The One I Love Read online

  The One I Love

  ANNA MCPARTLIN

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published in Ireland by Poolbeg as So What If I’m Broken 2009

  This edition published in Penguin Books 2010

  Copyright © Anna McPartlin, 2009, 2010

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-241-95016-6

  For Donal, and for all the fans of Jack

  Throughout The One I Love you will come across the lyrics of the fantastic and inimitable Jack L. Jack’s people have kindly arranged for readers to download two of his songs for free. To get them, simply type the words ‘Finding Alexandra’ in the subject line of an email and send it to [email protected]

  Table of Contents

  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

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Universe

  Oh nothing lasts for ever,

  you can cry a million rivers,

  you can rage it ain’t no sin

  but it won’t change a thing,

  ’cos nothing lasts for ever.

  Jack L, Universe

  Alexandra, 21 June 2007

  Tom,

  When you are shopping can you pick up the following:

  – Bread

  – Milk × 2

  – Water × 4

  – Spaghetti

  – Mince (lean! Make sure it’s lean and not the stuff they call lean and charge half price because it’s not lean. I want lean cut right in front of you and I don’t care how much it costs)

  – Tin of tomatoes

  – Basil

  – Garlic

  – Wine, if you don’t still have a case or two in the office and make sure it’s not Shiraz. I’m really sick of Shiraz.

  – If you want dessert pick something up.

  I’m meeting Sherri in Dalkey for a quick drink at five. She has the Jack Lukeman tickets so I took money from the kitty to pay for them. I’m taking a ticket for you so if you don’t want to go text me. I’ll be home around seven thirty. Your aunt called, she’s thinking about coming to Dublin next weekend. Try and talk her out of it. I’m exhausted and can’t handle running around after her for forty-eight hours straight. Your aunt is on cocaine. I’m not messing. An intervention is needed.

  Oh, and washing-up liquid. We badly need washing-up liquid, and will you please call someone to get the dishwasher fixed?

  OK, see you later,

  Love you,

  Alexandra

  PS When somebody close to you dies, move seats.

  God, I love Jimmy Carr.

  Alexandra laughed to herself as she put her note up on the fridge and held it in position with her favourite magnet, which was a fat, grinning pig rubbing his tummy. She was damp and sweaty having run five miles, which was a record and she was extremely pleased. She unclipped her iPod from her tracksuit, placed it on the counter and headed upstairs to the shower. There she sang Rihanna’s “Umbrella”, and did a little dance move before washing shampoo out of her hair.

  Forty-five minutes later she walked down the stairs with her shoulder-length hair perfectly coiffed. She was wearing black trousers, tucked into her favourite black high-heeled boots, and a fitted black blouse complete with a large bow. She stopped at the hall mirror and applied lipstick, then rooted some gloss out of her handbag and applied that too. She stared at herself in the mirror for a moment or two, sighed and mumbled something about Angelina Jolie crapping her pants. She smiled at her own joke while putting on her jacket. She picked up her handbag and went out of the door.

  Alexandra walked along the street and waved at Mrs Murphy from number fourteen. Mrs Murphy was busy sweeping her step but she waved and called out that it was a lovely day. Alexandra smiled and told her it was perfect. She waited for the DART and listened to a man talk to Joe Duffy about cruelty to animals on Liveline. It was too sad so she switched from radio to her music collection and only stopped humming along to James Morrison’s “Last Goodbye” when she realized that three spotty teenagers were laughing and pointing at her. She stuck out her tongue and grinned at them, and they laughed again.

  She sat on the train next to a man in his fifties. He asked her to wake him at Tara Street station if he fell asleep, explaining that there was something about moving trains that always made him sleep. She assured him she would wake him and, true to his word, he was snoring less than five minutes later. Coming up to Tara Street she tapped his arm gently but he still woke with a start. Once he’d regained his senses, he thanked her and made his way off the train. He forgot his bag so she ran after him and handed it to him. He was grateful but she was in a hurry to get back on the train so she just waved and ran.

  The woman sitting opposite her grinned and nodded. “My own dad would forget his head,” she said.

  Alexandra smiled at her. “He was sweet.”

  The woman nodded again. Alexandra got off the train in Dalkey. The woman got off at the same station but neither made eye contact again.

  Alexandra made her way through the station and out into the sunshine. She continued straight onto the main street and took the left at the end of the street. After that she took a right and then another left, and after that Alexandra was gone.

  Elle, 31 December 1989

  Dear Universe,

  Please don’t send a fiery ball of hellfire comet thing to kill us all. I’m only eight so if I die now I won’t get to do anything that I really want to. Miss Sullivan thinks that I could be an artist. If I’m dead I can’t paint and I love painting and living. Margaret Nolan says that everyone thinks that we’re going to be nuked in 1999 but the real truth is that a flaming ball of death is going to crash into earth at the stroke of midnight tonight. She sits next to me in class and sometimes smells like a hospital. Her dad’s a scientist and he told her so she has a good chance of being
right. She’s already given her pocket money to the poor and says I should do the same so that when our time comes God will think we’re decent enough sorts and let us into heaven. I forgot to go to the church to put money in the poor box because I got carried away working on a painting of my family dying in dancing fire. Jane says I’m a depressing little cow. She’s always in a bad mood lately. Mum says it’s because she’s a teenager, she’s fighting with her boyfriend and she’s got fat. She thinks being eight is the same as being slow but I know Jane is pregnant because they shout about it all the time. I’m not slow and I’m not deaf either. I feel sorry for the baby because if we all die tonight it will never have known life but then again maybe that’s for the best.

  OK, here are my promises to you if we make it past midnight.

  I’ll be good.

  I’ll do what my mum tells me to.

  I won’t swear.

  I won’t tell any lies unless my mum asks me to (see promise 2).

  I’ll be nicer to Jane.

  I’ll paint every day.

  I’ll help Jane take care of Mum a bit more. (I can’t help all the time – see promise 6.)

  I’ll give my pocket money to the poor tomorrow morning.

  I’ll be nice to Jane’s baby because I’ve a feeling I might be the only one.

  I won’t listen to anything Margaret Nolan has to say again.

  And, Universe, if we do all die in fire tonight, thanks for nothing.

  Yours,

  Elle Moore

  XXX

  That was the first letter Elle Moore wrote to the Universe. She folded it and put it into an old shortbread tin. After her supper she tied her long brown hair in a knot and dressed in her brand-new Christmas coat, hat, gloves and her sister Jane’s favourite tie-dye fringed scarf. She made her way down the right-hand side of the long garden where she dug a hole between her mother’s roses and the graves of four dead gerbils: Jimmy, Jessica, Judy and Jeffrey. Once the tin was placed in the hole and the earth covered it, she made a promise to herself that if she did live past midnight on that 31 December in 1989, the following year she’d retrieve her letter and replace it with another.

  Little did she know it back then but Elle Moore would continue to write letters to the Universe every New Year’s Eve for the next eighteen years.

  Jane, 5 May 1990

  Dear Mrs Moore,

  I am writing to you today about my concerns regarding your daughter Jane. I have attempted to reach out to Jane on a number of occasions in recent times but to no avail. As you are well aware I have also attempted to communicate with your good self but that too has proved difficult/nigh on impossible. Therefore I am now left with no choice but to write this letter.

  It is clear to the teaching staff and to the student body that Jane is in the latter stages of pregnancy and so it is now urgent that we speak. Jane’s schoolwork and attendance suffered immeasurably last term and, as a Leaving Cert student, she now faces her mock examinations unprepared and with motherhood imminent. Jane seems to be incapable of coming to terms with her condition, as it would appear are you, but we in St Peter’s cannot simply stand by and act like nothing is happening to this seventeen-year-old girl.

  I urge you, Mrs Moore, to phone me or to come into the school and meet with me at any time convenient for you. I cannot allow this silence to continue any longer and so if we do not hear from you within the next week we will be forced to ask your daughter not to return to school until such time as communication has been established.

  Over the years Jane and I have had our disagreements. Her flagrant disregard for our rules regarding smoking on school premises and the Irish stew incident that led to a fire in the Home Economics room are only two of the episodes I could mention. As you are aware we’ve butted heads on many more occasions, especially when she came to school with purple hair or, indeed, during her thankfully short-lived Cure-inspired Gothic phase. This school has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to the presentation of its students but I must admit, though I was exasperated by her opposition and having to endure debate on many occasions, she conveyed her points ably and with admirable passion. The reason I mention this is that although our relationship as principal and student is chequered I feel it necessary to make it clear that Jane is a very clever girl, bright and articulate, and I have often thought that she could do anything she set her mind to, and in twenty years I have only thought that a handful of times. I am worried for her, Mrs Moore. She has lost her sparkle and her fight. The girl I knew and, despite our differences, have a great fondness for has all but disappeared.

  Teenage pregnancy is terrible and absolutely not to be encouraged, but support is not the same as encouragement and with support Jane could continue her studies and fulfil her ambitions. Surely it is not the end for a girl such as Jane.

  Please come and speak to me for Jane’s sake. Don’t leave me with no option but to expel such a talented young girl from our school.

  Kindest regards,

  Amanda Reynolds (Principal)

  Jane finished reading the letter aloud and blew her blonde fringe out of her eyes while waiting on her best friend’s response. Alexandra twirled her chestnut hair around her finger and stared at it in silence. After a few seconds she shrugged. “Jesus, who knew Reynolds had a heart?”

  Jane felt like crying because her principal had responded to her crisis pregnancy with far more kindness and understanding than her own mother, who had had one tantrum after another since her condition had been revealed months previously. During her latest tantrum she had taken the time to mention how much money she had pissed into the wind by sending Jane to a private school and told Jane in no uncertain terms that her education was over because only a bloody childless spinster like Amanda Reynolds could possibly think that having a baby at seventeen didn’t mean the end of an academic career. She slammed the door on exiting the room, not once but twice for effect.

  On that afternoon, and for the first time, Jane truly acknowledged the predicament she was in and how badly wrong her life had gone. She realized that she would miss her principal and she would miss school, as well as the opportunity to go to college. She’d miss her friends who, except Alexandra, had drifted away during her pregnancy, and she’d miss Dominic even though he was avoiding her and completely ignoring the fact that she was carrying his child. He couldn’t hide his pain from her. She recognized and identified with his haunted expression, and she loved him. Following an argument with his parents, who had dared to imply that Jane was a little whore, her mother had made it clear that if she saw him anywhere near their property she’d attack him with a shovel – and Jane’s mother did not make threats of violence lightly.

  Once when Jane was seven a man had come to their door. He was buying and selling antiques. Her mother said she wasn’t interested but he had spied an antique table in the hall. He had put his foot in the door and attempted to change her mind about doing business. She reiterated that she had no interest and told him if he didn’t remove his foot she would hurt him. He laughed at her. “No can do,” he said, and his foot remained in the door. She counted down aloud from five to zero. He continued to push his foot further into her hallway, all the while grinning at her foolishly. It was clear to Jane’s mother that this man believed her to be a stupid, incapable woman and that she would not or could not keep her promise.

  When she reached zero she calmly reached for an umbrella she kept in the hall and, releasing the door, she pushed it, with full force, into his stomach. Startled, he bent forward, clutching his midriff. She then bopped him on the head not once or twice but three times. He fell backwards, she smiled politely, said good day to him, and left him winded and slightly dazed on her doorstep. Jane remembered the incident well because she had stood at the window watching the man sit on the step for what seemed like a long time before he was capable of getting up.

  Her mother had joined her just as he was leaving. “Good riddance,” she’d said, with a genuine smile. “You know, J
aney, there’s nothing quite like giving a smug, arrogant cock like him a good dig to cheer up a dull day.” So Jane knew that if her mother had enjoyed giving that cock a dig because he’d put his foot in her doorway she would definitely enjoy slapping Dominic in the face with a shovel for putting his cock in her daughter.

  After Alexandra had read the letter a few more times and lamented with Jane over her mother being a bigger bitch than Alexis on Dynasty, she opened the first of six cans of Ritz. Later, when Jane was drunk on one can and Alexandra was on her third, Jane compared her and Dominic’s plight to that of Romeo and Juliet. Alexandra threw cold water on Jane’s fanciful theory: “It’s like this, Janey,” she said. “Romeo didn’t get Juliet up the pole and then dump her at a disco.”

  “I know, but his parents made him give me up and –”

  “And anyway,” Alexandra said, with drunken authority, “as bad as your situation is with Dominic, you don’t want to be anything like Romeo and Juliet because Romeo and Juliet is a shit love story. Romeo was a shallow slut, Juliet pathetic and needy, their families were killing each other and they were in love one stupid day before they were married and then dead. Romeo and Juliet weren’t star-crossed lovers, they were knackers.”

  “When you put it that way,” Jane said sadly.

  “Can you believe Miss Hobbs only gave me a C in English? I may not be able to spell ‘apothecary’ but I have insight. That woman doesn’t know her arse from her elbow.” Then Alexandra threw up in Jane’s bin.