by Alison Walsh
***
Mary-Pat was the first to speak. ‘Very nice.’ She looked as if she’d eaten something unpleasant, her face screwed up and her mouth twisted. ‘Looks expensive anyway.’
There was a silence and Rosie’s face fell, her arms dropping to her sides. She looked all of nine again, in spite of her finery. For a moment, none of them said anything. There was a stillness in the room and June willed herself to speak, to open her mouth and say something, anything. She could see that Melissa’s fists were balled up, the knuckles white as she bit her lip. Oh, Mary-Pat, June thought, why on earth do you have to be such a bitch? And then she found her voice, rushing forward and pulling Rosie into a tight hug. ‘Rosie, you look beautiful, magnificent, utterly fabulous,’ and the compliments were so effusive, Rosie burst out laughing, while June pushed her away again to get a really good look at her. ‘Look at you. My baby sister’s all grown up.’ She felt Rosie’s bones under her hands, like a little bird’s, and then Rosie went a bit grey and her breath began to come in short puffs. ‘Do you need your inhaler?’
Rosie nodded, her cheeks flushed, her breath beginning to catch. ‘It’s all the excitement, I just …’
‘Don’t say another word,’ June said, motioning for Melissa to fetch Rosie’s handbag. ‘Just take a couple of puffs and relax.’ And she threw Mary-Pat a look over her shoulder. If you had been a bit nicer, the look said, this might not have happened. Wait till I talk to you later. But when she turned around, she noticed that Mary-Pat had tears in her eyes.
By the time June arrived home, she felt so exhausted she could just have gone to sleep in the car. She pulled into the gate and up the driveway, gravel crunching under the wheels of the Land Rover, and when she parked, the dulcet tones of Lyric FM fading, she sat there for a few moments, taking in the silence. She loved this view of the house, the bright yellow front door in the lovely Victorian porch, the two stained glass windows on either side, the bay window above it set into the red-shingled eaves: Georgia’s room. The estate agent had called it ‘a restoration treasure’, which had been shorthand for a complete mess, but June had loved it the first time she’d set eyes on it. It had been owned by a vicar, and the garden was lovely, and even if the rooms had been a little shabby, they’d also been beautiful, with their lovely high ceilings. It was large and gracious and restful – just like the life June had longed to have ever since she was a little girl. And now, she had it.
She sighed and climbed down from the Land Rover, opening the front door, popping her keys and bag on the eighteenth-century oak hall table, and went straight into the kitchen, where she opened the fridge and examined the contents before pulling out a plate of cold chicken, to which she added a large dollop of mayonnaise – the full-fat stuff that she kept hidden at the back of the fridge. There were a couple of cold sausages there, too, so she helped herself to them, starting to eat before she got to the kitchen table, plonking the plate down, fingers already greasy as she shoved the food into her mouth, chewing it quickly and then swallowing before sinking her teeth into the next mouthful. She wolfed it down, that was the expression, like a hungry dog and when she’d finished, licking the grease off her lips, she felt a bit sick. And guilty, and all of the other emotions she felt when she knew she’d failed to control herself. She put the plate into the dishwasher so Gerry wouldn’t notice it. He didn’t like to see her like this. It upset him.
She jumped when she heard a little cough behind her. ‘Oh, God, India, you gave me such a fright.’ She looked guilty. ‘I didn’t see you there.’
India grunted and continued to stare at her phone and June had to resist the urge to yell at her. She hated that bloody mobile. All India did was take endless selfies on it and text nonstop. June didn’t know what on earth she found to say on it – could she not speak to her friends the way June had at the same age?
‘I was at Rosie’s dress fitting,’ June said, trying to make a bit of conversation.
India looked up from the phone and her features softened. ‘Did she look amazing?’
‘She did. You’ll look like that one day.’
India rolled her eyes to heaven. ‘Not if I can help it.’
‘Oh, why not – isn’t it every girl’s dream to find Mr Right?’ June smiled, taking in her daughter’s lovely fair features, her bright blue eyes – when she was a baby, she’d looked like a doll, the kind you’d find in an antique toy shop. Even now, with her skin a bit spotty and her hair greasy, she had a freshness to her, a bloom.
‘Yeah, right,’ India said, curling her lip in distaste, ‘like we have nothing else to be doing, like educating ourselves or getting careers – important stuff.’
‘Oh, right.’ June felt hurt, catching the unspoken bit – ‘not like you’, thinking of how carefully she’d looked for Mr Right. How much thought she’d put into it, determined not to settle for the first man who came along. Determined not to find herself with another Daddy.
She was about to say something else, when India got up from her seat. ‘Better go and do some study. By the way, there’s a gaff on in Alice’s on Saturday – can I go?’
June winced at the word. ‘Gaff’. It sounded so … unpolished. ‘No, I don’t think so, India, you have a flute recital the following Wednesday.’
‘Please, Mum. If I go, I’ll practise all day Sunday.’
June sighed. ‘I’ll ask Dad – OK?’
‘He always says no.’ India was beginning to whine.
‘Well, no means no then.’
‘I’m nearly fifteen, not five,’ India blustered.
‘I know, India, but we’re still your parents and—’
India swore under her breath and stomped out of the kitchen. June closed her eyes for a second. Why did everything have to be so difficult?
‘June, is that you?’ Gerry’s voice wafted down from the landing. He sounded like a small child sometimes, June thought, wondering if he’d heard the clunk of the fridge door closing, the exchange with India. He had the hearing of a greyhound.
‘Coming now, love,’ June yelled up the stairs.
‘The Apprentice is on,’ he yelled back. He liked to watch it live and got annoyed she didn’t watch it with him, and even more annoyed if there were any interruptions. She was fed up telling him that he could pause live TV with the clicker. ‘Coming,’ she called, putting on her ‘face’, as she called it, that expression that she’d practised for so long she’d forgotten it wasn’t natural. A half-smile, a slight lift of the eyebrow.
He was watching the programme when she padded across to the bed, the TV remote balanced on his tummy, which June noticed was a bit bigger than usual, a round dome under the thickly padded duvet. She’d have to put him on the Atkins again. The two of them: one was as bad as the other with all the monitoring and controlling. It wasn’t like that at the beginning. At the beginning, they’d had so much fun. Now, everything was just … work.
He lifted the duvet and patted the empty spot beside him without looking up at her. She slid underneath and tucked her head onto his shoulder, and he rested a hand on her stomach, under her cream camisole. ‘You smell nice.’ His voice was a low rumble in his chest, but his breath smelled of whiskey. Surely it was a bit early in the week for that – he only ever drank at weekends.
‘It’s Jo Malone. You bought it for my birthday.’
‘I did? Well, I have very good taste, clearly.’ They chuckled, because they both knew that he’d sent India off to buy it. June lifted her head to peck his red cheek and fluff his gingery hair, then they both settled down to watch. He was quieter than usual, not ranting on about Alan Sugar and how he knew nothing at all about people. He did this every time they watched and June knew that this was because, secretly, Gerry had always wanted to do telly and was annoyed at not having been asked. He’d have loved to be Alan Sugar, she thought, but she also knew that he’d come across badly with his ginger hair and that big red face of his and his old-man sayings. His grumpy catchphrases were great on his morning radio show:
they whipped the nation into a frenzy of outrage every day between 9 and 12, but on TV – no. Not that she’d ever tell him. That wasn’t her job.
‘How was the fitting?’
Alan Sugar was wagging his finger at some cross-looking blonde girl with a severe hairdo. ‘It was fine. Mary-Pat was rude, of course.’
‘She’s always rude.’
‘I know, but this time, she was extra rude.’
‘Is that possible?’ Gerry half-smiled. And then there was a long pause as the girl was told, ‘You’re fired.’ ‘Too right,’ Gerry said, nodding in her direction. ‘She was a proper madam.’
‘She said that the dress was too expensive and that Rosie should wear heels and not “clumpy wedges”. And then she had a row with Melissa on the way to the bus – something about her dressing like a slut for the wedding. Oh, Lord, I was never so glad to see the back of the two of them.’ Poor Rosie, she thought, trying to banish the thought that if she’d never appeared, if she’d just stayed away, none of this would be happening. It was unfair to blame her, of course, but it was the truth. If she’d never come back, things would have stayed the same. And the same was just fine.
‘How’s your father?’
‘What?’ Gerry had never had the slightest interest in Daddy, apart from finding him a figure of mild entertainment. ‘He’s fine – much better.’
‘That’s good. It’s sad to think that your mind can just take you like that, isn’t it, and at that age?’
‘Yes, it is,’ she thought, suddenly realising that that was exactly what it was. Sad. Then she looked at Gerry, who was now squinting out the window into the garden, his grey eyes watering.
‘Do you want your glasses?’
‘What? No. I don’t need them.’
Yes, you do, June thought. You’re blind as a bat. She sighed. ‘What’s up?’
‘What? Oh, you know. Just thinking of your old fellah, wondering if it’ll be me next. I never thought I’d get old, do you know that? I never thought it’d happen to me.’
June sat up and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Everyone gets old, Gerry, it’s part of life.’
He shrugged. ‘Is it? Not in my game. Do you know, I saw an advert for plastic surgery the other week, in the back of one of the Sunday magazines, and I couldn’t help it, I just wondered if a little bit of work might do it,’ and at this, he mimed a facelift, pulling his eyes back at the corners so that they slanted bizarrely. ‘They’re all at it nowadays. Look at Simon Cowell.’
‘Oh, Gerry, you don’t need plastic surgery.’ June laughed. ‘You are just gorgeous and handsome and perfect, do you hear me?’ And she sat up and planted a kiss on his lips. They both knew that she was lying. Gerry wasn’t handsome – he looked like a farmer who’d been out in the fields for too long – but she loved him. She’d loved him ever since that first time they’d met in the Shelbourne – she knew that. They used to joke about it because he’d been with his friend Jim, a handsome barrister with nicely silvering hair and a range of pinstriped suits, and yet she’d gone for the short dumpy guy in the crumpled chinos. It was because he was always so sure of himself, so definite, that’s what had attracted June, that and his old-world manners. She loved him because he’d always been in charge.
‘Maybe I do, Junie. I’m old and past it and …’ He shrugged. ‘I just can’t help feeling that my best days are behind me. That there are all these nimble youngsters out there, waiting to pass me out while I limp along the road like an old dog. Maybe they’ll have to put me out of my misery,’ he half-joked.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Gerry, you’re being paranoid,’ June said, more impatiently than she’d intended. After the day she’d had, she wanted this conversation to be over. She distracted him then by taking off her camisole and snuggling up to him, asking him if he wanted to take Charlie for a walk. It was their code for sex – silly, but it made them both laugh, and laughing got them in the mood. But he just shook his head. ‘Sorry, Junie, Charlie needs a rest.’ And then he’d turned on his side and switched off his bedside light, leaving June half-naked and in shock. Gerry had never refused her. Not once in their entire marriage.
4
‘Mum, you’ve got something on your dress.’ Melissa’s face was screwed up in distaste as she dabbed at the stain on the lapel of Mary-Pat’s wedding outfit, a lilac two-piece with a floral trim around her neck that she privately thought made her look about ninety. But PJ said he liked it, and such compliments were so rare these days, Mary-Pat thought it must look all right. ‘Honestly, could you not have eaten your breakfast before you got into the thing – you’ve got muesli halfway down your front.’
‘I was distracted, Melissa, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ Mary-Pat shot back, wishing, as she did so, that she hadn’t said anything. ‘Let it go, MP,’ PJ had said to her earlier. ‘Don’t pick a fight with her. You’ll only make it worse.’ He was right, of course, but how could she not? How could she let her daughter out for her sister’s wedding dressed like that? ‘Trailer trash,’ John-Patrick had called it and he was right. She’d told her not to wear that tiny halter with the stars and stripes motif on it – and she wasn’t a small girl. Maybe that was it, Mary-Pat thought, looking at Melissa’s ample breasts spilling out of the halter, her thighs huge in a pair of denim cut-offs that showed half her arse. It was because she reminded her of her younger self – all that flesh, those dimpled thighs and fat arms – how she’d hated them. PJ said he loved them, of course, and they’d laughed when she’d accused him of being one of those big-girl fetishists.
But she’d never dressed like trash, that was for sure. She’d never dyed all that flesh that baked red with fake tan, the way Melissa did, so she looked like a Red Indian, those awful false eyelashes that clung like caterpillars to her eyelids. When she looked at her again now, tucking the tissue back in her little bag, swaying in the back seat of the Pajero beside her, Mary-Pat felt like crying. She didn’t want Melissa to be the laughing stock of the place, to be humiliated in front of half of Monasterard – at least that’s what she told herself, but really it was because she knew it would reflect badly on her. That she’d let her own daughter go out looking like that.
She wished that they hadn’t fought, but she knew that she couldn’t take it back. It had started when Melissa had been taking Mary-Pat’s heated rollers out. She’d been chattering away about the bloody flowers and how they were all organic and natural, and how Rosie’d taken Melissa and that friend of hers, Daphne, to Babington’s flower shop in Athy to discuss the order. Babington’s, no less, where you couldn’t buy a bunch of roses for less than fifty quid. And Rosie had bought Melissa lunch and a new pair of jeans – that fitted her, for a change – and Melissa had come back that evening, cheeks flushed with excitement. When Mary-Pat had asked about what they’d done, though, Melissa had just smiled coyly. ‘She made me promise not to tell, Mum – but the wedding will be spectacular. She showed me sample menus and the food is going to be fabulous and the cake … wait till you see it.’
She could barely contain her excitement and Mary-Pat had felt a wave of jealousy so strong it almost choked her. ‘I can’t see why she needs to go to Babington’s and why she had to order special food when I would have been only too delighted to do the catering. But it probably isn’t “sophisticated” enough for our Rosie.’ She’d emphasised the word ‘sophisticated’, making inverted comma gestures with her fingers. But Melissa didn’t give her the satisfaction, just shaking her head and rolling her eyes to heaven, a small smile on her lips. Mary-Pat had been left fuming to herself in front of Coronation Street.
She had to admit it, she’d thought later. She’d rather die than own up to the feelings, but she was jealous that Melissa found Rosie so fascinating, that they had such an easy way about them, even though they’d known each other all of three weeks. After that bloody fitting, they’d spent all their time giggling and gabbling and going out for coffee. Melissa had let Rosie buy her clothes and yet if Mary-Pat opened her mouth
to suggest that they go into Kildare Village to have a look around, Melissa would say that she was ‘busy’. But I’m your mother, she wanted to yell. You have to like going out with me. That’s what mothers and daughters do.
In desperation, she’d confided in June about the clothes Melissa wore. She didn’t want to, because Junie could be such a snob, but she needed some class of advice, even if it was to buy Burberry. ‘You can’t pay enough for class,’ June was fond of saying. Mary-Pat felt like replying, ‘Yes, love, but do you know how much it costs?’ Bless Junie, but she hadn’t a clue what life was really like.
‘You should try a different tack with her, MP,’ June had suggested. ‘Tell her what suits her, not what doesn’t. Emphasise the positive, not the negative.’ And she’d nodded sagely. You should know, Mary-Pat thought, with your two gorgeous daughters who never put a foot wrong. The only feckin’ thing they ever do is tie their cashmere jumpers the wrong way around their shoulders. You haven’t been saddled with Daisy Duke and Marilyn Manson.
John-Patrick just looked scary these days. Even his lovely blue eyes were gone – at least most of the time. She’d nearly died when he’d turned around to her in the hall the other day, with coal black eyes glittering. ‘Jesus Christ!’ She’d barely managed to stifle a scream. ‘Your eyes,’ she’d finally managed.