A Silver Lining Page 6

  ‘If I had a cigarette this is the point where I would take a long drag and look at you in a cool and appraising manner’, said Frankie.

  ‘I’ll never understand why when you have to narrate your smoking habits in public places.’

  Frankie shrugged. ‘I can’t help it. I feel naked without my cigarettes.’

  ‘She’s your mother though, you must love her. You could contact her more,’ said Rose, returning to their original conversation.

  Frankie placed both hands on the table and leaned slightly forward to emphasise her point. ‘Yes, I do love her but, you see, my mother is crazy. I left England to get away from her; it would be kind of pointless to indulge in long telephone conversations from here.’

  ‘All mothers are slightly crazy.’

  ‘Rose, when she found out I was teaching in a school that didn’t have a history spanning back over two hundred years, a horrid blazer and an eye-wateringly large fee she told everybody I was a secret agent.’

  Rose spluttered into her coffee. ‘She did what? You are joking?!’

  Frankie shook her head. ‘I’m deadly serious.’

  ‘Why didn’t she just lie and say that you taught in a private school?’ asked Rose, incredulously.

  ‘I suppose people would ask too many questions. Anyway, Ireland is a small place. They would have found out eventually that I actually didn’t work in any of the handful of schools that they would consider suitable. If she says that I’m a secret agent of some type or another she doesn’t have to answer any more questions.’

  ‘But surely secret agents don’t actually tell people their occupation? And pray tell, what is there to spy on in Ireland? It’s not exactly Russia, is it? The only state secret we have is exactly how many bottles of whiskey our government consumes in an average year.’

  Frankie gave an exaggerated Gallic shrug. ‘I don’t know. She is crazy. I love her, true, but we’re better when we only have contact sporadically. I email Dad a lot, so I keep communication up that way.’

  ‘In English or French?’ Rose asked curiously.

  ‘Does it matter? We speak both. God, you Irish! You think anyone who can speak more than one language has discovered the secret of spinning gold from thin air.’

  Rose decided to change the subject. ‘Are you doing anything next Tuesday night?’

  ‘No. Why, do you have something interesting planned?’

  ‘One of the groups that Daniel works with is holding an open mike night on Tuesday, where actors come and perform one person pieces.’

  Frankie raised an eyebrow. ‘It sounds like one of those things that could either be fantastic or truly shocking. Anyway, I’ll tag along and see for myself.’

  Rose smiled. ‘Thanks. Maybe you should bring your hip flask as a contingency plan. I better head off. I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow morning.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  On the way home, Rose went to a chemist-one of the large chains that stocked ranges of cosmetics that wouldn’t bring her face out in a rash. She needed to get some lip balm, she’d run out and the harsh January air had left them cracked and sore. She’d planned on just running straight in, making her purchase quickly and getting out before she could be seduced into putting anything else onto her already overloaded credit card. Unfortunately, she was weak and couldn’t resist the allure of the perfume counter. Rose could while away hours at perfume counters: there was something so grown up and sophisticated about them. She loved spraying herself with new scents, smelling undertones of vanilla and high notes of rose, feeling the weight of the heavy glass bottles in the palm of her hand. It brought back memories of being a child, sneaking her mother’s perfume out of her handbag and spraying her wrists with it. She bought into the adverts too, glossy pictures of beautiful women in romantic situations. They seemed to encapsulate that childlike dream of what grown up life would be like. It was comforting. Perfume was the only thing that Rose was fanatical about. She collected it and had dozens of bottles, from the heavy glass bottles of French perfume that Frankie tended to give her for her birthdays to fragrances from the large cosmetic houses, and even the cheap bottles that she saw in the school lockers of the second and third years. It was her passion – beautiful, romantic, and timeless. She found one fragrance she particularly liked, but replaced it regretfully. Moving in to the apartment had been more expensive than she’d thought. Daniel wasn’t earning a lot right now, so she’d have to start supporting both of them. She couldn’t afford to buy herself presents.

  When Rose let herself into the apartment it was in darkness, so she instantly knew that Daniel wasn’t home. She wondered idly where he could be. The flat was freezing so she put on the heating but couldn’t bear to take her coat off. She opened the fridge; there was nothing much for dinner in there. She thought Daniel had said last night that he would pick up some groceries, but he obviously hadn’t. Luckily, she knew there was some pasta somewhere if only she could find it. She rooted around in the back of the cupboard, eventually managing to dig up a bag and, by dint of a miracle, a packet of stir-in pasta sauce. She’d cook that and open a bottle of wine. It wasn’t exactly going to be a spread worthy of a domestic goddess but hey. If Daniel had wanted that he should have chatted up a domestic science teacher.

  She was just lifting up the pasta when she heard the sound of a key in the lock.

  ‘Perfect timing!’ she called out, placing two steaming bowls of pasta on the table. Daniel came in, his blonde hair plastered to his head from the rain that was still pouring down relentlessly outside.

  ‘I wish I’d been born in a less moist country’, he said as he gave her a kiss on the top of her head. He was tall and well built, with Scandinavian colouring and eyes so pale that it almost hurt to look directly into them.

  ‘Yeah? Well, I wish you’d got some shopping in,’ she said tartly.

  ‘Sorry I was busy’, he said ruefully, giving her a delicate kiss on the top of her head. ‘I was in the library.’

  ‘You, in a library?’ said Rose incredulously. ‘Why?’

  Rose, as befitted an English teacher, consumed books faster than most women consumed chocolate. She had joined her local library because paying ten quid for a book that she’d get a day out of at best was a more expensive habit than smoking twenty a day. Daniel on the other hand rarely bought a book, and when he did he read it slowly, so slowly that months would go by as he meandered his way through it. So for Daniel to say that he had spent the day at the library was like saying that he’d spent his day trawling around the lingerie department in Brown Thomas.

  Rose sat down as Daniel uncorked the wine and poured two glasses which the overhead light caught turning the drink a burning ruby red. He handed one glass to her and took his seat at the table.

  ‘Jenny called me.’ Jenny was his agent. Daniel regularly blamed his lack of work on his agent, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Agents were like gold dust, and with hundreds of aspiring actors and actresses clamouring for every decent part he needed to have someone in his corner. Daniel was a ‘struggling actor’. He managed to get parts in plays, and the occasional television part. As yet he hadn’t been cast in any big productions, or managed to receive the critical acclaim he’d need to kick-start his career. The only regular income he received was from the teenage acting classes that he helped teach at Stage Door Left, a drama school funded by government grants and donations from patrons of the arts. It didn’t pay well, but Daniel liked to be involved with it, because he felt it kept his acting CV up to date and allowed him to mix with people in the industry.

  ‘She said there are auditions next week for a new play with Onyx Odeon Productions. I was looking up a copy of the script, managed to track it down.’

  ‘Cool, what is it about?’

  Daniel laughed as he speared more pasta onto his fork, ‘I’ll tell you when I’ve read through the thing!’

  ‘Fair enough, so.’ They both continued to eat in silence.

  ‘No news on that
programme for TV3?’ Rose asked.

  Daniel had auditioned for a part in a new soap opera, and was waiting to hear how it had gone. Rose was hoping fervently that he got the job. Not just for him, though she knew that he’d be over the moon to receive the part. The idea of supporting two people on her salary was quite a scary thought; secondary school teachers didn’t earn a lot of money, not until they’d been working for a certain amount of years. Daniel had to socialise a lot to try to make the kind of contacts that might give him a break, and that cost money too. He brought in some money from side projects, but the amounts were so small that they would barely make a dent in their bills. He had survived for the last couple of years on inheritance from his grandmother, but there was precious little of that left now.

  ‘Nope I’ve heard nothing back at all on that front. And in this industry, no news is probably bad news. They’re due to start shooting it in the next couple of weeks, so I should have heard by now if they were planning to give me the part.’

  Rose placed her knife and fork side by side on her empty plate. ‘Aw, I’m sorry honey. I know how much you wanted it.’

  ‘Ah sure, I gave it my best shot,’ he said with a sad smile. ‘What more could I have done?’

  ‘Sneaked backstage and poured poison in the lead character’s ear?’ Rose asked.

  ‘It’s a feckin’ soap opera, not Shakespeare!’ Daniel said with a grin. ‘The character is meant to be a bit of a womanizer. I could give the actor a box on the nose, he can’t do much womanizing with a mangled face, can he?’

  ‘I don’t know, it might add to his roguish charm,’ said Rose, pretending to consider it.

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I do.’

  Daniel crinkled up his nose in disgust. ‘Ah feck. ‘

  They’d met at a barbecue held by a mutual friend of theirs, Shannon. Shannon had been in Rose’s class in school and had gone on to study acting in college. At one point she had played Ophelia in an inner city theatre’s production of Hamlet. Hamlet had been a set text for the Leaving Certificate that year, and small companies were cashing in by staging low cost productions of it in order to collect from classes of frazzled sixth year students looking for any means possible to cram the details of the play into their heads.

  Daniel had been playing Horatio in that same production. When its run had come to an end, Shannon had held a barbecue for all involved plus a few extra friends.

  It had been a great party. One of the cast members (Laertes) also worked as a barman occasionally to make ends meet, and had volunteered his services. He made eye-wateringly strong cocktails. Rose, who usually didn’t drink spirits, had gotten hammered fairly quickly. By the time night fell she was dancing barefoot on the lawn to the Shakira song Underneath Your Clothes. Dancing light as a fairy in the moonlight, Rose was feeling ethereal until she danced over the still red hot butt of a cigarette that someone had let fall in the grass.

  Knowing, even in her inebriated state, that burns needed water fast, she limped into the kitchen. She opened cupboard doors randomly in a vain attempt to find a suitable receptacle to pour water into, but every container had been used to hold potato salad, fruit punch or vodka jelly. It didn’t help that Rose kept reopening cupboards that she’d already looked in, while completely ignoring others. In the end she stuck the plug in the kitchen sink, pulled the dirty crockery out of it and filled it to the brim. She pulled herself up on to the counter, a feat that took her three attempts, and plunged her feet into the ice cold water. She sighed in contentment as the water gave her relief from the painful burn.

  Just at that moment, a man came in carrying a crate of lager. He was beautiful, casually dressed in a pair of khaki coloured combats and a white t-shirt. He looked familiar. Rose struggles to place him in her head.

  ‘Horatio,’ he said, pre-empting her question. ‘I played Horatio.’

  Of course, thought Rose. She had brought her sixth year English class to see the play, hoping to both support Shannon and ignite her student’s interest in Shakespeare. Well, one out of two wasn’t bad.

  ‘You were very good’, said Rose. She cursed herself inwardly. Was that the best she could do? You were very good? She sounded like a teenage girl who had never seen a good looking man in her life. And this Horatio was good looking. Very good looking, as a matter of fact.

  ‘Thanks’, grunted Horatio as he put the crate on the table. ‘Would you like a beer?’

  ‘Oh’, said Rose, aware that a red flush was making its way across her cheeks. ‘Ahm…yeah. That’d be nice.’

  He took two of the beers and deftly removed their tops with a bottle opener. He walked over to the sink and handed her a bottle.

  ‘Is there any particular reason why you’re sitting with your feet in the sink and being anti-social?’ he asked.

  ‘There is actually.’ Rose took a long draught of her beer. It was warm, but she was way past caring. ‘I burned my foot on a cigarette butt on the grass outside. I needed cold water and all the bowls were used up. So I’m stuck here.’ Rose made a sweeping motion that took in all of her body to illustrate that point.

  ‘You must be awfully lonely’, said Horatio, smiling at her.

  ‘Oh I am.’ Rose said seriously. ‘Although I’ve recently befriended that kind tea caddy over beside the kettle there, which kind of takes the edge off it.’

  ‘I could keep you company? If you and the tea caddy don’t think that I’m intruding, of course.’

  ‘We don’t mind in the slightest’, Rose said graciously.

  Horatio disappeared out the back door. Rose turned around and examined her face in the large plate glass window that was above the sink. She still looked the same, pretty ordinary, not beautiful. Her blonde hair was cut at her collar bone, and her large green eyes gave her an innocent childlike look. She wet her fingers and rubbed the area under both eyes to eradicate any rogue bits of mascara. She wished she had her make-up bag to do a repair job, but in her current position that was possible.

  Horatio came back into the room with a patio chair in one hand and a bowl of crisps in the other. He placed the chair beside the counter and sat down, perching the bowl of crisps on the draining board.

  ‘You can’t have a decent beer without a few crisps’, he said.

  Rose looked at the side of her bottle dubiously. ‘And is Bluebeard Beer classed as a decent beer?’

  ‘It is indeed. Now what’s your name?’

  ‘Rose. Rose Langan. And you’re Horatio.’

  ‘Daniel. Daniel is my real name,’ he told her.

  ‘Ooooh. I get you.’ Rose gave an exaggerated wink. My God, she thought, I’m plastered.

  Regardless, she seemed to make quite a good impression. Daniel told her about the acting courses he’d taken straight after school, and anecdotes about the various plays he’d been in and the one or two television parts he’d gotten. Although the roles were relatively small – he’d been a mechanic in a made-for-television movie and a theatre nurse with one line in a hospital drama, Rose was impressed. The nearest she’d ever gotten to a television personality was the time that Roger had been interviewed by RTE News after students from St. Jude’s had spray painted a giant penis onto the schoolyard on the day when the minister for education was coming to visit the school.

  She told him about her job as a secondary school teacher, dredging up the funniest anecdotes she knew to make her life seem as entertaining his. He lit a cigarette and offered it to her. She took it shyly, not wanting to tell him that she didn’t smoke, it felt such an intimate gesture. She didn’t have an ashtray, so she tapped her ash into the sink, turning the water a dark grey colour. They were getting on so well, that when he stood up to kiss her later that night she thought that she might melt with happiness. The kiss was firm, yet soft. The moment seemed to go on forever, which was just as well because they were brought up short by a big cheer from outside where they could be seen through the window.

  ‘Well how was it for you?’ he quipped as they pu
lled apart.

  Rose put her head to one side and pretended to consider it. ‘Just about bearable’. Then she burst out laughing at his mock indignant face. He laughed with her. A shout came from the hall.

  ‘That’s my taxi unfortunately,’ he said. His face was a mask of disappointment. ‘I’d really like to see you again. Can I give you my number?’

  Rose shook her head. ‘No, I’ll give you mine.’

  ‘And here was me thinking that all you liberty loving females were claiming their right to be the one to make the first move,’ he teased her.

  ‘Oh I acknowledge my right to. I just choose not to.’ She took his phone from him and punched in her number. She handed it back to him smiling, and he leaned over and kissed her gently on the inside of her wrist and walked away. She sighed happily. Now how was she going to get out of the god damn sink?

  She’d woken up the next morning lying on one of Shannon’s battered couches. The sun was streaming through a crack in the curtains, painting a bright butter yellow strip across the living room floor. Rose could tell from the strength of the colour that it was late morning. A glance at her watch confirmed her suspicions. She sat up slowly, giving a low groan as a dull pain pulsed in her head. Her head felt heavy and her eyes were slightly grainy. She had definitely drank too many cocktails the night before.

  She put her feet on the carpet and got a shock. Her feet were devoid of all colour, a pale grey. They looked like the feet of a corpse. Then Rose remembered the cigarette ash in the sink water. She turned her foot over and saw the blister, pink bare and vulnerable on the sole. She was due to babysit for her sister Charlotte in an hour or so. She wished she hadn’t offered to look after her niece and nephew. She loved them to bits, but small kids and hangovers did not mix.

  She went to the bathroom and scrubbed her feet so they didn’t look like they’d spent the night wrapped in newspaper. She walked into the kitchen, stepping over the recumbent body of someone she could identify only as Polonius. She walked over to a white board that was mounted on the wall and uncapped a large blue marker. She scribbled Hey Shannon, thanks for a great party. I’ll be in touch, Rose. She thought about adding a smiley face to the end of her message but she decided against it. She was way too hung over to be upbeat. She poured herself a glass of water and chucked some empty cans into the recycling bin, before walking outside to try and locate her shoes.