One Hundred Names (Special Edition)

anything further to say. She took the chips and left the vinegar-covered card on the counter. At least she had dinner. When she rounded the corner her bike was gone, and so were the kids.
    Kitty stood at the base of the steps that led to her flat and looked up into the darkness, dreading to think what might be waiting for her that evening.
    ‘Kitty? Kitty Logan, is that you?’
    She whirled around, trying to find the source of the voice. A man inside the dry-cleaners was squinting at her, head cocked to one side and then to the other as he tried to figure her out. She took him in: the smart suit, the respectable haircut, the polished shoes, the long face, the strong jaw. The small circular glasses were a new addition, though.
    ‘Richie?’ she asked. ‘Richie Daly?’
    He looked relieved and she knew she was right. She went into the dry-cleaners to meet him, usually a no-no for her as the owner was only ever a moment away from throwing her on the ironing board and steaming her to death.
    ‘I knew that was you!’ he laughed, holding his arms open for Kitty to fall into. She hugged him warmly and then stepped back to study him.
    ‘My God, you look like you but you’re completely different,’ she said, unable to believe her eyes.
    ‘For the better, I hope,’ he said with a grin. ‘The ripped cords and Converse weren’t a good look.’
    ‘And your hair! It’s all gone!’
    ‘I could say the same about you,’ he replied, and her hand immediately went to her bobbed hair, which had always been halfway down her back in college.
    ‘Listen to us – you’d swear we hadn’t met in fifty years,’ she laughed.
    ‘Well, twelve years is a long time.’
    ‘Is it twelve? Scary. So what are you doing here?’
    He signalled his surroundings, ‘Uh … dry-cleaning.’
    ‘Of course.’ She rolled her eyes.
    Her landlord cleared his throat, interrupting their conversation, and looked at them like he wanted to kill them both.
    ‘I live just upstairs, would you like to … I mean, do you want a coffee or something?’ Half-way through her sentence she realised there could be a possible wife and two point four kids waiting in a car outside the dry-cleaners, wondering why Daddy was hugging a strange woman. She looked outside self-consciously.
    ‘A coffee?’ Richie asked, appalled. ‘Forget it, let’s get a proper drink.’
    They went to Smyths pub on Fairview Strand, it was seven o’clock and busy on a Friday. They managed to find a table with two stools, and they shared the chips and caught up on old times.
    ‘So what are you doing?’ Kitty asked after filling him in on her work history since college, leaving out the disastrous Colin Maguire débâcle, of course, and though she was guessing he already knew, as she felt the entire world knew, he was polite enough not to bring it up.
    ‘Me?’ He looked down at his pint. It was his fourth already and Kitty, after her fourth glass of wine, was already feeling woozy. ‘I’m currently writing a book.’
    ‘A book? Wow, Richie, that’s fantastic.’
    ‘It’s funny to hear you call me Richie, you know. They all call me Richard now.’
    ‘Well, of course, any decent self-respecting author wouldn’t settle for anything less. What’s the book about?’
    ‘It’s a novel.’
    ‘That’s exciting.’
    ‘And that’s it,’ he said coyly.
    ‘Ah, come on, you have to tell me more. Is it romance? Historical? Mills & Boon?’
    He laughed. ‘Mills & Boon, definitely Mills & Boon.’
    She was suddenly aware of their closeness, how they’d gone from innocent catching-up to flirting, and more importantly, of how much more handsome he seemed now.
    ‘It’s a crime novel,’ he explained, their heads closer now, their knees touching. ‘I’m about a quarter of the way through. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do but never did. With work and everything it’s hard to find the time to do things for yourself. So I just thought one day, fuck it, Richie, do it. And I did. Or at least I’m trying.’
    ‘Good for you. It takes a lot for people to follow their dreams. You could be the next Susan Boyle,’ she teased.
    ‘What about you? Is
Thirty Minutes
the dream?’
    She looked down at her glass and was surprised to see it was empty again; hadn’t she just started it? Richie signalled for another. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, her head spinning nicely and her tongue feeling oversized. ‘I don’t know what the dream is any more.’
    ‘You don’t like