Anna Walsh is officially a wreck. Physically broken and emotionally shattered, she lies on her parents' Dublin sofa with only one thing on her mind: getting back to New York. New York means her best friends, The Most Fabulous Job In The World™ and above all, it means her husband, Aidan.
But nothing in Anna's life is that simple anymore… Not only is her return to Manhattan complicated by her physical and emotional scars – but Aidan seems to have vanished. Is it time for Anna to move on? Is it even possible for her to move on? A motley group of misfits, an earth-shattering revelation, two births and one very weird wedding might help Anna find some answers - and will change her life forever.
Extract from Anybody Out There? by Marian Keyes
1
Mum flung open the sitting-room door and announced, ‘Morning, Anna, time for your tablets.’
She tried to march in briskly, like nurses she’d seen on hospital dramas, but there was so much furniture in the room that instead she had to wrestle her way towards me.
When I’d arrived in Ireland eight weeks earlier, I couldn’t climb the stairs because of my dislocated kneecap, so my parents had moved a bed downstairs into the Good Front Room.
Make no mistake, this was a huge honour: under normal circumstances we were only let into this room at Christmas-time. The rest of the year, all familial leisure activities – television-watching, chocolate-eating, bickering – took place in the cramped converted garage, which went by the grand title of Television Room.
But when my bed was installed in the GFR there was nowhere for the other fixtures – tasselled couches, tasselled armchairs – to go. The room now looked like one of those discount furniture stores where millions of couches are squashed in together, so that you almost have to clamber over them like boulders along the seafront.
‘Right, Missy.’ Mum consulted a sheet of paper, an hour-by-hour schedule of all my medication – antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, antidepressants, sleeping pills, high-impact vitamins, painkillers which induced a very pleasant floaty feeling, and a member of the Valium family which she had ferried away to a secret location.
All the different packets and jars stood on a small elaborately carved table – several china dogs of unparalleled hideousness had been shifted to make way for them and now sat on the floor looking reproachfully at me – and Mum began sorting through them, popping out capsules and shaking pills from bottles.
My bed had been thoughtfully placed in the window bay so that I could look out at passing life. Except that I couldn’t: there was a net curtain in place that was as immovable as a metal wall. Not physically immovable, you understand, but socially immovable: in Dublin suburbia, brazenly lifting your nets to have a good look at ‘passing life’ is a social gaffe akin to painting the front of your house tartan. Besides, there was no passing life. Except ... actually, through the gauzy barrier, I’d begun to notice that most days an elderly woman stopped to let her dog wee at our gatepost. Sometimes I thought the dog, a cute black and white terrier, didn’t even want to wee, but it seemed as if the woman was insisting.
‘Okay, Missy.’ Mum had never called me ‘Missy’ before all of this. ‘Take these.’ She tipped a handful of pills into my mouth and passed me a glass of water. She was very kind really, even if I suspected she was just acting out a part.
‘Dear Jesus,’ a voice said. It was my sister Helen, home from a night’s work. She stood in the doorway of the sitting room, looked round at all the tassels and asked, ‘How can you stand it?’
Helen is the youngest of the five of us and still lives in the parental home, even though she’s twenty-nine. But why would she move out, she often asks, when she’s got a rent-free gig, cable telly and a built-in chauffeur (Dad). The food, of course, she admits, is a problem, but there are ways around everything.
‘Hi, honey, you’re home,’ Mum said. ‘How was work?’
After several career changes, Helen – and I’m not making this up, I wish I was – is a private investigator. Mind you, it sounds far more dangerous and exciting than it is. She mostly does white-collar crime and ‘domestics’ – where she has to get proof of men having affairs. I would find it terribly depressing but she says it doesn’t bother her because she’s always known that men are total scumbags.
She spends a lot of time sitting in wet hedges with a long-range lens, trying to get photographic evidence of the adulterers leaving their love nest. She could stay in her nice, warm, dry car but then she tends to fall asleep and miss her mark.
‘Mum, I’m very stressed,’ she said. ‘Any chance of a Valium?’
‘No.’
‘My throat is killing me. Warcrime sore. I’m going to bed.’
Helen, on account of all the time she spends in damp hedges, gets a lot of sore throats.
‘I’ll bring you up some ice cream in a minute, pet,’ Mum said. ‘Tell me, I’m dying to know, did you get your mark?’
Mum loves Helen’s job, nearly more than she loves mine and that’s saying a lot. (Apparently, I have The Best Job In The World TM.) Occasionally, when Helen is very bored or scared, Mum even goes to work with her; the Case of the Missing Woman comes to mind. Helen had to go to the woman’s apartment, looking for clues (air tickets to Rio, etc. As if...) and Mum went along because she loves seeing inside other people’s houses. She says it’s amazing how dirty people’s homes are when they’re not expecting visitors. This gives her great relief, making it easier to live in her own less-than-pristine crib. But, because her life had begun to resemble, however briefly, a crime drama, Mum got carried away and tried to break down the locked apartment door by running at it with her shoulder – even though, and I can’t stress this enough, Helen had a key. And Mum knew she had it. It had been given to her by the missing woman’s sister and all Mum got for her trouble was a badly mashed shoulder.
‘It’s not like on the telly,’ she complained afterwards, kneading the top of her arm.
For more information please contact Fiona McMorrough on 020 7405 7422 / fionam@fmcm.co.uk
