Someone Like You

After a couple of photos of the girls and Ray, who looked healthy and tanned, there was Fliss.

‘That was the day we took the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard,’ Mel said wistfully as she passed the photo along to her mother.

Leonie stared in shock. Instead of the young, gorgeous girl she’d imagined, Fliss was at least her own age. But there the similarity ended. As tall as Ray, she was slim with dark, boyishly cut hair and the sort of beautiful unlined face that made Leonie wonder when Revlon would be signing her up for a moisturizer advertisement for stunning women over forty. She wore faded jeans on endless legs and a navy polo shirt tucked in at the waistband. In every picture, she was smiling, whether she was hugging Ray or laughing with Mel and the notoriously camera-shy Abby. Even Danny had been coerced into the photos and had posed, long hair windswept, on the ferry beside Fliss.

‘She’s lovely and she’s very clever, you know. She’s a lawyer in Daddy’s firm,’ Mel prattled on, unaware that Leonie was passing the photos along to Claire with the frozen movements of a robot. ‘She has the most wonderful clothes. Daddy teases her for being voted Best Dressed Lawyer in the firm two years in a row!’

Leonie knew she’d never be voted best dressed anything, not unless outsized silk shirts and all-encompassing voluminous skirts suddenly became haute couture.

‘The most incredible thing is she practically never wears make-up,’ Mel added in awe, knocking the final nail into her mother’s coffin. ‘Mascara and a little gloss, that’s all. Although she gets her nails done. Everyone does in America.’

Leonie thought of her own pancake-plastered face and the long minutes she spent applying her goodies every morning. She wouldn’t leave the house without lipliner, kohl and blusher, never mind just a bit of gloss and mascara.

The pride in her daughter’s voice when she talked about this elegant, glamorous stepmother-to-be made her wonder what Mel really thought of her. Had Mel longed to have a mother just like Fliss, instead of a faux-jolly one who flirted outrageously and laughed loudly at even the most unfunny jokes in order to cover up her insecurities? Painfully, she saw herself through Melanie’s eyes: a big fat woman who tried to hide her bulk with ludicrous flowing clothes and tried to make herself interesting with make-up.

‘Time for Coronation Street,’ announced Claire loudly. ‘You’ll have to show me the rest of your pictures tomorrow, Mel – I can’t miss Coro. Now, get out to the kitchen and make us a pot of tea. I’m an old woman and I need sustenance. Biscuits would be nice too.’

Mel responded to her grandmother’s voice with total obedience. It was Claire’s manner that did it, Leonie thought, grateful for the interruption. If Leonie had asked for tea, Mel would have moaned, ‘Let Abby do it. She’s out there.’

As it was, she collected up her photos and went out to make tea, humming happily to herself.

‘Change the channel, Daniel,’ ordered Claire imperiously.

He did and the strains of the soap’s theme tune filled the room. Claire patted her daughter’s knee in a gesture of solidarity. Leonie knew her mother would never speak about Ray’s new love unless asked for her opinion, but she would be aware just how raw Leonie felt, simply because she knew her so well.

They sat through two hours of television before Claire took her leave. ‘I’ve got four bridesmaids’ dresses to make this week, so I need an early start,’ she said as she collected her keys from the pottery bowl in the hall. The girls appeared from their room to kiss their grandmother goodbye; Danny roared ‘bye’ from the kitchen where he was making a crisp-and-cheese sandwich for himself.

Claire hugged her daughter last of all: a tight, comforting hug. ‘Phone me tomorrow if you need to chat,’ was all she said, a coded message that meant: If you want to sob down the phone about Ray and Fliss.

After she was gone, Leonie pottered about, tidying up the sitting room and starting on the disaster area that was the kitchen. Mel had left the photos on the coffee table in the sitting room and they drew Leonie like a magnet. She wanted to look at them again, to see how beautiful Fliss was, how slim, how perfect.

Like a dieter drawn inexorably to the last KitKat nestling at the back of the cupboard, she couldn’t resist looking. Danny was engrossed in some cop show and wouldn’t notice, she hoped. Quietly, she snatched the photos and brought them into her bedroom. Penny followed her loyally and lay down on the bed with her as she flicked through the envelopes feeling guilty.

Afraid Mel would somehow know which order the photos were in, Leonie carefully went through them so as not to mix them up. There were loads more of Fliss, more than Mel had shown them.

In one, they were obviously all at dinner in some swanky restaurant. Mel was sitting beside Fliss wearing what looked like a very adult sparkly top that Leonie didn’t recognize. Abby looked her normal self in a white shirt, but Ray was utterly transformed. He looked as sparkling as Mel’s top. The next photo was a close-up of Ray and Fliss, and his face was animated in a way Leonie never remembered it being. He looked utterly content. He’d never looked that way with her, Leonie reflected sadly.

She flicked through the rest of the pictures, feeling more dispirited than ever. After a while, she put them back in the envelopes and stuck them in the kitchen in the old wicker basket on the table where she kept the bills and letters. That way, if Mel had been looking for them, Leonie could say she’d put them in the basket for safekeeping.

In the girls’ room, Abby was in bed reading Pride and Prejudice, her favourite book, while Mel was at the dressing table painstakingly cleansing her face with cold cream.

This was a new routine, Leonie realized. Normally, Mel didn’t bother with any cleansing ritual; she blithely imagined that acne was for other, less naturally pretty girls and never so much as wiped off the mascara she wasn’t supposed to wear. Now, she was industriously patting her face with cotton wool pads as if she was a restorer working on a muddy Monet.

Leonie sat down on the edge of Mel’s bed. ‘It’s lovely to have you back,’ she said, wishing she didn’t feel like an intruder in their bedroom after a mere three weeks’ absence.

‘Yeah,’ muttered Mel. ‘Wish we weren’t going back to school though. I hate school. I wish it was January.’

Unusually, Abby wasn’t in a mood to talk. She often followed her mother into bed, sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed, stroking Penny’s velvety ears and talking nineteen to the dozen until they realized it was half eleven and gasped at the thought that they had to get up at seven. Tonight, she smiled a suspiciously thin smile at Leonie and went back to her book, obviously not wanting to be drawn into any conversation. Maybe she, too, was missing the perfect Fliss, Leonie thought sadly.

Feeling in the way and miserable, she retreated. She turned off the hall light, locked the back door after Penny had been outside for her ablutions, and warned Danny not to have the TV on too loudly. Then she went to bed.

She rarely switched on her clock radio at night but tonight she felt lonely, so she flicked the switch. A late-night discussion show was on and the subject matter was dating agencies.

‘Where would ya find a fella in the back of beyond without some help?’ demanded one woman, fighting back against a male caller who felt that paying for introductions was the last resort of the hopeless.

‘I bet you look like a complete old cow,’ the male caller interrupted smugly, pointing out that he was married with four kids.

‘And I bet your wife is screwing around on ya, ya old curmudgeon,’ retorted the woman.

The radio host intervened, sensing the argument was going to hit the four-letter-word level. ‘We’ll be back after the news,’ he said smoothly, ‘for an interview with a couple who found true love in the personal ads.’

Leonie was hooked. An hour later, she turned the radio and her light off and lay in bed in darkness. She wasn’t alone after all. There were lots of people who felt lonely and didn’t know where to go to meet new partners, people who felt too old for the twenty-something pub scene and too young for tea dances. The woman on the radio had been like Leonie: a lonely woman who couldn’t imagine falling in love ever again. Two adverts in her local Belfast paper later, she was dating a lovely man. Now they were getting married and were going to be the subject of a documentary about finding love in unusual ways. Why shouldn’t I try that too, Leonie asked herself. If she had a man, she wouldn’t feel depressed about Ray and Fliss, or about how Mel seemed bored to be home, or about how fat she was getting, or anything.

She curled her toes up under the duvet at the thought of her exciting plan: she’d take out a personal ad or join a dating agency. Her mission, should she choose to accept it, was to find a man. That was it, she had to have one. And then she’d feel better about herself. Wouldn’t she?

‘What does GSOH mean?’ Leonie asked, staring at her horoscope in the tiny kitchen during the ten minutes they tried to snatch each day between morning rounds and the beginning of surgery.

Angie, the practice’s only female vet, looked up from the crossword she did effortlessly each morning in seven minutes flat. ‘Good sense of humour,’ she replied in her crisp Australian accent. Clear grey eyes scrutinized her colleague. ‘Why?’

‘Nothing.’

A moment passed.

‘You thinking of personal ads?’ Angie asked.

Leonie flushed and grinned. It was always a mistake to bullshit Angie, who was one of the smartest women she knew. ‘Yes. Desperate, isn’t it? I’m never going to meet a man round here, am I?’

‘Not unless you want to run off with the postman – who does fancy you, in my opinion. He takes a long time delivering the mail when you answer the door.’

‘You’re a cow, Angie. He’s practically at retiring age. And if he’s the best I can do, I may as well give up. It drives me mad, you know. People think if you work in a vet practice the place is a throbbing hotbed of lust with hormones all over the place because we deal with animals. I don’t see why,’ Leonie said plaintively. ‘What’s so sexy about staring at Tim’s face while he operates on some cat’s anal glands?’

‘It’s the old doctors and nurses thing,’ Angie remarked sagely. ‘Romantic novels are full of doctors and nurses having it off in between quadruple bypasses. It’s fictional fantasy, but everyone thinks it must be the same here. It’s the white coat that does it. Women want to be bonked senseless by a guy in a white coat because he’s in charge and they can indulge their “I couldn’t help it, m’lud, he made me do it” fantasy.’

‘Fantasy’s all very well, but the reality is very different,’ Leonie said, giving up on her horoscope because Virgos were going to have a bad day and fight with everyone. ‘Tim’s happily married, Raoul is engaged and, unless we both turn gay, you’re out of bounds. Maybe if Raoul went back to South America, we could hire a new hunky young vet and our eyes would lock over the operating table when we were neutering a ginger tom.’ She sighed at the thought. ‘Then again, he’d want to be deranged to fall for a divorced mother of three, wouldn’t he? An insolvent mother of three, at that. I’m broke again, Angie, my overdraft is in the stratosphere and Mel is whingeing on about new clothes…’

‘Personal ads are a great idea,’ Angie interrupted before Leonie got carried away on misery. ‘Loads of people use them these days and you’re not going to meet the man of your dreams in this town, now, are you? What would you say in your ad?’

Leonie extracted a piece of folded-up newsprint from her pocket. ‘I got this from the Guardian in the surgery waiting room. It’s got pages of ads. “Soulmates” they call them. I just don’t understand what they all mean. I read it for ages earlier and it’s like reading Mongolian. Listen to this: “Zany Slim Blonde F, GSOH, n/s WLTM creative M, preferably TDH for loving r/ship. Ldn.”’

Angie translated: ‘Zany blonde female with a good sense of humour, non-smoker, would like to meet a creative male, preferably tall, dark and handsome for a loving relationship. Based in London.’

‘Ah, gotcha.’ Leonie scanned the rest of the ads. ‘The only problem is that all these women are slim and all the men want slim women. See: “seeks slim, attractive woman…” She could be an axe-murderer, but as long as she’s slim, it’s OK.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Angie, who was tall, attractive in a sporty way and very, very slim.

‘It’s true. Look at them.’

Together, they scanned the list. The men, who described themselves as anything from ‘cuddly’ (‘That means fat,’ Angie pointed out), to ‘Not easy to describe in four to five lines’ (‘Short, fat and often mistaken for a pot-bellied pig,’ said Angie).

They giggled over some of the descriptions: the surgical walker who wanted a fun and adventurous companion; and Sir Lancelot who was seeking his Guinevere.

‘Would a wimple and chastity belt be necessary?’ Angie mused.

‘Listen to this: “Shy male, 35, virgin, seeks similar for relationship.” How could you be a virgin at thirty-five? That is weird.’

‘Not if he’s religious,’ Angie countered.

‘Oh yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. What does “seeks for possible relationship” mean?’ Leonie asked, bemused.

‘That he wants to shag you senseless after a meal where you went Dutch and then he never wants to see you again,’ Angie said knowledgeably. ‘Happened to a friend of mine in Sydney. She’s a veteran of the personals, but even she got badly burned once. He said he was a gorgeous doctor and he wasn’t lying, so she forgot her plan to play hard to get and they did it on the first date. Champagne, chocolate body-paint, Polaroid camera, the lot. She never set eyes on him again. Bastard.’

Leonie shuddered at the thought of someone with Polaroid photos of her naked self. She read some more: ‘ “Seeks classy blonde for fun and games.” This is mad stuff. Why doesn’t he just hire a hooker?’

‘These are hip and trendy ads. You want a nice country ad in a country paper.’

‘You sure?’

‘Positive. Someone with a cosy hearth who has several animals, pots of money and who looks good in wellington boots.’

‘Wicklow is full of blokes like that,’ Leonie dead-panned. ‘The surgery is probably jammed with a consignment as we speak, all bearing red roses at the news that I’m looking for lurve. Oh yes, and a sick sheep they need looked at. Come on, we’d better get to work.’

They discussed the personal ads some more that morning as Angie whizzed through spaying four cats, two dogs and descaling the teeth on a very old beagle.

Leonie assisted her, shaving the animals’ bellies and disinfecting them before Angie got to work. It was also her job to monitor breathing and colour. Older animals were often put on oxygen during operations. Younger ones tended to do well without it, but Leonie kept an eye on their colour to make sure they were getting enough oxygen. At the first sign of a tongue going grey, she’d give them pure oxygen.

‘Be honest in your advert,’ Angie advised, delicately sewing up a tabby kitten’s soft beige belly. ‘Say “voluptuous”, because you are and you want to make sure whoever wants to meet you knows that. You don’t want to end up with some bloke whose aim in life is to make you lose a stone.’

‘It’s nice to have at least one friend who’s honest with me,’ Leonie said, keeping an eye on the kitten’s breathing. ‘If I asked anyone else, they’d lie through their teeth and tell me I’m slim, really. My mother is always telling me I’m beautiful the way I am and not to think about dieting, which is bullshit.’

‘Your mother is a wonderful woman and no, it’s not bullshit. Half the women in the country are trying to kill themselves dieting. It’s a waste of time – you know it. Most people who lose weight put it right back on again eventually.’

‘Tell me about it!’ Leonie groaned, feeling the waistband of her blue uniform biting into her flesh. ‘If I was to put an advert in the paper, what would I say?’

‘Voluptuous, sensual…’ began Angie.

‘Get out of here!’ shrieked Leonie, secretly pleased. ‘Sensual! You can’t say that.’

‘Why not?’ Angie finished the kitten. She gave her a shot of antibiotics and brought her back to her cage.

She returned with a Yorkshire terrier for spaying and took up the conversation as if she’d never been away. ‘You are, in every sense of the word. Sensual isn’t just to do with sex, you know. It also means someone who enjoys using their senses, and you do.’

‘Yeah but saying “sensual” in an advert in the Wicklow Times will result in a rush of callers thinking I’m looking for an entirely different sort of man friend, the sort who leaves the money on the mantelpiece.’

‘OK then, how about “Blue-eyed blonde, voluptuous, er…”’

‘…loves children.’

‘That might put him off,’ Angie pointed out, ‘ ’cos he’ll think you’re on the hunt for a sperm donor rather than a man.’

‘Well, I’ve got to mention the children.’

‘“Loves children and animals”?’ Angie suggested.

‘That’s it.’

Angie really began to get into the swing of things. She wanted to keep discussing adverts. But Leonie didn’t want everyone in the practice to know about her personal life. Louise, one of the other nurses, kept going into the operating room to talk to Angie and Leonie didn’t want her to hear.

‘We’ll talk about it later,’ she hissed to Angie.

Operations over, Leonie went back to cleaning out the animals’ cages. As a nurse, she worked mainly at the back of the practice where two walls were lined with animal cages for their patients. At any one time, there could be forty animals looking mournfully out at the nurses and vets as they waited for operations or recovered from them. Today, there were several animals scheduled for spaying in the afternoon and three in for blood tests to try and figure out what was wrong with them.

Bubble, a pretty white cat with ragged ears, was vomiting constantly and needed a whole range of tests including liver and kidney function. Bubble had already been through the wars vet-wise. White cats were prone to skin cancers on the tips of their ears and Bubble had already had three operations. A seasoned surgery cat, she was very clever at escaping when her cage was opened, so Leonie had put an ESCAPE ARTIST sign over her cage. ‘Escape artist’ was better than ‘wild’, which was the sign they put over feral cats people occasionally brought in. These practically wild cats often tested positive for the feline version of HIV, and more often than not were put to sleep. Leonie had received many scars from being scratched by these poor, unloved creatures.

Below Bubble was Lester, a yellow ferret who was looking for a home. Lester was a bit of an escape artist himself and had managed to wriggle out of Louise’s arms earlier and had hidden in the medicine cupboard for ten minutes before he could be recaptured. Leonie carefully took Lester out and tidied his cage. Putting him back with a cuddly toy, she watched him play with it, biting its neck frenziedly. She’d thought of giving Lester a home herself because she could never bear to see animals unloved. Ferrets could bite but, so far, Lester hadn’t hurt anyone. Watching him kill the teddy, she reconsidered.

How would Lester describe himself for a personal ad?

Sleek, friendly male with an interest in the life of Houdini seeks loving home with someone who doesn’t mind being nibbled. Prospective females must enjoy romping in the garden and appreciate strong, masculine scent.

Leonie grinned to herself. Put that way, Lester sounded irresistible. She must remember to read between the lines of the adverts. Otherwise, God alone knew what would happen.

CHAPTER TEN

The one drawback about being one of the three members of staff who could work the switchboard was that you inevitably had to take over when the receptionist wasn’t available. And Carolyn, the girl who’d been working as the Dwyer, Dwyer & James receptionist for the past two weeks, was never available. Hannah was already regretting hiring her. Carolyn had been off sick once the previous week and today, she’d rung in at ten to nine claiming to have the flu.

‘Gillian, can you do reception today?’ Hannah had asked Gillian, who was still deeply resentful of the fact that Hannah had been brought in as office manager. Gillian had loved knowing where all the agents were and phoning them to check if they were all right. It gave her power over them.

‘I can until lunch,’ Gillian had snapped. ‘I’m on a half-day today.’

Which meant that Hannah didn’t have a chance to get on with her own work and had to spend the afternoon at the front desk, fielding calls in between trying to track down a consignment of office supplies which had gone missing.

Naturally, as soon as anybody walked in, the phones went mad. The woman standing at the reception desk didn’t look impressed by the fact that Hannah had had to answer four calls before dealing with her. The woman was quivering with impatience, but Hannah waited until she could see the red light on her switchboard go off, indicating that Donna Nelson was off the phone.

‘Donna, call for you on line one: a Mr McElhinney about the property in York Road.’

‘Thanks, Hannah.’

Swivelling in her new, very comfortable chair, Hannah finally faced the anxious-looking young woman in front of her reception desk. It was a low desk: it had to be, Hannah had explained to David James when he’d discussed refitting the office with her. ‘People need to be able to see you, not feel they’re queueing up at the post office.’

‘I do apologize for all the interruptions,’ she said in a conciliatory tone, ‘it’s been terribly busy today. Now, how can I help you?’

‘Number 73 Shandown Terrace, is it gone yet?’ the woman said, voice rising with each word, pale freckled face distraught. ‘We only realized it was for sale this instant. We’ve always loved that road and we so wanted to live there. Don’t tell me it’s sold.’

‘Hold on one moment,’ Hannah said soothingly. She scanned through her computer files and found the house. Steve Shaw, the agency’s obnoxious young agent, was handling the sale. He’d brought two people to view it but nobody had put in an offer.

‘Needs twenty thou spent on it before rats would live in it!’ Steve had snorted when he came back from his first visit to the property.

‘I’ve good news,’ Hannah said, ‘it’s still on the market. Would you like to speak to the agent who’s handling it?’

A few minutes later, Steve was sitting on the reception area’s oatmeal couch with the woman – sitting far too close to her, in Hannah’s opinion. That was Steve’s technique for selling property – invading women’s personal space and flirting with them as if they were the most beautiful creatures he’d ever set eyes on.

He’d tried it on with Hannah the moment he’d met her. Just back from his honeymoon and with a mocha Bahamian tan, he thought he was gorgeous. He thought she was gorgeous too and kept calling her that.

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