The Better Half

by Sarah Harte

  So Frank was being very generous. But then Frank had always been generous. He would have given you the shirt off his back. It was one of the things that I had loved about him. The fact he was so profligate, so devil-may-care. When I first met him I was in the habit of weighing my expenditure – I had no choice. Frank had soon eased me out of that habit.

  He’d said our house was ‘ring-fenced’. This information had not been good enough for Karen. ‘You need to understand why the house is okay and what income is coming in and from where, and what portion you can expect to get.’

  My eyes scanned the darkened garden. Karen was right. We had not talked about our finances except in the loosest and woolliest of terms. It was time to stop hiding from the truth. ‘I’ve time for a cup of tea,’ I said, feeling a cold sensation in the pit of my stomach. ‘A quick one.’

  He looked like all his Christmases had come at once.

  ‘Frank,’ I said, wanting to make things clear, ‘don’t get any ideas.’

  He shook his head eagerly.

  ‘I mean, don’t read anything into this. It’s just a cup of tea.’

  I pushed the key into the lock with more force than was strictly necessary and made myself turn and look him in the eye. ‘And we need to talk about money.’

  13

  I had planned on walking. Walking was my new thing. When I felt like a drink, I pounded the pavements like a mad woman, bombing along with my arms swinging like those of a goose-stepping soldier. I had cancelled my gym membership. I had no interest in attracting curious, pitying looks, having the same half-conversation over and over again, peddling platitudes and dodging questions. It was too expensive anyway, and too redolent of the past.

  I preferred being out under the urban skies, walking along Sandymount beach, with the red and white striped Pigeon House chimneys, like something a pop artist might have constructed, to my back. I’d thread my way through the seagulls resting on the sand, the changing cityscapes strangely exhilarating, marching to drown the longing for some gargle.

  ‘Heil Hitler,’ a spotty teenage boy had shouted at me one evening, so that his gaggle of mates had roared with laughter.

  Karen was waiting for me one night when I swung into the drive, peering out the drawing-room window with her nose pressed up against the glass. She opened it and stuck her head out, flicking ash onto the gravel. ‘You’re like horse dung, on the road day and night.’

  Frank would have had a mickey fit to see her smoking in the drawing room. ‘She’d have the place turned into Coronation Street in two seconds if you let her,’ Frank had hissed once, when he thought he was out of Karen’s earshot.

  Karen had been sitting out the back, sunning herself with her T-shirt rolled up, and her shoes and socks off. ‘You’d want to be careful, Frank,’ she’d shouted through the door, ‘shackling yourself to bourgeois bullshit like that. You didn’t grow up with it. And never underestimate the Butler ears. We can hear the grass grow.’

  Well, Frank could go whistle. He was gone. And Karen was around, breathing life into the place.

  Anyway, I’d been about to leave when I changed my plans. I got the crazy idea to cycle. I was officially gone mad. I hadn’t swung my arse onto a bicycle seat in twenty years or more. But down I went to the basement, sifting through old exercise gear, countless crazes of Dylan’s, including kayaks and skateboards, until I found Ella’s bike, with a basket on the front and gauzy white ribbons tied to the handlebars.

  I set off. It made me feel foolish, light-headed and giddy. I had to stop myself ringing the bell. A middle-aged woman – ex-lush (hopefully) – on the loose, attempting to start a new life. Today I was going to see Animal. The idea had been rumbling inside me for some time.

  It was another beautiful day. There was the odd wispy cloud floating across the sky, but otherwise it was crisp, clear and sunny. I cycled into town, sticking to the side of the road, walking my bike across some junctions, too chicken even to dream of weaving in and out of the traffic. Down St Stephen’s Green, onto Dame Street, then puffing my way up – I wasn’t sure how to change the gears so I left them – past the neoclassical beauty of City Hall on Parliament Street, my favourite building in the city, then the majestic Christ Church and into the more derelict surroundings of Thomas Street.

  Our old school was in the Liberties, off Thomas Street. It was near the Guinness brewery, not far from one of the few remaining pawnbrokers in the city, near where Frawley’s used to be. We used to get everything there, from our school uniforms to our Communion outfits to our knickers. Ma also used to buy from the traders outside, who sold knick-knacks and odds and ends, big packets of washing powder, granny clothes, cheap makeup, Easter eggs at Easter and Christmas decorations at Christmas.

  I passed a knot of junkies huddled around cans of what I thought was cider, their features gnawed away by skag or something else. A young fella in a hoodie called something out to me. He was standing next to a stream of thin liquid, pale in colour, his back to a wall covered with graffiti.

  Mickser luvs Sharon.

  Anto is a cocksucker.

  Our school seemed greyer and more decrepit than the one in Memory Lane. It was a rectangle shape, like a big block of cheese turned on its side. You could get depressed just looking at it. It was like somewhere you’d do time. It was painted a different colour now but it still had the familiar grey tatty look about it. I walked in the gates and I was transported back: the smelly toilets, rough bog roll that scratched your backside and carbolic soap. I could visualize the headmistress with her buck teeth scouring the corridors for miscreants, doling out slaps and ear cuffs without breaking stride. She was a strong, formidable woman, a real feminist. She wouldn’t have seen herself as such but she was. She had encouraged the girls to be strong and independent, not to take any crap from fellas.

  I walked through the schoolyard, which was empty, and chained my bike to the railings, fleetingly wondering if it was wise to leave it there. It was Ella’s and bound to be expensive.

  Up the stairs I went, with butterflies in my stomach, lugging the spectre of my big fat failure and flunk-out behind me. When I had won the scholarship to Trinity, the headmistress had bragged about it to the entire school. I had been dragged in front of Assembly and the students were made to clap for me and my great success. There had been a piece in the local free-sheet with the imaginative headline, ‘Local Girl Wins Scholarship’.

  Most of my old teachers were bound to be retired. The headmistress was long gone, prematurely dispatched by stress and overwork. I inched my way up the stairs feeling like a teenager, as if I was about to be pounced on and required to account for myself.

  I was outside the principal’s office. I knocked. The headmaster answered. He seemed very pleasant, and a lot less formidable than our headmistress had been. She had been scary in a good way. He looked at his watch. The class was just over. ‘Mr Stack’ had a free period afterwards he said, consulting a giant wall planner. ‘Nadine,’ he called out, to a chubby, round-faced kid who was passing his open door. He told her to escort me to the classroom.

  After throwing me a smile Nadine trudged along silently. She had backcombed hair, like a giant bird’s nest. Our headmistress would not have stood for that. She had been old school and unsympathetic to personal vanity. Her approach had been brutal but undeniably effective. She had also been devoid of irony. ‘You bully, you,’ she’d shout, thumping ten bells out of a pupil half her height who’d been caught hassling someone.

  The smell in the large brick building was the same, I thought, as I followed my silent guide down the narrow corridors. We passed what appeared to be still the cloakroom and a blast of teenage-girl smell wafted out, a sort of saccharine sweetness underlaid by something earthy.

  ‘It’s here,’ Nadine announced, her plucked brows lifting a little. I was aware that my breathing was a little shallow. I was sooo nervous.

  I thanked her and leant against
the wall. I could see Animal’s oddly shaped head through the small pane of glass in the door. He was talking about the Remainder Theorem.

  ‘The Remainder Theorem states that when a polynominal f(x) is divided by (x – a), the remainder is f(a).’ All his years in Dublin had not taken the edge off his bogger Kerry accent. Karen used to do a very funny impression of him. She was a brilliant mimic. Nobody was safe. I dreaded to think how she’d done me over the years.

  Animal’s voice had a winding-up quality. He was telling them to take down their homework.

  It had all seemed doable when I was working in my nice safe cocoon. Into school, back home to Ma and Da and my little desk. Being told I was ‘a great girl so you are’ by my headmistress and the teachers – the praise had been like oxygen to me. And then I’d gone on an organized tour of Trinity for prospective students and it had all fallen apart.

  I jumped as a loud bell rang and interrupted my dreaming. Any minute now the students would pour out of the classrooms like a herd of wildebeest. My stomach lurched. Animal was staring out the small window at me, like some sort of myopic sea creature. I could see recognition in his eyes. The door was opening. He was beckoning to me. He was saying hello, I was saying hello, and then he had ushered me into the classroom.

  If Animal was surprised to see me he didn’t show it. He pressed his damp hand into mine. His manner was as usual deliberate and slow, as if he had all the time in the world. He introduced me to the class. ‘This is Anita Butler,’ he said.

  I stood at the front, fiddling with my handbag.

  ‘Is that your girlfriend, sir?’ a bold strap with hair in her eyes shouted. There was a spasm of laughter.

  Animal ignored her. He was an old hand at that sort of banter but I had gone bright red. ‘Anita is an ex-pupil. She was once head girl of this school.’

  I could feel a sea of inspecting eyes. These girls were only a year or so younger than Ella. And I knew they were unforgiving in the way they dissected you.

  ‘Anita was one of the brightest maths students ever to pass through the gates of this school,’ he told them. ‘She won a scholarship from Trinity College to study maths.’

  I flushed, squeezing my toes inside my shoes.

  ‘Ooh, very nice – Trinity,’ came from somewhere at the back of the class in a strangulated parody of an English accent. ‘Anyone for cricket?’

  This produced more laughter.

  ‘Nobody has done that in this school since, to my knowledge.’

  ‘That’s for fucking sure,’ the girl with the hair in her eyes shouted. Animal told her not to swear.

  Our headmistress would definitely have yanked that hair out of her eyes, I thought, watching her lean over and mouth something at a heavy-chested girl in another desk.

  ‘What’s Trinity like?’ asked a pretty girl, with long eyelashes.

  The accents were strong Dub, not marooned in mid-Atlantic like the bored, tonally flat voices of Ella’s friends.

  I glanced at Animal but he was silent. ‘I didn’t go,’ I said, after a minute. My feet were welded to the ground. My mouth ran dry.

  ‘Why?’ came from the back of the class.

  I paused. ‘Because …’ I trailed off. ‘Because I bottled it.’

  ‘Why did ya bottle it?’ It was the hair-in-her-eyes girl again. She was leaning back in her chair with her arms behind her head. She reminded me a bit of Karen. Caustic and all front but whip-smart.

  ‘I was scared.’

  ‘Why were ya scared?’ she shot back.

  ‘I went into Trinity to see it and I was overwhelmed.’ I paused to slow myself down so that I didn’t start to talk my head off. ‘I didn’t know anybody who had gone there.’ I halted again trying to pick my words. ‘It was amazing – but it was all too much for me, the beautiful architecture, the sweeping grey buildings, the students with their backpacks looking to me like something out of another world. It was too foreign to somebody like me.’

  ‘It’s down the bleeding road,’ said someone. There was a rumble of laughter.

  On the tour I had been one of a little constellation of students following the guide around. The others had plied the guide with confident questions – or so it had seemed to me. I had listened to the rhythmic thud of balls in Botany Bay where the students played tennis and felt a clutching at my sides. What the fuck was Anita Butler doing thinking that she could fit in here? She was smoking crack if she thought there would be a place for her somewhere like this, with her accent and her background. That was how it had felt.

  We had visited the Long Room, in the Old Library – the description underplayed the beauty of the soaring timber barrel-vaulted ceiling and the ancient hand-bound books that lined the stacks and gave off the pungent but pleasant scent of leather and privilege. There had been marble busts lining the room of notables like Jonathan Swift.

  I had not been able to open my mouth. We – the little knot of students and our guide – had gone for coffee and I had not uttered a syllable. I had sat there like a speechless lump in my cheap clothes, foolishly silent and damp under the arms, drowning as the pressure built in my chest. By the time I had trailed back over the cobblestones of Front Square and through the hallowed gates into the other Dublin, my face had been tomato red and I felt I had failed some sort of test. I’d run home to St Stephen’s Green and the safety of my bedroom, where I’d lain on my bed and told myself I would defer. The diagnosis of Ma’s cancer had given me an out.

  ‘I thought it wasn’t for people like me,’ I said.

  ‘It’s for poshos,’ came a voice from the back.

  ‘She’s a posho,’ said Hair-in-her-Eyes Girl.

  ‘I’m not,’ I said, smiling. ‘I’m originally from the Coppinger Street flats.’

  ‘She is on her …’

  ‘Well, you don’t bleedin’ live there now.’

  ‘True,’ I said. ‘But I grew up there.’

  ‘The big bleedin’ accent on ya,’ said Hair-in-her-Eyes Girl so that everyone, even Animal and I, laughed.

  ‘My ma is from the Coppinger Street flats,’ said someone.

  ‘We’ll give you a medal,’ said a girl with a messy ponytail.

  ‘You should have gone,’ said the pretty girl with the long eyelashes, only half meeting my eyes. ‘If yez got a scholarship.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I told her. I wouldn’t tell them, I thought, about how I had planned to but that motherhood had intervened. About how those fabulous precious years of looking after my kids had rolled by in one long lovely blur until, hey presto, I was middle-aged and staring down the barrel of a lonely life by myself. I wouldn’t say that being a wife and a mother was wonderful but you had to watch out you didn’t go down a cul-de-sac from which there would be no coming back. I did say, ‘You should always – always – take the chances you’re given in life.’

  Animal gave them permission to go then, so they stuffed their books into their bags and fled.

  It was just him and me now. He stood there, rocking back and forward on his toes, like he’d always done, listening.

  ‘It was too far for me to travel,’ I said.

  He pressed his lips together. ‘That makes me sadder than you’ll know, girleen.’ He pinched his nose and sniffed. ‘Trinity is ten minutes away but it may as well be in another galaxy. And not all that much has changed,’ he said, with a little shake of his head.

  ‘So I owe you an apology,’ I breathed. ‘For being off-hand in the hospital. But more for not thanking you for all that time and effort you ploughed into me.’ He raised a hand to stay me but I barrelled on, colour flooding my cheeks. ‘I feel I wasted your time,’ I said, my eyes watering.

  His gaze seemed to turn inward. Then he said, ‘If I’d only picked up on it at the time.’ Suddenly he looked his age. ‘I’m glad you came back.’

  I was eating pasta for the second time in twenty-four hours. I had officially gone craz
y. There had been a lot of wisecracks and elbowing in the ribs. We were having a nice time.

  ‘You need to lose that American accent, sis.’

  There was regular mention of Jamie Deegan, I noticed. I was listening but my thoughts drifted back to Animal and the classroom. After a while I turned to the kids. ‘I went back to my old school today,’ I said, setting down my fork.

  ‘Why?’ asked Dylan, swivelling around on his stool.

  ‘I bumped into my teacher during the summer. Once upon a time he wanted me to go to Trinity to study maths.’

  They looked at me round-eyed.

  ‘I had the marks and I got a scholarship.’ If I’d said I’d had the option of a job as a hula-hula dancer they would have looked less surprised. I told them a bit about Animal but they didn’t really get how inspirational he was.

  ‘He sounds like he has personal-hygiene problems,’ was what Dylan said.

  ‘Oh, my God, why didn’t you go to Trinity?’ Ella demanded.

  ‘Because I didn’t have the confidence. Going to Trinity was like travelling to outer space to me.’

  ‘Because you were, like, from a poor family?’ Dylan asked, as if being poor was some sort of rare disease.

  ‘Yes. I didn’t know anybody who’d done something like that.’

  ‘That’s so weird,’ said Dylan.

  They had no real grasp of the invisible hurdles that sometimes existed as a bar to advancement. And my family’s poverty was exotic to them. Trinity was exotic to the kids I’d spoken to that day, although they wouldn’t have let on that they gave a shite. My background was unthinkable to my kids. I had more or less written the memory of Ma and Da out of the picture.

  ‘When I was growing up we didn’t have our own toilet. Not till I was seven.’

  ‘Where did you go to the loo?’ Ella asked.