Lifesaving for Beginners

sincere as it could be.
    ‘You busy?’
    She sighs. If there were papers on her desk, there’s a good chance they’re on the floor now.
    Minnie is an accountant. I can’t believe she ended up being an accountant. She could have done any course she wanted. She got eight As in her Leaving Certificate. In those days, the As and Bs weren’t divided up like they are now. But I’d say that if they re-examined her papers, the As would have been A1s. I’m positive. She did her best to mask her smarts, and because she was so good-looking and wild, she mostly got away with it. She joined a small, strictly non-profit theatre troupe and toured with them for a while. It drove her old pair mental, which I think might have been the point. She sometimes acted, sometimes directed, all the while experimenting with the kind of meds you can’t get over the counter, drinking complicated Martinis and judging Battle of the Band competitions up and down the country. I’m not sure how she got that gig. She may have slept with Fiachna Ó Braonáin at one time or other.
    Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that she spent six months doing that. And then she met Maurice, who happened to be an accountant. Just met him in a random sort of a way. In a café, I think. Or a Spar. Somewhere like that. They got to talking, I suppose, and that was it. Accountancy was like an infection that Maurice passed to Minnie. Like German measles. Soon she was covered in it and before you could say tax fecking return, she had herself enrolled in an accountancy course at Trinity College for the following September. It happened so quickly. There was nothing I could do.
    Minnie says some people are born to be accountants. I swear to God, she said that once, and, even though the two of us were most of the way down a bottle of wine, I think she meant every word. She said that if she hadn’t met Maurice and discovered her love of accountancy (and accountants, let’s face it: Maurice is an accountant and she’s cracked about him), then she might have ended up a junkie. Or – knowing her – an A-list actor. She shuddered when she said that, as if she was dead and a junkie, or an A-list actor, was jumping on her grave in heavy boots.
    She couldn’t look at me the morning after she told me that she was cracked about Maurice and had signed up for an accountancy course. Too ashamed, I suppose. We were on holiday together at the time. I told her there were worse things to be but when she asked me to be specific, it took me a while.
    Back then, I was writing the second draft of the first Declan Darker novel and had three publishers interested. That was Minnie’s fault. Read and destroy was the deal. Read the manuscript, destroy the evidence in the bottom of an industrial bin at the industrial estate where her father’s business was. She swore. I should have known better. After she’d read the first draft, she put the whole lot into a brown envelope and used up pretty much an entire week’s cigarette money posting it to Hodder & Stoughton in London. She said Dublin wasn’t big enough for Declan Darker when I asked her why she didn’t send it to an Irish publisher. She also told me that I owed her five pounds and twenty-two pence.
    I kept writing and pretended – to my father and sometimes to my mother, whenever she enquired – that I was attending the private secretarial course that my father had paid a fortune for and which was about all I was fit for, once the Leaving Cert. results came out.
    The publishers found my insistence on a male pseudonym amusing. I know that, because Jeremy said, ‘How amusing.’
    At first, it was just about Mum finding out. Crime fiction was up there with breaking and entering, as far as she was concerned. It was most certainly not an art. It wasn’t even a craft. It was like painting by numbers. She said that once. In a television interview.
    So I told Dad that I’d graduated from my secretarial course with first-class honours – that never happened – and was now gainfully employed as a trainee technical writer for a software company based in Cork. This is a handy job for someone who needs a cover. In fact, be wary of the man you meet on the shady side of a bar on a Thursday night who confesses to being a technical writer. Dodgy as all hell.
    Cork was where I said I was whenever I needed to be somewhere like, for example, London, meeting Brona, or what have you.
    Of course, I always meant to tell them. Someday.