Be Careful What You Wish For

For my own Molly, Molly Eccles, an aunt who’s also a friend … although infinitely better behaved than her namesake.

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

‘Red wine or white?’ asked Helen.

‘Red – our bodies need the iron,’ said Molly. ‘But imagine having both in stock. Helen, it’s official, you’re a grown-up.’ She lolled on the sofa, waiting for her friend to prise open the bottle.

Despite a smorgasbord of corkscrews, Helen was fundamentally challenged in the uncorking department. Every so often she’d say wistfully, ‘Isn’t it a pity that Liebfrausquilch in the screwtop bottle tastes revolting? It’d be so handy,’ and Molly would threaten to report her to the taste Gestapo.

‘Give it here, Sharkey,’ she ordered now. ‘I’ll die of iron deficiency if I wait for you to relieve me.’ And she extracted both Merlot and corkscrew from Helen’s fumbling hands. ‘I thought this was supposed to be a foolproof gadget,’ she added. ‘Didn’t the Image magazine testers give it the full Orion’s Belt of stars?’

‘Misled again,’ mourned Helen. ‘I read, I bought, I faltered. Fill up my glass to the brim there, Molly, this is an emergency. I need to funnel the alcohol into my bloodstream in jig-speed time.’

‘You know what getting drunk on alcohol is called,’ said Molly, dribbling only a few drops as she poured.

Helen waited for Molly to fill her own glass and then clinked. ‘Tell me.’

‘A return on your investment.’

They swigged in companionable silence, facing each other on Helen’s somewhat mauled matching sofas from which, until she could afford two identical new ones, she wouldn’t be parted. Helen favoured pairs, whereas Molly shuddered if she accidentally found herself with a double – mugs, earrings, socks, towels were all deliberately mismatched. Shoes were about all she’d concede needed to come in pairs. ‘Eclectic’ was the word she dredged up whenever anyone suggested her taste veered towards the idiosyncratic; nobody came right out and told her she looked like a walking jumble sale, at least not since being staffed, after years as a freelance journalist, allowed her to relax her financial guard enough to buy clothes in the Powerscourt Townhouse.

‘So what’s the emergency, oh inheritor of the face that launched a thousand computer blips?’ she asked Helen, who was a software programmer.

The reference usually didn’t fail to make her friend blush or giggle, or at least twiddle an eyebrow, but tonight she didn’t react – an ominous sign. Helen took a protracted swallow that emptied her glass and said, ‘Thanks for galloping around at a moment’s notice.’

‘You know me,’ shrugged Molly. ‘I’d do the Lough Derg pilgrimage if it meant a drink in the heel of the hunt.’

‘I won’t ask you to walk on rocks here,’ said Helen, ‘but you might be obliged to walk on water. I need a miracle. Or failing that, electric shock treatment.’

‘So it’s a red-alert emergency, sirens blaring, traffic lights contemptuously ignored and cars bulldozed aside. It can only be man trouble.’

Helen frowned and refilled her glass without topping up Molly’s – which meant she was really distracted because Helen was renowned for her impeccable manners.

‘Just supposing …’ began Helen, rotating an opal heart earring in her left lobe, ‘… just supposing you fell in love with someone you weren’t meant to, but it crept up on you, and before there was any chance to erect the barricades you were head over heels and resistance was futile. How do you hold the feelings at bay – feelings you’re landed with whether you want them or not? Even though you refuse to meet him or return his phone calls you still think about him constantly. You can’t sleep, can’t concentrate on your job, and your life – which didn’t seem so unsatisfactory until the thunderclap – is so sterile and empty and meaningless there’s no way forward. Actually it’s more of a lightning bolt than a thunderclap, but no less elemental, and it’s left wasteland in its wake. God knows why I’m banging on about the weather.’ Helen twisted her earring so ferociously the back dropped off but she disregarded it. As Molly bent to retrieve the sliver of metal Helen continued, ‘The joy has been sapped from everything: going to work is like wading through fog; coming home to an empty house is so disheartening it’s tempting to stay on the DART train to the end of the line, and a day off stretches endlessly like a prison sentence with no remission.’

Her voice dropped until it was virtually a whisper. Molly’s stomach contracted at the misery on her friend’s face. She leaned across the sofa and wrapped her arms around the slight frame. She’d no inkling Helen was interested in anybody, never mind running the gauntlet of thwarted love.

‘Is it truly hopeless?’ asked Molly.

‘Yes.’

Pause.

‘He’s married?’ prompted Molly.

‘No.’

‘Gay?’

‘No.’

‘A priest?’

‘No.’

‘In love with someone else?’

‘No.’

‘Indifferent?’

‘No.’

‘Struck down by a fatal disease?’

‘No.’

‘Helen, I submit. I can imagine no more obstacles. If it isn’t a love that dare not speak its name, seek its flame or shriek its shame, if it isn’t a love potholed by a wife and four children, or even a love with a continent, an incurable illness and a clerical collar between you, I don’t see the barrier.’

At this Helen sank her head on Molly’s shoulder and sobbed, while Molly furtively reached for her glass. It could be a long night, no point in it being a dry one. But after Helen had a weep and accepted Molly’s offer of a cup of tea she calmed down.

‘I’m being stupid,’ she snivelled, juggling alternate sips of wine and tea. ‘It’s not love, it’s infatuation. If I’m patient it will fade.’

Like curtains, thought Molly, unable to stifle the stray comparison that sneaked into her mind.

Helen continued, ‘I simply have to wait for the feelings to evaporate. It’s just so –’ and here her composure quivered – ‘dreary in the meantime. The one person to whom I could describe how confused and destabilised I feel, because he’s probably experiencing something similar, is the one person I can’t approach. Him.’

‘You can talk to me, angel face.’ Curiosity and compassion were battling it out within Molly as she wondered who this unattainable paragon could be. Helen steadfastly stonewalled efforts to probe his identity, and Molly assumed it had to be someone from work. Where else did thirty-two-year-old women meet men? It certainly wasn’t in the supermarket, despite those magazine articles about checking out the contents of a man’s basket in the check-out queue. Small cartons of milk, individual pizzas and a decent bottle of wine meant singles; trolleys with a rainforest of loo roll and reservoir-sized cola bottles equalled daddies. Or so the article claimed. Molly wasn’t convinced it could be so self-evident. People weren’t tailored from Lycra for a one-size-fits-all finish.

Whoops, Helen was talking again – concentrate, Molly chided herself. Mentally assessing other men, even mythical ones, was verboten when your best friend was in emotional hyperventilation.

‘I know I can talk to you, you’re a saint to put up with my moaning –’

‘Let me have that in writing,’ interrupted Molly. ‘I’ll never be believed unless I can produce proof.’

‘You know you’re a strawberry cream, not the nut brittle you like to pretend, Moll. The problem is I don’t feel free to go into details here. I can’t name names. This involves two people and it wouldn’t be right to reveal his identity. Information leaks out – honestly, I’m not pointing the finger at you – but it could be harmful. For both of us. Least said soonest mended, as the Bible doesn’t say. But probably implies somewhere.’

‘Right, of course you can’t say any more,’ agreed Molly, monumentally disappointed. ‘I expect it would be a breach of confidence if I knew him already …’

She looked hopefully at Helen to see if her shot in the dark had struck home but there was no response. Feck, she was longing to know the identity of this adonis who had the normally self-contained Helen sobbing into her wine glass. But after a brief internal tussle Molly acknowledged she was being selfish; the priority now was to distract Helen from her conviction that life was pointless. All this talk of staying on the DART until the end of the line had unnerved Molly with its bleakness. Depression ran in the Sharkey family – Helen’s uncle had thrown himself under a double-decker after he lost his job. She wasn’t about to stand by while Helen caved in to the black dog. This called for decisive measures.

What Molly liked to do when sad was to party. Also when she was happy, bored and feeling stressed. So her solution to Helen’s dilemma, or the two-dimensional aspect of it she’d glimpsed, was glaringly apparent.

‘We’re going on the lash tomorrow night, Helen,’ she announced. ‘That’ll take your mind off him. We’ll get chatted up and flirt outrageously. It’s cast-iron therapy. I’ll wear my foolproof on-the-pull T-shirt, Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am in a holiday humour, and like enough to consent – jackpot guaranteed every time. Perhaps we’ll even buy you one too, just to prove we’re both the answer to a young man’s prayer, cherchez la indiscriminate femme.’

‘But we’re not,’ objected Helen.

‘I know that and you know that, angel face, but no harm in stringing them along for a few drinks. So will I pick up one of my Shakespearean soundbite numbers for you? Something that intimates “Ready when you are, big boy”, only in ye olde English to show you’re sophisticated?’

‘No,’ shuddered Helen. ‘What works for you wouldn’t carry the same, er, conviction for me. I don’t know that I have the heart for a session, Molly. The city centre’s so congested, there’s nowhere to sit in pubs and you can’t hear yourself speak.’

‘You’ve lost the plot, my little wounded bird. That’s the whole point of Saturday nights on the town. We’re both thirty-two, not a hundred and two, so let’s get cracking and prove we’re irresistible women in the prime of our lives. I’ll meet you in the Lifer at eight and –’

‘Not the Life Bar, it’s too young and trendy,’ complained Helen.

‘So are we. And wear something jam-tarty.’

Helen looked dubious at this final injunction.

‘The nearest you can manage,’ amended Molly. ‘Nothing buttoned up or navy.’

No point in expecting an overnight metamorphosis.

Just as well, reflected Helen, in one of her frequent reflective moments, after Molly left, that friends didn’t have to share characteristics because the two of them would never have lasted the distance.

Just as well, reflected Molly, in one of her infrequent reflective moments, after she left, that friends didn’t have to share characteristics because the two of them would never have lasted the distance.

Instead they had instantly formed a bond when they’d met on day one at university fourteen years ago. Admittedly they’d been thrown together as first year Arts students by mutual terror of Sarah Daly, who was acquainted with Helen from school and Molly from sharing lodgings. Sarah had been superbly informed – she’d known which bus would take them to the Belfield Campus at University College Dublin and where the bus stop was located and she’d even identified the lecture theatre location for their first session on Longfellow or some other fellow. Meanwhile Helen and Molly had both been desperately intimidated and even more desperate not to betray it. Sarah’s savoir-faire – and their discovery over coffee that they each abhorred her for it – had sparked a chemical reaction friendship.

Sitting in the taxi home, with only a sixth of an ear (and even that was probably excessive) tuned to the driver ranting about teenage pregnancies and moving on seamlessly to refugees bleeding the social security system dry, Molly decided to unmask Helen’s love bug. Not to be inquisitive, God no. So she could splat him on behalf of her unhinged friend. Helen wasn’t the best at romance; come to think of it she’d only had one grand passion. That had been just after graduating, with a marketing executive called Eugene. He’d been more than presentable – apart from his predilection for wearing dark shirts under beige linen jackets, which had prompted Molly to christen him the Black and Tan, although he’d insisted he preferred Gene if a nickname were essential. That relationship had juddered to a halt when he’d shown the temerity to propose. Marriage. Time for the short step followed by the long drop for Eugene.

‘I’m never getting married,’ Helen had insisted and Molly had concurred. Never didn’t mean not ever, as Molly understood it, it meant not while you were in your twenties and could pick and choose. In your thirties, now, you might consider it. In fact Molly was actively, not to say compulsively, contemplating it. But Helen seemed curiously inflexible on the matter. One after the other their college friends had teetered up the aisle disguised as shepherdesses or woodland nymphs, surrounded by a bevy of miniature ruffians purporting to represent cherubs. Helen and Molly, meanwhile, bought cartwheel hats because there was nothing like them for creating allure, and mouthed along to The Wedding Feast at Cana during the service. By now they were word perfect.

Lately Molly had been gazing at those brides in their ivory tower dresses and wishing she were one. Wishing she were standing at the back of a church, with a man, razor nicks on his chin from an unsteady hand, waiting in the front pew for her. Not just any man, one who made her want to bolt to the altar at breakneck speed instead of decorously swishing up.

In the meantime there were best men – and second-best men – to audition at friends’ weddings. At the last wedding she’d attended, Molly had been disposed to give the best man the glad eye on the back of a spark of wit, despite his goatee beard, but a woman in a crocheted dress, complete with sausage-shaped baby-sick stain on the lapel, had swiftly signalled her prior claim.

Molly sighed. Despite fighting talk in her twenties, she wouldn’t mind being the one in satin slippers for a change, hemmed in by all those aunts from Killybegs and Gortnagallon never encountered except at weddings and funerals. Being thirty-two had much to answer for – perhaps she’d have passed safely through the stage by her mid-thirties. Everyone sympathised with women over their biological clocks but what about the ones saddled with a ticking Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. It left her wishing … wishing she were the one weighed down by Irish linen tablecloths and napkins bought in Clery’s sale and stockpiled until a gift was required. Tablecloths she’d never use because they belonged to the era of laundresses and starch, but that wasn’t the point – every newly-wed should have a selection. It left her wishing there was someone who regarded her as the most ravishing woman on the planet even when she couldn’t be bothered sliding in her contact lenses and blinked at the world from behind glasses. It left her wishing to exchange her apartment in Blackrock, with its undernourished fridge, for a house with a bulging fridge-freezer. One of those in-your-face Smeg jobs the colour of an ice lolly.

Once or twice she’d hinted as much to Helen but the shutters had grated down and her friend had made it crystalline there was to be no backsliding as far as she herself was concerned. Wedding cake was off the menu unless it was someone else’s.

Whereas Molly was finding the single life a little, well, single. She’d been in enough relationships – heck she was always falling in love; she was hooked on the adrenaline high – to know it wasn’t all roses as part of a couple. But the thorns seemed less prickly the older she waxed. Sometimes she daydreamed about how agreeable it might be to have someone to cut the grass. Not that she’d much call for gardening services living in a second-floor apartment, but it was reassuring to know you had the absolute right to dispatch a male with a lawnmower to your patch when you felt inclined to exert your authority or play at being a girlie or when – and this had to be a last resort – the grass needed it. Rules were rules. Everybody knew the marriage service ran along the lines of ‘do you promise to love her, honour her and cut the grass at her bidding as long as you both shall live?’

It was tricky, Molly reflected, imagining yourself immersed in marital bliss when you didn’t have a boyfriend. On the contrary, disagreed her opinionated inner voice, that made it easier. There was no need to cast your eye over the current boyfriend title-holder and realise this was it: this was as good as it got. Whereas the imagination, a particularly accommodating tool, allowed you to step out with Liam Neeson, who’d just happen to be rediscovering his thespian roots with a play at the Abbey when he’d bump into you one Sunday lunchtime. You’d be reading the newspapers on a caffeine and chill-out binge, despite the contradiction in terms, and you’d drop one of the sections and bend to retrieve it just as he reached it to you, and your gazes would collide. Naturally you’d both be sitting down because otherwise you’d need a stepladder to make eye contact. And even though you always looked like a regurgitated dog’s dinner on Sundays, this time you’d have bothered to wash your hair and wear something clean and pressed instead of picking over the pile of rejects on your bedroom floor and …

‘Blackrock, what street did you want, love?’

The taxi-driver curtailed Molly’s fantasy. I’m not finished with you yet, she instructed it, as she fished out her purse and advised the driver where to pull over. She debated withholding a tip in protest at his unreconstructed views on asylum seekers, hadn’t the courage, and compromised by rounding up the fare by a minimal amount.

However, the interruption returned her attention to Helen. Helen, who not only never wanted to marry but seemed disinclined for a little light relief in the jiggery pokery stakes too. Her last boyfriend had been booted into touch eighteen months ago, by Molly’s reckoning, the Daniel O’Donnell lookalike she’d dubbed Kitten Hips because he practised a panther walk. He had to practise it, reasoned Molly; nobody swayed naturally like that. Anyway, he went the way of all flesh that came into contact with Helen: namely she dumped him after four months when he turned serious, although her definition of too intense was his suggestion they should plant sunflowers in the 10-foot square of back garden where she used to live. His subtext: I intend to be around next year to see them flower. Her reaction: Pervert. What manner of man wants to make a commitment like that?

So for Helen to fall head over neat Cuban heels for someone off limits was a manifestation of natural justice. And while Molly was sorry for her friend’s palpable grief, she couldn’t help thinking: Cupid’s got you sorted, love, in one of those streetwise accents they use on television cop shows to portray gritty reality. Besides which, she was convinced Helen was overreacting. Too much red wine had blurred Molly’s recollection of the wan face weeping against her shoulder and the dejection in tones that described how life seemed to have dimmed from colour to monochrome. Molly wasn’t unsympathetic, she simply needed convincing the script was as unremittingly dire as Helen read it.

‘We’ll sort her out tomorrow night, Nelson,’ she told her teddy bear, named because he’d spent twenty-five years in a cupboard before being liberated (she’d been frightened of him as a child for no logical reason). ‘We’ll canter her out in the showing ring and she’ll be fighting them off with a broom handle. That’ll take her mind off the fellow she can’t have. And if it doesn’t, at least she might tell me some more about him. I’m agog to sneak a peek at the man who can send Helen Sharkey’s pulse ricocheting. Doesn’t the whole of Dublin know she’s the next best thing to celibate, barring lapses every eighteen months or so?’

As Molly was slinging Nelson onto the floor and climbing into bed without taking off her makeup – but remembering to collect a tumbler of water from the kitchen because Merlot furred her tongue – Helen was washing the wine glasses and bowls she’d filled with nibbles for her perpetually peckish friend. She sat on for the longest time after Molly left, her light-hearted reassurance warming the air behind her – ‘Chin up, Helen, we’ll all be dead in sixty years’ time.’ But now that she was alone again the temperature had plummeted and the solitary allure of her terraced cottage in Sandycove, just ten minutes’ walk from the seafront, seemed less acceptable – indeed, it was insupportable. She wallowed for a while, wondering why some malign fate had earmarked her for turmoil. Why couldn’t she have settled for Kitten Hips or the Black and Tan, or one of the other men who’d flitted through her life? They’d have stayed if she’d allowed them but she wouldn’t give them houseroom. Helen wasn’t a ‘settling for’ type of woman, however. And her mind had been made up about love a lifetime previously.

Movement, that’s what she needed. If she were busy she wouldn’t be able to dwell on him. She couldn’t even allow herself to think his name, although sometimes she said it aloud for the sheer pleasure of shaping her mouth around the syllables. Helen loved his name, the pattern of the K sounds in his Christian name and surname, the evenness of the double syllables in both. One time she’d been driving through Balbriggan and thought she was hallucinating because she’d passed a hardware shop and there was his name above the door. She’d had to retrace her steps to check whether there was actually a shop painted yellow and green on the corner of the main street with the name of the man she loved above it. There was. And it had made her laugh aloud with pleasure. She’d gone inside and felt herself suffused with joy as her eyes drifted along the shelves stacked with colour charts and tools whose purpose she couldn’t begin to fathom. Helen had bought a paintscraper to prolong the euphoria and kept it, unused, in a kitchen drawer alongside spare batteries and scissors.

But there wasn’t much gladness in her heart now as she dropped two red wine bottles into her recycling bin and recorked a third with only a glass or so eked from it. Although her feet were leaden, she knew there’d be little enough sleep that night.

‘Bring some hot chocolate to bed and read the new Maison Belle interiors magazine you’ve been saving for a treat,’ she urged herself. ‘That’ll make you feel better.’

Molly, who renamed everything, called it the Maison Smelly magazine, partly because Helen loved to lower her nose to the pristine scent of its unopened pages. Also because it inevitably offered free samples of potpourri refresher or fabric conditioner. Helen willed herself to believe that Maison Belle and a bedtime drink would reverse the decline in her flagging spirits. She knew all the tactics to manipulate a slump in mood – it was essential she did. Imagine if he contacted her on a day when she was feeling vulnerable and she succumbed to temptation and … Helen’s face crash-landed on her hands. She wished. She hardly knew what she wished for. Careful, don’t even think it, don’t let the narrowest scintilla of possibility edge around your mind. She leaped up and washed and wiped, perfecting her home; she’d as soon wedge the front door open with an All Burglars Welcome Here neon sign as retire to bed leaving dishes on the worktop or CDs separated from their holders.