24

  4.42 pm: Finishing a much-needed glass of wine and two slices of toast, Jenny went upstairs to redo her make-up. After all the drama and shouting and fighting, her smudged eyes looked like two lumps of coal on a snowman. She recalled what the bearded stranger had said – ‘By nightfall today, I will fucking destroy you.’

  It’s a weird coincidence. But there’s no magic spell being woven. Losing out on Otto’s deal and then Joan’s attempt to mention the unmentionable… they’re all just unconnected elements in a particularly shitty day. They have to be, because that creep is not a seer. And how could he be influencing things? How could someone like him influence anything? Anyway, today can only get better – right?

  The master en suite was effectively Shane’s bathroom. The whole area smelled of clean man. There was a giant container of shampoo on the window shelf. The fact that Shane kept his toiletries outside the cabinet was a bachelor crease she’d failed to iron out over the last fifteen years; along with his refusal to replace the toilet roll if there was as much as a single final sheet left on it.

  Looking into the mirror, she hurriedly, but expertly, put her face on. It seemed impossible to think that in a year, someone else would be using these rooms; that someone else would be gazing into this glass.

  The house is lost. Shane is too close to finding out the truth. Her father had maintained that the key to power was having the guts to choose wisely between two equally unpleasant options. Let Shane get the money back and I’ll find out what Mum is up to. Then I’ll stop her. If I don’t, then I’ll lose the only thing that ever really counted – my husband.

  ‘There you go,’ she muttered to the panoptic mirrors. Three layers of mascara; the first to darken, the second to condense and the last one for drama. She also applied a new lipstick, an unorthodox daytime choice – red. Jenny considered herself to have a thick skin – except with her mother. One could shine a torch through it, then. She needed these cosmetic shields.

  Shane thought her mother had narcissistic personality disorder. He’d printed out and given Jenny NPD-related information from the internet, and Vera certainly did tick most of the boxes on the identifying questionnaire: eighteen out of twenty, when only twelve positive answers were required to comfortably fit the diagnosis.

  But Jenny refused to acknowledge the high probability that Shane was correct. Vera hadn’t turned on her until she was eighteen. When Jenny thought of her life before that, she just remembered contentment, serenity, certainty that the best would always be available to her and that her future was gold-plated and guaranteed. So much so, that when Shane asked about her experiences growing up, she would feel obliged to trawl through childhood memories for instances that would satisfy him; scraps of suffering, that’s what he wanted. The truth was – they barely existed.

  Sure, she was hurt that Vera clearly favoured first Hugh and then Joan over her. But that also meant that she’d been able to do whatever she wanted. just as long as she caused no unnecessary drama that would force her mother to have to focus her attention away from herself and onto her youngest child. In fact, Jenny had liked Vera’s spiky humour, her endless stream of gossip. Had they not been related, she’d still have liked her. If Vera was a fully blown narcissist, then all those years leading up to her eighteenth year had been based on nothing real.

  Don’t fuck with my happy memories. People only have so many of those.

  Grabbing the car keys, she remembered that the Land Rover was a write-off and so left the house to walk to her mother’s, which was just ten minutes away in St Catherine’s Hill; an even more exclusive neighbourhood than Clareville.

  As Jenny walked along the pavement, she played a message from Detective Murray. ‘Sorry, missed your call earlier. I’m actually on my way down to Deirdre’s burial. You learn more about a person from the forty-five minutes you spend at their funeral than the entire day you spend at their wedding. If you can tell your husband what I’m up to, I’d appreciate it. He seems to doubt my dedication. I’ll try you again tomorrow. Cheers.’

  Jenny disconnected and once more thought of the bearded stranger’s threat. Will tomorrow be too late? There were just four hours till sundown.

  As Jenny closed in on her mother’s road, she proceeded along a sliding scale of house prices – expensive to exorbitant to prohibitive – as the terraced Georgians became detached Victorians which then became modern architect-designed homes, surrounded by landscaped gardens, which were indisputably the prized properties of the elite of Dublin’s privileged class. These homes included treats such as cinema rooms, balcony Jacuzzis, indoor heated swimming pools – all of which had probably seemed like a good idea when the architect, the owners and the developer did all that coke together.

  Stepping into a corner shop to buy a very specific packet of mints, the elderly man behind the counter said, ‘Oh, hallo. You’re one of the Donaldson girls.’

  Instinctively, she beamed the way she’d been trained, and said, ‘Yes. I’m Jennifer.’

  ‘You’re both so like your mother. Same eyes. Same faces. But you’re blonde. Haven’t seen your mother in a few days. Wonderful lady. So elegant and yet always has time and a quick word for everyone.’

  ‘She’ll be delighted to hear that.’

  ‘She’ll think I’m the right ladies’ man now. And you two girls – you’re a tribute to her. You both look so well and are so friendly. Anyway, tell Vera that Jim was asking for her.’

  ‘Will do. Bye.’

  Jenny left the shop, thinking of Hugh and of how he was never, ever, mentioned by anyone in passing.

  She turned onto her childhood street; a road most taxi drivers didn’t know existed. When people became aware of it, they seemed amazed that it was there – as if it only existed every second Wednesday. Jenny noticed how so little hurrying was going on. Time actually expanded here. It was like leaving the city and returning to a town she’d grown up in. Everything was connected in small towns. That was why interesting people wanted to leave them as soon as possible. Everything reminded them of the stupid shit they did, or the shit that was done to them.

  As she walked towards her family home, the fresh chlorine bouquet of a nearby pool carried on the breeze. There were two vans parked before the first house – a three-storey, red-brick restored mansion. About six people were unloading a sound system and food, as caterers and the event manager waited for the marquee to be erected in the garden.

  Jenny remembered her own birthday parties. They had always been lavish affairs with the best and the most of everything. Everyone wanted to come to them. Hugh and Joan had had big parties, too.

  Up ahead, her family house loomed into view behind a six-foot-tall wall. It was certainly a happy looking home. There was a swing chair on the upper balcony and birds sang in the background. Keying in the security code – Vera’s birthday – the pedestrian entry gate clicked open next to the huge, solid, ‘fuck-off’ car gates.

  As Jenny strolled up the wide gravelled driveway, which split the field-sized landscaped sprawl of lawn, she couldn’t help feeling that she was making a serious mistake by coming here. Since her father died, she must have been home no more than three times – all for family emergencies. The last time was two years ago, when Joan found Vera unconscious on the sofa after having a violently negative reaction to her flu vaccine. Each of those visits had been short, and all had ended in screaming matches between Jenny and Joan.

  As the front door drew ever closer, she inhaled deeply. Jenny’s anxiety was gruelling. Waiting, waiting, waiting for disaster. Yet disaster, by its very nature, was the one thing that you could not expect. Therefore, she must expect everything.

  Jenny pressed the doorbell. Its ding-dong was soft and polite. Be prepared – she gaslights. She lies. She denies. She knows that chronology is sanity.

  25

  5.20 pm: Otto’s shirt was air force blue, which clashed with his red tie. The colours soothed him, and he’d worn them because he had to put in an appearance at a reception given by an innovative Dutch bank. Otto liked to get his nose into the trough for first dibs.

  Most of the suits there had been continental blow-ins, soaking up the Dublin-4-ness of D4. Those who had buttonholed him talked small and gestured big, because they knew exactly how important Otto was. If people on the outside of his social circle were not jealous of those on the inside, then he was hanging with the wrong people. Otto had listened magnanimously, while thinking, if you and I were the same, then you wouldn’t need to spend ten minutes sucking up to me. We would already know each other. We would probably have worked together.

  After twenty minutes, Otto exited the stilted atmosphere of the hotel lobby with the relief of walking out of a bad play. The bank’s complimentary limo took him home.

  His house was an architectural marvel. Situated on a quiet headland on Dublin Bay, near the city centre and surrounded by landscaped gardens, it was a five-bedroomed, two-storey, windowed concrete bunker. But inside, the colours were warm and the lighting and space, enticing. The stone walls were painted a Moroccan red hue and throughout the house the Egyptian antique lamps exuded poetry.

  All of it was down to Jenny, who had decorated every room. Her expertise had been much appreciated, as the high end fine-art-and-décor market was like the Wild West, but politer. Jenny had explained that the value of all this stuff was simply what people paid for it – that nobody could say what the real value of a work of art was; that price was just symbolic. ‘Like Bitcoin,’ Jenny had elucidated, and immediately, Otto had finally understood.

  She’d also installed a UX system – tech speak for user experience – that bypassed all the manual switches so that he could simply clap his hands or give a voice command for the lights and fun stuff to turn on and off. But Otto had never activated it, even though it had cost a fortune. He’d finally reached the age where all new technological advances were unwelcome.

  Since leaving home, he’d never lived with a girlfriend or anyone else. Despite the affluence, space and luxuries, there were many signs of the bachelor life. Styrofoam shells crowned the overflowing kitchen bin, and the double sink was stacked with dirty cutlery – just two days since the cleaner had been in.

  On the second floor, Otto entered his bedroom and closed the door behind him, gently, as if the noise would spill his secret thoughts out into the empty house. The bedroom had lots of impressive equipment: a fifty-inch smart TV, home cinema system and piles of history and economics books. Framed photographs adorned the side tables – family snaps.

  Otto, the progeny of talented and wealthy parentage, was proud of his pedigree – but in a secretive way, because he realised that people prefer the underdog. The underdog makes them believe that they could’ve done better if they had just had the chance.

  Another reason he kept historical nuggets from the ‘my story’ section of company portfolios, was that the Third Reich cast a lengthy shadow, almost a century long, over Otto’s family. His father, Andreas Lubber, was an unspectacular millionaire bohemian playboy with a large stake in Jutland Petroleum Technologies. The company had been founded by Otto’s great-grandfather, who’d made his fortune supplying the Third Reich with compressed propellant nitrogen for their Panzer columns. He had also killed Russians with his sniper rifle across the Red Steppes. ‘Not enough,’ he’d always said.

  An only child, Otto was born to parents intent on raising him a perfect little factualist. Au pairs had nursed him through his formative years in Austria and, when he was eight, they moved into a superb maisonette in the Île de la Cité in Paris. Besides the race riots and their accompanying Parisian car barbecues, his most vivid memory was hiding outside the kitchen, watching his father fuck a stunning student from the Sorbonne over the kitchen table, her jeans lowered to her knees. On the opposite side of the table, Otto’s beautiful mother inhaled a Lucky Strike and blew a cloud of smoke into the student’s groaning face. After his father collapsed onto the girl’s back, little Otto tiptoed back to his bedroom which faced the gloomy winter sky behind Notre Dame. From that moment, his favourite fact about the world was that, out there somewhere, it was always summer for someone.

  Otto was then educated across the US, as his parents hopscotched about American cities on their great adventure. He made no friends, since when he was not being home-schooled by tutors, he was passing through different classrooms; he was a quiet teenager who seemed to spend his whole adolescence as a sleepwalker that his parents were unable to shake awake. By fourteen, he was on a pack of cigarettes a day – just for something to do.

  At seventeen, he entered the Erasmus University of Rotterdam to study economics: a degree, according to his father, which would ensure he would never be pigeonholed. After his masters, he opted out of academia for three years, instead cutting his teeth on the board of Jutland Petroleum Technologies and deeply impressing his uncles – who had assumed he would be as frivolous as his father. Then, on his mother’s recommendation, Otto once more took up the mantle of the scholar to begin his PhD, with the intention of killing three more years at university – this time in Dublin. Part of his remit was to supervise undergraduate theses and give the odd class.

  But after just one year, a shocking event occurred that made him abandon Ireland for a mews house in London’s Camden Town. There, he hid out from his family, ashamed of the terrible thing that had happened in Dublin, ashamed of abandoning his PhD, ashamed of how he had amounted to nothing much.

  Otto, alone in London, spent hours every day weeping, convinced that the world had used him badly. He would look from his window across Camden Lock towards the packed market, acutely aware that he’d never had any close friends, a real love affair or true ambitions. His life had simply amounted to one cocktail party after another, stints in a few universities and an almost ruinous end to his PhD attempt – one that had almost destroyed his life and someone else’s. Sitting in his room by the canal, Otto had understood just how lonely a human being can make itself, and he wondered how he’d ended up living such an existence. But the answer was too large, too tangled to clarify.

  One day, as Otto watched the barges cruise by, the post arrived behind him with a thud. Otto had always had great faith in the power of letters to transform his existence and, true to form, his father had somehow found him. Without referencing his disappearance, or seeking an explanation, or even hinting at his breakdown, Andreas Lubber asked Otto to steer the UK wing of the clan’s new investment firm, one that was intended to create and manage commercial property bonds for pension funds and banks. The package enclosed a detailed business plan that his uncles had put together.

  After reading the letter, Otto looked up to the London sky and once again considered himself to be an integrated part of a whole. For, suddenly, Otto had a plan. He would turn down the position. In fact, he would tell his father to go fuck himself. Instead, Otto would use his uncles’ business plan, which was really just a portfolio of hungry international connections, to set up the same venture, but in Dublin, and just for himself – which would be easy, as he reckoned Dublin to be just a more manageable London. His family would be initially shocked, but that would pass and be replaced with admiration. For what were the Lubbers, if not ruthless pioneers afraid of no arrows?

  *

  5.25 pm: Standing tall and priestly by his bedroom window, Otto gazed down to his garden. The sun was just low enough to spray everything pink. He poured himself a glass of water. Twenty-four years ago, things had got out of hand, and since then he had been teetotal and Class A-free. It wasn’t for his health. He didn’t work out. He didn’t knock back supplements. He didn’t watch what he ate. He smoked cigars four or five times a week. And Otto slept with actresses and models.

  Like Russian dolls, each new girlfriend seemed to be younger, slimmer and prettier than the last, and they all fucked him like they owed him money. Before, that was why he believed he was happy. However, gradually over the last year he’d come to realise that he wasn’t in fact happy – he was just making do. The source of this realisation was Jenny. She’s still young-ish. I’m middle-aged. She’s still beautiful. I’m past my peak. It’s a match made in heaven. Her currently intermittent presence in his life was something that he’d suddenly wanted to make constant, and permanent.

  Is Shane truly happy? Women can fake an orgasm, but men can fake an entire relationship. I mean, who exactly is Shane? Shane was one of those men that could feel justified in viewing all of the pretty Clareville housewives walking by as potential sexual partners. Yes, he was also smart. Not educated smart – obviously. He had no degree, but he was the type of guy who understood the laws of physics without being able to name a single theory.

  He remembered when Shane had firmly entered his life. Otto the invigilator had spent that morning fetching paper for undergraduates like some type of servant. But then the day got interesting, as he watched a student remove a tissue from a packet and gaze down upon the notes beneath. It was like watching a car wreck happen in slow motion, for this wasn’t any student – this was one of his students. This was, in fact, Otto’s best student.

  The exam was almost over, and Otto didn’t actually want Shane’s future in his hands. He just wanted to go home and nap before heading out to the end-of-year party at Krystal. He was due to join a few young lecturers and the odd sixty-something anti-establishmentarian. They liked to turn up at these things to sniff out the type of ripe, blithe undergraduate flotsam that stood out with their over-analysed feelings and condemnatory sentiments towards everything, but were a bit damaged and fucked well. Shane was now a potential spanner in the works. Ignore him. Just walk on. But his ancestral sense of rigid, systematic order kicked in and his hand landed on Shane’s shoulder.