The Better Half

by Sarah Harte

  When Karen would yank open the curtains and attempt to strong-arm me out of bed with ‘On your feet, you lazy bitch,’ I’d shoot back, ‘At least you can’t say it’s a lovely day.’

  The rain bounced down from the green rows of newly planted poplars in Frank’s ‘development’. ‘It’s not a bloody development, Frank,’ I’d roared at him, ‘it’s an estate.’

  I was parked next to a clump of densely spaced plants. My usual spot. I was like Stan in the van only without a plan. I had been out here many nights. Driving down the Stillorgan dual carriageway under the flyover, past the entrance to UCD, a little tipsy from wine, over the limit for sure, my SUV finding its way like a homing pigeon. Parking my car like now, watching the lights on in their apartment, picturing them inside, imagining my husband, the father of my children, lying with another woman, a baby growing in her tummy. My knees grew weak at the thought.

  At night my grief and anger would condense. I would float through the house, which had taken on the quality of a morgue, the silence ringing in the large, shadowy rooms, the quiet closing in on me. That was when I would swing up into the Range Rover and head for the dual carriageway.

  The development was reasonably new, and as property prices had started to go south, marketing techniques had become ritzier in a bid to attract buyers. There were giant hoardings running around the houses, which showed photographs of gorgeous young women and total rides of young fellas sipping champagne and looking sexy. The tag line at the bottom announced, in large bold letters, ‘Where elegant people live elegant lives in elegant surroundings’. I had to stop myself placing my hand on the horn and keeping it there to rouse the elegant people from their elegant sleep in their elegant development and let them know about my coruscating inelegant pain.

  A taxi drove up, splashing through the puddles, and disgorged its passengers, a couple who looked the worse for wear. It took the fella a couple of minutes to find his money. The girl ran into the darkness, her step unsteady. The car door slammed and the taxi took off.

  Three young fellas on a bike sailed past, oblivious to the rain, laughter burbling from them. They were college students, I thought. One looked at me and laughed again. I was like a mad woman in my nightie with a cardigan thrown over it. A slant of yellow light from the streetlamps hit my face. Mad, drunken thoughts were coursing through my mind. I could drive up to their apartment and shout out the window so everyone in the vicinity could hear me. ‘Come out you here, you fat, red-faced bastard and you curly-haired Whore of Babylon you, I’ll give you elegant living.’

  There were times I found myself gripped by a grief that bowled me over. It was surreal to think of Frank starting out again in an apartment with a new baby on the way, loosening his tie at the end of the day and throwing himself down on the couch, the remote control firmly in his grip, with a different woman trying to wrestle it from him.

  I’d sat at home that night, eyeing the box Karen had foisted on me. There had been copy books at the top. I’d stared at the fat round girly handwriting, in which I’d shared my thoughts on nuclear power and emigration. I had been surprisingly politicized. There was a dog-eared faded clipping from the paper about the young student who had won a coveted maths prize. A photo of Ma, Da and myself at the prize-giving caused my eyes to moisten. Ma, in her blue coat and headscarf with her chapped hands firmly clasped around her bag, was looking shyly at the camera. And although you couldn’t see it in the grainy shot, I knew that the face powder she wore would have been caught in the fine lines fanning about her mouth. There was Da with his slight stoop, smaller than I remembered him, in his suit, his shoes a bit too big for him, and me sandwiched between them, with a cheap bag and shoes and a wary but pleased expression.

  When I told them I was going to defer my place in college they had accepted it without comment. By then a small lump had been found under Ma’s arm – a small, savage lump that would cost Ma a breast, her hair and then her life.

  The reference I had sought from Bugs when I was looking for work in Brown Thomas made my heart turn over. ‘Anita is a natural leader, accepting of others and generous with her time. To any future employer I would describe her as the kind of person who has the rare combination of independence and reliability …’

  The girl in the letter was a phantom. I switched on the engine. She was long gone.

  8

  The summer had ended and the rain had stopped. But although the oppressive black cloud had moved away it had swiftly been replaced with a cloud of another type: a financial one. Right through the interconnected villages that made up Dublin, people could talk of little else than the recession. Would we all end up living in cardboard boxes? How long would it last? Which sectors would be worst affected?

  Frank was not exempt from this talk, and Dylan had told me that his name was being bandied about as somebody likely to go bankrupt. The Irish banks were said to be under-capitalized – maybe even at risk of going under – due to reckless lending to property developers like him. Even if Frank was to get his planning permission, it was by no means certain that the banks would lend him the rest of the money he needed to finish his development. Karen had ordered – that was the only word for it – me to talk to Frank about money. ‘You cannot continue to bury your head in the sand, Anita. You’re not an ostrich. You have no job, no pension. You need to wake up – and fast. Frank will have given personal guarantees left, right and centre. You know what that means? That Frank personally will be the mark for the repayment of all those giant loans he took.’

  She couldn’t understand how I could know so little about the family finances. But after I had given up doing Frank’s books I had retreated from all such practicalities into a childlike state of ignorance. My card worked when I put it in the wall. Frank was generous and never reined me in. Beyond that I didn’t ask. I was forty-five, with a child’s understanding of my husband’s finances. I felt as if I had been asleep and that now I was struggling to open my eyes and deal with what the daylight had brought.

  Sooner or later I had to work my way up to the money conversation.

  Frank came and went, dismantling his life with me bit by bit. Sometimes I ignored him, shutting myself in my room so that he hammered on the door begging me to come out.

  ‘Fuck off, you dirty, cradle-snatching bastard,’ I’d shout, until he went away.

  Other days I trailed him around, saying things to twist the knife in his back and make him feel bad about having left me. I could have changed the locks, of course. But that would have been no more than a symbolic gesture and he might have objected. The house was in my name, I thought – but could I be absolutely sure about that? Frank had said a lot of things that had turned out not to be true.

  This particular day I followed him down the stairs to the office in the basement. He looked grey-faced and jowly. I watched him plunge his thick fingers inside a filing cabinet.

  ‘How deep will this recession go, Frank?’ My breath caught in my chest as I waited for his answer.

  He gave a short bark of a laugh. ‘The party’s over, Anita, that’s for fucking sure.’

  I hightailed it out of there. I didn’t want to know any more. If he’d sat me down and started to lay it on the line, I probably would have put my hands over my ears and started shouting, ‘I’m not listening.’ The subject made my stomach knot. Frank had two houses to run now, two women. His business was shaky. I didn’t work. I had no money stashed away. Basically I just didn’t want to face the music.

  There was no sign of Frank, although I knew he was coming to Dylan’s party. Dylan and Biba were sharing a twenty-second birthday party in a nightclub, the Branch, on South Anne Street. Why Dylan wanted me to come I didn’t know, but he was angry with his father and protective of me.

  Frank would not be dissuaded from attending. ‘I’m coming to his birthday, no matter what,’ Frank had said, digging in his heels. ‘I’m his father.’

  I hadn’t bothered to poi
nt out that Frank had missed years of Dylan’s birthdays. And Ella’s.

  Whether or not Frank was bringing Fiona Keane, I didn’t know, but the thought made me sick with nerves. I was running to the toilet every couple of minutes. And I was scared stiff about how Dylan might handle it. There would be drink taken, which would increase the likelihood of, at the very least, a heated exchange of words.

  ‘Having a baby at his age,’ Dylan had exploded, when he’d heard that she was pregnant. ‘It’s disgusting.’

  While Frank’s feelings weren’t exactly top of my list of priorities I didn’t want things to get worse between Dylan and his father so I tried to lighten his mood a little with a bit of black humour. ‘Old people do have sex,’ I had said, but he had just stamped out of the room.

  The Branch was a sort of HQ for Dylan and the moneyed kids he hung around with. A sort of flotsam and jetsam of scenesters, wealthy south County Dublin kids – the perma-tanned pampered Celtic cubs – and what passed for celebrity in Ireland. It was owned by Jamie Deegan, the son of our neighbours. Jamie was a pal of Dylan’s, and Ella had met up with him recently in New York.

  The Deegans lived in one of the biggest houses on Shrewsbury Road. They had an outdoor pool, the entire floor of which was a television screen so that Ted Deegan – a striking man with close-cropped hair – could watch the telly when he was doing his laps. The Deegans led a glamorous life, a social rung above us, although it would have driven Frank mad to hear it put like that. While we went to Marbella or stayed in the Sandy Lane in Barbados, the Deegans existed in a more rarefied world of private islands and private jets. We had been to their house for a party when they had invited all the neighbours they were not fighting with. Ted Deegan seemed to sue and be sued by even more people than Frank. Our road was a hotbed of cross-litigation, people suing each other over inches of ground, boundary walls, which showed that Frank was not the only one with the peasant obsession about land in the blood.

  The Deegans’ party had been an eye-popping high-camp extravaganza – an Arabian Nights party. Flowers had been flown in from London along with jet loads of sand from the Middle East. Staff had been employed for a couple of weeks in advance, making props and creating lighting and decorations. Maria Deegan had come swaying over the lawn on a real camel.

  Ted owned a large insurance company that had expanded aggressively throughout the boom years and the Deegans were said to be billionaires, even though Ted had once lost everything by being a Lloyd’s Name and had had to start again. He hung out with a senior Irish businessman who was long divorced from his wife and was said to keep a stable of young girls around the world.

  Occasionally rumours swirled about the Deegan marriage. It was said that Ted had been caught by his wife in the pool house shagging their cleaner. It was also said that Ted had been seen trapped on top of the electric gates of their house, moving backwards and forwards for hours as his wife caught him attempting to scale them after he’d been out tomcatting around. Maria, a petite woman with kohl-rimmed eyes, was supposedly having an affair with Ted’s pal, the senior Irish businessman, right under his nose and le tout Dublin knew it. There were plenty of people who said she was about thirty years too old for the businessman, whose tastes ran far younger. Either way the Deegans were still together.

  Biba had advertised her birthday as a sort of PR stunt, inviting media types and people from within the fashion industry – ‘to increase her profile,’ Dylan said. Biba was all about her profile. She got paid for turning up at promotional photo calls scantily clad. The more she got her mug in the paper, the more ‘jobs’ she stood to get.

  Karen and I were arriving when a Porsche pulled up outside the nightclub with a squeal of brakes. Its tinted windows precluded us from having a gawk inside until the door swung open and a grinning Dylan and Biba hopped out sporting matching his and hers tans. The car, which I didn’t recognize, may have been Jamie Deegan’s.

  They sashayed up the red carpet, waving at the two or three waiting photographers. Apart from the odd sighting of a Premiership footballer or some minor pop star from England, the Irish paparazzi had to make do with snapping barely known local people from the worlds of television, modelling and the media.

  Biba led Dylan by the hand, tossing her head like a pony and looking upwards from under her eyelashes in that flirty way of hers. She threw her arms out so that her short dress rode up her thighs.

  ‘Jaysus, wouldn’t you love to yank it down?’ Karen hissed, from behind her hand. ‘She’s so full of herself I’d say she’s starring in a movie in her own head. Look at her stopping there. I’ll tell you what she’s doing. She’s mentally hitting the pause button on the scene and checking her angle.’

  We trailed after them – avoiding the carpet – to the top of the queue, as instructed by Dylan, where a lipsticked girl with a clipboard spirited us inside. She stamped our hands before ushering us up a couple of flights of stairs to what looked like the top floor of the building. We were then passed to a bosomy platinum-haired young woman who plonked us at a table.

  ‘It’s the VIP suite,’ Dylan told us proudly, hunkering down to our level.

  ‘I’ve news for you, Dylan, pet – there are no VIPs in Ireland, apart from Bono,’ Karen told him, but her voice had been drowned in the music so Dylan just nodded, delighted with himself.

  We were seated behind a velvet rope, our table – along with a couple of others – on a dais so that we were raised above the rest of the crowd, like sheep inside a pen. ‘I feel like a complete eejit up here,’ I remarked to Karen.

  ‘I feel great,’ Karen said, beaming from ear to ear. ‘Sitting up here rubbernecking,’ she added, in her unique blend of sarcasm and enthusiasm. ‘It’s great seeing how the other half lives.’

  ‘Yeah, on credit,’ I said drily.

  ‘Jaysus, I never thought I’d hear the day. It’s like hearing Imelda Marcos saying she’s giving up shoe shopping.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘That dress is fab on you,’ Karen said.

  I shrugged again. She had selected a vivid turquoise dress in duchesse satin for me. I’d stood, limp and uninterested, in front of my walk-in wardrobe while she had rifled through it. ‘You need to be looking hot in case that fanny has the cheek to show her puss,’ she had said.

  ‘You can take what you want too,’ I had told her, flicking my head towards the clothes.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I’m deadly serious.’

  ‘Happy days,’ Karen had replied, rubbing her hands.

  She had come in what could only be described as a rig-out, a creation of her own devising, involving a corset that hiked her boobs up, and fringing – a sort of Annie-Oakley-on-acid outfit. She was also wearing cowboy boots. And since we’d arrived she’d applied even more makeup. ‘An old door needs a lick of new paint,’ she had said, snapping shut her compact when she caught me watching her.

  ‘Oh, my God, Mum, what does Auntie Karen look like?’ Dylan had said, eyeing her doubtfully when she’d slipped from her stool and teetered off to the jacks.

  ‘Not a word about your auntie, Dylan,’ I said, in a sharp voice that caused him to swing his head towards me. I rarely spoke like that to him: I talked softly, using one of the long list of pet names I’d had for him since he was a baby – he gave out about it but secretly he loved it. In other words, I was the real Irish mammy who thought her boy walked on water. ‘Your auntie Karen is brilliant.’

  A young girl dressed in hot pants with endless legs and a thicket of hair burnt up the dance-floor below. The surrounding men were hypnotized as she threw back her head in a pose of mock-ecstasy. The club was a sea of writhing bodies, bumping and grinding. You could almost smell the pheromones in the air.

  ‘Get a load of him,’ Karen said, when she got back, nodding towards a bare-chested young man showcasing his rippling muscles. ‘Christ!’ She set down her drink and gave a lusty laugh. ‘In our day fella
s only shuffled onto the dance-floor just before they played “Amhrán na bhFiann”. And only when they were pissed out of their heads.’

  The atmosphere seemed very sexually charged, but I was being middle-aged – you always thought things had been more innocent when you were younger.

  ‘At least this lighting is our friend,’ Karen shouted, pointing to the dimmers. ‘I wouldn’t stand down there if you paid me,’ she said, gesturing to Biba beneath us, illuminated by strobe lights.

  Biba had flitted from person to person, like a bee between flowers, having her picture taken. Now, briefly stationary, she was talking to an incredibly big man. Built like a monster, he was in a tight T-shirt, chosen to highlight his beefed-up trapez-oids. He looked vaguely familiar, I thought, watching him smile at something Biba was saying. He was a sportsman, possibly rugby. The bold diagonal stripes of Biba’s dress flashed as she leant over to whisper something into his ear. I watched them disappear into the shadows at the rear of the floor.

  ‘I wouldn’t trust that one as far as I could throw her,’ Karen said, taking a long noisy sip of her violently coloured cocktail. ‘She’s an operator if ever I saw one. Aren’t fellas awful fecking eejits the way they think with their dicks?’ she said, twiddling the umbrella in her drink. ‘I mean, they’re so basic in their thinking. You’d wonder if in a scientific sense the evolution of women and men was different. If the developmental process didn’t go as far with the fellas. And speaking of thinking with your willy …’

  I followed her gaze to where Dylan was threading through the crowd with Jamie Deegan. At least there was one young person I knew. I didn’t recognize most of the crowd, apart from the girl Maureen’s Donal was seeing – to my relief, Donal was nowhere in sight, although if he had popped up in the middle of the dance-floor doing air guitar I wouldn’t have been surprised. Many of Dylan’s friends seemed not to be there. But, then, I could see that the party was largely a PR exercise.