Toxic People

Toxic People SD Monaghan First published by Lume Books in 2023 Copyright © SD Monaghan 2022 This edition published in 2023 by Lume Books The right of SD Monaghan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. To Anne – the arc of my story Table of Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 1 Friday Night It was after 11.00 pm when everything started to unravel. The warm summer night ensured that the pavements of Clareville were still bustling. It was like that for a few months, when the area filled with blow-ins turned on by being near true wealth. Then it would go quiet again for the rest of the year, when there was little noise except for the hush of luxury and money. Although Shane liked the summer evenings, his neighbours considered the descending crowds to be like children dragging muck in along the carpet. He found the Clareville residents to be generally untrusting, anxious, pompous and wary of strangers. It wasn’t their fault, really. It just seemed to be something that happened when people made a fortune every year. Walking by Pellicci’s, the local Italian eatery, Shane looked through the glass. He almost expected to see the diners staring out, their retinas in sudden, dazzling whiteout, examining him, curious as to what had gone wrong in his life. Instead, he saw the truth of himself within his translucent reflection: the settled, attentive husband, the researcher, the writer, the oarsman, the Xbox gamer. Being forty-four suited him. Shane had a swimmer’s body, dark mussed-up hair – dusted at the sides – and full lips. He was one of those men who could still wear black jeans and trainers and not look ridiculous. But in the glass of Pellicci’s, he also saw the man who was no longer an easy sleeper. He saw the loving, interested father that he’d never become. ‘Not just yet,’ Jenny used to say – as if, should she ever change her mind, they’d be able to order one, like a table from a catalogue. He’d always known that she had never wanted a child. He’d just hoped that one day she would change her mind. Up ahead was their house: a sturdy, three-storey Victorian end of row terrace. Among their neighbours were a businessman, a famous actor and a widower judge who still referred to England as ‘the mainland’; all splitting their time between town and country estates. Assessing the strip of lit-up front rooms, Shane saw that most were spending the evening in their studies, decaying away with their private art collections. None of the people living in this wedge of homes socialised together. This made Shane’s neighbours feel even more important, even more special, as if they had all that space to themselves. Living in a nice neighbourhood, near the city centre, did have the odd limitation. Shane and Jenny had no garden, just a decked-out yard. There was no driveway, only a garage around the back leading to a dark, grey laneway. However, pros and cons did not matter anymore because, just a few months previously, they’d received a year’s notice to vacate. The notice had come from his mother-in-law. Shane had always told himself that it didn’t matter where they lived, that a house was just a geographical location, that as long as Jenny and he were together, they’d be happy. However, Shane was also aware of how much he was going to miss the area. Money… Shane pictured his boat. He pictured a better one. I’m not above it. He wondered if it wasn’t just because of Jenny’s mother; if somehow, he was the real cause of Jenny losing the house. Could Shane have done more? Perhaps, unconsciously, he was dispensing retribution on Jenny for her refusal to give him children? Taking out his phone, he texted his wife: Home early. Scanning the screen of emoticons, he chose a straightforward red heart. They had been barely talking before they’d gone out – he to meet a student researcher and she to give a talk on interior design. His wife wanted to stake all their savings on a daydream, the fantasy being that a particularly clever and opportune investment would turn their four-hundred-thousand savings into over one million euros in a year. Then, with that incredible return, Jenny would anonymously buy their Clareville house from her mother, using the funds for both the mighty deposit and leverage for the mortgage. To Jenny, it all made perfect sense. Which it did, as long as the investment performed; or, in other words, as long as her horse won. It infuriated him how Jenny persisted with her belief that, unlike her, he did not really understand money. It was as if she actually believed that unless you came from a particular class, then you couldn’t possibly know what to do with substantial sums of cash. It was an innate snobbery that supposed that only people from a certain rank were trained to be wealthy. But Shane knew that money was not confusing – being poor was. Despite the frustration, the disillusionment, the disappointment, part of him still wished that he could make the investment. How surprised Jenny would be. But Shane knew that he was 100% correct in turning it down. Cars, houses, Breitling watches – they were all just more accumulated trash that people hauled with themselves towards the grave. Shane also understood why Jenny had found it impossible