by Sarah Harte
Shannon lifted her hand to her. Maeve waved jauntily at us. ‘Not a word, especially not to her,’ she said, through gritted teeth, before producing a bright, social smile.
Maeve, who was dressed in a leather jacket with a big diamond cross around her neck, flopped back in her chair. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said, snapping her phone shut. ‘It was the bloody au pair. I have to draw her a picture if I want her to do anything.’
Maeve was in perky mode. Her smiles were girlish, by Maeve standards anyway, and her skin had that post-coital glow. She’d just seen the French tennis coach, I decided. The glow certainly wasn’t courtesy of her husband. Maeve said that she often paraded around the marital bedroom in underwear that would have made a whore blush, bending over and licking her lips and striking exaggerated seductive poses, but that Ultan never seemed aroused: he just kept on reading whatever balance sheet he was engrossed in, his mobile phone head-set on. ‘How I conceived my babies I don’t know,’ she’d drunkenly confided once. ‘Their conception should be on a par with the Virgin Birth.’
Maybe Ultan Mohally was gay. He was not particularly effete. Nor was he per se unattractive. His features were in the right place. But there was something sort of neutral about his sexual aura. However, my taste ran to beefy, lusty, spear-chucking types, like Frank, with steak-eater handshakes. Men who savaged their food, alpha-male carnivores who, in a primitive, antediluvian – this was a favourite Ella word – way, would get you and your children to high ground if there was a flood.
‘Anyway, as I was saying, it’s the speed at which this downturn has come that’s most remarkable,’ Maeve said, sitting forward. ‘The important thing is that we keep spending,’ she added, blowing the surface of a decaf skinny latte. ‘We need people to consume or the economy will contract. The more we save, the worse it is.’
‘You’re certainly putting your money where your mouth is,’ Shannon said, nodding at the defiant sea of shopping bags around Maeve’s ankles and giving a tight smile.
Maeve’s smile was breezy. ‘Always happy to do my bit.’
Frank had said that Ultan and Maeve were grand, that Ultan had been too cute to invest his own money in the giant deals he put together for his clients.
I had not been shopping in a while. There was something so utterly bizarre about that. I was a professional drift shopper. Normally I would shop a couple of times a week. I shopped on-line. I was known by name in all of the shops, big and small. I planned my wardrobe seasons ahead. I was a marketing man’s wet dream. When my cooker wasn’t quite working or maybe smelling a little, I replaced it. When my fridge struck me as too small or my freezer as too big, whoosh, it was out the door. If the décor in my living room needed pepping up I started de novo.
Maeve and I had that in common, that and the drinking. I wanted to say to Maeve that the thought had struck me – very late in the game – you could be buried alive by shopping. In fact, I had said it: that night in the Shelbourne when I was off my head on coke. She had told me to fuck off then and was probably taking the view that all the things I’d said that night had been the ramblings of a woman who was out of her mind. She would certainly tell me to fuck off if I raised the topic again when I was stone-cold sober.
You could be deadened by the endless round of acquisitions, until wanting to consume became your main rationale for moving forward. And you never won the battle – that was the tyranny of acquisition. It was like trying to run across quicksand. The hole just kept getting deeper. You never managed to fill it with stuff.
Instead I said, ‘Maureen seemed to suggest we should be saving.’
‘Yeah, well, Maureen probably has her Communion money still under the mattress,’ Maeve retorted.
‘She always seems quite financially astute to me,’ I said.
Maeve harrumphed. ‘Well, I’d say now that Maureen has never heard of John Maynard Keynes. It’s our patriotic duty to shop,’ she said, flicking freshly blow-dried hair over her shoulder. It was anybody’s guess what percentage of her life Maeve spent in a hairdresser’s chair. She continued, ‘John Maynard Keynes gave an infamous speech in 1931 on the radio, telling housewives that it was their patriotic duty to spend.’ She put on a booming voice: ‘He said that if you do not buy goods, the shops will not clear their stocks, they will not give repeat orders, and someone will be thrown out of work.’
There were times like this when you got flashes of the other Maeve, the smart, professional woman she must have been.
‘It was a brilliant speech, actually,’ she said, her eyes darting to her watch. ‘He said something like, “Oh, sally forth, housewives of Britain, and lay you in sheets and towels” … And he was right. It’s time for a drink, ladies,’ she said.
Maeve routinely drank at lunch. She was brilliant at holding her booze so it was hard to tell when she’d been drinking. She would have had to drink all day and all night before you could tell she’d been at it. She was always up for demolishing a bottle or two. ‘Midweek, I’m only one bottle a day,’ was her joke.
That sort of drinking snuck up on you. Maeve and I were no different from the women who had drunk in the tenement flats I’d grown up in. But the appearance of money somehow masked the fact you were a lush. Drinking wine with ‘the girls’ seemed benign and fun.
‘We’ll get a bottle,’ she said, turning to look for a waiter.
‘I’m driving,’ Shannon said.
‘You’re always driving,’ Maeve said acidly, so that a faint flush appeared on Shannon’s face. Shannon didn’t drink much, which drove Maeve crazy. She hated non-drinkers, which made you wonder how she dealt with her abstemious husband.
‘I’m collecting the kids,’ Shannon said, sounding defensive.
‘Why can’t your au pair do it?’ asked Maeve, beckoning a waiter.
My eyes met Shannon’s in a split second of understanding. She wasn’t going to share the fact that she’d let her au pair go. ‘Count me out of the wine too, Maeve,’ I said, scrunching my toes in my shoes.
The remark distracted Maeve, as I’d intended. As her dark head telescoped towards me, Shannon shot me a look of gratitude. ‘I might have a piece of cake instead,’ I said, toying with the menu.
That was an incredibly stupid thing for me to say, if I was hoping to keep my new-found sobriety under the radar. I might as well have announced that I was planning on lighting a crack pipe. Nobody we knew ate cake – apart from Maureen. I felt as if a giant camera was zooming in on me for a high-definition close-up.
The waiter came to a halt by our table.
Maeve, still eyeing me, said, ‘I’ll have a glass of the Sancerre.’
My mouth started to water. Two opposing voices in my head began to slug it out.
One glass won’t kill you …
No, you can’t. One glass will lead to another bottle …
You don’t know if you’re an alcoholic …
You’re fooling yourself again …
You only live once …
You’ll end up carrying little bottles around in your handbag and pissing yourself like poor old Mrs Keogh who lived next door to Ma and Da used to do …
‘Have a glass,’ Maeve pressed me. ‘Go on, for God’s sake.’
‘I can’t,’ I said, trying to keep my tone light. An American website I had consulted on drinking said that saying no got easier the more you did it. It suggested practising refusing drinks politely. ‘Say something clever,’ it counselled, and gave examples, like ‘I’m performing neurosurgery in the morning’ or ‘I don’t need any more hair on my chest.’
Americans had a different sense of humour, I reckoned. Whoever wrote that had almost certainly never lived in Ireland. And needed to get out more.
The waiter continued to hover. ‘That’s fine,’ I told him, mustering a weak smile.
Maeve looked profoundly dissatisfied. ‘Are you not drinking or something?’ she asked bel
ligerently, her eyes now two blue slits.
I shrugged my shoulders and tried to think of something suitably evasive yet satisfactory to say. ‘I’m going out later,’ I managed.
Maeve scowled.
Not drinking in Ireland would be the opposite of fun. Non-drinkers were viewed with suspicion, if not downright hostility. I know because I’d had those feelings myself. Non-drinkers or, worse, teetotallers, were up there with holy rollers like Frank’s mam, flat-footed people with long faces and halitosis and bad hair and sinister Pioneer pins prominently displayed on their lapels. Karen had said that in Ireland the people without a glass in their hand were the problem.
‘I may as well have asked Father Matthew for lunch,’ Maeve said grimly. She was just about to add something when her eye was caught by a woman passing the café. She craned and swivelled her head. ‘Her daughter Mercedes is in Madison’s kindergarten,’ she remarked. ‘Would you look at her still hanging onto the summer?’ The woman was dressed in a pair of light-coloured jeans and a T-shirt. Maeve was encased in the season’s latest.
‘She probably can’t afford new winter clothes,’ Shannon said glumly.
Scenting news, Maeve swung her shiny head around like a heat-seeking missile. ‘But you and Jimmy are grand, aren’t you?’ she asked, her eyes narrow and assessing.
‘Of course,’ Shannon lied, mustering a brave little smile.
‘Oh, my God, don’t look now,’ Maeve instructed us, flicking her eyes to the left, then averting them again. ‘Check out Lisa O’Sullivan.’
A heavily pregnant woman walked by in a smock and leggings.
‘She’s exploded. The poor thing. She’s on her fourth, I think.’
‘She looks very well,’ Shannon remarked.
‘She does,’ I agreed, although the woman looked like a bloated marshmallow.
Maeve pulled a face. ‘I hope for her sake it’s water retention and not cake. I don’t get people who just eat and eat when they’re pregnant. That whole eating-for-two thing is a myth, and you only have to lose all the weight you gain afterwards.’
Shannon nodded. ‘I’d agree with you there.’
‘You were tiny when you were pregnant,’ Maeve told Shannon, her eyes still tracking her quarry. ‘But you hired a personal trainer to keep you thin, didn’t you?’
Shannon nodded. ‘And I watched my diet. I didn’t actually wear maternity clothes until the last month of my third trimester.’ She sounded proud.
Even in pregnancy being big was verboten.
‘I’m not being mean,’ Maeve said, which meant she was definitely about to be, ‘but I think Lisa’s got kind of old-looking.’
There was no limit to the appetite for this kind of conversation. I just didn’t have the stomach today for the usual conversational treadmill of weight, ageing and other women. I liked meeting for coffee. Usually there would be a part of me that didn’t want the morning to end because I’d be spat out into the long day stretching ahead. But walking back across the concourse from the coffee shop or trailing through the centre, I often felt strangely flaccid, tired from the chatting, the peren nial discussion of other women’s thighs, arses, life choices – the emptiness of it all, really.
There was something enticing about our non-stop chat – it was like opting for the bright colours of a sugary bun but after you’d eaten it you felt low and tired as you crashed down from the high. Today that feeling had kicked in sooner. I felt like leaving now.
‘She’s got three kids under the age of seven,’ Shannon said. ‘I guess she’s bound to look a little frazzled.’
‘I think she looks her age,’ I said then.
‘Exactly,’ Maeve said, her eyes resting on me.
‘What’s wrong with looking your age?’ I said, thinking again how I’d love a glass of wine.
Maeve looked at me as if I’d decided to blacken my arse and run around the café shouting heresies.
I continued, ‘Why should it be such a crime to look your age? Why do we hate ourselves so much? Is it innate or are we taught it?’
‘Christ, how much coffee have you had?’ she asked, her eyes popping. ‘This is what happens when you don’t drink.’
‘Seriously,’ I said, ‘I’ve hated myself for years. I’ve always wanted to be taller. I’ve always wanted a rounder, firmer arse, a greater distance between my knee and my ankle. When I was a little girl I didn’t love myself but I was happy. Then one day I woke up and I was dissatisfied. I knew all my physical faults. And the only thing that seemed to make me happy was spotting other women’s.’
Maeve mimed incredulity.
I sighed. ‘We spend so much time trying to prop up a building that’s only going to fall in the end anyway.’
‘That sounds kind of defeatist,’ Shannon said, frowning. ‘I mean, would you stop cutting your hair, or applying lipstick?’
‘Sometimes I wonder if we should just say no. To ourselves, to society …’ I ventured. ‘Maybe we should accept the fact we’ll never look twenty again and plough some of the energy we expend on trying to look young into other things.’
Shannon scrunched up her nose. ‘How is this movement going to start? Who’s going to be first to say that they’re not going to diet any more or get Botox or what-have-you?’
Maeve said, ‘Women have been adorning themselves since the start of time. It’s an intrinsic part of being feminine.’
‘But they haven’t necessarily had their skin sandblasted off,’ I countered, ‘or had the fat sucked out of their thighs or their forehead shot with poison or their faces cut open and stitched back.’
Maeve gave a dismissive flip of the hand. ‘Bodily discontent is the hallmark of our age,’ she said. ‘It’s the reality of the time we live in.’ She drank half her wine in one swallow. ‘There is a bright side to all of this. We’re the generation who can buy replacements for anything we don’t like. We can buy new boobs, new faces …’
‘I gotta go,’ I said, standing up.
Maeve looked put out. She never wanted any social gathering to end. And her powers of persuasion were considerable. Maeve was a spider and you were the fly being lured into her web. She kidnapped you. It was like some form of Stockholm syndrome. You started out committing to one drink or a coffee and the next thing you knew it was midnight and you were falling out of Residence, the private members club.
‘Why?’ Maeve demanded. Her mouth had pursed and curved downwards.
‘Ella’s coming home in a few days,’ I said, scooping up my bag. ‘I have a couple of things to do. Sorry,’ I said, trying to ignore Shannon: she looked trapped.
‘’Bye,’ Maeve said tersely.
‘’Byeeee,’ I said, and escaped outside into the bright clear day, resisting the urge to break into a gallop.
When Dylan came into the den, his gym bag banging against a sturdy hip, I was seated on the sofa. He was on his mobile – to Biba, I thought. I waited for him to finish. He was in a bad mood with me anyway.
I had been there for some time, my arms wrapped around my ribs. The room had cost a fortune to decorate. A guy recommended by Ciara as having ‘a good eye’ had guided me. He had ‘curated’ the space for me. ‘I’m going for a modernist temple,’ he had said, advising on varying shades of dove grey, which I liked. ‘I want the aesthetic to be strong but relaxing.’
I had actually listened to that kind of bull. Now I found that the urge to drink was threatening to overpower me. I’d unfurled a foot, which was now tapping the floor. I could turn to religion in my quest to battle the booze. Ma’s faith had always been a great comfort to her. She had not rammed it down people’s throats, like Frank’s mam had done. She had been a quiet, true believer. Maybe I could prostrate myself on the altar like one of our neighbours used to do when I lived with Ma and Da and Karen. The eldest Keogh boy with the watery blue Keogh eyes and the bad Keogh chest had got seriously into religion, praying to God in a pose and mann
er that had seemed almost sexual.
Of course, Karen had picked this up straight away. ‘He’s as gay as Christmas,’ she had hissed at me one night, when we were sent down to the church with flowers. ‘A good ride would sort him out. There’d be less of that praying and beating himself across the chest and hair-shirt carry-on. And what’s wrong with two fellas doin’ it?’ she’d said, tonguing her chewing gum into the other cheek. Karen had always been ahead of her time.
Dylan had dropped his voice. ‘Okay, love you,’ I heard him say. Inwardly I made a face. Outwardly I was careful to keep it neutral.
He let his bag drop. It clattered onto the floor.
‘Hi, love,’ I said, smiling brightly.
‘Hi, Mum,’ he said, giving me a quick peck. His cheeks were flushed from the gym. It was hard for Dylan to keep the weight off. He had the Lawlor tendency to pork up. His body was quite taut, but despite all the push-ups and circuit training he would eventually go the way of Frank, I imagined.
‘How was work, pet?’
‘Crap,’ he said. Hovering near the door he began fingering the lapel of his jacket.
Dylan’s job was not going well. I knew the signs. After the initial burst of enthusiasm, he stopped wanting to talk about it and then the shit would hit the fan in some guise or other.
‘I’m moving out, Mum,’ he said, squaring his shoulders as if anticipating a fight.
My first thought was for myself. I was seized by a momentary panic.
His eyes met mine, then moved away. He locked his jaw defiantly. ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ he added, deflating a little. ‘I don’t like leaving you here on your own. But if you won’t let Biba move in, I have no choice. I’m moving into her place.’
Dylan had wanted Biba to move into the coach house.
‘It’s not a good idea,’ I had said. ‘The timing is wrong.’
‘What do you mean?’ he’d asked, a flicker of apprehension in his eyes.