She reached for the album and opened it. A photo fell out of a torn plastic covering sheet and she picked it up and her heart gave a painful twist as she saw the image of herself and Lizzie with Jeff in the middle, his arms around them, laughing into the camera. She’d never been so happy in her entire life as she was then.
It had truly been the best time of her life, Valerie remembered, as the years disappeared and her thoughts drifted back to that glorious summer when everything had been absolutely perfect.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘I’ve something to ask you.’ Lizzie Anderson, Valerie’s best friend, tucked her arm into Valerie’s as they crossed the main street that ran ruler-straight through Rockland’s towards the small green, fringed by trees known as The Triangle, which sat in the centre of the village. A block of shops that included a supermarket, a newsagent’s, a butcher’s, a pharmacy, a café and chipper constituted the heart of the village. In summer flamboyant hanging baskets and window boxes of busy Lizzies, geraniums and petunias lent an air of Mediterranean gaiety and glamour for the tourists who came to buy ice creams, chilled drinks, cold meats and bread rolls for their picnics on the beach, or to have coffee or lunch in the small café. Tonight there was nothing of that Mediterranean buzz as the rain threatened and a howling south-easterly blew in from the sea.
The little whitewashed church with the narrow stained-glass windows on either side of the big wooden doors lay adjacent to the village primary school. On the other side of the church the large Victorian parochial house marked the intangible separation between the posh end of the village where the doctor, bank manager and ‘The Elite’, as Valerie’s mother called them, lived in big detached houses with sea views, and walled gardens whose mostly high, neatly trimmed hedges obstructed the view of the hoi polloi. At the end of the posh houses, a cobbled street that bisected the main road led to the railway station on one side and to a curved sandy beach on the seaside. It was a pretty village in summer but once the tourists were gone and the nights grew long, Rockland’s was dead boring, Valerie reflected as she and Lizzie skirted a large puddle beside the Ball Alley, where tonight, a hard-fought game of handball was in progress with some of the local lads.
‘What do you want to ask me? Something I’m not going to like, I just know by the way you’re saying it,’ Valerie said warily.
‘Please, please. Pleeeeease come to the match with me. I don’t want to go and stand on the sidelines on my own,’ her best friend pleaded. ‘I’ll do your maths homework for a week.’
‘Aw, Lizzie, I hate football.’ Valerie made a face.
‘You’re my best friend. It’s your duty to stand by me. I really fancy Phil, and he asked me to come to the match. Val, please.’
‘Oh, all right,’ grumbled Valerie, with bad grace. She didn’t particularly like Phil Casey, although she wouldn’t let on to Lizzie, who was totally infatuated. He thought he was ultra cool, strutting around, showing off with his new Walkman and his punk earring. If a real punk came near him he’d run a mile, Valerie thought scornfully. She couldn’t think of anything more boring than watching fellas kicking a ball around, with people screaming in her ear. What a waste of a Sunday afternoon, especially when she had a free house, a very rare occurrence. Her parents were going up to Dublin to visit an uncle in hospital and then they were going to visit Terence’s elderly mother. Terence had wanted her to come but she’d lied and said she had a maths exam the next day and she needed to revise. Terence put a lot of store on her studies. When she had got six honours in her Inter Cert he’d boasted about it for weeks afterwards, mortifying her everywhere they went. If she didn’t do well in her Leaving Cert he’d be devastated. He wanted her to go to college – preferably to study medicine, but law or accountancy would suffice. Valerie knew Terence well enough to realize that going to college wasn’t all about her. He wanted to be able to boast about his daughter ‘the doctor’ or ‘the lawyer’ or ‘the accountant’. Terence was a social climber and she was his ladder. He wanted to be as good as ‘The Elite’ at the grand end of the village, and Valerie was his stepping stone, his last chance to improve the family’s social standing, unless he won a fortune on the Sweepstakes.
Valerie had given him the one excuse she knew he would accept without question. She’d been looking forward to her few hours of freedom immensely. She had the new Hot Chocolate cassette and she was going to play it as loud as she wished and lounge on the sofa with Lizzie eating crisps and Trigger Bars – their last occasion of sin before going on a diet – and gossiping. Now Lizzie was changing their plans and wanted her to spend an afternoon shivering in a mucky field. But Lizzie was her dearest friend; what else could she do?
Lizzie was mad into boys. Valerie wasn’t any more, not since Gary Higgins, she thought glumly, frowning as she remembered that horrible night the previous year when he’d started snogging her under the cordyline trees in the middle of The Triangle.
It was the first time she’d been properly kissed, a French kiss, like the ones she’d read about in the romances she liked to devour. She had found it revolting. Gary Higgins, the village hunk, had walked her home from the hotel one night and told her he’d make a ‘real woman’ of her. She’d been scared but curious. He was a couple of years older than she. Until then she’d only been tentatively kissed by pimply, gangly youths with moon craters of acne on their faces, and damp, sweaty octopus hands that roamed all over her until she called a halt. She’d begun to think there was something wrong with her. All the Mills & Boons she’d devoured, all the Cosmo articles she’d read when she’d worked weekends in the local hairdresser’s, had led her to believe that she would feel hot and quivery and have mind-blowing orgasms, but all she felt as those boys slobbered over her and pressed their crotches against her, was dismay and disgust. Fortunately, she wasn’t alone. Lizzie confided that she felt the same. They couldn’t understand how Frances O’Connor and Anna McKenna and their gang were always boasting about shifting guys and having passionate sessions down on the boat strand behind the sheds.
‘I think they’re spoofing or else we’re frigid,’ Lizzie had fretted and Valerie had felt apprehension grip her as her best friend articulated a fear that caused her much anxiety. She wondered if frigidity could be inherited because she felt sure her mother suffered from the condition. Carmel had told her that men only wanted women for one thing and that she would be better off never getting married. ‘Be independent, Valerie. Never let a man have power over you. It’s different for you – you can have a career, you can earn your own money. Don’t give all that up to be some man’s skivvy.’
At night sometimes, when she was younger, she would hear the bed creaking in the room next door, Carmel’s murmured protests and her father’s hoarse guttural grunts. Valerie would jam her fingers into her ears and the growing revulsion she felt for her father deepened into an antipathy that would last until his death. Carmel had collapsed haemorrhaging one day, hanging out clothes in the back garden, and had to have a hysterectomy. She had moved into the small boxroom while she was recovering and had never returned to the marital bedroom.
When Gary Higgins had chatted Valerie up one Saturday night when she had sneaked out of the house to go to a disco at the hotel, she had decided once and for all to prove to herself that she wasn’t frigid. Gary was experienced; he’d know how to treat her; he’d know what he was doing, she reasoned. And so when he’d walked her through The Triangle and sat her down on a bench, her heart had thumped with excitement. It was finally going to happen. He would cup her breasts in his hands, just like in a Mills & Boon romance. He’d gently caress her nipples until they were hard peaks of desire and his kisses would be deep and tender at first, but then probing and insistent as she inflamed him with passionate desire. And then she would feel the quivery, aching need herself and know that she was normal, just like Frances and Anna, and those women she read about.
When he had stuck his beer-soaked tongue so far down her throat that she almost gagged, and twisted her
nipples until she had gasped with pain and dismay, he had mistaken it for a gasp of pleasure. Before she realized what he was doing, Gary had thrust his hand inside the waistbands of her maxi skirt and knickers and roughly jammed two fingers into her, making her cry out in shock and pain.
‘Good, isn’t it?’ he muttered drunkenly, jabbing his fingers in and out. ‘Now you touch me.’ He was unzipping his jeans as he spoke.
Stunned, she’d managed to pull away from him after a struggle and had jumped to her feet. ‘Hey, don’t be a prick teaser,’ he protested, lurching towards her, but she had raced out of The Triangle as fast as she could, disappearing down the narrow lane that led to the back of the cottages and climbed in through her bedroom window, her heart pounding so hard she was sure the whole street could hear it.
She lay on her bed, sore and violated, trying hard not to cry and had decided if being frigid meant you didn’t have to endure men doing horrible things to you, she could live with it. Her mother was right.
‘What was it like? Did you come?’ Lizzie asked excitedly the next morning as they walked through the village to Mass.
‘No, I went,’ Valerie giggled. Now that it was daylight and she had accepted her frigidity and resolved never to let a man ‘maul’ – another of her mother’s contemptuous metaphors – her, she felt a huge sense of relief. She related the events of the previous night as they headed to St Anthony’s.
‘Eewww!’ Lizzie uttered, horrified.
‘It bloody hurt,’ Valerie added indignantly as Mrs O’Connell, the principal of the primary school, click-clacked past them in her shiny patent high heels and green velvet hat, a jaunty white feather curling over the brim. ‘Morning, girls,’ she saluted brightly.
‘Morning, Mrs O’Connell,’ they chorused politely.
‘Don’t be late now and don’t hang around the end of the church. Make sure you go up the front,’ their former teacher instructed bossily as she overtook them and increased her speed. She was the organist and choir mistress, and she was running late.
‘Who does she think she is? Bossy boots! We’re in Secondary now; she’s not in charge of us any more,’ Valerie muttered.
‘Could you imagine her doing it? She has four kids. Maybe she’s a nympho,’ Lizzie tittered, and Valerie giggled. As they neared the church gates the air filled with greeting from various classmates who were already congregated inside the church grounds, waiting for them.
‘Good night, Valerie?’ Frances O’Connor asked slyly. She too had previous experience of Romeo Higgins and his roaming fingers.
‘Fab,’ Valerie said airily, and marched in through the gloomy porch of St Anthony’s with Lizzie right behind her. ‘What a bitch,’ she muttered. ‘She thinks she’s the bee’s knees with her pink leg warmers!’
‘Knobbly knees, more like,’ Lizzie retorted smartly as they genuflected and edged into a rapidly filling pew. ‘And she’s a bandy little cow!’
Valerie smiled at the memory of that Sunday morning last summer. Lizzie was always quick with a riposte. She was a brilliant friend and now she needed support in her new romance. Lizzie was convinced Phil Casey was finally ‘The One’.
‘He’s a great kisser, the best, actually,’ she’d admitted, deliriously happy after their first kiss, and Valerie had tried not to feel jealous. It was hard, though. Now it was all ‘we’ are going here, ‘we’ are going there, ‘we’ are doing this and that. Where once it was she and Lizzie who were the ‘we’, now an interloper had taken possession of her friend, her and Lizzie’s friendship was on the back burner and Valerie was lonely. She was going to feel like a real gooseberry when they went back to the pub for a drink after the match. But she hid her dismay with, to her mind, an Oscar-winning performance for fake enthusiasm.
‘OK, I’ll come. I’ll cheer Phil on for you.’ She smiled at her friend. Lizzie squealed excitedly. ‘You’re the best, Val, you’ll really enjoy it, and there are some fine things in the team. You might get off with someone.’
‘Nope, not interested. Besides, Da would have a fit if I started going with someone. You know that. There’s no point in me even thinking about dating until the Leaving is over,’ Valerie said as they reached the welcome shelter of Lizzie’s house, where her mother had kept them two luscious slices of home-made strawberry meringue. Valerie loved being at her friend’s house where she was treated like one of the family. It was a real home, unlike her own, which was fraught with arguments and tension.
She had a precious hour of peace the following Sunday when her parents left for Dublin, but it sped by and then reluctantly she pulled on her coat and a purple knitted hat to keep the cold out, and made her way to Lizzie’s house. Lizzie was dressed to impress in new Levi’s and a cream polo-necked skinny rib jumper under a cropped denim jacket, and wedge boots. ‘You better bring a coat, it’s cold out,’ Valerie warned, as her friend finished putting on her eye shadow.
‘Do I look OK?’ Lizzie fretted. ‘Should I put on some more blusher?’
‘Not unless you want to look like Bobo the Clown. You’re fine,’ Valerie assured her, whooshing her out the door, wishing the ordeal was over.
To add insult to injury it started raining about ten minutes after the match started; a fine grey mist, which clung wraithlike to her, seeping through her coat and hat, which she had pulled down over her ears. The heels of her boots sank into the soft ground and the bottoms of her jeans were caked with muck. Beside her, Lizzie jumped up and down like a crazy marionette yelling, ‘Come on, Rovers! COMMME OOOOOONNNNNNN!!!!! Put it in the net, lads. Put it in the NEEEET. Ref, Ref, are you BLIND? Offside, OffSIIIIDE!’
When, Valerie wondered, had her best friend turned into a football fanatic? Until a month ago, when Phil Casey had first asked her out, she had never shown a scintilla of interest in anything related to football. Now she was even watching Match of the Day with Phil, leaving Valerie to her own devices on Saturday nights. Valerie couldn’t help the by now familiar feeling of being hard done by. Lizzie had dropped her on Saturday nights and yet she expected her to be by her side at a boring football match. She expected a lot, Valerie thought with renewed resentment, praying Lizzie would shut up screeching.
Valerie was yawning, wishing she had worn a scarf to stop the rain dribbling down her collar, when a violent thump made her jump. The hard leather ball bounced again, spattering her with muck.
‘Bloody hell! Look at the state of me.’ She glared at Lizzie.
‘Kick it back in,’ Lizzie instructed.
Valerie was so mad she drew her foot back and let fly just as one of the players was heading in her direction to retrieve the ball.
‘Yikes, you nearly got Jeff Egan in the goolies!’ Lizzie snorted.
‘Pity I didn’t. Is this thing nearly over?’
‘Stop making me feel bad,’ Lizzie snapped. ‘Standing there with a face like a slapped ass. I won’t ask you to come again.’
‘Great, Lizzie, great that’s good to hear.’ She couldn’t hide her irritation.
‘Oh my God! Oh my God! Phil’s got the ball. Go, Phil! Go, Phil! Go, Phil! GOOOOOO!!’ Lizzie was dancing with excitement as her new boyfriend scored the winning goal. The hundred or so supporters erupted, yelling and roaring, and then, music to Valerie’s ears, the final whistle blew, a long sharp piercing note that led to more yelling and joyous cheering.
Later, while she was sipping a Bacardi and Coke in the Oyster Bar, a local pub near the football grounds, a hand tapped Valerie on the shoulder. ‘The least you could do is buy me a drink since you nearly ruined my marriage prospects. Just as well I’ve got good reflexes.’ A pair of smiling brown eyes looked down at her and she grinned when she saw Jeff Egan standing beside her. He had been a year ahead of her at school and they knew each other casually.
‘Sorry about that. But you ruined my trousers, buster.’
‘Ah, stick them in the washing machine, they’ll be fine,’ he laughed. ‘So what about that drink, then?’
‘They won’t serve me, I�
�m under age. I’ll give you the money for it but you’ll have to get it. Phil got our drinks for us.’ She went to open her bag.
‘I’m just teasing,’ Jeff assured her. ‘Did you enjoy the match? I didn’t know you were a Rockland’s Rovers supporter.’
‘I’m not, and no!’ she said bluntly. ‘I just came because Lizzie asked me so she wouldn’t be on her own.’
‘Ah, yeah, she’s started going out with Phil. So it’s kind of mandatory to go to the matches, for the first few months, anyway.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t be going if I was dating anyone in the team.’ She was almost shouting, it was so noisy in the bar.
‘And are you dating anyone?’
‘Nope. My da would have a fit. I’m doing the Leaving. I’d better be heading off home. The reason I got out of going to Dublin with my folks was I said I’d be studying.’ She drained her Bacardi and Coke and turned to find Lizzie, who was submerged in a gang of Phil’s mates.
‘I’ll give you a lift home. I have my da’s car,’ Jeff offered.
‘You’re going to miss all the celebrations.’
‘I’m getting the bus up to Dublin tonight. I need to put in a few hours at the books: I’ve got a thermodynamics exam tomorrow.’
‘Oh . . . OK, I’ll just grab my coat and let Lizzie know that I’m heading off.’ Valerie was taken aback. It was the last thing she had expected. And a guy as nice as Jeff Egan offering her a lift, at that. She didn’t know if he was dating anyone; now that he was studying in Dublin she didn’t see him around much.
‘Hey, Lizzie, I’m gonna head home, see you at school tomorrow,’ she shouted to her friend.
Lizzie battled her way through the throng. ‘Are you sure you have to go? A gang of us are going to the disco in Hanlon’s.’
With All My Love Page 5