Dorothy

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

He was early. The book festival didn’t kick off till the weekend.

Even though it was good for her business, Road Books, the festival was a difficult time for Dorothy. There was always a chance she’d run into John. Then all the progress she’d made convincing herself she was satisfied with her life would be shown up for what it was.

Bullshit.

She snuck another look at him, slouched over the table, his head almost touching his knees. Like a big man shielding himself from a wallop, she thought. His face was in profile but even that much of it gave her a familiar pain in her stomach. Worse than the grief. She would take grief a hundred times over this envy of her oldest friend. The door of the pub opened and his parents joined him outside. His mother brushed something from his shoulder as his father lit a cigarette.

Most people liked Dorothy, but John’s parents did not. They were never unfriendly but a bit too cool. Maybe they had suspected the friendship hadn’t been very good for him. There had always been a push and pull between her and John, since they were very young, as if the tide was going in and going out.

Dorothy had assumed she was the tide and he was the strand.

She was the one destined to be a writer, who read David Copperfield when she was 10, who went to university to study English and got a first. Her parents owned a bookshop for God’s sake. He left school when he was 16, trained as an electrician and started his own business. 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 Rush when a storm knocked down electrical wires and set the roof ablaze.

Dennis, who had worked for her parents since before she was born, took over the running of the shop. Her brother, Jack proposed to his girlfriend at the funeral and focused on building another life. Dorothy dropped out of her Creative Writing Masters and planted herself in the flat above the shop.

She didn’t want anyone’s company, not even John’s. He would drop groceries up to her, try and cheer her up, but she just sank into the couch and watched reruns of 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 bookshop one evening and didn’t come back.

He wouldn’t answer her text or calls and the shop stayed closed. She begged Jack to find someone to run it, it was his business now too after all, but Jack said they should sell up. Jack was in cahoots with Dennis.

On the Monday of the third week she couldn’t take it anymore. She’d lost her parents but she wouldn’t lose their shop. She washed her face, tied back her hair, found some clean clothes, unlocked the door and started selling books. Dennis returned to his high stool behind the counter. Her plan was to get the business into good enough shape that she could hire a manager and return to college. Three years later, reality had set in and she felt stuck.

When John told her he was writing a murder mystery, she was shocked. Writing was hard, not something you just took up, and here he was, working full time and finishing a first draft. She hadn’t written anything since her parents died and if she was honest, not much before that. The Masters was going to be her opportunity to push herself from believing she was a writer to actually becoming one.

He asked her to read it. 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.

“It’s not for everyone,” she said.
“Just people like you?”
“Well, yeah, John. People who actually read books?”

She’d said worse things even than that. They’d rowed for an hour but she wouldn’t backtrack. He had never contacted her since. And because she liked being mentally stable, she had kept away from him after he refused her apology.

Over the next fifteen years she forced herself to read each one of his books, hating herself for wanting to be right, willing herself not to enjoy them. But they were too good and only got better. 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. 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.