Of all the areas in the shop, the trinket display is my favourite. It’s an old drawer unit that Ciara found, a chunky old-school dresser with three wide heavy drawers and on top stands a discoloured mirror that is so covered in black spots you can’t see your face. I love this unit, and chose it specially for the trinkets. The top of the unit contains pieces, the first drawer is pulled out slightly and also displays items, the second drawer a little more and the bottom drawer all the way out, so that it dips because of the weight and sits on the floor. The owner said her mother used the bottom drawer as a cot for her babies. This is the section children are drawn to, but nothing is of any significant value – not that we know of, anyway – and usually items are priced at twenty euros or less. My favourite pieces are the pillboxes, compact mirrors, jewellery boxes and decorative spoons, along with the hair-slides and brooches which are specific to this area and not to be placed in the jewellery section. A new arrival perfect for this trinket display is a jewellery box that I discover wrapped up in newspaper, in a cardboard box. It is mirrored, the lid is embellished with crystals, emerald, rubies and diamonds, of the costume variety. Inside is a velvet insert with sections for individual pieces, where some of the jewels that have fallen off the top sit snugly. I give a gentle tug and the velvet insert lifts, allowing it to be used as a box.
‘What you got there, magpie?’ Ciara interrupts my thoughts. Today she is dressed as a 1940s glamour puss, all red lipstick and a black-netted head veil, a shoulder-padded dress that squishes her boobs up the V-shaped neck, a leopard-print belt sucks her waist in and sends her hips oozing out. She wears this with floral print Doc Martens.
I lift the box to show her. She examines it, leaving fingerprints where I’ve already cleaned it.
‘Pretty.’
‘I’m going to buy it,’ I say quickly, before she suggests keeping it.
‘OK,’ she hands it back.
‘How much?’
‘Work overtime tonight for free?’ she asks hopefully.
I laugh. ‘I’m going for dinner with Gabriel. It’s been a while, so I’m not cancelling.’
‘OK, well if you can’t work tonight, you can’t have the box.’ She pulls it away as I dive clumsily for it.
‘Ow,’ I wince, hurting my ankle in the process.
She dangles it higher in the air.
‘I’m going to report you for employee bullying.’
She sticks out her tongue and hands me back the box. ‘Fine, I’ll ask Mathew. Good luck with Gabriel, and tell him I’m …’ she pauses as I throw her a warning look. She thinks Gabriel is angry with her for making me take part in the podcast, and therefore angry with her for my involvement with the club. I keep telling her to stop apologising, he’s not angry with her, just me, but I don’t think that’s true. He seems to be irritable with everyone these days.
‘Tell him you’re what?’ I ask.
‘Nothing,’ she finishes her sentence.
‘Easy. I tell him you’re nothing all the time,’ I grin, wiping her fingerprints off the mirror.
At one of our regular spots, Cucino, an Italian bistro near his house, I find Gabriel seated outside. It’s a cool evening but the gas heaters give it a greenhouse effect and make it feel as though we’re in the midst of a balmy Italian summer.
He kisses me and helps me into my chair, laying the crutches on the ground beside us. I scan the menu and choose instantly. I always get the same thing. Gnocchi in burned butter and sage sauce. I wait while Gabriel chooses his dish. He’s leaning over the menu, forehead furrowed in deep thought and concentration but his eyes aren’t moving over the words. I watch him pretending to study the menu. He lifts his glass and takes an enormous slug of wine, then eyes back to the menu, back to the same place. I study the bottle on the table. Two glasses gone already.
‘What do you call a zoo with one dog?’ I ask, finally breaking the silence.
‘Hmm?’ He looks up.
‘What do you call a zoo with one dog?’
He looks at me blankly.
‘A shih-tzu,’ I say, smiling.
He has no idea what I’m talking about.
‘A shih-tzu. Shit. Zoo.’
‘Holly, I don’t … what are you talking about?’
‘It’s a joke!’
‘Oh. OK.’ He smiles a little, a vague one, and returns his attention to the menu.
The arrival of the waitress to take our order is the only break in the silence. We order, hand the menus back to the waitress and then he twists his hands and fingers together, fidgeting. And then it occurs to me. He’s nervous. I pour his wine to give him a moment to collect himself, but he seems to get worse as he waits, making trumpet-like sounds as he fills his upper lip with air, then stopping to drum the counter un-rhythmically with his forefingers, before resuming his odd in-out lip movements.
The waitress brings bruschetta and chopped tomatoes to the table while we wait for our main course. Seemingly relieved to have a new distraction, he turns his attention to the food, busies himself with balsamic vinegar and olive oil, giving it more attention than he ever has before. He starts playing with his food, separating the chopped tomatoes from the tiny pieces of basil, a wall built from crumbs in between, a precarious structure that rises and stumbles. He studies the increasingly interesting bruschetta. Basil to the left, tomatoes to the right. Crumbs down the centre.
I lean in. ‘What’s going on, Gabriel?’
He pushes his finger down on the crumbs on his plate, gathering them on his finger, then dusts them off, sprinkling them back to where they were.
‘Are you going to act like this the entire time I help the PS, I Love You Club? You don’t even know what I’m doing with them. Do you want to ask some questions? You don’t even know their names.’
‘It’s not that,’ he says firmly, abandoning the bruschetta and pushing his plate away. ‘It’s Ava.’ He leans in, elbows on the table, hands and fingers pressed together as if in prayer, and rests them over his lips. ‘She wants to move in with me.’
‘Move in?’
He nods.
‘With you?’
Nods again.
‘Into the house?’
‘Yes.’ He looks confused. Of course, where else would she live?
My head races. I’m supposed to move into the house.
‘She asked me a few weeks ago,’ he says, avoiding my eye, and I realise the reason for his distance. It had nothing to do with the accident, silly Holly, nothing to do with the club, he just let you think it was. So that’s what all those meetings with Kate and Ava were about.
‘Wow. Let me guess, you needed some time to think about it yourself first before telling me? This is familiar, isn’t it?’ And yet I feel as angry as he did when he accused me of creeping around behind him.
He ignores my bait and sticks to the issue at hand. ‘You know there’s been trouble with her and Kate. They’re not getting along.’
‘They haven’t gotten along for the two years that I’ve known you.’
‘It has gone up a level. Many levels,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘It’s like …’ He waves his hands and makes an explosion sound with his mouth.
His eyes still won’t meet mine. He’s told her yes. It’s already been agreed. So he meant it when he said we’d just do our own thing from now on, without discussing it first. Payback for the club.
‘Ava living with you means you being home all the time, getting her up and out of bed, getting her to school on time. Getting her to study. Keeping an eye on her.’
‘She’s sixteen, Holly, not six.’
‘She doesn’t get out of bed, she wouldn’t go to school if she wasn’t dragged in every day, you told me that. She’ll want to go to a party every weekend. You’ll have to speak to parents, get to know her friends, collect her in the early hours of the morning, or sit up waiting for her.’
‘I know, I’m not an idiot, I know how to be a dad,’ he says firmly. ‘I told her I need to speak with you first before finalising everything, but then there was the accident and lately you’ve been … busy every time I call.’
‘Sorry,’ I sigh. There’s so much I have to tell him, about Bert, about Ginika, my secret life that he’s had no part of but only because I’ve felt like it’s off limits. Talk of it before angered him. ‘Look, it’s fine with me. She’s your daughter, I’m happy for you that this is happening, I know it’s important to you. I’m OK with her moving in with us, as long as you know what you’re getting yourself into.’
He looks at me then, finally eye contact, his expression soft and apologetic. ‘You see, that’s the thing.’
It slowly dawns on me.
Ava is moving in instead of me.
‘She needs me.’ He places his hand on my forearm, holds me tightly. I want to spear his hand with my pasta fork. ‘I can’t turn my back on her after waiting so long for Ava to come to me for help. Kate and Finbar are getting married. She can’t stand Finbar. She hates being in the house. She’s all over the place, messing up at school, failing exams, partying. I’m afraid I fucked her up and I need to fix it.’
My heart pounds.
He tries a gentler, more apologetic tone. ‘Ava and I need space to figure it out and find our way together. If the three of us were living together during this transition, it would be too much for us all.’
‘So how long will this transition take, do you think?’
He shakes his head and looks to the distance, as if calculating the required transitional days in his virtual mind calendar.
‘I don’t know. Maybe the best thing would be to wait until she finishes school. I think,’ he adds quickly before I bellow, ‘that I need to help her through school. And then when she’s calmed down and starts university, you and I can do what we like. You and I have lived like this for two years already, we can keep going as we were. It works this way for us, too, doesn’t it?’ He reaches for my hands, squeezes them.
I free my hands, frustrated by his grip. ‘Two years,’ I say, looking at him in surprise. ‘Two years? I’m selling my house to live with you. You’ve been asking me for the past six months. It was your idea!’
‘I know, I know.’ It’s obvious from his pained expression that he doesn’t want to do this to me, and I don’t want to blame him for this situation. Any dad would do the same; choose their child over everything. But this is really screwing up my plans.
‘Maybe two years is too long. Maybe one year is more reasonable,’ he says, trying to keep it calm.
‘One year?’ I splutter. ‘What if I get an offer on the house tomorrow, where am I supposed to go? I need to make a plan. Do I search for a new place? Can I even afford one? Should I take if off the market? I mean, Jesus—’ I run my hands through my hair, suddenly realising the logistical nightmare I’m in. And of all the things I think of, I think of the holes in my wall that I now have to fix when I thought they would be someone else’s problem. Of all the things, I even have to fix my own mistakes.
‘Holly,’ he says, his hand brushing my cheek. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I need some time to help Ava settle. The rest of my life will be with you.’
I close my eyes. I tell myself he is not sick, he is not dying. Plans change. That’s life. But I can’t process this.
‘I thought you might be a bit relieved to hear this.’
‘Why the hell would I be relieved?’
‘Because of this club you’re involved with. You’ve barely had time for me.’
The waitress interrupts. ‘Are you finished here?’
Oh yes. I am.
She clears the table in a tense silence as we stare at each other, and then she hurries away.
I twist in my chair and lean over awkwardly to pick up my crutches. I can’t reach them. I strain my side and my fingers fumble on the ground to feel for them.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m trying to leave very fucking fast, but I fucking well can’t,’ I say through gritted teeth. I fumble again for the crutches, my fingers brush the handle but I push it away by mistake. ‘For fuck sake!’ I snap. The table to the right look at me. I ignore them.
Gabriel bends down to help.
‘I don’t want your help,’ I mumble. But I need it. He passes the crutches across to me, but as I take hold of one end, he keeps his grip on the crutch, holding me there, playing tug of war with a crutch.
‘Holly,’ he says passionately, ‘I’m not ending us. I need to hold back on the bigger plans for a while, that’s all.’
‘What are the bigger plans?’ I ask, interested now, raising my voice louder than I should. ‘Are we going to get married, Gabriel? Are we going to have a baby? Just so I know what I’m sitting on my ass and waiting two years for.’
The anger in him rises, but he keeps his voice low. ‘The two years, as I said, is open for discussion. I’m trying to be honest with you. I’m trying to deal with the child I actually have. I think we can talk about that another time, don’t you?’
It’s a funny moment to realise I want a child with him, and that I was hoping for so much more from this relationship. That two years longer places a panicked pressure on me and my body and my mind in a way that I never felt before. I’ve instantly lost something I didn’t even know I wanted. It’s being dangled in front of me, all of a sudden, this thing I hadn’t previously realised that I want, only to reveal that I may not have it.
I awkwardly manoeuvre my way through the tables and chairs, my crutches getting caught on chair legs, people having to move out of the way so I can get by. It is anything but a graceful exit.
Perhaps he’s done me a favour, perhaps we are better off cleaning up our messes alone. Ava back in his life, exactly as he wanted. And in a way, Gerry is back in mine. My life is so full, I think angrily, maybe there’s no room for Gabriel any more.