam’s life that perhaps he wouldn’t have shared with me himself.

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s helpful to me.’

‘Will it be helpful to me?’

‘Your mother passed away, your sister moved away, your father is sick, your girlfriend has met someone else. I think that your girlfriend leaving you was the trigger. Perhaps you can’t deal with people leaving. Perhaps you feel abandoned. You know, if you can recognise your triggers, it can help with being aware of those negative thoughts before you drop into the downward spiral. Maybe when someone leaves you now, you connect with how you felt when you were five years old.’

I was impressed with myself but I seemed to be the only one.

‘I think you should stop playing therapist.’

‘I think you should go and see a real one, but for some reason you won’t and I’m the best you’ve got.’

He was silenced by that. Whatever his reasons, that didn’t seem to be an option. Still, I was hoping I’d get him there eventually.

Adam sighed and sat back in the chair, looking up at the chandelier as if it was that which had asked him the question. ‘I was five years old, Lavinia was ten. Mum had cancer. It was all very sad for everyone, though I didn’t really understand. I didn’t feel sad, I only knew that it was. I didn’t know she had cancer, or if I did I didn’t know what it was. I just knew she was sick. There was a room downstairs in the house where she stayed that we weren’t allowed to go into. It was for a few weeks or a few months, I can’t really remember. It felt like for ever. We had to be very quiet around the door. Men would go in and out with their doctor’s bags, ruffle my hair as they passed. Father would rarely go in. Then one day the door to that room was open. I went in; it had a bed in it that never used to be there before. The bed was empty but apart from that the room looked exactly the same as it used to. The doctor who used to tap me on the head told me my mother was gone. I asked him where; he said Heaven. So I knew she wasn’t coming back. That’s where my grandfather went one day and he never came back. I thought it must have been a fun place to go to never want to come back. We went to the funeral. Everybody was very sad. I stayed with my aunt for a few days. Then I was packed off to boarding school.’ He spoke of it all devoid of emotion, totally disconnected as his defence mechanism kicked in to block out the overwhelming pain. I guessed for him to connect, to feel the pain, felt too much to bear. He seemed isolated and disengaged and I believed every word he said.

‘Your father didn’t discuss what was happening to your mother?’

‘My father doesn’t do emotion. After they told him he had weeks to live he asked for a fax machine to be put in his hospital room.’

‘Was your sister communicative? Could you talk about it together, in order to understand?’

‘She was sent to a boarding school in Kildare and we saw each other for a few days each holiday. The first summer we were back at the house from boarding school she set up a stall in town and sold my mother’s shoes, bags, fur coats and jewellery and whatever else was of any value and made herself a fortune. Every single thing was sold and couldn’t be bought back by the time anyone realised what she’d done a few weeks later. She’d spent most of the money already. She was practically a stranger to me and even more so after that. She’s made of the same stuff my father is. She’s more intelligent than me, it’s just a pity she didn’t put her brains to better use. She should be taking Father’s place, not me.’

‘Did you make good friends at boarding school?’ I was hoping for some kind of circle where little Adam had love and friendship. I wanted a happy ending somewhere.

‘That’s where I met Sean.’

Which wasn’t the happy ending I was hoping for, as that trusted person had betrayed him. I couldn’t help myself, I reached out and placed my hand over his. The movement made him stiffen and so I quickly removed it.

He folded his arms. ‘So how about we drop all this mumbo jumbo talk and get straight to the problem?’

‘This isn’t mumbo jumbo. I think that your mother passing away when you were five years old is significant. It affects your past and current behaviour, your emotions, how you deal with things.’ That’s what the book said and I personally knew it to be true.

‘Unless your mother died when you were five years old, then I think it’s something you can’t learn from a book. I’m grand, let’s move on.’

‘She did.’

‘What?’

‘My mum died when I was four.’

He looked at me, surprised. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Thanks.’

‘So how did it affect you?’ he asked gently.

‘I think I’m not the one who wants to kill myself on my thirty-fifth birthday, so let’s move on,’ I snapped, wanting to get back to talking about him. I could tell from his surprised expression that I had sounded a lot angrier than I had intended. I composed myself. ‘Sorry. What I meant was, if you don’t want to talk, what do you want from me, Adam? How do you expect me to help you?’

He leaned forward, lowered his voice, jabbed his finger on the table to emphasise each point. ‘It’s my thirty-fifth birthday on Saturday week. I don’t particularly want to have a party but for some reason that’s what’s being arranged for me by the family – and by family I do not mean my sister Lavinia, because the only way she can appear in Ireland without getting handcuffs slapped on her wrists is on Skype. I mean the company family. The party is in City Hall in Dublin, a big do, and I would rather not be there but I kind of have to be because the board have chosen that day to announce to everyone that I’m taking over the company while my father is alive, kind of like being given the seal of approval. That’s twelve days away. Because he’s so ill, they had a meeting last week to see if my birthday party could be moved forward. I told them it’s not happening. Firstly, I don’t want the job. I haven’t worked out how to fix it yet, but I’ll be announcing somebody else as the new head that night. And if I have to walk into that bloody room, I want Maria back, by my side, holding my hand the way it should be.’ His voice cracked and he took a moment to compose himself. ‘I thought about it and I understand. I changed. I wasn’t there for her when she needed me. She was worried, she went to Sean and Sean took advantage of her. I went to Benidorm with him when we finished our Leaving Cert, and I’ve partied with him every weekend since I was thirteen – believe me, I know what he can be like with women. She doesn’t.’

I opened my mouth to protest, but Adam lifted a finger in warning and continued.

‘I’d also like to get my job at the Coast Guard back, and for everyone in my father’s company who’s worked there for the past one hundred years to get off my back because I was chosen to take Father’s place instead of them. If I had my way, I’d rather any of them got the bloody job. Right now it doesn’t look likely, but you’re going to help with that. We need to undo my grandfather’s wishes. Lavinia and I can’t take over the company, but it must not fall to my cousin Nigel. That would be the end of the company. I have to work something out. If none of those things are fixed, then I’ll drown myself in a bloody stream if I have to, because I’m not living with anything other than that right there.’ He jabbed the table with a butter knife to emphasise the final two words. He looked at me wide-eyed, wired, threatening, daring me to walk out, to give up on him.

It was tempting, to say the least. I stood up.

His expression turned to one of satisfaction; he’d managed to push another person away, leaving him free to get on with his plan to demolish himself.

‘Okay!’ I clapped my hands as if I was about to start a clear-up of the area. ‘We’ve a lot to do if we’re going to make this happen. Your apartment is out of bounds now, I assume, so you can stay with me. I need to go home and change, I need to get to the office to pick up some things and I need to get to a shop – I’ll explain what for later. First, I have to get my car. Are you coming?’

He looked at me in surprise, at my not leaving him in the way he thought I would, then he grabbed his coat and followed me.

Once we were in the taxi my phone beeped.

‘That’s the third one in a row. You never check your messages. Not very encouraging for me for when I’m hanging off a bridge somewhere looking for a pep talk.’

‘They’re not messages, they’re voicemails.’

‘How do you know?’

I knew because it was eight a.m. And there was only one thing that happened as soon as it hit eight a.m.

‘I just know.’

He studied me. ‘You said no secrets, remember?’

I thought about it and out of guilt for having read his ‘proposal’, which was currently in my pocket, handed him my phone.

He dialled and listened to the messages. Ten minutes later he handed the phone back to me.

I looked at him for a reaction.

‘That was your husband. But I think you already know that. He said he’s keeping the goldfish and he’s getting his solicitors to draw up paperwork to ensure you’re legally never allowed to own a fish again. He thinks he might be able to prevent you entering a pet shop too. He’s not sure about winning at funfairs but he’ll personally be there to beat you and make sure you don’t win.’

‘Is that it?’

‘In the second message he called you a bitch twenty-five times. I didn’t count. He did. He said it was twenty-five times. He said you were a bitch multiplied by twenty-five. Then he said it twenty-five times.’

I took the phone from him and sighed. Barry didn’t seem to be cooling down at all. In fact, he seemed to be getting worse, more frantic. Now it was the goldfish? He hated that goldfish. His niece had bought it for him for his birthday and the only reason she’d bought him a fish was because Barry’s brother hated fish too so it was technically a gift for her, to be stored in our home for her to look at and feed when she visited. He could keep the damn fish.

‘Actually,’ Adam snatched the phone back from me with a mischievous look in his eye, ‘I want to count, because wouldn’t it be funny if he got it wrong?’

He listened to the voicemail again on speakerphone and each time Barry spat the word out viciously, with venom and bitterness and sadness dripping from every single letter, Adam counted on his hands with a big smile on his face. He ended the call looking disappointed.

‘Nah. Twenty-five bitches.’ He handed it back to me and looked out the window.

We were silent for a few minutes and my phone beeped again.

‘And I thought I had problems,’ he said.

8
How to Sincerely Apologise When You Realise You Have Hurt Someone

‘So this is him?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered, sitting in the chair beside Simon Conway’s bed.

‘He can’t hear you, you know.’ Adam raised his voice above the norm. ‘There’s no need to whisper.’

‘Shh.’ I was irritated by his disrespect, his obvious need to prove that he wasn’t moved by what he saw. Well, I was moved and I wasn’t afraid to admit it; I felt raw with emotion. Each time I looked at Simon I relived the moment he shot himself. I heard the sound, the bang that left my ears ringing. I ran through the words I’d said leading up to him putting his gun down on the kitchen counter. It had been going well, his resolve had weakened, we had been engaging perfectly. But then my euphoria had taken over and I’d lost all sense of what I said next – if I’d said anything at all. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remember.

‘So am I supposed to feel something right now?’ Adam interrupted my thoughts, loudly. ‘Is this a message, a psycho-babble way of telling me how lucky I am that I’m here and he’s there?’ he challenged me.

I threw him a dagger look.

‘Who are you?’

I jumped up from my chair at the sudden interruption by a woman walking into the room. She was mid to late thirties and held the hands of two little blonde girls, who looked up at her with large blue wondering eyes. Jessica and Kate; I remembered Simon telling me about them. Jessica was sad her pet rabbit had died and Kate kept pretending she would see him when Jessica wasn’t looking, to make her feel better. He had wondered if Kate would do the same thing about him when he was gone and I had told him he wouldn’t have to wonder, wouldn’t have to put them both through that if he stayed alive for them. The woman looked shattered. Simon’s wife, Susan. My heart began to palpitate, the guilt of my involvement wracking my body. I tried to remember what Angela had said, what everybody had said: it wasn’t my fault, I had only tried to help. It wasn’t my fault.

‘Hello.’ I struggled with how to introduce myself. It may have been seconds of silence but it felt as though it stretched on for ever. Susan’s face was not inviting, it was not warm and it was not reassuring. It did nothing to help my nervousness and worsened the sense of guilt I felt. I sensed Adam’s eyes on me, his saviour, now floundering in my lesson in self-belief and inner strength.

I stepped forward and extended my hand, swallowed, heard the shake in my voice as I spoke. ‘My name is Christine Rose. I was with your husband the night he …’ I glanced at the two little girls looking up at me wide-eyed ‘… the night of the incident. I’d just like to say that—’

‘Get out,’ Susan said quietly.

‘I’m sorry?’ I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. This had been my worst nightmare. I had lived this scene a thousand times in various ways and through the eyes of many people in my late-night/early-morning fears, but I didn’t think it would actually come to fruition. I thought my fears were irrational; the only thing that had made them bearable was knowing they weren’t real.

‘You heard me,’ she repeated, pulling her daughters further into the room so that the doorway was clear for me to leave.

I was frozen in place; this wasn’t happening. It took Adam placing a hand on my shoulder and giving me a gentle shove to finally make me come to my senses. We didn’t speak until we were both in the car and on the road. Adam opened his mouth to speak, but I got there first.

‘I don’t want to talk about that.’ I struggled not to cry.

‘Okay,’ he said gently, then he looked like he was going to say more but he stopped himself and looked out the window.

I wish I’d known what it was.

I grew up in Clontarf, a coastal suburb of North Dublin. When I met Barry, I obligingly moved to Sandymount, his side of the city. We lived in his bachelor pad because he wanted to be close to his mother, who disliked me because I was Church of Ireland although I didn’t bother practising – I wasn’t sure which bothered her most. After six months of dating, Barry proposed, probably because that’s what all our peers were doing at the time, and I said yes because that’s what all our peers were saying, and it seemed like the mature and grown-up thing to do at our age, and six months later I was married and living in a new apartment we had bought together in Sandymount with the party behind me and reality now and for ever stretching ahead of me. My business remained in Clontarf, a short DART journey away each morning. Barry had been unable to sell his bachelor pad and instead rented it; the rent paid the mortgage. It would solve a lot of our current problems if Barry moved back into the pad he had made such a song and dance about leaving, thereby allowing me to stay in our home, but no, he was claiming our apartment. He was claiming our car too, so I was currently driving a friend’s car; Julie had emigrated to Toronto and still hadn’t managed to shift the car, which had been for sale for a year. In return for the favour of driving it, I was also responsible for taking care of its sale, advertising it with a FOR SALE sign on the front and rear windows with my phone number, and as a result fielding phone calls, enquiries and test drives. I was learning that people had a tendency to phone at random hours looking for the very same details as the car magazine advertisements already stated, as if they were expecting to hear a completely different answer.

My office was on Clontarf Road, on the first floor of a three-storey house which had been the home of my dad’s three spinster aunts, Brenda, Adrienne and Christine, for whom me and my two sisters were named. Now the building was home to my dad and sisters’ firm, which was called Rose and Daughters Solicitors because my dad was a feminist. My dad had held his practice there for thirty years, ever since his remaining aunt decided to move into a self-contained flat in the basement instead of looking after the large house by herself. As soon as my sisters were qualified, they joined the firm. I had been dreading the day I’d have to tell him I didn’t want to work for the family firm, but he was more than understanding. In fact, he didn’t want me to work with him.

‘You’re a thinker,’ he said. ‘We’re doers. The girls are like me, we do. You’re like your mother, you think. So go, think.’

Brenda took care of property law, Adrienne took care of family law and Dad liked to chase the accidents, because that’s where he believed the money was. They took over the top floor; my office was on the first floor, along with an accountant who had been there for twenty years and who hid a bottle of vodka in a drawer in his desk and thought nobody knew about it. It was obvious from the smell of the room and his breath, but mostly I knew because of Jacinta, the cleaner, who gave Dad all the gossip on each of the offices that paid rent. It wasn’t a spoken agreement, but they had an understanding that the more information she supplied, the more Dad paid her. I frequently wondered what she told him about me.

The ground-floor businesses had changed so many times in the past few years I didn’t know who was who when I passed them in the halls. Thanks to the recession, businesses were moving out as quickly as they moved in. The basement, which had been my great-aunt Christine’s home in her final years, had gone from being an insurance company to a stockbroker’s to a graphic design studio, and it was currently my home. From one Christine to another. My dad had grudgingly agreed to let it to me and furnish it for me; the day I’d arrived I’d found a single bed in the bedroom, a single chair in the kitchen and an armchair in the living room. I had to kit the rest out myself by raiding my sisters’ houses. Brenda had found it hilarious to donate her son’s Spider-Man duvet cover to me. She’d thought it would cheer me up, but it had only made me sadder about the state of my affairs. A duvet cover I could easily afford, so for the first few days I kept meaning to change it, only to keep forgetting until I got to the point where I didn’t even notice it any more.

Next door was a bookshop, the Book Stand, also known as the Last Stand due to its stubborn inclination to stay open and current when every small bookshop for miles around had been forced to shut. It was run by my close friend Amelia, and I suspect that ordering books for me was the only thing keeping her in business, as the shop was almost always empty. The stock was low and most things you wanted had to be ordered, which meant it wasn’t appealing to browsers. Amelia lived above the shop with her mother, who was in need of constant care as a result of a severe stroke. More often than not the bell ringing in the shop was not the sound of a new client coming through the front door but her mother upstairs, needing some attention. Still a child when her mother fell ill, Amelia had been caring for her ever since and she seemed to me to be in desperate need of a break, of some TLC. Like most carers, she needed someone to protect and care for her for a change. The bookshop seemed almost secondary to what Amelia spent her days doing, which was being at her mother’s beck and call, devoting every thought and waking moment to her.

‘Hi, sweetheart.’ Amelia bounced up from her stool where she’d been reading to pass the time in the empty shop. She looked over my shoulder at Adam, who followed me in, and her pupils dilated at the sight of him.

‘I thought you were waiting in the car,’ I said.

‘You forgot to leave the window open for me,’ he said, poker-faced, looking around the shop.

‘Amelia, this is Adam. Adam, this is Amelia. Adam is … a client.’

‘Oh,’ Amelia said, disappointed.

I knew what I wanted and headed straight for the self-help section. Adam wandered around the shop, seeming dazed, withdrawn, looking but not really seeing.

‘He’s gorgeous,’ Amelia whispered.

‘He’s a client,’ I whispered back.

‘He’s gorgeous.’

I laughed. ‘Fred wouldn’t like to hear you say that.’

She studied her fingernails and lifted her eyebrows. ‘He’s asked me to go to the Pearl for lunch.’

‘The Pearl? That’s very fancy.’ I was confused by this, as Fred was not the spontaneous, romantic type. Then it hit me. ‘He’s going to propose!’

Amelia couldn’t keep a straight face any more, clearly thinking the same thing. ‘I mean, he might not, he probably won’t, but you know …’

I gasped. ‘Oh my God, I’m so happy for you!’ We hugged excitedly.

‘It hasn’t happened yet.’ Amelia hit me. ‘Stop jinxing me.’

‘Can you put this on the tab?’

Amelia looked at my book selection. ‘At last! Christine, that’s great,’ she said, with relief.

I frowned. ‘It’s not for me. What do you mean?’

‘Oh. Sorry. Nothing. No. It’s … Nothing.’ Her cheeks pinked and she changed the subject. ‘Barry called me last night.’

‘Oh?’ Fear flooded my body.

‘It was quite late. I think he’d had a few drinks.’

I nibbled on my nails.

Adam joined us. He was like a shark, sensing blood: he knew exactly when to be around me each time my life was being chipped away at.

‘I’m sure it wasn’t true, or maybe it was, but … but he shouldn’t have said it to me anyway. Whatever you two talk about together really should be kept private, even if it is about me, so I’m not blaming you for what you said about me.’ She looked hurt, her face contradicting everything she had said.

‘Amelia, what did he say?’

She took a deep breath and went for it. ‘He said that you think I’m a loser for living at home with my mother, that I need to get a life and move out. That I need to put her in a home and move in with Fred or else you wouldn’t be surprised if he left me.’

‘Oh my God.’ I hid my face with my hands. ‘I am so sorry he said that to you.’

‘It’s okay. I told him that I knew he was hurting but he was disgusting. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘No, that’s fine, you’re totally entitled to say what you like.’ My face was red and I knew it, revealing my guilt. I couldn’t deny that Barry and I had discussed those things, but how dare he tell Amelia. I wondered how many phone calls he’d made last night and how many truths he’d told to the people I loved, hurting them in order to hurt me.

Amelia waited for me to tell her it wasn’t true.

‘Look, I obviously didn’t phrase it like that.’

She looked offended.

‘I just worry that you’re always looking out for other people and not for yourself. That it would be nice for you and Fred to live together, to have a life together.’

‘But this is how it’s been since I was twelve, Christine, you know that.’ Amelia was becoming angry. ‘I’m not going to ship her off to a home while I go live the life fandango.’

‘I know, I know, but you haven’t even been out of the country … ever. You’ve never taken a holiday. That’s all I said – promise. I was worried about you.’

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