Primperfect
Page 5
I wonder what I’ll wear? Karen dresses pretty well, and I know it’s not like a date, but I feel like I should make sartorial choices that show that I bring just as much, if not more, to the table. My eyeliner definitely needs work. If this were a date with a normal boy, I would ring Ciara and be all ‘WHAT AM I GOING TO WEAR?’ and ‘AGH’. Actually, if this were a date with a normal boy I:
Wouldn’t ring Ciara to talk about clothes.
Wouldn’t hugely care what I wore. I mean, I would a bit, but Joel is more important. More important than anyone.
I mean, we’ve been friends since pre-school. We went to Niamh’s creche together, and both liked the fat crayons better than the skinny, and both fancied the same boy, Kevin (which is kind of fore-shadowy and creepy even though he didn’t look like other Kevin at all, but more like Aladdin from the Disney cartoon. Aladdin or Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid. If they had a baby, it would have been Creche Kevin), because he had dark twisty hair and light-up runners and freckles the colour of caramel.
Felix is a bit like how I imagine straight haired, grown-up Kevin would look. Only without the light-up runners, obviously.
I wish he liked me back.
I wish Joel loved me again. The best-friend kind of love we used to share where both of us were family together.
Sitting in the café beside Felix, I got a wave of jealousy for Joel. I will never have a life exciting enough to war rant interventions.
Would it be weird to bring a series of helpful and informative sex-pamphlets to the café?
Because you can get an STD from very little sexual contact if you are unlucky, and it’s best to be careful.
I’d hate to get an STD — you’d feel all filthy.
And not in a good way.
Good-filthy is a nice feeling.
But Kevin-shaped experience has taught me it is all too often followed by bad-filthy.
I wonder if Kevin ever felt bad-filthy after we hooked up?
It can’t be just a girl thing. The shame of letting yourself be taken for granted.
He was the granted-taker, though, so was probably fine.
If Duncan ever takes Joel for granted I will scratch his aging eyes out.
There is so much I don’t know about how people interact romantically. I wish I had a boyfriend.
But then I would worry so much about keeping him and acting around him and whether or not he was interesting enough and whether or not I was. It would be pretty bothersome.
Maybe boarding-school Robb could be my summer boy.
I mean, I don’t exactly fancy him that much, but it would be a welcome distraction from not being a very good person.
And also, it might make me feel prettier.
Deirdre Sullivan
I don’t feel very pretty at the moment.
Not that being pretty is the be all and end all.
But if you don’t feel like you are a very good person, feeling attractive on the outside couldn’t hurt.
I am so looking forward to Saturday.
I wonder how Joel will be. If he will hate me.
He totally will.
AA comes after Z in lists, a right-back-to-the-beginning that ties in with all of my problems. I have to work on being a better person than I am. But I am not going to do that by Saturday so the best I can do is have gossip.
I texted Robb with two bees to meet up. I hate that Kevin cancelled our ice-cream because he has a girlfriend. It reeks of ‘I only want to be friends with you if there is hooking up as well as friendship’. And that is not OK. Although, that is kind of how I feel about Robb with two bees. Because he is not a very interesting boy, but he is quite cute and I could see myself enjoying kissing him, if only to stop him from talking. And show Kevin that he doesn’t matter. And show Joel that I have interesting things happen that he doesn’t know about. And to show Felix that other boys fancy me, that I am someone who it is possible to find attractive. Not that it will make a difference now, but it could stew like a tea-bag and result in
at some point. Isn’t ‘ardour’ a lovely word? You never really hear it used, outside of a romance novel.
I am reading a book about a Viking who is a lot more supportive than Fintan. Is it too much to expect that the father of your child be as supportive as a storybook Viking? If not more-so? Though it would be tough to be more supportive than Godric the Bold. He had the local wise woman make balm for the tired feet of his lady-love and everything. My feet are also tired. And yet, I remain balm-less.
Quote from Prim’s mum’s diary
finally ran out of romance novels left behind by Mum last Christmas so I have been tracking down ones of a similar nature (knights, Vikings, sexy time travel) in charity shops for the past while. I wish that I could travel through time. Apart from the obvious, saving Mum from stupid drunken drivers, I could get up to all sorts of mischief with hilarious consequences. Romance-novel time travel doesn’t work like time-machine time travel, though. It’s a little different. You don’t have control over where you get sent. It’s either a mystical love wind, or the curse of a spurned warlock, or those meddling faerie folk that send you wherever, and initially you’re all, ‘AGH!’ and ‘How will a hard-nosed career woman (albeit with a tragic back-story and secret mushy centre) like me be able to cope in a medieval keep? They don’t have electric showers or anything.’ But it works out in the end, because you adapt and the handsome warlord who distrusted you initially comes to fall in love with you and then you do kissing and things in an apiary or a solar or somewhere else that is quintessentially of its time. And then something happens to tear you apart, but it all gets sorted. And while that would be fun, I’d really rather have a mum and still be friends with Joel than know
A
LOVE
STRONGER
THAN
TIME
ITSELF,
thank you very much.
I wonder if there’s anything I could do to make Fintan more excited about the baby.
Quote from Prim’s mum’s diary
need, like, a love-potion. But for friendship. Ciara thinks I am in the wrong for blackmailing Joel.
‘It just seems so needy, Prim. Make him chase you.’
‘He is a friend, not a boy.’
‘Nevertheless.’
She does not take her own advice, this Ciara, she is constantly texting me, wanting to hang out and things. Which I love, because she is my good friend. But when we started being friends, she was always texting. And it’s not like there is another solution to the Joel problem. I mean, I could just wait him out and keep on intermittently apologising, but that hasn’t been working so far and I really want to see him.
Ciara actually had an ulterior motive in calling around today. She wants me to go with her to the family planning clinic so she can start planning her family. Her current plan is for it not to happen for at least a decade and a bit. But things with Syzmon have been heating up a little. She’s mainly worried about pregnancy, because they’re both virgins and you can’t catch STDs from being a virgin. Being a virgin is, like, the opposite of how you catch STDs. You can get HIV if you’re one, from blood transfusions gone wrong and other things. But you’d be hard pressed to get chlamydia. When I think about things like chlamydia, I feel confident in the fact that I’m (probably) definitely not ready to have sex yet. But even if you’re never going to take a ride on the marital love train, as Grandma Lily liked to call it, it is best to be informed about these things, so you can give advice to passing Ciaras.
‘Not that things with Syzmon weren’t hot before,’ she said, flicking her hair as if daring me to judge her. ‘But I keep getting caught up in stuff and almost going all the way.’
‘How can you do that accidentally?’
‘Stuff gets rubbed against other stuff and things start to seem like good ideas and possibly needs. It’s all very passionate and so on and so forth, but I had intended waiting until things were nice and legal until we did THE DEED.’ She widens h
er eyes when she says ‘THE DEED’, emphasising it’s deedy importance.
‘You mean wait for marriage?’
‘No. Until my seventeenth birthday. Or shortly afterwards.’
‘Cool. That makes sense. Do you, like, feel ready and stuff?’
Ciara looked out the window, at the garden. There were bees but no birds, which may have been an omen but probably wasn’t. (The bees love our lavender plant.) ‘How do you know if you feel ready? I mean, I totally want to sometimes, but other times I’m, like, “WHAT IF I GOT PREGNANT?” and “AAAGGH”. It would totally ruin my plans to go to millinery school.’
‘Babies are wont to do that. It is a tough one. Do you know what sort of contraception you want?’
‘Well, I kind of want to get the pill, but I can’t ask Mam’s GP for it, because they are, like, friends and stuff, so it would totally get back to her, which is why it would be better to go to the family planning clinic and get it from someone who is a doctor who doesn’t still try to give me lollipops and stickers when I visit. Also, I am NOT buying condoms.’
She said this as if buying condoms were up there with selling heroin.
I offered to buy them for her, which was actually pretty generous of me, because I’d get a bit nervous about that sort of thing too. I don’t even like buying tampons.
‘Would you? Wow!’ she said. ‘I don’t know, though. Isn’t buying condoms a bit of a slutty thing to do?’
‘What? No! Why would you think that?’
‘Well, you have to buy, like, this big box of them. I mean, I think you can get, like, little packs of three, but that’s still committing to have sex three times, which is huge. I mean, I’m not even sure I want to once, you know?’
‘Buying condoms does not mean you have to use them, Ciara.’
‘But they’d only go to waste otherwise.’
‘Condoms are NOT ham sandwiches. They don’t like “go off” or anything if you don’t use them within six weeks.’
‘I think buying them is the boy’s job.’ She nodded her head, the way she sometimes does when she agrees with herself. ‘Only … I don’t want to ask Syzmon to buy them, because I don’t want him getting any ideas. I want it to be a lovely surprise if I decide to share my body with him.’
Ciara actually says stuff like
I lent her some of Mum’s Viking books a couple of years ago and they really took.
‘I wonder if Joel is sharing his body with that Duncan creep?’ I tried not to sound like I was making air quotes with my voice when I said ‘sharing his body’. It was really challenging.
‘You are NOT to ask him that on Saturday.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it is private, and you need to woo him back with niceness and not being judgey before he is your friend-you-can-say-anything-to again.’
This is sound advice, but I am not sure if I will be able to follow it. I can’t believe Ciara is thinking about having sex when I don’t even have a boyfriend. It’s so unfair.
Not that I want to lose my virginity, but I would like to have the option, in the context of a loving relationship, of course. I’ll most likely end up losing it to Kevin (or someone just as bad) on a pile of coats, while she gets roses and scented candles and a soft and tender playlist she is probably already in the process of compiling.
Mum didn’t lose it to Fintan. Which is why reading your mum’s old diaries is a mix of
She had a secondary-school boyfriend, who she was with for the first six months of college. His name was Seán, which is a very normal name for a man to have. She broke up with him for not being THE ONE. She has this whole bit about wishing she had met him when she was twenty-five or thirty and ready to get married and all that. She was weirdly sure she was going to get married. It is kind of sad she never met anyone she liked enough, apart from Fintan for an ill-advised period preand-post-me.
Sometimes I wish I had stayed with Seán. I wouldn’t be happy, but I wouldn’t be pregnant either. Probably.
Quote from Prim’s mum’s diary
um loved me once I came out. I know this for a fact because she has written about it. But I’m kind of hurt by the fact that she wasn’t happy about the possibility of a me for a long time. She didn’t want a baby. She didn’t want to stop being irresponsible and she didn’t want to have to worry about a whole other person. She was weirdly OK with the idea of being forever tied to Fintan, until he messed things up. I still don’t one hundred per cent get why she wanted to be with him so badly. He is not that cool. Nor is he that handsome. Unless you’re into enormous noses and facial topiary. And he was so much older. Perhaps Joel could shed some light on the fancying-older-men thing when I meet up with him.
I miss my mum, always will, but I don’t think I realised how complex she was until I started reading her diaries. Three and a half years after she died. You think I would have copped on to it earlier. I mean, she was a mum, she was my mum, but she was also a person with intricacies and worries and feelings about things that were grey and blue and green, not black and white. She was as much of a person as I am now. Which is hard to get my head around.
I feel bad that I didn’t appreciate her enough. But I was a kid when she died – I mean, I’m still a kid now, more or less. But I was a proper child then. I didn’t know. It isn’t that I didn’t care. I didn’t know how hard it was for her. She loved me, but she raised me on her own, for the most part. And babies are very high-maintenance. Like needy fiancées, but more so.
I read the things she wrote, the who she was, the fragments of her self over and over again. Balancing accounts. Lashing interpretations on top of them, as though they were The Merchant of Venice, or To Kill a Mockingbird, or any other text I had to study. I don’t know why I feel compelled to do that. It’s not like anything will bring her back.
But I do want her to come back because I could be a better daughter now. I wouldn’t be as selfish. I’d help more in the house, listen when she needed me to listen. I feel like she put all this work into me, and now when it’s about to pay off, when I’m mature enough to be a proper friend as well as daughter, she’s gone. And Dad is here to reap the benefits of the way she raised me. It isn’t fair on her (or me). But I still keep reading, because maybe something’s hidden in the text. An Easter egg. A clue. A recipe for strange important somethings.
I really think the baby will be a boy. I keep wanting steakand potatoes. Hearty, manly things.
Quote from Prim’s mum’s diary
met Robb with two bees again today. He looked me up and down when I walked up to him outside Easons on O’Connell Street and said, ‘You’re looking well.’ I don’t know why, but the way he said it kind of put my back up. Like he was objectifying me, but not in a nice way. I can’t really put my finger on why it niggled but it did. He wouldn’t have said that to a boy. And it made me think about all the times he hadn’t said that to me and wonder if I wasn’t looking well before.
Maybe I was edgy because I was going to be meeting Joel later, after Robb, for blackmail-tea-and-catch-up. Robb with two bees will never be as good as Joel. It was nice to ramble around town with him, though (Robb I mean), chatting about films and music and books and TV shows. Nice neutral topics of conversation. He gets a bit superior about things. Like, he assumes that he will know more than me on any given subject. Which is nonsense, because he thought Bolivia was in eastern Europe. I do not know much about Bolivia, but I do know what continent it is in.
AND ROBB WITH TWO BEES DID NOT.
‘It kind of sounds eastern European, though,’ he said, doing a ridiculous approximation of a Russian accent:
‘I see what you mean. But it is in South America.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
And then he googled it, hoping to prove me wrong.
Oh, Robb with two bees!
I don’t mean to make him sound completely dreadful, though. Because he isn’t. It’s just that I do not think that our destiny is written in the
stars. I’m also fairly sure he thinks I fancy him. Well, I mean, I do keep meeting up with him and messaging him and things. But that is ONLY because I am lonely and bored.
I didn’t tell Joel that, though, when we met afterwards. From the way I went on to Joel about him, you’d swear Robb was my new bestie. It was so good to see my real (former? current?) bestie again. He didn’t hug me. I kind of knew he wouldn’t, but I really wanted to hug him, to hold him close and tell him he was awesome and I’d missed him.
I have to admit I had met Robb (kind of) so me and Joel would have something neutrally gossipy to talk about. Is that terrible? It kind of is, isn’t it? It totally is. I kind of wanted to be all: ‘I have a life, even when you are not around to be my social crutch’ and ‘I have made a new friend who is a boy’ and ‘I have people interested in me too, like you have the mysterious and possibly dodgy Duncan.’
Because my life is not very interesting and Joel makes it more interesting when he is in it, because he is awesome and always up for devilment and doing things, while I kind of prefer to stay in my bubble of friends and stuff. Also Joel has way more friends than I do. I mean he is not short of companionship. I have Ciara. And Ella. That is the extent of my inner circle. I mean, I’d love to include Felix in there, because he is a big ride and I’d like him to be my friend with or without benefits. But we aren’t that close. I mean, I’d never ring Felix crying or for a random chat about dachshunds or whatever. So basically my inner circle is an inner triangle. An inner square if you count Joel.