I lay in bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. Usually if you have a good cry, you can slip off to sleep really easily afterwards, but this time, my head ached and pounded and I felt as if my brain was on fire. Maybe I should have taken the paracetamol after all.
I got up after an hour. My eyes were stinging, and there was a dull gong beating in my head. I washed my face with cold water. It was deliciously soothing to my puffy eyelids. Then I brushed my hair – that’s when I discovered the marmalade – and went downstairs and sat quietly in the drawing room, waiting for Margaret.
Fights are supposed to be cathartic (that means it’s tough going at the time, but it sort of cleanses and purifies you, a bit like Lent or Purgatory or Greek tragedy, I read it in an essay on Shakespeare – we do this pretty cool stuff in English this year). But in real life it doesn’t seem to work that way. I don’t feel a bit cleansed. I just feel worn out. I didn’t know Ashling felt like that. I was quite shocked when she said all that about me. I thought maybe we could eventually get to be, well, not friends, but at least to tolerate each other, see the other one’s point of view. But maybe it isn’t really me she is so mad at. All that stuff about my bereavement, my feelings, I bet that is all coming from her mother, the stupid woman. She’s such a victim, and she doesn’t even know it.
For a little while there, it was nearly like being a family, though. It was certainly a family sort of fight. But it didn’t last. We went back to being polite. Maybe that’s the way it will go – we start behaving like a family for a little while, and then we remember, and start being nice to each other again, and then gradually we will stop remembering and we will forget to be nice, and in the end we will all settle down into being a normalish sort of family – people who live together and row a lot. Maybe that’s how families just are. Maybe it’s not about playing charades and going to parent–teacher meetings. Maybe it’s more about fighting over shoes and who gets to sit on the hump in the back seat. Or maybe it isn’t and we won’t.
Anyway, we all apologised to each other beautifully at dinner, everyone rushing in to say it had been their fault. Alva said it was all her fault for taking the boots, which really it was. But I said no, it was my fault, I’d over-reacted, which I didn’t really believe, but I wasn’t going to be outdone. And then Ashling said she’d spoken out of turn too, and she was sorry. And Margaret said she should have made sure Alva knew not to take my things, so really it was all her fault. Only Dad didn’t join in the mass confession. I didn’t notice at the time, but now I come to think of it, it was all really his fault, wasn’t it? I mean, if he hadn’t got Margaret pregnant, then none of this would have happened, they wouldn’t have got married, Alva wouldn’t have been here in the first place to borrow my Docs, so really it’s all Dad’s fault. It’s all his fault, the whole miserable business. Oh Dad, why did you do this to me? It’s all so horrible, I hate it. I want it to go back to being like it was before, even like it was after Mum died. At least then it was just you and me.
Friday 28th November
Of course, on the other hand, if all this had never happened, if Dad hadn’t married Margaret, then I wouldn’t have been at Imelda’s that night, and I would never have met Robbie. Was it worth it all to meet him? I wouldn’t go that far, but he is pretty cool. Really he is. He’s funny and kind and he’s a great kisser. And he looks quite nice, too, sort of smiley and crinkly. Not as handsome as Red Hugh, I have to say, but much more fun. It’s nice to have a boyfriend, even if he isn’t really. It’s more than nice. It’s rapid. I think I’ll ring him in the morning.
Sunday 30th November
I went out with Robbie last night. I wore a jumper Ashling lent me. It was my first ever real proper date. I asked Dad if I could, and he said, Fine, fine, he seems a nice boy, but be home before eleven-thirty.
I thought he should have put up more of a fight. I thought fathers were supposed to say, Over my dead body, and Never darken my door again. Maybe he was just glad to get me out of the house for a while.
He didn’t come on his motor bike, Robbie, I mean. He hasn’t got one actually, it’s Ger’s that he goes on sometimes. He came on his push bike and he locked it to the drainpipe behind our house. Then we went into town on the bus. The lights were on in Henry Street, for Christmas. I don’t like it being Christmassy too early, but it will be December tomorrow. It was lovely, like fairyland, and the air was sharp and cold and it made the lights seem to twinkle even more, and town was full of people, even though the shops were closed. We went to see a film in The Lighthouse, something in French, I think it was 18s, but I don’t see why. It wasn’t violent or dirty or anything, though it had some good sexy bits, but tasteful, you know. Anyway, I’m nearly sixteen. Afterwards we crossed the Ha’penny Bridge, holding hands – I like holding hands, it’s nearly the best part – and looked down into the river, the lights sparkling in the water, all wavery and shimmering. Then we skipped over the hump and raced across the road and into Merchant’s Arch and we wandered through all the crowds in Temple Bar, it was like the middle of the day, except for the street lights.
Then we went for our bus because it was nearly a quarter to eleven. It was cold at the bus-stop and Robbie put his arms around me to keep me warm, and it was all snug in there, and I said, We’re good at bus-stops, aren’t we. He said we were great at bus-stops and gave me an extra-special hug and kissed the top of my head, and I felt safe and happy and I thought, this is great, this is what it’s all about, this is how you grow up, this is what life after being a child is like, this is me, with someone I choose to be with, doing something I choose to do, not just missing Mum or hating Dad, being annoyed with Ashling or Alva, getting impatient with Margaret, thinking about the baby, this is just me, doing something for me, with somebody I really like, and it’s great. Some day I will get to live that life all the time, have my own place, my own friends, control of my own life, choose who I live with and where I go, be like Imelda, free.
And then the bus came, and we got on it, and we trundled home.
You’re not going to believe this. Alva just told me Ashling keeps a diary too. I can’t imagine what she puts in it. Nothing ever seems to happen in her life. I’d love to get hold of it, though, just to see what Miss Prim thinks of me. She probably thinks I’m quite nice, actually.
Aisling’s Diary
Wednesday 2nd April
We always laugh about Gavin’s birthday being on April Fool’s Day, but it’s not much of a consolation really. Gavin is a very sweet child, and it’s not his fault that his birth, his very existence, sealed our fate. We sent him a card. We always do. I think it was sealed anyway – our fate I mean, not the card, a sealed card costs fourpence more to post – but Alva used to have a desperate hope, until Gavin was born. Then even she had to start to see that we weren’t all going to live happily ever after.
That’s why she cries in the night, like last night. She usually sleeps with the door open, but when she wants to have a weep, she creeps out of bed and closes her door. That always puts me on the alert. I can hear the creak as she gets out of bed, then her footsteps padding across the carpet, and the soft click as the lock engages. I don’t hear the creak as she gets back into bed, presumably because the door is closed, but within minutes I can hear her sobs coming through the wall. She always cries rhythmically, so you can predict each gasp. I lie there, tense, listening for each one. I daren’t go to her. I know she’s embarrassed about it. Otherwise she wouldn’t close the door.
It’s heartbreaking. All I can do is lie there and listen to it, and will her to drift off to sleep. When the gaps between the sobs get longer, I know she is getting sleepy, and it will soon stop.
It’s been going on for four years now. It was worse in the beginning. Then she was only nine. At first she did it to make Mum come, but then later, when she was past the stage of loud hysterical shrieks and screams, I think she started to use quiet tears as a punishment, to make Mum feel guilty. There is a sly side to Alva. I don’t blame her. It�
�s hard to lose your father when you’re only nine. It makes you distrustful.
I lost him too, of course, but I was older. Not that much older – some people would say twelve is an even worse age – but I was quite a grown-up twelve, I suppose, and I wasn’t Daddy’s favourite. Alva adored him, ever since she was a tiny little thing. I remember her in her high chair, waving her stubby little arms and legs, her whole body going into a paroxysm of delight when he came home in the evenings.
Mum would be feeding her her tea, but as soon as Daddy appeared Alva would start to push the spoon aside impatiently, her fat little fingers all splayed like a starfish. I remember that once she splattered baby rice all over Mum’s blouse. Nothing would do her then until Dad put down his briefcase and came and fed her himself. He used to play little games with her, holding the spoon of food away out of her reach, and she would be laughing and sizzling with anticipation and excitement and banging on the tray of the high chair, and then he would swoop the spoon at high speed and accompanied by aeroplane noises, or bus noises, or motorbike noises – every spoonful got a different noise, that was part of the fun – wham into her wide-open, pink-rimmed, pulsating little mouth.
After she’d eaten up all her tea, Daddy would swoop her out of the high chair and throw her up at the ceiling. Mum used to say she would bring up all her food if he jostled her around like that, but she never did. She was always vomiting all over Mum, but she never once as much as dribbled on Dad that I can remember. I would sit in my corner – I had a little table of my own, for eating off and playing at, I think it might have been an old school desk – and watch them. After a while he might remember I was there and come over with the baby wriggling delightedly under his arm and put his hand on my head and say something sweet and meaningless. I usually didn’t answer, just looked at him solemnly and went on cutting up my French toast. Sometimes Mum would come and sit beside me, crouching down to my level, and ask if I would like jam. I always loved her for that. It seemed to me such an entirely relevant question, and one I could answer, instead of, And what did Daddy’s little poppet learn at playschool today?
It wasn’t a case of me and Mum against Dad and Alva or anything like that. I loved him too. It was just that she and he had a very special closeness. He used to take her fishing. I wasn’t jealous. He asked me to come fishing lots of times too, but I was afraid of seeing the fish dying. I think I was even more afraid of the idea that they might not die, and he would have to kill them. I didn’t want to see him killing the fish. Alva didn’t have to see him doing that, because she did it herself. You just catch them by the tail, she said, and give their head a good wallop on the ground. But I couldn’t imagine catching a fish by the tail. Surely it would slither out of your hand – wouldn’t it be all slimy and hard to get a grip on? And your hand, wouldn’t it smell fishy afterwards? So instead I would stay at home with Mum, and we would make a coating for the fish. Sometimes we used just flour with pepper and salt in it. Sometimes we made a more elaborate batter with egg and breadcrumbs. Once or twice we even used cornflakes. You have to put the cornflakes in a plastic bag and then roll them with a rolling pin to crush them. I liked that. I liked the sensation of rolling the bag and feeling the cornflakes scrunching under the rolling pin, but I didn’t like the taste. The combination of fish and cornflakes always seemed incongruous to me.
It’s usually on the nights after we come home from his place that she cries herself to sleep. We go there for visits every now and then. It used to be every second weekend when we were younger, then it became once a month, and now it’s really only token visits, two or three times a year. He likes to show us off when we’re with him. He takes us around and introduces us to people he knows, My daughters, from before, you know.
I don’t like being a daughter from before. It’s almost like he’s saying we’re girls he sees sometimes because we used to be his daughters. I don’t like it, but Alva finds it unbearable, to go from being the light of his life, the apple of his eye, his fairy princess, his angel-cherub, to being one of his daughters from before. It kills her, and when we come home she weeps for nights on end. She never talks about him now, between visits, but she used to all the time. She was for ever planning things, working out dramatic scenarios in her head, staging events, in which she was the star, and he was the male lead. She would work it all out, and then she would tell me the story, like the plot of a film she’d seen. These dramas all took different twists, but they always had the same ending: Daddy would come home and he and Mum would be married again, and it would all go on as before. Of course it never happened. It couldn’t happen, but she couldn’t see that at the time, not at the age of nine. It just wasn’t on, and especially not after Gavin was born.
Friday 4th April
Alva and I are going to paint her bedroom this weekend. I said I would buy the paint, instead of an Easter egg this year. I thought it would cheer her up.
I got Mum to leave us at the DIY shop yesterday, while she went off with her trolley in that distracted way of hers – she goes into a complete trance once she enters a supermarket, I don’t know why – and we chose the paint. It’s a very, very pale pink, so pale you could almost call it white.
The best part is that it was on special offer, so it didn’t cost a fortune. I love getting things cheap. Money is a bit of a problem in our house. Mum’s job is only part-time. In some jobs, part-time is fine, because you can get by on half a salary if you really put your mind to it and anyway you pay less tax, but Mum is a teacher, which means that there are three months in the summer, plus other holidays, when she doesn’t get paid at all, so cash is always tight with us.
Dad pays our school fees. That’s his contribution to the family economy, that and half the mortgage. He says he doesn’t agree with single-sex education. The only mixed school in our area is a fee-paying one, but he insisted we go there anyway. I don’t really believe it has anything to do with co-education. I think it’s just snobbery, but I love our school, so I don’t argue. That’s the only extravagant thing about our lives. We are always having to plan our finances and budget for things.
I help Mum with all that side of things. She’s not very good with figures, but we do it together and it’s very satisfying, seeing the columns all adding up and balancing out. I’ve got her into the habit of using her credit card for most things, and we only keep enough cash for bread and milk and the paper, so we don’t buy things we haven’t planned for, like expensive magazines or sudden-impulse takeaways. We have an emergency fiver, in the bottom of a spaghetti jar – one of those long ones, so it’s hard to get it out unless you really need it.
Tuesday 8th April
Alva is delighted with her bedroom. She gave me a big painty hug and half-smothered me in kisses on Sunday when we finished it and said I was the best big sister anybody ever had and that nobody ever had such a brillo bedroom ever ever before. It is nice, I must say, not too pink, just a nice soft rosy glow. She tore up all the old posters and pin-ups and postcards she’d had festooned over her walls, saying that they were all too raggy and dog-eared for such a beautiful room, and she went out and bought an enormous, shiny technicolour poster of Boyzone and put it up reverently with blu-tack. Mum and I had to act as consultants while she put it up, and she kept begging us to tell her whether it was properly centred and whether it would be in a glare when the curtains were open. At one point she even wished she had Dad’s spirit level so she could be completely sure it was straight. Dad took all his DIY tools with him, which was a bit mean of him. We never have a hammer or a pliers or anything.
When the poster was exactly where Alva wanted it, Mum and I had to stand there and admire it, nudging each other secretly, and agreeing that the lads were just the pinnacle of male desirability. So there they are, like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and a stray friend blessing the bed that she lies on, and grinning down with their toothpasty smiles at her all night long. I suppose they are quite goodlooking, really, if you’re going on fourteen.
/> I wish it was as easy to cheer Mum up. She’s never been the same since Dad left. I know that’s natural, up to a point, but I think it’s time she started picking up the pieces and making a new life for herself. It’s all very well for us, I tell her, we’ll get over it in our own way, and we’ll go on and leave school and get jobs and maybe get married, but she could just get stuck at this point in her life. I keep telling her that she should be going out to clubs for separated people and finding some nice man who will be kind to her. She just laughs when I say that. I think she thinks there aren’t any kind men. But that can’t be so. Bob is kind, for example, as well as being cute.
It’s not as though she’s going to meet anyone through her work. She teaches in a convent school. Actually, she doesn’t really teach much. She specialises in guidance counselling nowadays, which is more one-to-one sort of work, and she only does a few hours a week in the classroom. She’s interested in helping people with their career choices, and she says she feels she has a special empathy with teenage girls who are going through family difficulties, and she likes to be able to help them in any way she can. (I don’t think she realises Alva cries herself to sleep.) She’s very earnest about her work, takes it very seriously, and she’s always reading American books about self-development. I’m a bit dubious about self-development. I can’t help thinking it’s just a buzz-word for selfishness, but she seems to find it interesting, and in her case, it’s not her own self-development she is thinking about, but the self-development of ‘her’ girls.
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