How could I live without her? I wondered.
I ran around to the back of the house, past the hexagonal stones taken from the Giant’s Causeway and placed attractively in the garden, and sure enough the back door was open. I entered the house and leapt up the stairs faster than Sebastian Coe at the Olympics. I burst into Lesley’s bedroom.
‘I’m not wearing any make-up!’ were her first words.
I was very relieved as these did not sound like the words of a dying woman. Lesley was tucked up in bed in her Marks & Spencer’s dressing gown with a million hankies, a hot water bottle and the pink cuddly dog I had bought her for Valentine’s Day that year. Although just a few years ago I had received fourteen Valentine’s Day cards, this year I had received only one.
‘Don’t look at me!’ Lesley sniffled miserably.
‘How could I ever not look at you?’ I said, smiling. ‘Is it your asthma? Do you need your puffer?’
‘No, it’s the friggin’ flu,’ replied Lesley, ‘and my hair’s awful!’
I was relieved that the illness was not life-threatening and climbed up onto the bed beside a mountain of used pink tissues.
‘So I don’t need to examine your big breaths?’
Lesley laughed weakly. ‘I don’t like you seein’ me like this,’ she said.
‘Sure you saw me when I boked into your Mummy’s beige bidet.’
‘It’s Sahara Gold.’
‘Well I think you’re just as beautiful without your make-up, anyway.’
Lesley let out six consecutive sneezes. ‘Och, you’re just saying that. You’ve no idea!’
‘I’m not! I mean it, so I do.’
‘Will you make me a Lemsip and a hot Ribena?’
I ran downstairs to the huge kitchen, boiled the kettle, prepared the remedies and carried them upstairs on a floral tray.
‘There you are now,’ I said, administering the healing potions. ‘I’ll look after you.’
‘Will you, Tony?’ Lesley asked, looking up at me with her lovely eyes as she sipped Ribena from her favourite mug with the ponies on it.
‘I’ll always look after you,’ I added.
‘What do you mean?’ Lesley asked before six more sneezes.
What do I mean? I wondered.
Then suddenly, impulsively, I knew exactly what I meant. I cuddled up very close to my girl in bed; Joyce Huggett would have approved as I was fully-clothed and Lesley was wearing more layers of clothing than if she had not been in bed at all. I held her close in my arms, and realised that I was going to ask her a very important question. The most important question a man could ask a woman. The moment was spoiled slightly when Lesley sneezed again and the hot water bottle sandwiched between our bodies almost scalded me in the region of my jimmy joe.
‘Will you marry me?’ I asked lovely Lesley from up the country.
‘Of course I will!’
‘Really?’
‘Yes!’
‘No kiddin’?
‘Aye!’
‘Even though I get on your nerves sometimes?’
‘Yes!’
‘Even though I’m just some wee lad from up the Shankill?’
‘Yes, but you’ve got some potential!’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes!’
‘So we’re getting married then?’
‘Yes! I love you, Tony.’
‘I love you too, so I do.’
‘What will Mummy say?’
‘She’ll say “What am I going to wear?”’
We laughed.
‘I thought you were never going to ask. You’ve no idea!’ Lesley said, beaming through a handful of tissues before launching into yet another sneezing fit. I was going to marry a beautiful serial sneezer.
We lay together on the bed and hugged and talked until we realised it was dark and we hadn’t even put the light on. We agreed that it was better not to announce to the Christian Union that I had proposed while we were in bed together. We talked for hours about our hopes and dreams for the future. We would get engaged as soon as possible – if I could borrow enough money to buy a diamond and sapphire ring like the one Charles bought Diana – and on the one strict condition that the engagement ring would not be purchased in Argos. Then we would graduate and get jobs so we could afford to buy a house and get married. This would mean official sex – approved by Joyce Huggett – and I could leave Bo Derek behind in the sand dunes on Portstewart Strand forever. I’d get a job as a television presenter on Blue Peter and Lesley would become a trainee manager for Marks & Spencer and we’d earn so much money that I could afford my first real leather jacket and Lesley could continue to guarantee employment for the staff in Logan’s boutique near Ballymena. Or maybe we would go to Africa to save the hungry children and sacrifice all our material possessions instead. Or perhaps we would move back to Belfast and live on the peace line and work to bring peace to Northern Ireland or Lesley could get a job as a prison governor and I could become a famous war reporter. Or we might buy a pebble-dashed chalet bungalow in Magherafelt with a Leylandii hedge and a bidet, or maybe move to a cottage in Glarryford and rescue a wee dog and Lesley would look after it in case I accidentally killed it. We could buy a brand new Renault 5 or a Porsche if we wanted to and buy nasturtium borders and variegated shrubs in garden centres and go on camping holidays to the Scottish Highlands or go to Egypt to see the pyramids.
Then after a few years, if Lesley could get over her fear of childbirth, we would have two perfect children and take them on day trips to Belfast Zoo on Bank Holiday Mondays and send them to an integrated school so they wouldn’t grow up to hate Catholics. Then maybe I would become a famous film director and produce a science-fiction blockbuster that Stephen Spielberg would be proud of and the BBC would beg me to write an episode of Doctor Who and Benny and Björn would ask me to direct the ABBA reunion concert in the year 2000. I would win an Oscar and be so rich that we could start our own charity to save whole villages in Africa. Lesley would open a designer boutique on the Lisburn Road and it would be such a success that she would buy Anderson & McAuley’s in Royal Avenue and change the name to Evans & Macaulay’s. Our children would grow up to become even more successful than us but would never forget where they came from, and Lesley and I would become grandparents but still be trendy. Eventually when we were very old, we would retire and move back to Porstewart where it had all begun and live in a house with a lovely view of the Atlantic Ocean and the beautiful sunsets over Portstewart Strand and go for walks up and down the prom and buy pokes in Morelli’s on a good day, if our arthritis wasn’t too bad. Then finally one day when we were both old and tired, we’d die in each other’s arms and go up to heaven and be together forever with God and Big Isobel and all the other wee good livin’ folk that had ever lived.
Lying there together in the darkness, it was just the two of us. For now this was our secret, and our hopes and dreams were ours alone. We were proper adults now, about to take on proper grown-up responsibilities like sex (definitely), a mortgage (possibly), a job (hopefully) and a dog (riskily).
As I walked home that night I decided to take a detour and walk along the empty beach in the moonlight. I was completely alone under a sky full of twinkling stars with a carpet of soft sand beneath my ankle boots. The waves rolled in and out quietly and the sea spray shone silver in the moonlight. I said a quiet prayer, thanking God for creating this moon and the sea and Lesley and me. I whistled a happy tune like Anna in The King and I but more manly, obviously, like Yul Brynner. I walked to the end of the strand, climbed the Second World War sentry post and stood on top of it as if I was Marcellus in Hamlet and nothing was rotten in the state of anywhere. This was where I had got the green Simca stuck in the sand only a few short years ago! So much had changed since then. Big Isobel would definitely be proud of how ‘all growed up’ I was. I took deep breaths of moist, salty air and stood very still, appreciating the beauty of the moonlight reflecting on the River Bann. The west of the Bann and the
east of the Bann seemed at peace with each other. I could almost imagine I was living in a place of absolute harmony, like the Westy Disco on a Saturday night.
I silently marvelled at how far I had come in my life since I was a wee paperboy delivering the Belfast Telegraph for Oul Mac up the Shankill. To think that just a few years ago I was a naive breadboy for the Ormo bakery burdened by nothing but handfuls of plain and pan loaves; now I was betrothed and about to become the first person in my family ever to graduate from university! In the post office on the West Circular Road my mother would tell Mrs Grant and all the women in our street how she would have to buy a hat for my graduation, and in the searing heat of the foundry on the Springfield Road my father would boast to his workmates that a son of his had got an Honours degree and would never have to work there.
I still had no job, no money and nowhere of my own to live, but I felt I had come of age – like The Karate Kid but without the violence. My head was bursting with excitement as to what was going to happen next, and though the future was a mystery, I believed it would be kind. I was about to go forth on a great adventure, just like Indiana Jones, but with fewer whips and Nazis.
I stood alone on the beautiful beach in the darkness, feeling happy and thankful. I searched for a slim stone to skim across the waves in celebration and found one that was perfect. As my stone skipped three times over the surface of the water and disappeared beneath the waves, I knew it was true. There was absolutely no doubt about it. I was all growed up now, so I was!
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to acknowledge all the support I have received from bookstores, libraries, festivals, voluntary groups, universities and schools at home and abroad.
I am grateful to Kim Plyler and to all the team at Sahl Communications for managing my book tours in the USA.
Special thanks to Jane McCarter in the New York Irish Center; George Heslin of the 1st Irish Theatre Festival; Neville Gardner of Donegal Square in Bethlehem, PA; Pat and Mike O’Connor Thomas in Ballston Spa, NY; and the Moser Family in Goshen, IN for their generous support and hospitality.
I want to acknowledge the continued encouragement, support and advice of my literary agents, Paul and Susan Feldstein.
Last but not least, I would like to thank Patsy Horton, Helen Wright, Kerri Ward, Jim Meredith and all the team at Blackstaff Press for their enthusiasm, hard work and warm support in publishing All Growed Up.
ALSO BY TONY MACAULAY
eBook
EPUB ISBN 978-0-85640-167-1
KINDLE ISBN 978-0-85640-170-1
Paperback
ISBN 978-0-85640-910-3
www.blackstaffpress.com
Follow Tony on Twitter @tonymacaulay
All Growed Up Page 24