Cecelia Ahern - One Hundred Names

She called Pete for the second time that day.

‘You better have something for me, Lois Lane.’

She laughed. ‘Not that I’m ready to reveal yet. I told you, Friday . I forgot to ask, how long is the piece?’

He paused. ‘Kitty, considering you should be finished and merely going over the article for perfection right now, I’m a little surprised to hear you ask that.’

‘Have we gone back to bad Pete again?’ She moved to the vacated back row of the bus for privacy.

‘Bad Pete,’ he laughed. ‘Am I really that bad?’

‘At times you are horrendously scary.’

‘Well, I don’t mean to be horrendously scary,’ he said, and she almost felt his breath on her ear, one of those conversations when every pause, every word, breath and sigh meant something. ‘Not to you, anyway.’

She smiled and then looked around to make sure no one was catching her obvious silly smile.

‘So how many words have you written?’ he asked more gently.

‘You can’t answer a question with a question, Pete. I asked you first.’

‘Okay.’ He sounded like he was stretching and she pictured his broad muscular shoulders and then her hands running over them. She surprised herself with this fantasy: this was Pete, bad Pete, duty editor Pete, who had often given her nightmares, not sexual fantasies on buses. What was happening?

‘It’s the main feature so you have five thousand words. However, I could reduce it to four if you’re having problems. You could draw matchstick people to take up space or something,’ he teased.

‘I’m not having problems – well, okay, I am but in the opposite way. It’s just that there is so much material. One hundred people’s stories in five thousand words is near impossible.’

‘Kitty …’ He was warning her now.

‘I know, I know, just listen.’

‘No, I’ve heard you. This is your baby, you drove this thing forward. If this was Constance’s idea for a feature then she would have figured out a way to do this. You knew her better than anyone, you’re a great writer, Kitty, you’ll figure it out.’

Kitty smiled at the praise; she hadn’t had much of that for the past year. ‘Thanks.’

‘It’s true, but I don’t want to ever have to tell you that again.’

‘I know, I’m sure it hurt you to say it.’

‘You think I hate you so much.’ She heard the smile in his tone. He lowered his voice so nobody could hear him. ‘What can I do to make you believe that I don’t?’

She heard herself say, ‘Hmm,’ and they both laughed.

‘Actually, what are you doing tonight?’ he asked.

‘Oh, you don’t want to know.’ She thought of the manure lining the stairway to her flat, an impatient Zhi and a long night ahead of her, cleaning.

‘So you’re busy.’

‘Why?’ She sat up, her heart beating faster. She wanted to backtrack, say no, she had no plans. What had she been thinking? That had been a deliberate lead on from her previous suggestive comment and she was too stupid thinking about manure to have realised it.

‘Oh, no reason.’ Pete cleared his throat. ‘I’ve been working late here to get this done. I’ve been here most nights till ten or eleven; if you wanted any help or a meeting about anything, just drop by.’

‘Thanks, Pete.’

‘Otherwise, putting my bossy hat back on, you know Friday is the deadline, we’re having a staff meeting and I need you to be there to present the story. No excuses.’

Kitty hopped off the bus, feeling lighter than before. When she reached her apartment she expected the smell of manure to greet her but it was clean. In fact, it smelled of turpentine, which was actually a welcome scent compared with the last. She pushed open the door to the dry-cleaners with a big smile on her face.

‘Zhi, thank you so much. I can’t thank you enough for cleaning that up. I fully intended on—’

‘My wife. She do,’ he snapped, and a scowl-faced woman bending over a dry-cleaning press looked up to glare at her.

‘Ah. Mrs Wong, thank you so much.’

She grunted.

‘We no do for you. We do for tenant. We show flat. New girl move in two week.’

‘You showed my flat to a tenant?’

‘My flat. Yes.’

‘But you can’t do that without my permission, Zhi. You can’t just let someone wander around my home without telling me. It’s … it’s … against the rules of our tenancy agreement.’

He looked at her, unimpressed. ‘So you write in newspaper,’ he snorted.

She looked at him helplessly but he didn’t care. She slowly backed away from the counter and retreated from the shop. Just as she was closing the door behind her he shouted, ‘Two week from today. You out.’

Kitty sat at the kitchen table with the names of her six subjects spread out before her. Each name was written on a card of its own and beneath each name was her story idea for each person. She laid them out neatly and then studied them slowly, one by one, hoping a link could be sparked in her mind. She drummed her fingers on the table, looking at the ninety-four other names, many of whom she had contacted and hadn’t had time to meet, many of whom she barely had time even to think about as they lived so far out of Dublin. Her stomach rumbled as she hadn’t eaten since tea with Mary-Rose, but she had no food in the fridge, no time to shop and no desire to steer off course. She was lost in the stories of the men and women who were taking over her mind: Archie, Eva, Birdie, Mary-Rose, Ambrose and Jedrek. Their worries were her worries, their problems were her problems, their delights her delights, their successes and their failures all hers too.

But – and there was a big but – no matter how much she stared at their names and how intrigued she was by their individual stories, they did not and could not make up one single combined piece for Constance’s tribute, one that would join their stories together seamlessly, unite them under one great glorious banner. Kitty laid her forehead down on the cool surface of the kitchen table and groaned. Pete had named Friday as the final day for her to present the story and he meant it. He had put up with her procrastination for long enough. He had somehow managed to ease the worries of the panicking advertisers, allowing her to write for the magazine, and for that she owed him a lot. He had fought hard for her and it was time she repaid him by delivering on her promise, but she had been so busy being on the move, meeting with the people on the list, that she had barely had time to face the truth. The truth being, she was in big trouble. It was time now that she admitted it, not just to herself but to someone of far greater importance.

Kitty knocked on Bob’s door. He was the only person she could bring herself to talk to honestly about Constance’s story, and she hoped that his understanding of the woman would help shed light on her problems.

Bob opened the door with a tired smile. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

‘You have?’

‘Though you’re later than I thought you’d be. Days later, my dear. Never mind, come on in.’ He opened the door wider, and made his way down the hall.

He sounded good-humoured but he looked so tired. He walked with a weariness that Kitty felt also, a weariness that came from a constant sadness, a hollowness in their hearts. The heart knew that something was missing and it was having to work extra hard to make up for it.

The living room was as cluttered as it always had been. Constance’s death had not changed that, though it may have helped add to it. Teresa had not managed to change Bob and Constance’s filing system, though Kitty was sure Bob would have fought her to the death if she’d tried to introduce a more linear, pedestrian form of living. Somewhere among all of that mess lay an order nobody else could decipher. It was impossible to sit at the kitchen table. The surface was covered in paperwork and miscellaneous items that spilled onto each of the six chairs that hugged the table.