Dorothy

Fuck, Dorothy thought, when she saw him, outside O’Shea’s pub drinking a coffee.

He was early. The book festival didn’t kick off till the weekend. Even though it was good for business, the festival was a difficult time for Dorothy. There was always a chance she’d run into John. Then all the progress she felt she’d made convincing herself she was satisfied with her life would be shown up for what it was.

Bullshit.

Their friendship had ended ten years ago when she had laughed at his first book, thinking it was a joke. Confident she was the talent and he was not. Now she was the custodian of the books, and he was the one writing them.

Looking at him gave her a pain in her stomach. How she felt around him was worse than the grief she felt for her parents. She could take grief a hundred times over this envy of her oldest friend.

How did he do it? The writing was so good it was almost literary. And the books were page turners. Which made it all the more difficult, his violent commercial success. For the last three Christmases, he’d published a best seller, and she had no choice but to put it in the shop window. He was a local boy, after all, as well as a world famous author.

She snuck another look at him. Still the same pale skin and slouched demeanour, as if recovering from a bout of tuberculosis. The door of the pub opened then and his parents joined him. His mother brushed something off his shoulder as his father lit a cigarette.

Most people liked Dorothy, but John’s parents did not. They were never unfriendly but just a bit too cool. Maybe they had always suspected that their friendship hadn’t been very good for him. She knew they thought she was stuck up.

There had always been a terrible push and pull in their friendship, since they were very young, as if the tide was going in and going out at the same time. It had meant they hadn’t had much time for anyone else. But she had always assumed she was the tide and he was the strand.

She was the one who published short stories online, who went to university to study English and got a first. Her parents owned a bookshop for God’s sake. She read Vanity Fair when she was 10. She was the one destined to be the writer. John was the apprentice electrician, who left school when he was 16 and earned loads of cash. When everyone else went to O’Shea’s or into the city at the weekend, they went up to Dalkey Quarry, lit a fire, got stoned and talked about moving to London or New York. He’d make his millions rewiring Brownstones and she’d live in them.

Then there was the fire that killed her parents, and everything stopped. They had been visiting her granny, her mother’s mother, in County Clare when a storm knocked down electrical wires and set the thatch roof ablaze.

Dennis, who had worked for her parents since before she was born, took over the shop. Her brother Jack married Melanie Bellew, and Dorothy dropped out of her Creative Writing Masters.

She couldn’t bear to be in anyone’s company, not even John’s. He and Jack would drop groceries up to her, try and cheer her up, but she just sank into the couch and watched Tales of the Unexpected on repeat.

For six months she lived on that couch, mostly forgetting to eat or sleep, until Dennis locked the door of the shop one evening empty and didn’t come back.

On the Monday of the third week she couldn’t take it anymore. She washed her face, tied back her hair, found some clean clothes, unlocked the door of the bookshop and went to work.

When John came in one evening to tell her he was writing a book about a cold case murder, she had been shocked. Writing was hard, not something you just took up, and here he was, John, on leave from his job, living back with his parents, so he could finish his book.

When he asked her to read it, she did. Like most first drafts it wasn’t very good. She could see the story was good, but his style was dreadful, and she told herself he wouldn’t improve. It would be unkind to encourage him.

Better he give up, she said. It’s not for everyone.

“Just people like you?” John had said.

“Well, yeah, John. People who actually read them.”

Since that awful day he had never come into the shop looking for her. And because she liked being mentally stable, she had kept away from him after he refused her apology.

If she just had the nerve to bump into him in O’Shea’s some evening, have a pint, congratulate him on his success, she would. She would tell him she was wrong and mean it this time.

Then he could just be John again, and she could just be Dorothy. Not the friend who had shamed herself by being a cunt.

But she was too afraid that if they talked and caught up, he would walk away wondering what he had ever admired in her.

And even though she’d always taken his admiration for granted, now the memory of it meant more to her than she knew it should.