3
Raising the Rasa
I was convinced that the only person liable to pierce my heart on my wedding day to Jamie was my father. Surely this was going to be our once-in-a-lifetime chance of emotionally bonding because it was such a momentous occasion. I had worn waterproof mascara because during the drive to the church, I just knew that Dad was going to tell me the words I longed to hear. Wasn’t he? Fathers and daughters on their wedding day? Bring on the Kleenex! I’d had the whole thing scripted for twenty years.
Act One
The bride gets into the car with her father. She is beautiful; in a full-length satin dress and glittering tiara. He is bursting with pride. He takes her hand.
FATHER
Daisy, I’ve never seen you look more radiant than you do today.
The bride beams.
FATHER (CONT.)
I know I’ve never been that good at expressing myself . . .
The father’s voice falters . . .
FATHER (CONT.)
But I want you to know how proud I am of you.
A tear trickles from the corner of the bride’s eye. Her father leans over and gently wipes it away with his hand-kerchief.
FATHER (CONT.)
I know we’ve had our ups and downs over the years but I’ve never stopped believing in you.
The bride muffles a sob.
FATHER (CONT.)
You’re a one-of-a-kind. I love you, Daisy Dooley.
Bride, her eyes glistening, looks at her father.
BRIDE
I love you too, Daddy.
The car draws up to the church. The peal of wedding bells fills the air. The photographer captures the bride’s smile as she beams at her father.
FATHER
Jamie is a very lucky man.
Fade out.
In reality it went like this.
Act One
The bride gets into the car with her father. She’s not sure if she looks beautiful because her father hasn’t said anything except “Wow!” wide-eyed like an owl. “Wow!” fabulous? Or “Wow!” freaky and thoroughly over the top? The father sits, looking very tense. He obviously hates all of this. The train is folded into the car and the door shuts. The car gently motors forward. The bride leans forward to speak to the driver.
BRIDE
Would you mind opening the window? It’s so hot in here.
The driver nods and opens the window. A gust of icy wind blows wisps of hair from the bride’s chignon, untangling it from her tiara.
FATHER
You shouldn’t do that, Daisy. It’s messing up your hair.
The bride snaps, tense.
BRIDE
I know but I’m on fire. My mouth has gone completely dry.
FATHER
It’s nerves. Actually I was pretty nervous myself at one point this morning. I was driving here along the M4 and heard on the radio that there was a terrible crash on the M25. I looked at my watch and thought, “I don’t want to get caught up in that jam as I could be late for my own daughter’s wedding!” I was so agitated I ate a whole pack of Fisherman’s Friends, so my mouth was on fire, too. I made a calculated decision to get to the M25 at Junction 16, then go the other way and cross over to the M40 so as to miss the problem. Obviously not a direct route as the crow flies, but as there was a five-mile tail back and by this time . . .
BRIDE (screams)
Dad! Can you please be quiet? This is the most important day of my life and I’ve got to get my head together.
Bride thinks bitterly: if you’re not going to tell me what I’ve waited the last two decades to hear, you can at least shut the fuck up.
Father is unfazed by acutely agitated state of bride.
FATHER (absentmindedly)
Yes, you are right. It IS an important day. Because whatever happens, marriage is never quite the same the second time around.
Bride looks at father, stunned. Freeze-frame on that image. Car pulls up to church. Wedding bells peal. Click. Photographer captures bride’s look of horror.
Fade out.
I had never been reared to bask in paternal adoration, but now that I was divorced and despairing, I still craved Dad’s reassurance. I had always longed to be one of those smug daddy’s girls, utterly secure that they could get what they wanted from a man because they had always had what they needed from Daddy. Sure, they were manipulative but they were also fearless when it came to men because they had never suffered a moment’s self-doubt. I grew up aware that I was loved, which differed from that Teflon feeling of being adored by one’s father. It was almost love by proxy, taken as read but without much supporting evidence. If I walked into Dad’s study as a child, he didn’t look at me as if his world had just lit up. He merely held his pen aloft and said, “Yes?” It wasn’t that Dad was unkind; more that I never felt he had time to understand me. He didn’t know what to do with me, any more than I now knew how to relate to him.
I may have been sitting on the tube, resembling an adult—albeit not a very sophisticated one with my black eye—but inside I was in pieces. It was all I could do to stop from shouting, “I want my dad. I need a man to tell me he loves me because I can’t cope with myself or any of this.”
Dad was sitting at his usual banquette in Thai Temptations. He motioned to the groaning grease-laden buffet. “Come on, stoke up. You look like you could do with a decent meal.”
“You call this food decent?” I muttered, but followed him up to the buffet anyway. Dad piled his plate high while I toyed with some noodles. He pointed to my bruised eye.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” I said. “Just larking around.”
After a while, he gestured to my untouched food. “Are you sick?”
“Not exactly.” I watched my father eat his green curry, then I let out a half moan, half sigh. “Actually, Dad, yes, I am. Sick in the head. Do you know that in the last year I’ve walked out on my marriage, had a disastrous rebound fling, got pregnant, and, to cap it all”—I let out a manic laugh—“I’ve just had an abortion.”
He didn’t raise his head but kept quietly chewing. “And guess what? Jamie’s girlfriend is pregnant and they are keeping their baby.” I pointed to my blackened eye. “When I heard I fainted and hit my head.”
Dad finished his mouthful, then looked up from his plate, “How’s work?” I blinked, incredulous.
“Actually, I’ve just won the Booker prize.” I let out an irritated sigh. “I gave up work at the publishing house when I married Jamie. Remember? Jamie didn’t want me to have a life—or at least not a life worth living.”
Dad balanced his chopsticks on the edge of his empty plate. “I do agree,” he said ponderously, “that it does look as if you’ve pressed the self-destruct button wantonly. But you see, Daisy, real life is about birth, death, marriage, divorce, termination even. You’ve had to make some challenging decisions of late, which means you are finally growing up.” He dabbed his lips with a paper napkin. “And that, my dear, can only be a very good thing.”
“So you’re not shocked?”
“Shocked? No. Naturally I want to see you settled and happy. But you have a fresh start now, so I expect you to turn your life around.” He leaned over and kissed my cheek. “You know, the most painful thing about loving someone is that you can’t do their journey for them.”
My heart soared. He’d said he loved me. Maybe I was a daddy’s girl after all?
After lunch with my father, I felt buoyed and optimistic about my future. I didn’t even let returning home to Mum, who was coping with two litters of puppies, dent my determination. Everything was going to get better, even if my self-help addiction was getting worse. I spent my days devouring spiritual texts and scouring the Internet for a fast track to enlightenment. I was particularly taken by a Web site on ancient wisdom. Apparently, the Chinese believe that there are three mirrors that form a person’s reflection. The first is how you see yourself, the second is how others see you, and the third mirror reflects the truth.
To know yourself, you must know the truth.
The truth was that, however much of a hash I had made of my life of late, at least it felt real. When I was married to Jamie, I didn’t feel as if I was living the life that was meant for me. It felt like a two-dimensional, more contained version. Strangely it didn’t feel safe, because not living one’s dream isn’t safe, is it? It’s a crime against your own spirit. A roadblock in your journey of hope.
Now I had to work out what my dream for my future was. In yogic terms, apparently, all I had to do was connect to my “rasa,” my “spiritual nectar,” whatever that was. As I found meditation bottom-numbingly boring, I decided to start by cleansing my aura. I had read that Mayan tribes believe that covering your whole body in honey and then washing it away sweetens you after a bitter experience and gets rid of all that negativity. Perfect! I decided to give it a go.
I stood naked in the freezing bathroom, slathering myself with sticky goo, rubbing great globs across my face and body and into my hair. While I was waiting for the bath to run, staring at the rust marks on the tired old tub, Donald and Dougie pushed open the door. Before I could escape, they started licking my ankles, tickling my embarrassingly hairy legs with their rough little tongues. Yelping, I managed to leap free of them and into the bath. They barked angrily, impatient for more honey, so I threw a wet flannel in their direction. They looked at me utterly indignantly, then flounced off to find Mum.
I lay back, eager for contemplation. I could see that I had gotten the balance of my life completely wrong. I had spent two decades wasting precious energy on relationships with unworthy blokes when I should have been focusing on my relationship with myself. I used to repeat the mantra: “I want to be a better woman so I can attract a better man.” How sick and codependent is that? Something Jess said to me when I gave up work during my marriage to Jamie kept popping into my mind. “You’ll live to regret this, Daisy,” she had said, “because the one thing career girls have promised themselves is self-fulfillment. We know that the more you demand from a man, the lonelier you are likely to be made.” She was right. I felt so blocked by unhappiness when I was with Jamie that I willingly gave up anything creative for myself in order to make my marriage work. The result was that I became lonelier, needier, and more insecure—and doubtless more irritating by the day.
During my marriage I was consumed with my own misery, at the expense of anything else. You know how when you read a rousing book, leave the theater after a heart-jolting play, or see a profoundly moving film, you either feel more alone or less alone? I’ve always felt more alone. Now, more than anything else in the world, I wanted to feel less alone.
Mum knocked loudly on the bathroom door. “Get out,” she said excitedly, “you’ve got a visitor.”
A visitor? In the country? On a weekday? I dried myself off, put on my faded flannel pajamas that were covered with a hearts-and-puppies motif, grabbed my ugly old sheepskin slippers, and bumped into Mum on the landing.
“You can’t go down looking like that,” she said. “You look a fright. What’s with your hair?”
I put my hand into the clumps of honey and laughed. I ran downstairs with Mum in hot pursuit.
“Daisy, wait. Why not get dressed?” she called after me.
“Where is he?”
“He’s in the drawing room,” she said. Only grown-ups were ever invited into the least dog-hair-covered room in the house. Hooray! It must have been Dad. He had obviously braved Mum’s icy glare to check that I was all right. My heart sang in delight.
I pushed open the door, my arms flung wide, and did a double take. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It wasn’t Dad. It was Troy.
I stared at him in shock as Mum bustled past, a plate of pâté and crackers in hand. She put them next to Troy, who flashed a devastating well-practiced-with-mothers smile. Donald and Dougie came snuffling in after the pâté. I could tell by Troy’s overly anxious-to-please manner and the way he gingerly patted them as they sniffed his shoes that he didn’t like dogs. That he was nervous gave me a joyous edge. Suddenly, I began to think that there was justice in the world after all.
When Mum went off to refill Troy’s drink, he turned to me and said, “Daisy, I’m not asking you to forgive me. I know I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
I raised an eyebrow and gave a sarcastic smile, as if to say, “You said it, buster.”
To my delight, Dougie began humping his ankle. At first Troy tried a snort of amusement, then he kicked Dougie off, a tad too aggressively, I noted. “When you told me you were pregnant after our brief liaison, I panicked. I was scared,” he said.
“You weren’t the only one, mate,” I retorted.
“But don’t you see? This changes everything.”
I shook my head slowly and theatrically. “No, Troy, there is absolutely nothing that can be changed about an abortion.”
Troy moved toward me. “You don’t get it. You see, I thought you were like the rest of them, but you’re not. You’re different.”
As he spoke, he caught sight of a dog hair on his black jacket and meticulously picked it off his sleeve. I watched him, thinking, “How could I have ever been interested in such an anal idiot, even as a sexual sorbet?”
Troy took another step toward me. “Daisy, now I know for sure that you are different. You are not like the rest of the desperate single women out there. You are not a gold digger trying to trap me, after all.”
Incredulous, I remained rooted to the spot while Troy put his hand inside his jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope. “I know I’ve messed up but let’s face it, we didn’t know each other well enough to have a baby.” He handed me the envelope, with a smile as if I’d just won the lottery. “But who knows what the future could bring? I’d like us to get together. I’m going to give you another chance.”
At that moment I felt as if I was standing outside my own body. I had a perfect flash-forward vision of what I wished I could do. I wanted to surge forward with a roar of fury and, with all my force, push Troy backwards onto the sofa. I would then grab the slab of pâté, stuff it down his trousers, and motion for Donald and Dougie to leap on to his lap. Once they got stuck into the pâté and Troy’s private parts, he would never have to worry again about getting a gold digger pregnant, would he? Instead I took the envelope. “What’s this?”
“A week in the Caribbean, all expenses paid. I thought we could go away together. Start again. Wipe the slate clean. We could have time to relax and really get to know each other. After all, this whole business has been pretty stressful, hasn’t it?”
I nodded, thinking, And how exactly has it been stressful for you? All you had to do was write a check, draw a veil over your conscience, and consider the case closed.
I smiled at him and said quietly, “That’s really kind, Troy. What an amazingly thoughtful gesture.”
Relief flooded his features. He put his arm out to touch me. “Daisy, you’re so cool. It’s great that you understand.”
I batted his arm away. “What you must understand, though, is that us mad, bitter bitches, with our wound-up body clocks and shriveled ovaries, us desperate divorcées, who, according to you, don’t want real men but only crave walking wallets and sperminators, well, we don’t give guys like you a second chance.”
Troy looked away. “Daisy, I was . . .”
“Funny, I don’t see this powerful, successful, ‘catch,’” I continued, relishing every second of my moment. “I see a pathetic, deluded little man who’s got a great, big . . . wallet in his pocket but who never knows whether people like him or what he’s got.” I ripped the envelope in two and threw it in the fire. “Do you honestly think that a couple of extra noughts on your bank balance make you a better person?” I shook my head. “You know the only time you told me the truth about who you are?” Troy, like a schoolboy in detention, remained silent, staring at the floor. “When you said you had nothing to offer me. You were right.” With a triumphant flourish, I walked out and shut the door.
Mum was aflutter next to the Aga. “He’s awfully good-looking, your rich fellow.”
“You’ve changed your tune,” I said. “Remember, you told me not to get involved?”
“I just wanted you to be careful, that was all. But he was charming when I showed him ’round the kennels.”
“Mum, you were right. Don’t be fooled. He’s a bastard.”
“Oh?” She looked concerned. “So it’s over between you two?”
“It never began.”
“You’ve had a row? Is that it? He came to patch things up?”
“Sort of.” I shrugged, eager to change the subject.
Suddenly Mum let out an anguished cry. “He hit you, didn’t he? That explains that black eye and the terrible bruise you had.”
I went over to her. “No, no, it’s nothing like that.”
Mum sat at the table. “What happened, then?”
I sighed. “You don’t want to know.”
“Daisy,” she said firmly, “I am your mother. Out with it.”
I took a deep breath. “I got pregnant.”
Daisy Dooley Does Divorce Page 7