by Cathy Kelly
Nola was big, beautiful and sexy with it, just like her mother. Everyone loved Nola’s mother and it was to Nola’s house that the trio gravitated after school and at weekends.
There, nobody hassled them for eating too much or for smiling in a way that implied sluttish, non-Catholic-en-route-immediately-to-helldom.
After college, Tiana became engaged to Dean, a Cork-born firefighter who was a Buddhist – ‘I love him even more because he’s into Buddhism and not Catholicism, if that makes sense,’ Tiana had told her friends, who both said it made perfect sense.
Amy said she was mildly surprised Tiana hadn’t located a Satanist cult to take up with and that Dean was far too lovely and normal to upset Tiana’s mother sufficiently.
‘In my more bitter years, I did think of finding a nice tattooed bloke with a nose ring, a few eyebrow rings, a skinhead and a Prince Albert, but they’re not as easy to find as you’d think.’
Nola and Amy giggled.
‘We could have helped you look,’ they’d said, all thrilled at the thought of introducing said boyfriend to Tiana’s mother, who said she would not countenance a marriage between her daughter, a good Catholic, and Dean, whom she called ‘that heathen’.
Tiana, even though she said she should have known what would happen, was ridiculously devastated at her mother’s intractability.
‘We could have found someone in a heavy metal band?’ said Nola, to drag humour back into it.
‘We could have hired an actor,’ said Amy. ‘Drawn a pentagram in magic marker on his forehead and hung a few weird animal bones on him, given him a pack of Tarot to flash around …?’
‘I always loved hearing your essays read out in English,’ said Tiana wistfully, close to tears. ‘You’re so inventive. I don’t know why you didn’t go into creative writing instead of window dressing. No, Dean it is. Even if my mother hates him and me.’
Tiana and Dean got married without her mother present and then moved to New Zealand. Her Facebook posts were about her beloved young children, work, Dean and pot-luck dinners with gorgeous new New Zealand friends. It all sounded wonderful. She had entirely turned her back on religion and even Buddhism had taken a hit.
‘I’m potty-training Brandon – I don’t have time for meditation!’
Nola was larger than ever and had a successful business in London on how to be fabulous and feel it.
Amy glowed with pride when she saw the adverts on the internet: ‘Own your Big Beauty!’
Big Beauty specialised in makeovers for women who’d felt marginalised all their lives for being larger. One look at Nola – size twenty-two, sexy and able to rock leather trousers and red lipstick – and women threw away tent dresses like nobody’s business and went looking for their own leather trousers.
She was happy, she told Amy, and while she wasn’t sure about settling down yet, there was no shortage of Mr Right Nows in her life.
And Amy felt left behind.
Her two closest friends had moved on and she felt stagnant.
Even her mother – who had sworn off love for ever – was enjoying a blissful second marriage.
And Amy couldn’t help but think that her mother was comparing her to Edward’s daughter, Jojo.
Jojo was stunning and look how desperately Bess had tried to doll Amy up for the wedding. Why else would she do that unless she felt that Amy would look terrible beside her new, exquisite stepdaughter?
Despite all the make-up and the expensive dress, Amy had not outshone Jojo at her mother’s wedding to Edward Brannigan – well, who could? Jojo was gorgeous. So gorgeous, she made Amy feel shy, and she clearly hated Amy’s mother, although she’d been polite to Amy, which had been a huge relief.
Jojo, Cari and Paul had great jobs. Careers.
Amy had wanted to talk to Edward’s niece, Cari, about publishing but had felt too shy: Cari was so glamorous, like the vision of a career woman from a magazine, all long legs and heels with that silky dark hair, and glossy lips, forever joking and laughing.
Amy worked in the window design department of a discount chain of shops. She was not rearranging elegant mannequins draped in Pucci and Gucci. She was dressing very cheap dummies in 4.99-euro sweatsuits and 1.99-euro-for-five knickers alongside lawnmowers and angle grinders. It was not what she wanted to do with her life but it was experience, seeing things, and she needed to pay for her apartment and eat.
Her apartment was tiny, although she loved it, mainly because it was on the corner of Delaney Gardens, which was so pretty and had such a sense of community that it didn’t matter that she had an hour’s commute to work.
She was still overweight – not by normal people’s standards, but by her mother’s. She wasn’t large enough to be noticed, the way dear Nola could never, ever blend into the background. People noticed Nola, what with the fabulous clothes, the red lippie and the over-the-top gestures that made men love her.
But nobody noticed Amy, for all that the hairdressers were always saying she had ‘beautiful hair and skin and could be so pretty …’ which was code, she knew, for ‘You’d be prettier if you were thinner or tried harder.’
Amy didn’t want to be thinner.
She wanted to be happy.
Sometimes, when he had time and came over, she was beyond happy. When he was in bed with her, telling her how beautiful she was, Amy felt gloriously happy. But she couldn’t boast about her man on Facebook or post photos of them out enjoying dinners or walking along beaches. Because Clive, gorgeous Clive, was married.
Five
‘Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives
you the test first, and the lesson afterward.’
Oscar Wilde
Maggie Brannigan worked in an insurance firm run by a close friend of her uncle’s. It was not the job from heaven but it was better than working for her Uncle Edward, who had always seemed to be a pussycat during her childhood, but whom, it transpired, magically turned into a cold-eyed automaton at work and expected all his commands to be carried out almost before the words had left his mouth.
Maggie’s year after college, being trained up to be a secretarial assistant in Brannigan’s Engineering, was not filled with memories of fabulousness.
‘Uncle Eddie expects the family to work even harder than anyone else in the place,’ her big sister, Cari, had explained when Maggie had put forward the notion that their uncle had been eaten by pod people and replaced by an alien as soon as his Lexus pulled into the office car park. ‘He’s a high achiever, he expects the same of everyone and more so of us.’
‘Why?’ demanded Maggie, who’d thought she’d scored a nice number in the family business when it turned out that her liberal arts degree had somehow not been translatable into actual employment, other than in the fast-food business.
‘We’re Brannigans,’ said Cari, as if that explained it all.
Fine for Cari to say that, Maggie thought crossly. Cari had been born with determination, brains and all that other businessy stuff in her veins. Cari was all for careers and breaking glass ceilings.
But what if you wanted a job where you started at nine, left at five, got paid well and had no real responsibility?
Maggie was in her twenties! This was the decade for fun, letting loose, drifting through the world like a free spirit, going on fabulous holidays with gorgeous men!
Her mother, Nora, the kindest woman on the planet and the most maternal, was – unfortunately – not impressed when Maggie was, reluctantly, let go from the family firm.
‘I think it’s the best thing for her, Nora,’ Uncle Edward said on the phone. ‘She’s immature, nothing like Cari. If we keep her, she’ll think she doesn’t have to work. I’ll find her something.’
‘Thanks, Ed, for being so honest with me,’ Nora replied, knowing he was right. Blood, like lava, boiled up inside her, and when Maggie arrived home – obviously, she hadn’t managed to move out of the family house yet, because rent was so high and it was hard to combine actual rent and party
ing – she found her mother waiting for her.
‘Your Uncle Edward phoned with the news,’ she said, knowing that Maggie was a good kid and yet wondering what the heck she, as a mother, had done wrong? At Maggie’s age, Nora had a job and a child, and still put dinner on the table for Mick every night.
‘You are clever, Maggie Brannigan. You did brilliantly in your exams in school and yet in college you did nothing. Nothing! It’s a miracle you got any degree at all.’
‘Mum, the office was dreadful. All these old biddies glaring at me if I left the desk to go to the loo. And in college, come on, I was finding out who I wanted to be. Everyone does that, it’s like, practically a rite of passage,’ said Maggie, twirling a bit of hair and wondering if she ought to dye her dark hair blonde because the last two guys she’d dated had moved on to platinum blondes, and she’d really liked one of the guys, and therefore, her look might be wrong—
‘Maggie, I love you and I will always love you, but if you think you are going to become a boomerang kid, racing back home when you’re thirty because you’ve screwed up a job, I will shave that lovely head of yours and your eyebrows, and throw you out on the streets, kiddo. Tough love!’
‘Jeez, Mum—’ began Maggie.
‘Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain in front of me!’ snapped her mother. ‘We are the poor Brannigans, your father has a decent job and I’m only part-time in the school. So forget any trust fund dreams. It took a lot of effort to send you to college. I know damn well your Uncle Edward would give us any amount of money if we asked but your father and I are not like that. We make our own way.’
‘I’m sorry …’
Maggie burst into tears, looking, at twenty-five, much like she’d looked when she was five. Big blue eyes wobbling, dark hair a mess, lips wobbling.
The tough love thing was over, Nora thought, and pulled her younger daughter into her arms. Why couldn’t she have a little medium in her life – she had one over-achieving daughter who had – understandably – no time for men in her life, and another who viewed over-achievers as lunatics. Did one child automatically want to be the polar opposite of the other? She should have had a third – it might have balanced the whole thing out.
‘We are invited to a party,’ Maggie messaged her cousin Trina on Friday morning, in neither of their break times. ‘Two posh invitations arrived in the post. I opened yours too.’
Maggie, who now worked in We’ll Be There For You insurance, said she had perfected the art of pretending to be on her computer on office business when she was really on her smartphone, tap tapping away as she discussed things with Trina like the dress she’d seen online that she might get, should she try pink streaks in her hair, or Trina’s latest boyfriend – ‘He is so hairy, it’s like dating Cromagnon man,’ Trina said, ‘but it’s sort of sexy – does that make me strange?’
They now shared an apartment but found that, weirdly, despite seeing each other blearily over their toast every morning and over wine, box sets, pizzas or emergency there’s-nothing-in-the-place-to-eat cereal meals at night, there just wasn’t enough time in the day to talk about all the things they needed to talk about, hence all the work calls, WhatsApps and messaging.
Trina worked in a very off-beat shoe shop in a cool, tourist trap part of Dublin city and there were vast periods when nobody came in or out of the shop, so she could generally tweet/text/WhatsApp or phone anyone she felt like whenever she felt like it. The market for perilous brocade shoes that looked like something Louis XVI might have worn was shaky at best. They did much better on the biker boots.
‘Why sell biker boots and those weird dressing-up sort of shoes?’ Jojo had asked once. ‘Why not one or the other, the more profitable one?’
‘Dunno.’ Trina shrugged. She had no interest in the actual business as long as she got her wages every Friday lunchtime.
Like Maggie, Trina saw work as a means to an end.
They worked to be able to afford their apartment and a fun lifestyle – the former currently a bit messy and requiring a clean, but they were both too busy. Everyone thought the pair were sisters instead of cousins. While Jojo was the Scandi-looking one of the Brannigan girl cousins, Maggie, Trina and Cari were the dark ones with the fabulous blue/green eyes.
Cari’s hair was short and stylish, while Maggie’s was long with the recent addition of purple streaks. She wore a slender tattoo in Chinese that climbed elegantly around her wrist. Their mother still wasn’t used to the tattoo.
‘What does it say?’ asked Nora.
‘I forget – something about good fortune …’ Maggie said, wondering where she’d put the bit of paper with the actual translation.
Their cousin Trina’s hair was equally long but more glossy and she was a dab hand at making gentle curls with her hair straighteners.
Out together, the flatmates looked like a hip Manga girl and her posh, hair-flicking sister.
When Trina got the message, the shop was empty and she hit speed dial for Maggie.
‘A party?’ squealed Trina. ‘Whose party?’
‘Nothing thrilling, Uncle Edward’s seventieth.’
‘Oh.’ The single syllable made it clear how deeply un-fascinating this type of family event was to Trina.
Family parties were fine when they were kids and the three families had done so much together but now – ugh.
‘The parents will make us go,’ Maggie reminded her. ‘Although it’ll probably just be all of us and unless we try inbreeding, there won’t be anyone exciting to meet,’ she added.
‘But—’ Trina’s voice held a grin in it. ‘It’s in Lisowen Castle. A whole weekend, and I betcha it’s all expenses paid.’
Maggie matched that grin. ‘OMG, I betcha you’re right! Spa treatments! Holy freaking shit!’ she said, far too loudly.
The words just slipped out and immediately, Maggie hid behind her computer monitor. That had come out louder than she planned. Unless a wholly unexpected storm had wiped out half the western seaboard, nobody said things like ‘holy freaking shit’ in We’ll Be There For You insurance.
Because the whole email complaint section had been badly hacked twice, it was currently closed. Therefore, the staff had all reluctantly been trained in how to say things like: ‘I’ll look into that for you; I’ll put it onto somebody in senior management; we take this type of thing very seriously, indeed’, all of which were code for ‘I don’t really care as it’s nearly five o’clock and I have a date with a guy from Claims, but still, you are a customer and, hey, nobody wants you to phone the papers/radio/go online bitching about us, so your name will be added to our lengthy complaints list for whatever sap is working Complaints this week. We will get back to you, like, whenever.’
‘Holy freaking shit’ had not been on any of the training modules.
‘I better let you go,’ Trina muttered, as Maggie whispered ‘shit’ again, much more quietly.
Trina hung up, thinking of what she’d wear to Lisowen Castle. She couldn’t tap her mother for more money – Ma was getting bad-tempered about money lately. Said it wasn’t fair they were always broke and bloody Edward was married now, so no hope he was going to leave them shedloads of cash when he died.
Sometimes Trina worried about her mother’s future in the karmic sense – not that Trina was into the whole heaven or hell concept, but surely it was bad karma to even be thinking about Uncle Ed’s death, wasn’t it?
With practised ease, she flipped back to thinking about the hotel. Maggie had mentioned spa treatments. Was there a spa – of course there was a spa! All those posh places had spas now. She’d look it up online in a minute.
What could she have done? Total body massage, mani and pedi, obvs. That would be covered too, surely? Uncle Edward wasn’t a cheapskate, whatever else you said about him and even Bess, the recently installed Aunt Bess, with a white gold engagement ring with a diamond solitaire the size of a golf ball on her bony finger, wasn’t mean. Conniving, possibly, and definitely vulgar, as Trina’s m
other insisted, but not mean.
Friday was Jojo’s late morning when Elaine opened up the shop, so she could have a late breakfast. Late meant a luxurious nine, which gave her time to have a long shower and do her hair afterwards because it was always a busy day. That morning, the radio in the kitchen was blaring out the news – miserable – while the kettle was boiling with its ‘I-am-a-rocket-about-to-take-off’ noise.
She looked at her breakfast: spelt toast, a banana, low-fat spread and low-sugar marmalade ready to go.
Low everything.
Health was vital. You couldn’t make a baby with the appliance of science if you drank, smoked or partied.
During her wild college years, Jojo had tried ultra hard not to have a baby.
She’d had the morning-after pill (made her sick), taken the contraceptive pill (made her put on weight) and made boyfriends use condoms, and had still spent a handful of fearful mornings staring into the toilet bowl, wishing it would turn red.
It always had. Lucky, lucky! she’d thought then. Lucky never to have become pregnant after a fling with some guy she wouldn’t want to date longer than a month, never mind have a child with.
But with hideous irony, at the ancient age of thirty-two, married, having recently lost her mother and ready to be a mother, it turned out that she couldn’t have a baby after all. She and Hugh had begun a battery of tests a year ago which proved that Hugh’s sperm could win Olympic medals in the freestyle swimming events and that Jojo’s insides looked as bumpy as the dark side of the moon – she’d seen the laparoscopy DVD – with endometriosis.
Two failed cycles of IVF later, she was wondering if irony was a speciality of whoever was in charge of the planet.
Unwanted babies cried in foreign orphanages, tiny children in sub-Saharan countries died from having nothing to drink but dirty water, and Jojo had not managed that magic second line on the pregnancy testing kit.
Worse, there were babies everywhere.
She’d stopped going on Facebook because all her school friends put up endless photos of their adorable children; clients of the shop she co-owned came in shimmering with delight and wondering might they fit into a large sweater ‘Because it’s early days and I can still wear my jeans! Although my sister – who has three kids – says I won’t once I hit four months. That’s when you really need the pregnancy stuff on your first pregnancy. On your second, you need it straight off. It’s the stomach muscles, apparently …’