Marianne pumped the accelerator. Plumes of noxious black smoke billowed out of the exhaust pipe and the Jeep heaved and coughed. ‘Come on, come on,’ she urged it, thumping the steering wheel. Rita looked pointedly at her.
‘Lovely Jeep,’ Marianne said, in a less aggressive tone. The Jeep emitted a short groan and then the engine caught and while the Jeep’s initial movements were jerky, it cheered up in second gear and she was able to drive away before Mrs Montgomery caught up with them.
‘Can everyone smile and wave,’ said Freddy fretfully, ‘so she doesn’t think that we’re running away from her?’
‘Isn’t that what we are doing?’ enquired Ethel.
‘I’m not running away from anyone,’ said Bartholomew.
‘Please?’ said Freddy, and his voice was so plaintive that they all planted smiles on their faces and waved at Freddy’s mother.
Even Bartholomew.
Mrs Montgomery did not wave back.
‘What ails her today?’ asked Bartholomew. ‘Another severe bout of homophobia, perhaps?’
‘She’s not homophobic,’ said Freddy. ‘There are just some people she doesn’t like who happen to be homosexual.’
‘How could anyone not like David Norris?’ said Bartholomew, shaking his head.
‘Another of your conquests, I assume?’ snapped Freddy.
‘A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell,’ said Bartholomew. ‘But I will allow that David and I were very close during his gay rights campaign. You might say I was his muse.’
‘So what were you going to say about your mother?’ asked Rita, and Marianne, who feared that Freddy might box Bartholomew’s ears if he was not sufficiently distracted, was relieved.
‘Well,’ said Freddy, sighing, ‘she has found out that Marianne is separated.’
‘What?’ snapped Marianne.
‘I’m sorry, Marnie,’ said Freddy. ‘Mother has a way of worming things out of me. And I’m afraid that she has decided that you would make an excellent catch, being a professional. And, you know, available.’
‘And a woman,’ added Bartholomew, drily.
‘I may be separated but I am most certainly not available,’ snapped Marianne.
‘No, I didn’t mean …’ Freddy said, flushing. ‘I’m afraid Mother’s right. I always I manage to say the wrong thing.’
‘Has she considered taking up motivational speaking?’ wondered Bartholomew.
‘She means well,’ said Freddy. ‘She’s just wishes I wasn’t a loser, like Dad.’
‘I’m sure your father isn’t a loser,’ said Ethel, patting his arm.
Freddy shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know much about him. Mother says he was an alcoholic but that’s about all I know. He left before I was born.’
‘To live with a man,’ said Bartholomew pointedly.
‘They were just good friends,’ said Freddy, tensing. He slumped against the back of his seat. ‘Can we not talk for a while?’
Marianne thought that was an excellent idea.
Shirley had Sheldon and Harrison with her again. ‘Fucken in-service training day at school,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Whatever that means.’
‘Fucken school,’ said Sheldon, grinning. Shirley rounded on him. ‘Don’t say “fucken”.’
‘You said it.’
‘That’s different.’
Shirley glared at Marianne, her jaws working a wad of chewing gum around her mouth. Today she was wearing oversized navy overalls, pinched in at the waist with a wide rainbow-coloured belt and rolled up at the bottoms so that her Doc Martens were on show. Most of her face was covered with a pair of massive sunglasses with white plastic frames and a Star Wars schoolbag hung off her shoulder.
‘So,’ said Shirley, when she had put her seat belt on. She leaned forward and poked Marianne’s upper arm. ‘Maths lesson today, yeah?’
‘Well, I …’
‘I’ll pay,’ Shirley said. ‘I’m not expecting a hand-out.’
‘It’s not that, it’s …’
‘Or I can do your eyebrows instead. You decide. But, if I were you, I’d take the eyebrow offer. No offence.’
‘I’m going to be a train driver and a referee when I grow up,’ shouted Harrison from the back of the Jeep.
‘You can’t have two jobs,’ Sheldon informed him.
‘Can so,’ said Harrison. ‘Can’t I, Mam?’
Shirley kissed the tips of her fingers and pasted them against Harrison’s forehead. ‘You’ll be the best train-driving referee in the world,’ she said.
Harrison smirked at Sheldon, who responded by sticking his tongue out.
Marianne deposited them at Ancaire, then went, without being instructed, to the kitchen to make tea.
She supposed she was becoming institutionalised.
She had taken to employing a tape measure to divide up Rita’s various wares. Today, it was her shockingly sweet and extremely popular millionaire slices which Rita had re-named socialist slices since confectionary – like everything else – should be for everybody. Freddy and Bartholomew scrutinised the portions Marianne handed them with zealous concentration, the warmth of their fingers prompting the caramel to ooze from the biscuits in long, golden lines, which the men caught – expertly – on their tongues.
It wasn’t exactly the routine Marianne might have hoped for but it was a routine of sorts, none the less, and it distracted her from things.
Like Brian and Helen and the babies.
The twins.
It distracted her from thoughts of her home. Its contents, each item hand-picked by Marianne with the sort of care and attention that other people simply didn’t understand in this world where everything was replaceable and expendable. Where nothing lasted.
It distracted her from thoughts of strangers being shown around her home, inspecting it with a critical eye, already making plans to change everything that had taken Marianne so long to perfect.
Chapter 14
In the end, Marianne agreed to give Shirley a maths lesson after the Get Well Soon meeting.
Or rather, she failed to come up with an excuse that Shirley would accept.
Besides, Marianne told herself, she loved maths. It would serve as a welcome distraction from everything else.
After she dropped Bartholomew, Ethel and Freddy home, Marianne pulled up outside Shirley’s house. Harrison and Sheldon scrambled out of the Jeep. ‘You two better not break another of Mrs Hegarty’s china dogs, do yiz hear me?’ Shirley shouted after them as they ran towards the house next door.
‘We only broke two,’ said Harrison, holding up five pudgy fingers, then carefully folding down three of them, the tip of his pink tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth.
‘She has millions of them,’ said Sheldon.
‘Don’t even look at them,’ said Shirley. ‘Don’t breathe in their general direction. Is that understood?’
The boys nodded sombrely as the front door swung open and a large, plump lady appeared with her arms outstretched. The boys succumbed to her embrace as she gathered them to her enormous bosom, soft and wide as pillows.
‘I’ll be back in time to give them their dinner, okay, Mrs Hegarty?’ shouted Shirley from the Jeep.
Mrs Hegarty nodded and ushered the boys inside, waved at Shirley and Marianne. Her eyebrows looked out of place, being very full and dark while the rest of her features had a sort of bleached, worn-out appearance.
‘Do you pay her in eyebrows?’ wondered Marianne aloud.
Shirley nodded. ‘Mostly,’ she said.
Marianne turned off the engine but Shirley made no move to get out of the Jeep. ‘Hugh said we can study in his house,’ she said. ‘I’m working in the salon later, which is in his back garden.’
‘Or we can study in your house and I can drop you to work afterwards,’ said Marianne. She imagined Hugh’s house to be a place where things like disarray and clutter were not just acceptable but celebrated. Shirley looked at her house and shook her head. ‘I use
d to love that house. That’s where I moved when I finally got round to leaving my ex and got my shit together with the drinking. It was always a kip, being honest, but it was my kip, you know? Mine and the boys’.’
Marianne nodded. She got that.
‘I hate being in it now, knowing that we’ll have to move out soon.’
‘You don’t know that for sure,’ offered Marianne. ‘Rita reckons the protest—’
‘Come on, Marianne,’ said Shirley, ‘you look like a clever woman. No offence.’
‘Eh, none taken,’ said Marianne.
‘A handful of recovering addicts shouting a few slogans and holding up their homemade placards? It’s hardly going to make front-page news.’
Marianne thought that an accurate summation.
‘And the landlord’s a developer,’ Shirley went on. ‘It’s not just my house he owns, it’s the entire row. He’s going to empty them all, one by one, then raze them to the ground and build apartments. He’s got his fingers in lots of pies and throws money at whoever he needs to – politicians, big business, same thing really – to get what he wants. That’s the T.’
‘The tea?’
‘The goss, the news, the word on the street,’ said Shirley, shaking her head at Marianne’s ignorance. ‘I hope you have way more patience than me, by the way,’ she added.
‘Well, I definitely couldn’t have less,’ said Marianne.
‘Are you slagging me?’ asked Shirley.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Marianne.
Shirley shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter so long as you’re a good teacher.’
‘I’ve never taught calculus to anyone except myself,’ Marianne admitted.
‘And do you get it?’ asked Shirley.
‘I love it,’ Marianne couldn’t help saying.
‘Fucks’ sake,’ was all Shirley could manage after that.
Hugh lived in a small cottage near the end of Sandy Lane in Rush. It looked like a child’s drawing of a cottage, with its bright red front door and a small square window on either side, books piled against them so that Marianne wondered how any natural light managed to penetrate inside. The gable wall had a bumpy appearance and, as Marianne pulled up outside, she saw that seashells had been stuck onto the plasterwork. The front garden was an uncultivated affair, long grasses swaying on their slender stems, interspersed with bright pockets of heather, in purples, greens and yellows. An enormous cat sat on a sturdy wooden bench and studied Marianne, then flicked his tail at her before dropping his gaze, as though he had seen enough.
Shirley slid her hand along the narrow ledge on top of the front door and lifted down a key, which she fitted into the lock, turned it. The door swung open.
‘It’s not exactly Fort Knox, is it?’ said Marianne.
‘There’s nothing to steal in here,’ said Shirley, stepping inside. ‘Unless you count books.’
Marianne followed her. The door led directly into a sitting room. It was small and square, taken up mostly by an oversized, squashy couch in soft brown leather with a tartan wool blanket draped across the back and cushions scattered across it. A squat, black wood-burning stove had been set into the wall and was lit. Along the gable wall, an enormous bookshelf, crammed with – Marianne paused to look – old classics in the main. In the middle of the room, a beautiful wooden slab of a table – beech, Marianne thought – with benches along either side.
Marianne suspected Patrick’s involvement.
‘Do you want tea?’ Shirley asked.
‘Let’s get started,’ said Marianne, setting her bag on the table and rummaging through it, pulling out a notebook Aunt Pearl had given her – ‘It’s just a lend, mind’ – and the fountain pen she had bought Brian for their third wedding anniversary. She had thought he’d loved it, the pen. She’d found it on the floor under the sideboard after he’d left.
Marianne took off the cap. Well, she wasn’t going to let it go to waste.
She sat down and Shirley sat beside her. Marianne shuffled a bit down the bench. The spine of Aunt Pearl’s notebook cracked when she opened it. She cleared her throat and began. ‘The reason why calculus is fun is because—’
‘Seriously, can you actually hear yourself?’ said Shirley. ‘Like when you talk out loud, I mean?’
‘I …’
‘Ah, don’t mind me,’ said Shirley, nudging Marianne’s elbow with her own. ‘Maybe if I’d thought calculus was fun in school, things might be different.’
‘Maybe fun is the wrong word,’ said Marianne, moving her elbow away from Shirley’s. ‘Fascinating is probably better.’
‘Right,’ said Shirley, who didn’t sound convinced.
Marianne tried a different tack. ‘All calculus is really about,’ she said, ‘is change.’
‘Change?’
Marianne nodded. ‘It’s the mathematics of change,’ she said. ‘And growth. Take your boys, for example.’
‘O … kay,’ said Shirley.
‘They’re constantly growing, right?’
‘Well, with the amount of Cheerios they demolish, they’d want to be.’
‘Do you keep a record. A height chart, for example.’
‘Of course,’ said Shirley picking up her phone, which was never beyond the perimeter of her arms. She jabbed at a few buttons, presented the screen to Marianne.
‘Perfect,’ said Marianne. ‘So, with calculus, we can plot their growth, and the time it took them, on a chart like this, see?’ Marianne drew a grid. Shirley looked on with something approaching interest. Marianne began plotting. ‘We’ll be able to derive all sorts of information about the boys from this chart,’ she told Shirley. ‘Like which of them is growing at the fastest rate.’
‘It’s Sheldon, isn’t it? He wins everything, that fella.’
‘Actually, it’s Harrison,’ said Marianne.
‘There’ll be killings,’ said Shirley darkly. ‘Can it tell me if they’ll ever brush their teeth without being threatened with the wooden spoon?’
‘Calculus is brilliant but it has limitations,’ Marianne had to admit.
They worked for about an hour, after which Marianne set Shirley a problem to solve, working out the dimensions of a designated area for the boys’ Lego within the confines of their bedroom. Marianne sat back while Shirley worked it out. All Marianne could hear was the scratch-scratch-scratch of Shirley’s pencil against the page, the crackle of the logs in the wood-burner and the purring of Hugh’s cat, who had taken up residence across Marianne’s feet and fallen asleep. She had tried to shift him a couple of times but he paid no attention to her efforts. Also, she had to admit that her feet, which often fell victim to poor circulation, were warm as toast beneath the bulk of his body.
‘Ta-dah,’ sang Shirley, lifting her head from the page and pushing it towards Marianne. ‘Nailed it.’
There was something childishly neat about Shirley’s handwriting that made Marianne’s heart sort of lurch in an uncomfortable way. Something hopeful and trusting about the arrangement of the letters and numbers, like a declaration of confidence in Marianne’s ability to see her through.
Maybe she could? At least in mathematical terms?
‘You actually have … nailed it,’ she told Shirley, who beamed.
Shirley stood up. ‘Break time,’ she declared.
‘I was going to do tangents next,’ said Marianne.
‘Well, I’m going off on a tangent to make tea,’ said Shirley. ‘That’s a pun, by the way. Shakespeare is only mad about puns; he thinks he’s so fucking funny.’
‘You don’t like Shakespeare?’
‘Like, I’ve read Hamlet and I didn’t laugh out loud once. Hugh says I have to remember that the humour is “of its time”’ – she put the words in inverted commas with a caustic tone and a roll of the eyes – ‘but, like, funny is funny, isn’t it? No matter what century you’re in.’
‘So, Hugh likes Shakespeare?’
Shirley nodded. ‘He didn’t always. When he was in school, he thought Sh
akespeare was a dickhead too.’
Shirley disappeared into the kitchen and made tea.
‘Do you want me to set you some homework?’ Marianne called into her.
‘That’d be great,’ said Shirley.
Marianne was stunned. ‘Great’ seemed like a furiously optimistic term, coming from Shirley.
Shirley popped her head out of the kitchen, as if she knew that her use of the word required clarification. ‘I like having stuff to do when Harrison and Sheldon go to bed. The house gets quiet without that pair bulldozing about the place.’ She withdrew into the kitchen again and Marianne heard her opening presses. ‘There’s a bar of chocolate here. Only dark stuff, with … fucks’ sake, chillies in it. Do you want some?’
‘Eh, won’t Hugh mind?’ said Marianne.
Shirley poked her head out again, grinning. ‘Ah, no,’ she said. ‘He said I’m the main reason he’s not fat. I’m like a dose of colonic irrigation.’ She threw a slab of chocolate at Marianne, who caught it in one hand.
‘Impressive,’ said Shirley. ‘Didn’t have you down as the sporty type.’
‘I was asked to play on the lacrosse first team in school,’ admitted Marianne, feeling a degree of pride. ‘But I didn’t in the end.’
‘Why not?’
‘I was good at the mechanics of the game, the catching and throwing and all that,’ said Marianne. ‘But I just … wasn’t great at being on a team, you know?’
Shirley nodded. ‘No milk, no sugar, right?’ she said, holding up a mug of tea.
‘Thanks,’ said Marianne.
The back door opened and Hugh barged in, making the room seem immediately smaller. He grinned at Marianne, who did her best to deflate her cheeks, which was difficult given the amount of chocolate she had crammed into her mouth. ‘You’re both still in one piece,’ he said.
‘Actually calculus isn’t too bad,’ said Shirley, settling herself cross-legged on the rug in front of the wood-burner.
‘This from the girl who threatened to vandalise the bust of Isaac Newton in the Long Room at Trinity last week?’ He said ‘gir-del’, which Marianne couldn’t help finding amusing.
‘Are you not cold in that rig-out?’ she asked, nodding toward his kilt, which he was wearing without the benefit of socks, his barge-long feet slotted into a pair of pink flip-flops.
Make Yourself at Home Page 11