by Sarah Harte
‘Not half as sorry as I am. Portofino is grand, but full time? Christ.’ She sighed. ‘I get it. If we rent this house out, it’ll look like we’re making some sort of effort. Anyway, there’s another reason I can’t cut and run. I’d get half of nothing. I’m just gonna have to hang in there. If I’d half a wit I’d have siphoned some money off for myself and set up a running-away fund.’ She threw her hands up. ‘Some accountant I turned out to be.’
‘Do you ever think, Maeve,’ I said, my heart racing a little at the torrent of abuse I might draw on myself, ‘that we’ve made a holy hames of things?’
Maeve was looking at me darkly. ‘No,’ she said tersely.
‘I sometimes find myself thinking,’ I said, ‘that what the commentators are saying is right: that we have brought our country to its knees and that our kids and our grandchildren will have to pick up the tab for our foolishness and greed.’
Her eyes rested on me. ‘I hope, now you’re off the sauce and you’re teaching the underprivileged, that you’re not going to turn into a pious Holy Mary,’ she said, with a tight smile.
I looked at her sadly. It was true that since I’d stopped drinking I had gained a lucidity that was not always welcome.
‘Because I’ll tell you something for nothing, I’m sick of being expected to wear a hair-shirt. So I had a good time. I’m tired of people looking at Ultan as if he’s a pariah. I’m actually scared to go shopping. The other day I bought an Yves Saint Laurent scarf and I was frightened to be seen with the bag on the street. I put it into a cheaper unbranded one. They’ll be lynching us next.’
There was a national mood of anger. Sometimes when I walked into the staffroom and sensed a remark dying away I wondered if they resented me for what they perceived my ilk and I had done to the country. In the main, though, I found my colleagues kind.
‘Although, Christ above, that’s the least of my worries,’ she said, patting her stomach. She exhaled noisily. ‘I keep thinking that Ultan and his family are very dark, dark-skinned and dark-haired. My whole family is dark. Would anyone be any the wiser? Statistics show that up to twenty per cent of men may be raising kids that aren’t their own.’
I remembered going to the funeral of my uncle. His widow and son had stood by the graveside, mourning him, inconsolable. Next to them had been my uncle’s best friend. My cousin – the son – and the best friend had shared the same distinctive flame-red hair, milky white pallor and spattering of light brown freckles. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes, as Karen had said in the pub afterwards.
‘Do you think I could pull it off?’ she asked. ‘Shakespeare said it was “a wise father” that knew “his own child”. I mean, the baby wouldn’t come out coal black or anything, would it? Pierre is very dark-skinned.’
I thought of the Frenchman with his shifty movie-star looks and insolent smile slinking around the gym. How could I possibly know? Did Ultan not have a say in this? Or even the Frenchman?
‘I don’t really know,’ I said. ‘Either way,’ I forced some life into my voice, ‘regardless of whether you go ahead or terminate I’ll do whatever I can to support you.’
There was giddy laughter in the air. Karen was hanging a bauble towards the upper mid-section of the tree. With her freshly applied tan she was unseasonably brown. Her breasts were cantilevered so high that they were nearly touching her chin. She was decked out in a scarlet silk blouse that made her look extra buxom. We were all wearing Santa hats. Karen had insisted.
‘Come on,’ she’d said, jamming one on Dylan’s bolshy head, ‘it’s that or a set of antlers. You’re looking very well,’ she’d said to me. ‘You’re losing that ironed-face look.’
‘Jaysus, thanks very much,’ I’d shot back at her. We’d both laughed at the language and the way I’d said it.
Karen blinked. ‘The tree is lovely, very tasteful – too tasteful, if you ask me. When Anita and I were growing up we had plastic Santas and flashing neon lights and big gaudy Christmas decorations that were highly flammable and you could see from space.’ She popped a chocolate into her mouth. She’d brought two boxes of Quality Street and a tin of luxury chocolate biscuits, which we were all lashing into, Karen in particular: she had given up cigarettes. It was really strange not to see streams of smoke coming from her nostrils.
‘Great,’ she said, foraging again. ‘I’m going to be a fat non-smoker. The best of both worlds. I’m definitely going to beat this thing, though.’
She was covered with nicotine patches, and when her mouth wasn’t filled with chocolate, her jaws were furiously clamped on nicotine gum. At least there was no haze of smoke to provoke Ella’s wrath. Ella who hated smoking – What kind of simpleton smokes when the information about how bad it is for you is out there? Ella had become a little less spiky recently, although it was probably a question of degree.
She’d been late arriving home from college. She was seeing Frank, I thought. Instinct told me so – and the way she had not quite met my eyes when she apologized for being late. Actually, Frank had mentioned it. I had said nothing to Ella in keeping with my new policy of minding my own business. She had come in and let her bag fall to the floor, its contents disgorging. She had brought sweets for Karen’s girls.
We were a motley crew, Ella, Dylan and I, Karen and her two girls, Saoirse and Colleen Eireann who – their chatter punctuated with giggles – were frisky and lovely.
Shannon hadn’t come. I’d asked her and the boys to decorate the tree with us but she’d backed out at the last minute. This had become her norm. ‘I could lie and say that one of the boys is sick,’ she’d told me on the phone, ‘but I won’t. I’m just not up to it. I don’t feel like performing.’
Darren had dropped off his family in their Ford Mondeo, his taxi plate down off the roof, and I’d seen a nosy neighbour – a stalwart of the local Neighbourhood Watch brigade – peering through her gates as if she was wondering whether to ring 999. She’d once, in the course of a rambling story about taking a wrong turn and having to slam on her central locking, referred to the back of St Stephen’s Green as ‘Injun territory’. The story had centred on some ‘corner boy’ in a hoodie eyeing her bag on the front seat. It was a shame, I thought, watching her stare at Darren, that he hadn’t stopped to show her his ‘tats’.
Karen’s son, Derry, had opted to stay with his father at the last minute, his head bent over his mobile phone, his thumbs flying across the key pad.
This was the first time we weren’t having our tree professionally decorated in I didn’t know how long. Last year we’d sent out a Christmas card of the four of us seated under a giant tree touching the roof, with an enormous star on top that looked like a UFO. Frank had been darting glances at his watch, anxious to be away. I had been quietly pissed.
I wouldn’t have minded a Christmas drink. But I was managing. I had to reiterate the positives to myself periodically, like a mum telling her children in a bright, upbeat voice why leafy vegetables were good for them. It was corny but I had to do it. I’d look in the mirror and say to myself, ‘My name is Anita and I don’t miss vomiting in the morning. I don’t miss headaches. I like the improved relationship with my children. I enjoy a new-found sense of mental clarity. Yeah, you go, girl.’ I sort of had to pretend that I was a get-up-and-go, kick-ass American and not a booze-loving Irish person who liked to rationalize her drinking – there was always a good excuse for a drink – and drown her sorrows in the bottom of a glass.
Anyway, Christmas was different on a lot of levels this year. ‘We’re approaching it in a different way,’ I’d told the kids. Dylan had put a hand over his face and groaned.
We’d been in the family room.
‘It doesn’t have to be as materialistic. It really doesn’t. We don’t have the money we had and it’s unseemly to be splashing out when so many people are losing their jobs.’
Dylan had flipped over the back of the sofa. When he resurfaced he had said, ‘Mum, pl
ease don’t ask us to make homemade presents or anything loserish like that. Like, I know there’s a recession on but I’m beggin’ you.’
‘Hard times,’ Ella had said humorously, and Dylan had crossed his eyes.
Ella had surprised me. She was coping unbelievably well with our more straitened finances. She’d even found herself a job in the stacks of the university library, reshelving books.
‘Well, it’s not exactly like you’re asking her to live in penury, now is it?’ Karen had said, when I’d relayed this information to her.
Ella had been kind to the girls, taking Saoirse upstairs and giving her some T-shirts – the pre-teen had been delighted. Colleen Eireann was dressed in a noxious Barbie pink dress, covered with sparkles, but she was chattering and laughing, totally unabashed by her cousins or surroundings. She reminded me of Karen. There had been no acclimatizing for either girl: Colleen Eireann had simply remarked that the house was a ‘mansion’ and that theirs would have fitted into our kitchen. It was said without envy or rancour.
Karen had a great rapport with her kids. That much was clear. They were bright-eyed, clever children, whose needs had been taken care of and who had been brought on and nurtured by a devoted mother. Saoirse was reading Little Women. She and Ella had discussed it, Saoirse going a little shy but Ella coaxing her. They agreed that Jo was their favourite character.
Ella had finally come clean about Jamie Deegan. ‘We’re seeing each other,’ she’d said one night, later leading him through the door and producing him like exhibit A, her cheeks reddening.
You couldn’t have accused her of having a type. Jamie seemed to be the exact opposite of Christopher. Where Christopher was chippy and deliberately down-at-heel, Jamie looked as if he’d polished himself – his teeth were a set of blindingly white delft. I wasn’t sure if he’d been to college but I’d stopped myself asking. With Christopher I’d more or less requested a complete set of academic results before he’d even had his coat off for the first time.
Christopher, it seemed, was but a distant memory. He’d turned up at the door one day with his strange springy walk, presenting himself in that humourless way of his, and I’d felt myself warming to Jamie even if he seemed like something bang out of a toothpaste commercial. Christopher had been wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt pulled down over a long-sleeved one, his donkey jacket – a judge’s son in a Corporation worker’s jacket! – hanging open, a woolly hat pulled down over his face.
I’d hidden behind a curtain in the drawing room, my head cocked, my big old snout twitching. Old habits died hard. The only thing different was that now I was smart enough not to reveal that I’d been playing the detective.
‘I want my books back.’
‘Fine.’
‘It’s not like that slow-learner nightclub owner you’re going out with will be reading them.’ This was said with a knowing sneer.
Oh, God, I thought, wincing, waiting for the comeback. I wasn’t to be disappointed.
‘With good reason, Christopher. Half of those books are arcane, turgid, obscurantist rubbish, notable only for their desire to be incomprehensible.’
Wow. Ella rocked.
Then she had said, in a real up-your-bum, hoity-toity voice, ‘The hallmark of good writing is not only its universality but its simplicity.’
Game, set and match to my girl. I slunk away feeling half sorry for Christopher.
I’d been watching Jamie like a hawk, but he didn’t seem to be distracting Ella from her studies. If anything, the poor boy seemed in awe of her intellect. He didn’t seem to know what had hit him. He was preoccupied. His nightclub plans in New York were on ice, the swishy Deegan pad in TriBeCa was up for sale and his dad had his hands full. Ella had said very little about Ted Deegan’s rumoured troubles, only that she thought things were a bit fraught business-wise. I hadn’t pried.
I had told myself that if Ella did deviate a little from the straight and narrow and kick back it would be no harm. I would keep my big mouth shut. I was relieved, though, when I saw that she was keeping her focus.
Around Jamie Ella seemed to lighten up. He had none of Christopher’s grinding moral superiority and Ella was a little less intense and self-consciously cool. It was refreshing to be free of her signature ironic detachment. Now she was poking Dylan in the back with an angel figurine. He was studiously ignoring her. She switched to elbowing him in the side. He pulled his hoodie over his head. She advanced on him with a big smile and muscled him backwards into a chair so that he landed with a thump, protesting loudly, his hood falling down. Karen’s kids giggled. He tried to look huffy but a grin crept across his features and betrayed him.
Biba was going out with the rugby star we’d seen in the nightclub. Dylan was livid. ‘I never saw it coming,’ he’d said. ‘Rugby is such a gay game.’
‘It’s very homoerotic,’ Ella had volunteered loyally.
‘Yeah, shoving your head up next to some other guy’s arse, sniffing his butt cheeks. Taking group showers afterwards. Benders.’ Dylan had snorted. ‘He thinks he’s such a beast. He did that stupid ad for those stupid ladders that old dears use to get to the top of a cupboard, some stupid sponsorship deal.’
Everything was ‘stupid’ in Dylan’s world at the moment. He might have been a little put out, too, by Ella’s appropriation of his friend Jamie. He hadn’t said anything but you could see it: there was a faint bang from him tonight – he was not as dedicated to his ablutions as he used to be. And that was an understatement.
‘You’re acting like a depressed person,’ I’d heard Ella hurl at him. ‘I can help you with your CV.’
He had righted himself and was dunking one of Karen’s biscuits into a cup of tea now, his shoulders hunched. His eyes were puffy and he was sleeping too much. His clothes were rumpled.
‘When are you going to find a job?’ I’d asked him again that morning, looming over him like the Antichrist. He’d had a blanket around him. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Playing X-box,’ had been the bald response.
‘Are you not too old to spend your day playing games?’
This had been greeted with a wall of silence.
Then he had said, ‘You can make serious money if you design a game and pitch it perfectly. There are actual competitions with prize money. And in America gaming tutors get paid.’
‘We don’t live in America, Dylan. And you can’t spend your life slack-jawed in front of a monitor. I need you to get a paid job while you make up your mind about what you want to do … Jesus, Dylan, are these crisps I’m crunching on?’
‘Sorry.’
‘What about getting off your arse and looking for a job?’ I’d asked, thin-lipped.
‘There aren’t that many going in stockbroking, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
‘Then look for a job somewhere else – behind a bar or as a waiter.’
‘I can’t see myself as a waiter, Mum,’ he’d said, his voice dripping sarcasm – I’d wanted badly to swat him. ‘I’m not exactly a minimum-wage type of dude.’
‘Your grandfather was a bus conductor and your grandmother was a cleaner. Your great-grandmother was a washerwoman. Your father worked his way up from basically nothing. Are you saying that work is beneath you’?
He’d looked a bit taken aback. Then he recovered himself: ‘Like, it’s great and all that you’re not on the sauce any more, Mum, but I think you need to chill.’
That was the first time he’d mentioned my ‘drinking’. ‘Thank you for your good wishes, Dylan …’
‘Ah, Mum, don’t be like that …’
‘Thank you …’
‘I actually mean it. It’s great you’re off the hooch.’
‘Thank you, Dylan – and I actually mean that you need to get a job. Any job. You can’t continue to live here and not contribute. Ella has a job in the library and she’s in full-time education.’
He went to open his
mouth but I stayed him. ‘If you want to go to college I’m sure Dad and I would find the money, but you’d still have to get a part-time job.’
‘Stop, Mum,’ he’d said, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.
For all his sunniness Dylan had always been prone to self-dramatization. He was really going for it big-style at the moment – Oh, woe is me, I have no job, no girlfriend, the world does not understand me, et cetera. He was either sequestered in his room or he slouched dolefully around the place as though he had a huge load on his broad back. Ella had taken to calling him ‘Atlas’.
Karen had let him have it right between the eyes. ‘You’d want to get up off your arse and find yourself a job, Dylan. A big able-bodied fella like you sitting around …’
Frank had been more understanding, which confirmed my suspicion that he would do anything to mend fences with his son. ‘Should you bring him to someone?’ he had asked. ‘In case he’s depressed?’
I’d been dead surprised at that. Frank, I’d thought, came from the kick-up-the-arse school of psychology. Then he’d followed up with another revelation about his father. His father had ‘suffered a bit from depression’, he’d said, in that distinctly euphemistic Irish way, which could have meant Mr Lawlor had had anything from mild blues to weekly electric-shock treatments. I’d spent so many years with Frank and that was the first time he’d ever said one word about it.
But, then, Frank had more or less rewritten the script of his childhood, editing and omitting where necessary. I knew that these were defence mechanisms, that Frank’s emotionally austere background had been parlayed into something much more befitting the Waltons. I grasped that when he said to people he would ‘never be too proud to work any job’, the assertion was underpinned by an insecurity about where he had come from and a determination to present his origins before they could be laid at his door.
The idea that Dylan might be depressed frightened me. I watched him closely, not sure whether to coddle him or, indeed, administer the kick up the arse. He did not need counselling, my gut instinct told me. He needed work. He was marinating in a stew of his own self-pity. He needed to realize that the world, as Karen might have said, did not smell of fresh paint. And that we did not have a right to be continually happy.