what time would you like him to visit you?’ She tapped some more.
‘Visit me? No!’ I shouted down the phone. Mr Pan jumped, opened his eyes, looked around and closed them again. ‘Sorry for shouting,’ I composed myself. ‘He can’t come here.’
‘But I thought you said that wouldn’t be a problem for you.’
‘I meant it’s not a problem that he’s a man. I thought you were asking if that would be a problem.’
She laughed. ‘But why would I ask you that?’
‘I don’t know. Sometimes health spas ask that too, you know, in case you don’t want a male masseuse …’
She chuckled. ‘Well, I can guarantee he won’t be massaging any part of your anatomy.’
She made anatomy sound dirty. I shuddered.
‘Well, tell him I’m very sorry but he can’t come here.’ I looked around at my dismal studio flat that I always felt quite cosy in. It was a place for me, my own personal hovel; it was not for entertaining guests, lovers, neighbours, family members or even emergency services when the rug caught fire, it was just for me. And Mr Pan.
I was huddled up by the arm of the couch and a few steps behind me was the end of my double bed. To my right was a kitchen countertop, to my left the windows and beside the bed was a bathroom. That was about the size of it. Not that the size bothered me, or embarrassed me. It was more the state of it. My floor had become the wardrobe. I liked to think of my scattered belongings as stepping stones, my yellow brick road … that kind of thing. The contents of my previous top-dollar penthouse wardrobe were bigger than the new studio apartment itself and so my too many pairs of shoes had found their home along the windowsill, my long coats and full-length dresses hung on hangers at the right- and left-hand ends of the curtain pole and I slid them open and closed as the sun and moon requested just like regular curtains. The carpet was as I have already described, the couch monopolised the small living area reaching from windowsill to kitchen counter, which meant you couldn’t walk around it but had to climb over the back to sit on it. My life could not visit me in this mess. I was aware of the irony.
‘My carpets are being cleaned,’ I said, then I sighed as if it was just such a nuisance that I couldn’t bear to think about it. It wasn’t a lie. My carpets very much needed to be cleaned.
‘Well, can I recommend Magic Carpet Cleaners,’ she said brightly, as though suddenly jumping to commercial hour. ‘My husband,’ ma husbaand, ‘is a devil for shining his boots in the living room and Magic Carpet Cleaners get that black polish right out, you wouldn’t believe. He snores too. Unless I fall asleep before him I get none the rest of the night so I watch those infomercials and one night I saw a man shining his shoes on a white carpet, just like my husband and that’s what caught my attention. Was like the company was made just for me. They took the stain right out, so I had to go out and get me some. Magic Carpet Cleaners, write it down.’
She was so intense I found myself wanting to invest in black shoe polish in order to test these magical cleaning infomercial people and I scrambled for a pen, which in accordance with the Pen Legislation Act of Since the Beginning of Time was not anywhere in sight when I needed it. With marker in hand I looked around for something to write on. I couldn’t find any paper so I wrote on the carpet, which seemed appropriate.
‘Why don’t you just tell me when you can come see him, save us the back and forth.’
My mother had called a special meeting of the family to gather on Saturday.
‘You know what, I know that this is so important, being summoned by my life and all, and despite having an important family gathering on Saturday, I’d really love to meet with him then.’
‘Oh,’ ewwww, ‘sweetheart, I will make a special note that you were willing to miss that special day with your loved ones to meet with him but I think that you should take that time to be with your family. God only knows how long you’ve got ’em for and we’ll see you the following day. Sunday. How does that grab you?’
I groaned. But not out loud, it was inside, deep within, a long agonised painful sound from a painful agonised place deep inside. And so the date was set. Sunday, we would meet, our paths would collide and everything I’d considered to be secure and anchored would suddenly slip and slide and change beyond belief. That’s what I’d read would happen in a magazine interview with a woman who had met with her life. They provided before and after photos of her for the benefit of the uneducated reader who couldn’t access picture images in their mind. Interestingly, before she’d met her life, her hair hadn’t been blowdried, but it was after; she had no make-up or spray tan on before, but had after; she wore leggings and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt before and was photographed in harsh lighting, but wore a softly draped asymmetric dress afterwards in a perfectly lit studio kitchen where a tall vase of artistically placed lemons and limes showed how life had apparently made her more attracted to citric flavours. She wore glasses before meeting with life, she wore contacts afterwards. I wondered who had changed her more; the magazine or her life.
In just under a week’s time I was going to meet my life. And my life was a man. But why me? I felt my life was going just fine. I felt fine. Everything in my life was absolutely fine.
Then I lay back on the couch and studied the curtain pole to decide what to wear.
CHAPTER FOUR
On the fateful Saturday that I’d been dreading ever since the day before I even heard about it, I pulled up to the electric gates of my parents’ home in my 1984 Volkswagen Beetle that had backfired all the way up the exclusive estate, attracting a few unhealthy glares from the sensitive rich people. I didn’t grow up in the house I was waiting outside and so it didn’t feel like a return to home. It didn’t even feel like my parents’ home. It was a house that they lived in when they weren’t in their holiday house, that they lived in when they weren’t in their domestic house. The fact that I was waiting outside, pending permission to be granted, detached me from it even more. I had friends who drove straight up driveways, knew passwords and alarm codes, or used their own keys to visit their parents. I didn’t even know where the coffee mugs were kept. The big gates had the desired effect, designed to keep out vagrants and deviants – and daughters – though the deterrent for me was being trapped inside. A burglar would climb over them to get into the house, I would scale them to get out. As though picking up on my mood, my car, who I named Sebastian after my grandfather who was never without a cigar in his hand and as a result developed a hacking cough that eventually sent him to his grave, seemed to run out of steam as soon as it realised where we were going. The route to my parents’ house was a tricky system of windy narrow roads in Glendalough that dipped and rose, twisted and turned around one giant mansion after another. Sebastian stopped and spluttered. I wound down my window and pressed the intercom.
‘Hello, you’ve reached the Silchesters’ Home for the sexually deviant, how can we fulfil your needs?’ came a breathy male voice down the line.
‘Father, stop messing about.’
There was an explosion of laughter through the speaker, causing two power-walking Botoxed blondes to end their secret nattering and whip their high pony-tails around to stare. I smiled at them but as soon as they saw me, a brown unimportant thing in a junk of metal, they looked away and shook their VPL-free tight little
