Best of Friends. Cathy Kelly

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      ‘Sorry, honey,’ he said. ‘I know you’re cold. Let’s get on to the agency tomorrow.’ Then he’d fallen into the deep sleep of the shattered, leaving Erin shivering in bed beside him, despite her bed socks and thermal shirt.

      The agency said they would send round a maintenance man, but nothing happened. The next morning she phoned them again and they promised to send someone out that day.

      Erin, who felt strangely out of sorts and still jet-lagged, wasn’t amused. ‘You said that yesterday,’ she pointed out drily. ‘Is there some kind of draw going on? You put all the names into a hat and when my name comes out, you actually send someone out. Is that it?’

      The agency lady sounded quite sniffy and pointed out that two days of freezing weather had burst pipes in a few of their properties and that their maintenance men were busy.

      ‘Burst pipes?’ Erin enquired. ‘If that’s what it takes to get you guys out here, just tell me where they are and I’ll burst them. OK?’

      She hung up and glared round at the empty kitchen. It had been too chilly to unpack things since the cold snap. She had only opened the boxes for the living room because there was a gas fire in there. Besides, if they were going to be moving into a better house soon there was no point in getting out everything. She made yet another cup of coffee for personal central heating and stomped into the living room, pausing only to pick up Greg’s old ski cap from the banisters and jam it on her head.

      She was already wearing leggings under her track bottoms, two sweaters and an electric-blue padded ski gilet. All of which looked ridiculous, she knew. But who cared. She didn’t know anybody in this town so there was nobody to wonder what had happened to the normally exquisitely groomed Erin Kennedy to turn her into such a slut.

      Plonking herself down cross-legged on the floor, she tackled a box destined for the study. She was engrossed in a pile of newspaper clippings she was sure she’d thrown out in Chicago, when the doorbell rang.

      Fantastic. Losing it with the rental company was clearly the way forward.

      But it wasn’t the maintenance man at the door. Instead, there stood a tiny Flower Fairy of a person, with round dark eyes, rippling ebony curls and a red hooded woollen coat that made her a dead ringer for Little Red Riding Hood.

      ‘I don’t know whether to invite you in or tell you that Grandma’s sick and the big bad wolf is around,’ said Erin before she could help it.

      The woman laughed: a deep, throaty laugh utterly at odds with her Little Red Riding Hood image. ‘I’ll have to throw this coat out,’ she cried, pushing back the hood.

      ‘Sorry,’ Erin said quickly.

      ‘No, you’re right,’ insisted Red Riding Hood. ‘Grown women should not buy clothes because they’re cute. Then people call you cute and I hate that. Cute is an overused word. I’m Sally, by the way. Sally Richardson, Steve’s wife.’ When Erin still looked blank, she added: ‘Steve Richardson works with Greg in Cuchulainn.’

      Erin grimaced at her own stupidity. Greg had spoken every day about Steve Richardson, the hardworking second-in-command, who, to Greg’s delight, did not appear to have applied for the top job, being newly promoted himself, and, therefore, who did not have a chip on his shoulder about a new boss.

      ‘Sorry again,’ apologised Erin. ‘My brain isn’t functioning these days. Jet lag. Or hypothermia, perhaps. The heating isn’t working.’

      ‘So I hear. Steve says Greg is worried sick because you’re stuck at home getting frostbite.’

      ‘I am wearing some fetching thermals.’ Erin pointed down to her Michelin Man outfit. ‘I didn’t think it would be this cold.’

      ‘It’s freak weather, lowest temperatures for March in fifty years,’ Sally said. ‘We never usually get really icy weather because we’re beside the sea. How about coming out to lunch with me? Steve phoned me to say he got Cindy in personnel to have a word with the rental company boss. Cindy loves a challenge.’ Sally grinned. ‘You’ll have a maintenance guy out at half three.’

      ‘I may offer to have sex with him in gratitude,’ Erin deadpanned. ‘Sorry, that was a joke. That’s incredibly kind of you and Steve. Lunch sounds great.’

      While Sally sat amid the boxes in the kitchen, Erin rushed upstairs to change into a less padded outfit. She hadn’t washed her hair since the day after they’d left and she knew it was greasy. So she stuck a black felt beret on it, added mascara and lipstick, and was ready.

      ‘Oh, I wish I could wear hats,’ said Sally in genuine admiration when Erin arrived downstairs, willowy in a mocha corduroy coat, her long legs endless in suede bootlegs. ‘I’m too short but you’re so graceful and elegant, you can get away with it.’

      And Erin smiled and said, ‘This is the lazy woman’s hairdo. It’s been too cold to shampoo my hair, so a hat is the only option.’

      ‘Well, if that’s how you look when you haven’t made an effort, you must be pretty amazing when you have.’

      They went to a cosy pub and sat beside a crackling log fire to eat chilli wraps and fat chips.

      Sally seemed to know without it being said that Erin didn’t want to be cross-examined on where she and Greg had come from and why. Instead, she filled Erin in on Dunmore and Cork, explaining that the Cork people looked down their noses at Dunmore for being a sleepy country town, and the Dunmore people looked down on Cork for being a city.

      ‘I was brought up in Cork, mind you, and I love it,’ she said. ‘There’s a real buzz to the place. But I love Dunmore too. It’s so tranquil here. You feel as if you’re in a small community, yet the city is only a few miles away. The best of both worlds, really. We moved here because I had this dream of setting up my own beauty salon and we heard about some perfect premises on the Lee Road here.’

      Erin, who had told Greg in no uncertain terms that she didn’t want to cosy up with the locals until she’d found her feet, heard herself saying that she’d love to visit the salon soon.

      ‘I haven’t had a manicure for two weeks and my hands are chapped with the cold,’ she said ruefully, examining her long slender fingers.

      She regretted it as soon as she’d said it. Now Sally would leap on her and before she knew it, she’d book Erin in and take over.

      But no. ‘Come in when you’re ready,’ Sally said equably. ‘Settle in first. You don’t want to make lots of friends right away and then spend the next two years trying to shake them off!’

      This was so much what Erin had been afraid of that she stared open-mouthed at her new friend.

      ‘I know what it’s like to move into a new area,’ Sally added. ‘People want to be friendly and you end up intimately acquainted with half the town and promising to have a drink with the other half by the end of the first week.’

      ‘Now that sounds like the Ireland I know and love,’ Erin said wryly. ‘I’m originally from Dublin and in my neighbourhood, when a new family arrived, if the neighbours hadn’t been invited in for tea and heard their life history within a week, the new arrivals were considered oddballs of the highest order.’

      Sally grinned. ‘Same as where I came СКАЧАТЬ