The Last Week of May: The Number One Bestseller

by Roisin Meaney

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER -- a warm engrossing tale of friendship and new beginnings ... 'Like chatting with a good friend over a cup of tea' Irish Mail on Sunday May O'Callaghan has decided that life's too short and she's decided to throw in the towel in her predictable nine-to-five job. Now what? As May fits into her new life we meet her friend Pam and her husband Jack - but why is Pam terrified to tell Jack that she's pregnant? And then there's Denis and Bernard, May's next-door neighbours, going about their business oblivious to the deadly threat that lurks close by. There's Paddy, who lives on his own yet never seems to be at home. And Paul, three doors up, willing to risk everything for an affair with Carmel, the young teacher who has yet to learn that there's a price to pay for having something that shouldn't be yours. But what May can't figure out is who gave her the beautiful shell necklace and was it really meant for her? On this one particular week, all is about to change for the inhabitants of Kilpatrick and May discovers that while only love can break your heart, only love can put it back together. The Anniversary, Roisin Meaney's sparkling new novel, is now available for pre-order

Release date: May 17, 2007

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 319

Sample

Rain at first in all areas, brightening slowly in the west and spreading eastward as the day progresses. Chances of more heavy showers overnight. Highs of 14 to 16 degrees.

May

A tractor, that’s what it reminded her of. The same irritating, gravelly splutter, ack-acking its way roughly into her sleep. She opened an eye and saw 4:18 on the clock radio. Waste of time, putting a glass of water on his locker every night. He never touched it, preferred to cough her awake some time between midnight and daylight.

She’d learned to ignore it, to put up with being woken at least once every night. It’s like having a baby in the house. The thought leapt out at her before she could smother it, and she felt the familiar lurch of sorrow before she pushed it away and began to think about the week ahead.

Gardening at Paul and Francesca’s this morning, just two doors down, if the rain eased up – she could hear it pattering steadily on the roof. No mowing, that would have to wait for a drier day, but the poppies were finished, they needed to be cut away, and the big flower bed under the bay window could do with weeding, which May always enjoyed, even in the wet. She liked the smell of the damp earth, the lovely pungent robustness of it. And the weeds would come up easier from the softened soil. So satisfying, teasing them out.

A window-cleaning job across town this afternoon, up the road from Marjorie’s house. She might drop by on her way home, take a chance that her old babysitter would be in from work. Marjorie always seemed so happy to have someone to talk to, and eager for any bit of news May brought. Probably because her teenage daughter provided precious little company – any time May met her, Jude was sullen and uncommunicative. Poor Marjorie.

Painting for Carmel Gannon tomorrow, and again on Friday – good to have a new customer. Nice of Pam, May’s home help, to recommend May to her friend.

Lots of work to keep her going. Three years on, May was still amazed at the way things had worked out, once she’d made the decision to quit her job at Dr Taylor’s. Not that she hadn’t enjoyed it there, answering the phone and making appointments, and doing the post and filing, and generally making sure that things ran smoothly in the busy little surgery.

But it was at Dr Taylor’s that she’d met Gerry; it was where it had all begun. And when it was over, after he’d taken everything they’d had together and smashed it to pieces and walked away, after May had picked herself up and somehow survived, she found she couldn’t bear the thought of working there any more.

Her decision hadn’t gone down too well. Dr Taylor didn’t want her to leave, had done his best to persuade her to stay, but May was adamant, and in the end he’d had no choice but to let her go with an extra week’s wages and a very nice set of Galway Crystal wine glasses that his wife had probably picked out.

Of course, May’s father had had plenty to say. ‘You’re giving up a permanent job, just after buying a house? Are you out of your mind? How will you pay for it?’

And, as usual, Aideen was more understanding, but even she had trouble with her daughter’s decision.

‘What if you don’t find another job for a while, May love? How will you make the repayments? We’ll help you out, of course, but …’

‘It’s OK, Ma – honest.’ May smiled. ‘I’ve been living very cheaply for ages, I’ve got loads saved up.’ No need to point out that the savings had been intended for the wedding and honeymoon. No need to bring all that up again. ‘I’ll be fine, really I will. And I’ll get a job in no time, wait and see.’

And May knew well that Aideen saw right through her, saw exactly how terrified May was that it would all go horribly wrong, that she’d have to sell the house and look for someplace else to rent – or even move back home for a while, and put up with Philip’s grumbling again. The thought often kept May awake, in her new bed in her newly painted house.

And then one day, while she was prowling through the jobs section in the Kilpatrick Post, after three letters of application she’d sent off for secretarial jobs had been ignored, she’d read Cleaner wanted, and further down, Gardener required for light gardening, and in the next column, Housepainter needed, and over the page, Window cleaner wanted.

And May had thought, But I can do all those jobs.

She cleaned her own house, didn’t she? Windows and all. So she could clean anyone else’s too. And gardening would certainly be no problem. Since she’d been old enough to grab on to Hilda’s finger, May had toddled along beside her aunt as they explored her spacious back garden, as Hilda had pointed with her free hand and said, ‘That’s called sweet pea, Maisie. Smell it, it’s nice, isn’t it? And see all those little orange ones over there? They’re nasturtiums. They’re very easy to grow, and look how they can climb right over the wall. And see these big tall ones here? They’re lupins. They’re like Rapunzel’s tower, aren’t they?’

May had nodded, and put out a plump baby hand to pat the flowers, and Hilda hadn’t told her not to touch them. And every time Aideen took May to visit Hilda, May would insist on a walk around the garden, until Hilda presented her, on her fifth birthday, with a packet of mixed flower seeds that they sowed together in a long dark blue planter.

It sat on the windowsill in May’s bedroom until the little green shoots were strong enough to be planted out in the strip Philip had dug for them at the bottom of the mossy lawn behind the house. And when the flowers appeared, one by one, May dragged a kitchen chair over the bumpy grass and sat beside them and read to them from her English book, telling them about Ann and Ben and their dog Polly that was always getting into trouble. No, Polly, no, she’d read. Bad dog, Polly.

And every so often, she’d glance up at the flowers and marvel again at the magic that could take the little hard brown things – which looked just like the bits of dirt Mammy would sweep up and whoosh into the fire – and transform them into these brightly coloured, delicately scented beauties.

All her life May had adored gardening. She’d learned what she could from Hilda and then taught herself whatever else she needed as she went along. She went from flowers to shrubs, and for her tenth birthday she asked for two dwarf apple trees, because their garden wasn’t big enough for the real things. She treated the lawn, got rid of the moss and coaxed it back to a healthy greenness, scattered it with camomile and stretched out on it face down whenever a sunny day came along, inhaling the sweet, herby smell.

And painting? May could paint. Hadn’t she just painted her new house from top to bottom? Her bedroom in a rich cream, the cramped bathroom in the palest duck egg blue, the rest in lavenders and whites and soft yellows and shell pinks, all the colours she loved to see in a garden.

So May decided to answer all the ads for jobs she thought she could do. She picked up her pen and wrote five separate replies, and then, just to be on the safe side, she wrote an ad of her own:

Gardening, house painting, window and house cleaning, any other odd jobs considered. Friendly and reliable service, reasonable rates.

And before she had time to wonder if she really wanted to be this kind of jack-of-all-trades, she was gardening for Paul and Francesca every Monday, and she’d lined up three houses to paint and two other gardens to overhaul.

Over the following few weeks, she got several enquiries from people who’d heard about her through friends. And then a woman phoned to ask her if she walked dogs, and a man wanted to know if she cleared rubbish from sheds, and another was looking for someone to come and do his ironing.

Within six weeks she was turning people down, or telling them that she was completely tied up, that she’d have to get back to them.

She was also earning more than she’d been getting at Dr Taylor’s.

Her hours were longer, with the dog-walking in the evenings, and sometimes the jobs were tough – scrubbing years of neglect from a house, shifting the clutter from a dusty attic and hauling it down to a skip, sanding innumerable coats of paint from intricate wrought-iron gates – but May didn’t regret her decision to leave Dr Taylor’s for an instant.

She loved the freedom of being her own boss, of deciding which jobs to take on and which to let go. She enjoyed meeting new people, and working in a different place every day. And once it became clear to her that she wasn’t going to starve, or have to sell the house, she learned to enjoy the uncertainty of not knowing what the next week was going to bring. She invested in a set of expensive paintbrushes, a folding ladder she could carry on the bike and a supply of window-cleaning solution.

She settled on a few regular customers – Paul and Francesca on Monday morning, and window cleaning across town in the afternoon. Wednesday mornings, after what almost amounted to a row, were spent in Rebecca’s house.

‘You don’t need a cleaner – there’s just you and Brian.’ May knew exactly why her best friend was asking her to come and clean. ‘I realise you’re trying to help, but—’

Rebecca stood her ground. ‘Help, my foot. My house is like a tip, as you well know. Have you ever seen me clean? And Brian, bless him, wouldn’t know one end of a Hoover from the other. If you don’t come, someone else will have to, or the dirt will take over.’

May folded her arms. ‘How come you never talked about getting a cleaner before? How come you suddenly need one now, just when I’m looking for business?’

Rebecca sighed. ‘Because in my job I’m suspicious of everyone, so I wouldn’t dream of letting a stranger into my house, poking around in my drawers. You, on the other hand, know all my dirty little secrets, so you’re the perfect cleaner. Come on, three hours a week at whatever you charge – and I promise to sack you if you leave one bit of fluff behind.’

So eventually May agreed, and Wednesday mornings were spent in Rebecca’s house, tidying up what May always suspected was the mess that Rebecca carefully created every Tuesday evening.

And on Thursday mornings, she went to Paddy O’Brien’s. For the past few months, she’d been going to the home of a man she had yet to meet. A man who drank decaffeinated coffee and kept a bowl stocked with kiwi fruit and plums beside the stack of cookery books on his kitchen worktop, and who was some kind of carpenter, judging by the jumble of tools and stack of planks by the back door, and who used nice apple-scented handwash in his bathroom.

The first perfume May owned was a bottle she’d found sitting under the Christmas tree when she was eleven. It was called Orchard and it came in an apple-shaped glass bottle, and she pulled out the stopper and dabbed the bright green liquid on her wrist and sniffed. To this day, the scent of apples reminded her of Christmas.

Before long, between them, her regular jobs were paying most of the bills. And the rest of the time May slotted in the casual jobs, the one-offs that kept arriving. The phone calls that started, ‘You don’t know me, but you painted my friend’s house a while ago …’

She smiled in the darkness. Not a bad old life, really. Then she turned over and tried to get back to sleep.

Paddy

Before he opened his eyes, while his thoughts were still scrambling into focus behind his closed lids, she tumbled into his head. Every morning she arrived, always with the same sweet, smiling mouth that he ached to taste. He wondered how she knew, how she could sense that first moment when he was drifting out of sleep, before he became aware of the solid tek-tek of his watch on the wobbly little table by the bed, the warm, cottony smell of the pillow against his cheek, the dampish creases in the sheet under his body.

And even as all these things started to take up their positions in his head, May began to fade away, her face disappearing bit by bit, Cheshire-cat-like – her blue-green eyes, gone, her butterscotch hair, vanished, her adorable laughing mouth, all gone – till he had nothing left but the blackness under his still-closed lids.

Did she ever think about him? Did she wonder, like he did, if they’d meet that day? Or did he never pass through her thoughts at all, in the way she so often passed through his?

They could meet any time, in a place the size of Kilpatrick. He’d often see her cycling past him on her blue bike, hair flying. Or crouched over a flowerbed, or walking behind a lawnmower – or, once, up on a ladder, stretching to reach the top corner of a window with her chamois.

Funnily enough, the only morning he knew they wouldn’t meet was the day she came here, to work in his own garden from nine till twelve. For the past eight months she’d been transforming the rectangle of wilderness behind the house into a real garden, with shrubs and flowerbeds and a little gravel path that curved from the patio down to a raised rockery in one corner.

She was gradually hiding the ugly block wall at the back of the garden behind climbers he couldn’t name – he hadn’t a clue about gardening – and something she’d planted near the back door smelled wonderful in the evenings. He gradually became aware of butterflies around a purple flowering shrub, and bees had started humming recently in the bush he thought might be lavender.

Most of the shrubs she’d planted were producing some sort of colour now – golden yellows and bright oranges, delicate pinks and deep scarlets. He’d taken to going out there in the evenings, just leaning against the back wall of the house and sniffing the scented air. He should get a few deck-chairs – or maybe he’d make a wooden garden seat.

He wondered what May thought of the bird table he’d put out on the lawn last week. He was happy with how it had turned out, glad now that he’d taken so much time over it. But he kept forgetting to put anything on it – he didn’t imagine the birds would appreciate a nicely put together table without a crumb of food.

May never helped herself to anything from his fridge, never even made herself a cup of tea, despite the note he’d left for her on her first morning.

He reached out and tilted the face of his watch towards him. He never set an alarm, didn’t own anything that was designed to jolt him out of sleep. Winter or summer, he woke a few minutes before or after half past five. Today it was after: twenty-five to six on a wet, grey June morning. Time to get up.

He pushed back the sheet and blankets and swung his legs out, put his feet down to touch the knobbly rug his sister had made eleven years ago as part of a craft project in her teacher-training college. It was amateurishly put together – handwork of any kind didn’t come naturally to Iseult. The red and pink and purple stripes travelled uncertainly along its length – now cucumber fat, now pencil thin – and threads from one section meandered carelessly through other colours and trailed from the edges in a can’t-be-bothered kind of a way. The scarlet fringes at each end were cut crookedly, like the messy scribbled fringe on a pre-schooler’s self-portrait.

But Paddy liked it. He appreciated its charming awkwardness, didn’t mind its imperfections. And Iseult, whom he loved, had made it. She’d sat in the tiny, damp apartment they’d shared then in Limerick, cursing as she struggled to pull the big blunt needle through the rough fabric and stopping every now and again to rub her face rapidly. ‘Bloody stuff makes me itch like crazy.’ And then she’d bend over the half-born rug again, spread in a careless splotch of colours across her lap.

Paddy yawned as he pulled the grey T-shirt over his head and dropped it on to the bed. He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his shorts, shoved them down over his hips and let them drop to the floor. Then he padded to the bathroom, pulled the cord of the electric shower and switched on the water.

He stood under the warm flow, letting it drench and flatten his hair, feeling it course over his chest and stomach, run down his legs. As he reached for the shower gel, he thought he heard a muffled shout. He paused, tube in hand, and tilted his head out of the water.

More shouting, a single long scream, the screech of brakes and a rat-tat-tat explosion of what could only be machine-gun fire. Too dramatic to be coming from anywhere but Mr Kennedy’s television on the other side of the wall.

Paddy squirted a glob of gel onto his palm and worked up a rich lather that he massaged into his neck and shoulders, under his arms, across his chest, down his stomach, between his thighs.

May O’Callaghan. The hot water flowed. The bathroom began to fill with a gentle, pine-scented steam.

Philip

He grasped the wooden handle and jerked it up and down again. The ridiculous little bell went ting-teling-teling in his hand. How could anyone hear that?

‘May?’

Where was his breakfast? She shouldn’t keep him waiting, not at his age. Not when he’d already been awake for what seemed like hours. ‘May?’

He coughed irritably and pulled himself up in the bed with an effort. These pillows were too flat – how was he supposed to get comfortable with no support? He punched at them awkwardly with his elbow.

The door opened and May appeared with a tray. ‘Good morning – did you sleep?’

Always the same question, always managing to make it sound as if she was interested in the answer. He grunted and looked pointedly at the tray.

‘There you go.’ She laid it on the duvet. ‘Are your pillows all right?’ She went to rearrange them, but he waved an impatient hand at her.

‘They’re fine.’ A boiled egg again. He hoped it wasn’t as hard as the last one. And the toast cut up into those silly little strips, as if he was a youngster. Still, he’d offer it up, say nothing.

She poured tea from the little pot. ‘It’s wet today.’

As if he couldn’t hear the rain, as if he was deaf as well as old and useless. He lifted the knife and sliced the top off his egg. A thin yellow finger dribbled out – good. He looked at the tray, and then back up at May. ‘Salt?’ She’d forgotten again. Such a small thing to remember, and she kept forgetting it. With an effort he kept his face neutral, managed not to sigh.

‘Sorry.’

He listened to her rapid footsteps on the stairs, remembered, with a pang, the breakfasts Aideen used to cook for him. Creamy porridge with a spoon of blackcurrant jam sitting on top. Two fat sausages on Sunday that he sliced lengthways and arranged with a dollop of tomato sauce on top of a thick slice of her homemade brown bread, still warm from the oven.

Or kippers the odd time, deliciously salty, with a couple of grilled tomato halves to keep them company on the plate.

Potato cakes when she had leftover spuds from the night before. Fried to a goldeny brown, knob of butter on top, shake of salt, dip of mustard. His mouth watered at the memory.

He looked down at the little white egg sitting primly in its china eggcup, and the sigh slid out of him loudly. Plenty loud enough for May, just walking back in, to hear.

May

She put the last of the breakfast things away, shook out the damp tea towel and hung it over the cooker rail. She glanced out the big window above the sink, scanning the garden as usual, but of course Lonesome George wouldn’t be out in the rain. Was it brightening up? The sky was still pretty grey, but the rain seemed to be easing off a bit.

Didn’t matter anyway, she had everything she needed for any kind of weather. She took her yellow oilskin from its hook on the back door and put it on top of the rucksack that held her green wellies and waterproof leggings, her gardening gloves, her hand spade and fork, her secateurs and her blue foam kneeling-pad.

She buttered two slices of bread and separated them with a slice of thick ham and a gloop of mayonnaise. Ridiculous not to come home for lunch, only two houses away, but one meal a day sitting across from his dour old face was more than enough. Much easier to eat a sandwich on her way across town.

Her eyelids felt gritty as they slid over her eyes. You’d think he’d ask her, once in a while, how she’d slept. The glass of water on his locker, still full this morning, as usual. Not caring about having her running up and down the stairs for his bloody salt, not caring that it was bad for his blood pressure. Served him right if—

No, she shouldn’t think like that; Ma wouldn’t approve. She felt the familiar dart of sorrow when she remembered her mother, buried eighteen months ago now. She lifted her hand and fingered the tiny opalescent shell that hung on its thin gold chain around her neck. Somehow, it always seemed to comfort her. Such a pretty thing, so delicate. She wished, for the umpteenth time, she knew who’d given it to her.

She heard the key turn in the front door. Pam, dead on time, as usual. ‘Hi, I’m in h. . .