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“Are you okay?” I asked, checking him over. He looked a little pale.
“I’m fine, Maggie. I’ve lived on this street for forty years. It’s nothing I haven’t dealt with before.”
The sound of clapping came from above. “That was marvellous!” Siobhan bellowed. “You really stuck it to him.”
I chuckled. “I’m not so sure about that. He heard the sirens and ran.”
At that, a Garda car sped by, still blaring its sirens. It hadn’t been coming to our rescue at all but headed to another incident. I quickly called back to inform them the disturbance was over, and their assistance was no longer needed.
“You were brave coming out to face him,” I told Bob as I walked him to his house. “But next time, promise me you’ll stay inside and call for help instead. It’s not safe to confront unpredictable drunks. He could’ve attacked you.”
“If he did, I would’ve gone down fighting,” Bob declared, and I shot him a fond smile before heading back to my place. Siobhan had closed her window, and the lights were off in her flat, so I assumed she’d gone to bed.
After all the drama, I was ready for an early night, too. I cleaned up the few dishes I’d left in the kitchen, locked up, then hit the hay. The incident with the drunk man stuck in my head, the look of emptiness in his eyes. Grabbing my headphones, I put on my sleep meditation and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to reach a place where my mind was completely empty, and I wasn’t thinking about anything at all.
***
On Fridays, I cleaned for the Connollys, a large family with four children, two dogs, a cat and a menagerie of exotic birds. Thankfully, I wasn’t required to clean up after the animals.
The family lived in a large period house, but no matter how large it was, it never seemed big enough to contain the raucous Connolly clan.
Mr and Mrs Connolly worked demanding jobs, and they were rarely home, which was why they had a full-time nanny, a cook, plus me, the cleaner. Both the nanny and the cook did little bits of cleaning here and there, while I came once a week to take care of the bigger jobs.
Personally, I felt like they could do with me coming more than once a week because three out of four of their kids, though lovely, were incredibly messy. The eldest teenaged girl, Imogen, was the only tidy one. The other three lived like tornadoes. I swear I had dreams about taking all the clutter in their rooms and simply dumping it into a giant bonfire.
The bus to work that morning was packed. I made brief eye contact with him before taking my seat, awareness prickling at the back of my neck. There were few constants in my life, and him being on the bus each day was one of them. I sometimes had a fear about arriving one morning to find him gone. He’d moved away or gotten a different job that required him to take another bus route.
I didn’t even know him. It shouldn’t be such a big fear of mine, and yet pathetically, it was. If he randomly disappeared, I would be unnecessarily heartbroken.
What was I saying? I was already unnecessarily heartbroken over the fact he’d ignored the one and only time I’d found the courage to broach a conversation. Clearly, whatever was between us, if there was anything at all, he wasn’t interested in talking to me. I should be glad for this. It meant I didn’t need to open myself up to possible pain. Even so, I couldn’t stop the disappointment from creating an aching hole in my gut.
I needed to get a hold over this silly obsession because it wasn’t healthy. I kept latching onto to random hopeful thoughts, like maybe he was just incredibly shy, or perhaps he was recovering from a throat infection, and it was painful to speak.
I was also still irritated over what happened with that drunk arsehole last night. Incidents like that tended to stay with me for a while, mainly because they reminded me of my childhood when I’d had to deal with my mother and whoever she was spending time around.
I wondered how he might’ve dealt with the drunk guy. A large man like him only had to look at someone a certain way, and they got the message to back off. He seemed like the kind of person even idiotic, self-hating drunks wouldn’t dare try to mess with, and they certainly wouldn’t be so blasé about making a racket outside his flat at night.
When I arrived at the Connolly house, I said a quick hello to the nanny, Helena, a reserved woman of few words. She was enjoying the quiet hours while the kids were at school. I then said hello to Marco, the chef, who I was friendly with. He always left a sandwich in the fridge for my lunch. Marco knew there was very little I wouldn’t eat, and I always looked forward to seeing what delicious sandwich he left for me each week.
