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.
At the bottom of the stairs, magazine under an arm and mug in hand, she cast an eye back over her immaculate domain. At least some aspects of life were under her control. Control. It was what rendered existence manageable. When she reached the top stair the phone rang. She counted as its bells pealed twelve times. Her fingers itched to lift it but she willed them to cup her drinking chocolate, breathing suspended as she waited for the jangling to cease. When all was silent she walked into the bedroom and pressed a button to read the confirmation – he was calling. The magazine slipped to the floor and she placed the drinking chocolate sightlessly on her bedside table, toppling the alarm clock. Her uncharacteristic clumsiness flung tongues of milky liquid from the mug but Helen didn’t notice the pool’s inching progress towards the table’s edge, or the way it dribbled onto her chrysanthemum-embroidered duvet cover. She curled, foetal fashion, with a pillow clutched to her cheek, too distressed to weep. Longing washed over her. And remembering.
He throws himself onto the ground and subsides against a tree trunk, mute with misery. Sweating from his headlong pelt, he tugs open his shirt buttons to create a current of air against his torso. His pain is so intense she reaches out instinctively, chafing his inert hand. Helen searches for words of comfort – lies or truth, no matter so long as they soothe – but can find none. Every angular line of his body exudes desolation and it gashes her to witness it almost as much as it wounded her to watch the scene five minutes earlier between the boy and his rabid father.
Impulsively she slides onto her knees in front of him, the leaves crackling on impact, and takes his face between her hands. He’s no longer sprawling, disconsolate, but watching her now, mesmerised, as she edges ever closer, bridging the gap between their bodies. Helen’s unaware of what she’s about to do until it happens. Her pulse is erratic, her body curves forward of its own accord; her lips sink onto his and cling there for the space of a heartbeat. There’s a momentary hesitation, then she feels his lips move under hers, warm and moist.
Pinpricks of perspiration flare around the pulse-point map of Helen’s body. She’s tingling and the intensity of her reaction causes her to waver – she pulls back and looks at him, leaning on one hand to steady herself. An indefinable gleam in his expression touches her immeasurably. She subsides towards his mouth, even as he moves towards hers. Their lips collide, his chin rubs against hers and she experiences surprise at the grating of his stubble, then has no further conscious thought.
The two are subsumed by sentience, mouths softening into one another, captivated by the delirium of pleasure. Her hand cradling his head scrapes against the abrasive texture of the tree trunk but the pain does not register. She presses against him, winding her arms around his neck, and her body against his incites a change of mood for his mouth is no longer whispers; there’s urgency in his serrated breathing and in kisses that clash teeth against teeth.
She disengages and rests her face in the hollow of his shoulder. A smattering of hairs clump in the sternum hollow between the salmon-pink nipples
