Claudia Carroll - Love Me Or Leave Me

For anyone who finds themselves in the position of looking for a divorce, you’ve basically got two options. Either you go to court, have a lengthy, protracted – and doubtless expensive – case, where every single detail of your personal family life would be aired in a public courtroom. With absolutely no dirty linen left unexamined.

Humiliating, mortifying, prohibitively expensive and the end of it all, what would the net result most likely be? By and large, you’d get one third of the couple’s joint assets, he’d have a third and the lawyers ultimately would make off with the final third.

And now suddenly here’s a viable alternative. Given that this is undoubtedly a process both parties will want to get over and done with as quickly as possible, why not check into discreetly luxurious surroundings and get the whole thing sorted out in a single weekend? And with cocktails on the side? After all, there’s nothing to be gained from dragging out the whole process. This way, instead of lawyers carrying off a vast chunk of the couple’s joint assets, everything would be split fifty-fifty, fairly and equitably down the middle.

Best of all, no matter what stage a couple happened to be at in their separation, they could still check into a divorce hotel and at least get the final settlement set in stone. Then all the couple need do would be to bide their time and live their separate lives apart, until such time as they could appear before a judge, hand over their agreement, a gavel was walloped and they were formally granted a decree nisi. Easy as that.

A divorce hotel strove to make something complicated, simple.

Best of all, the premises that Ferndale Hotels had leased for their hotel in Dublin might as well have been purpose built for the job. Elegant and utterly discreet, it was one of those four-storey Georgian redbricks on Hope Street, just off leafy Fitzwilliam Square, surrounded by accountants’ and lawyers’ offices. The hotel’s name wasn’t even written on a canopy over the door, instead there was just a neat brass plaque saying, ‘Ferndale Hotels, Hope Street.’ Subtle and inconspicuous, its message clear. No one need ever know you’re a guest, not unless you want them to.

‘The Hope Street Hotel,’ as it quickly came to be known.

*

So I’m officially based back in Dublin now and oh thank you God, it feels so good to be home! Even if I’ve been so run off my feet that I’ve barely had the chance to spend any quality time with my best mate Gemma or any of the old gang. Somehow just being here, doing a job that’s challenging and yet that I really feel can and will take off, is firing me up and propelling me through each busy day until we formally open for business.

Plus of course, being this overloaded with work means I’ve absolutely zero time to think about the one and only blight on the horizon. The all-too-real possibility that I might just be standing in the vegetable aisle in Marks & Spencer’s with greasy hair and no make-up, turn a corner and then walk slap bang into the whole reason why I hightailed it over to London for as long as I did.

Frank. Or as Gemma refers to him, He Whose Name Shall Forever Remain Unspoken. Now, my spies tell me, promoted to Assistant General Manager at my old stomping ground, the Merrion Hotel, barely a stone’s throw from Hope Street. I imagine bumping into him with such punishing frequency it would scare you. But I stop myself from going any further. After all, this business venture is about helping others through their broken relationships. And not dwelling on my own troubles. At least not now. Not yet.

But he’ll be watching my progress here, I know he will, as will half the industry. So this is it then; my one and only chance not to be the girl who bolted from a perfectly good job because of what I went through. This is my shot at proving not just to Frank, but to all our old colleagues and not least to myself, that I can make this work. That I can make a success of this; that I can make it fly.

‘I think it’s amazing what you’re trying to achieve here,’ Gemma says to me over a hasty lunch break I manage to snatch. ‘But I just have one question for you.’

‘Fire away,’ I say, between mouthfuls of takeout sushi.

‘Don’t get me wrong, the Hope Street Hotel sounds like a great concept and everything,’ she says, shaking her head in puzzlement. ‘But mother of God, given that all of your guests will be going through marriage break-ups …’

‘Yeah?’

‘Well, sweetheart … exactly what kind of dramas are you going to end up having to deal with?’

Still in total shock, but at that numb stage where you can somehow function purely on automatic pilot, Dawn took one final moment to have a last, quick look around the tiny little shoebox of an apartment she and Kirk had been sharing, ever since they’d first been married. A poky flat above an Indian takeaway in town that permanently stank of garlic and onions, no matter how many cans of air freshener she went through.

The tiny part of her brain somehow getting her through the hell she was stuck in, reminded her that of late, the place been starting to drive her insane anyway. The constant stench of grease from the takeaway mixed with prawns well past their use-by date. And how noisy it got from about midnight onwards, when drunk revellers would nip in for a cheap vindaloo, then start calling each other wankers at the top of their voices on the street outside.

For as long as she and Kirk had lived here, they’d always planned to move on, just as soon as they could properly afford to, but of late, all the chats they used to have about their ideal pad had fizzled out. Almost as though each of them silently recognized it was pointless, because this day would inevitably come.

Just not like this , Dawn thought suddenly, shaking from head to foot, as the enormity of what she was about to do really hit home. Not this way. They’d been happy here. In many ways, they were still happy. Kirk was her best friend, her right hand, her go-to person. This would devastate him, but then he’d devastated her first, and like a child that knew no other way of expressing hurt, all she could do was try and inflict the same degree of pain right back instead.

So are you really prepared to do this? she asked herself for about the thousandth time that miserable day. Just run away from the problem and not at least try to work through it?

Yes was the answer. Because what he’d done had completely broken them forever. How could she possibly stay in this now? Just what kind of a doormat would that make her?

Suddenly overcome by a crashing wave of exhaustion, Dawn slumped down onto their tiny sofa bed and tried her best to sit still for a moment, at least until her head stopped spinning.

For a split second, her eye momentarily fell on a wedding photo on top of the bookshelf and she found herself dithering for a minute, wondering what she should do with it. Leave it where it was to remind Kirk that he had actually made a solemn vow that day? After all, he was the one who was forever saying that, ‘a vow was a promissory note against your soul.’ That that’s how much getting married had meant to him way back then. Okay, so most of the time he was stoned off his head when he did come out with it, but still, the sentiment was there. Or would she just angrily fling it into the bin, so he could gauge for himself exactly how she felt about what had just happened?

She took a last second to really look at the photo. Her dream wedding. Or ‘that hippy-dippy, tree-hugging fiasco’ as her mother liked to refer to it. Hard to believe that it had been taken just a few short years ago. Has it really been that long, she wondered, her heart suddenly twisting in her ribcage as she thought back to that young, hopeful girl, so in love with this guy that she’d have happily walked through flames for him.