2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie (48 page)

A security guard sticks a vibrator-like thing into my jacket, then nods at me like I’m free of infection. People are scurrying hectically across the floor, scrambling up and down escalators, dragging suitcases, staring at notices, pushing trolleys, queuing up at car-hire stalls and check-in areas. At every point you have to step aside to avoid being bashed.

Loud noise echoes up to the giant ceilings of the huge rectangular departure lounge. At one end of the area is a fifty-foot Christmas tree with red, green, blue and gold baubles and flickering lights, and on the metal wall behind it is Santa Claus holding the reins to his reindeer, with a colourful pile of presents in the trunk behind him. Everywhere there is bunting and mistletoe, with red berries and Christmas cards suspended on long lines of string. Just above the Alitalia and Lufthansa booths is an exhibition of figures – one yellow Christmas cracker with purple feet skiing down a makeshift ski slope, a penguin jazz band, jiving Christmas trees, oranges hopping on coloured stilt-legs, waltzing bananas.

Powerful bright lights have turned the place into a vast stage. Everywhere are yellow signposts and red digital messages, and blue TV monitors screening arrival and departure times. I check for the three o’clock flight to Amsterdam. Manchester, Madrid, London Heathrow, Edinburgh, Brussels. Amsterdam! – boarding at two thirty.

It’s two thirty-five.

I can’t see them anywhere.

I rush around the back of the escalators towards the departure gates. I stick my head into a narrow brasserie but she’s not there. I duck in behind a vast seating area, check through a tie shop, a newsagents, a souvenir shop.

Still no sign anywhere.

The man on duty at the departure gates…he would surely have remembered Nicole and baby if they’d passed through?

I rush to the front of the queue and give him their description. Long, wavy, golden hair, lemon-yellow anorak, carrying a baby in a carrycot, wearing brown trousers and boots.

He says he doesn’t remember, but I shouldn’t take that as a guarantee.

Desperate, I scour the departure lounge once more. Toilets, baby facilities, Burger King, Burger King toilets, the bar and restaurant down the escalators in the arrivals lounge, everywhere.

And then suddenly I catch sight of her. I stop to steady my breath and wait until my pulse subsides. She’s in the bookshop, standing beside a revolving rack, checking out the best-sellers. I approach her from the side: her left profile. She’s reading from a book with the name Cathy Kelly printed in large purple letters. On her back is the small red leather rucksack. At her feet is Debbie in her carrycot. She is gurgling and humming and prattling in that newborn language of hers like no one I know.

When I walk over to Nicole her face lights up like a lantern. With joy, but also astonishment.

“Julie! What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know.”

She eyes me carefully, replacing the book on the rack. She touches me on the arm.

“Is everything okay with Ronan?”

“Yes.”

“I’m really glad to hear that, Julie, I really am.”

She’s stroking my arm now.

“We’re getting a divorce.”

At once she picks up the carrycot with Debbie in it, puts her arm round me and leads me out of the bookshop to the big window overlooking the pink runway, not far from the departure gates where travellers and their companions are congregating, giving one another the final farewell. I stare out at the planes preparing to take off, the minibuses, the vans, the luggage carts.

“But you love each other, Julie!”

She stands facing me, attentive, urgent, upset. I’m just staring out of the huge window. She offers me a handkerchief, which I accept. Now talk is pouring from me like an unstoppable torrent, out of the blue, a complete surprise.

I’m telling Nicole everything. About me, about Ronan, about how we met, fell in love, lived. How I believed in him, in us, in our future, but at the same time how distant that future felt because, eel-like, he seemed to keep slipping through your fingers. I’m telling her how different we were. How – in his mind – I was just
there
. A fixture. Therefore, he no longer wanted me, because life, for him, was a launching pad to someplace else. His life was an airport, mine more like a private garden.

I’m telling her about how I missed Ronan all these months, how I still miss him. I’m telling her about the good things, how kind he could be, how warm, how funny and playful he could be at times. And the bastard had to go and destroy it all.

I tell her I can’t get him out of my head. I don’t know if I will ever be able to get him out of my head, although I don’t bother telling her that.

“No one really understands.”

“I understand, Julie.”

A plane is coming in to land. It seems to hover in the air, motionless as a bird against the wind. Nicole pulls down the light shade over Debbie’s eyes to protect her from the glare.

We stand like this for a long time, saying nothing. It’s easy, not to have to say anything. It’s her presence. It soothes. I can talk to Sylvana for hours and she’s great to be with – but with Nicole it’s more than that. There’s something passive, almost, about her that opens up a space which is safe, where I can feel totally at ease when I talk, where she makes no suggestions, no condemnations, no judgements. She’s just there. She doesn’t even seem too worried about missing her plane.

This is the first time I’ve been able to speak like this to anybody since the whole thing started. You know, it’s so strange, the fact that she’s here listening to me like I’ve known her for years and yet I know hardly anything about her except that she’s a scattered, messed-up girl who experiments with various ways to find happiness in this turbulent life including falling in love with the man I once thought I couldn’t live without.

The plane has now landed. You can hear the roar. Its nose has straightened itself as it passes the terminal building, half a mile out, a bullet of shining silver gliding in slow motion through the soft pink light of the runway.

“I’m so sorry, Julie,” she says, her lovely eyes peering through the window, perplexed.

“It’s okay, Nicole.”

She shakes her head as if she doesn’t deserve my understanding.

“I feel bad, having to leave like this…” She falters.

I blurt it out now: “Nicole, why don’t you both stay with me?”

She stares at me. She thinks I’m just being nice. Thinking of her feelings.

“I’m serious. You and Debbie. For a while.”

Shaking her head, she says she doesn’t deserve anything nice. She says she deserves what she got: losing Ronan, losing her career as an artist, losing her tropical marine fish, losing the love of her father and stepmother, having had an awful love life. Given everything she did to me, she says, she got her just deserts.

She says she doesn’t even deserve Debbie.

“Please, Nicole, don’t do yourself down. You deserve the best of everything and I consider you a friend. Stay with me. I mean it, Nicole. You can’t take Debbie to Amsterdam. Do you think your brother wants a squawking baby in his house? Do you want Debbie to grow up a Dutchwoman? Selling flowers or chopping cheese? You’re not Dutch. You belong here.”

I want to tell her:
I like you, Nicole, I really do. You’re fun, you’re gentle, you’re sweet, you’re kind, you’re good to be with
.

But across Nicole’s sympathetic face there has fallen a dark shadow of unhappiness. I want to see the sunshine gleaming once more from her eyes, I want to see her sad countenance dancing once more with laughter.

There’s this silence between us now. The surrounding buzz of the airport has faded away like dying music, there’s the distant sound of a loudspeaker making an announcement, it contains the word Amsterdam but I don’t care, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Nicole agrees to take Debbie home with me where we can all at least discuss things.

But she’s resisting. I know it.

“Come back to my place, Nicole. You can stay for as short or as long as you like. There are two spare bedrooms. If you want you can use the second spare bedroom as an artist’s studio. I still have your easel from that time you painted the park. Mother’s minding it for you. It’s a little scarred but it’s basically okay. Think of it, Nicole, you could paint the park every day if you wanted. You could even use a little green! And you know, despite what I might have told you in Paris, I think you’re actually a
very
good painter…”

“Thanks, Julie,” she says, sheepishly shaking her head.

“…And you wouldn’t have to pay rent. The place is easily big enough for three. And you’d love my roof garden during the spring and summer: in just ten hours, you can get a three hundred and sixty degree suntan. Stop laughing, Nicole, I’m serious!

“Well? What do you think? Stop saying that, Nicole, of
course
you deserve it, it’s not as if you can’t do anything in return, I mean, what about those
Feng Shui
consultations you told me about? I was hoping to redecorate my apartment and I could do with some ideas about colour and design…”

She laughs at this.

“I’ve got that
Feng Shui
book which I consult from time to time – I’m keen to learn more about energy flows and furniture positioning. Oh, and by the way, when I told you that time in Paris that
Feng Shui
was a whole lot of codswallop, I didn’t mean it, Nicole. I was simply…I
know
you don’t hold it against me. It’s just that I was a bit annoyed at the time…”

“Sometimes I think I took all that
Feng Shui
stuff too seriously.” She smiles weakly.

“And I’m mad about tropical fish too. I actually miss having an aquarium: Mother insisted on keeping ours. She had this strange idea that the fish weren’t safe in my hands…”

Nicole laughs in that tinkly, musical way of hers.

“…I was thinking of buying a proper goldfish bowl – I suppose I’ve built up a kind of debt to fish over the last few months. You could come and help me choose some – oh, it’s just an idea…”

She agrees that it would be wonderful if I had a goldfish bowl.

“Besides.” I laugh. “Aren’t goldfish supposed to improve your finances? Not that I’m doing too badly right now, but I could always use another million or so.”

And again I’m looking through her eyes and she through mine, and she is semi-laughing at me, semi-sobbing, and she says she can’t understand why I’m being so nice to her. I should be pulling her hair (she says). I reply that I wouldn’t in a million years dream of pulling her hair because I think she’s a wonderful person, because she’s been hurt more than I have, but still there is not a cynical bone in her body. She is incapable of hating, of being snide, ruthless, harsh.

Compared with me? I stand here and admit openly to her that I have destroyed things she loved. I have plundered her living-room like a born-again Vandal, stolen her books, liquidised her already dead fish, burnt her art, destroyed her loving relationship with Ronan who only happened by an odd quirk of fate to be my husband. (I find myself painfully unable to tell her the truth about Max.)

And what kind of person does that make
me?

And not just that: I tell her how I have insulted her intelligence, slagged off her looks, taken pleasure in her misfortune, taken her for a ride, been cunning and deceptive and spiteful, and for the most part totally nasty and horrible.

“Oh, no!” she urges. “Please don’t say that.”

Nicole refuses to allow me to say these things about myself.

She is trying to tell me I’m a good person. How can everyone be so deceived about me? How can everybody fly so blatantly in the face of the most obvious, quadruply corroborated, damning character evidence?

Nicole is beseeching me to speak well of myself. At the same time, there are tears trickling from the corners of her eyes. I put down my plastic bag, take a handkerchief from my jacket pocket, raise it to her face and pat it over her cheeks and dry her eyes, holding her shoulder. Despite all the awful things I did to her, she lets me do this. Despite everything, she still looks upon me with kindness, in a way that forgives me completely – that’s assuming she ever blamed me for my atrocious behaviour in the first place.

She’s like a dream, a mirage. Do people like her really exist? Am I staring at an illusion? An illusion like Ronan was an illusion?

“Stay in my place, Nicole. You and Debbie. Sylvana – that’s Imelda – thinks you should stay as well. She said she thought you were a howl. And my mother can’t wait to meet you. You’ll like her a lot. She’s a total fruitcake, a true original. Also, she’s crazy about babies and has been for quite some time. She plays the piano. You could play duets together. I was thinking of buying a piano for my new place. And having it installed on the roof garden. You could give concerts to people in the park below. Why not? You could play Chopin on it all day if you wanted. Prudence…Max loves the piano. I swear he does. He used to sit right on top of the strings and lick himself.”

“How is the poor thing?” she wonders.

“He’s great,” I reply very quickly. “He misses you a lot, Nicole. Anyway, as I was saying, if I do go ahead and buy a piano, you could always give me lessons. And you needn’t worry about Debbie. She can roam free, subject, of course, to the french windows being closed at all times in case she falls out. I shouldn’t have said that. And if you wanted to go out alone I wouldn’t mind babysitting. I actually like babysitting, you know, I used to do it at college. And of course I was married for two years – that counts too. Anyway, I’m quite good with babies. Did you see me back there with Debbie?”

I bend down and take Debbie’s tiny hand and shake it and say how do you do, and Debbie gurgles something uninterpretable. The feeling surges through me once again that I want to pick her up and smother her with love, so much so that she won’t ever want to let go of me. Ever.

When I stand up again I can’t help feeling like breaking down.

Nicole is holding my arm again.

“So look, Nicole, if you’re coming with me I think you’d better come now.”

I’m looking down at Debbie, the bundle of love sleeping peacefully at our feet. When I raise my eyes again, I find Nicole staring at me with concern, speechless, crushed.