Page 62 of Such a Good Couple
‘They came over to the party especially to see me, I gotta hang with them,’ he’d said in that cajoling tone that Maggie was growing to despise.
The thing that was annoying her most was that she wanted to nip outherself. Instead, she tore around Dodi and Essie’s pale pink bedroom on the third floor. The room’s vibe was like an extravagant cake, frosted in frills and lace with two large four-poster beds with white sparkling canopies.
She threw favourite teddies, blankies and charged tablets into the two little wheely cases her daughters always brought on board for long flights. As fast as she was packing, the girls were undoing her work.
‘Mam.’ Dodi fell upon her bag. ‘I want my iPad for the taxi.’
‘No, no. Please just leave it in there,’ Maggie begged. ‘I just need to keep everything in its place right now so I don’t forget anything.’
‘Stop annoying Mam,’ Essie shouted at Dodi from her position, jumping up and down on her bed, completely fucking it up in the process.
‘That’s antique.’ Maggie grabbed Essie’s hand to halt the jumping. ‘Do you like the princess bed? You don’t want to break it.’
‘But we can just get another one?’ Essie sounded genuinely perplexed that Maggie would be worried about a broken bed when there was an unending line of possessions streaming into their lives at all times.
Oh God.Maggie didn’t even have time to start spiralling about the girls’ growing sense of entitlement.
She zipped up the bags and pulled them into the landing and checked her phone: 4.30 p.m. Fionn had still not blue-ticked her message from an hour ago. They were leaving for the airport atsix. She chewed at the inside of her lower lip. Fuck it, she would just bring the girls with her.
The three of them were in the car five minutes later, her daughters bombarding her with questions about their destination. ‘I just have to get petrol,’ Maggie said, steering them away from the house.
‘What’s petrol?’ one of them asked.
‘Gas, honey,’ Maggie corrected herself.
‘Why do we need gas? We’re leaving.’ The other joined the interrogation.
‘We’re getting it because we don’t want to leave the Dublin car empty.’Well, that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, she thought. And if the girls mentioned the outing to Fionn, he would definitely think it was an odd thing to prioritise.
She glanced at the matching blonde heads in the rearview mirror. ‘Also, I’ve to get special Irish tea bags to bring home to LA.’
‘Can we have Olivia Rodrigo?’ Dodi asked.
‘Sure.’ Maggie handed the phone into the back seat so her daughter could cue up the music. At the next lights, she made a right towards the petrol station that was further up the coast road. She hadn’t actually planned on it, but her petrol excuse was actually kind of good because she could safely leave the girls in the car while she got everything she needed and could go into the station’s toilets.
Inside the shop, she kept an eye on her car through the long window in front as she picked up a fat stack of Cadbury’s chocolate bars – they were more compact than any of the bags of crisps. She felt she’d get the bars into her pockets and so look fairly normal going into the loos.
All it took was five frenzied but satisfying minutes to dispatch the chocolate and then less than a minute on the floor of the toilet to rid herself of it. After three days of being constantly inthe company of others and unable to do her routine whenever she overate, it was a huge release. Back in the car with her daughters, she chewed gum to hide the smell. She felt dizzy but pleasantly sedated. She took a couple of breaths to savour the lightness in her mind and body, before pressing the ignition button.
‘Mam. Mam.’ Essie tapped at her. ‘Where is the special tea?’
Shite. Fair point, Maggie thought.
‘Oh my God, I’m such a silly.’ She smiled at Essie. ‘I’ll be right back.’
CHAPTER 16
Annie circled the dining table, tidying away the Sunday roast she’d made for herself and Rachel. Through the timber-framed, slanted windows under which the table was tucked, she could see the low, flat-roofed structure at the other side of the tiny garden where Rachel painted when she wasn’t in her studio in the gallery in town. The garden was completely overgrown which, coupled with all the delicate glass panels at this end of the house, reminded Annie of the Victorian glasshouses in the Botanic Gardens.
The house itself was also Victorian. From the front, it looked like a storybook house. Two sash windows flanked a jaunty yellow door that was tucked under the sharply pitched roof of the porch. Inside, the attractively wonky floorboards seemed to gently curve and swerve through the hallways and rooms. Every inch of the walls was covered in beautiful things to look at, from ornately framed paintings and prints to Rachel’s huge collection of eccentric ephemera. There were tax bills covered in scenes rendered in watercolours. Endless postcards arranged into a vast mosaic in the kitchen. The fabric limbs of slack puppets trailed on the mantelpiece in the living room, while hooked on a nail in the toilet there was the skull of what Annie later found out was a dog with the words ‘get well soon’ written above one of the empty sockets.
On the tiny second storey were two dreamy little bedrooms under the eaves, each with a small dormer window looking overthe back garden and Rachel’s studio, with the foothills of the Dublin mountains in the distance. Annie was positive that she would be way more traumatised by everything that’d happened in the last five weeks if she hadn’t had this incredibly soft landing in Rachel’s home.
She stacked the dishes and brought them into the little galley kitchen. She loaded the dishwasher and then checked on the two little individual trifles in the fridge that she’d made that morning. The custard was setting very nicely. Since she’d moved in, she’d been flat out behaving like the dream housemate. Well, apart from the few nights at the start when she’d gone too heavy on the white wine and had insisted they listen to the ten-minute version of ‘All Too Well’ on repeat. Rachel had been very patient about this and, miraculously, now, more than a month since the split from Conor, Annie seemed to have moved through the furious ‘fuck that guy’ stage of break-up grief and into the vaguely more optimistic ‘what the hell do I do with my life now?’ stage.
She and Rachel had even done some light vision-boarding which Rachel said wasn’t quite cliché enough so they threw in a spell-casting they’d seen on TikTok. This went great until the ceremonial burning of old ‘negative-energy-holding knickers’ got a bit too smoky and they couldn’t get the fire alarm to shut up. Eventually Annie had smashed it down from the ceiling with the broom handle and Rachel pronounced her the best housemate ever.
Annie returned to the table to give it a wipe. From the clock on the oven, it was coming up to 8.30 p.m. and the sky above their garden was pinking up nicely. Annie picked up her phone and texted Rachel:
