The Better Half

by Sarah Harte

  I meant what I’d said to her. She had the place like a little palace now. The whole building was different today anyway. The Corpo had totally rebuilt the flats so that the block was unrecognizable from when we were growing up. They even had solar panels on the roof, which had made Frank grumble, ‘Yeah, and it’s the likes of me that are paying for it,’ even though he had every tax dodge going in the book – tax shelters, buying art, sticking stuff offshore, dosh under the mattress, you name it. When the Corpo had torn down the terrace and replaced it with brand new modern flats there had been some complaints from well-heeled objectors at the destruction of such a historic part of Dublin, but people like Karen and Darren weren’t complaining. It wasn’t easy living in a piece of history. And while I could understand why people were sorry to see the old terrace pulled down – the beautiful doorways and arches and Bakelite handles all gone – it was far nicer sitting in a bright front room than it was in the gloom of our childhood.

  Now all the flats had central heating. And, of course, they had bathrooms and loos. I’d been about seven when we’d stopped sharing a toilet with two other families. Mrs Collins, who had lived next door and given out about everything from the government to the young people – like one uninterrupted monologue – was long dead and buried. The Keoghs, a large family, with children like steps, all with watery blue eyes and bad chests, had moved to Neilstown. It had been the policy in the seventies to move Dubs from the inner city to housing schemes on the periphery. Only a hard core of people had held out. Our family was one of those.

  ‘They’re not feckin’ ethnically cleansing us,’ my da had said. ‘It’s those feckin’ culchie civil servants who want to deport us from our own city.’ It had been a subject he’d felt strongly about.

  Karen had boards on the floors. Her walls were painted white, which gave the illusion of more space. The old Belfast sinks were gone, which was a pity in a way, but there were bookshelves with books on. That had been a surprise. Karen and I had not grown up with books. I had made sure that was not the case with my kids, but I had not expected to see books in Karen’s.

  ‘You’re staring at the books,’ Karen said, following my gaze so that I coloured. ‘Surprised to see them in my house, are we?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ I lied, the flush spreading.

  Karen looked at me coolly. ‘You were always a desperate liar.’ Then, blowing out a ring of smoke, she said, ‘I might never have read but that doesn’t mean I don’t want my kids to read.’

  There was a pause.

  Then she said, ‘I heard this American one on daytime telly going on about how you had to give your kids the keys to lots of doors by giving them an education, and that once you’d done that, it was up to them if they wanted to go through those doors.’

  She made a moue. ‘She had frosted lipstick and a big hickey perm. And she spoke in that slow, dozy drawl that makes Americans take all day to say stuff that could be wrapped up in two seconds and which makes you want to shout at the telly, “Piss or get off the pot.” But what she said kind of hit a chord with me.’

  I felt a sort of shame. I had always equated Karen’s insistence on remaining ‘authentic’ as her not wanting to get on in life. Unlike me.

  There was a rattling sound, followed by a loud thump. Karen ran over to the door and yanked it open. ‘Colleen Eireann, keep it down a bit,’ she bellowed. ‘Good girl.’ Then, more softly, in a voice that held a smile: ‘Good girl, India-Jade, pet, you’ve a grand high kick there. You too, Colleen Eireann. You should get your auntie Anita to dance for you. She was the all-Irish champion back when you two weren’t even twinkles in your daddies’ eyes.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ came a giggly voice.

  Karen retracted her head and winked at me. ‘Never you mind,’ she said, closing the door behind her. ‘Colleen Eireann takes after her mother,’ she said, rolling her eyes, ‘at dancing.’

  ‘You weren’t that bad,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, lay off with the praise or my head won’t fit out the door.’

  Karen was great. The only time I had smiled in the last month was when I had been with her.

  ‘I had two left feet and two thighs like big pink Limerick hams poking out under my costume,’ she said. ‘Of course, you were great. Ma used to spend hours sitting there at the feis with her knitting, waiting for her little chicken to scoop the first prize so she could go home and sew you another costume.’

  An image flashed into my mind of me scudding across the stage in my heavy black battering shoes, my sausage ringlets bouncing, my arms rigid, counting time – a haon, dó, trí, ceathair, cúig, sé, seacht – full of it, packaged inside one of the elaborate Celtic costumes that Ma had spent hours embroidering for me.

  ‘Poor Colleen Eireann,’ Karen sighed, ‘she’s like a baby elephant.’

  No question, Colleen Eireann was built like a Sherman tank. She didn’t get that from her parents. Karen was curvaceous and she was carrying a couple of pounds but she certainly wasn’t fat. And Darren was like a glass of milk in a tracksuit with a thin moustache – or Ronnie, as we called it growing up. Karen was probably feeding Colleen Eireann too much fattening pro-cessed food, I thought, and immediately felt guilty for being so judgemental.

  ‘I haven’t the heart to tell her,’ Karen whispered. She poured the water in on top of the teabags. ‘But they’ll have to reinforce the stage if she keeps going. There,’ she said, setting a cup of tea in front of me. She plonked the milk carton on the table. There was no jug, I thought, and batted away another judgemental thought.

  ‘Why were we never that close, Karen?’ I asked, watching her blow on her tea.

  She considered my question for a minute or so. ‘Because,’ she said, swivelling her head towards me, ‘you got to be the Virgin Mary in the Nativity play at school with a blue cloak and a Tiny Tears doll cuddled up in your arms. And I got to be a donkey.’

  I laughed. ‘Seriously,’ I said.

  ‘When you left home, Anita,’ Karen said, fixing eyes with me, ‘you made it as plain as the noses on DJ’s children that you weren’t coming back.’

  It was true. I’d wanted to better myself. At least, that was how I had seen it. Growing up I’d often had guilty dreams of belonging to a richer, more glamorous family. Sometimes sitting in the cinema, sucking bonbons in the dark, staring up at the screen, I’d dream of belonging to another family. I’d concoct all sorts of scenarios where it would be discovered that there had been a mix-up of babies at the hospital and that I really belonged to a rich flaxen-haired man and his beautiful bow-mouthed wife who spoke like something off the BBC and brought me home to live in a big house with white muslin curtains and a large garden with a dog called Lassie. I wasn’t particularly imaginative.

  I had loved my parents but I didn’t want Ma’s nervousness or Da’s jaunty whistling, which gave the impression he thought he was cock of the walk, but was just a cover for his lack of confidence.

  I wasn’t sure how to explain my flight. There probably wasn’t a way that didn’t make me sound like a snobbish disloyal, ungrateful little bitch. ‘Ma and Da worked so hard,’ I said, feeling my way.

  Karen said nothing so I continued, ‘Life was such a struggle for them.’

  Our parents had always been burdened by want. Ma had twelve pregnancies, four miscarriages and eight kids. Their lives were about the daily grind and duty and sacrifice and loving their family and their country. It was all about survival.

  ‘Sometimes, Karen, I felt as if Ma and Da always expected the worst. That it sort of became their default setting. I think I wanted to get away from that.’

  Karen stubbed out her cigarette and shook her head. ‘They adored each other. That’s why Da followed Ma to the grave.’

  Technically Da had died of a brain haemorrhage. But he’d really died of a broken heart. He’d had a stroke not long after Ma went so that the left side of his body had been paralysed. He had l
ain in bed with his frozen limbs and thick slurred speech, dealing with the double whammy of Ma’s death and the stroke. There had been talk of recovery and rehabilitation but I’d known he wouldn’t last long.

  It was not too sentimental to say that Ma and Da proved that true love existed. Frank used to say sometimes that men married birds for their looks and that birds married men for their money. I wasn’t sure if he was joking. But I knew that Ma and Da had loved each other.

  I had another stab at explanation. ‘Ma and Da knew their place. I remember going down to the doc with Ma and watching her kowtowing to him – yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir. I hated watching that, the way she sort of put up with him patronizing her.’ I’d hated the way that, like pricked balloons, Ma and Da would deflate around school teachers or others they thought were authority figures. They scrambled for formal language they didn’t have, and let themselves be totally intimidated.

  Karen gave a derisive sniff. ‘That doc was so full of it. One time Ma went to him with her chest and do you know what he said to her? He told her it would do her a power of good if she went out sailing.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yeah,’ Karen said. ‘He pointed to the photo of himself on his boat that he had hanging behind his desk.’ She put on a mincing voice, and an image of the tall doctor with the leathery, flushed face and red-rimmed eyes floated into my mind. ‘Sailing is wonderful, Mrs Butler. I’d highly recommend it.’

  I laughed. ‘I think he was an alcoholic, you know.’

  ‘Really?’ Her voice dripped sarcasm. She made a face. ‘He was a complete pisshead. His breath was always minty but it was only masking the booze. He should have been struck off.’

  ‘That’s why Frank was so attractive to me,’ I told her.

  A sceptical look spread over her face.

  ‘He never would have put up with that. He just wouldn’t take it. When I had Dylan, the consultant was very good but he was a bit short with us. Frank told him where to get off. Frank never knew his place. He just went out there and took what he wanted.’

  It was true. Ma and Da had never seemed to imagine anything outside their own existence. For Frank, the world was his oyster. Karen was conspicuously silent so I decided to change the subject. I reverted to the earlier part of the conversation. ‘I was a stuck-up little cow, wasn’t I?’ When I was young I’d cottoned on to the fact that adults loved me. They thought I was pretty and good and sweet. I’d made a career out of being pious and grubbing for approval.

  Karen arched an eyebrow. ‘I cannot tell a lie. Lookit, there was a pair of us in it,’ she said, beginning to unwrap what looked like a cake. I watched her plunge a knife into it with more force than was necessary.

  She set a plate in front of me. ‘It’s called cake,’ she said, handing me a fork. ‘And eating. You should try it some time. And, no, it’s not organic,’ she said. ‘And it’s not fat-free, dairy-free or from some Fancy Dan shop. It’s a Tea Time Express cake from Dunnes, which you once thought was the dog’s … It was hard being your older sister.’

  ‘Bet you it’s not so hard now,’ I said, giving a stagey laugh.

  She ignored this. ‘You were good at everything. School, dancing, debating … I was practically slung out of school every second week for going behind the bike sheds and smoking.’ She gave a big dirty laugh. ‘For learning about biology in the practical sense.’

  ‘You were cool,’ I countered, ‘with your eye-liner and frosted pink lipstick and your flares. Listening to music with your pals in our room with your posters stuck all over the walls.’

  ‘Right,’ she said drily.

  ‘You were so funny. Everyone wanted to be around you.’

  ‘Karen the character,’ she said. ‘I’ll never forget at the end of first year old Bugs’ – the principal – ‘coming into the classroom with her big buck teeth stuck out in front of her and her clipboard calling out the names of the different streams, dividing us up into groups. My name got called out first. I got up off my chair trying to keep the smile off my face. I thought I was clever.’

  ‘You were clever,’ I said firmly. And she was.

  Karen continued, ‘Then she called out another name or two and the doubts started to creep in.’ She looked at me. ‘They weren’t exactly Mensa material. Then Jean Murphy’s name got called and I knew the game was up. My ears started buzzing and ringing. I thought there was some mistake. I saw Jean Murphy lumbering across the room with her pasty face and her heavy breathing and her knuckles scraping the ground and her too small eyes, God love her, and I knew that was it. I was in with the thickos.’

  She puffed out her cheeks. ‘It still hurts in a way,’ she said, with a crooked smile. ‘Isn’t that fucked up?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘It felt unfair to me. I was sick with glandular fever in first year. I missed a good bit of school so I did crap in my summer tests. That was me washed up for ever. After that I sort of switched off for good. I barely went to school.’

  A memory crawled into my mind then of the man from the Department of Education at our house, wondering why Karen wasn’t coming to school. Da and Ma had been mortified. It had almost been as bad as having the law to the door. Karen had walked in from school – or wherever she’d been – swinging her bag over her shoulder, her school skirt cut up to her bum and the tie half-way down her chest, unaware that Da was waiting for her. He’d whacked her across the face – Da, who’d never laid a finger on us and who was trembling himself. A ghost white Karen had lifted a hand to the spot on her cheek, which was stinging red. Ma hadn’t spoken all night. Da hadn’t said much more.

  ‘On the scrap heap at the age of twelve and labelled a character. “She’s some bleedin’ character that one.” “Karen the character”, that was me. Give someone a label and they’ll live up to it. It’s why I never label my kids.’

  ‘You’re the successful one now, Karen,’ I said.

  She rewarded this remark with a sceptical look.

  ‘You’ve got a great marriage, gorgeous kids, a lovely home, a career.’

  ‘I like my life, I suppose.’ Then she said, ‘I was so jealous of you. Ma and Da were so proud of you. They practically levitated off the ground when they heard you were head girl.’

  My throat constricted. That was not how I remembered it. Ma and Da had seemed pleased enough but they hadn’t seemed all that interested. They had not pushed me. They had not asked me about my plans.

  ‘And when that bogger maths teacher said you should go to Trinity …’ Karen said, and I felt as if an electric current had been shot through me ‘… Ma practically had to be sedated she was so excited. When you got the scholarship I thought she was going to have a bleeding heart attack.’

  I shook my head. ‘I came home and told Ma and Da that Animal said I should go to college and they gave me a very cool reception.’

  ‘Would you go on out of that?’ she said. ‘They were beside themselves. I mean, they mightn’t have gone on about it but it was so obvious. They probably didn’t know what to say. It was like telling them you were about to travel to outer space. And we weren’t the sort of family to discuss our “feelings”.’

  That was true, I thought, closing my eyes. There had been constant chatter in the flat but very little discussion or real talk. Things were routinely pushed under the carpet. There had been no mention of my brother Keith skipping off to England after he’d been arrested for receiving stolen tellies. I’d only heard about it years later from Karen. The commentary on our uncle Robbie’s roaring alcoholism was confined to ‘Ah, sure Robbie’s fond of an auld drink.’ Our auntie Mary went ‘for a little holiday’ every now and then. There was no mention of the fact that she was periodically committed when she threatened to throw herself out of top-floor windows.

  Karen crossed the room, bent down and opened a cupboard. ‘I found some old stuff belonging to you,’ she said, turning around with a small battered ca
rdboard box in her hand. Her tone became teasing. ‘The letters you wrote to Sellafield complaining about the plant,’ she said, setting the box on the table. ‘Copy books. Reports. A glowing reference from Bugs, which I would pin to my chest if I was you.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘Ma kept it all.’

  It was hard to believe that Ma had kept the reports she had so fleetingly glanced at. ‘Why are you giving me this stuff now?’

  She let a shoulder drop. ‘I did a big clear-out. And it’s not like you don’t have the space,’ she said, her tone suspiciously casual.

  ‘Ma kept my school reports,’ I repeated.

  A cloud of smoke was hovering in front of Karen’s face. ‘She probably burnt mine out of shame.’ Then she said, ‘I was surprised you never made it to Trinity. You were that poor bogger teacher’s great white hope. What was it he used to say? “If some day one of you walks the ten minutes up the road to Trinity College and goes through the gates, my life’s work will have been worth it.”’

  Her comment hung in the air, like lead in my veins.

  ‘You made such a song and dance about your studying. With your special desk and lamp and highlighter pens and study plans tacked up on the wall. I tried so hard to distract you but no way were you looking up. There was more planning went into your studying campaign for getting to college than there was for the Normandy Landings. I never got what made you change your mind. One minute you were going to college, the next you were taking a year off, and that was it,’ she said, snapping her fingers.

  The room had closed in on me. I felt claustrophobic.

  ‘Why, Anita? Why did you not go to college? I’ve never asked you.’

  ‘I have to go, Karen,’ I said, standing up.

  She looked at me dubiously.

  ‘I forgot. I have a man coming to do some painting,’ I lied, pushing back the chair.

  ‘Don’t forget your box,’ she said, thrusting it into my arms.

  The rain was ceaseless. It was as if one giant cloud was parked over Ireland. The rain fell and fell and fell. Nobody had ever seen anything like it before. At least, not since records began.