I stared at her steadily. “What? Your sanity?”
“No.” She sounded a little annoyed. “My cell phone.”
I murmured an apology.
But when we arrived at Rachel and Luke’s, lo and behold, who happened to be sprawled on their sofa, moodily kicking the brick wall with his boots, only Joey.
“Did you know he was going to be here?” I asked Jacqui.
“No.”
At the sight of Jacqui, Joey sat bolt upright and agitatedly brushed his hair back, trying to smarten himself up. “Hey! Jacqui! You left your cell phone here last night. I called you. Did you get my message? I said I’d swing by with it if you wanted.”
I looked at Jacqui. So she had known he was here. But she wouldn’t look at me.
“Here it is.” Joey leaped up and retrieved it from a shelf.
It was quite entertaining, seeing him trying to be nice.
“Thanks.” Jacqui took the phone and barely looked at Joey. “Anna and I are going for a pizza. Everyone’s welcome to join us.”
“And after the pizza,” I asked, “will we be playing Scrabble?”
At the word Scrabble, something funny happened, as if there had been a power surge in the room. Between Jacqui and Joey there was a vrizzon, a definite vrizzon.
“No Scrabble tonight,” Rachel said, dousing the mood. “I need my sleep.”
Jacqui and I shared a cab home. We sat in silence. Eventually she said, “Go on. I know you want to say something.”
“Can I ask a question? Mum tells me you put your hand down his jocks to get your Scrabble piece back—”
“Jesus H!” She buried her face in her hands. “How does Mammy Walsh know that?”
“Luke told her, I think. But it doesn’t matter, she seems to know everything anyway. But what I’m wondering is, was it nice?”
She thought about it for a while. “Quite nice.”
“Quite nice? Just quite nice?”
“Just quite nice.”
“And was he soft or…er…you know?”
“Softish when I started. Hard when I finished. It took me a while to find the piece.”
She flashed me a sudden minxy smile.
“Something you might like to think about,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Your beef with other men is that they’re always nice to begin with, keeping the fact that they’re bastards well under wraps. At least with Joey, you know where you are. He’s a narky prick and he’s never pretended to be anything else.”
Jacqui was thoughtful, then she spoke. “You know, Anna, that’s not really a recommendation.”
55
Aidan? The spiritual place? Should I go today?”
No voice answered. Nothing happened. He just continued to smile from the photo frame, frozen in a long-ago moment.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do a deal.” I tore out a page from a magazine and scrunched it up. “I’ll throw this ball of paper at the bin over there, and if I miss, I’ll stay at home. If I get it in, I’ll go.”
I closed my eyes and threw, then opened them to see the scrunchedup page lying in the bottom of the bin.
“Right,” I said. “Looks like you want me to go.”
First, I had to make excuses to Rachel, but because the weather was still boiling, she wanted to go to the beach. I told her I was going to spend the day at a spa, which she seemed happy enough about. “But next time, tell me or Jacqui and one of us will come with you.”
“Grand, grand,” I said, relieved to be off the hook.
Nicholas was already waiting in the corridor. This week his T-shirt said DOG IS MY COPILOT. He was reading a book called The Sirius Mystery and I made the mistake of asking him what it was about.
“Five thousand years ago, amphibious aliens came to earth and taught the Dogon tribesmen of West Africa the secrets of the universe, including the existence of a companion star to Sirius, a star so dense that it’s actually invisible—”
“Thanks! Enough! Okay, do you believe Princess Diana is working at a truck stop in New Mexico?”
“Check. And I also believe the royal family murdered her. That’s how good at believing I am. I am a true believer.”
“Roosevelt knew in advance about Pearl Harbor and let it happen because he wanted America in the war?”
“Check.”
“They faked the moon landing?”
“Check.”
Along lumbered Undead Fred—while everyone else was sweltering, he was in his black suit and barely breaking a sweat. Next to arrive was Barb.
“What about this heat?” she asked.
She dropped down beside me on the bench, her thighs apart, lifted the hem of her skirt, and flapped vigorously. “That’ll get a bit of air up there.” She added, “Not a day to be wearing underpants.”
Oh God. Had she just told me she wasn’t wearing knickers? My head went spinny: this was what Aidan’s death had reduced me to, hanging around with these oddballs.
But were they oddballs? (Apart from Undead Fred, who was as odd as they come.) Were they not just broken people? Or broke people, as Mackenzie thought herself.
“Don’t tell the guys.” Barb winked and indicated the hem of her dress. “Drive ’em wild if they knew I was bushing.”
As “the guys” consisted of Nicholas and Undead Fred, I wasn’t so sure but said nothing.
Her dress was a button-down and it gaped at the hips. I didn’t want to look, I did everything I could think of to stop myself, but it was like Luke and his crotch, the draw was simply too powerful. Entirely against my will, I caught a glimpse of her pubes.
“Barb,” I said, a little high-pitched, as I fastened my eyes firmly on her face, “what brings you here every Sunday?”
“Because all the interesting people I know are dead. Drug overdoses, suicides, murders, awww, I tell ya!” She made it sound as if people didn’t know how to die properly nowadays. “And I can’t afford even two seconds of Neris Hemming’s time.”
“You’d like to talk to her?”
“Oh yeah. She’s the real deal.” My heart lifted. If Barb, with her gravelly voice and her grouchiness, said Neris Hemming was the real deal, then she really must be. “If anyone can channel your husband for you, it’s Neris Hemming.”