“Here,” Réiltín said, thrusting a mobile phone into her aunt’s hand. “Look at my new phone.”
“Very nice! It beats my old brick anyway,” Isla said.
“That wouldn’t be hard! I still don’t know how you survive without any apps.”
“Well, I just breathe in and breathe out. I find that usually works,” Isla said, laughing.
Réiltín laughed too, linked her arm through Isla’s and led her into the living room. Jo watched as they fell down to sit side by side on the sofa.
“I love this one,” Isla said, looking at the screen.
It was an old episode of Friends. Jo couldn’t stand that show with its childish humour and phony canned laughter. She felt a pang inside her. A pang of what, she wasn’t too sure . . . it wasn’t quite jealousy . . . but it wasn’t a good feeling either . . . She loved how close her daughter was with her sister but, if she was really honest, she wished Réiltín could be like that with her, just sometimes. But all she seemed to get from Réiltín these days was a roll of the eyes whenever she said something or monosyllabic answers whenever she asked her a question. She knew it was all part and parcel of being a parent to a teenager – she had asked her friends recently if they were going through the same thing with their children and she smiled now as she recalled how they had all tried to trump each other as they recounted stories about how awful their teenagers were to them. Stories of raging arguments and of devious lies were swapped with conspiratorial relish. The worst by far, though, was one mother who discovered her son had been stealing money from her purse. Jo had come away from that conversation feeling relieved. It seemed she actually got off very lightly with Réiltín compared to the way some teenagers behaved towards their parents.
“Would you mind fetching a bottle of red from the cellar, love?” Jo asked Ryan who had come into the kitchen. Their Victorian house had a basement wine cellar, which was one of the selling points the estate agent had pushed hard on when they had bought the house.
He didn’t bother to reply as he vanished out of the room. He came back up a few minutes later with a bottle, which he uncorked and let sit on the table to breathe.
“Dinner’s ready!” Jo called as she set plates of burgers and chips and a large bowl of salad down on the table.
The four of them took their seats and began helping themselves.
“So any plans for the weekend?” Jo asked Isla.
“Well, I’m going for a bite to eat with the work crew on Friday night and I have Vera’s baby shower.”
“Vera Rowland is pregnant?” Jo asked.
“Yep, she’s due next month.”
“What age is she? She must be nearly forty?”
“She’ll be forty in September.”
“She was lucky,” Jo said.
“Why, Mum?” Réiltín asked.
“Well, because as a woman gets older it can be hard for her to conceive a baby. After forty, a woman’s fertility falls off a cliff.”
“You’re nearly forty, Isla – well, nearly thirty-nine,” Réiltín said, turning to her aunt.
“Damn it!” Isla said, slamming the palm of her hand theatrically to her forehead. “I knew I had forgotten to do something!”
“Well, you’d better hurry – you’ve only got a year left!”
“If the baby would be like you then no thanks,” Isla said, laughing.
“Harsh, Isla!” Réiltín replied with pretend affront.
“Well, I’m not sure if they teach you in biology that you need a woman and a man to have a baby?”
“Hmmh, I can see you might have a problem there all right. We really need to get you a boyfriend!”
“Well, cheers, Réiltín, you’re really playing a blinder today!” Isla replied.
“But I don’t get it. I know you’re good-looking and men think so too – isn’t she, Dad?”
“Absolutely!” Ryan said, looking mortified. He took a large gulp of wine.
“You see! You’d need to be blind not to notice it, Isla.”
“Now that’s enough, Réiltín – eat up your dinner, please,” Jo interjected.
“Yeah, well, life is complicated,” Isla sighed. “It’s not like in the films. It’s not that easy to meet someone, you know.”
“You should try online dating,” Réiltín continued. “You know my friend Georgie? Well, her mum tried it after she broke up with her dad and it worked! Now they’re getting married and Georgie is really happy about it because he has a son the same age as her and he’s hot! They’re all going on honeymoon together to Antigua so she’s packed lots of bikinis.”
“I can’t believe I’m getting dating advice from my fourteen-year-old niece!”
Réiltín turned to Ryan then. “Dad, do you have any single friends for her?”
“Eh . . . I’ll pass, thanks, Réilt.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right” Réiltín said with a world-weary sigh. “They’re all stuffy bankers anyway.”
“Réiltín!” Ryan said, laughing. “Will you leave poor Isla alone? She doesn’t need advice from you. I’m sure Isla has lots of men interested in dating her . . .” He looked as though he wanted the ground to swallow him up.
Jo felt a tinge of jealousy grow inside her. The familiar pang that seemed to be reserved just for Isla. “Okay, can we all please stop discussing Isla’s love life?” she said, more snappily than she had intended.
For her whole life, everyone fancied Isla. Even when they were growing up as children in Lambay Grove, their neighbours had all had a soft spot for her – girlfriends and boyfriends, they all wanted to be with her because that was where the fun was. Jo had often wondered what was it about her younger sister that made men flock to her. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful. She never dressed up or made an effort with her appearance. God knows Jo had tried hard enough over the years to get her to take more care with how she looked. Jo used to try subtlety to get her to update her wardrobe by buying her new pieces for Christmas or her birthday, a new sweater or maybe a dress but she had never once seen Isla wearing the things that she had so carefully chosen for her. Her hair wasn’t styled – instead its long strands hung loose and wild around her face. She wore the same clothes all the time, faded jeans and baggy sweaters over them, clothes that were too big and hid the thin frame underneath. But even Jo could see that there was a certain fragility about her, a vulnerability that men felt the need to tend to. They wanted to mind her, care for her. It had been happening their whole life.
“What about Greg in the coffee shop? He totally fancies you,” Réiltín was saying now.
“No, he doesn’t!” Isla felt the heat making its way up her cheeks.
“He so does! You should see how he looks at you!”
“Well, anyway, I’d hate someone to accuse me of trying to sleep my way to the top.”
Réiltín leant in towards Isla and punched her arm playfully.
“Okay, that is quite enough, everyone.” Jo was stern.
They all looked down at their plates and continued eating their food.
Chapter 6
Frustration
On Friday night Isla walked down the street to the small Italian, where she had arranged to meet Greg and the others from the café. She pushed open the door and saw that the restaurant was full of groups just like theirs, some roaring in laughter, others drowning in forced camaraderie. She squinted across the room to see if she could see anyone. Eventually she spotted Greg standing up out of his seat, waving over to her. He looked smart, dressed in jeans, shirt and jacket, and she knew that he had made an effort. His sandy hair was styled up carefully. He never usually wore gel in his hair.
“Hi, Isla,” he said when she reached the table.
She said hi to Michelle and Fran, a college student who worked part-time, usually at weekends.
Michelle handed her a laminated menu. “It’s a set one, darling, so you don’t have to make your mind up,” she said, laughing.
Greg filled her glass with yellow
wine and the four of them raised a toast and clinked glasses. The background music was a loop of saxophone covers of eighties easy-listening classics.
They ate and, as the wine loosened them up, they joined in when Lionel Ritchie’s ‘All Night Long’ came on.
“Who’s coming for one more?” Greg asked after he had settled the bill.
“Go on then,” said Michelle, “I don’t get out that often so when I have a baby-sitter I’m making the most of it! What about you, Isla?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“Fran?” Greg asked.
“I said I’d meet a few of my mates,” he said sheepishly.
“Ah, we’re not cool enough for you,” Greg said, laughing. “I get it.”
They left the Italian and stepped out into the cool night air.
“The forecast said it’s to snow tonight,” Michelle said.
“It’s too cold to snow,” Greg said.
“That’s the most illogical thing I’ve ever heard!” she responded. “Doesn’t it snow in Greenland and Antarctica and all those other places and they have much colder winters than anything we’re ever likely to experience?”
“I suppose so,” said Greg.
“It’s very late – we don’t normally see snow in March,” Isla said.
“Blame global warming!” Michelle said as assuredly as a person who had spent a lifetime studying meteorology. “It’s got all our seasons muddled up.”
They strolled down the street until they reached McFadden’s. As soon as they pushed open the door of the pub the sound of drunken laughter hit them. It wasn’t one of the cooler places that had sprung up all around the area recently. The walls were still covered in purple velvet-effect wallpaper and the Formica tables were from the eighties but they always had a good night there.
“What’ll you have? The usual, is it?” Greg asked them as they sat down at a table.
“Yeah, a beer would be great, thanks, Greg,” Isla said.
“A Bacardi and Coke for you, Michelle?”
“That’s the one.”
He signalled the lounge boy over and ordered the round. They looked up at the stage where a yellow-blonde woman with a weathered face was singing Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’. Her chorus of followers swayed their arms back and forth.
“G’wan, Joan!” someone roared. “You’re the Debbie Harry of Rialto!” This was followed by a cackle of raucous laughter.
Later, Greg moved closer to Isla when Michelle went to the toilet. She picked a beer-mat off the table and folded it in two as she chatted with him. They watched Michelle coming out of the bathroom and stop to chat to someone at the bar. After a while Isla said she was going outside for a cigarette. She had given up the year before but still smoked whenever she was drinking.
“I’ll come with you,” Greg said quickly. “No point in me sitting here like Billy-no-mates while Michelle’s off up at the bar.”
She grabbed her coat from the back of the chair and they went out the back. Greg flipped open his packet and pushed one up for Isla. She took the cigarette and put it between her lips and he held his lighter out for her until the end of her cigarette glowed orange. She raised her chin towards the sky and exhaled a long plume of tarry smoke onto the cold night air. Greg lit up one for himself then. The snow had finally started to fall.
“Looks like Michelle was right,” Greg said, nodding at the flakes that dithered on their lazy descent to the ground. He paused for a moment to take a drag on his cigarette. “You look very nice tonight, Isla.”
“Do I? Thanks, Greg, so do you. Is that a new jacket?”
“It is – do you like it?” He started to pinken.
“I do, it suits you.”
“I got it in the shopping centre at lunchtime earlier. They were having a sale.”
She nodded. “Well, it’s a good buy.”
They fell silent for a few moments until Greg spoke. “There’s been something on my mind that I wanted to ask you about.”
“Go on.”
“You know the other day when you said you were dreaming of a baby . . . I thought you might have been . . .” he paused, “you know . . .”
“Pregnant?” she finished for him.
He nodded.
“Well, don’t worry, I’m not.”
She looked away from his gaze and flicked her ash onto the ground where a light dusting of snow had lodged, like someone had gently sieved icing sugar over it.
“But that’s what I wanted to say to you – I wouldn’t mind if you were.” He turned her around to face him and took her free hand in his. “Honestly, I’ve been thinking about it and it would be great. I’m probably jumping ahead of myself here . . . but it got me thinking about it and if you were . . . we’d work it out. We could move in together – I mean, only if you wanted to, of course . . . For what it’s worth I think we’d be good parents . . .”
“You’re right, we would be good.”
“So you’re definitely not then?”
“No,” she said sadly.
“Oh . . . I see. Do you think you would like to have children, Isla?”
“Yeah, I would.” She had never admitted that to anyone else before. “I really would.”
He nodded in agreement. “I always saw myself as a dad. I thought I’d have a whole football team by now but it hasn’t happened yet so who knows if it ever will?”
“It’s different for men – you don’t have that clock ticking, putting a deadline on things.”
“Yeah, but who wants to be the geriatric dad in the playground?”
“I suppose that’s true.”
She really wished she could make things work between them; she liked him so much that she wished a relationship between them were possible. He was kind and considerate, he wanted to have children – he was perfect for her. But there was something inside her stopping her from letting it grow into something more.
It reminded her of a conversation she’d had with her dad before he died. She remembered he was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, pulling off his steel-toed boots after a long day in the factory. She knew by the heaviness of his steps as he’d entered the house, the invisible weight that seemed to be loading down his movements, that something was up with him.
“Bad day?” she had asked, sitting down on the step beside him.
“Ah, it was all right, mo ghrá, but the supervisor called me in for a chat . . .” He had exhaled slowly.
“Why?”
“Ah, sure I’m not as fast as I used to be – my times are slipping. The young ones that come in, you should see how fast they go – I can’t keep up with them – I’m slowing everyone down and then they all have to stay late to get the orders out because of me.” He was referring to the assembly line where he worked inserting components into other components, which was monitored to the second to keep the production line going.
“You’ve worked there for over thirty years, Dad – that has to mean something to them?”
“It doesn’t matter – it’s all quotas and production targets these days. It was a different place when I first started there. I’m not able for it any more.”
She leaned in and rested her head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Dad.”
“Sure it’s not your fault, Isla love. So anyway, enough of listening to your old dad feeling sorry for himself – have you no young man taking you out somewhere fancy tonight?”
She laughed. Her dad said the same thing to her almost every night of the week. “I keep telling you, Dad – it’s slim pickings out there.”
“There must surely be a nice man out there somewhere for you. What about that Martin fella you were seeing for a while?”
“Ah, he’s too nice.”
“Now how can that be a bad thing? The man who gets you will be a very lucky lad. If you ask me, you women are all mad. Do you know your mum said the same thing to me about being too nice once?”
When he’d first met her mother she was working as the boss’s secretary in
the office up on the balcony that looked down over the factory floor. He would see her walking in and out to her office and she would take his breath away. She had long shiny brown hair in waves down her back when all the women in the place had their hair cut up short. She always dressed in skirts and high heels and she wore lipstick when none of the other girls in the factory did.
Isla had heard the story many times and had always found it hard to reconcile the former glamorous version of her mother with the woman she remembered in her head. The woman who wore slippers with dresses, and wellington boots with shorts. She knew that was why the whole business with his timings in the factory had upset him so much – because it was more than just a job to him – that place was his life. It was where he had met her mother and it held a lot of good memories for him.
“I didn’t think a man like me had a cat in hell’s chance with a woman like that but we got talking and eventually I plucked up the courage to ask her out and that’s what she said to me – ‘You’re too nice for someone like me, Dennis,’ – and sure didn’t we get married and have three beautiful children together?” His voice had been tinged with sadness.
Isla often wondered how her dad had been so happy with his lot. He’d had a wife who barely acknowledged his existence and a job he was much too clever for, and yet he never seemed to expect or want more. And that was exactly the reason why she couldn’t allow herself to get into a relationship with Greg. She couldn’t do that to him. Live a lie with him. Give him half a life. He deserved someone better than her, someone who could love him back just as much he loved her.
After last orders Greg offered to walk her home. Michelle lived on the way so they dropped her off first before continuing on their own. The sound of their steps along the pavement echoed in the night air. The snow seemed to make everything sharper, crisper.
They went back to his place on the South Circular Road and Isla followed him down the narrow hallway, squeezing past his flatmate’s bike, which had left streaks of black along the white painted wall. She followed him into the kitchen and sat down at the table. It smelled like sausages. There were always food smells in Greg’s place. He put the kettle on to make a pot of tea. Isla lit up another cigarette while it boiled noisily.
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