Page 4 of Love Unlocked

He punches the button for the elevator and when it doesn’t come to the ground floor fast enough he abandons it and takes the stairs in twos, using the rage-fuelled adrenaline that’s coursing through his body. He wants to shout and roar. He wants to punch the walls. He wants to tear Walter to shreds.

His best friend. His fiancée! His best friend and his fiancée.

Al had felt sorry for Walter, throughout their lives. Al had lived with him since college, had known him since childhood. He’d trusted him with everything. Walter knew Al’s first crushes, his first kiss, his first time having sex, they’d drunk together, puked together, and been in detention together. They’d partied in Ibiza, and had suffered sunstroke working on beach sunbeds in Miami together for a summer. Al had held Tommy Brown down while Walter punched him after calling Walter’s mam a prostitute, who was actually a book-keeper and had businessmen visiting the house. How he’d like to hold Walter down now and throttle him.

The run upstairs does nothing to quell his anger. He feels like making an announcement in the open-plan office. Love is a con! Walter is a cock!

He’d even gotten Walter a job right here at Bridgespan. They needed an in-house ecologist. Al had pushed for Walter, prepped Walter for the interview and they’d hired him. Because of Al, Walter had a proper paying job instead of floating as an assistant ecologist for a non-profit eel organisation. Walter is now making just as much as Al is.

He had legitimised Walter, dragged him into adulthood. He’d helped him change his stupid Oasis haircut that even Oasis stopped wearing and he lost the Converse and T-shirts. He wears suits now, he has his own office. And now Al is forced to see him every day. How much Al wants to flatten Walter’s nose against his face.

Every morning Walter gets out of the bed that Al shared with his fiancée, that he bought with his fiancée, in a house that Al shared with his fiancée and was kicked out of, and goes to his job that Al got for him.

‘What?’ he snaps aggressively, removing his headphones as his office assistant Natasha waves her pink fluorescent fingernails across his face.

Natasha, twenty-four years old, amateur boxer, looks like she’s stepped out of a fashion magazine. She has a total of thirty-one piercings – according to her special skills section in her CV – she is petite at five feet tall, she is more metal than skin. She wears a blunt blonde haircut with strips of pink, with pink train tracks, and usually one or all items of her clothing are pink. She is refreshing, and deserved the job, but he’ll admit, sometimes intimidates him because nothing intimidates her and, despite their height difference, she could probably knock him out in seconds.

‘That music is so loud, Al, I could hear the song from here.’

‘I like it like that,’ he says sniffing, feeling self-conscious that he played it multiple times on repeat in the crammed tram.

‘It can’t be good for you.’

Love isn’t good for you.

He removes his bag and coat and enters his office. Everybody else is open-plan but the offices around the edge of the building are private.

‘Helen Hanratty is here.’

‘I don’t know who Helen Hanratty is,’ he says, sitting down. His office looks out over Dublin’s River Liffey in the centre of the city. All around him a new Dublin has emerged from the docklands, glass buildings for living and working in.

As head of bridge maintenance in Leinster, he feels pleased that he can see at least most of the bridges over the River Liffey. Al is closest to the newest bridge in town, the Samuel Beckett Bridge, named after the Dublin-born writer, a cable-stayed swing bridge that joins Sir Rogerson Quay to Guild Street and North Wall Quay. The shape of its spar and cables evokes the image of a harp on its side. At night the strings are lit up and move, sometimes acting as a screen for animation. There are over twenty bridges spanning the River Liffey and instead of doing the twelve pubs of Christmas, which entails visiting each of twelve pubs on Christmas Eve and having a pint in each, he and Walter had attempted the bridges of Christmas. Loaded down with cans in their bags they’d embarked on their adventure. He couldn’t remember how far they’d gotten but he’d woken up at home, with an empty bag of cans, sharing a bed with Walter, with a fuming Tara who would barely look him in the eye the next

morning.

‘You do know Helen Hanratty,’ Natasha says, snapping him back to the room. ‘She’s from the No Locks Association. She’s been contacting you since before Christmas.’

Before Christmas. Before his life crashed and burned.

‘Ahh, my friend Helen. They’re not an official association. She’s just one nosy local with an equally nosy friend.’

‘Well now they’re an association.’ Natasha hands him a document showing its creation, signed by Helen Hanratty. ‘They’re in the meeting room.’

‘Who let them in?’

‘Walter. She’s meeting with him about the river water. People throw their padlock keys into the river. Maybe they choke turtles or give fish concussions.’

‘There aren’t any turtles in the River Camac.’

‘Well whatever,’ she says with a shrug.

Al is raging. He had successfully avoided a meeting with this nutter for months and now Walter had gone and granted her a meeting which would give her the illusion of legitimacy. Lovely sweet Walter, unthreatening Walter. Demure third-wheel Walter who makes you feel sorry for him and then stabs you in the back.

He holds back on saying the nasty Walter insults aloud, which takes all of his inner strength. Walter and Al have managed to keep what has happened private. Al had returned to work in the New Year expecting everybody to know everything, for the office to be awash with gossip, but nobody knew that his engagement was off and so, at least at work, his life was unchanged. He would tell them eventually, not that it required an announcement, but he would not outright lie the next time somebody asked him about Tara.

‘Okay. Tell Helen Hanratty that I’ll meet with her for ten minutes.’

‘Great,’ Natasha says happily. ‘Pedro and I have a lock on that bridge, so don’t you dare get rid of it. It’s two padlocks connected, gold, engraved, got our names on them. PG. Pedro García, like the shoe designer. And I’m NK. Natasha Kelly. You better not do anything to our locks,’ she warns him.