“Bobby! Honestly, Emily, I don’t know where he gets these things.”
“It’s all right, Liz.” Emily remembered asking her mother about birds and snake skins, and she gave Bobby a special smile.
“I’m not going to die, Bobby.”
“Oh.” He looked very disappointed and turned his attention to her locker instead. “Can I have a grape?”
“Ah, yes, of course you can.”
The rest of them took this as their cue, and descended on her locker like a swarm of locusts. Emily watched as grapes, chocolates and bottles of 7up were devoured at speed.
“Those grapes, they have seeds in them,” she warned Liz.
“It’d take more than a few seeds to kill them,” Liz said rather gloomily. “Boys! Take them over to the table.” She sat in the chair by Emily’s bed. She didn’t sigh today. “I’ve tried to explain to them that you’re having a baby. Poor Mikey and Bobby are too young, of course. But Tommy! Do you know what he said to me, Emily?”
“What did he say to you.”
“He said, I suppose Auntie Emily and Uncle Conor had sex then. Sex! He’s six years old, Emily!”
Emily laughed. Well, it was funny, a little bit. But Liz was annoyed that she wasn’t taking it seriously. She puffed up further. “And do you know what Myra Byrne heard some lads talking about in the school yard last week?”
“What?”
“Blow-jobs!” Liz hissed. “She didn’t know what they were on about first – they were just talking about BJs. BJs, Emily! But she put two and two together. She’s very sharp, is Myra.”
Indeed. She’d given a few of them in her time, according to local lore.
“I’m going in to talk to Mr Harrington. First thing tomorrow,” Liz declared. “I’m not having that kind of filth coming into my house.”
“They’re going to pick it up anyway, Liz. You can’t really stop them.”
“Quite the expert now,” Liz said a bit loftily.
Emily threw her eyes to heaven. “No, I’m not an expert, but I’m going to have to contend with the same thing myself in a couple of years’ time, and I’m entitled to an opinion, aren’t I?”
“Well, yes, of course you are,” Liz conceded. “So, how are you?”
“All right. They’re trying to find a bed for me in Cork.”
“Oh, that place is a right mess,” Liz said, as though she’d just come from there herself. “Can’t cope with the amalgamation at all, for all their guff. Poor old Larry Power was sitting in Casualty for three hours yesterday.”
That was pretty par for the course in any hospital, Emily thought. The noise level from the other side of the room dropped dramatically. The boys had put the television on and had found a cartoon.
“How are things at home?” Emily asked.
“Grand, why wouldn’t they be?” Liz said.
“Well, you know – Eamon, the bank situation.”
“I don’t know why you have to keep bringing that up, Emily.”
“What? I wasn’t –”
“We’re sorting it out,” Liz announced.
“Good,” Emily said tightly.
“He’s made an appointment to go in and see the bank manager and the accountant and work out a system of repayments.” She looked at Emily. “If you could believe a word out of the mouths of any of them.”
So, she knew about the affair. Emily was only surprised that word hadn’t got around sooner. Liz shook her head vigorously from side to side now. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“Neither do I,” Emily agreed.
“At least it wasn’t with some local one,” Liz said in commiseration. “That was the only good thing about Eamon’s mess – he doesn’t owe money to anybody in the town. At least we know there’ll be no gossip about either of them on the church steps on Sundays.”
Eamon and Conor had finally found common ground, unbeknownst to themselves.
And so had Emily and Liz, sitting there counting their blessings and telling each other that it could have been worse.
“I don’t really want to talk about it, Liz,” Emily said.
Liz was hurt. And she after confiding in Emily and all! But that was typical of Emily. She’d encourage you to go and on about yourself, and then tell you nothing at all about her own situation. She could be very selfish that way.
“Mammy’s heard. She’s worried,” she said, a bit superior. Liz had kept her own problems within the four walls of her house, and not bothered Mammy with them.
“Yes, well, Mammy’s not married to him,” Emily said and she didn’t care if she sounded heartless.
“Anyway, I told her to stop dropping around shepherd’s pies to that fellow.”
“Conor,” Emily said in a voice that invited no further comment on the subject.
The boys were bored with the television now and were jumping up and down on the two spare beds. Bobby was making a tent with the sheets and pillows. Vera would go mad.
“You did great work on that petition,” Liz said eventually.
“It wasn’t too hard. People were in and out of here all the time.”
“Oh, can’t you just take a compliment, Emily?” Liz said irritably.
“You’re absolutely right,” Emily said. “We don’t pat ourselves on the back enough, you and me. We should blow our own trumpets every now and again.”
“I suppose.” Liz looked doubtful at this.
“No, really, we’re brilliant.”
Liz threw back her head and laughed. She looked younger. “I wouldn’t go that far, Emily.”
“I would. Why not?” Emily smiled too.
“Despite the odds,” Liz added.
“Despite terrible odds. We should look at ourselves in the mirror every morning, like they tell you to do in those self-help books, and tell ourselves that we’re magnificent.”
“Eamon would think I was mad if he found me talking to mirrors.”
“Eamon hasn’t a leg to stand on.”
The nice moment was broken by a wail from the corner. Tommy was suffocating Bobby with a pillow.
Liz sighed and stood. “I don’t suppose I’ll see you again. Not if you’re down in Cork. I could try . . .”
“No, really, Liz. Maybe when I have the baby.”
Liz fidgeted with her bag. “If you want to come and stay in our house when you get out, you’re welcome – if we still have a house, that is. You could have Tommy’s room. He can sleep in with Bobby and Mikey. It wouldn’t be the quietest place on earth, but just until things settle for you . . .”
“That’s very good of you, Liz. I’ll keep it in mind.” Emily was touched. She wouldn’t in her wildest dreams go and stay with Liz, but that wasn’t the point.
“Right, well, good luck with everything.” Liz rounded the boys up with a bellow, and went off.
Emily thought about getting out of bed and packing her things for tomorrow. But the effort was too great, and she was having those pains again. Her breasts were also leaking; her pyjamas felt damp. She’d never heard of that happening to anyone she knew and she was mildly embarrassed. But her books informed her that it was perfectly normal.
At least something was. She felt that she and Conor were at a crossroads, and that things could go either way now. And it wasn’t just on her part, either. She had not seen him like that before, like he had lost control. It was that stranger in him again. What had he been like with Ffion Rivera? Had he shown her hidden depths that he had withheld from Emily? Emily felt robbed, cheated.
Too much had happened for them to go on in any previous capacity. They would have to rebuild from the ground up.
Emiliy wondered now whether it was really possible to change. For anybody to truly change. All the magazine articles and self-help books assured you that it was. A simple quiz first to diagnose how hopeless you really were, then ten revelatory tips which could be applied in any order, followed by a paragraph on how great you should feel now that you were actually somebody else.
&nbs
p; But what about things that were so ingrained, that underpin your entire life, things that form the essence of yourself? Even if you did manage to change those parts of yourself, was it a constant battle to maintain it? Would you live your life as though it were one long, miserable calorie-controlled diet?
And if it were hard enough for one person to change, how did two people in a flawed relationship change in perfect synchronisation? Especially if they didn’t know what it was about them that the other person wanted changed? Would it require endless, heartbreaking effort? Would the relationship become not one of spontaneity and joy and love, but gruelling hard work?
People in so-called happy relationships were very fond of saying ‘oh, you have to work at it’, as though it were yet another chore to do at the end of a long, hard day. Emily did not live in never-never land like Neasa, but neither did she want to become one half of those tight-faced couples who were together for all they were worth, but would really be much happier on their own. Or possibly with a small dog.
Neither was she afraid of hard work. Indeed, she loved hard work, was too fond of it really, as though it were an end in itself. But not this time. She would not waste her precious energy unless her conviction was there. And that’s what it came down to at the end of the day.
She wondered whether Conor was thinking these things right now. It was odd, the way they’d always had of thinking exactly the same thing at the same time. Emily used to laugh and think it meant some kind of spiritual bond. Now she was inclined to think it was just coincidence.
Maggie came in, pink-cheeked and breathless.
“Are you having an attack?”Emily asked warily. Maggie’s asthma attacks always frightened the life out of Emily. All that wheezing and gulping, and Maggie’s hands would claw at the air as though she were trying to gather it up. The attacks had become more frequent recently as Maggie’s due date approached fast.
“No, no.”
“Pains, then?” Maggie had been having a lot of pains. Everyone expected her to have her baby any day now.
“The girls were telling me!” she said in a rush. “About you not going to Cork!”
“Oh, yes.” Had they nothing better to be talking about?
“Well, I think it’s great,” Maggie declared.
Emily wasn’t sure why. “I’m going in the morning, Maggie. They just haven’t got an appropriate bed.”
“Oh, they’re desperately trying to find one. That’s what the girls said. They’d nearly chuck someone out onto the streets to get you a bed!” Maggie was triumphant.
“I don’t want them to chuck anybody out onto the streets.” Jesus, hadn’t she enough on her conscience?
“I’ve decided that I’m not going either,” Maggie declared.
Emily roused herself from her cosy cocoon of sheets and blankets. “What are you on about?”
“Well, the more the merrier,” Maggie said. “They won’t be able to ignore a sit-in.”
Emily thought about this for a minute. Then she laughed. Maggie was a desperate eejit sometimes.
“What?” Maggie asked, understandably hurt. “I know I’ll probably go into labour any minute, but I could sit-in until then, couldn’t I?”
“Maggie, I’m not starting a sit-in,” Emily explained patiently. “I just didn’t want to go to a general ward, that’s all.”
“But it’s on the radio and everything.”
“What?”
“On LKR fm. Everybody heard it.”
‘Everybody’ was the thousand or so citizens who tuned into LKR fm on a regular basis. Emily imagined Conor listening to this, slack-jawed, and she laughed again.
“They didn’t actually name you,” Maggie said stiffly.
Emily found she was a bit disappointed. Anyway, Conor didn’t listen to LKR fm. He was an RTE 1 man, with occasional forays into the classical stations.
Maggie was looking at Emily as though Emily held her future in her hands.
“You do a sit-in if you want, Maggie.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. You obviously feel strongly about it.”
“I thought you did too.”
“Well, I do . . . look, I’ve kind of made a promise to myself, Maggie. I’m not taking on other people’s problems any more.”
Spoken aloud, this didn’t sound half as noble as it did in her own head. Maggie obviously thought so too.
“That’s very convenient,” she said.
Emily felt annoyed again, like people were constantly pricking her with little needles.
“I did the petition,” she said.
“This is just a bigger petition,” Maggie reasoned.
“It’s not. This is different. It’s taking on something we know nothing about,” Emily argued fiercely.
“It’s scary,” Maggie agreed.
“Aren’t we scared enough? Aren’t we about to have babies?” Emily pleaded. “Haven’t we pre-eclampsia and wheezy lungs?” Not to mention broken marriages.
“I can’t do it without you,” Maggie said stubbornly.
Why was Maggie looking at her like she was some kind of leader? A hell-raiser, even? She giggled again.
“I don’t know what you find so funny about all this,” Maggie said, miffed.
“You’re right. It’s not funny at all,” Emily said, sobering. “Especially when they drag us kicking and screaming from our beds and cart us off in wheelbarrows.”
“They wouldn’t do that,” Maggie said confidently. “Think of the publicity!”
Maggie was speaking like one who had spent most of her life in the trenches.
“And what happens when we have our babies? Are we going to continue to sit in then?”
“Oh, Emily, don’t be so negative!” Maggie almost stamped her foot in frustration.
“I’m being realistic. Now go away, Maggie.”
Neasa had spent most of the afternoon beautifying herself and preparing the romantic meal. She’d even cooked it this time, instead of opening a jar of Dolmio. She’d bought four bottles of good red wine and put so many candles in the living-room that there was a very real possibility of a house fire. Tonight would work, she resolved fiercely, and made a head start on the wine. Alcohol always added such a nice rosy glow to things.
Gary arrived in from work at half past seven. He’d been working later and later this past while, much to his chagrin.
“Hi, darling,” Neasa said, floating up to him on a cloud of Obsession.
“Those fucking pricks,” Gary raged, storming past her.
Neasa took a moment to regain her balance. “What’s happened now?”
“You’d know if you hadn’t skived off this afternoon,” he said sourly.
Neasa decided to let this one pass.
He threw off his coat. “You know the way we’re nearly out of headed notepaper in the office?”
“Oh Gary,” she commiserated. “Don’t tell me they’ve put you in charge of the stationery too?”
Gary’s job these days seemed to be less about making sales and more about ordering paper clips and mending photocopiers. He’d even taken to making the coffee.
“Actually, yes,” he admitted. “But it’s not that. I was supposed to get my name on that headed notepaper, Neasa! As a partner! They said they would change the name of the firm when I was promoted! They promised!”
Neasa told herself that he only sounded childish because he was upset.
“So what’s the problem?”
“Well, my surname is O’Reilly, isn’t it? They already have an Ewan O’Reilly!”
“Hmmm,” Neasa said. She could see their problem. Crawley Dunne O’Reilly & O’Reilly didn’t have a great ring to it.
“I suggested that they put my name first,” Gary said. “You know, O’Reilly Crawley Dunne & O’Reilly. But bloody Ewan didn’t want my name first, said that I was the newcomer and so I should go last! So now he wants to go first!”
“So it would still be O’Reilly Crawley Dunne & O’Reilly?” Neasa
asked carefully.
“Exactly! But this still wouldn’t do him. Oh no!”
“How about Crawley Dunne & O’Reilly Times Two?” Neasa tried to coax him out of his black humour. He was unamused.
“Now Creepy suggests that we leave it the way it is, that we can both share the O’Reilly! I’d like to see him sharing his name! And that Daphne one sitting there muttering that they wouldn’t have had this problem with Collins.”
Neasa was getting a headache. “Why don’t we have some food? It’ll take your mind off it.”
Expecting Emily Page 22