Cecelia Ahern - One Hundred Names

‘There’s no age limit on love.’ Kitty tried not to sound sarcastic but failed.

‘You don’t believe in love?’

‘This week I don’t believe in very much at all.’

‘And you’re telling me you’ll believe in me?’

‘You’ve been very open so far. Plus, my future depends on you.’

He smiled. ‘What do you think about God?’

‘I don’t believe in God,’ she replied honestly.

He accepted that. ‘Do you know what I think about love? I think love can change us beyond recognition, we become love-sick, soft-eyed jelly-bellied fools.’

‘You were never that,’ Kitty teased.

‘I was too. When I met my wife. Gorgeous, she was. I was a right eejit at the time too. Love can soften people, I believe that. But in me, now, love riles up an anger, a red-hot rage that crawls on my skin, seeps into my blood and brings out the worst in me. That’s why everyone I love is better off loving me from afar. From Mayo. From Manchester. Wherever.’

Kitty pushed him to talk about it more.

‘My love for people takes on negative forms,’ he explained. ‘Shadowy, threatening, it’s far from the soppy crap you read in cards or the sweet nothings that people whisper in each other’s ears. Love makes most people soar. For me it pulls me down. I’m a demon ready to defend, to protect, to do anything for the people that I love.’

‘That’s understandable considering what you’ve been through.’

‘Is it?’ He looked at her, surprised.

‘Of course it is.’

‘For the past seven years, I’ve felt like a monster that doesn’t know how to love in the right way. And I know that, and yet …’ he disappeared into his mind. She could see him building his barriers again, the tension was returning, the tough guy was coming back.

Kitty had to talk before she lost the loose-tongued Archie completely. ‘Archie, tell me what it is.’

He studied the blackboard for a long time and then he turned round to check on the woman in the café again. He sighed, conflicted.

‘Tell me,’ Kitty said firmly.

‘Sometimes,’ he paused, ‘I hear people’s prayers.’

Kitty raised her eyebrows and waited for him to laugh, to tell her he was joking, but his expression didn’t change. She analysed it all in the seconds she had to win or lose this story. The woman stood up and left the café and Archie’s eyes followed her. Then he turned back to Kitty, probably waiting for her to do the same. She took a gamble.

‘And what do you hear her pray about?’

For the second time he seemed surprised that her first question hadn’t been anything more negative, that she’d got straight to the point.

‘“Please”,’ he said, settling back down. ‘She sits here for twenty minutes every morning and says “please” over and over again.’

Kitty massaged her temples as she sat on the bus to her next destination. A man who hears people’s prayers? What on earth was she supposed to think of that? She could drop it right now, move on from Archie and speak to somebody else on the list. Someone normal. With such a tight deadline and Pete breathing down her neck, it was probably what she should have done, but it wasn’t her list to play with, it was Constance’s. Kitty remembered her old self, who used to crave meeting people like Archie and stories like his. She thought about Constance’s teachings and realised this was exactly the kind of story Constance believed in covering. This was the kind of story that twenty-three-year-old Kitty, just out of college, would have brought to her job interview, and one that Constance would have been intrigued by. Anything unusual and non-traditional would be the first thing she would want to investigate. Her heart raced as she thought about the possibilities. Perhaps Archie had heard Mary-Rose’s, Birdie’s, Eva’s or Ambrose’s prayers, perhaps he had a link to everybody on the list. She desperately needed to find out more.

She stared at the words she had written on her notepad.

Name Number Sixty-seven: Archie Hamilton

Story Title: Man of Pray – from the hunted to the haunted, to the hallowed

CHAPTER NINETEEN

With less than a week to Pete’s deadline, and no more leads, Kitty was conscious of a mounting panic. A phone call to Archie established that he was not familiar with any of the names on the list. He impatiently snapped ‘No’ after each name she called out and informed her time and time again he didn’t know the names of anybody whose prayers he heard, and she managed to reach reading out only as far as number eight before he hung up on her. Being realistic, if you could be when dealing with the issue of a man who believed he heard prayers, if it was possible he could have heard the prayers of each person on the list and simply not know it, then how could Constance possibly know? The answer was, she couldn’t. The link between them did not lie in him hearing their prayers.

Kitty needed to meet more people. She needed more clues. She sat on a step in Temple Bar Square and rang name number four on her list.

‘Mr Vysotski, my name is Kitty Logan, I write for Etcetera magazine and I’m contacting you regarding—’

‘You received the press release?’ a man with a foreign accent shouted excitedly down the phone.

‘Excuse me?’

‘The press release. We sent it on Friday. I am so happy you received it. You will come to our press conference?’ He was so eager, so excited, talking a mile a minute, that she had to smile.

‘Yes, Mr Vysotski, but—’

‘Call me Jedrek, please!’

‘Jedrek. Where is your press conference?’

‘It was on the sheet! Today at noon! Erin’s Isle GAA Club. Don’t miss it now, will you?’

‘I won’t. I won’t miss it.’

‘You promise? We’ll have cakes and tea. It will be nice, yes? Mrs Vysotski is the most excellent baker.’

‘I’ll be there, Jedrek.’ She hung up, excited about her new intriguing addition to her growing list of quirky characters.

Kitty had a dilemma on her hands. She had made an appointment to meet Eva Wu at a brunch in the Four Seasons where Eva was to meet George Webb’s family for the first time at a pre-wedding family meet and greet. Eva or Jedrek …? Eva or Jedrek …? She quickly made the call and let Eva Wu down for the second time. Then she took out the business card that Sally had given her. She dialled the number and waited.

‘Hello. I’m calling about the teaching position for Television Presentation. My friend Sally Collins told me to call you …’

Kitty arrived at Erin’s Isle GAA Club at twelve fifteen, fifteen minutes late for the press conference. She was anxious travelling through Finglas, Colin Maguire’s home turf, and kept her head down low on the bus while at the same time she was constantly on the lookout for him. She pushed open the door quietly, hoping to sneak in unnoticed, without disturbing the event. However, that didn’t go according to plan. As soon as she opened the door she was faced with a long hall with two men sitting behind a big head table, before which rows of chairs had been set up. In the front row sat one single person and a photographer who stood by a table of food with his camera around his neck, eating cake.

They were all looking at her.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ she apologised, making her way to the pews under their stare. ‘I’m Kitty Logan from Etcetera . I spoke to Jedrek on the phone.’

‘Ah, yes! Miss Logan.’ A rotund man jumped up from the table and she immediately recognised his voice and his energy as the jolly man over the phone. He appeared to be in his fifties, a large pot belly as big as a six-month pregnancy on his cuddly frame. He came round the table, his hand extended, his head shaved to even the baldness, but a dark goatee around his mouth. He took Kitty’s hand, practically crushed it in his and violently shook it.