Time Out

by Emma Murray

  Heather is waiting for me outside the nursery door, arms folded, and wearing a look that says, ‘Don’t even think about fucking with me.’ I ignore her and head straight to the staff room where two teenagers masquerading as nursery staff are peering through the keyhole, whispering softly, presumably in an attempt to coax Anna out.

  I close my hand into a fist and knock softly on the door. ‘Anna, it’s Mummy. Turn the key and come on out. I’m taking you out of here and I’m never bringing you back.’

  I turn around and glare at Heather when I say this last bit. Heather may be tough as nails when it comes to threatening parents, but I know her weak spot. Her whole career as nursery manager depends on meeting a certain quota of high-paying customers and if one parent pulls out, her arse is on the line.

  Suddenly, I hear the sound of metal on metal and I shift my attention back to the door. It opens slowly, and there is Anna, her huge eyes looking even bigger than normal, and her cheeks red and muddy with tears. I hold my arms out and she runs into them. For once, Anna and I are on the same side. I pick her up and triumphantly carry her out of shitting Rocking Horses, with the pride of a firefighter carrying a child from a burning building.

  Heather follows me out of the nursery, shouting like a true jobsworth, ‘But your paperwork! You need to fill out paperwork if you are taking her out for good!’

  ‘Fuck the paperwork!’ I cry in return, which makes absolutely no sense as I’ll obviously have to sign something to make it all legal. But right now, I’m not in the mood to be responsible.

  So I keep walking, hugging Anna more closely as I exit Rocking Horses for good, slamming that crappy ham-stringing gate behind me for the last time. It is only when I get home and Anna becomes, well, Anna again, it occurs to me that I have shot myself in the foot, big time. I have a pitch I haven’t started yet and no childcare. Shit.

  After an hour of me trying to persuade Anna to watch her iPad, do some colouring, or play with her dolls – and failing at all three – she finally settles on playing games on my smartphone. I wrestle it off her just long enough to get Bea’s number and call her on the landline. I am too fired up to start work now. I need to get everything that’s happened out of my system, including my row with David.

  ‘And then David compared me to Elsa from Frozen!’ I wail, in full flow.

  ‘Why? Because of your good looks and magical powers?’ Bea jokes.

  ‘No, because he reckons I’m a fucking Ice Queen when it comes to sex.’

  ‘But you’re married with a child,’ Bea shoots back indignantly.

  ‘That’s what I said!’

  If I’m being honest, sex with David has been fairly low on my list of ‘things to do’ lately, or more accurately, ever since Anna came along, but calling me an ‘Ice Queen’ was a low blow all the same.

  ‘Then he had a go at me about not earning enough. Talk about putting the knife in. He told me he couldn’t believe he had married someone who had no assets.’

  There is the sound of a ringing phone in the background.

  ‘Don’t you need to get that?’ I say.

  ‘Nah, they’ll call back,’ she replies, casually.

  Bea is in the office today but has no qualms about picking up the phone for personal calls. One time, she let me drivel on for about five minutes before telling me she was in a meeting with her boss. She is the queen of late starts and early lunches. I have no idea how she gets away with it, but I’d say with her straight talk and a gaze that could slice you in two that they’re all petrified of her.

  ‘So, what did you say when he said that thing about the assets?’ Bea says.

  ‘I pulled up my top, grabbed my tits and said, “THESE ARE MY ASSETS”.’

  ‘Nice,’ Bea responds, admiringly.

  ‘Then I called him a neat freak and told him never to touch my stuff again,’ I continue, getting myself all worked up once more.

  ‘And what did he say to that?’ Bea asks.

  ‘He said that he had every right to do whatever he wanted, given it was HIS name on the mortgage,’ I reply angrily.

  ‘Low blow,’ Bea replies, with just the right amount of sympathy.

  I sniff in response, feeling very sorry for myself.

  ‘Did you say anything to piss him off?’ Bea asks craftily.

  Dammit, she knows me too well.

  ‘Not really,’ I say breezily, hoping she won’t pursue it any further.

  ‘Did the whole Jordan thing come up?’ she says.

  Fuck. The jig is up.

  I sigh. ‘OK, yes, I brought up Jordan.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Saoirse, Jordan was years ago, and nothing even happened between her and David,’ she says, sounding exasperated.

  ‘So he says,’ I reply petulantly.

  Now Bea sighs.

  A wave of fatigue rushes over me. I’m so damned tired.

  ‘And to top it all off, I have just liberated Anna from Rocking Horses,’ I continue, wearily.

  I spend some time filling Bea in and, as usual, she says just the right thing. She tells me that Anna is better off without that ‘shithole’ nursery anyway, and that she’s sure Heather is only a nursery manager because the position for ‘prison executioner’ has already been filled. She finishes with, ‘You were totally right to get her out of there.’

  All the Rocking Horses talk reminds me of Nell and the social fail. I fill Bea in and she says, ‘Remind me, which one is Nell? The one who wants to sell her child on eBay or the one who takes it up the arse?’

  This is what I love about Bea: she has never met any of the nursery mums, yet she remembers all the right details about them.

  ‘The one who takes it up the arse,’ I reply.

  Bea pauses for a moment. ‘You’d expect her to be a bit less uptight under the circumstances,’ she says thoughtfully.

  I burst out laughing, and the tightness in my chest starts to relax, only to be replaced by an overwhelming feeling of crashing exhaustion.

  ‘I need a break, Bea,’ I say quietly, rubbing my eyes. ‘From David.’

  ‘And from Anna,’ Bea adds.

  I take a deep breath to stop my voice from cracking. The truth is that I feel trapped – suffocated by Anna’s hourly meltdowns and David’s insufferable fussiness. At least once a day I feel the need to just get away from the pair of them, and the only thing stopping me is guilt. When I trust myself to speak again, I say in a forced jocular tone, ‘Chance would be a fine thing!’

  ‘Well, actually…’ Bea says in her ‘plotting’ voice, ‘why don’t you get away? It’s summer. You’re not paying for nursery any more. Why don’t you stay at The Cube for a week or two to get some space and focus on writing the pitch?’

  ‘What the fuck is The Cube?’ I say.

  ‘Oh, it’s just this summer house in Wexford that my mother bought years ago. Haven’t I mentioned it before?’

  I sigh. This is typical Bea. This sort of thing happens all the time. It’s like she has this whole other life that she thinks she has told me about but hasn’t. I only found out a couple of years ago that her mother was the famous health nut Arianna Wakefield; and to this day, she has never told me who Harry’s father is. Now here she is dropping in the fact that she has some almost certainly fabulous summer home in Ireland.

  With some effort to keep the weariness out of my voice, I say, ‘Well, tell me about this house then.’

  ‘It’s all rugged cliffs and crashing waves. Very romantic. Real Maeve Binchy stuff. My mother uses it as a retreat when she’s writing her “cookbooks”.’

  I can almost see her doing the air quotes.

  ‘Wow, it sounds amazing,’ I say wistfully. ‘But I can’t, much as I’d love to. Who would look after Anna?’

  ‘That’s the easy part. Maria will take her when David’s at work. Harry will love having his partner in crime around for the day.’

  I think about this for a minute, a glimmer of hope rising. Anna adores Harry’s nanny, Maria, as much as she adores Harry. A
week or two, though. It seems an awfully long time.

  ‘I can’t leave Anna,’ I say, feeling defeated. ‘Not only have I never left her before, but she fucking hates David at the moment.’

  ‘Well, then, a bit of time together will be good for them,’ Bea says. ‘Besides, they will have a better chance of bonding without you being there.’

  Deep down, I know she’s right. Anna wants me and only me at the moment; maybe if I’m out of the picture she will start to lean on her dad a bit more.

  ‘Listen, Saoirse, you need some time to yourself, and some space from David. I bumped into him the other day and he was telling me how much pressure he is under at work. Maybe a break from each other is a good thing: you can focus on your work without the extra strain of his neat-freak side, and he can focus on getting this bloody deadline out of the way in relative peace.’

  I sigh. Bea has always been good about understanding David’s ‘quirks’ when he is in stress mode. Not for the first time, I am grateful that she is the type of friend who sees arguments from both sides. Despite my frustrations with David, I don’t want to hear anyone else slagging him off – that’s my job and mine alone.

  Even though I know she’s right, the anxiety keeps on rising. Going away by myself seems utterly out of reach. I can just hear the Organics now, ‘How could you leave your four-year-old daughter for a couple of weeks? How selfish!’

  ‘It would be different if it was just a day or two,’ I mumble. ‘But a week or two…’

  Then something else occurs to me. ‘My mother!’ I say.

  ‘What about her?’ Bea says, puzzled.

  ‘Even if I did take you up on your offer, I can’t go back to Ireland and not stay with her – she’ll murder me.’

  ‘Well, don’t tell her,’ Bea says practically.

  ‘I’m sure she has my phone tracked,’ I say in dismay. ‘She’ll know exactly where I am.’

  I must be the only forty-year-old whose mammy tracks them on Google maps.

  ‘So, tell her you’re going to Wexford and ask her to spend a couple of days with you.’

  Oh, that’s good, I think. My mother would love the idea of getting away to the country and nosing around someone else’s fabulous house. After Bea spends a few more minutes making a convincing case for abandoning my husband and only daughter, I end up promising that I’ll at least think about it. Then I grab one of those children’s snacks that pretends it’s healthy by virtue of the fact that it has ‘fruit’ emblazoned on the packet, and check on Anna. She is exactly where I have left her: in my office, sitting on the sofa bed, legs crossed, eyes tuned to YouTube Kids. My heart swells with love for her. How could I ever think about leaving her? Look at her! She’s such a sweetheart!

  ‘OK, Anna?’ I say, merrily.

  ‘Snack,’ she growls, through the corner of her mouth, tearing her eyes away from the screen just long enough to say, ‘Now!’

  ‘Grand,’ I say, and place it carefully beside her, gingerly stepping backwards and edging out of the room. Not for the first time, I wonder if it’s normal to be so terrified of your own child. Maybe I’m suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. I look at my watch. There is just enough time to call my mother to see what she thinks about a potential break in Ireland.

  My mother, Brenda (Irish to the point where even the stereotype is a bit understated), was a primary school teacher, and now teaches English to ‘foreigners’ in Dublin. Her hobbies include all things social media related. I find more out about her over Twitter than I do when I’m talking to her on the phone. If you were to compare my mother to an animal, you would probably choose a terrier: short, wiry, energetic, and snappy.

  My mother’s mobile phone rings at least six times before she answers – unusual for her, given it lives in her back pocket, despite the number of ‘falling down the loo’ incidents.

  ‘What?’ she says, sounding breathless and distracted.

  I groan. There are only two explanations for my mother when she’s like this. She’s either on the toilet or on eBay.

  ‘Are you on the loo again?’ I ask, immediately fearing the answer.

  ‘No, no. I’m on the eBay,’ she says impatiently. ‘I have three people watching the ‘Marital Miracle’ I have put on and I want to see who bids the most.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake…’ I mumble, but she picks up on it anyway.

  ‘Language!’ she barks.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, contritely. ‘For feck’s sake.’

  ‘Better,’ she says, approvingly.

  I’m becoming more and more uncomfortable with my mother’s latest online entrepreneurial ventures. Ever since she discovered that anybody could sell anything on eBay (or ‘the eBay’, as she likes to call it), she has set herself the challenge of sourcing the most unusual items to auction guided by the ‘one man’s trash is another person’s treasure’ philosophy. In the beginning, it had all seemed fairly harmless: rubbish items picked up at bargain-basement shops in the poorer parts of Dublin, which she sold for a few pence more on eBay. Most of it was animal related: jockstraps for dogs; a little wooden coffin for a dead hamster; or a weird metal contraption designed to protect the virginity of your cat.

  I take a deep breath and try to sound interested.

  ‘I’m afraid to hear the answer, but what on earth is the “Marital Miracle”?’ I say.

  ‘Well, it was Father Casey who gave me the idea when I was cutting his hair the other day,’ she says, in what I refer to as her ‘storytelling’ voice.

  I give a silent groan. My mother doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘nutshell’ when it comes to short answers.

  ‘But you’re not a hairdresser,’ I say.

  ‘Sure, didn’t I cut your hair for all those years when you were younger?’ she says, indignantly.

  Yes, I think silently, and a crooked fringe and a bowl haircut do not a hairdresser make.

  ‘It’s very simple, Saoirse,’ she begins, giving a sniff of self-importance, something she does when she has something significant to say. ‘Father Casey gave a sermon about marital disagreement at mass the other day – the church with the twenty-five-minute mass. Not the church with the priest who loves the sound of his own voice. Sure, you’d miss your Sunday dinner if you went to mass there, it’s that long…’

  My mother’s determination to find the world’s shortest mass comes a close second to her eBay fixation. She treats her mass attendance with the same Murphy’s Law mentality as the most dedicated of lottery ticket buyers. If she misses just one mass then you can be sure that would be the one week where she would have received the grand prize of everlasting salvation.

  ‘Anyway…’ I say pointedly, to move her along. There is no stopping her when she goes off on one of her tangents.

  ‘Right, yes, Father Casey and the sermon. I’ll keep the story short, Saoirse, because I only have five minutes to go on this auction and I have a million things to do when it’s over.’

  I clench my free hand in frustration. Keeping a story short? Chance would be a fine thing.

  Apparently, my mother had hijacked poor Father Casey as he was shaking hands with the parishioners after mass and told him he could do with sorting out that ‘shaggy mop on top of his head’. Clearly bewildered and confused by this short but snappy pensioner, Casey had allowed himself to be led into the back room of the church where priests get ready before mass. There, my mother had ‘magically’ produced a pair of scissors and proceeded to chop away merrily, drilling Father Casey about his sermon.

  ‘And it was while Father Casey was telling me the extent to which married couples disagreed, that the idea came to me, like a big flash of lightning.’

  She pauses for effect. My mother loves nothing better than a big build-up to her stories.

  ‘Jesus, Mother. Will you get on with it?’ I snap.

  It’s almost Anna’s teatime and I need to get cracking before she starts getting ‘hangry’.

  ‘Don’t be taking the Lord’s name in vain,’ she snaps ba
ck.

  This time I don’t apologise. But she can’t stay mad at me for too long because she is desperate to tell me her big story.

  ‘Anyway, it was the scissors that gave me the idea about how I could help married people solve their disagreements,’ she says triumphantly.

  I think that if I had a pair of scissors now, I’d put myself out of my misery rather than put up with the rest of this story.

  ‘It was then I decided to make two boxes; one for him and one for her. In each box is a rock, a bit of paper, a pair of small scissors, and a haiku,’ she says confidently.

  ‘A haiku?’ I say, bewildered.

  ‘Yes, Saoirse,’ she says in her best ‘teaching foreigners English’ voice. ‘A haiku is a Japanese poem,’ she explains, importantly.

  ‘I know what a haiku is!’ I say, annoyed. ‘Since when do you know how to write a haiku?’

  ‘One of my Japanese students, Noboku, is into them. Sure, they’re only three lines, Saoirse. Any eejit can do them.’

  I massage my left temple with my fingers, trying to shake off the feeling that I have entered into some parallel universe where my mother is now a haiku-writing marital peacemaker.

  ‘So you’re telling me that you’re selling these boxes to couples on eBay as an aid to solve marital disagreements,’ I say slowly.

  ‘Exactly!’ she replies delightedly. ‘I’ve called it the “Marital Miracle”. It’s a brilliant way to make decisions. Say you wanted David to look after Anna one night but he has already made plans for the same evening. You would each take out your Marital Miracle box and choose either the rock, the paper, or the scissors. So if you took out the paper, and David took out the scissors, then David would win because scissors cut paper. Then he would head out for the night and you would stay at home to look after Anna.’

  ‘And what’s the haiku for?’

  ‘It’s there to help you to reflect on your relationship,’ she says cheerfully.

  ‘And then you put these boxes on eBay,’ I say tiredly.

  ‘The eBay,’ she replies. ‘They’re flying off the shelves, Saoirse. You wouldn’t credit it!’

  Before I can respond, she gives a delighted shriek.