Someone Like You (33 page)

‘We’ll take it,’ Denise said triumphantly. ‘I can just see that living room done in greys and greens with a slate fireplace. We’ve got to have it.’

‘That sounds fantastic,’ lied Hannah before congratulating them and asking for a deposit cheque.

Ten minutes later, the BMW sped off down the quiet road and Hannah allowed herself to squeal with delight.

She was good at this! Bloody good! The Parkers were the sort of people who expected to be bullied into doing things and their instinctive belligerence meant they were always poised to fight back. She’d taken them totally by surprise by pointing out the bad features of the house, treating them as if they were naturally more intelligent than your average client, and so they’d never had the chance to be aggressive.

The only sour point was that poor Donna’s misfortune was the reason she’d been given this wonderful chance.

She switched on the mobile she’d taken from the office and rang Gillian, anxious to see if Donna had phoned in with an update on poor little Tania’s condition.

‘No,’ said Gillian, sounding put out. ‘Mr James rang in and he said to tell you it was a great idea to take over Donna’s client yourself.’

Hannah grinned at the little sniff with which Gillian finished this sentence. Obviously Gillian had delighted in telling the boss that Hannah had stepped out of line, hoping Hannah would get her knuckles rapped. How irritating for Gillian to have her plan backfire.

‘Thank you for telling him what I was doing, Gillian,’

she said calmly. ‘That was efficient of you. I’ll be back shortly.’

Hannah knew it would only have taken her fifteen minutes to get back to the office, but the sense of achievement inside her was so heady that she felt she needed to sit back and enjoy it.

She made a detour to a small coffee shop, bought a takeaway cappuccino and sat on a bollard on Dun Laoghaire pier, watching the hustle and bustle of the busy port.

She loved looking at the sea. Back home in Connemara, the sea wasn’t too far from her parents’ house, although the rocky shore leading down to the tumultuous Atlantic Ocean was a million miles away from the Victorian splendour of Dun Laoghaire’s harbour where order seemed to reign. The elegant hotels behind her looked as if ladies in tea gowns holding parasols could emerge at any moment, while the pretty yachts moored side by side along the marina could have come from another era if you narrowed your eyes and ignored the modern innovations like radio aerials.

The two giant arms of the pier encircling the harbour like a lover’s embrace made the sea look safe and comfortably tame. At home, Hannah always felt the sense of dangerous nature prevailed. Small boats were tied up firmly against ancient stone jetties and when the waves lunged violently over the sea walls making the boats rattle, Hannah remembered thinking she would never get in a boat as long as she lived. The sea was much safer here, she decided, sipping her cappuccino pleasurably.

‘It was wonderful today,’ she told Felix that night when he rang her. He still hadn’t taken his mobile phone to get it fixed so it was a rare treat for him to call her during the week. ‘Donna couldn’t believe I’d sold the house to that pair. She rang in to say Tania’s getting out tomorrow and she was delighted ‘

‘That’s great, darling,’ Felix interrupted. ‘I’ve only got a minute to talk. I’m on Leon’s phone. I was just ringing to say I won’t be up this weekend as we’re moving the set to Waterford for the final two weeks before we break for Christmas and we’re on slave duty.’

‘Oh.’ She couldn’t hide the disappointment in her voice: she’d planned a special lunch with Leonie, Emma and Pete.

The girls were dying to meet the delectable Felix they’d heard so much about and Emma had been promising to bring Pete along for months.

‘We’ll do that another time,’ he said impatiently.

When he’d hung up, Hannah gazed at the phone despondently.

Being in love with an actor was like being in love with a married man, she thought despairingly. You could never make plans.

Her mother ran a hand over the floral fabric in the centre bolt. Pale blue with yellow and blue flowers, it was very Laura Ashley and very pretty. Just the sort of thing her mother adored, Emma knew. She could imagine the brief her mother would give the curtain-maker: ‘Frills, frills and more frills.’

AnneMarie O’Brien’s hand moved to another bolt of fabric, also blue but with only a small cream design in it.

‘Lovely,’ she said absently.

They’d been in Laura Ashley’s fabric department for ten minutes and, so far, that was as much as Emma’s mother had said about anything. Normally, on a trip to buy material for her spare-bedroom curtains, she’d have been on a high of excitement, in raptures at the thought of redoing yet another room in the house. Pete swore the O’Briens redecorated the entire house from top to bottom every two years. ‘Your mother is a decorating nut,’ he said each time the ‘What colour shall we paint the woodwork?’

shenanigans began.

Emma didn’t know why her parents didn’t buy their own wallpaper stripper. They paid so much in hire fees that they could have owned one twice over. This time, the spare bedroom was being done up because her mother’s second cousin was visiting from Chicago and, naturally, the spare bedroom was in such a state that nobody could be expected to sleep in it. Certainly not someone from Chicago, AnneMarie would have said in scandalized tones.

Only she hadn’t said it, hadn’t suggested redecoration: her husband had. Although once she’d got the idea, she was all for it.

‘You’ll come with me to buy the curtain material, won’t you, Emma?’ she’d pleaded with her daughter.

Emma wouldn’t have dreamed of refusing. Another Saturday morning wasted, she thought with irritation. She and Pete had planned to start their Christmas shopping that day. Christmas was barely three and a half weeks away and they didn’t want to spend endless hours at the last minute trying to get into crowded city-centre car parks as the entire country went mad buying gift sets, novelty ties and other useless Christmas presents.

Perhaps if she and her mother weren’t too long looking for wallpaper and fabric today, she could nip down to Alias Tom’s and see if they had anything nice for Pete, Emma thought. A really nice sweater or a designer shirt, maybe. It’d be splashing out, but he deserved something special. He’d been working so hard lately, making lots of overnight trips because of the overtime money he got paid for them.

Emma had never mentioned her father’s horrible comments about how she and Pete had borrowed their deposit money from him, but it was as if Pete had somehow sensed what had been said and was now doing everything he could to pay it back. She sighed. Darling Pete. He was so good to her and yet she’d been like a bear with a sore head for the last few weeks.

‘Where’s your father?’ enquired her mother suddenly, breaking into Emma’s thoughts.

‘What?’

‘Your father. Where is he? I can’t see him anywhere.’

A moment passed as Emma stared uncomprehendingly at her mother. What had she said … ?

AnneMarie’s eyes, so like Emma’s, were pale with amber flecks. Always alert and watchful, looking for things she didn’t approve of. Now, the pale eyes were filled with some secret fear. She was looking anxiously around them, pupils darting here and there, blinking rapidly.

‘Dad’s not here,’ Emma said slowly, watching in horror as her mother’s mouth wobbled and she began to cry.

‘He must be, where is he? He was here. You’re lying to me!’ AnneMarie’s voice got louder.

She was panicking, Emma realized.

Quickly, she took her mother’s arm, hoping to comfort her and remind her that Jimmy O’Brien was working that day. But her mother shook off Emma’s arm with surprising strength and started to run away from her, calling, “Jimmy, where are you?’ in an increasingly frantic voice.

Still in shock, Emma ran after her and, because she couldn’t think of what else to do, grabbed her mother again. They were beside a display of cushions and Anne Marie seized one and started hitting Emma with it.

‘Get away from me! Get away from me! Where’s my husband?’

She must be having a stroke or an aneurysm, Emma thought wildly as she dodged the blows. Something terrible, something that had affected her mind in this way.

She didn’t even seem to recognize Emma. Her face was distorted and her expression was quite manic, utterly frightening.

‘Mum, Mum, it’s OK. It’s me, Emma. Stop hitting me.

We’ll find Dad, I promise. OK, Mum?’ Emma begged, unable to control the sheer terror she was experiencing.

What was happening, why was her mother behaving like this? AnneMarie kept roaring, her shouts overpowering the gentle shop muzak.

‘Where’s my husband? I have to find him!’

Emma kept a grip on her mother, scared that, if she let go, AnneMarie might run away again. The screams and the frantic bashing with the cushion continued. Emma did her best to pull the cushion out of her mother’s hand but couldn’t. She was so strong. People were watching them now, a crowd had gathered in a wide circle around them, and one of the shop assistants approached tentatively.

‘Is everything all right?’ she asked.

As abruptly as she’d started, AnneMarie stopped hitting Emma with the cushion. She stared at it in astonishment, as if bewildered as to how it had found its way into her hand in the first place.

‘Emma?’ she breathed.

‘I’m here, Mum. I’m here.’ Emma hugged her mother’s rigid body gently, afraid to hold her too tightly in case she started screaming again. ‘It’s OK. We’ll find Dad.’ With one hand, she took the cushion and dumped it back on the display.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said to the shop assistant, ‘I don’t know what happened … She got confused or something.’ The girl looked at AnneMarie, whose face was now quite normal, and then back to Emma. She clearly didn’t believe a word Emma was saying. Who would, Emma thought. This perfectly normal-looking woman and her daughter must have had some sort of row. What else would people think?

Her mother patted Emma’s cheek briefly, then smiled brightly and turned around to admire the cushions she’d been using as weapons only moments before. The onlookers drifted away and Emma was left, her legs like jelly with shock, her heart pumping like the drums in a techno-music song.

‘Nice,’ said her mother happily, holding up a tapestry cushion.

‘Let’s go, Mum.’ Terrified the whole procedure would start again, Emma led her mother out of the shop and into a cafe. Still holding AnneMarie’s arm, she bought two coffees at the counter and a Danish pastry for her mother.

Emma found them a table, keeping up a stream of meaningless conversation about Christmas and buying fabric for the bedroom, like a parent trying to amuse a fractious toddler. She put a spoon of sugar in her mother’s coffee and pushed the Danish in front of her.

Not saying a word about how she could put her own sugar in her coffee, thank you very much, AnneMarie took the cup and drank deeply before starting on her pastry.

Emma, barely able to swallow a sip of coffee, watched her.

‘Will we look at wallpaper now?’ her mother asked in a normal, contented way.

‘I don’t know, Mum,’ Emma replied weakly. ‘I’ve got a migraine,’ she lied, anything to avoid more shopping.

‘Will we go home?’ her mother said eagerly, like a child.

Emma nodded. She couldn’t speak. Seeing her mother reduced to someone she didn’t recognize was the most terrifying experience of her life. As AnneMarie drank her coffee, Emma ran through the list of possibilities behind her bizarre behaviour in the shop. Each time, she came painfully back to the one answer: Alzheimer’s disease.

There could be no other explanation. It was warm in the coffee shop, almost tropical, to ward off the early December wind outside. But despite the heat, Emma felt a shaft of pure cold slice through her. Her very bones felt chilled, touched by an icy grip that had nothing to do with the actual weather. Her mother was ill. Very ill. Whatever could they do now?

”Kirsten,’ Emma said with relief into the receiver. It was so comforting to hear her sister’s voice, the voice of normality.

‘I don’t know what to do. You’ll never believe what’s happened.’

‘Can you be quick?’ came the reply over the phone, ‘I’m just going out to the manicurist to get a nail fixed. We’re going to a ball tonight and I snapped my thumbnail on a tin of Diet Coke.’

Emma raised her eyes to heaven. No matter what domestic disaster was unfolding, Kirsten would be bound to have some much more urgent matter awaiting her attention.

If the world was ending in a giant fireball, Kirsten would insist on getting her roots coloured first.

‘You won’t feel much like going to any ball when you hear what I’ve got to tell you about Mum,’ Emma said soberly.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Kirsten said brusquely when her sister had finished the story. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Mummy. You’re imagining it. You know how she frets when Dad isn’t around, how every little incident becomes a full-scale disaster. That’s all that’s wrong.’

‘No,’ protested Emma. ‘That isn’t all. You didn’t see her, Kirsten, she was … she was crazy, hitting me with a cushion and yelling at the top of her voice. It was terrifying, I thought she’d lost her mind. I know what it is, I think.

Alzheimer’s. Oh God, I even hate to say it.’

There was silence at the other end of the phone. ‘You can’t be serious,’ Kirsten said finally.

‘This is hardly a joke. Who’d make something like that up?’ Emma demanded.

‘Well, she’s fine now, isn’t she? It’s all over, so there’s nothing to worry about. You’re panicking about nothing.’

‘Kirsten!’ exploded Emma. ‘Will you listen to me. Mum didn’t know who I was. She’s been acting a bit strange recently, you know she has. She can’t remember words to things. She tried to tell me last week that the washing machine had broken down and she couldn’t remember the word for it.’

Emma recalled the phone conversation: ‘The thing’s broken,’ her mother had wailed. ‘There’s water and it won’t work. I don’t know how to fix it.’

‘What thing?’ Emma had asked gently.