Eoin Doherty and The Fixers

By Pauline Hall

“Chance, choice, change. Life is played out in that space. Start with any one of these words, and you bring in the other two.”
TV producer, Eoin Doherty, returns to Dublin from London in the early 2000s with his career in freefall. He has one opportunity to salvage his career: to sell his idea for a prime-time reality TV show to an unsuspecting nation.
A chance encounter with showbiz psychologist Maggie Vernon leads to her becoming the co-creator of his show and, soon, his lover.
In Eoin’s eyes, The Fixers is ‘just a little women makeover thing’ - four troubled Irish women being coached on TV to emerge into a new personal and financial independence - but it’s a new direction for Irish television, and one that he hopes will open the door into the groundbreaking TV work he really wants to do.
Maggie also has a professional and personal interest in human reinvention and renewal, but to her, The Fixers becomes a chance not just to dig up the past of the show’s participants, but her own, and ultimately for her to take a very public revenge.
A journey into the culture of instant celebrity, Eoin Doherty and The Fixers explores the limits of human reinvention and the inescapable shadows of our past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pauline Hall
• Release date: Sep 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370653423

Pauline Hall

Pauline Hall was born in Dublin, Ireland. She spent periods of time in France, Italy, Spain and the United States before returning home to live in Ireland permanently. Having originally worked in the Irish public service, she now writes full-time, both fiction and poetry. Her stay in a manor house deep in Picardy, France in the late 1950s, followed by a period at an Ivy League college in the USA in the 1960s, was the spur to the writing of her first novel, a Bildungsroman, ‘Grounds’, published by Brandon Books in 1983. Her poems have been published in Cyphers, Stony Thursday, The Mews and Encounters. She was shortlisted for the Rattlebag Poetry Slam on RTÉ Radio One in 2004 and for the Poetry Ireland Introduction series in 2009. In 2012 and 2014, she was one of the twelve Irish fiction writers selected to participate in the Arts Council of Ireland's Writers’ Workshops programme. She is an active member of Dublin’s Airfield Writers’ Group and has done readings at the Irish Writers Centre, and at the Books Upstairs literary cafe in Dublin. In 2013, she published ‘The Cream of the Milk’, an illustrated broadsheet of clerihews (a form of short comic verse) on famous and infamous Irish women. In 2016, she was one of a select group of poets invited to a workshop with Paul Muldoon, Poet In Residence at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in Ireland. Her most recent publications include the novel ‘Eoin Doherty and The Fixers’ (2016), the guidebook ‘Rathmines and the Rising People and Places’ (2016), and a series of articles on fictional treatment of the Easter Rising for the Dublin Review of Books (2015-16). She has contributed to the Irish Times and The Dubliner and has reviewed Irish fiction for the English/Spanish online journal Estudios Irlandeses. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, she worked as a lecturer, consultant and manager. She edited the ‘Network Directory of Women in Management’ (1989) and co-wrote (with Hilary Maher) ‘Agents of Change, a Managers’ Guide to Planning and Leading Change Projects (Oaktree Press 1991) and several distance-learning packages on managing change and projects. Her knowledge of the change process, also on a personal and human level as part of a women’s group, is reflected in her poetry and fiction.

Book preview

SEVILLE

1

Since I came here, I haven’t owned a television. Nor have I watched it, though I can’t easily dodge snatches of game shows or news drifting up from the bars below, as the drinkers wait for a Deportivo or Real Madrid match. Signature tunes and ad breaks drive me out into the night, shaking, to walk for miles to unfamiliar and distant barrios. Otherwise, no sleep for me.

How I used to despise Spanish TV: deeply stupid, sexist, ageist, racist, dumb entertainment, not like the work we did. We preened ourselves on being pioneers. We were giving a voice to the silenced, tackling real-life issues, lighting up dark areas of Irish life. What bullshit.

I took a long walk that night. Just as I reached my apartment the phone was ringing.

The front door stuck as usual, but I managed to grab the phone in time. Gerard. ‘So, you’re still over there?’

‘Obviously.’

‘Eoin, I’ve just got rid of a reporter from my doorstep. Charming, on a Sunday afternoon. The bastard nearly got into the house. It was Nicholas who opened the door.’

Nicholas; my godson, Gerard’s youngest kid.

‘Was he all right afterwards?’

‘It took a while.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. That was the most parroted word, from the start. As Maggie used to say, ‘How does an apology make any difference?’

Everyone turned out to be sorry: the fixers, the heads at the TV station, all the chatterers.

‘What was he looking for?’

Gerard sighed. ‘For information about you, of course. A persistent bugger. Quizzing Nicholas, trying to catch him out – Has your uncle been in touch? When exactly did you last see him? What about Maggie? What is Eoin planning? Is he returning to Ireland? – I wish I’d got my hands on him.’

As Gerard talked, I was seeing with the usual surprise, how the Dublin Mountains seem to grow at the end of his quiet cul de sac. And how the deep gravel sounded when I walked away the last day. Here, in Andalusia, the darkness had come with an abrupt switch, but I knew all about the slow retreat of light from an Irish sky.

Of course, if Gerard’s neighbours saw a strange car, a conversation on the doorstep, someone would say, ‘Oh, yes, it’s just a year now, isn’t it? Amazing how quickly the time went.’

‘Sorry,’ I said again. ‘I read the interviews: not much there: none of the women said anything new. The media is like a dog with a bone, still trying to suck out non-existent juice.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong, Eoin. There’s still lots of juice.’

Gerard doesn’t let me away with anything, nowadays.

‘Good on Breege, she didn’t give them an interview,’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘The oldest woman, used to be a nun, remember?’

In the silence, I could hear kids’ noise from behind him. I guessed the French doors were open on to the garden, and he had just finished bustling there: pruning or something.

‘No’, he said, ‘no, I don’t. How are you managing, anyway?’

‘Well, I have my routine. Private classes. An early one at the airport, a late one at the Town Hall, some hours at the Institute in the middle of the day. My Spanish is improving, too. Honestly, I’m getting by.’

He said nothing.

‘If teaching English was good enough for James Joyce, it’s good enough for me.’

‘Very funny, Eoin.’

I told him how the Institute had come to take me on as Profesor de Ingles, mostly because I showed up at the right moment. That’s a pattern in my life. Someone had just walked out and there I was with my English degree and my cream linen jacket.

He laughed, then asked, in his lawyer’s voice, ‘What brought you to Seville anyway? Was it their penitential antics? Did you want to put on a pointy hood and walk in the Semana Santa procession?’

‘Far from it. That kind of creepy stuff triggers my inner Protestant. Anyway, you’ve got the wrong image of this city, based on one week of the year. Mostly, it’s full of alegria.’

‘Of what?’

‘Joy and pleasure.’

Gerard was puzzled by the life I was leading here – modest and slightly old-fashioned. But he was wrapped up in Ireland, mindful mainly of Irish news.

‘Damian O’Carroll marked the first anniversary, too. He was ignoring the subject for while. Now he wants journalists and lawmakers and clergy to treat the whole episode as a warning to our culture. He says it’s still haunting us. We’ve had questions in the Dáil, and he looks forward to novels, exposes, theses. A hangnail, he calls it.’

‘I wonder how that guy filled his column before we made our show. Still, I have to say he has a point, and a hangnail is good, very good.’

I stood, holding the receiver, even after the dial tone started. ‘A hangnail,’ I said out loud to the blinds lowered against the breathless air of the narrow street. It’s a street that would be called típico de españa: a long whitewashed wall with flowering creeper tumbling over the top. The flat itself is tiny, a bedroom whose door strikes against the bed, a hall door with no hall, but opening abruptly into the living room, and a galley kitchen where the sink is covered with a board and the taps are so close to the wall it’s a struggle to turn them on. I keep the sink, the draining board, the taps and the worktop very clean. Despite the shortage of space, I never open the cupboard under the sink. Once was enough. The cockroaches are of heroic size. Las Cucharachas: sounds like a Latin American group. I eat out, mostly, to leave the rickety table free to work on my book.

Impossible to stay there, so I headed out again, drumming along by the river wall, to the partially decrepit, yet oddly wholesome quarter around the Alameda of Hercules. There’s something almost innocent about the red light trade here. I stopped in a bar where I watched a prostitute deposit her kid on a bar stool while she went outside. The drinkers bought him bocadillos and Fanta. I guessed he was about the same age as Nicholas.

The squid was chewy and the wine harsh, but my spirits lifted as I mused on how I would stir things up at home. Next time someone asked Gerard about my whereabouts, he could say that I had become a Buddhist monk or else a mercenary in Africa. I’d let him pick which.

Back through Calle Sierpes. One shop window displayed nothing but a pair of long crimson gloves, the leather stretched yet faintly crinkled. Behind them, a black and gold enamel crucifix. The run–up to Semana Santa. Maggie.

I spewed, leaving the squid and the wine, the lot, in the entrance to an alley.

DUBLIN

2

The birth of our TV show, The Fixers, came about in the same way as my job as Profesor de Ingles. Another brush with chance. Maggie always linked those three words: chance, choice and change. It was one of the mantras from her books, and like everything she said when we were cooking up The Fixers, it seemed full of condensed wisdom, as if she was a Zen artist who could move freely between those three points.

How do I begin? With an encounter. Where encounters are concerned, there are coincidences, and there are intuitions: both were in play on that rainy May morning in Dublin nearly two years ago. I ought to have been at the office, proving my worth by getting to grips with my new project, a project that didn’t make my heart sing. Yet perversely, with a deadline looming, I had to mooch. Telling myself that I’d take a little time to think, I detoured into the Burlington Hotel.

In the lobby stood a life-size cardboard cut-out of a woman in a black dress alongside an invitation to Meet Famous Australian Psychologist and Author, Doctor Maggie Vernon. Even in that ridiculous format, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Without quite knowing why, I went over and stood beside the cardboard her – taking in her warrior bearing that somehow matched the soft fall of her dress, the loops of her gold chain. Breakfast Seminar, the sign beside her declared, Lavender Room.

I moved slowly along the corridor as if I wasn’t really heading towards the Lavender Room, merely ended up there, just as the door happened to open. The breakfast seminar had finished and well-turned-out women were chatting as they left. The room was all oak wainscotting, oatmeal carpet and Celtic motifs in the fabric panels behind the dais, where Maggie was surrounded by women clutching books. When she leaned over to sign an offered page, the sharp razor cut of her hair shadowed her cheek. I heard her big laugh as she touched the shoulder of a woman whose three books she had just signed. I was almost sorry when she suddenly spotted me, because then I had to move. I would have been quite happy to stay watching.

‘Well, hello, do come in,’ she called, as the whole queue looked towards me. ‘There’s only cold tea and croissant crumbs, I’m afraid, but you’ll have to take a book now that you’re here.’

The title, Up and Away, didn’t match the cool cover design of geometric blocks, a bit like a Mondrian. As she heard my name, she laughed. ‘E-o-i-n, the smart spelling... Your surname?’ Then, looking up from the page where she had written with steep diagonal strokes, ‘For Eoin Doherty, on the morning he gate crashed my seminar’, she held my eyes.

‘What’s your book about?’ I asked.

‘I’d love to tell you, but we’d need a little time.’

‘I’m in no hurry. How about when you’ve finished with this lot?’ I gestured to the queue of fans. ‘It seems you’ve done enough work today already.’

She laughed. ‘What brings you here?’

‘Coffee and deep thought,’ I said. ‘No, if I’m being honest, coffee and a moan.’

‘Have you got anyone to listen?’

‘Not as yet. I may have to make do with myself.’

‘No,’ she said, laughing again. ‘That won’t work. Let’s take care of the coffee, anyway. I might entertain the moan also, but I’m not promising.’

In the lobby, we took a corner table. I sat with my back to the wall. Behind her, the traffic of the lobby moved inside the big windows. The shrubs around the car park were bowed and soaking.

‘So are you going to let me hear a quick moan?’ she asked, turning to look for a waitress. I studied her ornate gold rings, the matte black dress, the Egyptian profile.

Though I usually held my troubles close, I felt oddly comfortable outlining the shaky state of my career. The UK debacle. Her gaze was as clear as a boy’s, almost unsettling.

‘You poor thing: now you’re back in Ireland, where’s the win for you?’

‘Get in quickly with a new little show that I have in mind, deliver it without any problems, and move on. I need a foothold here. I’m fucked in the UK. I’m afraid I’ve missed the boat.’

‘Well, have you or haven’t you?’

‘It can easily happen, in our business.’

‘In any business,’ she said. ‘Do go on.’

I went on. I had to. She was in front of me. ‘I’m back in Ireland only because I cost the UK production company a shedload of money. They had to settle out of court with a hotel that claimed we libelled them, because there was an identifying sign in one of the shots.’

‘So?’

‘The point of the show was to portray a rubbish hotel, so they sued. Dangerous business, TV.’

‘Now, let me guess, you’ve come back to Ireland to live it down...’

‘I’ve come back to Ireland to prove myself professionally,’ I insisted.

‘Let’s put it in concrete terms. That means you’ve a chance. You’ve landed some sort of show?’

‘I’ve a chance to get a contract, but only one chance: The newest player into the market here - still quite a small outfit - need some quick wins, and I got tipped off that they are in the market for a short series on women’s journeys. If I can land the gig, a production company here is bound to give me another start.’

‘Say a bit more about women’s journeys,’ she said.

‘Real-life heroines, that sort of stuff. No great shakes.’

‘You reckon it’s kind of harmless, just a filler, then?’

‘More or less. Ho-hum.’

‘As it happens,’ she said, ‘I’ve been on TV panel discussions at home, based on my agony aunt column.’

‘It dealt with?’

‘Women’s stories, full of hidden sadness, horrible family secrets. Not at all harmless. Really potent. You're way off the mark about ho-hum.’

‘You would say that wouldn’t you? Lookit, my take on this show is that it’ll get me in the door, could put me in line for others, significant stuff. And I need to bring in some money.’

By the time the waitress arrived with a big silver pot, I had forgotten all about the coffee. She started setting out our cups and balancing sugar tongs on the side of the bowl, till I waved her away.

‘Sure. Will you tell me a bit about your concept?’

I hesitated, moved to pour coffee.

‘It’s still ungelled.’

‘Eoin, I can keep a secret, if that’s your worry. At this stage, I don’t even know anyone in this town, for God’s sake. Do you mind? After a morning of talking about me, it would be nice to hear about something different.’

I didn’t mind. I would have made a pitch about serialising Peig Sayers if it would keep her beside me.

‘I think best in pictures,’ I said.

‘But you’ve nothing to draw with,’ she smiled, as from her huge soft red bag she pulled out a set of coloured pens and a chunky notebook. She laid it between us, and I began to sketch.

‘These are, say, four women and this is their TV journey,’ I said, as I traced a path for each colour, at different slopes, some rising higher and falling more sharply, all flattening out to lead off the page. Then I divided the paths with vertical black lines, labelled as Programme 1–7. We leaned over the page together. Putting on the glasses she had worn at the book signing, she looked full at me.

‘Well, Eoin Doherty, you’re lucky you met me today.’

I picked up her book with the Mondrian-esque cover.

‘Will this help me?’

She took it from me, and laid it beside her cup.

‘Now that you’ve bought it, of course. It’ll become your bible, and everything will be wonderful. But I’d rather talk more about your show. It could be a sweet number.’

‘You tell me how.’

She dropped a sugar cube into her coffee and raised the cup.

‘Here’s to your show, Eoin. Get it right; it’ll be a hit. And authentic.’

I wanted to believe her. The texture of her dress was one with the colour; definitely black, yet soft and light, a black I had never seen before.

Putting down her cup, she told me, ‘After my husband died last year I decided I’d take a trip we had long planned together, to revisit my childhood homeland – here, Ireland,’ she looked away. ‘And do some sailing here at the same time. My agent landed me today’s breakfast gig. He never misses a chance to unload a few books, wherever I am.’

‘I envy you. It sounds like you’re on the cusp of big success.’

‘Yes and no. Just now, I’m still tagged with the businesswomen and professional schtick. But I’m ready to move on. What I’m going to do next is to facilitate change for ordinary women, like battered and deserted wives, immigrant women, farmers’ wives from the outback and so on. The next move is to champion Native Australian women, when I put my mind to negotiating the obstacles.’

I started to speak, but she waved her hand to silence me.

‘Let's get back to Ireland. Because you’re correct, now that you’ve had shows that dredged up the country’s hidden distresses – yes, even in Australia we’ve heard how the media is changing Ireland – it’s time for a deeper look at just a few stories, from self-selected women, not anonymous, but proud to be launched and speeded on their journey in full view. You’ll get the whole country talking again: not about victims this time, but survivors, explorers. Strong women. And I feel it, that Irish women are really strong.’

She took four white sugar cubes from the bowl and lined them up on the table.

‘Now, look, these are your volunteers, your participants. They’re really all the same, but look how each one wants to be bigger.’

She moved a second lump on to each one in turn.

I was enjoying how her hands moved around the table, her sharp-cut bob ended just below her ear.

‘Let’s see now...’ She chose four brown sugar cubes. ‘These can be the experts, the fixers. They probably should be two cubes high, though each will also be trying to tower over the others, and maybe one will succeed.’

She put a second cube on each of these, then a third cube on one.

‘Do you know what?’ I said. ‘There’s the show. There on the table. You’re right. We get the viewers rooting for the white sugars and yet entertained, exasperated and even excited by the brown sugars.’

‘Well, don’t get carried away yet. Let’s think some more about it. Each of your women will have her champions. They’ll be popular with different sections of the audience. You monitor their progress: who rises higher, who plateaus out and who drops back towards the baseline. Ditto for your experts. Now, tell me, how does it work, the development of a new TV show?’

‘Well, if my pitch goes down OK, I’ll be assigned to work with a Development Exec, probably Andrea O’Dwyer. She’s a young one, new to me, I’d say not long out of college. The word is she’s on the rise in the Light Entertainment Department. Together we’ll kick around everything about the show, add and subtract. If she approves it, then we meet with Brendan Devine, Head of Light Entertainment. He’s the Commissioning Editor. Also in charge of budgets. I’d have to pitch him the improved version – with Andrea’s help. He’d be a hard sell for me alone, at the moment. But don’t quote me on that,’ I added hastily. ‘But lookit, the participants will cost less and need less than actors. And they’re not just like the audience: they are the audience. The low cost of making the show will be on my side.’

She held my eyes, saying nothing. For a moment, I lost my thread: there was so much to notice, like how the blue-brown shadows of her upper lids led into her dark blue eyes.

I turned back to the notebook, drew a black arrow at the top of each vertical column.

‘These are the experts, the brown sugars. What was it you called them? The fixers? We’ve had them on some shows. They burst into people’s lives mostly to sort out neglected gardens or harangue them about diets. There’s an arc to each show, a satisfying one. Every programme ends with lots of contrived drama and questions, like, Will the makeover be done in time? or, It looks good now, but is this really what she wants? The participants are supposed to baulk a bit, but they’ll follow the advice, and it always works. I’m suggesting the fairy godparents to our Cinderellas should be a financial adviser, a fitness coach, a stylist, and a psychologist.’

‘More heavyweight. You need a three cube expert.’

She took the black pen off me and, at the top of the page, she drew a triangle, labelling the three sides Change-Choice-Chance. She touched each corner. ‘Life is played out in that space, Eoin. Start with any one of these words, and you bring in the other two.’

Smiling, she wrote something else on the page tore it out, and handed it to me. The paper felt like fine fabric as my fingertips found its nubbled texture. Expensive, as only handmade paper can be. Under the diagrams was a telephone number.

‘Do you know what my favourite quote is?’ Maggie asked, sweeping the pens into her bag and getting up to leave.

‘Who dares wins?’ I said, laughing.

‘The SAS. Not bad, but I prefer George Bernard Shaw: The thing is not to find yourself, but to invent yourself.’

I watched her elastic stride as she crossed the lobby. Held briefly in the revolving doors she looked back at me. The cardboard cut-out was gone. I was sorry. I’d have liked to go over to it, put my arm around