The Better Half

by Sarah Harte

After the garda station I’d gone home and drained every last bottle down the sink. Frank’s wine cellar in the basement was still intact, but I’d flushed the key down the loo. Or tried. It was still lying at the bottom of the bowl, daring me to shove my arm down and retrieve it. I’d thought about doing that. But I hadn’t. Yet.

  Since I’d decided to abstain, my desire for gargle had ballooned. I was practically hallucinating about a glass of wine. I’d have sold my body, slept with Maureen’s Donal in exchange for one, as Maureen talked on about Donal having ‘the foresight to de-invest’. No, I wouldn’t go that far. A disturbing image of Donal’s round white bottom bobbing up and down like a penny apple in a basin of water invaded my mind.

  One website I’d consulted had suggested making a list of the reasons you had to give up the sauce. I’d actually had a stab at it. My half-written list had been on the pillow and was stuck to my sweaty cheek when I had woken up the following morning. So that I don’t …

  1. … crash cars

  2. … spend nights in cells

  3. … make scenes in airports

  4. … end up in hospital with suspected drug overdoses

  5. … over-share with my friends and insult them

  6. … have to be dragged out of bed by relatives

  7. … suffer from constant wine flu

  8. … have to pretend to be bright and breezy in the morning when I feel like dry retching

  9. … blot out reality

  Listening to Maureen, I added a tenth.

  10. … become a custodian of the past

  Maeve would want to drink at lunch. I had no idea how I might dodge the issue. Would I have to go around and say to people, ‘I don’t drink,’ in the heavy tone that telegraphed you shouldn’t ask why?

  I had only really started to hit the bottle towards the end of Ella’s school years. Initially, staving off boredom had been a large part of it. Then maybe the reasons had shifted. I began drinking to avoid looking into the gaping chasm that was opening up in my life. And once my life had become less regimented, without the school pick-ups and drop-offs and vaguely supervisory role of the teenage years, I’d had more opportunity to drink. Was I an alcoholic? Like your typical problem drinker, I suspected my eye had sought out the information on the web that I wanted to find: ‘But having a drinking problem doesn’t mean that you are alcoholic or that you have to abstain from alcohol. Most people who experience problems from drinking choose to reduce their consumption to moderate levels rather than to abstain.’

  ‘I don’t really think that you’re an actual alkie,’ Karen had said, expelling a spiral of smoke thoughtfully. ‘What?’ she’d asked, catching sight of my face. ‘You asked … You drink too much, though. It’s hard to tell when we’re a nation of functioning pissheads.’

  I would abstain for the moment. But I would take it one day at a time, not making any grand promises to myself. If I ended up cracking and swigging madly from a bottle, I’d start again. I would learn to live for today.

  Maureen burbled happily on: ‘And I know it isn’t patriotic but maybe it’s time to move money offshore, as Donal says.’

  ‘What money?’ I heard Shannon mutter.

  Shannon manoeuvred her great big jeep down the narrow lane to the maze of car parking spaces in the bowels of the hulking great shopping centre.

  ‘I mean, Donal says that the Irish banks may not be able to deal with their huge liabilities. Their loan books are in real trouble, thanks to the excessive culture of lending to the developers. No offence, Anita.’

  ‘None taken,’ I said shortly.

  Frank’s name was cropping up in the news as one of the guys who might have contributed to taking Paul Hogan’s bank down.

  Maureen followed her comment by leaning forward and squeezing my shoulder. Inwardly I sighed. She began to talk about Ted Deegan. Something about ‘contracts for difference’ and ‘share price movements’. Maureen could easily have taught the Central Bank a thing or two but it was beyond me.

  ‘Ted Deegan bet on shares going up. Now that those shares have pretty much collapsed he’s said to have lost well in excess of a billion on them.’ The kernel of what she was saying seemed to be that he was in financial difficulties.

  ‘It’s so confusing in this car park,’ Shannon complained, taking her ticket from the machine and swivelling her head indecisively. ‘Trying to park is such a pain in the ass. It’s like a goddam maze. I don’t really care for this mall,’ she said, scowling.

  I had never seen Shannon like this before.

  When the car was parked the three of us trotted down the main concourse, our heels clicking along the marble floor.

  ‘Donal is driving a Harley Davidson around,’ Maureen was saying darkly. ‘He thinks he’s in that movie Easy Rider. You know – the one with the men in leather jackets and unbrushed hair who do nothing but drive around all the time.’ She bristled. ‘He told Donal Junior that he finds it very mind expanding.’

  Maureen was like a car jammed in gear, chugging along, unable to drive freely. Her life was a memorial to something that no longer existed.

  ‘Gee, it’s so quiet here,’ Shannon remarked.

  And it was. Normally the place would have been teeming at this time. But on this day – in a week when the global stock markets had plummeted and governments, including ours, had moved to prop up the banking sector – tumbleweed might have blown through the atrium.

  ‘I’ll see you in Harvey Nicks,’ Maureen said, at the foot of the escalator.

  ‘See you later,’ I said, gathering from Shannon’s face that she was as glad as I to have a little breather from her.

  Shannon and I left the centre and crossed the square, past the fountains, to the Harvey Nichols glass-cube café. It was home from home, with its incongruous orange plastic furniture and large vases of lilies. We the stay-at-home mums had flocked here like starlings after we had left our precious cargo at school. There was a uniform. In winter we tucked our jeans into riding boots; in summer the jeans were white and the footwear sandals. But we always had sunglasses pushed back above our shiny Botoxed foreheads, regardless of the season. Today we were few in number. The café was half empty. A sort of eerie pall hung over the place. Voices seemed lower, hair less bouncy – even the large soft leather handbags that littered the floor seemed to slouch, as if to say, ‘RIP, our day is gone.’

  I wolfed my entire scone and pictured a headline in the paper: ‘Woman Eats Whole Scone In Harvey Nichols Café’. Maybe it was because I wasn’t drinking, but I found myself much hungrier. Shannon’s scone lay in front of her. She had cut it into four quarters, eating roughly half of it before pushing the remainder away. Suddenly she zoomed her face in towards mine. Underneath the layers of makeup, she looked pinched. ‘Jimmy’s under so much pressure. Obviously, being a stockbroker, he played the market. He borrowed money from Paul Hogan’s bank to buy shares. The shares are worthless. Now he owes the bank and he owes them big.’ She exhaled noisily. ‘And work’s really hard for him. He’s in the private client department. There’s nothing happening for him. Bonds are where it’s at now. The private client work has almost totally dried up. And clients are jumpy.’

  She bit her lip. ‘One guy came into the office and went crazy. He did a sort of Michael-Douglas-falling-down impression. He’d lost three million over a six-month period on the back of advice they’d given him, and when they sent him a bill for forty thousand euro he went ape. It tipped him over the edge. He ran around the place threatening to kill himself.’ She shook her head balefully. ‘I mean, he was legally obliged to pay – stocks go down as well as up – but Jimmy felt awful. Now they have bouncers discreetly tucked away in the lobby in case it happens again.’

  ‘Ireland has turned into Russia,’ I said. Frank had told me a story about a well-known developer who had been beaten up for not paying his subcontractor – in another version of the story he had been bea
ten up by the Russian Mafia to whom the subcontractor had sold the debt. It might or might not have been true but it gave a flavour of the stories doing the rounds, and reflected how Ireland had changed.

  Her shoulders drooped. ‘Jimmy’s not eating.’

  It was hard to imagine the buoyant double-chinned Jimmy off his food. He had seemed to get fatter as Shannon had shrunk, as if he had swallowed some of her. That happened with a lot of the husbands and wives we knew. The men grew bigger, their stomachs steadily distending towards their toes, while the women shrank, their lollipop heads seeming to grow larger.

  ‘He’s not sleeping, he’s hollow-eyed – I’m really scared for him. I tried to get him to take sleeping tablets but he won’t. He just lies there, looking at the ceiling. If things get really bad they might let him go.’

  ‘But he’s a partner, isn’t he?’

  ‘He set up the firm. But they won’t be prepared to carry him for ever if the private client work doesn’t pick up. And in his game he has to appear chipper and confident all the time. It’s kind of crucial. There’s no room for self-doubt. Show your soft underbelly and you’re gone. Negative thinking is contagious. At least, that’s how they view it in stockbroking. They fear it like nothing else. You have to talk the talk and walk the walk. And Jimmy has lost his confidence. Hell, I’d say the kids can see it in his eyes.’

  Her face collapsed. ‘He won’t get another job. He’s over forty. Stockbrokers burn out. They have a shelf life. Who’d take him on?’ Her gaze seemed to turn inward. Then, after a slight pause, she said, lowering her voice, ‘We’re still finishing off the house. It’s gone way over budget. The designer ordered carpets and fabrics and all sorts of things that weren’t okayed and which have to be paid for now. We’re tied into buying an apartment in Dubai and the realtor says we can’t back out at this point. We’re obliged to complete or they’ll sue us for the purchase price. We’re in serious shit.’ She grimaced. ‘And the worst of it all is that there’s nothing I can do to help.’

  ‘Hi, guys.’ It was Tracey Thornley.

  ‘Hey there, Tracey,’ Shannon said, nailing a wafer-thin smile to her face.

  ‘Look at you!’ Tracey trilled at Shannon. ‘You look great – you’re so skinny!’

  That was Tracey’s stock greeting. Tracey herself looked emaciated – all tiny limbs and big eyes. And now, with her deflated chest, she had a bony clavicle. ‘Oh, my God, how are you?’ she asked, in the manner of someone addressing survivors of a nuclear disaster. ‘It’s so dead in here,’ she rocketed on, without waiting for an answer. ‘Where is everyone?’

  Her eyes, which looked as if they had been stitched back – Maeve insisted they had – flicked around the room. Tracey had once had a good job in television but now she was the ultimate trophy wife. She turned her attention to me. ‘Anita, I’m sooo embarrassed,’ she carolled. ‘I’ve been meaning to call you.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I told her.

  She stooped to give me a quick hug, which made both of us feel super-awkward. When she had straightened up she folded her arms across her chest. ‘How are you?’ Her voice dripped an almost theatrical concern. This still happened: women would be smiling and chatting and then their eyes would alight on me and they would become funereal.

  ‘Great,’ I said brightly.

  Tracey continued to look at me, radiating sympathy so that the smile nearly cracked off my face. It was like a game of Chicken, I thought, wondering which of us would look away first. She caved before I did. She switched to being perky again, which was her natural mode. ‘It’s weird what a difference a couple of months can make – we’re all recessionistas now.’

  She was still clearly in the dark about how much trouble the economy was in and, by extension, most of us. It was no laughing matter. But conversation had always rattled out of Tracey, like bullets out of a machine gun. When she had moved on, you were always hard pressed to remember one thing she’d said.

  ‘Do you remember when this place opened?’ she asked, shaking her expensively highlighted head. ‘It was the big thing.’

  I did. I’d come up for a nose with Maeve. We’d stood at the back of a queue that had turned out to be made up of thousands. The media had been there. When the doors had opened we’d been pushed forward in the scrum, barrelling through the doors like eejits, providing the journalists with their shots of the happy shoppers ready to spend their loot. The local clergy had been there, too, to bless the centre.

  ‘We’ll all just have to soldier on,’ Tracey said, with a game little smile.

  Although Tracey had once been beautiful she now resembled a wax doll or maybe a mannequin. Her over-plucked eyebrows gave her a sort of bald look, like a newly hatched chick. The fillers she’d had – or maybe the surgery – had altered her expression. She had a sort of puffy look around the nose. Her skin had seen too much sun but it had been stripped back and sanded. There was a thin line, I thought, between self-preservation and pride in one’s femininity, and a crazy maniacal determination to hold back the years at whatever cost. Where exactly it lay was debatable, but Tracey Thornley, I felt reasonably sure, had crossed it a long time ago.

  Now she gave a conspiratorial smile. ‘I’ve just bought a bespoke Zagliani bag. Naughty me,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to hide it from Dermot.’

  Shannon had an odd look on her face and remained conspicuously silent so I felt obliged to say something. ‘They’re made from python skin and injected with Botox, aren’t they?’

  Tracey nodded and twittered on for another couple of minutes, before taking her leave. La, la, la, la, la, la, la. Shannon kept her eyes fastened on the menu.

  ‘Ciao,’ Tracey said, blowing us an extravagant kiss. Although originally from Howth, she always said, ‘Ciao,’ very loudly when you were saying goodbye to her, like she had Italian connections.

  ‘Have a good one,’ Shannon said, her face tight. ‘Not,’ she added, when Tracey had tick-tacked off.

  The warmth had drained from her face and she was bristling, which was not like her. Normally Shannon was smiley and good-humoured. The fact that she didn’t bitch about people was one of the things I loved about her. Now she looked really riled. ‘She’s got to be kidding. A Zagliani bag!’ she said, her face flaming. ‘They cost a small fortune.’

  ‘The Thornleys obviously aren’t feeling the pinch.’

  It had become like a competitive sport, wondering who was suffering as a result of the downturn and who had remained unaffected.

  ‘She’s nuts if she thinks she can bleat on Marie Antoinette-style about Zagliani bags. Say what you like, Anita, but it’s bad taste,’ she said, looking aggrieved. ‘That sort of conspicuous consumption is going to pall very quickly, the way things are going. Bling is dead.’ Her mouth bunched at the corners as if it was being yanked back by a bridle. ‘Jimmy played a bit of golf with Dermot and those guys bet enormous dough on their rounds. Like twenty big ones a pop. And Jimmy says they’re all laughing at us now in Brussels and abroad, saying that financially we’ve been like the Wild West, that we live in a banana republic. Screw Tracey,’ she said.

  I was flabbergasted to hear her swear – Shannon had the American thing of not cursing so she spent a lot of time being appalled by our bad language.

  ‘I don’t know what Jimmy and I are going to do. I’m really scared.’ Her shoulders sagged. ‘Hell, I don’t even know if I got licensed to practise law here whether I’d get work. The word on the street is that there has been a huge evaporation of legal work and that my area, mergers and acquisitions, is on a major slowdown. I’d be surplus to requirements, Anita.’ She gave a brittle laugh. ‘And I’d thought the world would be waiting for my contribution.’

  ‘It’s the recession,’ I said.

  ‘I was emailing a girl I used to work with back home. The American banking system is in ruins too. Do you think it’s, like, a coincidence that the whole show was run by men high on life and testosterone?
Maybe if they’d had more women at the higher echelons of the banks we mightn’t be looking at the train wreck we’re faced with.’

  Some of us had gone along with it, too, though, I thought. We had colluded by not asking any questions, happy once the money landed in our accounts. Shannon and I had been part of that high-rolling, high-spending gang. We could have piped up and said no in our own way. No use in saying it now.

  Shannon stared at the table. When she looked up she wore an expression of panic. ‘We may have bitten off more than we can chew. We couldn’t sell the house if we wanted to – or, at least, only for way less than we borrowed. The bottom has fallen out of the market for houses like that. I’ve let the au pair go and the cleaner, I don’t buy clothes, I don’t go to the beauty salon …’ She heaved a deep sigh. ‘And I’ve cancelled the gym membership.’

  That was seriously hard core – and told me everything I needed to know.

  Shannon gave a small smile. ‘I shouldn’t be whining,’ she said. ‘You have your plate full too.’

  I shook my head. ‘You’re not. You never do, Shannon,’ I told her. ‘You are one of the most positive people I know.’

  ‘Not any more,’ she said ruefully. She looked despondent. ‘It’s just I don’t know what we’re going to do. And I know I shouldn’t say this but I’m completely bushed from stress and I’m bushed from the kids. I’m not used to doing so much housework and child-minding.’

  It was funny, I thought, how, bit by bit, with prosperity your norms changed so that you didn’t even notice it happening. And then one day you woke up and you’d come to expect certain things. You didn’t think it was weird to have au pairs and cleaners even though you didn’t work outside the home. You didn’t laugh people out of court, as you once might have done, for hiring party planners or even people to decorate your Christmas tree. And you didn’t think it was weird that you hadn’t touched an iron or mopped a floor in at least ten years.

  Her lips parted. ‘And the worst is, because I can’t get a job there’s nothing I can do to help my husband,’ she repeated. She straightened. ‘There’s Maeve.’ Her eyes flicked to where Maeve was striding along, her shoulders weighed down with bags.