The Flower Arrangement (23 page)

The moonlight had papered over all the cracks on the facade of the shabby Georgian terraced house that Ciara had moved into last September. It looked reassuringly solid from the outside, like a proper home, but it wasn't the kind of place that anybody stayed in for very long. It was a shabby mansion full of temporary lives. The huge, drafty
rooms had been subdivided into odd-shaped flats with incongruously high sash windows and chipped plaster ceiling roses.

Ciara stopped at the bottom of the granite steps that led up to the front door and shoved the roses into the green bin. It was nearly three in the morning, but all the lights were on in the basement flat where Mrs. Costello, the eighty-eight-year-old widow who owned the house, still lived. She took the bouquet out of the bin and went lightly down the steps and left it on her worn doormat. As she climbed the steps again, she heard Mrs. Costello singing to Princess, her ancient, battle-scarred cat. One of these days they were both going to join Ciara's ghostly pee-watch.

*   *   *

The next morning, when Ciara got up, Suzanne was kneeling in the shower stall dressed in a pair of silver hot pants and a pink T-shirt that said:
I may not have free will but I have free won't.

Suzanne liked to dress up when she cleaned the flat. “It's impossible to feel like a drudge when you're wearing a tiara,” she'd explained to Ciara the week she moved in.

Ciara flipped the loo lid down and sat watching Suzanne scrubbing the grotty grouting between the tiles with an electric toothbrush.

“Is someone coming over?” She had been planning to turn on the TV and stay on the sofa all day. Possibly all weekend.

“My parents will be here in an hour,” Suzanne said over her shoulder. “Dad wanted to take Mum for lunch, but she wasn't up to it so I said I'd cook.”

Suzanne's mother was terrified of spaces, open and enclosed, and eating in public, and meeting strangers, and dirt.

“You aren't planning on staying in, are you?” Suzanne looked worried. “I thought you'd be going into the shop as it's, you know”—she waved a rubber-gloved hand—“V-Day.”

“I am,” Ciara lied. “I just slept late.” The thought of having to go
out into the world made her feel queasy. What would she do? Where would she go?

“Oh, I forgot to tell you, some flowers arrived. They're a little weird. And that's ‘little' with a capital ‘L.'”

It was the bouquet of roses that Ciara had left outside the basement flat, but each rose stem was now just three inches long.

“Mrs. C found them outside her door,” Suzanne explained. “She didn't have a vase big enough for them so she did some surgery. Then she thought maybe they were actually for one of us, so she brought them up. She thoughtfully taped the stems back on but they just fell off again.”

Suzanne peeled off her rubber gloves and made a coffee in the mocha pot that Ciara and Mort had bought at a street market in Palermo two weeks before they split up. Mort had thrown away one of his favorite sweatshirts so he could squash the pot into his carry-on. It hadn't even been unpacked from its box when she moved out.

“Let's have our coffee outside,” Suzanne said. “Everything smells of bleach in here.” She went to get their coats while Ciara brushed the cobwebs off the rusty garden chairs. Then they sat in the watery February sunshine, warming their hands on their cups.

Suzanne had been busy. The leaves had been swept up and the various clapped-out bicycles belonging to the students who lived upstairs had been tidied into a corner. The higgledy-piggledy plant pots that didn't really belong to anybody had been regimented into a neat row along the wall.

“I don't know why I did that,” Suzanne said. “My mother won't even come out here. Sometimes I think I'm CDO.”

“What's that?”

“It's OCD arranged in the correct alphabetical order. Holy Mother of God!” She jumped up. “The erotic poetry kit!” She hurried back into the kitchen and began to pluck explicit magnetic words off the fridge door.

“You've forgotten ‘erotic pleasure,'” Ciara pointed out as she came inside with the cups.

“I will have,” Suzanne sighed, “unless Mr. Athletic comes along soon.”

*   *   *

Ciara heard the distant whisper of Mrs. Costello's slippers. There was a long pause, then the basement door opened just a crack. Through it Ciara could see a sliver of pale face and a bright slash of unevenly applied lipstick.

“It's me, Mrs. Costello. Ciara. From upstairs,” she began. “I brought back the roses. They were actually for you—” The door closed again before she could finish.

She trudged back up the basement steps and dumped the roses on the passenger seat of her car. She switched on the engine, then turned the heating on full and sat there until Suzanne's parents arrived.

She watched them get out of their huge 4×4. Suzanne's mother was clinging to her husband's arm, scanning the street as if she was expecting a predator, a mountain lion or an eagle, to swoop in and snatch her.

In the photograph that Suzanne kept on her dressing table, her parents were young and glamorous, captured in black-and-white, kissing in a cloud of confetti. Ciara wouldn't have recognized them from that picture. She wondered if they recognized themselves.

She and Mort had been married beneath an arch of white hibiscus and frangipani flowers by a petite Balinese woman wearing a navy micromini business suit, the kind that sassy paralegals wore in TV dramas.

“
Could
you take this woman to be your awfully wedded wife?” the woman had asked Mort, and he'd grinned at Ciara and said, “I could.”

In their wedding picture, Ciara was standing under the arch,
barefoot, her newly highlighted hair loose, her floaty white Ghost wedding dress damp up to the waist where it had trailed in the water when Mort carried her into the sea. She was smiling straight up at her husband and he was smiling past the camera at the Swedish girls in ice-cream-colored sarongs who had acted as their witnesses.

Ciara pulled away from the curb before Suzanne opened the door to her parents. She drove into town, circled St. Stephen's Green twice and then took the coast road back out again. She slowed down as she passed the small town house in Sandymount where she had lived with Mort, where he still lived. There were flowers in the window.

She drove to Killiney and parked by the beach shelter where Mort had proposed to her. The heart with
Ciara, will you marry me?
that he had spray-painted on the whitewashed wall three years ago had disappeared beneath layers of new graffiti.
Macker is a knacker
.
Foxrock girls are dykes
.
Fight apathy! Or don't
.

They hadn't meant to get married on Valentine's Day. It just happened. When they arrived in Bali, they'd applied for a license, but it had taken ten days instead of a week. Ciara had lost track of time. It all merged into one exotic blur. Mornings in a double hammock watching scarlet and purple butterflies hovering over them like floating flowers. Afternoons exploring temples with lotus-choked ponds and offerings laid out under wheels of incense smoke. Nights eating under the stars watching distant electrical storms flaring on the horizon and counting fireflies as they walked home along Monkey Forest Road to make love.

It seemed like a delicious slice of destiny when their photocopied wedding certificate was dated February 14, as if the universe was rubber-stamping their love. As if the universe, Ciara thought now, gave a crap.

She started the car again and drove past the pier where Mort had first kissed her and the cinema where they'd seen their first film and the Indian restaurant where they'd had their first fight. It was boarded up now. Teenage boys in low-rise baggy jeans and baseball caps were hanging out in the doorway, passing a beer can between
them. Somewhere between meeting Mort and breaking up with him, Ireland had started to look like another country.

She parked opposite Finnegan's. It was a proper old-fashioned pub with nicotine-stained ceilings and cracked leatherette stools and chipped Formica tables with folded beer mats wedged under the wonky legs.

She switched off the engine and watched the narrow street dissolve as the windscreen misted over with drizzle. Nearly four years ago she'd walked into the soupy gloom of Finnegan's out of the dazzling light of a June afternoon. She had been wearing a summer dress and flowery flip-flops and carrying a summer arrangement addressed to someone called Peggy.

A couple of old men were sitting at the polished mahogany bar, their heads raised like withered sunflowers toward the TV. The volume was on low and Ciara could hear the faraway rattle and click of snooker balls and the soft “ooohs” of the studio audience.

The guy standing behind the bar polishing a glass wasn't old; he was heart-stoppingly beautiful. He looked as if he had slipped through a hole in a Calvin Klein ad and landed in a grungy Dublin local. In three lazy blinks he took Ciara in. Her mouth, her light summer dress, her bare legs.

“For me?” He nodded at the flowers.

“Not unless your name is Peggy,” Ciara said, trying to put him in his place.

“I'm Mort.” He sounded Australian but he was, it turned out, from New Zealand. “And you are?”

“Double-parked,” Ciara said, “looking for Peggy, remember?” But she heard the waver in her voice and so did he.

“Well, leave the car when you come back later,” he said, taking the flowers, “so you can have a drink.”

*   *   *

She sat in the cooling car, gripping the steering wheel as if it was a lifebelt. Every atom in her body was telling her to open the door and
cross the busy road and walk into Finnegan's and tell David Mortimer that she could cope with anything if they were still together.

She closed her eyes and begged Granny Rose and River Phoenix, John Lennon and Audrey Hepburn for a sign. When she opened her eyes again, she saw it in the one lit window above the pub. A wonky hand-lettered card that said:
Psychic
.

*   *   *

She was expecting a woman in a traily dress, but the psychic was a man in his sixties with porcupine spikes of silver hair and stubble like iron filings. He was hunched over a two-bar electric fire popping a piece of Nicorette from a blister pack. His lined face lit up when he saw her.

“I'm sorry, wrong door.” Ciara backed away.

“No such thing.” He popped the gum into his mouth. “Take a pew.”

He wheeled himself over on an unsteady swivel chair. The thought of Mort mere feet away below her in the bar hit Ciara behind the knees. She sank down onto the arm of the grubby sofa. “So”—the psychic worked his gum—“what can I do for you?”

“Nothing. I just came in to ask about prices. For a friend.”

“You'd be amazed how many people say that.” He scooted a little closer and took her hands before she could stop him. He squinted down at her palms for a full minute.

“You've been through a dark time, but it's coming to an end. It's like you're in a tunnel, but you're walking toward the light.”

Ciara wasn't sure what she'd been expecting, but this was just too trite. She pulled her hands away.

“That's all you see? A tunnel and some light?”

“Yeah. Oh, hang on!” The psychic chewed his gum and gazed over her left shoulder intently, as if he was scanning an invisible queue. “Your grandmother is here now.”

“What about Mort?” Ciara asked him slyly, laying a trap, willing him to fall into it, face first. “Is Mort here too?”

His dark eyes darted around the room. “Nope. Nobody answering to that name, I'm afraid.”

“Great, what do I owe you?” Ciara rummaged in her purse for her wallet.

“You don't have a cigarette in there, do you?” The psychic looked sheepish.

“You're the psychic,” she snapped. “You tell me.”

“Sssh!” He was looking over her shoulder again. “Your grandmother has a message for you. She says that you know where to find Mort, but you should leave him alone because he's . . .”

Ciara's heart was caught inside her rib cage, a trapped hamster on a wheel. “Because he's
what
?”

The psychic frowned. “She's fading. She's saying something about three letters. She says you'll understand.”

Ciara snorted. Granny Rose had never even written her
one
letter. She stood up. She was at the door when he called after her. “Do the letters ‘S,' ‘O' and ‘B' mean anything to you?”

*   *   *

It was only four o'clock, but the sky was already folding itself away for the evening, exhausted. Grubby clouds were banked above the high granite walls of the graveyard.

There were flower sellers at the gate. Early daffodils and forced tulips blazed in aluminum buckets.

A line of wet black cars was snaking between the high gray pillars. Ciara followed the slow procession along the narrow gravel road that wound between the grassy avenues.

There were fresh wreaths and bunches of flowers laid out on the graves, and here and there, heart-shaped balloons on sticks had been stuck into the damp earth.

She dimly remembered that the grave was close to a stand of winter-flowering cherry trees. When she found it, the small granite cross and
the rectangle of grass were covered in leaves. She used her scarf to brush them away, her breath coming in little puffs, like smoke.

She snapped the rubber band off the butchered roses and fanned them out over the rectangle of grass, roughly where she thought her grandmother's heart must be. She lifted her face and tried to make a smoke ring with a puff of breath, but it vanished into the air.

The first stars were already appearing. Ciara picked one that was caught in the branches of the cherry tree and gave it to herself for her third and last wedding anniversary. Then she put her head down and walked quickly through the gathering darkness to the gate, out of the tunnel and into the light.