There’s silence. I didn’t expect silence. I have to say ‘Sam?’ a few times just to check that he’s still on the line.
‘I’m here,’ he says dully and I swear to God, now I can actually feel the beads of sweat starting to roll down my face. ‘To be honest, Woodsie, I think right now, that would be a bad idea. A really bad idea.’
For a second I can’t speak. Then more gibberish comes tumbling out, Tourettes-like. ‘Look, I know it’s a big ask, and an even bigger imposition, but Sam, it’s just temporary, just until I find another job, that’s all…’
‘I’ve got my parents coming to stay, so I’m afraid it’s not going to work.’
‘But your house has seven bedrooms! It’s not like we’ll all be on top of each other!’
‘Look, there’s no easy way to say this, but I really feel that…’
The breath catches in the back of my throat. ‘You really feel that…what?’
‘That you and I should take a bit of a break. I need to be honest with you; I’m finding all of this negative media attention very difficult to live with.’
There it is, the one cold, bald sentence that I’ve been dreading this whole, horrendous week. Funny, now that it’s out in the open, a dead calm comes over me. ‘Just so you’re clear on a few things, Sam,’ I say icily, almost spitting, staccato style. ‘The negative media attention as you call it, is dying down. We put out a press release and that’s pretty much killed the story—’
‘Woodsie,’ he interrupts, ‘you know where I’m coming from here.’
I’m cooler now so I let him talk. And out it all comes, all my worst fears, verbalised. He’s worked so hard to get to this level of his career and bad press is the last thing he needs right now, he feels his position is utterly compromised because he and I are so publicly linked together…blah-di-blah-di-blah.
It’s like he’s reading from an instruction manual on how to break up with someone and leave them with absolutely no hope of reconciliation. And all I feel is numbness, like I’m anaesthetised from pain that’s going to hit me like a sledgehammer any minute now.
‘What you’re trying to tell me, Sam, is that you don’t want to be tarred by association with me. Like my fall from grace is something contagious.’
‘Woodsie, look—’
Then I throw in an old classic. What the fuck, I’ve nothing to lose. ‘I thought you loved me. But here you are, at the first real hurdle we’ve ever had to face, bailing out, running for the hills. You’re the single most important person in my life and I mess up once and suddenly you decide that I’m flawed and therefore dispensable. Have you any idea how that makes me feel?’ My voice is shaking so much, I’m amazed I even managed to get that much out coherently.
‘Woodsie, you’re taking this the wrong way…’
‘What other way is there to take it? You’re dumping me over the phone? After two years?’
‘Can we drop the dramatics? No one is dumping anyone. I’m just suggesting we take a break, that’s all.’
It’s an odd thing when the man you love asks you for ‘a bit of time out’. Makes you feel like the first quarter in a basketball game.
‘Woodsie? Are you still there? Because there’s something else I need to say to you.’
I catch my breath, waiting on some crumb of comfort he might throw my way.
‘I’m having my PR people put out a press release to say we’re not together any more. I think it’s best for both of us to put a full stop to this. Don’t you?’
Week from hell: day five
Somehow I manage to get out of bed and haul myself to the one meeting I’ve been postponing all week but have now run out of excuses for. My accountant. You should see me; I’m like a dead woman walking. Literally. Dead on the inside and dead on the outside. The whole way there, all I can think is, If I were to getrun over by that bus…it wouldn’t necessarily be the worst thing that could happen. Given the rate at which my entire life is unravelling, I’d be surprised if Satan wasn’t waiting at the gates of hell for me with a fruit basket and a complimentary robe.
My accountant is called Judy: she’s a widow with four sons all of whom she’s single-handedly putting through schools and colleges, and I’d say she’s never been in debt once in her whole life. I think she realises that there’s rock bottom, followed by another 500 feet of crap before you finally arrive at where I’m at right now. So, for once, she’s going easy on me.
She sympathises over my being turfed out of the house and even manages not to invoke the one phrase that really would send me over the edge, ‘I told you so.’ Then, for a full hour, Judy goes through every sickening, nauseating entry on my credit card statements, household bills, the works, trying to figure what we can write off against my tax bill versus debt that just has to be saddled onto all of my other loans and toxic debts. I’ve even come clean with her about the secret Visa card I’d been hiding all along. At this stage, on the brink of bankruptcy, what’s another few thousand? But, try as I might, even in my numb, deadened state I still can’t tune her out entirely and snippets of past extravagances keep filtering through, stabbing me right in the solar plexus.
Shopocalypse Now. Story of my life to date. Veni, Vidi, Visa.
‘The fifteenth of last month, crystalware from Louise Kennedy, €485.’
I remember. Six beautiful long-stemmed champagne flutes. An anniversary gift for Nathaniel and Eva. Who by the way, I rang this morning to ask/beg/plead for a temporary roof over my head. Eva didn’t even have the good grace to sound concerned about me; just said that they’d now decided to stay down in Marbella with the kids for longer than they’d thought, so it just wasn’t a runner. Anyway, she’d spoken to Sam and knew about our break-up. Knew about it before I did, I’ll warrant. And her final word on the subject? ‘Yeah…you know, we’re really sorry but I suppose these things happen. Shame you won’t be coming away with us this Easter. You’re always such fun to be away with.’
Like I’m some kind of court jester. But however vague and dismissive she sounds, the subtext is clear as the crystal I bankrupted myself to buy for her; Sam was their friend long before I came along, so, foursome or no foursome, if anyone is going to get jettisoned, it’s me. Of course it is. I’m utterly dispensable. In Eva’s eyes, I’m broke = I’m out.
In fact, the only real friend that’s come out of all this for me is Emma. Before I’d even had a chance to ask, she said that I’d be more than welcome to stay at her flat in town. The only person I know who actually offered to put me up. There was a catch though; she’s on a few months’ paid leave from Channel Six and is going down to stay with her parents in Wexford for a few weeks, so she’d already sublet the flat before she’d heard about my, ahem, domestic difficulty. Nice of her to offer though. More than some people. A lot more.
‘So to recap,’ Judy the accountant is still droning on, ‘I’ll have to get on to credit control at Visa and explain the situation. Needless to say, your card will be cancelled forthwith. But, with luck, maybe we can stall them from referring this to their legal team.’ She smiles at me. God love her, she must think this’ll cheer me up. ‘Obviously with a commitment from you to come to a long-term payment arrangement with them,’ she adds.
‘A payment arrangement?’ I say, temporarily stunned out of my deadened stupor. ‘Emm…sorry to state the obvious, Judy, but payment from what exactly? I have nothing.’
‘Come on, you must have valuable items you could possibly sell? When you were earning, did you invest in paintings? Jewellery? Anything?’
I’m too embarrassed to tell her that the only investments I ever made were in handbags/shoes/designer clobber etc, so instead I just focus on dividing the snotty Kleenex that’s lying on my lap into half, then quarters, then eighths and not bursting into tears. Yet again.
‘Jessie,’ she says, softly, ‘you have to understand that I’m trying to help you as much as I can. And I want you to let me know if there’s anything else that I can do for you.’
&nb
sp; ‘You could lend me the bus fare home.’
‘Please, be serious.’
‘I was being serious.’
‘What I meant by that was, do you have any assets at all which I could liquidise for you? Something that would give you a cash injection to get you through this?’
Me? Assets? For a second I want to laugh. I’m a live now, pay later kind of gal.
‘Jessie, I hate bringing up a distasteful subject but needs must I’m afraid. When your father passed away, didn’t he leave you anything at all?’
‘No,’ I mutter dully. ‘Poor Dad had nothing to leave. Well, apart from the house that is.’
Her eyes light up.
‘He left you a house? Explain, please?’
‘Nothing to explain. Dad left our family home equally to my stepmother and me. That’s all.’
‘So this would be the house that you grew up in?’
‘Yup.’
‘And he left it to be divided fifty-fifty between both of you?’
‘Ehhhh…yeah.’
‘So, all this time, you’ve been part-owner of a house and you never told me?’
Swear to God, the woman’s eyes look like they’re about to pop across the room like champagne corks. ‘And was it sold? Is it rented out?’
‘No, my stepfamily still live there. The three of them. But I have absolutely nothing to do with those people and they’ve nothing to do with me. Trust me; it’s an arrangement that suits all of us.’
‘But you’re the legal owner of half of this property.’
‘Judy, I’m not with you. What do you suggest I do here? Turf them all out and sell the place from under them? They’d get a hit man after me. You have no idea what these people are like; they’d have me knee-capped. This is their home.’
‘You needed somewhere to stay, didn’t you? Well here’s the answer staring you in the face.’
For a second I look at her, my mouth I’m sure forming the same perfect ‘O’ that the kids do in the Bisto commercial.
‘Jessie, welcome to the wonderful world of “Got no choice”.’
Chapter Six
It’s like a mantra with me the whole of the next day: I have no choice, I have no choice. I. Have. No. Choice. And in fact, if I don’t get a move on, chances are I’ll come home to find all my stuff in cardboard boxes outside the security gates, the locks changed and new people already living there. All of which fits in beautifully with the recurring theme of my life right now; when you’ve got everything, you’ve got everything to lose.
It’s late Saturday afternoon and I’m still in bed, paralysed. Praying that at this exact moment Sam is doing the same thing. That he’s dead on the inside too. Despondent. Missing me. Willing himself to swallow his pride, pick up the phone and beg me to get back with him.
I’ve been practically a ‘Rules Girl’ since our last, harrowing conversation and by that I mean I’ve only texted him approximately a dozen times and left around eight voice messages on his mobile. Per day, that is.
TV is my only friend, but as I’m avoiding the news for obvious reasons, I stick to the History Channel where there’s bound to be nothing on that’ll only upset me more. An ad comes on where they quote Buddha saying that all suffering stems from failed expectations. Yup, sounds about right to me. Next thing, out of nowhere, there’s a massive, urgent walloping on my hall door downstairs, which my first instinct is to ignore, but then it flashes through my mind, Suppose it’s Sam? Standing there with a huge bouquet of flowers and a speech all prepared about what a complete moron he’s been? I dive out of bed like I’ve just had an adrenaline shot to the heart and race downstairs, still in my pyjamas. Course, it’s not Sam at all though. It’s the estate agent, with a middle-aged-looking couple standing on either side of him like twin bodyguards, wanting to view the house. The estate agent is super-polite and says he’s mortified for disturbing me, but his implication is clear; just disappear for the afternoon and let people who can actually afford to live here get a once-over of the place in peace.
Which is how, about an hour later, I end up back in our humble little corporation estate in Whitehall, on Dublin’s Northside. My first time back to the house since I was eighteen, all of eleven years ago. I’m absolutely dreading what lies ahead and at the same time, so punch drunk by all the body blows I’ve taken in the last week, that the part of me that’s numb just takes over everything; all bodily functions like walking down streets and holding conversations without crying. Anyway, like I said, where I come from is not posh. Nor, from what I can see so far, has much of it changed since I used to live here. It’s basically 1950s corpo-land that’s so close to the airport, you can actually see the wheels going up and down on the bellies of all overhead flights. It also gets so deafeningly noisy at times that you feel like you could be living on the near end of a runway. But it just so happens that deafening noise suits me right now. As does anything that drowns out the loop that’s on eternal long play inside my head: dumpedhomelessjob-lessdumpedhomelessjoblessdumpedhomelessjobless…etc., etc., etc., repeat ad nauseam.
The house is right at the very end of a cul-de-sac, which means that when I get off the bus, I have to do the walk of shame down the whole length of the street, alone, unprotected and totally exposed. Which, I know, makes it sound like I come from Fallujah Square and it’s not that I’m worried about broken bottles or other random missiles being flung at me; no, it’s the kids on this street you’ve got to watch out for. They’re complete savages and their cruelty knows no bounds. Plus, as it’s a warm, balmy evening, they’re all out swarming round the place like midges. Sure enough, right across the street, there’s a gang of them led by a boy of about ten, a dead ringer for the kid in The Omen, all harassing someone I can only presume is a Jehovah’s Witness making door to door calls.
‘You says there’s no Our Lady, you says there’s no Our Lady!’ they’re chanting at the poor gobshite, hot on his heels. I pull the baseball cap I’m wearing down even lower over my forehead and pick up my pace a bit, head down at all times. But just then an elderly neighbour out doing her hedges spots me.
‘Jessie Woods? Mother of God, it is you!’
Shit. Caught. And by a neighbour who’s known me ever since I was a baby, worse luck. ‘Oh, hello, Mrs Foley.’
Right then, stand by for the sideshow. And sure enough, Mrs Foley yells excitedly over at another pensioner who’s busy doing the brasses on her front door. ‘Mrs Brady? Would you look who it is! Jessie Woods herself, as I live and breathe! She’s come home!’
‘Suffering Jesus, I don’t believe it,’ says Mrs Brady, clutching her chest, then abandoning the hall door and waddling over to Mrs Foley’s front gate.
Nononononono, you see, this is exactly what I wanted to avoid. The thing about our street is that it’s considered rude to walk past a neighbour without having at least a ten-minute chat about the most intimate details of your private life. God, the difference between life here and life in Dalkey, where my house – sorry, my ex-house – is. Over on that side of town, I couldn’t even tell you who my neighbours are. Everyone lives behind high security gates and apart from seeing the odd four-wheel-drive zipping in and out, you wouldn’t have a clue who’s living next door to you. There were always rumours flying around that Bono and Enya lived locally, but you’d never, ever get a glimpse of them out buying cartons of milk, Lotto tickets or similar. There was a Southside snobbery at play too; even if you met people locally, say in Tesco’s, they were all far too cultured and sophisticated and up themselves to even admit that they recognised me from TV.
But Toto, I’m not in Kansas any more.
‘Terrible about what happened to you last week, Jessie love,’ says Mrs Foley kindly. ‘Big fuss over nothing if you ask me. And they really fired you just for doing that? For taking the offer of a free car?’
‘Yes, they really did.’
‘But sure I watched the whole thing myself. They made it very hard for you to say no. Nearly forced it on you, they did.’
‘Yeah, you’re right, they did,’ I agree, touched and grateful to her.
‘Well, if you ask me, you should have had more sense, Jessie Woods,’ snaps Mrs Brady, treating me exactly like I’m still the kid she used to give out to for sitting on her front wall and damaging her geraniums. ‘You big roaring eejit. No such thing as a free lunch, sure the dogs on the street could tell you that. You should have told them where to go with their flashy car and then you’d be on the telly tonight, wouldn’t you? Instead of walking the streets, looking like a refugee.’
I’d forgotten that about Mrs Brady. She has a very nasty side to her.
‘So what’ll you do now, love?’ says Mrs Foley gently. ‘The papers all said no one would come near you for work, you poor pet.’
‘Emm…well, I’m actually hoping to take a bit of time out and just, emm…you know, reassess my options,’ I manage to say, weakly.
The pair of them look completely unconvinced, so I try changing the subject instead.
‘So how’s Psycho, Mrs Brady?’ Psycho is her son. He’s my age, we were in junior school together and from what I heard, he went on to spend most of his teenage years in juvenile prison. Everyone calls him Psycho, ever since he was about three. Even his mother.
‘Ah, he’s grand, love. Thanks for asking,’ she smiles proudly, instantly brightening. ‘He’s getting out on TR tomorrow, so we’re having a bit of a knees-up for him. You should drop in if you’re still around. He was always very fond of you. And I happen to know that he’s single at the moment.’
‘Ehh, sorry…TR?’
‘Temporary Release. Please Jesus, with a bit of good behaviour, he could be out before the summer. Only a short stretch this time, thank God.’
I ooh and aah about how brilliant that is and am just about to make my excuses when the gang of kids, led by Omen-boy, spots me.
Personally, I Blame my Fairy Godmother Page 8