Primperfect

by Deirdre Sullivan

  Ciara is of the ‘I regret having to do this, but it was the right decision for the both of us’ school of dumping. Her mum dropped her over to my house pretty much right away after the phone call. Ciara is a surprisingly loud sobber, and her mum was having her fibromyalgia support group over for coffee. Ciara’s mum has fibromyalgia. It is a thing where you sometimes get really bad muscle pain and have to take to the bed. Ciara does the hoovering and toilet-scrubbing for her whole house because her mum doesn’t want her fibromyalgia exacerbated and Ciara’s dad is the kind of man who wouldn’t say ‘That’s women’s work’ but would definitely think it.

  was my main question for Ciara.

  Because she properly loves Syzmon and he properly loves her. And fulfils at least 180 of her 234 requirements for a boyfriend.

  ‘It wasn’t because of 194, was it?’ (Syzmon has recently begun growing a sort of beardlet. He calls it a goatee, but ‘beardlet’ is a far more accurate term.)

  ‘No. I would never dump someone because of 194. Beards are so easily shave-able. It was because of loads of things. I mean, I still think that we’ll end up together eventually.’ She was trying to sound positive but her eyes were sad. I held her hand and squeezed it.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. But I didn’t want him to be my only boyfriend. And I kept on wanting to sleep with him, but I don’t want to lose my virginity yet, because Mum goes through my drawers, like, all the time, and she’d go ape if she knew that I was even considering sharing my body with him.’

  ‘But you’ve already shared loads of your body with him.’ I refrained from putting air quotes around the body-sharing. She had enough going on without me criticising her word choices.

  Ciara smiled a bit. Her lips curved anyway. There was some latent positivity bubbling under all the sad. I hoped it would come out soon. I didn’t like her little crying face. It made me want to hug and I’m not huggy.

  ‘I know, but I don’t, like, give Mum a blow by blow account of it. I think she thinks we spend most of our time holding hands and talking about TV programmes we like.’

  ‘So you broke up with him because you fancied him too much?’

  This kind of blew my mind, but I held back from saying ‘BUT WHHHYYYY?’ because I’m tactful like that. She got it, though. Ciara understands the importance of having a boy to fancy. It is high on her list of priorities. Or was, at least, before she had this break-up.

  She snuggled into the sofa and held her cup of tea in both her hands, like she was an old lady in the winter. ‘Kind of. Any time I thought about losing it with him, I’d kind of also think about when I moved to London and he stayed behind and I’d get all sad and kind of wanting to stay in Dublin or follow him to Bratislava if he decides to go to college there and, I mean, if you’re scared of the future all the time, that’s no way to live, and I kept turning it all over and over in my brain until I decided the best thing to do would be to pull off the bandage.’

  ‘Syzmon being the bandage.’

  I looked at her. Syzmon is not a bandage, he’s a person, said my look. A person that you loved and stuff. You know?

  She wiped at her eyes and spread the make-up round them so her sockets looked like whirlpools with eyes inside the middle. ‘I think I broke his heart, Prim. He properly cried and everything. I had to go downstairs and get him a glass of water.’

  ‘Where did you break up with him?’ I don’t know why this seemed important. But it did.

  ‘In my bedroom. I was going to do it in a public place, but then I wanted us to be able to have a proper chat about it without anyone looking or anything.’

  ‘That was nice of you.’

  ‘Syzmon didn’t think so.’ She started to cry again, big Hollywood tears bouncing down her cheeks one after the other. Ciara is ridiculously pretty, even when she’s in bits. I think I would hate her if she weren’t my second bestie. ‘He said … oh God, Prim, he said, he said …’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘If that’s the way you feel.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘I know. I never. I never thought he’d be so upset. I mean, I’m not that great.’ She put her heavy head inside her hands.

  ‘Yes you are, you’re lovely. Of COURSE he’d be upset.’

  ‘What if he gets another girlfriend? Oh my God, Prim.’

  I curled my legs up underneath me. ‘He won’t for a while. He’ll need time to heal.’

  ‘I need time to heal.’

  ‘I know you do. I know you do. Would you like a sausage sandwich and some Joy Division?’

  ‘I’m not Fintan. I would like a cheese pizza and some High School Musical, please.’

  ‘That sounds doable. I’ll text Dad and ask if you can stay over. He’ll totally let you.’

  ‘I’ll text Mum and see …’

  Dad said it was OK, but Ciara’s mum needed her to do some house things, so she stayed till eleven and then Dad dropped her home. We had fun, interspersed with weeping. It takes a lot for Ciara to cry. I don’t think I had seen her do it since Grandma Lily died the year before last. Maybe she cries when she is by herself, though. I mean, if I weren’t me, I’d think that I didn’t cry a lot. But I actually do. At least once a week. Usually when thinking about Mum, sometimes when thinking about Joel not being friends with me or Kevin not wanting me to be his proper girlfriend or the amount of time I will spend getting rid of unwanted body hair over the course of my lifetime. Time that could be better spent on snacking or reading books.

  I hate using that stupid hair-removal cream on my legs and pits. It smells SO WEIRD. Shaving was much simpler, but Dad won’t let me do it any more because he sucks. When I go to college, I’ll totally shave again. And, I mean, it is nice that Fintan is trying to do some parenting. Laying down rules. Having concern for my well-being. All that nonsense. Look how far we’ve come since he was secretly going to propose to Hedda without telling me.

  I wonder how Hedda is doing with her new, presumably childless husband and her new life? Probably fine. She struck me as the kind of woman who would always do pretty well for herself, no matter what. No crying into ham and pickle sandwiches while pregnant with the child of a much older man who is inevitably going to dump you for Hedda. No shifting forbidden Kevins and then fighting with your best friend and then not being fancied enough to warrant anything beyond house party hookups and the odd text.

  Kevin is not a very nice boy. I probably dodged a bullet. I wonder when a bullet will actually hit me? I quite want to get my heart broken nice and early to get it out of the way.

  Although, looking at Ciara, maybe I could cope without any heartbreak for a while yet. She also timed the break-up perfectly. She didn’t want to break up with Syzmon, or have just broken up with him, in Leaving Cert year. Because it would impact on their exam results and she wants him to be all he can be. Ciara over thinks things. But then again, you can’t just go through life being surprised by the consequences of your actions, like they were something you had no control over. Something you couldn’t help.

  The man who killed my mum was one of those. He didn’t mean to do it. He just did, and the end result is the same. Maybe if he had planned ahead and ordered a taxi before he started drinking, Mum would be alive today. I can get so stuck in those maybes. Maybe if she hadn’t been all worried about her carbon footprint and bike-ridey. Maybe if it had been a nicer day, the visibility would have been better and she would have seen that he was driving dangerously and gotten out of the way. Maybe if the car had been going slower, or had hit her differently.

  And then there are the other maybes. Maybe if Mum had been alive, I wouldn’t have felt the need to cut myself. Maybe if Mum were alive, I wouldn’t miss Roderick so much. Does that sound cold? He was like a furry little memory of her, you see. As well as himself. I wonder am I a smooth little memory of Mum for Sorrel? The kind of memory that smells faintly of hair-removal cream?

  Syzmon must be gutted, the poor dude. I was going to text him, but I’d hate for Ciar
a to think I was putting the moves on him. I would not like to put a move on Syzmon. He belongs to Ciara and is not my type. Past history has shown that if he belonged to Ciara and were my type, it probably wouldn’t stop me. God. I hate that Kevin completely eroded my morals, like as if my morals were limestone and he was water. Or a weak acidic solution that would also dissolve limestone. It’s not that I am Karen or whatever. I chose limestone because it is one of the easier-to-dissolve sedimentary rocks. Karen’s morals aren’t even mudstone. They’re like those vitamin C tablets that fizz up in water. I wish I had granite morals like Joel, or diamond ones like Ciara.

  God, geography was a very boring subject. I’m glad I’m not taking it next year. For all that it’s boring, though, sometimes it’s nice to know things, random useless things you wouldn’t ordinarily know. I mean, I had the whole Internet in front of me for fourteen years before I found out about different types of erosion.

  I think people get eroded too, by disappointment. Like, every time you get hurt, a little flake dissolves from off your heart and you’re still able to hope and feel and love and all that. It’s just – smaller. More guarded. Less of a leap. I don’t know that there’s anything you can do to stop it, though.

  Ciara made the right decision. But Syzmon will be less now, because he knows about getting hurt by someone who loves you. And Ciara will be less, because she knows about hurting someone you love to save yourself from bigger, future hurts. Everyone is crumbling, like that story at mass about the woman who looked back and turned to salt. One shower’s all it’d take.

  So, I wonder who I’ll talk about next. Robb or Duncan? Duncan or Robb? Robb has two bees but Duncan has Joel and is therefore more important. So we’ll start with him. Joel and me were having tea and Duncan popped in to join us for an hour. Then he paid for the tea and cake and him and Joel left together to do kissing and things presumably. They said they were going to watch a movie. But I think if they were really going to watch a movie, Joel wouldn’t have made don’t-invite-yourself-along eyebrows at me. Joel’s eyebrows have a wide vocabulary. Duncan isn’t as much of a sex predator as I had envisioned. For one thing, he looks younger than his age. And for another, he’s quite unassuming. He kind of listened to Joel talk more than talked himself. But not in a creepy way. Although, an older man watching a boy with a view to fancying him is always going to be slightly creepy, just because of the age difference and the sexual intent.

  I

  KISSED

  Robb.

  Just thought I’d get that in there. It wasn’t that great of a kiss. Is it weird that I felt it was, like, expected of me? Like he was an earl who had saved me from a highwayman and I was a lowly wench who had but one way to reward him – her virtue? I am reading the BEST Regency romance novel at the moment. I think earls might be my thing, the way Mum liked Vikings. Especially if said earls are also Egyptologists. I do still like Vikings, though. And certain knights.

  Anyway, Robb was an earl because he expected things from me and, lo, he got them. Am I so easily won? While he was kissing me I was already telling Joel and Ciara about it in my head, like, Look I have a life as well. Interesting things also happen to me. That is not a good reason to kiss someone. No more for you, young lady. I could feel his teeth. His oddly needley little incisors. I thought he was going to cut my tongue on them. I think I need to kiss another boy to stop Robb seeming like a viable summer-boyfriend option. No-one except him wants to kiss me, though. Because I amn’t pretty and I suck at making friends.

  Besides, I want to experience things and stuff. And if I’d only done kissing with people I fancied, I’d only ever have kissed one guy. And he didn’t like me properly, so I feel there is a need to kiss other people to show him he is not important. Not that I still fancy him or anything. I don’t. He is not important. I have moved on. I don’t think I have moved on to Robb, though. I mean, I don’t particularly want to be his girlfriend. He’s a bit up himself. He paid for everything (which was a sign that kissing would be expected of me), so I suppose it’s not a complete loss. Is that a dreadful thing to think? I actually am not short of a buck. I mean, Dad is loaded and even though he’s big on making me earn a crust to teach me life skills, this is only in theory, because in actual practice he is too lazy/busy to do the proper kind of parenting that you read about in books.

  Luckily, I was poor for the first thirteen years of my life. Not, like, living-in-a-garret, making-a-bag-of-rice-last-the-month poor, but the kind where, if I wanted to go on a school trip we had to look for something we could cut out. Dad paid maintenance for me, but Mum used that for big things like health insurance and saved the rest for college. She didn’t like taking money from Dad. Reading her diaries, I can kind of understand why. Things went downhill pretty quickly after they got engaged.

  I am teaching myself to knit. The baby will appreciate the fine clothes I will soon be able to make for it. Maybe it will impress Fintan as well. He caught me crying into a pair of tights that didn’t fit me the last day. I was eating a sandwich at the same time and the tights were covered with pickle juice and tears. He put them in the bin and stared at me. It was not the stare of a man who thinks his wife-to-be will be a very good mother. It was not the stare of a man who thinks his wife-to-be will be a very good wife, as a matter of fact. I can’t lose him. Being engaged is literally the only thing I have going for me at the moment.

  Quote from Prim’s mum’s diary

  o, Ella asked me to come over. But then she wasn’t there at all. It was the weirdest thing. Felix was there, though. I think she might be trying to set us up. I know this because she said it, just after I rang the doorbell.

  I am not home at all. I have gone to town with Mum. I am trying to set you up. I hope you wore something blue. Felix likes blue. You’re welcome.

  I was wearing a black dress and a big orange hoodie with kitten ears growing out of the top. I looked like a jack-o’-lantern in drag. He asked me if I wanted tea, and I really did but I felt like I was going to puke and walked all the way home. It took ages and I was all sweaty and afraid.

  How did I not know that he liked blue? I only have three or four blue things in my wardrobe. Mum’s tea-party dress is blue. Light blue with fat dark-blue poppies on it. It is a kind of a magic dress that looks lovely on everyone. I feel like a lady when I wear it. A lady who wears little white gloves and goes for tea and has love affairs with wounded soldiers between the wars. It is only for special occasions. Seducing Felix with my average lady looks and moderately entertaining personality would be a special occasion, though. And by special occasion, I mean

  I kind of don’t want to encourage this sort of thing. Because I’ve fancied him for so long that actually hooking up with him would be like making out with God or something. My poor flawed human body would not be able to process what was going on and I’d probably implode into a puddle of lady-goo and tears. I say implode because it is more decorous, knowing full well it would be an explosion and some would get on his T-shirt and probably not come out in the wash and how he would hate me then.

  Look Ella. I appreciate what you are trying to do. But please don’t do it any more.

  Do you not like him?

  How do you answer a question like that? Ella is very direct and I like to dance around the point and occasionally brush against it with an ankle in a flirtatious manner. I need to get sexier ankles. I have a big purple scar on the inside of my left one and it kind of looks like a flat varicose vein. Now, I’m no expert on what makes boys all wibbly and full of sex-lemonade in the tummy region, but I am, if not full sure, at least ninety-nine per cent sure that flat varicose veins are not the sort of thing people have fetishes about. I could do an Internet search and remove all doubt, I suppose, but I’m scared of what I’d find. I left the text unanswered for an hour until she asked again and then I was all,

  Ella. He’s your brother. I cannot discuss any of my emotions with you at this time.

  Which I thought was very ambiguous of me.
>
  He makes your elbows blush, Prim. I’m not exactly reading between the lines.

  Nice use of idiom.

  Don’t patronise me.

  Well, don’t patronise ME then. Just because you are lovely and skinny and able to get with anyone you want does not mean you get to sort out my love life as well.

  You are not fat, Prim. You’re medium sized and some guys like that. And I don’t think Caleb counts as anyone I want.

  Have you fancied anyone since him?

  No.

  Then, 100% success rating.

  I suppose so. Feel quite smug now.

  You should. But not matchmaker smug. Desirable woman smug.

  That is a good smug.

  I wouldn’t know.

  Shut up, Prim.

  Whereupon I did. I hope Ella doesn’t meddle any more. I’ve liked Felix for so long that I feel it’s kind of a magic secret, as opposed to a real thing that could happen. The power balance would be off. Because he would have all of it and I would have none. I think the power balance has to be equal in a relationship, with maybe a wee bit more fancying on the side of the person who is not me. At least to begin with. Mum’s diaries have taught me a very valuable life lesson about power imbalances in relationships and what they get you. Apart from awesome girl babies who grow up into slightly less awesome teenage girls, that is. NATCH.

  Fintan and I aren’t speaking. I think he is having an affair with his secretary. He keeps working late and being out and not answering his phone or checking his answering-machine messages. I confronted him about it and he said I was being unreasonable. I didn’t back down, for once, and now we aren’t talking but we’re still engaged and it is so weird and wrong and flawed and it is making me seriously unhappy. How can you be marrying someone who isn’t speaking to you? Maybe I should call him and apologise. I’m probably being paranoid. Do pregnancy hormones do that? Probably. They seem to affect everything.