It's Got To Be Perfect

by Claire Allan

  I walked through the living room and sat on the sofa, my eye glancing at the mantelpiece where the picture of Darcy and Gerry used to stand. Used to. It had been moved. I wondered had Darcy packed it away with the picture of her sleeping in Africa – and a small sob caught in my throat.

  “Are you coming? Say you’re coming?” Darcy called in to me as I brushed my tears away and painted on a smile.

  “Where?”

  “To the pub? Come on, it will be fun. Honest.”

  “I think I would stick out like a sore thumb.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m not. Honest, Darcy, you go with your friends. I’ll hang out here for a while and when Gerry arrives I’ll go for a walk or something.”

  She looked at me incredulously. “You? Go for a walk in Dublin? Now that is funny!”

  “I can walk,” I said defiantly. “Look, Darcy, you go and be with your friends. Maybe I’ll join you later?”

  She gave me a look which begged me to reassure her I would be okay and I stood up to hug her.

  “Sure what do I know about fashion anyway? And no doubt you will talk shop and I’ll be there embarrassing you with tales about my bargains from Dunnes Stores and Tesco.”

  She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. “Be good. And be careful. And don’t do anything stupid like knee Gerry in the bollocks or the like.”

  I nodded, but little did she know that I had already done something stupid. The text messages I had sent earlier remained simply sent – no replies, no phone calls, no reassurances that I was missed.

  I didn’t mind so much with Owen. He wasn’t important to me. But, well, with Ant it was different. Not that he was important to me, but I kind of wanted to believe that he could have been. I had wanted to prove Fionn wrong – that his gift of flowers (ignoring the edible knickers) had been born out of some genuine sense of affection. I had wanted to think that the hours spent in his arms in his house at the beach meant more than just mind-blowing sex. A wee small part of me had wanted it to work more than I had ever wanted anything to work. Because then he wouldn’t have been just another mistake and I could have believed that I was worth more than just a fuck buddy.

  And I suppose I had wanted something of the last few weeks to have been salvageable although maybe I would have contented myself with the salvageable thing being Fionn and Alex’s relationship. I should really text her but there was still an hour to check out and I was pretty sure she would be making use of her time in the hotel fully. The fact that she had not called or texted me in a fluster led me to feel fairly sure things were okay for her. At least that was something.

  I slipped on a cardigan and lifted my bag. My ankle felt okay so I figured I could risk a walk. I would have to be brave some time and I really didn’t fancy running into Gerry so I set off walking, only stopping once every five minutes to check if I had missed a call or a message on my phone.

  I had walked and window-shopped for ninety-three minutes and was rewarding myself with a coffee and a Danish when my phone did actually beep to life. And it was from Ant. He had responded! My heart leapt and I clicked open the message, bracing myself for some flirty or dirty reply about just how much he missed me and what he wanted to do to me when we were reunited.

  “Annie, sorry if you thought this was more than it is. I thought we were just having fun. I’m not ready for romance or a commitment but any time you feel those gorgeous urges of yours then please get in touch.”

  Even though nobody but me could see the text message, even though no one but me could feel the rise of heat and shame on my neck, I felt more exposed than I ever had done. I had played with fire and I had got burned. I should have known Ant wasn’t the type – he never pretended to be – so I shouldn’t have been surprised or disappointed. But I was – and I was humiliated beyond words and, unlike Darcy with her harem of oddly named friends, I had no one to turn to. Fionn was off with Alex. Mum and Dad where a million miles away (or so it felt) and that was really about it in my list of people I could call on in an emergency.

  What would I tell them anyway? That I had fallen into the bed of an exceptionally hairy and well-endowed Donegal man on several occasions and it turns out he was just going along for the ride and nothing more?

  I left my Danish untouched and picked up my coffee, then walked towards the park where I vowed to find a big shady tree to sit under and drown my sorrows with a latte, a good book and a sinking sense of failure.

  Although in fairness my sense of failure had now sunk so low it was virtually impossible to see how it could sink any further without actually ending up in Australia. In fact, if I was robbed now, or hit by a car or just the victim of some random self-combustion type of event it would probably be the perfect end to a perfectly shitty few weeks.

  Of course I was never going to allow myself to have those “urges” Ant spoke of again – not with him anyway. In fact, it crossed my mind to go back to find Darcy and tell her we could both forsake men for life and a buy a baby from the internet and raise it together. We could be Derry’s answer to the Golden Girls only we were not so much golden as a bit turd-coloured at the moment. Still, it could work. Us and our weird non-lesbian relationship. Just two sisters, with a shared child who could call her “Mum” and me “Mammy” so no one would get confused. And any time anyone with a penis came within five foot of us we could shout – or just show them our T-shirts which would be embossed I’m single. I’m sad. Get used to it.

  Except we wouldn’t be sad because we would have no feckwitted men getting on our wick and Darcy would have her child and I would no longer find myself in this repeatedly humiliating position. And Alex could supply us with new sofas every couple of years so we didn’t come across as completely man-hating – although of course we would be – and wouldn’t that all be grand?

  I was in the middle of contemplating just exactly how much it would cost to buy a brand new baby – as opposed to a toddler or an older child in a Madonna style – when my phone peeped to life again.

  “No problem,” Owen wrote and it took me a split second to realise he was referring to my earlier text and not to my plan to buy a child. (He was a child psychologist after all. He had to have an excess of children in his presence at any one time.)

  No problem. Not a fizz. Easy for him to do. To save people. From death. And walk them to nice hotels. Like he did that every day. Then again, he probably did. Beneath that suit there was probably a Superman-style costume and a secret aversion to Kryptonite. For a split second (there were a lot of split seconds that day) I hated him – just for being lovely and life-saving, because I knew just like every other man I had ever met in my entire life there was no doubt some underlying level of bastarditis I was heretofore unaware of and which would undoubtedly come to the fore just when I least wanted it to.

  I muttered “No problem” to myself in a very childish and whiny voice and then laughed at myself before realising my behaviour was most probably making me look like a complete mentalist. Taking a deep breath, then sitting back and drinking my latte, I decided today was the first day of the rest of my life, which of course I realised sounded particularly wanky. But feck it. If I couldn’t do wanky when my life was in the toilet, then when could I?

  By mid-afternoon I was hungry and tired and wondering if it was safe to go back to Darcy’s. I decided to head for the very same coffee shop Owen had taken me to after my near-death experience and grab a sandwich. What I didn’t expect, however, was to see Superman himself striding towards the self-same coffee shop in search of a cappuccino.

  I hid my head behind my magazine, but I stilled feared my swollen ankle would give me away. Although I would be the first to admit that random strangers in random coffee houses in Dublin generally don’t look at people’s ankles first of all.

  I heard him order. I watched him smile. A little part of me wanted to get up and reach out and stroke his arm, or something equally weird. But I didn’t. I just hid behind my magazine until he turn
ed and walked away with his coffee and even though there was a part of me that wondered if I had done the right thing, there was a bigger part of me that was deeply proud of not throwing myself headlong at another stranger.

  Yes, Darcy and I would be just fine in our spinsterhood.

  I wandered around for another hour before making my way back to Waterloo Road, reasoning that Gerry was most likely to have gone by then. However, my reasoning was once again up the left and when I opened the door he was there, walking towards me carrying what looked like a very heavy box of books.

  I should have offered to help. I knew that, but it felt that if I did I would be betraying my sister so I didn’t. I just nodded in his direction and he tried to shrug his shoulders, but failed under the weight of the box.

  “I’m sorry about this, Annie,” he said.

  “You don’t have to apologise to me,” I said coldly and walked past him into the kitchen where I poured myself a long, cool glass of water.

  I heard him put the box down and follow me.

  “Any chance I could get a drink too?” he asked and it felt very weird that he was asking me if he could have a drink in what was still his own flat and his own kitchen – and out of one of his own glasses.

  “Help yourself,” I said, stepping out of his way and watching him reach for a glass. I noticed his hand was shaking slightly. He stood back, sipped from the glass and looked at me.

  “I never wanted it to end this way, you know. I didn’t really want it to end at all.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “How’s Darcy?” he asked, not looking me in the face.

  “Probably as you would expect her to be. Bit of a mess. Trying to keep it together.”

  He sighed, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “How did it come to this, Annie?”

  But I knew he didn’t need or want me to answer. There was no point.

  “I love her so much, you do know that?”

  I nodded.

  “Can I talk to you?”

  “Sure isn’t that what you’re doing?” I said sourly.

  Much as I tried to stay neutral, and tried to realise that leaving must be as painful for him as it was for Darcy, I couldn’t hide my disdain. He was hurting my sister and, regardless of his reasons, that made me want to hurt him. Sure he had never stood before a church and promised to love and cherish forever, but as far as I had been concerned he was my brother-in-law all the same and I had trusted him not to fuck this up and yet here he was – fucking things up.

  “I want you to understand.”

  I shrugged.

  “No,” he said, “I need you understand. Otherwise you’ll just think I’m some godawful gobshite and, while I will admit to a degree of gobshitedness, you need to know the full facts.”

  “I know what Darcy has told me – that’s enough.”

  “But it’s not,” he said, his face etched with pain. “Don’t you realise, we – that’s both of us – never wanted kids? I never expected Darcy to change her mind. How could I? She changed, not me.”

  “But people do change. No one is the same person they were five years ago. Can you say you’ve never changed?”

  “Not when it comes to whether or not to be a dad, Annie. I can’t do this because I don’t want to make the same mistakes my own father did. Not that, to be fair, I know too much about him. But he messed up so badly I never want to risk doing that to any child of mine. I know the damage that causes. I feel it every day.”

  I stood, open-mouthed, unsure what to say. Here Gerry was, pouring his heart out to me while I stood giving him bad looks in his own living room. Surely this was a situation where he could at least sit down and yet he stood, awkwardly swaying from foot to foot, unable even to look me in the eye.

  “I can’t take the risk. I can’t risk bringing a child into this world and it all going horribly wrong and then my child ending up with no da like me. I’ve only met him twice since he left, you know. Once when he lumped in drunk after my Confirmation and asked me for a loan of money and once when he sat at the back of one of my lectures and started roaring and shouting about me being an ungrateful bastard halfway through. I’m not sure what I was supposed to be ungrateful for to this day . . . but . . .”

  He sighed, looking so broken I felt embarrassed.

  “Does Darcy know this?” If she did, she should have told me. Gerry was right: it made a difference to know where he was coming from.

  “She does and she says I’m a different man to him, but who knows, Annie? I couldn’t make that call. Children change things.”

  “You are a different man,” I said softly and he shrugged.

  “I can’t take the risk,” he said sadly. “No matter what, I can’t take the risk.”

  He placed his glass in the sink and gave me a weak smile before going back to lift the impossibly heavy box. But this time I helped him carry it out to his car and I even hugged him when we got there. It didn’t feel like a betrayal then and there. Gerry had been a part of my family for a long time and I felt genuinely sad that it hadn’t worked out and that I probably would never see him again.

  “Take care, Gerry,” I said.

  “You take care of my girl, okay?” he asked and I nodded.

  And then he left and I went back to the flat to wait for Darcy’s return which I knew would be deeply horrible indeed.

  The phone rang just before six. I stared at it for a bit, wondering if I should answer it. Conceivably it could be someone for Gerry who didn’t know that he didn’t live there any more and I wouldn’t want to have to try and explain what had happened. It could also be someone for Darcy who might be enquiring how she was and the truth was I didn’t really know. It made me realise how little I actually knew about my sister’s day-to-day life – who she knew, what she confided in them. Did they know she had wanted a baby? Did they know her relationship had been in trouble? I looked at the phone and bit my lip. Whoever it was wasn’t giving up easy. Lifting the handset, I offered a fairly weak hello.

  “Darcy,” Mum’s voice started and momentarily I was floored.

  My mother’s voice. I hadn’t heard it in ages.

  “Mum.” It was hardly deep and meaningful but I was fighting the urge to tell her I really, really needed her.

  “Thank God you’re in. I tried to get you earlier in the week. Dad and I aren’t coming back this year, Darcy. We’ve decided to go to Mexico for Christmas. I know you were hoping we could come back and meet that man of yours and maybe go up to Derry but we got a great deal. And Dad has always wanted to see Mexico, so I know you won’t mind.”

  I listened to her ramble on. There was a part of me that was gutted that she hadn’t instantly recognised my voice when I had called her “Mum”. Surely it is a mammy’s job to recognise the voice of their child – even if we spoke less frequently than I spoke to my bank manager. I wanted to jump in and tell her it was me but, as I listened to her put her once-in-a-lifetime cheap package holiday to Mexico ahead of Darcy and ahead of me, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  “You don’t mind, do you, Darcy?”

  She sounded a bit like a child looking for reassurance and I realised she had been like this for a long time. And Darcy and I – well, Darcy mostly – had been picking up the pieces for a long time.

  “No,” I said. “Not at all.”

  Four words. Surely it would have been enough for her to catch on to the fact I wasn’t actually Darcy after all. It wasn’t. Her voice brightened and she signed off . . . there was a jug of sangria with her name on it or something. And that was it, Mum was gone. Our first conversation in three months had lasted one minute and thirty-four seconds and she had mistaken me for my sister. All in all, as conversations with my mother went, this one had been a success.

  Dermot and Summer carried Darcy into the flat at gone seven. She was still conscious and still had some make-up on her face which had not washed down to her knees. However, she crumpled when she saw the slightly emptier flat and I held her
while Dermot brewed a pot of coffee.

  “Did you see him?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And how was he?” She had the same pathetic look on her face that he’d had on his.

  “Okay, considering,” I answered, not sure whether it was the right thing to say or not. I could have told her about his shaking hands, but it would have made her feel awful – but somehow I think me telling her he was okay also made her feel awful. Maybe I just had to accept that there was frig all I could say in that moment that would make her feel better.

  “Did he mention me?”

  “Yes, he did. He said I was to take care of you.”

  And that prompted a fresh flurry of tears – so full on that I wondered if she would actually become dehydrated.

  “She was okay in the bar,” Summer offered. “She even wanted to start a sing-song. Life and soul of the party. We thought she was coping remarkably well.”

  Summer looked a little shocked, and a little scared. She was obviously used to seeing Darcy cool and in control.