The Better Half

by Sarah Harte

  After a cursory nod Dylan had ignored Frank and Little Miss Big Knockers. It must have been a new experience for Frank to be invisible. He was not used to being sidelined socially in favour of me.

  ‘Thank you,’ I had said, leaning forward and pressing my cheek to my son’s.

  I had felt him stiffen. ‘Why did he have to bring her?’ he’d asked, pulling back from me, his face contorted. ‘He’s a loser.’

  ‘Please don’t speak about Dad like that, Dylan,’ I had said softly. ‘He’s still your father and he loves you very much.’

  Dylan had shaken his head in a way that told me he was trying not to cry. It made me want to howl.

  ‘Go have fun, my pet,’ I had said, etching a deliberate smile onto my face. I had aimed for a jaunty, upbeat tone. ‘Happy birthday!’

  I was on Pembroke Road now, scudding through Balls-bridge past the white circular American Embassy on my right.

  There had been no scenes.

  ‘Anita,’ Karen had said, underneath her umbrella, a plume of her smoke floating up into the ether, ‘leave the grog alone when you get home.’ She’d asked to come with me. ‘We can have a pyjamas party.’

  ‘I want to be on my own, Karen. Thanks, though.’

  ‘Okay,’ she’d agreed reluctantly.

  We’d stood in silence as Karen had pulled hard on the fag.

  ‘Thanks, Karen,’ I’d said. ‘I just need to … sleep.’

  She’d looked at me. ‘No more booze.’

  ‘No more booze,’ I’d echoed, clamping on a false, perfidious – an Ella word – smile. I was already hearing the sweet sound of the bottle being uncorked.

  I was turning into a liar, I thought, inching forward and waiting to exploit a gap in the traffic. Booze was making a liar of me. My eyes swam with tears. The visibility was terrible. I saw my chance. Gunning the accelerator, I swept right taking the corner too wide. The Range Rover reared forward, like a huge metal stallion, mounting the footpath with a huge bump. There was a crashing sound of metal crunching against wrought-iron railings.

  Switching off the ignition, I sat crouched over the wheel, stunned. My head fell back against the seat. I swivelled it to the side. There was a faint ringing in my ears. I don’t know how long it was before I saw a car with markings slide up to the kerb on the other side of the road. A man jumped out of it. He had a rain jacket. He was putting on his hat. I stared at him, shadows flickering in my head, as he strode across the road. I was a little dazed. There was a sharp rap on the window. He was beckoning to me to roll it down. I leant forward to find the button. It took me a minute or two to find it. Everything seemed in slow motion.

  ‘Please step out of the vehicle, ma’am.’

  He was stationary in front of me. His lips were pursed.

  Still I didn’t move.

  ‘Step out of the vehicle, ma’am.’

  The tone had gone from firm to insistent. Oh, God. He was barking at me now.

  ‘Ma’am, I’m afraid I’ll need you to step out of the vehicle and take a breathalyser test.’

  9

  I got one call. I rang Frank. He had come charging into the station on his white steed with his consigliere Eamon in tow. Now we were standing on the steps of the Donnybrook garda station, the Three Stooges. It was the early hours of the morning. Frank was grey-faced, his lips a worrying blue that I was trying to ignore. He had damp circles under his arms and there was a faint sheen on his forehead.

  Eamon’s sallow skin looked yellow under the streetlights. His bald patch gave him a monkish appearance. He was a small, slightly nervy man, with a high-pitched laugh that was nowhere in evidence now. We’d known him for ever.

  Frank lit a cigarette. He was back on the fags. Eamon smoked like a demon too. I watched them, Mutt and Jeff, friends since childhood. Two boys from Offaly – from the same tribe – done good. Eamon was a clever Offaly boy – from even humbler circumstances than Frank – who’d the Christian Brothers to thank for his education. He’d studied law at night. He had the same political allegiances as Frank and was in the tent everyone wanted to be in at the Galway races with his small blonde wife, who was dwarfed by the massive feathers she had stuck in her head, which made her resemble a cockatoo. She’d bought it with her mother in tow for a second opinion – country girls let loose with big wedges of the cash that Eamon had been salting away.

  I was fond of Eamon. He was a decent old skin in his own lick-arse fox-faced way. He was what passed as a friend for Frank. Frank knew everyone, he was gregarious and outgoing, but he was essentially a lone wolf. He had fallen out with more people than I could keep track of so it was a miracle that he and Eamon had been friends for over forty years.

  Of course, Eamon was a yes-man, like most people Frank had managed to work with successfully. Frank’s thin skin and psyche did not allow for criticism. I’d often wondered privately if his Dubai-style resort scheme had happened in part because he surrounded himself with men who were not prepared to shout, ‘Halt.’

  Frank gave him an awful time, leaving messages at six in the morning – ‘Answer the fucking phone, Eamon.’ Or he would bellow, ‘Can I do it or not?’ Eamon definitely earned his money. But he’d made plenty out of Frank. And when the good times had rolled there had been plenty of dough to go around. So, Eamon would have jumped off a cliff for Frank.

  Eamon was godfather to Ella. He always remembered her birthday and Christmas, and came to the house with unimaginative but generous presents. You could see, though, that he couldn’t quite get over his luck at being a solicitor, just as his wife Carmel hadn’t got over the joy of marrying one. Of course it had been Karen who had pointed that out to me, years before. ‘I’d say the pair of them get down on their knees every morning and thank Holy God for making Eamon a solicitor,’ she’d said.

  Anyway, fair play, Eamon had got the finger out in the station. He’d swung into action, asking questions in a crisp tone, taking notes, pushing up his sleeve to check the time, demanding to speak to the member in charge, like a small, determined dog with a bone.

  I’d been driven to the station in a paddy wagon. A paddy wagon. They’d shoved me into a cell. The door had swung shut and I’d started to weep self-pitying, fearful tears. I was a forty-five-year-old pisshead housewife, sitting in a cell in a dress too young for me, waiting for my ex-husband, who had left me for a girl young enough to be our daughter who was pregnant. I was in jail. This was rock bottom.

  ‘Well, I suppose we’ve done what we can,’ Eamon was saying, darting another glance at his watch.

  That was the one thing about Eamon. He spoke in riddles with references so veiled that I never had a clue what he was on about. He wouldn’t have told his right hand what the left was doing, which made him just the sort of boyo to be Frank’s solicitor. If you asked Eamon the time of day he’d tell you he’d get back to you on it.

  The two men were eyeing me warily – the crazy lady – as if they didn’t know what the hell I might do next. I’d never had so much attention from the pair of them in years. I was staring at them, challenging them to say anything to me, when I felt a surge of weird energy.

  If this was rock bottom, I thought, watching Frank light another fag, I could handle it. If this was rock bottom the only way was up. My head was pounding. I felt tired and sweaty but strangely alive. It was as if I had gone so far beyond the pale that I felt fearless. I was ‘Anita the outlaw’.

  The irony was not lost on me. The woman who had spent years manoeuvring her way up some invisible social ladder, getting her children to play with the right children so that she could insinuate herself with the parents, working out the correct place to holiday, trying to get into the right golf club, even though she didn’t play golf, the kids into the right tennis club, observing all the little rules, sucking up to people she didn’t particularly like, being nice to people Frank had decided she should court.

  I stared at Eamon. He looked like a
n undertaker. But, then, he always did. His suits, which probably cost a fortune, always looked too big for him, as if he’d found them in a charity shop. He shifted from foot to foot, looking like Eeyore the small grey donkey in Winnie-the-Pooh. It wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine him standing by a graveside with a suitably sepulchral look, wringing his hands professionally, as the coffin was lowered into the ground, or backing a hearse to the door of a church.

  At this moment Frank didn’t look much better.

  ‘Nobody’s died,’ I said, taking a deep breath. Then I started to giggle. The giggles turned into gales of inappropriate, rollicking laughter. I saw a nervous smile flicker on Eamon’s face. It was quenched entirely when I kept on laughing. Eventually I was doubled over.

  ‘Jesus, Anita,’ Frank said.

  ‘Jesus nothing,’ I said, gasping, ‘I’ve really done it now.’

  Eamon’s eyes darted to Frank.

  ‘Back away from the crazy lady,’ I wheezed, wiping my eyes.

  They were silent.

  ‘I’ll drive you home,’ Eamon said, still eyeing me doubtfully.

  Frank put his arm around my shoulders, presumably to steer me in the direction of the car, but I shook it off. He coloured and Eamon looked away in embarrassment. It was quite clear from his face that he wanted to be anywhere but embroiled with Frank’s dipsomaniac ex-wife.

  ‘You’ll drive us home. Home,’ I repeated, and Frank flinched. ‘We no longer have a home.’

  ‘You stay here sure,’ Eamon said, edging cautiously away. ‘I’ll bring the car around.’

  ‘The last time I met yourself and Carmel was when we spent that weekend in Dromoland,’ I said to Eamon, so he was forced to stall.

  Frank and I, Eamon and Carmel, with a couple of Frank’s business associates and their wives, had spent a weekend in Dromoland Castle, set in the lush green fields of County Clare. Dromoland was sixteenth-century and beautiful, with chandeliers, patterned carpets and heavy brocade curtains. There were stiff linen tablecloths and heavy silver cutlery, and through the window of the dining room you could see a lake and ancient trees. It was slightly kitsch maybe but the best of Irish.

  Frank had been paying for the whole jaunt – nobody could accuse him of being ungenerous – and he had enjoyed playing ‘mine host’. He and the other men had come trooping down the stairs to go pheasant-shooting, tricked out in check shirts, silk waistcoats, sleeveless pullovers, their plus fours tucked inside heavy green socks with feathers. The atmosphere of the place, it seemed, had gone to their heads.

  There had been a line of Range Rovers and Land Rovers parked on the gravel outside. I had made some joke about us being used to living in an estate rather than on an estate, which had caused Frank to look annoyed. It had obviously been a fantasy of his that he should be a gentleman shooter. We, the wives, had watched them truck over the lawn, in tweed caps and brogues, rifles over their shoulders, delighted with themselves, Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men.

  ‘Don’t they look impressive?’ Carmel had said, clasping her hands to her chest.

  One of the men’s voices had floated back on the breeze, followed by a burst of laughter: ‘Don’t let him be fookin’ rushin’ ya.’

  We women were supposed to beautify ourselves in the spa and trail around the gardens – which were based on designs by the fella who’d planned the gardens at Versailles – chatting until our menfolk came back. Carmel had talked a lot about the Royal Family – in a way that suggested she was their intimate – so it seemed fairly certain that she, too, had been overcome by our surroundings. Over coffee – the girls having a gay time – she had said things like ‘What a terrible burden for Wills to carry,’ and ‘I think Harry will find it hard to deal with the discipline in the army.’

  They were a nice bunch of women, although at one point I had half thought of drowning myself in the lily pond. Instead I had drowned myself in booze.

  ‘I stand corrected, Eamon,’ I said. ‘The last time I met you was at Frank’s fiftieth. It doesn’t really count, though, because I was bombed out of my mind. I’d just discovered that Romeo here was slipping it to Juliet.’

  Eamon didn’t know where to look so he settled for staring at the pavement.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Anita,’ Frank said, a pulse twitching at the side of his head.

  ‘The truth hurts, Frank.’

  ‘They don’t teach you this in Blackhall, Eamon, I’d say, when they’re teaching you to be a solicitor,’ Frank observed. ‘How to deal with a valued client’s drunken, irate, crazy ex-wife. You get the car.’ He ground out the cigarette under his foot, his jaw clenched.

  We watched Eamon scuttle off. I turned to Frank. ‘I’m surprised she lets you smoke. I thought that generation was very health-conscious.’

  Silence.

  ‘Sorry about all this, Frank,’ I said, wanting to needle him further. ‘I hope I didn’t wake Fiona up. I know she needs her sleep.’

  Frank said nothing.

  ‘This will be in the papers, I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘If it goes to court,’ Frank said, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose.

  ‘It’s going to court, Frank,’ I said flatly.

  ‘I’ll hire a top barrister,’ Frank said, ‘the very best.’ He looked slightly askew. His shirt was crumpled and the stubble on his face left a bluish shadow.

  ‘Did you not hear what Eamon said?’ Heat had crept into my voice. ‘It’s a strict liability offence meaning that once you’re over the limit you’re convicted. I blew into the bag. I was two times over the limit and, ta-da, case over. They even,’ I said, rummaging in my handbag, then waving a piece of paper in his face, ‘gave me a printout to prove it. And there isn’t a stroke you can pull to change that, Frank.’

  ‘I have a cousin a guard in Tullamore …’

  I wasn’t listening to him any more. Eamon’s car looked very phallic, much like Frank’s, I thought, watching him glide up to the kerb. Was there something in that? Two short-arsed men driving around in mobile penises?

  Frank was trying to put his hand on mine. I felt a tsunami-sized rush of indignation. ‘You have no right to do that,’ I barked. I could feel the fury bubbling up inside me. The bloody cheek of him.

  Eamon’s meagre little features peered out from behind the wheel of his Mercedes, like a small anxious baked bean. I strode to the edge of the kerb with my hand raised, transported by my anger. Catching the eye of a taxi man, I climbed into the back seat of the cab. ‘I’ll make my own way home,’ I shouted, poking my head out. ‘And you can go to fuck with your uncle in Tullamore, Frank.’

  They were gawping at me now.

  ‘Cheers, Eamon, regards to Carmel,’ I added, and the taxi took off.

  10

  It was a week since I’d been carted off to jail in a paddy wagon. Now I was being carted off to a prison of another sort. Shannon and I were going to Dundrum shopping centre to meet Maeve for coffee. And Maureen was coming.

  Maureen had rung me and I had sort of said where I was going and she had sort of tagged along. ‘Oh, that’s perfect. I need to get a baby present for my friend Louise’s daughter. Did I tell you about Louise? She’s my golfing friend, plays off a handicap of …’

  I didn’t want to go – and not just because I wasn’t in the humour for Maureen. The shopping centre was in the middle of a built-up suburban area. I’d never been that gone on the suburbs: they sprawled on for ever in a way that left me feeling uncertain. There was something so definite about the tenement flats where I had grown up in terms of their location and your identity: you were such and such from the Coppinger Street flats off St Stephen’s Green; everyone knew your mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother and so on. Our house in Shrewsbury Road, detached and set back from the road behind its electric gates, also had a firm sense of territorial markings although more in a dare-to-come-onto-our-land-and-a-sniper-will-b
low-your-head-off sort of way.

  Talk, talk, talk. Maureen was in the back seat of Shannon’s great big metal beast, rabbiting on. So far we’d covered her ovaries. Maureen’s ovaries had been our close friends for years. We’d also received an update on her sciatica – she never had anything as low level as back pain, always sciatica – and her reflux. We heard that her grandsons in Cork looked like Donal ‘around the eyes’. But if Our Lady had appeared to Maureen she would have looked a lot like Donal.

  Maureen had the absolute confidence of the bore that what she had to share with the world was eagerly awaited. If you’d stuck her under a tree and gagged her she’d have kept going. She hadn’t always been that bad. It was loneliness, I thought, which was why I tried hard to be tolerant. She didn’t get the attention she needed so she had to make guerrilla attacks on people to get it.

  What would Maureen have said if she’d known about me being slung in a cell? She wouldn’t have liked it. The confession would certainly have stemmed the ceaseless flow of medical revelations. She might even have withdrawn some of her sympathy. That would have been a relief. Maureen was kind, but her mournful little smile, undershot with something strangely upbeat, depressed me. It made me want to leap about and holler and whoop and do the jitterbug and shout, I’m alive, I’m alive.

  Shannon was gripping the wheel glumly – Jimmy had lost a lot of money on shares. The markets had gone mad. Dylan had said – mouthing someone else, I was sure – that ‘all the old certainties’ had ‘been debunked’. He parroted what was said at work. Sometimes he spoke in the swinging-dick lingo of the alpha male, some of it pretty sexist and reeking of a machismo that just wasn’t him: ‘Share prices went up and down like a whore’s knickers.’

  We were meeting Maeve in Dundrum. I was trying not to dream of wine. I was off the grog for one week, which equalled one hundred and sixty-eight hours, or ten thousand and eighty minutes. Not that I was counting.