Sisters ... No Way!

by Siobhán Parkinson

  The upshot of it all was, anyway, that Milly-Molly-Mandy wants to meet Dad. I told her I didn’t think he’d appreciate her trying to counsel him, but she said she wouldn’t dream of it, she just wanted to talk to him about me. I don’t see the point. I mean, I told her he’s the one that needs counselling. No good will come of this, mark my words.

  Monday 21st April

  Dad’s come out. About The Great Composers, I mean. He must have twigged that you can hide a stack of magazines in your bedroom, but it’s difficult to hide a collection of CDs, and there is not much point in acquiring the best hundred tunes in the world or whatever it is supposed to be if you can’t play any of them. So now it’s official. We are a family that gets The Great Composers – how low can you sink? – and the house is full of ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ and the march from Aida and Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ and ‘The Four Seasons’ from morning till night. It’s OK, especially the bit from Aida. I saw that on the telly once, and it’s kind of cool, especially at the end, where this fabulously beautiful black woman – I bet she’s never even heard of Colour Me Beautiful, but she is all style – goes off into a tomb with her lover and they die a terrible death, buried alive for love. Mad!

  Anyway, there I was trying to learn my history homework and listening to one of Dad’s Great Composers, Palestrina I think it was – have you ever heard of Palestrina? sounds like a flavour of ice cream, doesn’t it, or a make of sports car – when the phone rang. Let him answer it, I thought. I was comfy on the sofa, with a rug pulled up to my chin. But it rang and rang. Dad must be in the garden, or in the loo or somewhere, I thought, so eventually I answered it. Old Milly-Molly-Mandy. For a split second I was tempted to say, Wrong number, and hang up and then quickly take the phone off the hook, but I figured I would only be staving off the evil day, so I went and got my runners on and waded out through the weedbed that passes for a lawn in our house and found Dad clearing out the old shed at the bottom of the garden. I gabbled something to him about bereavement counselling and janey mac if he didn’t burst into tears, right there in front of me, leaning on a spade. I didn’t know where to look. At least he’s human, I thought. Funny how the word ‘bereavement’ seemed to do it. It had nearly the same effect on me. I stood there for a moment and considered whether I should fall weeping on his neck and have a touching scene, widowed father and orphaned daughter console each other sort of thing, but then I thought, hey, no, he wasn’t there for you when you had the weepies, remember? But I wasn’t actively cruel. I gave him a few manly thumps on the back, and said, There, there, come on now. Are you going to talk to old Milly-Molly-Mandy or not?

  He took his hanky out – he always has one, and it’s always cotton, pure affectation – and blew his nose a few times, dreadful sound, like an elephant with sinus trouble, and pulled himself together.

  He was ages on the phone. Old Palestrina had played himself out, and I’d got through half of Rachmaninov before he came in. He was still pretty mucky from the garden, so he didn’t sit down, just held onto the doorknob and said that he’d had a long chat with Ms Magee (I ask you, does anyone else in the world actually pronounce Ms?) and had agreed to go and see her. Good luck to him, I thought.

  Wednesday 30th April

  He wouldn’t tell me how he got on with Milly-Molly-Mandy last week, but yesterday evening, there I was doing my homework, with The Simpsons turned down really low, when he announced, cool as a breeze, that dinner was ready, and would I hurry please, that he had to go out. He was in such a rush he didn’t even notice the TV was on, which is strictly against the rules while I’m doing my homework. It is a pretty stupid rule actually, because it helps me to think. I can’t stand all the silence in this damned house.

  I winkled it out of him over the spaghetti bolognese. Off for another meeting with Milly-Molly-Mandy if you don’t mind. What can they possibly have to talk about? I mean, it can’t be me still. I’m OK. Maybe she ignored my advice about Dad and is trying to sort him out herself. These amateur psychologists. They think they know it all. Well, it’s her funeral. Oops! Didn’t mean that. Her lookout, then. She’s welcome to him.

  Thursday 1st May

  He didn’t get home until all hours last night. Well it was only half-past eleven but that is all hours on a weeknight. I’m at that awkward age, too old for a babysitter, too young to leave on my own after midnight, or so he says, and to be perfectly honest sitting around at the witching hour with only the late-night movie for company is not exactly my idea of a cool way to spend an evening. I rang Lisa after I’d finished my homework and had washed up – yes, I do wash up, every second evening, we take it in turn, very democratic. Anyway, Lisa hadn’t even got halfway through her homework, so she couldn’t stay on the phone for a natter. Funny how parents have this idea that teenagers spend all their time on the phone locked into eternal meaningless conversations. It’s not true. Just another stereotype. Another manifestation of the generation gap. (That’s Dad’s word. He has all these phrases from the seventies.)

  Give him his due, he never leaves me on my own late at night, so even half-eleven was late for him. And considering that he left the house at seven, that was a long chat he must have been having with her ladyship. Not that I care. Couldn’t give a fiddler’s, just so long as I can be sure it’s not me they’re talking about. But I don’t think so. At least, I hope not.

  Monday 5th May

  This is getting to be ridiculous. Yesterday lunchtime the phone rang. We had just got back from mass. Yes, we do go, though I know for a fact Dad doesn’t believe in anything, with the possible exception of the report of the closing prices on the Stock Exchange. We had gone to the grave afterwards, so that’s why it was lunchtime when we got home. I hate going to the grave. It’s all so raw still, all earth and stuff, the grass hasn’t really settled in again properly yet. It’s one of those grassy cemeteries, which is quite nice, just rows of headstones and lots of grass. Sort of open plan death, you could call it. No actual little marble walls around the graves and absolutely none of those awful pointy stone chips. But of course our grave doesn’t have a headstone yet. They explained to me why you don’t put a headstone on a new grave, and believe me, you do not want to know. So there’s just this makeshift sort of wooden cross thing, stuck into the earth at a rakish angle. It’s all too, oh I don’t know, too real or something, and I just get depressed there, thinking of her with all that earth weighing her down, which you wouldn’t think if the grave was all smooth and grassy and part of the general rolling lawn effect.

  Anyway, we had just got in, with a stick of French bread and two chocolate croissants from the French bakery – bakeries in our area are open on Sundays now, very continental, don’t you know – and the Sunday Tribune, and there was this absolutely delicious smell of roasting lamb and rosemary and garlic, because this was one of the Sundays where we go in for the traditional Sunday lunch. Some Sundays we do that, we make it a proper Sunday and do the whole bit, the graveyard and the French bakery and the roast, but other Sundays we just stay in bed and listen to ‘Sunday Miscellany’. At least, I do. I don’t know what he listens to. Probably exactly the same. Except he probably thinks I’m listening to Atlantic or Rock 104 or something, which shows how much he knows about me.

  So there we are, sniffing the air and looking forward to our lunch and a lazy afternoon reading the paper – at least I was planning to go over to Lisa’s after lunch and maybe go somewhere, into town, for a milkshake in Eddie’s Diner or something like that – when the phone starts shrieking at us, before we’d even got our coats off. We’re still wearing coats, even though it’s May. Dad pushed past me. I swear, he nearly knocked me over in his eagerness to get to the phone first. He picks it up and he’s all smiles, even before he hears who it is. He knew who it was. He had to have known. Otherwise, why would he have been grinning like an idiot before she even spoke? He’d been expecting her call. It was a prearranged thing.

  I sat on the bottom step of the stairs while he was talking t
o her, pretending to read the newspaper. It was all the usual stuff, not very interesting really, and far too much sports coverage, but I sat there grimly for a good ten minutes while he muttered into the phone.

  He ignored me when he hung up, just walked past me into the kitchen and started fussing with oven gloves. I don’t get it. What’s the big deal here? He couldn’t possibly fancy her, could he? I mean, she’s not even pretty. She has blondish hair, cut like a bush, exactly like a work of topiary, actually, all sticking out from her head so that from the back – she’s very slender, I’ll give her that – she looks for all the world like a small bay tree, the sort they have in tubs outside Italian restaurants. I suppose she is not actually unattractive. She has a nice smile. But what a name! And what a job!

  I told Lisa the whole story today. I didn’t meet her after all yesterday. I was too busy trying to think this business through, so I just hung around the house for the afternoon, tidied my room, got out the handful of T-shirts and single cotton skirt that constitute my entire summer wardrobe in case we have a summer, cooked the tea – always sausages on a Sunday – and then had a bath and washed my hair, cut my toenails, pampered myself with creams and unguents, and went to bed early with a book and half a bar of Bourneville.

  Lisa hooted with laughter when I told her, and I had to make her swear she wouldn’t breathe a word about this to anyone. I could see she was dying to blurt it all over the school. So I told her I was very upset at the idea of my Dad having a girlfriend so soon after my mother’s death, and I managed to muster up a tear or two, so that shut her up, and she promised she wouldn’t breathe a word to a living soul. I gave a convincing little wince at that expression, and embarrassed her no end, so that should keep her quiet. Anyway, the point is, Lisa agrees. She thinks they must be ‘seeing each other’. It can’t all be bereavement counselling, not if she’s ringing him up on a Sunday lunchtime.

  Friday 9th May

  Lisa has been doing a bit of snooping on old Milly-Molly-Mandy, or the Bay Tree, as I now call her. Lisa fell about when I told her that. Well, at least she did after I explained what a bay tree was. It turns out she’s a single parent – the Bay Tree that is, not Lisa, obviously. Except she used to be married, so it doesn’t count, or not in the same way as being an unmarried mother anyway. Still, she’s not a widow, which is the only truly respectable way you can be a single parent. She has two daughters, one a year older than me, one a year younger. I must ask Lisa where she got all this lovely information. I was so interested in what she found out that I forgot to ask her how she did it.

  It turns out that Magee is her married name, so I take back all that stuff about her parents giving her such an impossible name, but I do think she might have thought about the consequences when she married Mr Magee, whoever he was, and kept her own name, for aesthetic reasons if not from feminist principles. Though mind you, she might have been called something awful to start with, like Hogg.

  The daughters go to a mixed school, one of those Protestant places where you have to pay fees and play hockey. Maybe their father is a Protestant, though I don’t think Magee is a very Protestant name. A Protestant father would be quite exotic, and it could explain why they are divorced or separated or whatever the word is. Catholics aren’t allowed to. Well, they do, but they aren’t supposed to, so it might be easier if you were a Prod, I suppose. But what I want to know is why they broke up – apart from his being a Protestant, I mean. There has to be a reason. I wonder does she make a habit of falling for other men, like my father? Maybe she has a history of it. Maybe she kept doing it while they were married, and he just got fed up and left her. Probably that’s what happened. I mean, you couldn’t blame him, really, could you?

  Monday 12th May

  Dad’s given up weeping over his garden spade and grinning idiotically into the telephone receiver, so that’s something to be grateful for. I think maybe the little fling with Mrs Magee must be over, because the telephone hasn’t been for him once all week, and he stayed in every night except one, when he had to meet a business associate. That’s a relief. I really didn’t like the direction that was going in.

  The phone hardly rings at all these days. Imelda rang me a few days ago, Just keeping in touch, petal – that’s what she calls me – and then she asked to speak to him, but that was just out of politeness, I know it was really me she wanted to talk to. And then there were a few phone calls for the hotel in the next road, whose phone number is almost identical to ours. Windsor Court or Hampton House or something it’s called, something English anyway. Funny how people get cross when you tell them it’s a wrong number – even though they’re the ones who’ve made the mistake. Makes me mad that, I feel like screaming obscenities into the mouthpiece at them, but I don’t. I can be very self-disciplined at times. But that’s about all. If it wasn’t for the occasional phone call from Lisa, who is eternally forgetting her homework notebook and needs to check out what we have to do, I’d nearly think people were avoiding us.

  Anyway, after the fuss about the Bay Tree died down, Dad went a bit funny, as I say, and started getting all fatherly and concerned about me. Yesterday, he suggested we go ‘out for a drive’. Now, if there is one thing I cannot abide it is going ‘out for a drive’. It seems so pointless to me, getting into the car and just going anywhere, any old place. The way I look at it, a car is just a mode of transport, something for taking you places you want to go. Going just ‘out for a drive’ seems to me a distortion of the whole point of a car, not to mention the waste of petrol and the damage to the environment. I told him all this, as I was buckling my seatbelt, and he put on that long-suffering look he does so well and said that actually he had been going to propose we go down the dual carriageway and have an early lunch at a little restaurant he knows in Kilmacanogue with a nice garden and outside tables. Well, that cheered me up. I know the place he means, and it is very pleasant, as Mum used to say. She had these little pat phrases she used to use. That was one of them: ‘a very pleasant lunch’, ‘a very pleasant evening’. I think she used to collect non-American phrases and practise them, and then she would forget that they were a sort of language-learning exercise and instead of assimilating them into her normal vocabulary she would get particularly attached to them and overuse them. It was one of those things Dad and I used to scoff at her about. We went in for scoffing at Mum a bit, I have to admit, but it was all in fun. I miss her.

  Anyway, there we were having this lovely broccoli soup they do there with brown scones, delicious and good for you too, which is an unusual enough combination, and gazing at the trees, all feathery with new leaves and sort of fresh-washed looking in the sunlight, when he starts asking me how I am. I said I was fine, had a touch of a headache one day last week, but that was only because my glasses were broken and I’d been squinting at the blackboard. No, no, I mean how are you, he asked, all earnestly, not waiting for me to explain how I’d had to borrow a few quid from his jeans pocket to pay the optician, which until that moment I had forgotten to tell him about. Then I twigged, he meant how was I psychically, you know, ‘in myself’. Oh lord, I thought, this is the Bay Tree talking. Well, I told him I was perfectly all right, which I am. But that didn’t seem to satisfy him. He kept going on about ‘our loss’ and I felt quite uncomfortable. I didn’t finish the soup. Then he went on about ‘a girl of your age’. Oh no, I thought, don’t let him say ‘tender years’, but of course he did. It was dead embarrassing really. I mean, I was afraid for one awful moment he was going to ask me did I know the facts of life or did I need money for a new bra or anything. He didn’t of course, but really it was a moment I would rather forget.

  Tuesday 13th May

  I’ve been thinking about our pleasant lunch. I mean, is Dad genuinely trying to get in touch with me, after all these months of aloofness, or what? There’s something fishy about this. Was he testing the waters, seeing how I’d react to something that he then decided not to tell me? Or was he genuinely concerned about how I am ‘in my
self’? This is all very puzzling.

  Wednesday 21st May

  I’m really disappointed in Dad. It’s so sneaky, that’s what kills me about it. There he was that Sunday being all fatherly and concerned, and now this.

  The doorbell rang this evening at about half-past five. That’ll be the milkman, I thought. Actually it’s a girl on a bike. Her dad is the milkman. He does the deliveries in the mornings, and she comes around on Wednesday evenings to collect the money. They make a good team, all neatly worked out, division of labour and all that. I wonder if she has a mother? Anyway, I was just stirring the tomato sauce into the mince – I’m afraid it was the sort of tomato sauce that you get in a jar, Mum would die a thousand deaths, and I have to admit that our diet has come to rely rather heavily on pasta – and I yelled up to Dad, who was upstairs changing out of his office gear, I’ll get it, and I pulled the saucepan off the gas and went to get the money out of the cutlery drawer, where we keep cash for everyday expenses like milk and bread and the newspaper. But there wasn’t enough, so I went upstairs to ask Dad for some money.

  I knocked at his bedroom door, which was closed. I thought that was odd, because he usually leaves it ajar, even when he’s changing, even at night he sleeps with it slightly open. Anyway, I knocked, and without waiting for a reply I opened the door and walked in. I mean he was only changing from a jacket into a jumper. He wasn’t likely to be starkers or anything, and he wouldn’t have passed out with embarrassment even if he’d been stalking around in his socks and underpants. We’re not exactly naturists in our house, but we don’t go in for major coyness either. Anyway, he was fully dressed, except he wasn’t wearing any shoes, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed with the upstairs phone in his hand, chortling away into it. He didn’t even hear me, he was so intent.