The Valentine's Card (12 page)

Orla blinked.

Without allowing her time to
speak, Marek said, ‘Here, take this,’ and draped his scarf, grey and soft and musky, around her neck. ‘It’s turned cold and you’re dressed for summer.
Pozegnanie,
Orla Cassidy
.
’ He turned and walked away.

A fat blob of rain stained the pavement. Orla held the scarf to her nose. Cashmere, she guessed. She turned and ran back to Maude’s Books.

The rain chased Orla, falling harder with every step she took. By the time she turned the corner onto her stretch of the high street, her hair was plastered to her head and her sandals were ruined.

She squelched to a halt.

Across the road, a man teetered on a ladder against a hoarding, pasting down the last corner of a huge poster of a twenty-foot-tall Sim in a frock coat. Airbrushed, his face was smooth and perfect, with a heart-shaped beauty mark pencilled above his top lip. His eyes, greener than she remembered, looked straight down at her. Impish, sexy, and not at all dead.

Sim’s journal

11 December 2011

It was a fib by my rules, but Orla would file it under ‘lie’. Whatevs. With my best my-puppy’s-been-run-over voice I told her the Skype camera is broken. And it isn’t. So. No Skype sexiness tonight. She was devastated. Who’d have thought she’d take to it so enthusiastically? But if we Skyped, if she saw my face, she’d know everything, in a flash.

That’s the way it is with fairies.

‘You’re loving this, aren’t you?’ Orla took it out on the valentine as she nibbled her fingernails, hunched by her window in a darkened sitting room tinged a seasick yellow by the street lamps. A glass of wine sat neglected, as, somewhere on the floor above, did Maude, whose offer of company Orla had spurned, preferring to sit on her own at the window and contemplate Sim.

‘Bastard,’ she whispered, holding the valentine
to her cheek. This was a luxury she allowed herself only now and again, knowing it could age the envelope. ‘How many other widows have to put up with a gigantic cardboard clone of their deceased other half leering down at them?’ The universe – which had excelled itself of late – demonstrated yet again just how nasty its sense of humour could be. Orla treated herself to a kiss, a chaste one, on the card’s flat pink front. ‘I love you.’ She enjoyed the words, enjoyed meaning them. ‘I do, I love you Sim.’

The beauty spot mesmerised her, perfectly placed on the curve of his lip at the exact point where Sim’s smile changed from innocent to knowing. That curve had incited Orla to devilment on countless occasions. It had brought her back to bed when she should have been jogging, made her miss the last episode of a favourite serial, had promised much and then delivered. And there it was, for all the world to see. Pimped out on the high street.
Those lips are mine, dammit!

With a slug of wine that both anaesthetised and warmed her, Orla reminded herself that Sim was just acting for the camera. ‘But you meant it when you looked at me,’ Orla told the valentine, ‘I could always tell when you were faking it.’

Not that
he
could always tell
when Orla faked it. ‘You twit,’ she said fondly to the valentine, laying it carefully on her lap. ‘You really thought I enjoyed sitting like an eejit in red lingerie and saying I’d been very naughty and please would you slap my bum. Jaysus, Sim, I can tell you now that I am not the woman for a peep-hole bra. It dug right into me. And the crotchless panties struck me as hilarious. But you pleaded – don’t deny it, you feckin’ pleaded – and once I’d got over the embarrassment it was just like any other household chore.’ She stroked the valentine, sighed. ‘It wasn’t the real thing. It wasn’t like having you in my arms.’ She choked a little at that. She capsized against romantic language these days. A platitudinous pop song could catch her unawares. ‘Do you remember …’ Whispering now, this was personal. ‘Do you remember how it was for us?’

Orla did. She had been unlocked by Sim. By her own lust for him. By his insouciant sexiness, his readiness to play. Being rugby tackled and ravished by Sim Quinn was a memory that would warm her all her life. Orla’s sexuality was direct, wench-like,
fun
. She liked to jump on the bed, then jump on him. Before him, she’d acted and reacted, taken some pleasure with her lovers, but she’d never dived down to the depths, never luxuriated in passion.

It’s pure with you
, Sim had said, early on. He’d likened her to a milkmaid, called her that for a while. It became shorthand:
Any chance of my encountering a saucy little milkmaid on the way home from this pub?

Every chance, koind sir.

‘So, you see,’ she told
the valentine, ‘the sexy underwear, dirty talking thing never did it for me.’ She had been relieved when the Skype camera broke down. Orla had no dark streak, sexually. She tried not to wonder whether Sim had found his milkmaid too wholesome. ‘I wore that nurse’s uniform whenever you asked,’ she admonished the valentine, huffily.

Across the road, Sim’s eyebrow arched, daring, provocative. Orla swallowed. Her hand felt the soft jut of her tum. She cupped a breast, braless and heavy in the folds of her dressing gown. Orla put the valentine to her forehead as if it could cool her. The breathless denouement of tussling with herself beneath the covers wasn’t worth the crushing sadness of the long night afterwards, when she had to admit that her lover was a phantom, his words of desire script-edited by herself.

Across the road, Sim’s eye was unblinking. Orla wasn’t reflected in it. She drew the curtains, ran a bath, lay in it too long. Damp, marshmallowy, her thighs peeped through the bubbles. She wondered if love was over for her.

Allowing another man to study her flesh, her familiar dips and gullies, felt fantastical. What if he was cruel? What if she felt mocked? What if he pounced, and she felt violated? And where would she find the energy for all the legwork of a new relationship, the two steps forward, one step back of sexual discovery? All those men out there, naked under their clothes, each one a different planet, requiring its own etiquettes and language. The thought exhausted her.

And what was Marek like under his black clothes? The leap to him was instinctive and shocking. Why jump from half an hour in a Polish café to sex?

Orla’s soapy sponge slalomed down a calf.

It had been an odd half hour. Something
else had gone on, parallel to two strangers sipping coffee and trading polite comments. Like spies, they had communicated beneath the surface. They had been working up a code.

Marek’s declaration in the street remained undigested, usurped by the
Courtesan
poster. She’d been blank with shock and admiration at his candour and his courage, even if she did reel at the importance he attached to her on such short acquaintance. And then a few steps around the corner –
Pow!
As messages from beyond the grave go, that poster was a doozie.

Orla dropped the sponge, lay back, closed her eyes. Ma would say it was a sign.

Sim’s journal

13 November 2011

Poor Maude. I’ve worked it out. It’s obvious, once you realise. I want to help but … There shouldn’t be a but. I’m a shit. I just don’t have any energy left over from dealing with my own mess. Reece doesn’t hold back. ‘You’re screwing up,’ he says. ‘Fucking idiot.’ If O was here, none of this would be happening. So it’s her fault, too, in a way. Poor Maude. Poor me. And although she doesn’t know it yet, poor Fairy.

Chapter Ten

‘That’s a unique problem. I don’t know what to
say. And I always know what to say.’

‘I can vouch for that, Ju. Remember that flasher by the swings? You said to him—
’

‘
I won’t scream because I don’t want to make a fuss over nothing
. I have fond memories of him and his little purple Hoover attachment.’

‘I don’t
want
a unique problem. I want nice obvious problems. But there’s no agony aunt in the world who’s had a letter that starts,
Please help me. There is a twenty foot high picture of my dead not-quite-fiancé staring in at my window.
’

‘Ha! We shouldn’t laugh.’

‘Yes, we should. Please let’s laugh.’

‘Tell me about college.’

‘It’s good. Great, really. I have a lovely Russian girl and a fabbo African girl, Abena, who I’m just in love with. I have no idea why the Japanese guy is in my class. He speaks better English than what I do.’

‘Teach him to say feck and eejit. God, Orla, if Sim was alive, I’d kill him.’

‘I was so glad,’ said Orla, interrupting herself to kiss Reece on the cheek, ‘to get your text. It’s been a horrible morning. You’re just what the doctor would order if he had any sense.’ She settled into a plush Regency-style chair; stained and frayed, it seemed faintly surprised to find itself furnishing a tatty wine bar in Hammersmith. ‘But what brings you to this neck of the woods? I thought you could only breathe the rarefied air of Belgravia or Soho or … ooh, my knowledge of posh London has let me down.’

‘Meeting. Money men. Just
up the road in a re-purposed brewery.’ Reece, his overcoat a tribute to the worsening weather, pushed a bowl of nuts towards her. ‘Tell me about this horrible day, then.’

‘Abena, she’s one of my students, from Ghana, is having problems with her visa. I’ve been on the phone to various bastards who don’t give a you-know-what, and I’m speeding on the adrenaline.’ She crossed her fingers. ‘Abena is not going home. Not while I’m here. I’ll lie down in front of the aeroplane if I have to.’

‘Arguing with officialdom has brought colour to your cheeks.’

Orla smiled, blushed. Was he flirting? She peeked at him over her glass. No, he wasn’t. He was being gallant. He was being protective to his dead friend’s almost-fiancé. She was relieved: she liked Reece in that role.

‘Ooh, for me?’ She took the stiff, creamy envelope he proffered.

‘For you and a plus one. It’s an invite to the Reece Dodds Artists annual party.’

‘Hmm.’ Orla read the invitation, felt the bumpy embossing of the logo, savoured the quality, went cold with dread. ‘I don’t know …’

‘No excuses accepted. It’s the end of
October, three weeks away, so plenty of time to get used to the idea. It’s always enormous fun, if I do say so myself. All my clients, the great and the good, will be there. Sim fell in the pool last year.’

‘He rang me when he got home, blind drunk, hooting. He’d wanted me to fly over for it.’ A poignant tune reprised; something else she’d do too late to please him. ‘Yes, of course I’ll come.’

‘Good.’ Reece’s shoulders dropped. ‘Mission accomplished.’

‘Is it dressy?’

‘Yes, country mouse, it’s dressy.’ Reece was amused. ‘It’s
posh
, as you would say. My place in Sussex. Flunkeys everywhere. Teddibly teddibly lovely little nibbles to eat. Champagne flowing like, well, champagne. And when you finally collapse I put you up at the hotel up the road.’

‘I’d better buy something new to wear.’

‘You’d look lovely in a sack, but yes, do buy something new and wear your highest heels. And use your plus one. Why not?’ Reece rebelled at the face she pulled. ‘Sim would want you to.’

‘Not you too.’ Orla shook her head. ‘Everybody says
Sim would want you to be happy.
Ma. Maude. Even Juno, my mate. But you and I know better. He’d rather I jump in the grave after him, sobbing and rending my garments. He’d like me in a black veil and matching chastity belt for the rest of my life.’

Early on in their relationship, Orla had detailed her few love affairs; the non-starter, the stately plodder, the out of character but kind of nice one-night stand in Ibiza – her entire love life dealt with in half an hour.
I was waiting for you
, she’d said. How he’d loved that.

She’d never found the right
moment to ask about Sim’s past and now he was gone, her imagination filled in the gaps, peopling his past with lithe-limbed actresses, older women, slutty fans, friends’ sisters, foreign exchange students, cheeky-eyed waitresses, bendy teenagers, every female in his year at drama school plus his mother’s friends.

‘If Sim had his way I’d be in a convent.’

‘It’s up to you.’ Reece spread his hands, palm up, as if she were a lost cause.

‘I’ll fly solo.’

‘In that case, here’s a thought.’ Reece leaned in, thighs wide, leaning towards her over the low table. ‘Bring the valentine.’

‘As my plus one?’

‘No,’ said Reece with mock patience. ‘Bring it and we’ll … deal with it.’

‘Read it?’

‘We could do that. Read it together.’

‘Well …’ That felt exposing. Orla squirmed.

‘It might be cleansing. You needn’t show it to me but I could be there to support you while you read it, and then we get back to the party, have another glass of shampoo, maybe push each other in the pool.’

Such flippancy. The valentine was precious, not a boil to be lanced.

‘Or,’ Reece clattered on, ‘we could burn it. Ritually. Let the ashes float into the sky. Take some of your sadness with them.’

‘Will Anthea be there?’

‘Well, yes.’ Reece frowned. ‘Is that a problem?’

‘No. Why would it be?’ Orla frowned back.

‘No reason, just the
way you asked.’

‘To be honest, I was trying to steer you away from the card, Reece. I don’t need another lecture.’

‘But you do. You obviously do. Because you’re a woman in the prime of her life whose primary relationship is with a pink envelope.’

‘Were you this bolshy with Sim?’

‘At all times.’

They both grinned. There was a sibling aspect to her relationship with Reece that was missing from Orla’s relationship with her actual brothers. They were alike, Orla and Reece, on some level; they
got
each other. She understood why he found her devotion to the valentine unsettling and why he periodically tried to cure her of it. Flattered that he found time and energy to care, she was gentle with her rebuttal.

‘I’ll work through it in my own way and shush!’ She leaned over, placed a finger on his lips. ‘I won’t necessarily read it. But for now, and for the foreseeable future, that card is Sim. So indulge me.’