Rules for a Perfect Life Read online

  I see it as my responsibility to remind Dom that it’s far from a Stud Muffin he is. Very, very far. To be a stud you have to partake in regular sex with many women and his record in that department is pretty dismal. Of course, he claims to have sex all the time – at least three times a week with willing females who, he says, fall all over him at the seedy nightclubs he likes to frequent – but there’s very little evidence that it’s true. Granted, he does go to an awful lot of trouble to come up with fictitious names for all the gorgeous girls who apparently find him irresistible, but I have yet to see any actual evidence of his legendary sexual magnetism or success with the ‘laydees’, as he calls them. For example, none of these conquests ever come into the office looking for him and he never gets any mysterious calls from husky-voiced women either. In fact, he never gets any calls at all, except from his mother telling him she’s finished his ironing and he can come round for his dinner. Dom is a classic poster child for a mummy’s boy and proud of it, a fact I like to tease him endlessly about – or I did until I met his mother. She was a bit scary.

  ‘You’ve hurt me, Maggie.’ He pulls a sad, wounded face. ‘You’ve hurt me deep.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, you muppet.’ I laugh, pulling a face back. ‘You started it.’

  I know Dom’s not the least bit hurt by my jibe. Our mutual slagging is like a little tradition between us now. It began on the first day I started work in Hanly’s five years ago and has more or less continued unabated since then. I walk in, Dom comments on what I wear, how I look – and even occasionally how I smell – I tell him to go ride himself and then we get on with our day. In a strange way, it’s a comforting ritual and one that I cherish in these dark, uncertain times when no one knows what’s around the next corner. Unemployment, weird flu and possible Armageddon are what the papers say we all have in store, so insulting each other is something Dom and I can rely on, even if the whole world is apparently falling off some cosmic cliff. Besides, I don’t take any of the jibes he flings at me seriously because I know that behind the banter Dom’s actually a sweet guy who’d do anything to help anyone in trouble. Not that I’ll ever let him know I think that, of course – his head is big enough as it is.

  I turn back to my computer, a feeling of dread consuming me. It’s bound to be another awful day, trying to fill in eight hours pretending to be busy. I used to love working here, but since the property market went bust, an estate agent’s office is not the laugh a minute it used to be. In the good old days, people tossed money around like it was going out of fashion and you didn’t even have to try to sell a property because it sold itself. A few short years ago, punters were lining up, begging you to sell them just about anything, but now that boom has turned to bust, buyers are scarcer than hens’ teeth and you practically have to throw in convertible sports cars to get so much as a sniff of interest in anything. And that is exactly what some sellers are doing, they’re so desperate. Cars, boats, plasma TVs – you name it, they’ll include it if it means getting a quicker sale. Last week one vendor even offered to hand over a time-share in his Marbella penthouse just to offload an investment flat he’d bought in the city centre.

  I’ve seen it all since the market imploded and unfortunately, most of the time, even these tactics have no impact: people just aren’t buying and even the lure of free stuff won’t persuade them to part with their cash. Meanwhile, anyone who does want to buy is being refused finance by the banks. Dom and I have spent many hours viciously dissecting these bankers and fantasizing about what we might do to punish them for refusing prospective buyers’ mortgages. It’s a fun game, deciding which torture devices we could employ (the water wheel is my particular favourite) – and, more importantly, it helps to pass the time.

  Passing the time has become the main focus of my day in past months because, instead of actually selling anything, I now spend most of it filing properties over and over again. Dom is determined to look on the bright side – but, then, as I always tell him, he makes it his business to be stupidly optimistic. Now, instead of enjoying the buzz of selling, he focuses on getting his kicks in other ways – mostly by sexually harassing anyone who ventures into the office, including the postman. In fairness the postman, a nice middle-aged man called Nigel, who has seven children, a wife and two girlfriends, takes it in good spirit.

  Meanwhile Dermot, our boss, spends almost every day staring blankly into space. He has sunk into a severe depression since the market collapsed. Even Dom can’t cheer him up by sending him snippets from porn sites. Nothing can raise a smile – although Dom keeps trying his best. His theory is that Dermot needs to see busty platinum blondes frolicking with each other now more than ever. He maintains he’s only trying to help, but we both know it’s not working because Dermot is still hollow-eyed with worry and stress over the business. I can’t say I blame him – like so many businesses out there the company is in serious trouble. We have eighty-nine unsold properties on the market, and ninety-nine places to let. Nothing is moving and, thanks to the economic downturn, nothing is likely to anytime soon. We are – to use a highly technical estate agent’s term – screwed.

  ‘So … how are you really?’ Dom asks coyly, sliding over to me on his swivel chair. ‘Meet anyone nice over the weekend, did you?’

  It’s the same line he’s been using every Monday morning since I broke up with Robert. He’s convinced I need to get out and play the field before I become a born-again virgin and forget how to do it at all. He doesn’t want to hear that I’ve been home alone, watching reruns of Friends. (I still occasionally like to fantasize that I’m Jennifer Aniston in series four – when she had the straight blonde hair extensions and the washboard stomach.) But I like staying in: the apartment that Dermot rents to me as part of my package is so cosy. It’s in a complex he invested in with a local developer and it was a Godsend when I left Robert. Dermot charges me next to nothing for it, which I’m grateful for: trying to pay full rent on a salary that’s no longer bulked up with commission would be impossible.

  ‘My weekend was fine,’ I say.

  ‘Come on – don’t hold back the details. You met some bloke out on the town and exhausted him with dirty sex, right?’ Dom suggests, winking at me. ‘Do you need a strong coffee to help you stay awake?’

  ‘No thanks,’ I deadpan. ‘I think I’ll manage.’

  Coffee is the last thing I want. My stomach is already queasy from the anxiety of not knowing what today will bring. I’m not sure I can stand one more hour of pretending to be busy, or filing every property we have yet again.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me how my weekend was?’ Dom says, pouting. He’s desperate to get to the juicy stuff – his own dirty-stop-out exploits.

  ‘How was your weekend, Dom?’ I enquire obediently.

  Dom likes to tell me about his fictitious conquests every Monday morning and usually I try to ignore him. Because I’ve nothing urgent to get to immediately, though, I’m willing to indulge him for a bit now. I could do with cheering up and a story about one of his highly unlikely liaisons may just work.

  ‘Well,’ he slides closer, ‘you’re not the only one who had a dirty weekend, if you know what I mean.’ He puffs out his chest. ‘I’m pretty whacked myself.’

  ‘Really?’ I say, trying to look totally disinterested.

  ‘Yeah.’ He leans across the desk to tell me more. ‘I met this Australian bird on Saturday night. She was a real goer.’

  ‘Let me guess – she was an air stewardess, right?’ I say.

  ‘Yeah – how did you know that?’ Dom misses the sarcasm in my voice.

  ‘Let me think, Dom. Could it possibly be because almost every woman you allegedly sleep with is an air stewardess?’

  He grins at me, delighted with himself. He firmly believes he’s a legend – I blame his mother for inflating his ego.

  ‘The trolley-dollies love me, Maggie – what can I say? Maybe it’s because I take them to amazing heights – gettit?’ He roars with laughter at his tried a
nd trusted joke.

  God bless him, but Dom also thinks he’s some sort of comedian. He reckons he could give Graham Norton a run for his money if he really wanted to.

  ‘Go on,’ I sigh.

  ‘Oh, OK.’ He looks disappointed by my neutral reaction to what he thinks is his brilliant wit. But he recovers pretty quickly. ‘So, anyway, we’re in bed and you’ll never guess what she asked me.’

  He grins broadly at me again, and I try not to grin back. I don’t want to encourage him too much, even if I am just a teeny bit interested. His tales, although completely fabricated, are usually hilarious. Not that I would ever tell him so, of course.

  ‘Let me see … Did she want you to go Down Under?’

  ‘Eh?’ He misses my joke and I decide not to attempt to explain it to him.

  ‘I don’t know what she asked you,’ I say. ‘Do tell me.’

  ‘OK. Well, she only asked me to pretend to be Crocodile Dundee!’

  ‘Crocodile Dundee?’

  ‘Yeah. Like, the movie? You know – he lives in the outback and wrestles wild crocodiles?’

  ‘Yeah, I remember that movie.’ God, how does he make this stuff up?

  ‘So, she has this hat, right? You know, like Crocodile Dundee wears?’

  ‘A wallaby hat?’

  ‘That’s the one!’ He beams. ‘So I put that on and I start to feel the part, you know?’

  ‘Not really, but go on.’

  The thought of Dom wearing a wallaby hat and nothing else is pretty disturbing. I try to erase the image from my mind.

  ‘Anyway, I’m there wrestling with a pillow, pretending it’s a man-eating croc.’

  ‘You were pretending a pillow was a man-eating croc?’

  ‘Yeah – I was improvising, you know, to spice things up.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So, there I am, letting the pillow have it – shouting at it and telling it its days were numbered – when this bird goes crazy.’

  ‘She goes crazy?’

  ‘Yeah, she starts moaning and groaning – it was really wild.’

  ‘And then what happened?’ I’m waiting for the punch line. Had a troupe of air stewardesses leaped from the wardrobe and performed safety manoeuvres in the nude, perhaps?

  ‘Well, we did it, of course.’ Dom looks confused.

  ‘So, that’s it? That’s your big story? You pretended to be Crocodile Dundee and you had sex with an air stewardess?’

  ‘Well, yeah.’ He beams at me. ‘Isn’t it fantastic? I can barely walk this morning – she almost freaking killed me!’

  ‘And that’s it?’

  He looks disappointed that I’m not more impressed.

  ‘Yeah, that’s it. Why – what did you do?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ I certainly don’t want to go there.

  ‘Well, obviously you had a much wilder weekend than I did.’ Dom seems devastated by the idea that he’s not the most sexually adventurous male on the planet. He likes to think that he’s King of the Wild Sexual Exploits – it’s why he gets his back waxed every four weeks in Ultimate Wax Off. He denies it, of course – but I know the truth. I’ve caught him coming out of the salon more than once.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ I mutter, fiddling nervously with my computer keyboard.

  ‘No, go on, tell me. Or let me guess …’ He starts to cheer up a bit. ‘Did you play Tarzan and Jane with some dark stranger, maybe?’

  I concentrate on my computer screen.

  ‘Aha!’ Dom jabs the air between us with his index finger. ‘If ever there was a guilty look that’s it! I’ve hit the nail on the head, haven’t I?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ In spite of my best efforts, I feel heat rise to my face. Of course, it’s the one morning I didn’t have time to use the special green concealer – the one that covers broken veins and hides high cheek colour.

  ‘Oh, Maggie, you’re blushing! God, what did you get up to? It must have been X-rated! You didn’t tape it by any chance, did you?’ He sounds positively excited.

  The phone goes and I pick it up gratefully before I have to answer him. ‘Hanly and Company, how can I help you?’ I say, injecting as much enthusiasm into my voice as possible. This may be the only call I get today so it’s vital I sound friendly and approachable. Not that it will matter, of course – the market is dead so sounding friendly and approachable probably won’t make any difference one way or the other.

  ‘This is Rita Hyde-Smythe.’

  The voice on the line is clipped and businesslike and my heart drops to my toes, waving hello to my spasming stomach on the way down. Rita Hyde-Smythe is the greatest bitch in the city, possibly the entire country. She’s been trying to sell her hideous mansion for months now, to no avail, and to say she’s not happy about it is a serious understatement. It was built at the height of the Celtic Tiger and is the most repulsive display of ostentatious wealth I’ve ever seen. And that’s saying something because there’s a lot of temples to bad taste out there.

  Rita’s nine bathrooms are decked out with gold-plated taps, she has hand-cut marble work surfaces in her one-off custom-designed kitchen and, as she likes to remind me every time we speak, there are solid mahogany floors throughout. Dom now calls her Solid Mahogany Hyde-Smythe, among other things.

  Rita paid a snotty interior designer a vulgar amount of money to achieve what she believes is the ultimate in luxury, but the trouble is that all this ‘glamour’ has failed to attract even one bid from the buying public. There have been viewings, but the opulent interiors coupled with the enormous price tag have failed to attract even one offer. Rita feels this is all my fault, and she’s not afraid to tell me so. She calls me frequently to berate me because she believes I haven’t arranged enough viewings. I haven’t marketed her ugly mansion properly. I haven’t followed up potential buyers effectively. The sole reason her house is still on the market is apparently due to my incompetence and nothing to do with the fact that her taste in furnishings is horrific and the house is overpriced by at least half a million euro. If Rita had her way, I would be traipsing up and down the street with a sandwich board strapped to my back, advertising her property twenty-four hours a day. Even then she probably wouldn’t be happy because Rita is a breed of Celtic cub who just doesn’t understand why she can’t get what she wants – she always has before.

  I silently curse myself for being so eager to answer this call. Why didn’t I let Dom take it? He’s much better at handling Rita than I am – mostly because she falls for his charm every single time. What she doesn’t know is that while he’s sweet-talking her and reassuring her that her exquisite property will be sold very soon indeed, he is also sticking his fingers down his throat and making vomit gestures to me.

  ‘Good morning, Rita,’ I say, trying to sound professional.

  ‘Is that Mary?’

  ‘Maggie,’ I correct her.

  Rita never gets my name right. I know she does it on purpose to wrong-foot me.

  ‘Have we had any enquiries about River House?’ she asks coldly, getting straight to the point. Rita doesn’t do pleasantries. She also likes to talk in the ‘royal we’ – as in, ‘we haven’t been trying hard enough’ or ‘we need to do better’.

  ‘Let me double check for you, Rita,’ I reply, as politely as I can. ‘I’ll pull out the file. Just give me a second.’ I put her on hold before she can protest and try to think.

  I’m playing for time. I know full well that there hasn’t been a single enquiry since we last spoke before the weekend. Rita knows that too, because if there had been even a glimmer of hope I would have called and told her straight away. I wonder if now is the time to take the bull by the horns, insist she pare back on the lavish interiors and slash the asking price. We might have a few bites then. And we have to do something about the name too, that’s critical: even though it’s called River House, her stately pile is nowhere near a river. The nearest water – a paltry stream that dries up in summer – is at least ten miles away, so
mething that the handful of prospective buyers who have viewed the property in the past few months have felt enormously aggrieved about. The only reason it’s called River House is because Rita thought it sounded grand. She even had a limestone slab specially hand carved with the name and placed at her customized electric gates.

  I wish I had the courage to say all this to Rita but I know if I do she’ll hit the roof – again – and I’m really not in the mood to listen to her histrionics this morning. It’s not as if she really needs to sell the property anyway: she inherited millions from her uncle when he died so she doesn’t even have a mortgage. She’s in a much better position than some of the other vendors desperate to get rid of houses they can no longer afford. Maybe if I try to tell her delicately – drop just a few hints – she might react better.

  I flip the file open and immediately spot a Post-it note at the top of the page. I can hardly believe it – it looks like Dom took a call about the property on Friday when I was out. His scrawl is barely legible, so I can’t make out what it says, but my heart leaps with hope. Maybe things are looking up. Maybe someone wants to view it. Dom is on the other line and I can’t risk keeping Rita on hold for much longer – I have no time to quiz him about the query. I’ll have to bluff, tell her there’s been an enquiry and get the details from Dom later.

  ‘Rita?’ I depress the hold button.

  ‘Yes, I’m waiting. I must say I don’t care too much for being put on hold. If you were a true professional you’d know the exact state of affairs regarding River House without having to consult any file.’

  I resist the urge to slam down the phone on her. She really is a battleaxe.

  ‘It seems there’s been some interest in the property,’ I go on, willing myself not to snarl. ‘According to the file, we received a call about it on Friday.’

  ‘Really?’ Rita perks up. ‘Why didn’t you contact me immediately? I should have been informed!’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know about it. I just need to talk to –’

  Before I can finish, she interrupts me rudely: ‘I don’t want to listen to any of your excuses, Mary. I am paying you to handle all River House affairs, am I not? This breakdown in communication is most unsatisfactory.’ Her voice is icy.