The Truth Club (24 page)

‘We’ll rent a DVD and go back to my flat.’ She smiles. ‘That
slug film sounded awful anyway.’

‘Are you sure you don’t mind?’

‘Of course not.’ Erika threads her arm under my elbow. ‘When
did you meet this Nathaniel?’

‘Yesterday,’ I sigh. ‘I did tell you it was a very busy day.’

Chapter
Sixteen

‘He sounds nice,’ Erika
says, after I’ve told her about how
Nathaniel saved me from Larry. ‘He sounds nice and kind
and fun.
’

‘Yes, he is,’ I agree, ‘but he’s also very odd and stubborn. And
his car looks as if he found it in a skip. I really thought it was going to disintegrate on the Howth Road.’

Erika laughs.

‘He left his wife because she was having an affair with a transvestite.’

‘This gets more and more intriguing,’ Erika says, bright-eyed.

‘And he’s got an extremely beautiful girlfriend called Eloise.’

‘
Oh, dear.’ Erika frowns.

‘He’s Greta’s cousin.’ I shudder slightly. ‘She’ll probably be furious with me for running out on Larry.’

‘Any sensible woman would have run out on Larry.’

‘But I’m not a sensible woman.’ I sigh. ‘I was before I married
Diarmuid, but marriage has done something to me. I’ve… I’ve started leaking.’

‘Leaking?’ Erika leans forward. We are surrounded by at least
twenty papier-mâché cats at various stages of completion, and they all seem to be staring at me too.

‘Yes. These strange new bits of me keep sort of seeping out. I
keep thinking that maybe I don’t have to do things I clearly
should
do. Yesterday, when I was going to that reception, I
thought for a moment that I could just keep on walking, walking
across Dublin, and never go to it at all.’

‘That’s understandable,’ Erika says. ‘Receptions can be a right
pain in the arse.’

‘Yes, but it’s part of my
job
to turn up at these things and look
interested.’ I stare at a bright-pink table Erika made from wooden
fruit-boxes. ‘And then, when I was supposed to meet Diarmuid, I
found myself walking to the bus stop; I actually had to
make
myself turn back and go to the pub.’

‘Well, you must have wondered why he needed to see you quite
so urgently,’ Erika says soothingly.

I look at her guiltily. ‘Sometimes, late at night, I even find
myself thinking I don’t have to go to Marie’s big do in September.
I could just say I have to attend a conference or something, like April.’ Erika starts sniffing the air. ‘And then I went off with Nathaniel like that – a man I don’t even
know…’

‘Oh,
feck –
the pizza!’ Erika jumps up from her chair and races
into the kitchen. ‘Oh, good… it’s just a bit singed.’

I have never eaten a non-singed pizza cooked by Erika, so I
can’t pretend to be that surprised. ‘Do you need some help?’ I call.

‘No, I’ve just got to cut some of the brown bits off.’

As Erika attends to this task, I stare at her lemon-coloured walls and turquoise bookshelves. When she has a paintbrush in
her hand she gets a bit carried away. The midnight-blue sofa came from a warehouse that sells charity furniture; it’s very squishy and
soft, and she has scattered it with brightly coloured Indian
cushions and a large teddy called Wilfred who always looks slightly depressed. The place is awash with ‘alternative’ things and books about how to love yourself more and connect with
your guardian angels. Bloody Alex’s books about how to have a
contented relationship are, naturally, on prominent display.

‘Sorry about that,’ Erika says, when she returns with two large
plates.

‘It looks delicious,’ I say, even though there isn’t that much pizza left now that the singed bits have been removed.

‘Maybe I should get some rice cakes… you know, to bulk it up a bit.’

‘Oh, no, Erika – this is lovely.’ I am not a great fan of Erika’s rice cakes.

‘We both need to have more fun,’ Erika announces, as she opens a large bottle of red wine. ‘We’ve become terribly earnest and worried. Nathaniel has the right attitude.’

‘I hardly know what kind of attitude he has, Erika,’ I say. ‘I barely know him.’

‘Yes, but he’s light-hearted and playful. We should be more like that.’

I take a bite of pizza. ‘Maybe he’s only like that because he’s crazed with grief about his marriage.’

‘It doesn’t sound like it,’ Erika says. ‘Not if he’s already found
himself a girlfriend.’ She goes over to the stereo, and soon salsa music is cavorting wildly around her flat, making me feel jiggly
and excited. It’s the kind of music DeeDee would have heard in
Rio. As I gulp another glass of wine and surrender to inebriation,
I think of the fascinating life she must have led – not necessarily
an easy one, but a life full of colour and variety. She probably
danced and sang in sultry late-night cafés. She probably kissed her
dark and handsome Latin lovers
under the stars. Maybe they even swam naked in the sea, tossing off their clothes and rushing into the waves, laughing.

Erika must sense my thoughts, because she suddenly says that
the problem with our lives is that we don’t dance or sing enough.
She adds that we also need to go to churches where they sing gospel music.

‘And we need to go to New York, too,’ she says, as she opens another bottle. ‘We need to go to New York and shop for shoes.’

I laugh. I like this new Erika and Sally she’s inventing, though neither of us is a shoe person. It’s Fiona who has rows of shoes neatly arranged in her walk-in wardrobe… poor Fiona. I feel a stab of anxiety.

‘Sailing,’ Erika suddenly announces. ‘We could go sailing, too. We need to get out and be more adventurous.’

I look at her doubtfully.

‘Or photography. I’d really love to do more photography.’

I don’t comment on this either, because I’m remembering the time Erika got Fiona and me to pose for hours at that funfair. She’d borrowed Fiona’s fancy camera and was very excited. We posed beside the coloured carousel horses; we laughed gaily and smiled while eating candy floss. We even got the hunky young man in charge of the dodgems to photograph us all on the bouncy castle. They would have been really nice pictures if Erika had remembered to put the film in.

‘Horse-riding,’ I find myself declaring. ‘That’s it! We both really like horses.’

‘But we mightn’t like riding them,’ Erika observes.

‘I think we’d enjoy it,’ I say. ‘We need to get out in the country more. We need to get back to nature.’

‘Not on big horses, though.’

‘No,’ I agree. ‘Friendly horses that are just the right size.’

‘And we must really
do
it,’ Erika says. She’s chomping on some taco shells; they’re the closest thing to crisps that she had in the house. ‘We mustn’t just
talk
about it. We must ring a stable and book. If we want our lives to change, we have to be more proactive.’

She gets up to get more tacos and almost falls over the huge cheese plant by the bay window. She is slurring her words a bit, and heaven knows what I sound like. I find myself thinking fondly of April. April is proactive. She does things that actually change her circumstances, instead of complaining about them.

And then, I don’t know why, I suddenly find myself thinking of Nathaniel again. I think of the map of Manhattan and the melted chocolate. I think of the beautiful dark curve of his eyelashes. In fact, I’m about to mention Nathaniel’s eyelashes to Erika when the phone rings.

It’s Zak, to say that Fiona has had a beautiful baby girl.

Chapter
Seventeen

Fiona is sitting up
in her double bed. It is a vast four-poster, and she looks lost and fragile under the sky-blue satin coverlet. Her face looks puffy and drawn with tiredness, but her smile is serene and spreads across her face. Her baby is in a cot beside her, almost hidden by a soft pink blanket.

‘Oh, Fiona,’ Erika and I whisper, overcome by the moment. We move slowly towards the cot, somehow not wanting to disturb the room’s stillness, the quiet after seven hours of labour. Fiona is still dazed by the force of it, the determination of this little creature to find her way into the world.

Fiona leans over and gently pulls back the blanket so we can see the baby’s face – her tiny nose, the delicate line of her eyelashes; the rosebud mouth that sucks at something suddenly and then purses again. And she has hair. Dark-brown hair.

‘Oh, Fiona…’ Erika’s breath catches with emotion. ‘She’s
gorgeous
.’

‘Yes, she is,’ I say. ‘She is absolutely beautiful.’

‘She’s been crying for the last hour,’ Fiona says. ‘I couldn’t get her to settle and I don’t think she was hungry.’

‘She looks very peaceful now,’ Erika remarks, lowering her voice. ‘Yes,’ Fiona agrees, staring into the cot with something close to amazement.

‘How are you, Fiona?’ I say.

‘Knackered, but at least I’m home.’

‘Was it… all right?’ Erika asks, obviously in awe of the whole situation.

‘No, it was awful.’ Fiona sighs. ‘It was excruciating. I yelled for drugs.’

‘When did it happen?’

‘In the middle of Friday night.’ Fiona smiles like a veteran. ‘They scoot you out of that place as fast as they can, and that was fine by me. I… we… got back here this morning.’ She looks at us apologetically. ‘I told Zak not to phone everyone the minute she’d popped out. I just couldn’t do the beaming, happy, just-given-birth-thing right away.’

Erika and I sit down on the side of the bed.

‘I felt like I was giving birth to a giraffe,’ Fiona says. We both pat her hand. ‘I thought it would never be over – all those people prodding and poking at me. It was so
undignified
.’ She manages to look both indignant and cheerful. ‘I’ll never do it again.’

I, naturally, do not say that this is just as well, given Zak’s slow-sperm situation.

Fiona shifts awkwardly. ‘My breasts are leaking… I feel like I’m a cow or something.’ She is clearly not the sort of mother who goes on about the miracle of birth. But she looks happy – incredibly tired and happy.

‘Zak was great. He stayed with me the whole time. I think he went into labour too; the sweat was pouring off him. He didn’t ring the family until it was all over. I didn’t want Mum there, fussing about. She would have yelled at the midwife, I know she would. I yelled at her myself.’

‘What did you say?’ I ask.

‘I said, “Push yourself, you big eejit!”’

‘That’s our girl,’ says Erika.

Fiona looks into the cot again. ‘Poor little Milly. You’re tired too.’

She has a name. Milly. Erika and I didn’t dare ask, because Fiona has come up with about a hundred and fifty names over the past nine months; there was a point when she said she was just going to call the child Maurice, regardless of its gender.