Further Under the Duvet by Marian Keyes Read Free Book Online

one, fear of public speaking, fear of journalists, fear of causing offence, fear of saying no, fear of looking in the mirror, fear that all the size 36 sandals would be gone before I got to the shops. You know, the
usual
. How to encapsulate it? ‘Sometimes I feel like I can’t cope.’
    With that she took a deep breath and yelped, ‘
You
feel you can’t cope. You’d want to try being me. I’ve not got a day off, not one day for the next month and a half. I’m bookedsolid with readings, back to back, and they’re always asking me to be on TV, they’re making a documentary about me – did I tell you that? – a film crew are going to follow me for a week, then I’ve got the shows in Dublin and I’ll be on telly a lot for that and talking to journalists and being on the radio. I could tell you a thing or two about not being able to cope!’
    She said it with enormous pride. She loved it. She fucking
loved
it. The giddy whirl of being a busy, in-demand medium had gone to her head.
    ‘Book a massage, breathe deeply and spare a thought for me, girl,’ was her advice.
    It was now seven twenty-four. ‘No one else is coming through for you. Bye now. And don’t forget to tell everyone to come to my shows!’
    A couple of months later she came to Dublin to do her live shows and she got a lot of publicity. I saw her on the telly; she’d done a reading for a presenter on a daytime programme and the presenter looked at the camera and intoned solemnly, ‘This woman is amazing. In a world full of con-merchants, I can promise you that she is the real thing.’
    Previously unpublished.

ON THE ROAD

Passport Out of Here
    Many years ago I was living in London and about to visit New York for the first time. My sister had moved there four months previously, and I was going to spend Christmas with her. Three nights before the off I began to pack and when I looked in my ‘official things’ drawer for my passport, there it was – gone! Except it couldn’t be. It had sat in that drawer since I’d last needed it, on a trip to Greece the previous summer. I rummaged through bills and stuff expecting it to appear and when it didn’t I took the entire contents out and systematically went through each item one by one – nada. My mouth went a little dry, my heart-rate increased, but I told myself that it
was
here, I just couldn’t see it – hadn’t my mother always told me that I couldn’t find the water in the river?
    But unless it had gone invisible, it simply Was Not There and with sweaty hands I began to tear my room apart, going through every pocket of every item of clothing in my wardrobe, looking in old rucksacks and handbags, pulling books out of my bookcase, and although I stumbled across a handful of sandy drachmas and half a bag of inexplicably abandoned Maltesers (still edible, quite nice, actually), there was no passport. Then I launched an attack on the rest of the flat and late into the night I finally had to admit the inadmissible: mypassport wasn’t here. At this stage I was almost whimpering with terror; although my ticket to New York had put a huge dent in my meagre finances, it was non-changeable and non-refundable. If I hadn’t a passport in two days’ time I wouldn’t be going.
    I rang my mother in Ireland. There was nothing she could do but, selfish brat that I was, a trouble shared is a trouble doubled, and at least she promised to pray to St Anthony – for those not familiar with the superstitions of Catholicism, the idea is that you pray to St Anthony when you lose stuff and if it turns up you make a donation to the poor box. Under normal circumstances I poured scathing scorn on the notion but right now I was so desperate that I nearly considered doing it myself.
    I went to bed in my bomb-site bedroom but I barely slept and got up again at about 5 a.m., dervishing through the silent flat, looking behind boxes of breakfast cereals, inside video cases and when I arrived at work I was a hollow-eyed