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
