by Alex Coleman
“Another day, another dollar,” Holly said breathlessly. She almost looked around to see who had spoken. It was one of the sayings on her list. Don’t overdo it, she scolded her unconscious mind.
“Yup,” James said. “Any big plans for the weekend?”
A sarcastic (albeit benign) response occurred to her at once. She swatted it away. “Not much, alas. Grocery shopping will be about as exciting as it gets.”
“Yeah. Can’t say I’ll be getting up to very much either. I see a Sopranos box-set marathon in my future.”
Holly was only just able to keep a smile from forming. She had given him a golden opportunity to say he was meeting her friend, actually, just the two of them, and he hadn’t taken it. That had to be good.
“We’re quite the pair.”
“Ah well. You can’t be wild your whole life.”
“Oh? Are you saying you had a wild past?”
He winked, sneered and stuck his nose into the air. Just when Holly was beginning to panic, he hung his head and shook it. “No. I’ve always been more of a box-set kind of guy.”
Holly felt her knees buckle a little – in a nice way.
“Okay,” she said. “See you on Monday then. Say hi to the mobsters for me.”
“Will do. Say hi to the frozen food section for me.”
He drove off, waving all the while. It was some consolation, she supposed, that she managed to stop herself chasing after him again.
That night, shortly after she had polished off the Lamb Bhuna that she’d had delivered as a small treat, Holly decided that enough was enough. She was a grown woman, for God’s sake, and she’d known Aisling for twenty years. It was about time she called her up on the damn phone and just flat-out asked her. Her new-found confidence survived the first part of the test – she did indeed call her up on the damn phone. But it melted away into a little puddle at the second. They talked about Orla and John, naturally, and did a little reminiscing about the play. When it became clear that the information she wanted was not about to be volunteered, Holly asked if Aisling had experienced any difficulty getting home.
“No,” Aisling told her. “Of course not. Why would I?”
“No reason,” Holly spluttered. “Just asking. You didn’t go on anywhere or anything?”
“Nah. We stayed put. It was comfy enough in there, especially after a few voddies.”
This was the moment when Holly’s confidence failed her. She could hear the question in her head, clear as a bell: “Did anything happen with you and James?” She just couldn’t make it come out of her mouth. She let the silence hang between them, hoping that Aisling would volunteer anything there was to be volunteered. But she didn’t.
“Anything wild at work?” Holly asked eventually.
“Not much. Oh, one of the account manager’s revealed that he’s gay. It’s sickening.”
“Aisling!”
“No, I mean it’s sickening the way everyone’s carrying on around him. They’re all falling over themselves to be his friend now, just to prove that they’re not bigots. I don’t get it. He was a prick before and now he’s a gay prick. The key word is ‘prick’, not ‘gay’. I said as much and they all turned on me. I thought of you, actually. It’s not easy telling it like it is.”
Holly didn’t know whether to feel insulted or proud. “What about your stalker?”
“Meh. Haven’t heard from him since, so I’m just going to pretend it never happened.”
“Fair enough. So! What are you, uh, what are you getting up to at the weekend?”
“Not much. It’s my cousin’s birthday, Christina, the loud one, so I’m going out in an hour or so for that. But I’m not staying long. The rest of the weekend, I’m spending in my pyjamas. Yourself?”
“Much the same, without the drink with a loud cousin.”
“All righty then. I’ll have to run on. Talk to you soon, yeah?”
“Good enough. See ya.”
Two out of two, Holly thought, after they’d hung up. So Aisling and James weren’t meeting this weekend, at least. It didn’t prove much in itself, but it was better news than the alternative. She went into the kitchen for a bottle of wine, then parked herself in front of the box. For the first time in a week, she felt relaxed.
Chapter 15
Holly was up and running early on Saturday morning. She gave the house a good working-over, even going so far as to change the bedclothes in the spare room – she couldn’t recall the last time anyone had stood in there, let alone slept there – and then set out for the supermarket. Holly had often thought of grocery shopping as a sort of sport. Some days you played well and some days you simply weren’t on form, retracing your steps in pursuit of forgotten items, realising at the checkout that you hadn’t weighed your vegetables, and so on. Today, she played a blinder. She felt like some sort of shopping genius as she swept along the aisles, hardly ever consulting her list and barely slowing down as she plucked her items from the shelves and dropped them into just the right slot in her trolley. Barely an hour after she left the house, she was back in the kitchen, putting everything away while humming (for reasons that escaped her) the theme from Home and Away. When that task was behind her, she found that she still had energy to burn. A number of potential activities occurred to her. The one that she finally settled on was paying a surprise visit to her mother.
On the drive home – she still called it that – Holly started to panic that she might find her mum and Charlie Fallon lounging around in dressing gowns, feeding each other grapes. The thought was almost enough to make her turn back, or at least phone ahead. But she decided to press on. If she did find them in compromising circumstances, it would at least make up for the time more than a decade previously when her mother walked in on her and Vinny Simmons (who took an unfortunate couple of seconds to remove his hand from under her jumper after the living-room light snapped on).
As it turned out, she arrived at the house to find her mother slumped in a chair, sound asleep. Evidently she’d been doing a jigsaw and had nodded off. The half-completed puzzle was arranged on a fold-away board of some kind that was perched on the arms of her chair. It seemed borderline miraculous that she hadn’t upset it in her sleep. Holly approached and gave her shoulder a little shake. Her eyes flew open and with impressive speed, she sat upright.
“What?” she said. “What time is it? Hello. Hello. Oh . . . Holly.”
As her senses powered up, she blinked and looked around the room like someone who’d never seen it before.
“Hiya,” Holly said. “Having a wee nap?”
Her mother rubbed a hand across her face and nodded. “I didn’t mean to. Must have dozed off.”
She looked slightly trapped underneath her jigsaw board. Holly wondered if she should offer to move it but supposed that her input wasn’t necessary; it wouldn’t be much of a product if its users needed external assistance to get out from under it.
“You mustn’t have been out too long. I’m sure you would have sent this yoke flying sooner rather than later.”
“I don’t know,” her mum replied. “It’s pretty sturdy.” She gave it an experimental wobble with her knees.
“How long have you had this? Where did you get it? Since when were you into jigsaws?”
Holly realised a fraction of a second too late that asking three questions in quick succession like this made her sound disapproving and even a little panicked. The truth was, she did disapprove and she was ever so slightly panicking. Jigsaws? Lunchtime naps? These were old-people activities. It was only a short step from lunchtime naps to little comfy boots with zips up the front.
“I sent away for it,” Mrs Christmas said. “A few weeks ago. Saw an ad in the back of one of the Sunday supplements.”
This was no solace to Holly. In her mind’s eye, she saw the large-type ad, tucked away between promos for stair-lifts and expandable-waistline slacks.
“Oh. Right. And jigsaws in general . . .” She tried hard to keep the concern out of
her voice but she knew even before her mother’s expression darkened that she had failed.
“You look worried, Holly. What, do you think I’m losing my marbles?”
“Of course not!” She attempted a smile and found that it sat so weirdly on her face that she quickly dismantled it. “I just wondered, that’s all.”
Mrs Christmas looked at her daughter for a long moment and then looked down at the jigsaw. “They pass the time,” she said. Her voice sounded as if it was coming from the end of a long hallway.
“Sure,” Holly said, too quickly and too loudly. “Why not? What’s it a picture of?” She looked around for the box.
“The Taj Mahal,” her mother said without looking up.
Holly was stumped for a follow-up. “Nice,” she said after a thick pause. “So . . . are we having a cup of tea or what?”
Mrs Christmas snapped out of it. She looked up and nodded. “Yes. I don’t see why not. Stick the kettle on like a good girl.”
Holly turned in the direction of the kitchen. She couldn’t help but glance back over her shoulder as she left the front room and saw that although it was perfectly possible for a person to escape from under a jigsaw board on their own, it wasn’t something that could be done with a great deal of dignity.
In the kitchen, they chatted about school. Holly provided the headlines of the term to date but didn’t so much as reveal James Bond’s very existence. She surprised herself with how upbeat her summary sounded, featuring as it did a mere trio of angry rants. When that subject had been exhausted – it didn’t take long – Holly took some heavily disguised deep breaths and said, “So, listen . . .”
Her mother eyed her with sudden suspicion. “What?”
“I was just –”
“What is it? You’re making a face.”
“I am not.”
“Yes, you are. What’s going on? Are you pregnant?”
“Mum!”
“Are you?”
“No! And, by the way, when you ask your unmarried, unattached daughter if she’s pregnant, you’re not supposed to have that hopeful look in your eyes.”
“Ah, g‘way. You’re imagining things, Holly.”
“Hm. Anyway. I was about to say . . .”
“Yes?”
“I was wondering about your . . . I was wondering about Charlie.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I haven’t heard from you in a while and I didn’t like to ring you up and badger you about it.” When her mother didn’t make any reply, she added, “So, what’s the story? How’s it going?”
It took a little while, but this time she responded. “It’s not. Going. I haven’t seen him since that night we had dinner with you.”
“You haven’t? How come? Did you fall out?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
Mrs Christmas sighed so deeply that she seemed to physically deflate. “I don’t know.”
“Mum. Come on. Tell me.”
A long pause. Then: “I just can’t . . . I just can’t take . . . the next step. We haven’t so much as held hands. I’m terrified of the whole thing.”
Obviously, this was territory in which Holly felt distinctly uncomfortable. The only thing that stopped her running out the door was the certain knowledge that it must be ten times worse for her mum. “That’s only natural,” she said, hoping she sounded wise and not patronising. “It’d be weird if you felt any other way, I think.”
“Maybe.”
“No, not maybe – definitely. I mean, you do want to . . . take some sort of a step? Don’t you?”
“Maybe. I think so. I don’t know. What do you think?”
“Mum! You’re going to have to stop asking me what I think about all this. It doesn’t matter what I think, it matters what you think.”
“I said, I don’t know what I think!”
It wasn’t so much the volume of this line that shocked Holly – although that was certainly remarkable – it was the tone. There was a degree of anger in there and a great deal of confusion, but the thing that really stood out was the marked note of sadness. Mrs Christmas slumped still further into her seat. Holly’s mind turned once again to the aging process. It seemed to be speeding up right before her eyes.
“Would I be right in guessing that this has less to do with Charlie than it has to do with Dad?”
Mrs Christmas tilted her head to one side and exhaled.
Holly took that as a yes. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
“Try.”
There was no reply at first. Holly put her elbows on the table and settled her chin on her fists. She hoped the gesture would communicate the idea that she was willing to wait for as long as it took.
Before long, her mother swept some imaginary crumbs from the table into her cupped hand and then deposited them in her saucer. “I feel . . . I feel like it’s a no-going-back sort of scenario. You know? If I cross that line, then that’s it, it can’t be undone.”
“Like losing your virginity,” Holly said. She was trying to be helpful. But if the sudden corrugation of her brow was anything to go by, her mother didn’t see it that way. “You know what I mean,” Holly said before any complaints could be filed. “Go on.”
It took her mother a moment to recover from the interruption. “Your father’s been gone for twenty-eight years,” she said then. “Suppose I do . . . suppose Charlie and me wind up . . . more than friends. And it only lasts a fortnight. I’d feel like my . . . Ah, never mind, it’s silly.”
“Come on, Mum. Just say it.”
The response came shockingly quickly: “I’d feel like my good record had been broken. For nothing.”
“There’s nothing silly about that! Anyone would feel the same way. It’d be like if you hadn’t had a cigarette in twenty-eight years, then you had one, decided you hated it and went back to being a non-smoker. If anyone asked, you wouldn’t be able to say you hadn’t had a fag in all that time. You’d have to have, like, in brackets, apart from that one time.”
Holly seemed to hear herself saying all of this only after she had finished speaking, as if she was getting it via satellite. She braced herself for unpleasantness. If her mother had objected to the virginity analogy, then she sure as hell wasn’t going to take kindly to this one, in which her marriage was likened to a nasty habit that she’d managed to kick.
“Well, exactly,” Mrs Christmas said.
Holly tried not to look surprised. “Yeah. I understand completely, Mum. I really do.”
“And I never had any plans on that front. It’s not like I’ve been sitting around waiting for some man to show up.”
“Of course not.”
“Charlie’s just . . . caught me at a bad time, that’s all.”
She said this casually, almost jovially, but Holly thought the words had a shadow behind them. After letting them dangle for a moment, she said, “What do you mean by that?”
“Ah, you know . . . ”
“No. I don’t. Tell me.”
Mrs Christmas swept up more crumbs that weren’t there. “It’s no big deal. I’ve just, lately I’ve just . . . y’know. Been feeling a wee bit . . . lonely.”
Holly couldn’t really say that she was surprised to hear this. If anything, she was surprised that she hadn’t heard it before. Her mum had one brother, who lived in Toronto, and one sister, who lived in Perth. She had never gone out of her way to make friends with the predictable consequence that she didn’t seem to have any. While she was on good terms with most of the neighbours, these were hardly deep relationships. Holly had long since assumed that she was her mother’s only regular visitor. Fearing a turn for the morbid, she decided to make a small joke.
“This would explain the Christmas Convention of Christmases,” she said with a twinkle.
“Sorry?”
“There’s no way you would have considered that for half a second if you hadn’t been desperate for some sort of social outlet.”
&
nbsp; “I still say it might be fun. He wrote again, I meant to say. Your man. Simon Christmas. He’s set a date. The twenty-ninth of November.”
“Wow. The Christmas Convention of Christmases isn’t even going to be in December. It just gets better and better.”
“He found a hotel he really likes. That was the only date they had. Got a big response, he said. People are coming from all over.”
“Well, they’re not coming from Dublin,” Holly snapped. She was sorry she’d brought it up. And sorrier still that she’d snapped. “Getting back to Charlie: you must have at least spoken to him since dinner, surely?”
“Yeah. A few times. He rings me up suggesting things to do. I tell him I don’t feel well, or I’ve got something else on. Anything to get him off the phone. And then I kick myself for being such a coward. He rang again last night, but I didn’t even answer it. I saw his number come up and I just let it ring like some mopey teenager having a row with her friend. It’s pathetic, that’s what it is.”
Holly chose her next words carefully. What she really wanted to say was, He’s not going to hang around forever. In the end, she came up with, “This must be confusing for him.”
“I know, I know. Next thing you know, he’ll give up altogether. Maybe that’s what I want, underneath it all. I want the decision taken out of my hands. That’s why I keep asking you to get involved too. I’m not stupid, Holly, I know how ridiculous that is.”
Holly was pleased to hear that she wouldn’t have to point out the obvious but alarmed by the new tremble in her mother’s voice. She was getting upset. It was time to take the situation by the scruff of the neck. “It’s not ridiculous, Mum,” she said. “Come on. This is all a bit strange to you, that’s all. It’s no wonder you need a bit of a nudge. So what was last night’s message?”
“Art.”
“Who?”
“The National Gallery. He wants to go for a wander around it.”
“Oh. But that sounds lovely.”
“Holly, I don’t know the first thing about art. I’d only make an eejit out of myself.”
“You don’t have to know anything about art to go to a gallery, Mum. Have you never been to one?”