The Woman Who Stole My Life Read Free Page B

Ryan had done some paying work, was probably the happiest person there. I wore a pair of vintage Pucci palazzo pants and a matching tunic that I’d found in the Help the Aged shop and had washed seven times, and my hair was blow-dried into a Farrah flick by a hairdresser pal in exchange for a manicure. ‘You look beautiful,’ Ryan told me. ‘So do you,’ I replied, perky as you please. I meant it too because, let’s face it, suddenly becoming a wage-earner would add lustre to the most ordinary-looking of men. (Not that Ryan was ordinary-looking. If he’d washed his hair more often, he could have been dangerous.) All in all, it was a very happy day.
    Suddenly Ryan had a career. Not the one he’d wanted, no,but one he was very good at. He followed his Studio 54 triumph by going in a different direction – he created a bathroom that was a green-filtered, peaceful, forest-style retreat. Mosaics of trees covered three walls and real ferns climbed the fourth. The window was replaced with green glass and the soundtrack was of birdcalls. For the final reveal to the client Ryan scattered pine cones around the place. (His original plan had been to source a squirrel but, despite Caleb his electrician and Drugi his tiler spending most of a morning shaking nuts and shouting, ‘Here, squirrely!’ in Crone Woods, they weren’t able to catch one.)
    Hot on the heels of the forest bathroom came the project that got Ryan his first magazine coverage – the Jewel Box. It was a wonderland of mirrors, Swarovski tiles and claret-coloured velvet-effect (but water-resistant) wallpaper. The cabinet knobs were Bohemian crystal, the bath was made of silver-flecked glass and a Murano chandelier hung from the ceiling. The soundtrack (Ryan’s music was fast becoming his USP) was the ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ and every time you turned the taps on, a tiny mechanical ballerina rotated gracefully.
    Working with a small, trusted team, Ryan Sweeney became the go-to man for amazing bathrooms. He was imaginative, painstaking and ferociously expensive.
    Life was good. There was the odd hiccup – when Betsy was three months old, I got pregnant with Jeffrey. But, thanks to Ryan’s success, we were able to buy a newly built, three-bedroomed house, big enough for the four of us.
    Time passed. Ryan made money, he made beautiful bathrooms, he made people – mostly women – happy. At the end of every project, Ryan’s client exclaimed, ‘You’re an artist!’ They meant it and Ryan knew it, but he was the wrong sort of artist: he wanted to be Damien Hirst. He wanted tobe famous and notorious, he wanted people on late-night arty-discussion shows to shout at each other about him, he wanted some people to say he was a fake. Well, he didn’t. He wanted everyone to say he was a genius, but the best sort of genius generates controversy so he was prepared to put up with the occasional slagging.
    Nevertheless, all was well until one day in 2010, when a tragedy befell him. Strictly speaking, the tragedy was mine. But artists, even unfulfilled ones, have a habit of making everything about themselves. The tragedy, a long-running one, didn’t bring everyone together, because life isn’t a soap opera. The tragedy ended with Ryan and me splitting up.
    Almost immediately, strange, exciting things began to happen to me – which we’ll get to. All you need to know for now is that Betsy, Jeffrey and I moved to live in New York.
    Ryan stayed in Dublin in the house which we’d bought as an investment in the mid-noughties when everyone in Ireland was tying up their futures in second properties. (I got our original starter home in the divorce. Even when I was living in a ten-room duplex on the Upper West Side, I hung on to it – I never trusted that my new circumstances would last. I was always afraid of boomeranging back to poverty.)
    Ryan had girlfriends – once he’d started washing his hair more regularly, there was no shortage. He had his work, he had