Sisters ... No Way!

by Siobhán Parkinson

  Thursday 3rd July

  I can hardly believe it. As he was leaving for work this morning – I get up early, even though it’s the hols, as I don’t like to think of him eating his prunes on his own, I feel I owe him that much, he makes such a ritual of mornings – he threw me thirty quid and said, I don’t think I can bear those brown shoes with the black gear. Get yourself some black shoes. I was stunned. Thirty quid is in the birthday present league.

  Friday 4th July

  High as a flag on the… Well, not exactly. I got a pair of Docs with the thirty quid. They look great, but they’re a bit heavy for July. Still, I like the look. Dad sighed when he saw them, but he didn’t comment. He can’t afford to say anything, can he, off on his dirty weekend this evening.

  Sunday 6th July

  Imelda is a pet. She went out of her way to make sure I had a good time this weekend. It’s not her fault if I’m miserable. Friday night I spent at Lisa’s, and then on Saturday, I went window-shopping in town with Lisa – neither of us had any money – and then we went to the Green. We had to wade through a huge gaggle of Spaniards that had gathered swarming outside Habitat and were making a horrendous gobbling noise, like a thousand turkeys who’ve just heard about Christmas. We managed to avoid being sucked in and chewed and spat out by them, just about by the skin of our teeth, and ran away across the road to the sanity of the duckpond, where we sat and watched children feeding the ducks.

  It must be nice to be that little. Mum used to take me, I remember, when I was very young, on the bus, and we’d bring a paper bag full of stale bread. I’m sure it’s terribly bad for them, but they seem to love it. I wonder if ducks get heart attacks. Lisa says that’s a loadarubbish (one of her favourite expressions at the moment). Lisa can be just a little unsympathetic at times.

  She had to go off then to cook the children’s tea. Her mother takes Saturdays off from family responsibilities and Lisa and her dad divide the day into shifts between them. It sounds such a cosy arrangement, but Lisa says it’s a drag. I suppose it might be, if you really had to do it.

  When Lisa went home, I wandered along to Imelda’s place. It’s a flat near the canal, an apartment I should say. She has all these cool gadgets that she had put in by the builders when they were building the apartment. She has these really sensitive taps. They nearly turn on if you so much as look at them. And she got them to do it all open plan, because, as she says, it is ridiculous to slice up a space of this size into conventional rooms that are too small to swing a cat, even too small for a Thalidomide person to swing a Manx cat (her joke, not mine, so it’s not in bad taste).

  Her place looks like something out of an American TV programme, you know the sort, where the kitchen is in one corner, on a sort of a little stage, and you can see the front door from the fridge, except she has an ordinary doorbell that goes bzzz instead of the ones that go ding-dong, like they have on those shows. (I have never been to America, despite being half-American, so my impressions of that country are entirely based on TV. My mother was adopted or fostered or something, and she doesn’t have a proper family, so it’s not like there are grandparents to go and see or anything.)

  And she has a mezzanine bedroom, which means it’s not a proper room, just a sort of floating platform above the main room. You’d think she would find it difficult to get up the steep little staircase to reach it, but she manages. It’s great, except that there is a bit of a problem if you have fried onions. You can’t get away from the smell. So don’t eat fried onions, she says with a shrug (onion slicing is not exactly her favourite thing to do anyway, I imagine), but unfortunately it applies to a few other things as well, such as Indian takeaway, which is what we had on Saturday.

  I washed up afterwards. That is a golden rule you learn in an open-plan flat. Never leave the dishes until tomorrow. Then we went to the cinema and we missed the last bus because the movie was over late and we went for coffee afterwards in Bewley’s anyway, so we walked home. It’s only about a mile. It was a lovely balmy summer’s evening, and we sauntered along the canal. Well, actually, my new boots were hurting a bit, so sauntered is a bit of an exaggeration. Imelda sauntered. She was wearing an ankle-length dress and she looked very graceful, which sounds silly about someone who has no arms but really she did. I had thrown a smart jacket over her shoulders, and you’d never guess really. The moon was like a big bright coin in the sky and it was reflected in the stilly depths of the canal. We stopped to admire it – the reflection I mean, which was somehow more eerie, more lunar even, than the moon itself, which is of course anyway really only a reflection, or at least its light is. Then she said, Those boots are killing you, Cindy. Take them off, why don’t you, it’s not cold. So I did. I tied the laces around my neck and stuffed my socks in my pockets, and then we really did saunter, the pair of us. The grass was cool and springy under my feet, and it looked navy-blue in the moonlight. It was like being in a film, you know, one of those old black-and-white musicals, where people suddenly start hugging lamp-posts and bursting into a duet. It would have taken very little to persuade me to hug a lamp-post. I felt game for anything. I think it’s the moon that does it.

  When we got home, the flat smelt of garam masala, which is not very romantic, but we made some hot chocolate and we put on a bar of the electric fire, not because it was cold, but more for the glow, and then we turned the lights off and lit some candles. We sat up for ages in the candlelight and toasted our toes at the fire, and sometimes we talked and sometimes we were silent, except for the soft hiss of the electric fire and the occasional sputtering of the candles. And the best part was that Imelda didn’t try to make me talk about Mum, which I had been just a bit afraid of. We didn’t talk about anything much, except the film we’d seen, and how the moon looked, dropped into the canal like that. Like a Japanese picture.

  I never once thought of Dad and Margaret and what they must be doing. Not until this morning.

  We slept late. Imelda never goes to church, not even at Christmas, which is a bit extreme, I must say, though it has the value of consistency, I suppose. She says she is an apostate, which sounds like something holy, but is actually the exact opposite. It must have been nearly mid-day when we got up. Time for brunch, Imelda announced, and said I could choose between going to a jazz brunch in a pub in town or Bewley’s. Do you eat every day in Bewley’s? I asked. She shrugged and said nearly every day. I know it sounds silly, but to me at that moment it seemed the height of sophistication to live in a flat and eat in Bewley’s most days, and I longed to be grown up and finished my education so I could live like that too.

  I’m not really into jazz, though I keep that to myself – it’s terribly uncool not to be into jazz – so I chose Bewley’s. But as soon as I sat down to my plate of sausages and scrambled eggs I started to cry. Mum used to make scrambled eggs when I was little and heap them up on toast, just like that. I know it doesn’t sound very spiritual, getting doleful over a plate of scrambled egg, but life is like that, you know, it’s not a romantic novel after all.

  So anyway, as Lisa always says every time she starts a new paragraph, so to speak, in any story she is telling, there I was plopping big fat tears onto my brunch, and with my shoulders heaving unbecomingly. Imelda made soothing noises as best she could and through my tears I picked up her cutlery and started cutting up her sausages for her. I must have looked a bit peculiar, leaning across the table and doing that, with tears running down my nose and onto the brawny table-top. I suddenly had a vision of myself doing it, how ridiculous I must have looked, and that made me giggle, so I cheered up a little then. But having broached the subject, so to speak, by crying, I then began to get emotional about Dad and Margaret too and the fact that they had gone off on this weekend, and I told Imelda I thought he might have the decency to wait till Mum was cold in her grave – I don’t know what made me use such a horrible expression, but of course as soon as I said it, I realised the awfulness of it, and that made me cry some more. I got angry then, and I let f
ly about Dad and his callousness. I forget sometimes that Imelda is his sister, but I don’t think she goes in for false loyalty anyway. She sat and listened, and chewed her sausages thoughtfully. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t stand up for Dad, but she didn’t tell me to pull myself together either. I could have kissed her for the way she just listened and chewed like that. I would have too, if it hadn’t been Bewley’s on a Sunday morning, and the scrambled eggs and everything.

  Wednesday 16th July

  He’s finally admitted that he wants Milly-Molly-Mandy (I’m really going to have to stop calling her that) to move in with us. Well, he didn’t actually put it like that. He said he was ‘serious’ about Margaret, and he wants me to know this, as we will have to start to plan for the future, but I knew what he meant. I threw a tantrum. Well, I felt I owed it to Mum. It was quite a spectacular tantrum. I smashed two dinner plates and a bottle of ink. Dad quietly swept up the shards, but he couldn’t do much about the ink, except dab at it with kitchen paper. It made an amazing pattern on the wallpaper, like one of those psychological tests. What does this ink spot say to you? Treachery? Inconstancy? Adultery even? Not technically, perhaps, but as near as makes no difference, and anyway, who says not? This relationship has developed suspiciously quickly. It’s still there. The inkspot, I mean.

  It really needled him, not the inkspot specifically, the tantrum in general, I could see that. He came to my room afterwards, when I was sprawled prone on my bed, with my hair all over the duvet, all passion spent, just sobbing occasionally. He sat very tentatively on the edge of the bed and spoke softly to me, as if I were a small child. He stroked my hair. Then he started to gather it all up, like a skein of wool, and he wound it around his wrists. (It’s pretty long.) I couldn’t be sure, because my face was firmly in the pillow, but I think at one point he may have raised it to his lips. We sat there for ages like that, and then he said, If it makes you so unhappy, Cindy, OK, let’s forget it.

  Not on your life! You can’t just ‘forget’ something like that. I’m not going to let him away with it that easily. I turned over and shook my hair free. I mumbled, No, it was all right, it was his house, his life, if he wanted to share it with someone from outside the family, that was his business. He winced when I said the bit about someone outside the family, and he started to protest that of course it was my house too, my home, and he wouldn’t dream of forcing me to share it with other people, it was just that he felt the house was so empty with only the two of us, and that I needed company, and wouldn’t it be nice to have two girls of my own age about the place. Talk about naive! Or maybe it wasn’t so much naive. Maybe it was straightforward manipulation. It was like a scene from one of those very bad, very mushy Hollywood films, one of the ones we sometimes get out on video on a Sunday evening and have a giggle over. Sleepless in Seattle maybe, or Kramer versus Kramer.

  That gave me an idea, so I said that it would be so much easier if Dad and Mum were divorced, that then I could just go and live with Mum, but that being an orphan, I didn’t have that option, and that’s what made it so difficult for me. Divorce made him wince again. I knew it would. And orphan really cracked him up. He started to cry quietly. He put his hand to his forehead and wept.

  He’s not urbane now, I thought.

  Thursday 24th July

  Margaret has broken it off! She says Dad is too recently widowed (should it not be widowered for a man? and if not, why not?), and is not in any position to make a radical life decision at the moment. I know that’s just her potted psychologist self talking, but at least it’s a reprieve. Maybe she isn’t a total nerd.

  Dad is a broken man.

  Friday 25th July

  Dad’s booked two tickets to Lisbon for a fortnight, leaving tomorrow! They’re for me and him, by the way, not him and Margaret.

  Monday 11th August

  Dad and I had a wonderful holiday! I thought it might be a strain, just the two of us, but it wasn’t. The weather was baking, far too hot for my black gear, which was all I had, as we left in such a rush, so on the first day Dad took me to a department store and bought me three cotton dresses, all long and pale, a straw hat and a pair of flat strappy sandals. After that I waltzed around on his arm, like a Helena Bonham-Carter character in one of those Edwardian films. Not that I am as pretty as Helena Bonham-Carter, and glasses aren’t really in role, but still, with my straw bonnet well down on my head, I would pass at an angle anyway. Besides, I had my contact lenses for good wear.

  We visited art galleries and churches and palaces by day, fabulous places, with the most gorgeous tiling you can imagine, and then every evening we sought out a new restaurant and ate fresh sardines and swordfish and goat and swigged red wine, sitting at little rickety tables out of doors, on pavements and terraces. Sometimes they cooked the sardines on an outdoor brazier. We sat around and ate lots of bitter little pinkish-black olives that they brought to us on platters while we waited for our orders to cook. They served cheese also as an hors d’oeuvre, sharp-tasting but creamy-textured white cheese, with the olives usually. Some evenings we had African dishes, a legacy of the Portuguese colonial past. That’s where the goat came in, I think.

  We hear so much about how poor Portugal is nowadays, that it is hard to remember it was once such a colonial power. Lisbon is weird like that, all these really fabulous palaces and so on, and then if you take the train anywhere you can see the backs of the houses, slum-houses really, with the washing hanging dolefully out of the windows. It makes you wonder how dirty the clothes were before they were washed, when you see the state of them on the line.

  We went to Sintra one day. That’s a really pretty village outside Lisbon, in the hills. And Estoril, we went there another day, very fashionable, very European, which sounds ridiculous, but I mean you could pretend you were in Baden-Baden, if you see what I mean, or on the Lido, watching old who’s-it in Death in Venice with his make-up melting. You could even be a William Trevor character, or a hesitant Anita Brookner middle-aged girl. (I’m quite well read, you will observe. English is my best subject, not all thanks to Mr O’Donnell. There is some honest-to-god natural talent there too.)

  Dad was great in Portugal. It was like old times, except for Mum not being there of course. But I didn’t miss her as much as you’d expect. We even went to a casino one night. Now was that Estoril or Cascais? I can’t remember. I took off my straw hat for that, and put my hair up, to look older. It was delicious having Dad all to myself, not having to listen in on the extension to make sure it’s not Margaret again. He did slip away a couple of times, ostensibly to change traveller’s cheques, but I knew he was really ringing her. I know she broke it off, but I don’t imagine she forbade him to ring her. It didn’t seem to matter so much, when I knew he was on a post office phone and there was probably a queue outside and a Portuguese telephonist listening in to improve his English.

  I hated coming home. It is always either raining at Dublin Airport or has just been raining, or it’s working itself up to rain again. It’s as though the holiday people arrange it that way so that you want to rush out and book your next holiday as soon as you step off the plane. Maybe they have a secret arrangement with the Met office to leave one of those little cloudburst stickers they use on the TV weather forecast permanently in place at Collinstown, and maybe it works by a sort of voodoo.

  Thursday 14th August

  I went over to Lisa’s, to bring her her present, a tile from Sintra, which is where they make them. She looked at it and said, What am I supposed to do with a single tile? Tile the shower in the kids’ dolls-house? Very witty, very amusing, I don’t think. It’s really an exceptionally pretty tile, with a picture of a bird painted on it in lovely colours. I said it was just a token, that it was only for decoration, and she said she knew that, she was just pulling my leg. You know that sinking feeling you get in Dublin Airport when you come home from your holidays, I got it all over again at Lisa’s place today.

  We went to the Phoenix Park then. That
was complicated. Lisa’s little brother Trevor is learning to cycle, so Lisa cycled his bicycle over, and I got the bus with Trevor. He wriggled on the seat all the way and chewed gum. I am beginning to see the disadvantages of younger brothers. I don’t see why it had to be the Phoenix Park. What’s wrong with all the parks on the south side? But apparently Trevor wanted to use the cycle paths in the Phoeno and nothing else would do him. He couldn’t cycle there himself, as he is not safe to let out on the road yet, which is why Lisa had to cycle his bike there for him.

  Once we got there it was fine, because he cycled off on his own, wobbled off I should say, and Lisa and I got to sit on a park bench under a tree and watch the world go by. It sort of glided by. There were all these people on their bikes, sailing along the cycle paths, not like Ireland at all, more like Holland, and people on roller-blades on the pedestrian paths, and then the cars on the main road. Everyone seemed to be rolling along on some sort of wheels, in the afternoon sunlight. It was a bit like being a figure in a modern-day, summery version of those winter scenes you see in the Dutch sections of art galleries, with bright knots of colour that are people skating on the canals. Sitting on our bench with everyone spinning along, in and out of our field of vision, calling to each other, and dogs leaping over fences in the distance, it all seemed a bit unreal.