Best of Friends

Erin laughed in genuine amusement. Thankfully, there was zero chance of that. Before their marriage, Erin had been utterly straight with Greg and told him that she wasn’t sure she’d want children after what her mother had done to her. It wasn’t that she didn’t like kids, but she wasn’t certain she was mother material. And he’d said he understood. Another reason to love him, she knew, because she was sure it was hard for him to accept her decision.

Now she shook her head at the kind Korean lady. ‘Not a chance. I’m just dizzy,’ she said. ‘Low blood sugar.’

The rest of the line, familiar with medical problems from lactose intolerance up, went back to waiting. Rendered almost invisible because she was slumped in a plastic chair like a well-heeled dope-head, Erin let the panic flow away from her body until she was able to examine the problem from a distance.

She was going home and she’d never really planned to. Oh yes, she’d talked about it. What person didn’t? Home was like some magical and unchanging world of childhood for so many of her and Greg’s friends. Scottish, Australian, Irish, Italian, every nationality possible – everybody talked about their homeland as though viewing it through misty, uncritical eyes. Not only was the grass greener at home but life was simpler.

‘Different times,’ everyone would sigh when they had enough drink inside them and the mournful music of home was playing on the CD player.

Erin had long suspected that those who did return home drove everyone in Italy or Australia mad by telling them how wonderful America was and how they missed it and how the roads/hospitals/coffee were better there.

She, on the other hand, never indulged in shows of nostalgia for the country of her birth. Not that anybody ever noticed. With a name like Erin and her swathe of rippling copper silk for hair, she seemed as Irish as they came. People assumed she quietly longed to be sitting in an Irish pub on Paddy’s Day, proudly wearing a clod of shamrock and sighing mournfully into her Guinness. They didn’t know she felt she’d recklessly thrown away her Irishness the day she abandoned her family.

When their friends heard that she and Greg were leaving the States, they all said the same thing: ‘We knew you would.’

Erin felt like remarking: ‘You knew more than I did, that’s for sure.’

The line in the dry-cleaner’s was gone but Erin didn’t have the energy to leave the plastic chair and pick up her stuff. She was going home and she didn’t know how to face the guilt.

Greg fell asleep halfway through the new Spielberg movie. Erin, who’d been watching the latest Nicole Kidman offering on her tiny screen, leaned over and gently removed his headphones. She pulled the grey airline rug over his shoulders so he wouldn’t be cold and moved his empty water glass onto her own tray in case he knocked it over, smiling at the realisation that she only gave in to her mothering instinct with Greg when he was asleep.

Conscious of getting dehydrated, she drank some more water, and settled back to watch the movie but her concentration had been broken.

As the plane flew through the night, Erin cast her mind back to her last hours at home. She remembered the stricken face of the woman she’d always called Mum but who was, in fact, her grandmother, when she’d shouted that she was leaving because they’d lied to her all her life. She remembered leaving many of her childhood treasures behind when she fled the house because she’d wanted to demonstrate the depth of her rejection. Most of all, she remembered the pain she’d felt when she found out that the most important people in her life – her mother, her father and her sister – weren’t who they said they were. Thanks to Erin’s shocking discovery, all her family relationships had shifted. Dad was really her grandfather, bolshy Kerry wasn’t her sister but her aunt, and the long-absent sister Shannon, the wild one who never came home but sent postcards from exotic locations when the mood took her, was really Erin’s mother.

The first thing that struck Erin as she and Greg followed the Cuchulainn driver out of Cork airport to the car park was how warm it was. There was no sign of the beating rain that was part of her memory of home. Instead, a soft spring breeze shimmied over her face, like a silky scarf just out of the dryer. The acid bite of Chicago’s wind chill seemed a lifetime away.

‘Lovely day,’ said Greg appreciatively, filling his lungs with clean air after so many hours in the stuffy cabin.

The second thing Erin noticed was that the driver was refusing to fit the chatty Irish cabbie mould. There was none of the blarney she had expected, no third degree as he tried to work out where they were from, had they any family in Cork or did they know so and so in Chicago, which was the kind of thing Erin remembered from home. Oh well, she shrugged. She’d changed, so it was only fair to assume that Ireland had changed too.

Eager to see a bit of the place, Greg asked for the scenic route, so instead of taking the most direct road to Dunmore, which bypassed the centre of the city, the driver drove them along Patrick Street, pointing out places of note.

Erin tried to look at the sights but kept getting distracted by stylish people, who could have stepped off a Manhattan sidewalk any day. This, she didn’t remember.

Sure, there were the usual few ould fellas in jackets so dated they could have taken part in a centenary of clothes exhibition, but for the most part, the citizens of Cork looked…well, marvellous.

When they finally drove through the hills to reach Dunmore, it looked marvellous too: very cute in a picture-postcard way, like the upmarket towns she and Greg had visited in New England on their honeymoon.

‘Dunmore looked lovely on the Internet but those pictures didn’t do it justice,’ said Greg, admiring the Victorian town square, which was dominated by a forbidding grey statue of some long-dead mayor. ‘I can’t wait to see our house.’

After the beauty of the buildings they had passed in Dunmore, the home the company had rented for them was a definite disappointment. The box-like terraced house on a shabby 1980s estate was so small that it was completely filled by their packing cases and their furniture, which had arrived the day before. Even a deeply apologetic letter from the agent on the kitchen counter top, explaining that due to unforeseen circumstances the house they’d been supposed to have was unrentable, didn’t bring a smile to their faces.

‘“I apologise to both you and Mrs Kennedy,”’ Greg read from the letter,‘“but if you could just bear with us for the next couple of weeks, we’ll have other, more suitable premises for you then.” I’d better get on to Steve Richardson about this. His office are supposed to have sorted the house out. Oh, the letter says there’s champagne in the refrigerator as compensation,’ he added, cheering up as he read the next paragraph.

Erin looked round the kitchen, which, although heroic last-minute efforts had been made, had clearly been rented out for years to people not familiar with basic cleaning equipment. One wall in the kitchen diner was obviously where the kitchen table had stood, for it bore a line of suspicious reddish stains that scrubbing hadn’t been able to remove. The mustard-yellow cabinets and the pink-tinged walls hinted that at least somebody had a sense of humour, but wafting down from upstairs there was a definite hint of tomcat in the air.

‘There’d better be two bottles of champagne,’ Erin said, wrapping her arms round Greg’s waist, ‘because I’d hate to find out that the cat peed in the master bedroom and, at least with a bottle each, we’ll sleep.’

Greg lifted her up effortlessly and sat her on the counter, so that her legs were free to lock round his waist.

‘I vant to take you here, in ze kitchen, my Irish maiden,’ he said, nuzzling into her neck. ‘But I zink we bettair clean up first.’

‘Good idea, Casanova,’ said Erin, kissing him on the mouth. ‘You wouldn’t know what you’d catch here and I’m not taking off my knickers until this place is spotless.’

‘Ooh, stop with ze durty talk,’ moaned Greg.

‘Later.’ She held him close, loving the feeling of his heart beating next to hers. ‘You open the champagne and I’ll find the carton with the rubber gloves in it.’

Three days later, Erin was fed up. The day after they’d arrived, the weather had suddenly become unaccountably cold and the heating was either a very mysterious system that normal humans couldn’t work, or it was broken.

Greg fiddled around with the timer for half the evening but he was so exhausted with the combination of jet lag and starting the new job that he failed to make any improvement.

‘Sorry, honey,’ he said. ‘I know you’re cold. Let’s get on to the agency tomorrow.’ Then he’d fallen into the deep sleep of the shattered, leaving Erin shivering in bed beside him, despite her bed socks and thermal shirt.

The agency said they would send round a maintenance man, but nothing happened. The next morning she phoned them again and they promised to send someone out that day.

Erin, who felt strangely out of sorts and still jet-lagged, wasn’t amused. ‘You said that yesterday,’ she pointed out drily. ‘Is there some kind of draw going on? You put all the names into a hat and when my name comes out, you actually send someone out. Is that it?’

The agency lady sounded quite sniffy and pointed out that two days of freezing weather had burst pipes in a few of their properties and that their maintenance men were busy.

‘Burst pipes?’ Erin enquired. ‘If that’s what it takes to get you guys out here, just tell me where they are and I’ll burst them. OK?’

She hung up and glared round at the empty kitchen. It had been too chilly to unpack things since the cold snap. She had only opened the boxes for the living room because there was a gas fire in there. Besides, if they were going to be moving into a better house soon there was no point in getting out everything. She made yet another cup of coffee for personal central heating and stomped into the living room, pausing only to pick up Greg’s old ski cap from the banisters and jam it on her head.

She was already wearing leggings under her track bottoms, two sweaters and an electric-blue padded ski gilet. All of which looked ridiculous, she knew. But who cared. She didn’t know anybody in this town so there was nobody to wonder what had happened to the normally exquisitely groomed Erin Kennedy to turn her into such a slut.

Plonking herself down cross-legged on the floor, she tackled a box destined for the study. She was engrossed in a pile of newspaper clippings she was sure she’d thrown out in Chicago, when the doorbell rang.

Fantastic. Losing it with the rental company was clearly the way forward.

But it wasn’t the maintenance man at the door. Instead, there stood a tiny Flower Fairy of a person, with round dark eyes, rippling ebony curls and a red hooded woollen coat that made her a dead ringer for Little Red Riding Hood.

‘I don’t know whether to invite you in or tell you that Grandma’s sick and the big bad wolf is around,’ said Erin before she could help it.

The woman laughed: a deep, throaty laugh utterly at odds with her Little Red Riding Hood image. ‘I’ll have to throw this coat out,’ she cried, pushing back the hood.

‘Sorry,’ Erin said quickly.

‘No, you’re right,’ insisted Red Riding Hood. ‘Grown women should not buy clothes because they’re cute. Then people call you cute and I hate that. Cute is an overused word. I’m Sally, by the way. Sally Richardson, Steve’s wife.’ When Erin still looked blank, she added: ‘Steve Richardson works with Greg in Cuchulainn.’

Erin grimaced at her own stupidity. Greg had spoken every day about Steve Richardson, the hardworking second-in-command, who, to Greg’s delight, did not appear to have applied for the top job, being newly promoted himself, and, therefore, who did not have a chip on his shoulder about a new boss.

‘Sorry again,’ apologised Erin. ‘My brain isn’t functioning these days. Jet lag. Or hypothermia, perhaps. The heating isn’t working.’

‘So I hear. Steve says Greg is worried sick because you’re stuck at home getting frostbite.’

‘I am wearing some fetching thermals.’ Erin pointed down to her Michelin Man outfit. ‘I didn’t think it would be this cold.’