Page 20 of The Reboot
She liked having a clear demarcation between her work and home life, and it felt good to have made it through the week and earned that ‘Friday feeling’.
‘Smells amazing!’ she said to her mother. ‘Anything you want me to do?’
Ruth shook her head. ‘It’s almost ready. You could set the table.’
Ella stood and opened the cutlery drawer.
‘It’s just the two of us,’ her mother told her. ‘Nora’s out on a date.’
‘Oh, good for her!’
Ruth sighed. ‘Hopefully.’
‘You don’t sound very optimistic.’
‘I just don’t know why she puts herself through it when her heart’s not in it. You should have seen her this evening – you’d think she was going to the gallows. She even said she’d much rather stay in and have dinner with us. I kept telling her she could do that if she wanted to. No one’s forcing her to go out on dates. But off she trudged – a martyr to the cause.’
Ella laughed. ‘Well, I can’t believe she chose a man over your homemade pizza. But maybe this one will surprise her and she’ll have a good time.’
‘Maybe,’ her mother said doubtfully.
‘Mmm,’ Ella closed her eyes and groaned as she bit into her first slice of pizza. ‘This is so good. Better than a man any day.’
Ruth smiled. ‘It is pretty amazing, if I say so myself.’
As they ate, Ella talked about her first week at work. It had been fun, and much more interesting than what she’d expected when she’d applied for what sounded like a routine admin position. She’d been surprised at the amount of freedom she’d been given to use her initiative, especially in her first week. She also liked that she was allowed to do a bit of everything to see what was the best fit for her skills and interests, and didn’t just get stuck with the most boring jobs that no one else wanted to do. Philip had given her all the passwords for their various social media advertising accounts, and she’d worked with him on some campaigns. Yesterday they’d given her access to their accounts, which turned out to be in a bit of a mess. Their book-keeping was sketchy to non-existent, so she’d spent the day getting stuck into that, doing some forensic tracing of invoices and receipts, and trying to sort it all out. On Monday she planned to set up a new record-keeping system to keep everything on track in the future.
She hadn’t expected to be given so much responsibility, and she loved that she was left to her own devices to get on with things. She could decide what needed doing and then go ahead and do it without asking anyone’s permission. She may not have much office experience, but she knew that wasn’t how things worked at most companies. It may be unconventional and a bit chaotic at Citizens, but she thought it was going to suit her very well.
Everyone had been very friendly and helpful too. Jake and Dylan checked in regularly to make sure she was finding her way around and knew she could ask if she needed help with anything. But they didn’t hover, and she never felt they were looking over her shoulder. Kerry had been almost motherly, taking Ella under her wing, despite being almost ten years younger.
‘So you reckon Tweedledum and Tweedledee are keepers?’ her mother concluded.
‘Yeah.’ Ella nodded, smiling. ‘It’s not the sort of place I ever saw myself working. But I think I may have landed on my feet there.’
She was still exhausted, so she went to her room straight after dinner and crashed out on her bed, catching up on social media. She was scrolling through Instagram when she noticed she had a new message request. She opened it, prepared to delete the usual dodgy greeting from some random dude chancing his arm. Sure enough, it was an account she didn’t recognise, with an anonymous string of letters and numbers for a handle and a cartoon character avatar. The character looked vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t place it – someone from Pokémon maybe? Then she opened the message and gasped.
Hi Ella, It’s me, Roly! Roly Punch, remember? Sketcher of ox-bow lakes? French conversationalist extraordinaire? Sorry for the bait and switch. You were probably expecting a message from Charmander, so hope you’re not too disappointed. Anyway, how are you? I was wondering if you’d like to meet up. I’d love to see you. It’s been so long. I promise not to be a knob this time, but cool if you’d rather not. R x
Roly Punch! That was a name she hadn’t heard in a very long time; a person she hadn’t thought about much if she could avoid it. She smiled, the thought of him bringing up warm, fond feelings, though still tinged with guilt even at this distance of years.
The few times he’d come to her attention in the last few years, it was usually some mean article in the paper about his solo career floundering or a grossly unflattering photo snapped by paparazzi when he was out and about. The story was always about how much weight he’d put on, how bad his solo album had been, how well Oh Boy! had done without him. She felt so sad for him, for all he’d lost — and she hated knowing she’d played a part in his downfall.
Still, she told herself it could have been so much worse. He’d lost money, fame, friends, his career. But he was still alive. He hadn’t lost his life. And she consoled herself that maybe she’d had a hand in that too.
She sank back against the pillows, rereading his message. What would it be like to see him again? They’d had a strange, episodic friendship over the years, and every time she saw him, she thought it would be the last. But he’d pop up in her life again when she least expected it, and they’d take up where they left off.
She remembered the first time he’d spoken to her during morning break in their final term of school, the summer sun streaming in through the windows of the classroom. She’d had her head buried in a book, and he’d asked her what she was reading. It felt like an anointing because if Roly showed an interest in you, other people started to sit up and take notice. He was the most popular student in their year – even with the teachers, which really pissed off some of the nerdy kids who were cleverer than him and way more eager to please. They didn’t get why Roly was so liked – because he was funny and friendly and kind, but most of all because he was genuinely interested in other people.
Ella had never been one of his inner circle, but he wasn’t elitist, and eventually he befriended pretty much everyone. Unfortunately for Ella, there were a lot of people to get around, and her turn didn’t come until the last term of their final year, so she didn’t benefit from it for long. She sometimes wondered what might have happened if the consecration had happened earlier. How might her life have been different? If they’d been closer, maybe she’d have gone on the Leaving Cert holiday to Magaluf with his crowd instead of interrailing across Europe with Julie. If she hadn’t been in Italy at the precise time she was, maybe she would have avoided that opportunistic virus that had put her life in a choke-hold for the past ten years.
As it was, school finished a few weeks later and they all went their separate ways. She thought she’d seen the last of Roly. Then somehow they’d ended up together after the Debs. She’d spent the official last hours of her school days sitting across from Roly Punch at a little table in a greasy spoon cafe, eating breakfast the morning after the dance.
It wasn’t a story she could tell anyone now. No one would appreciate what it meant, or understand how strange and wonderful it was. They’d assume it was noteworthy because Roly had become a member of the biggest boy band of their generation – because he was Roly Punch from Oh Boy! They wouldn’t get that it was because he was lovely, friendly Roly, the most popular boy in school, the one all the girls wanted to be with and all the boys wanted to be around. And because she was who she was, and they weren’t a pair, and he was out of her league. And yet, despite all that, she was the one who got to spend those last moments of their schooldays with him. She was still ridiculously pleased by that.
Closing Time
After leavingthe hotel at two am, a gang of them had gone to an after-party at an apartment owned by somebody’s boyfriend. The Debs was their last hurrah, the severing of the very last connection they all had, and the atmosphere had been equal measures of maudlin and exuberant. They were high on life and cocaine, drunk on cheap alcohol and the endless possibilities that seemed to stretch out before them. The Debs happened in September, so they’d already taken their first tentative steps into their new lives. But until tonight there was still this one last tie linking them together, a rite of passage marked, as tradition dictated, by a bland dinner in a nondescript city centre hotel, and dancing until the small hours in a glorious blur of silk, sweat and sobbing.
