The One I Love Page 13

  *

  Back in his hotel room, Jane insisted that Tom have a strong brandy to calm his nerves. He was berating himself for believing it possible to find Alexandra at a gig in London and saying how stupid of him to think that his wife would be in Jack L’s dressing room – after all, the Jack camp had been so good about helping him. That woman was not just thinner, she was rail-thin, and she was taller and, despite certain similarities, up close she was nothing like his wife. He had been fooling himself.

  His police liaison officer, Trish, had said as much the last time she called to the house to update him on the investigation surrounding his wife’s disappearance. Their unit had analysed the CCTV footage that Michelle had passed on and found that it wasn’t a match. He had argued with her that computers were not gods and he knew his wife’s face. She had been patient with him and was always kind, but she was adamant that he needed to let go of the notion of finding his wife in a London club.

  “I can’t let go,” he said. “I have to find her.”

  Trish left soon after and he promptly blocked out the information she’d just given him because, more and more, his mind was visiting the dark place and he desperately needed hope.

  Now, as he sat drinking brandy, that conversation came back to haunt him. He apologized to Jane for wasting her time and for breaking down in the alleyway. He assured her he would pay to clean the oil stains from her coat, the result of her sitting on the ground and rocking him like a baby for ten minutes.

  She told him he should get some sleep. She kissed his cheek and said they would keep searching.

  He held her hand and looked into her eyes and bit his lip. “Tell me something about her.”

  So she told him about a time when her best friend Alexandra was a little girl, maybe eleven or twelve, and stole an ice cream from the local shop. She’d spent a second or two choosing the one she wanted, placed it under her coat and made her way outside. When the shopkeeper ran after her, calling on her to stop, she turned to him, calmly took out the ice cream and handed it to him. Then she smiled and congratulated him on catching her. “No flies on you, Mr Dunne, no flies at all!” Alexandra had said.

  Mr Dunne was taken aback, especially when she pointed out that two days earlier, while he was away from the shop and his wife was behind the counter, she’d stolen a bar of chocolate without any fear of capture. She took it from her pocket and handed it to him. “I practically dangled it under her nose,” she said to Mr Dunne, who was now decidedly confused. “To be fair to her, the shop was busy but, Mr Dunne, you can never be too careful – shoplifters are everywhere.”

  “I’ll mention it to her,” he said, still unsure as to what was going on.

  “You’re welcome,” she said, and walked down the road.

  Mr Dunne stared from her to the chocolate bar and to his wife, who was busy serving a customer. What the hell just happened?

  Alexandra made it around the corner to where Jane was waiting and, as soon as she was sure that Mr Dunne could no longer see her, she burst into tears. Once she’d recovered sufficiently to walk home Alexandra promised Jane she would never again engage in a criminal act, but although she had scared the pants off herself and was down a bar of chocolate, the encounter was not a total loss because Alexandra had learned something very powerful that day: any lie delivered with confidence and conviction is believable, no matter how ridiculous the circumstance. This self-awareness had really worked in their favour when they were caught poaching while on holiday with Alexandra’s parents in Mayo a year later.

  “And what about you?” Tom asked. “Did you just wait to see if she’d get away with it before you had a go?”

  “Oh, no! I’d successfully robbed three Mars bars from a shop two doors down. It was one of those bars that she gave back to Mr Dunne.”

  He laughed a little. “So what did you learn?”

  “That the hand is quicker than an old woman’s one good eye.”

  When Jane was content that she’d cheered Tom up a little she bade him goodnight.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  He walked to the door with her and watched her go down the corridor to her room. She could feel his eyes on her back and she smiled at him when she turned to place her key card in the door. She disappeared into her room and Tom entered his, opened the mini-bar again and started drinking. When he saw he’d missed three calls from Jeanette he turned his phone to silent.

  When Jane’s taxi pulled up to her house her son opened the front door, walked down the steps, met her at the gate and took her suitcase from her hand. “Sorry, Mum,” he said. “I should have helped out with Gran.”

  Jane was surprised and unsure what to say. Instead she just hugged him tight and took the opportunity to kiss his cheek.

  “Mum!” he moaned. As they walked up the steps together he put his arm around her shoulders. “I have something to tell you,” he said.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Irene’s here.”

  “And?”

  “She needs a place to stay.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “There’s no food in her house.”

  “Okay.”

  He stopped at the door and turned to her. “Really?”

  “Really. Just make sure she lets her mother know.”

  “She would if she could reach her.”

  He followed her inside, she hung up her coat and he placed her case on the floor.

  “Are you hungry?” she said.

  “We’re starving.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Give me five minutes and I’ll get busy.”

  Irene appeared in the sitting-room doorway. “Hi, Jane,” she said shyly.

  Jane walked over to her, hugged her and kissed her on the forehead. “Welcome.”

  Irene brightened. “Thanks, Jane, you rock.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said, “and you’re in the spare room.”

  “I know, I know. Don’t have sex, not here, not there, not anywhere,” Irene said, in a voice that mimicked Jane’s.

  Kurt laughed and Jane nodded. “Exactly.”

  She walked into her bedroom, sat on the bed and took a minute to allow the events of the weekend to wash over her. Then she took time to be grateful for her life, as hard as it sometimes was. I’m one of the lucky ones.

  Chapter 8

  Numero Uno

  I looked behind the counter,

  sofa and the sink,

  got down on my knees

  and looked under the fridge

  but I can’t find love.

  Jack L, Metropolis Blue

  April 2008

  Dominic had never been very good at relationships. In his thirty-six years on the planet his longest had been three years. He had married Bella six months after he’d ended a disastrous but very passionate affair with a dancer called Heidi. She was twenty-three and liked to take E or alternatively acid on weekends. He hadn’t bothered to take E in his teens and twenties with his peers so he was damned if he was going to do it in his thirties. Also he’d witnessed a guy in college attempt to hack off his own foot with a wooden spoon while screaming that the eagles had landed after a particularly bad acid trip, so that was out. Besides, as a respectable bank manager the last thing in the world he wanted was to be found in a club in Dublin off his tits and bouncing off walls or screaming bloody murder while attempting to land himself on the moon.

  Heidi resented that he didn’t share her interests and he found it difficult to live with someone who was in a bad mood from Sunday morning to Tuesday night. So, class A drugs were blamed for the demise of their relationship. They had fought and she had ordered him out of her flat, and he told her he wouldn’t be back and she was happy with that, further promising that if she saw him anywhere near her place again she’d call the police. Obviously he pointed out that calling the police would be a bad idea, considering she shared a flat with a drug-dealer named Seth and spent half her time either going u
p or coming down. He had walked from her flat to his car and gone to Jane’s house. She had made him dinner and provided a shoulder to cry on, because even though Heidi drove him crazy he would miss her. Jane was a great listener. She was always there for him even though when she’d needed him most he hadn’t been there for her.

  Dominic often regretted the choices he had made aged seventeen but there was part of him that was also secretly grateful. If he and Jane had married, as Rose had demanded at the time, they wouldn’t have made it. He would never have gone to university. If he hadn’t gone to university he wouldn’t now have an extremely well-paid and cushy job in a top bank and he certainly wouldn’t be living the luxury lifestyle he’d become accustomed to. He could have kissed goodbye to his cars and his house in Ballsbridge, his chalet in France and the five apartments he was earning high rents from in an exclusive development in Blackrock. God knew where he’d be because, when he was seventeen, his parents had warned him in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t go to university and get a degree and follow in his father’s footsteps he was on his own.

  At the time he was a kid, confused and scared, and although he was high on a drug called love, the reality of becoming a father had brought him down fast. His parents had insisted he stay away from the girl who they believed had become pregnant on purpose to trap him. When their offer of financial support, on the condition that Jane kept away from their son, was rejected by the madwoman who had reared her, they were happy to wash their hands of the girl and child entirely. They were adamant that if Dominic didn’t want to pay for university himself he would never speak to the girl again. He didn’t want to pay for college himself. He wanted the same free ride that his two older brothers had enjoyed. He wanted the cool apartment he could share with his two best friends, Mint and Brick. He wanted to experience the college lifestyle, the parties, the girls, the clubs, the drink, the sport, the late nights, the crap food and mostly the freedom from a life lived under the watchful eye of his strict parents.

  He acquiesced to their demands easily, and afterwards when Jane tried to talk to him he ignored her. When she took the hint and stayed away, he watched her grow under her uniform and it was hard to avoid the terrible sadness in her eyes because she wasn’t given a choice. All the ambition that had burned so brightly in her would be lost and all Dominic wanted to do was run away, because Dominic, like their principal Amanda Reynolds, knew that Jane could have achieved whatever she wanted. She could hold a full-scale conversation with Alexandra during the maths class, and if the teacher tried to make an example of her by asking her to explain the theorem on the blackboard, she could do so without so much as a second’s thought. Alexandra, on the other hand, would make up something so preposterous that the whole class would burst out laughing. Then she’d take a bow, leaving the teacher too busy trying to regain control to bother correcting her for not paying attention.

  Jane barely opened a book and yet she maintained a B average. She could have been an A student with the greatest of ease but deliberately maintained the B because she didn’t want to be associated with the class nerds. She, too, had been desperate to go to university and she’d applied to the same colleges as Alexandra, and although it would mean being apart from Dominic, she had secretly hoped that they would both get Cork because that meant she could leave home. Dominic was sorry for Jane and he wanted the best for her because she was cool and they’d had the best two years together, but he was far too selfish to risk his own future to tell her so.

  Four years after his son was born Dominic had graduated from college. He had experienced all the things that came with college life, he was on a good starting salary with the bank of his choice and his parents didn’t own him any more. He walked up the steps of his old girlfriend’s house on their child’s fourth birthday. He carried a gift in his hand. Passing balloons tied to the railings, he stopped at the front door and took a moment to collect himself before knocking. He was perfectly prepared for the door to be slammed in his face but it wasn’t. Jane opened it with their son on her hip, and even though he’d walked up the pathway and knocked on her door, he was shocked to see her and his son. He tried to raise a smile but he was ashamed and embarrassed so he lifted up the gift and held it out. She looked from him to the gift and then to her son, and she opened the door a little more and invited him in. Thirteen years later Dominic still couldn’t work out why Jane had found it so easy to forgive him.

  The first time they had slept together again was on the night of Kurt’s Holy Communion. He was seven, and in the three years Dominic had been a father to him he and Jane had become close confidants and friends. He was there, dressed in a suit with video camera in hand, when his son came down the stairs dressed in his own little mini-me suit and wearing his rosette pinned to his chest. Kurt was embarrassed and hated his suit and begged Jane to gel back his blond curls but there was no way that was happening, so after a mini-tantrum at the bottom of the stairs, which was later edited out, they made their way to the church as a family. Dominic drove, Jane sat in the front and Kurt sat between his auntie Elle, who was sixteen and going through her Siouxsie and the Banshees “craving for a raw love” phase, and Rose, who kicked the back of Dominic’s seat twice, claiming it was an accident and pretending to be horrified at the notion that her daughter could possibly think it was anything else. “I was merely crossing my legs, Jane, and if this car wasn’t the size of half a can of beans I’d have been able to do so without nearly losing a knee.”

  Afterwards they had met up with his parents in a posh restaurant in Dublin city centre and, in spite of Rose getting completely twisted before the main course was even served and in spite of Dominic’s parents’ coldness, Kurt was happy. He was surrounded by the people he loved because, back then, Jane and Dominic were the centre of his universe and Elle was the coolest person he knew. Dominic stayed until well after Kurt had been put to bed. Together he and Jane opened a bottle of wine and toasted their son’s big day. They weren’t even through the first glass when Dominic was taking Jane to her bedroom, the same one that she had snuck him into seven years earlier. They both crept as silently as they could because at that time Rose still lived in the main house, and although she was in a drunken stupor, neither Dominic nor Jane wanted to risk waking her and provoking her wrath.

  Once Jane’s door was locked they kissed and touched and were naked within minutes, lying together on the bed in which their son had been conceived. This time Jane had a coil fitted and Dominic was wearing a condom. Dominic snuck out a few hours later.

  The next day he phoned. He was regretful and hoped that their actions the previous night wouldn’t ruin the fantastic friendship they’d built up. Jane had promised him that nothing would change and when he’d hung up he was relieved that, once again, Jane Moore had proved herself to be so cool. Of course he didn’t see her, broken-hearted, lying face down on her bedroom floor crying for hours. Neither did he have any idea how much she had hoped that he’d give their relationship a chance because, for Jane, what could have been better than a happy ending with the man she loved, the father of her child?

  The second time they’d had sex was after Jane’s twenty-seventh birthday. Dominic was seeing two girls but it was early days as neither had allowed him access to their bedrooms. Jane had broken up with an artist she’d dated for six months. They were incredibly drunk and if Jane had not woken up on top of Dominic neither of them would have remembered having sex. This was rectified the following night when Dominic brought flowers and chocolates to apologize once again for his pesky penis. Jane opened a bottle of wine, and half an hour after Dominic’s apology they were in bed. Over the next year they often got together when Dominic was between relationships or Jane was lonely and having a hard time dealing with her mother, her sister, or their son. By that stage their relationship was firmly in the friends-with-benefits zone, which suited Dominic completely, and Jane seemed happy to make the best of it.

  It stopped when Dominic met Gina at a conference
held in the Gresham Hotel. She was a country girl, accomplished, nice to Jane and kind to Kurt. They lasted for three years and Jane was sure they’d marry, but when Gina demanded a ring Dominic walked away and found himself in Jane’s bed once more. And so their sexual history continued until the last time they’d had sex – the night when he’d split with the tripped-out Heidi.

  A week later he’d arrived to Kurt’s birthday with his new girlfriend, Bella, and one month later they were engaged. He hadn’t slept with Jane since.

  Elle felt like a new woman since her weekend away with Leslie. She had continued to work for hours every day, labouring over each face as though she was re-creating it in the presence of God. When the collection of twelve was complete, two of her old art-school contemporaries arrived at her cottage to view them. Fiona and Lori arrived together and Elle greeted them warmly, hugging them, and when Lori pointed out that they hadn’t seen her since before Christmas she explained that she had been working very hard. They complained that she hadn’t bothered to turn up to her last exhibition and she apologized for her absence, telling them she’d come down with flu.

  She made coffee before the unveiling and Fiona admitted they’d heard gossip that Vincent had ended the relationship and she’d burned out his car.

  Lori laughed a little. “He deserved it,” she said.

  “Elle,” Fiona said, “he’s a user, always was and always will be.”

  Elle joined them at her kitchen table and poured the coffee. “So what’s the story about the blonde?” she asked. “Caroline. I bumped into them recently.”

  “She’s an actress on that stupid drama shot in the UK – what’s it called?” Fiona asked Lori.