Anybody Out There - Marian Keyes by Anybody Out There

consensus was that it must have been a pretty large
favor.

But anyway, there I am, working away, doing my best, being nice to the builders who come in
for petty cash, and one day Mr. Sheridan, the big boss, throws a check on the desk and says,
"Send that to Bill Prescott, stick a compliment slip in the envelope."

In my defense, I was nineteen, I knew nothing of the language of administration, and luckily the
check was intercepted before it went out in the post with my accompanying note: Dear Mr.
Prescott, although I have never met you, I believe you are a very nice man. All the builders speak
highly of you.

How was I to know that sending a compliment slip did not actually involve complimenting
anyone? No one had told me and I wasn't psychic (although I wished I was). It was the kind of
mistake any uninitiated person could make, but it became a watershed event: it took pride of
place in the family folklore and crystallized everyone's opinion of me: I was the token flake.

They didn't mean it unkindly, of course, but it wasn't easy.

However, everything changed when I met Shane, my soul mate. (It was a long time ago, so long
that it was permissible to say that sort of thing without getting sneered at.) Shane and I were
delighted with each other because we thought exactly the same way. We were aware of the
futures that awaited us--stuck in one place, shackled to dull, stressful jobs because we had to
pay the mortgage on some horrible house--and we decided to try to live differently.

So we went traveling, which went down oh-so-badly. Maggie said about us, "They'd say that
they were going up the road to buy a Kit Kat and the next time you'd hear from them, they'd be
working in a tannery in Istanbul." (That never happened. I think she must be thinking of the time
we went to buy a can of 7-Up and decided on a whim to skipper a boat around the Greek
Islands.)
Walsh family mythology made it sound like Shane and I were a pair of work-shy layabouts, but
working in a canning factory in Munich was backbreaking work. And running a bar in Greece
meant long hours and--worse still--having to be nice to people, which, as everyone knows, is
the toughest job in the world.

Whenever we came home to Ireland, it was all a bit "Ho, ho, ho, here they are, the pair of smelly
hippies, coming on the scrounge, lock up your confectionery."

But it never really got to me--I had Shane and we were cocooned in our own little world and I
expected it would stay that way forever.

Then Shane broke up with me.

Apart from the sadness, loneliness, woundedness, and humiliation that traditionally accompanies
a broken heart, I felt betrayed: Shane had got his hair cut into something approaching
respectability and had gone into business. Admittedly it was a groovy kind of business,
something to do with digital music and CDs, but after he'd scorned the system for as long as I'd
known him, the speed with which he'd embraced it left me reeling.

I was twenty-eight, with nothing but the fringey skirt I stood up in and suddenly all the years I'd
spent moving from country to country seemed wasted. It was a horrible, horrible time and I
ricocheted around like a lost soul, directionless and terrified, which was when Maggie's husband,
Garv, took me under his wing. First he got me a steady job, and while I admit that opening the
post in an actuarial firm isn't exactly scintillating, it was a start.

Then he convinced me to go to college and suddenly my life had taken off again, moving at
speed in an entirely different direction. In a short space of time, I learned to drive, I got a car, I
got my hair cut into a proper, medium-maintenance "style." In short, a little later in the day than
most people, I got it together.

     8
How Aidan and I met for the second time

A barrel-chested man slung a hamlike arm around my neck, swung a tiny plastic bag of white
powder at my face, and said, "Hey, Morticia, want some coke?"

I extricated myself and said politely, "No, thank you."

"Aw,