The Brightest Star in the Sky by Marian Keyes

The Brightest Star in the Sky by Marian Keyes
Extract

Day 61

June the first, a bright summer's evening, a Monday. I've been flying over the streets and houses of Dublin and now, finally, I'm here. I enter through the roof. Via a skylight I slide into a living room and right away I know it's a woman who lives here. There's a femininity to the furnishings ­pastel-coloured throws on the sofa, that sort of thing. Two plants. Both alive. A television of modest size.

I appear to have arrived in the middle of some event. Sev­eral people are standing in an awkward circle, sipping from glasses of champagne and pretending to laugh at what the others are saying. A variety of ages and sexes suggests that this is a family occasion.

Birthday cards abound. Discarded wrapping paper. Presents. Talk of leaving for the restaurant. Hungry for information I read the cards. They're addressed to someone called Katie and she appears to be celebrating her fortieth birthday. I wouldn't have thought that that called for much celebration but it takes all sorts, I'm told.

I locate Katie. She looks a good deal younger than forty, but forty is the new twenty, according to my information. She's tallish and dark-haired and bosomy and gamely doing her best to stay upright in a pair of spike-heeled knee-boots. Her force field is a pleasant one; she vibrates with level­-headed warmth, like a slightly sexy primary-school teacher. (Although that's not actually her job. I know this because I know an awful lot.)

The man next to Katie, glowing with dark pride - the pride is in large part to do with the new platinum watch on Katie's wrist - is her boyfriend, partner, loved one, whatever you want to call it.

An interesting man, with a compelling life force, his vibra­tions are so powerful they're almost visible. I'll be honest: I'm intrigued.

Conall, they're calling this man. The more polite members of the group, at least. A few other names are hovering in the ether - Show-off; Flash bastard - but remain unuttered. Fascinating. The men don't like him at all. I've identified Katie's father, brother and brother-in-law and not one of them is keen. However, the women - Katie's mother, sister and best friend - don't seem to mind him as much.

I'll tell you something else: this Conall doesn't live here. A man on a frequency as potent as his wouldn't stand for a tele­vision of such modest size. Or plant-watering.

I waft past Katie and she puts a hand up to the nape of her neck and shivers.

'What?' Conall looks ready to do battle.

'Nothing. Someone just walked over my grave.'

Oh come now! Hardly,!

'Hey!' Naomi - older sister of Katie - is pointing at a mir­ror that's propped on the floor against a cupboard. 'Is your new mirror not up yet?'

'Not yet,' Katie says, sudden tension leaking from between her teeth.

'But you've had it for ages! I thought Conall was going to do it for you.'

'Conall is going to do it,' Katie says very firmly. 'Tomorrow morning, before he goes to Helsinki. Aren't you, Conall?'

Friction! Zinging around the room, rebounding off the walls. Conall, Katie and Naomi volleying waves of tension against each other in a fast-moving taut triangle, the repercussions expanding ever outwards to include everyone else there. Entre nous, I'm dying to find out what's going on but, to my alarm, I'm being overtaken by some sort of force. Something bigger or better than me is moving me downwards. Through the 100 per cent wool rug, past some dodgy joists, which are frankly riddled with woodworm - someone should be told ­and into another place: the flat below Katie's. I'm in a kitchen. An astonishingly dirty kitchen. Pots and pans and plates are piled higgledy-piggledy in the sink, soaking in stagnant water, the lino floor hasn't been washed in an age, and the stove top sports many elaborate splashes of old food as if a gang of action painters has recently paid a visit. Two muscular young men are leaning on the kitchen table, talking in Polish. Their faces are close together and the conversation is urgent, almost panicked. They're both pulsing with angst, so much so that their vibrations have become entangled and I can't get a han­dle on either of them. Luckily, I discover I am fluent in Polish, and here's a rude translation of what they're saying:

'Jan, you tell her.'

'No, Andrei, you tell her.'

'I tried the last time.'

'Andrei, she respects you more.'

'No, Jan. Hard as it is for me, a Polish man, to understand, she doesn't respect either of us. Irish women are beyond me.'

'Andrei, you tell her and I'll give you three stuffed cabbages.'

'Four and you're on.'

(I'm afraid I made up those last two sentences.)

Into the kitchen comes the object of their earnest discus­sion and I can't see what they're so afraid of, two fine big lads like them, with their tattoos and slightly menacing buzz cuts. This little creature - Irish, unlike the two boys - is lovely. A pretty little minx with mischievous eyes and spiky eyelashes and a head of charming jack-in-the-box curls that spring all the way down past her shoulders. Mid-twenties, by the look of her, and exuding vibrations so zesty they zigzag through the air.

In her hand she's carrying a pre-prepared dinner. A wretched-looking repast. (Greyish roast beef, in case you're interested.)

'Go on,' Jan hisses at Andrei.

'Lydia.' Andrei gestures at the, quite frankly, filthy kitchen. Speaking English, he says, 'You clean sometime.'

'Sometime,' she agrees, scooping up a fork from the drain­ing board. 'But sadly not in this lifetime. Now move.'

With alacrity Andrei clears a path for her to access the microwave. Viciously, she jabs her fork into the cellophane covering her dinner. Four times, each puncture making a noise like a small explosion, loud enough to make Jan's left eye twitch, then she slams the carton into the microwave. I take this opportunity to drift up behind her to introduce myself, but to my surprise she swats me away as though I were a pesky fly.

Me!

Don't you know who I am?

Andrei is giving it another go. 'Lydia, pliz . . . Jan and I, we clean menny, menny times.'

'Good for you.' Breezy delivery from Lydia as she locates the least dirty-looking knife in the murk of the sink and runs it under the tap for half a second.

'We hev made rota.' Feebly Andrei waves a piece of paper at her.

'Good for you again.' Oh how white her teeth are, how dazzling her smile!

'You are livingk here three weeks. You hev not cleaned. You must clean.'

An unexpected pulse of emotion radiates from Lydia, black and bitter. Apparently, she does clean. But not here? Where, then?

'Andrei, my little Polish cabbage, and you too, Jan, my other little Polish cabbage, let's imagine things were the other way round.' She waves her (still soiled) knife to emphasize her point. In fact, I know that there are 273 different bacteria thriving and flourishing on that knife. However, I also know by now that it would take the bravest and most heroic of bacteria to get the better of this Lydia.

'The other way round?' Andrei asks anxiously.

'Say it was two women and one man living in this flat. The man would never do anything. The women would do it all. Wouldn't they?'

The microwave beeps. She whisks her unappetizing dinner from it and, with a charming smile, leaves the room to look up something on the internet.

What a peppy little madam! A most fascinating little fire­ brand!

'She called us cabbages,' Jan said stonily. 'I hate when she calls us cabbages.'

But, eager as I am to see what transpires next - tears from Jan, perhaps? - I'm being moved again. Onwards, downwards, through the health-hazard lino, through more porous timber­work, and I find myself in yet another flat. This one is darker. Full of heavy furniture too big and brown for the room. It features several rugs of conflicting patterns, and net curtains so dense they appear to be crocheted. Seated on a sturdy arm­chair is a dour-looking elderly woman. Knees apart, slippered feet planted firmly on the floor. She must be at least a hundred and sixteen. She's watching a gardening programme and, from the furrow-browed expression on her face, you'd swear she's never heard such outrageous idiocy in her life. Hardy perenni­als? No such thing, you stupid, stupid man! Everything dies!

I float past her and into a small gloomy bedroom, then into a slightly bigger, but just as gloomy, second bedroom, where I'm surprised to meet a large, long-eared dog so big and grey that momentarily I think he's a donkey. He's slumped in a corner, his head on his paws, sulking - then he senses my presence and instantly he's alert. You can't get away with it, with animals. Different frequencies, see. It's all about the fre­quencies.

Frozen with awe and fear, his long donkey-ears cocked, he growls softly, then changes his mind, poor confused fool. Am I friend or foe? He hasn't a notion.

And the name of this creature? Well, oddly enough it would appear to be 'Grudge'. But that can't be right, that's not a name. The problem is, there's too much stuff in this flat and it's slowing the vibrations down, messing with their patterns.

Leaving the donkey dog behind, I flit back into the sitting room, where there's a mahogany roll-top desk as dense and weighty as a fully grown elephant. A modest pile of opened mail tells me that the crone's name is Jemima.

Beside the mail is a silver-framed photo of a young man, and with a flash of insight I know his name is Fionn. It means 'Fair One'. So who is he? Jemima's betrothed who was killed in the Boer War? Or was he carried off in the flu epidemic of 1918? But the photo-style is wrong for a First World War type. Those men, in their narrow-cut uniforms, are always so rigid and four-square to the camera you could believe their own rifle had been shoved up their back passage. Invariably, they wear a scrubbing brush on their upper lip and, from the lifeless, glassy-eyed way they face the viewer, they look as if they've died and been stuffed. Fionn, by contrast, looks like a prince from a child's storybook. It's all in the hair - which is fairish and longish and wavyish - and the jaw, which is square. He's wearing a leather jacket and faded jeans and is crouching down in what appears to be a flower bed, and he has a handful of soil, which he's proffering to me with a cheeky smile, saucy almost, like he's offering a lot more than -! God Almighty! He's just winked at me! Yes, he winked! His photograph winked! And a silver star pinged from his smile! I can scarcely believe it.

'I can feel your presence!' Jemima suddenly barks, scaring the living daylights out of me. I'd forgotten about her, I was so engrossed in Fionn the Prince and his winking and twinkling.

'I know you're here,' she says. 'And you don't frighten me!'

She's on to me! And I haven't gone near her. More sensi­tive than she looks.

'Show yourself,' she commands.

I will, missus, oh I will. But not just yet. Your time will have to be bided. Anyway, I appear to be off again, being pulled and stretched ever downwards. I'm in the ground-floor flat now; I can see the street through the living-room window; I'm sensing a lot of love here. And something else . . .

On a sofa, washed by the flickering light of the television (32 inch) is . . . is . . . well, it's a man and a woman, but they're clinging so tightly to each other that for a moment I think they are one and the same, some strange mythological, two-­headed, three-legged thing, which is all I need right now; (The fourth leg is there, simply hidden beneath their bodies.)

On the floor are two plates, on which the remains of a hearty dinner can be discerned: potatoes, red meat, gravy, carrots - a mite heavy for June, I would have thought, but what do I know?

The woman - Maeve - now that I can make her out, is blonde and rosy-cheeked, like an angel from a painting. There's a chubby, cheruby freshness about her because she was once a farm girl She might be living in Dublin now, but the sweet clean air of the countryside still clings to her. This woman has no fear of mud. Or cow's udders. Or hens going into labour. (Somehow I sense that I've got that slightly wrong.) But this woman fears other things . . .

It's hard to get a look at the man - Matt - because they're interwoven so tightly; his face is almost entirely hidden. Fun­nily enough, they're watching the same gardening programme as Jemima one floor above them. But unlike Jemima, they appear to think it's a marvellous piece of televisual entertain­ment.

Unexpectedly, I sense the presence of another man here. It's faint but it's enough to send me scooting round the place to check it out. Like the other three flats in the building, there are two bedrooms, but here only one functions as an actual bedroom. The other, the smaller of the two rooms, has been turned into a home-office-cum-skip - a desk and a computer and abandoned sporting goods (walking poles, badminton racquets, riding boots, that type of thing), but, nothing on which a person could sleep.

I sniff around a bit more. Two matching Podge and Rodge cups in the kitchen, two matching Tigger cereal bowls, two matching every things. Whatever this extra male presence is, he doesn't live here. And from the wild, overgrown state of the back garden that you can see from the bedroom window, he doesn't cut the grass either. Back in the living room, I move up close to the angelic Maeve, to introduce myself ­being friendly - but she starts flapping her arms, like someone swimming on dry land, disentangling herself from Matt. She breaks free of him and sits bolt upright. The blood has drained from her face and her mouth has opened into a big silent O.

Matt, struggling from the couch's saggy embrace to a seated position, is equally distressed. 'Maeve! Maeve. It's only about gardening! Did they say something?' Alarm is written all over him. Now that I get a better look, I see he's got a young, likeable, confident face, and I suspect that, when he isn't so concerned, he's one of life's smilers.

'No, nothing . . .' Maeve says. 'Sorry, Matt, I just felt . . . no, it's okay, I'm okay.'

They settle - a little uneasily - back into their clinging posi­tions. But I've upset her. I've upset them both and I don't want to do that. I've taken a liking to them; I'm touched by the uncommon tenderness they share.

'All right,' I said (although of course they couldn't hear me), 'I'm going.'

I sit outside on the front step, a little disconsolate. One more time I check the address: 66 Star Street, Dublin 8. A red-bricked Georgian house with a blue front door and a knocker in the shape of a banana. (One of the previous occupants was a fun-loving metal-worker. Everyone hated him.) Yes, the house is definitely red-bricked. Yes, Georgian. Yes, a blue front door. Yes, a knocker in the shape of a banana. I'm in the right place. But I hadn't been warned that so many people live here.

Expect the unexpected, I'd been advised. But this isn't the type of unexpected I'd expected. This is the wrong unexpected.

And there's no one I can ask. I've been cut loose, like an agent in deep cover. I'll just have to work it out for myself.

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