He looks over as Susan emerges from the fridge carrying a slab of cheese, some sliced ham and a tub of olives.
As she lays the stuff down on the breakfast bar, she makes a face at him, half apologetically, and says, ‘Starving.’
Mark looks at his watch. He clicks his tongue. ‘I have to go in a few minutes,’ he says, ‘but I’ll leave you a key and the alarm code.’
Susan looks a little surprised. ‘A key? Wow. But… I see you’ve already chosen the curtains.’
Mark snorts at this. He met Susan on a skiing trip last winter, and a few nights ago they bumped into each other again in town.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I went ahead. I didn’t think you’d mind.’
‘No, go on. Jesus. They’re fab.’
She tears a slice of ham in two and puts one of the pieces into her mouth.
‘How do you like your coffee?’ he says.
‘Strong. Black.’
Ten minutes later, getting into his car, Mark glances over his shoulder at the house. It’s a weird, unfamiliar feeling to be leaving someone behind like this, inside the house.
He pulls out onto Glanmore Road.
It isn’t a bad feeling.
He reaches down, flicks on the radio and tunes it to Morning Ireland.
Actually, it’s a nice feeling.
But Mark doesn’t want to dwell on that, because feelings like these – he knows from experience – tend not to last.
2
Gina opens her eyes.
She rolls over in the bed, onto her back, and stares up at the ceiling.
Something is bothering her. It’s not just her nephew, that’s a given. It’s something else, a separate strain of anxiety.
She looks at the clock on her bedside table: 8.45 a.m.
She got home at around three. Yvonne and Michelle had taken charge of things, so there wasn’t much point in her sticking around any longer. Besides, she had to get home and change.
She called a taxi at 2.30.
Her mind freezes for a second. Then she remembers what’s bothering her.
Noel.
He’d told her outside the house that he had to go and meet someone and would be gone thirty minutes, forty-five at the most, but by the time Gina was leaving nearly three hours later he still hadn’t shown up. Yvonne tried him on his mobile a couple of times, but got through to his voicemail. Catherine really seemed to need Noel and kept asking, in between sobs, where he was, so instead of anyone getting worried about the fact that he hadn’t come back, they got increasingly annoyed about it. At one point, out in the kitchen, Gina found herself defending him.
‘Look, he had some business thing in town. He’s -’
‘Oh don’t give me business,’ Michelle said, spitting the word out, ‘I’m sick of hearing about business. Everything has to stop for business.’ She had tears in her eyes. ‘It’s the middle of the fucking night for God’s sake…’
Gina slides off the bed and walks over to the en suite bathroom in the corner.
Maybe Michelle was right, but the question remains… where did Noel get to?
Standing under the jet of hot water, Gina wonders if he turned up later, or at all. She’ll call Catherine’s in a few minutes and find out – after she gets dressed and puts on some coffee.
Though on reflection, these are serious commitments to being awake – clothes, coffee, a phone call – and she’s not quite sure she’s ready for them yet. She lingers in the shower, still a little drowsy – turning slowly, arching her back, stretching. Not that there’s any plausible route back to sleep at this stage. She’s awake, and the new day is already in full swing. A few moments earlier, through the open window in her bedroom, she could hear traffic rumbling and the general din of the streets. In fact, her last hour of sleep, with its busy parade of dreams – by turns scrappy and full-blown, lucid and phantasmagoric – had probably been moulded to some degree by this soundscape of the city coming alive six floors below her.
She is normally out of bed by seven, when the process is just beginning – having breakfast, listening to Newstalk, rallying her senses. But as she turns the water off now, steps out of the shower and reaches over to the radiator for her towel, Gina is struck by how abnormal this particular day, even before she’s left the apartment or spoken to anyone, is shaping up to be.
She dries herself, standing at the washbasin. The mirror is steamed over, her reflection a grey blur. She lets her towel drop to the floor. Then, as she takes a moisturiser and some cotton discs from the narrow glass shelf above the washbasin, the reality of what has happened hits her again – her nephew’s life cut brutally short, her sister’s life rendered permanently miserable. With Catherine’s anguished face in her mind’s eye, Gina stands there for up to a minute, staring into the blur.
Out in the kitchen a while later, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, she packs the Gaggia, switches it on and then gets her phone from where she left it the night before – on the desk in the corner, beside her computer. She calls Catherine’s. When Yvonne answers, she asks straightaway how Catherine is and can’t imagine any other answer than the one she gets. She then asks if Noel ever showed up.
‘No, he didn’t, and we’re starting to get worried.’
‘Worried?’
‘Jenny phoned about an hour ago. He never went home, and she can’t reach him on his mobile. It isn’t like him, she said.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘She’s actually freaking out.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘When you spoke to him outside the house, did he tell you where he was going?’
‘No, he just said town.’ They went over this last night, more than once. ‘He said he was meeting someone. He didn’t say who.’
Gina wants to articulate something here, but she can’t bring herself to do it. What she wants to say is either too ridiculous or too scary.
Yvonne, who quit smoking a couple of years ago, pulls audibly on a cigarette.
‘What about his office?’ Gina says.
‘Jenny was going to call them. She said she’d call me back if she heard anything. I thought you might be her.’
‘OK, look,’ Gina says, detecting a slight impatience here, ‘I’d better get off, but call me back, will you, if you hear anything? Or text me.’
‘Yeah.’
Gina goes over to the coffee machine. She pulls down a cup and puts it in position. She presses a button and waits for the coffee to trickle out. But when it’s ready, she doesn’t move. She stands there, staring at the cup, and all of a sudden, in the emptiness, in the silence, her eyes well up. She steps back and leans against the counter. She puts a hand up to her chest and takes a few deep breaths.
It was hard watching Catherine like that last night. It was hard watching Yvonne and Michelle coping with her, and in such different ways. It was hard not having Noel around to provide some kind of ballast. It was all hard, every aspect of it, every passing second. What is hard about now, though, is almost worse, this creeping sense of dread that it’s not over yet, that something else is going to happen, or maybe even has happened.
Gina wipes her tears away and rubs her eyes. She reaches over to the coffee machine, takes the small cup and looks into it. She swirls the coffee around for a moment and then knocks it back in one go.
She looks at her watch: 9.25.
She picks the phone up again. She calls Siobhan at the office and says she mightn’t be coming in today, but Siobhan reminds her that she has an eleven o’clock meeting with Tom Maloney.
Gina rolls her eyes.
Most VC-fuelled start-ups have independent boards of directors. Typically, these will include one or two industry experts, people who can keep an eye on things, give advice and occasionally even get some traction for the company’s product. Tom Maloney, the CIO of a financial consultancy firm, is one of these. He’s not exactly what you’d call interfering, but he likes to be briefed on a regular basis. Gina meets him now and again for coffee and feeds him a line of bullshit about how things are going.