by Claire Allan
I hug him, holding him tight and he lets me. He pulls me closer and we stand there – in the garden – in front of the neighbours and anyone who wants to look or cares to see, and hug until I hear Jack and Lily come running into the garden looking for their share of the action.
Driving home, I can’t help but smile. Lily and Jack are chattering in the background like a pair of cute baby birds. I know their excitement will only increase when they find out we have proper chip-shop chips waiting at home.
“Auntie Grace,” Lily chirps and I look at her through my rear-view mirror. “Granny Mammy says we are the Six Aminos – what’s an amino?”
I laugh, her childish mispronunciation making me feel warm and fuzzy inside. I answer, “An amigo is a special friend. You, me, Jack, Grandad, Granny Mammy and your mummy are all special friends.”
“Yes, we are,” she grins, “and Uncle Aidan too!” “Yes, Uncle Aidan too.”
❃ ❃ ❃
The music is thumping in the background and I’m struggling to hear Aidan over the noise.
“Is everything okay?” he shouts down the phone as I press the receiver tightly to my ear in the hope of hearing him a bit clearer.
“Just fine, Aidan!” I shout. “I just wanted to say I love you.”
“Are you okay?”
“Perfect!” I shout and hang up.
Daisy is staring at me from across the room, a silly grin on her face. “Grace is in lo – ove!” she sings. “I love it when things go right.”
Chapter 26
I can’t remember the last time I went shopping in my lunch-time for something other than nappies, Calpol or a wilted ham sandwich and yet here I am, standing in the middle of Debenhams – at the Pineapple concession – looking at the self-same dancewear I mocked Daisy for buying two weeks ago.
I pull out a black, off-the-shoulder, slouch top with the Pineapple logo emblazoned in pink across the front. Next I pull out a pair of funky boot-cut tracksuit bottoms and make my way to the changing rooms. Before now the changing rooms in Debenhams have been my least favourite place in the world. Yes, I’ll have sat there happily advising Daisy on what looks fabulous on her (almost everything) and what looks naff on her (virtually nothing) – that much I was fine with. What I could never stand though was stepping into the teeny, tiny changing rooms with their huge mirrors, which I swear they bought at one of those fun-house places because surely no one is that fat?
Now I don’t mind. Every curtain on every changing room is now my Golden Curtain of Dreams, and while I know not everything will fit and I know that I’m still on the wrong side of a Size 16, I know that I’m getting there and I have nothing to fear any more.
I slip out of my RBTs and into my new ensemble. I scrape my hair back in a shaggy ponytail and turn 360 degrees slowly to check all angles. Not bad for a fat bird. I get dressed and start to make my way out of the changing rooms, making my mind up that I will buy one of those fancy designer water-bottles all to myself before tomorrow night’s dance class.
Head held high, I head to the counter to pay for my purchases and straight into the path of one Lizzie O’Dowd.
The years have not been kind. I always wonder if I look like a woman hurtling towards her thirties and now I realise I don’t. I’m quite a youthful-looking twenty-nine in comparison to Lizzie, who now looks closer to her forties than I would have thought possible. She looks fatter too, fatter than me anyway.
This is my moment. My chance to shine, to tell her she did not defeat me. This is where I tell her just how fabulous my life has become, where I play out years of fantasies, where I shove my business card in her hand and let her know I am somebody. This is where it all ends – where I let go and move on. This is perfect.
I look at her, noting a faint glimpse of recognition in her eyes, and I smile at her, moving closer towards the queue and muttering under my breath, just as I did with Louise, “Fuck off!”
I am free.
❃ ❃ ❃
Dressed in my Pineapple ensemble, with my Pineapple twin Daisy beside me, sipping from our Pineapple water- bottles I feel excited. There are no nerves – no sense of impending doom. I am wearing a pair of rather fetching dance shoes, not dissimilar to the ones they wear on Strictly Dance Fever. They even have a little smattering of diamanté on the T-bar.
I feel as invigorated as I did at sixteen when I was imagining I was that backing singer for Bros. All that is missing is Matt Goss dropping his kecks and revealing his American-flag boxer shorts. I’ve been having imaginary conversations in my head all day where I reveal ‘I’m a dancer’. I find myself standing taller, pointing my toes and thinking about poise.
There is a strange sense of irony that I’m here, in my old dance school – the school to which I never allowed myself to go – aged twenty-nine and more confident than I have ever been. I let a little squeak of excitement leave my lips and I ask Daisy to pinch me.
“Are we really here, Daisy? Am I going to do this?”
She nods, putting her arm around my waist, “We are and you are.”
Two women walk to the front of the class and tell us it is time for a warm-up. This week we are dancing the merengue, I’m told – a dance from the Dominican Republic.
“Loosen your hips and get ready to feel the music,” the short blonde teacher shouts, turning on the stereo and letting the sexy Cuban beats fill the room. “Now sway your hips!”
She steps from side to side in a fluid and sexy movement. I join in, instinctively knowing what to do. My body seems to pick up the rhythm. I should be self- conscious but I’m not. I don’t care. I’m good at this. My body is good at this – spare tyres and all. I want to walk to the front of the class and show them all how to do it. I’m lost in this music and it feels amazing.
❃ ❃ ❃
I don’t feel this appointment is necessary. I was having quite a great time sitting at my desk, writing, editing furiously – putting the finishing touches to my article, enjoying the buzz of the office, the banter with Sinéad and Erin.
Louise has been behaving. She has left me in charge of the layout of the Life Change spread but has stopped doing her spoiled-brat routine. She managed to tell me I looked as if I had lost weight yesterday, and the compliment didn’t choke her.
Nonetheless I made a commitment to be here for at least four weeks and I suppose I’d better keep it. The room is as calm as it was last week, the chimes are tinkling softly in the breeze and the fresh jasmine smells permeate the room. Cathy sits opposite me, her notebook poised, her ear ready to listen and she waits for me to start.
Today we are supposed to talk about Aidan. Apparently it’s all about discussing the symptoms and the problems to find the cause but not the blame. Or something.
But there is so much just waiting to bubble out that Aidan seems like one small fish in a very big pond. There is Jack, Daisy, Máire, Louise, even Lizzie to talk about.
I want to tell Cathy how they have shaped me, affected me, changed me. I’m just not sure how to start.
“Don’t worry,” she says, as if sensing my thoughts. “In your own time.
I stand up and start to walk around the room, walking being the only way to keep up with what is racing through my mind.
“I’m getting better,” I say. “I don’t feel like crying. In fact I haven’t cried since Tuesday and even then, those were happy tears.”
She nods.
“I feel as if I’m seeing the world for the first time in a long time and it’s bright, and colourful and full of hope. When I see Jack and his excitement for things, I feel it too. I allow myself to feel it. I don’t push the emotion away. I don’t have that wee voice telling me I’m making an eejit of myself any more.”
“What do you think has changed?” Cathy asks, and it’s a good question.
I find myself repeating that oft-used phrase of last month.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the happy pills, maybe it is these sessions, or singing ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ with a
room full of strange adults.”
“That’s good, Grace. It’s good to know you feel better. And how about your relationships?”
“Aidan and I are trying again,” I say triumphantly. “We are taking it slowly but surely, and talking a lot.” (I’m guessing Cathy would approve of us talking a lot.)
“And your parents?” “It’s all good.”
“Did you talk to them?” “Yes and no.”
She raises an eyebrow (in a manner not too dissimilar to the delectable Dermot).
“I didn’t chicken out,” I protest. “I just don’t see what good it would do. We’ve all made peace with it now.”
She looks as if she doesn’t believe me. “You don’t put a sticking plaster on an amputated leg,” she says, avoiding my gaze as I stare at her in bewilderment.
I sit down, deflated by her belief that all is not right with my world.
It is her turn to walk, and she does. She stands up and walks to the window, opening it just a touch more so that the wind chimes rattle together. The breeze is still warm though and, as I watch the gentle billowing of the voile curtains, I have to force myself to focus on the task in hand. “My leg isn’t falling off,” I say, gesturing at my extremities, struggling to find a clever put-down and failing.
“What I’m saying, Grace, is that you feel good now. You’ve had a counselling session. You are taking tablets. You have lost a little weight – but you won’t get better, really better, until you have laid your demons to rest.”
“I’m not stupid and I’m not sick either,” I say, a note of anger in my voice. God, why when I’m doing well does someone have to try and knock me down again? I tut and put my head in my hands. I’m tempted to cover my ears to block out this waffle.
“Don’t get angry,” Cathy says, sitting down again opposite me.
Immediately I jump up again. To any observers this must look like one fucked-up version of Musical Chairs. “angry!” I bark. “I’m telling you I’m doing okay and you are as good as calling me a liar. I feel alive this week. I’ve not felt this way in such a long time. I don’t have a fecking amputated leg!”
“I’m not saying you haven’t come a long way,” Cathy counters, “but don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ve completed the journey.” Here she is with her metaphors and flowery language again. I wish she would call a spade a spade, or a mentalist a mentalist.
“Why do you want me to hurt my family?” I ask, sitting down defeated.
She doesn’t get up this time. “I don’t want you to hurt anyone, but I want you to help yourself. Get the feelings out there. You don’t have to tell them, but you need to clarify this for yourself. Think about what you are feeling and why. Write it all down and then you can decide what to do. Hang on to it or let it go. You’re a writer, Grace; you know how to use words. Use them to your advantage.” She pauses, sitting forward, looking me straight in the face, waiting for my response.
I sigh, head in hands again.
She reaches for my hand, gently touching it, pulling it from my face. “I’ve seen too many people think they’ve dealt with their problems when all they’ve been doing is sweeping them under the carpet. I don’t want that to happen to you.”
“I went to see them the other night, my parents,” I say, in case she doesn’t realise who I’m talking about. “I watched them as they played with Jack and Lily. I watched the joy on their faces. I saw the happiness those two children brought and who am I to be so selfish as to have wanted that all to myself?”
“You were four,” Cathy says, as if that is an excuse for acting like a spoiled brat.
“I was spoiled and selfish,” I say, “too spoiled and selfish to realise how much they did love me.”
“You have told me you were scared.”
“Of course, I was. Mammy is pregnant one day, the next she isn’t. The baby is gone and no one tells me why. They just cry and Daddy disappears and I can’t make it better.” “You were four,” she repeats, as if that is an excuse for not being able to make it better.
“I was glad of it. I didn’t want another baby. I wanted Mammy and Daddy all to myself. I wanted them to stop trying because every time they tried, and every time they failed, they stopped being my mammy and daddy for a while and I needed them.”
“You were four.”
“I was only four,” I say, and start to cry big gulping tears.
I can’t believe I’m still here, stuck in this childish moment. I get up again, these damn thoughts racing and I walk around, sniffing and weeping periodically.
“Twenty-five years,” I say, “Twenty-five fecking years of feeling like a consolation prize!”
Cathy poises her pen over her notepad. I sense she feels she is getting somewhere now. She is getting to the crux of the matter. She has made me cry. As her pen moves across her paper I imagine she is writing ‘CONSOLATION PRIZE’ in bold letters with asterixes and doodles on the side.
“Are you only talking about your family here?” she asks.
And I scream, “Of course I’m fecking not! I’m talking about everything and everyone and never feeling good enough – not until now – and now that I do feel good enough I’m so damned angry that I wasted so much time not feeling good enough.”
The writer in me knows that sentence was clumsy and grammatically pish-poor, but there is no other way to express my feelings.
I’ve felt not good enough my whole life – and why? – because of something that was beyond my control and got locked in my four-year-old brain? How stupid was I? I have let it colour every experience, every thought for twenty-five years, and I’ve let what should have become a distant childhood memory become this colossal issue that has almost destroyed me.
“When I was in secondary school, I had a best friend,” I start. “Her name was Eve and she was so cool. She liked Bros too and we would sit and chat for hours in each other’s houses, listening to our tapes, making scrapbooks, planning trips to London where we would marry our idols. We had sleepovers at least once a week and of course we never slept. We just talked all night. Eve was like the sister I never had and we were inseparable. We both hated the school bully Lizzie O’Dowd.” I pause, wondering briefly if Cathy knows or is indeed related to my arch-nemesis. I feel compelled to watch for any flicker of recognition in her face. There is none. I decide to carry on. “We would sit for hours and plot our revenge on Lizzie and her cohorts, thinking how much we would laugh and gloat when we were married to the Goss brothers and she was left on the shelf. When I was a teenager, I auditioned for the dance school. I loved dancing,” I twirl around for effects, the tears still dripping from my face. “I thought I was pretty damned good. I was pretty damned good!” I stomp my foot and sit down. “The next day I went into school and overheard Lizzie tell her cronies I had made a holy show of myself. That hurt, but what hurt more was that sitting there, laughing beside her, was Eve. We never spoke again. She became part of Lizzie’s group and the worst of it was that I can’t say I blamed her. I mean, there was me, Grazing Grace, all on my own – and then there was Lizzie, with all the cool girls. I’d probably have done the same, but I didn’t get the chance.”
“And this renforced the notion that you weren’t good enough?”
“I was there for Eve until something better came along,” I sigh. “I was the consolation prize, the starter before the main course, the Tesco Value version of what a friend should be.”
Cathy writes some more, and I talk some more. “When I started at Northern People I thought I had laid my demons to rest, and when I was appointed Health and Beauty Editor, I was convinced I had left them behind, but they had just gone into hiding. When I got pregnant – and fat, and miserable – I got ‘promoted’,” I find myself making quotation marks around the word because the world and his mother knows a move to Parenting Editor was far from a promotion. “I wasn’t good enough any more. I wasn’t beautiful enough, or talented enough or presentable enough. I had baby-sick on my top and stretch-marks just about
everywhere. They brought Louise in, 5’11” of sex appeal. She was good enough,” I finish bitterly.
“But you’ve told me Louise isn’t thought of that highly?”
“I know that now,” I say, “but I didn’t then. Just like now I realise that Eve was just trying to be liked, to be popular, but then all I could see was the rejection. It’s like I’ve pushed people away my whole life because I’m waiting for them to move on. People like Jack, like Daisy, like Aidan.”
I sit back, my hands resting on my legs, totally exhausted. It’s hard work getting better.
“Have you ever explained to these people why you pushed them away?” Cathy asks.
Here we go with the fecking letters again.
Chapter 27
I had left Cathy Cook’s office, a snivelling mess. Every feeling of inadequacy had come surging through my body and I had forced myself to take a long walk along the riverside to calm the thumping of my heart. I’m sure I looked as if I was on day-release from the local funny farm.
I cried, talked to myself and gestured wildly while walking as fast as my legs could carry me.
I had been walking for an hour when I finally ran out of puff. I sat down, staring at the gentle lapping of the Foyle against the quay and I let go of it. I let the pain go. I said goodbye to it and I decided to move on. At least now I understood why I had felt so wretched for so long. Surely it was a good thing that I was now in control of my own thoughts?
I still wasn’t going to write those damned letters though. Fate had other plans, or should I say Mammy had other plans.
She and Daddy had had a chat – just after we left on the night my father had told me I was always enough and they decided to take matters into their own hands. Mammy phoned Cathy and asked if it would be at all possible to arrange a family counselling session. Cathy in turn contacted me and asked me would I mind. At the time I was deleting the 126 th attempt at my letter to them and I was too weary to argue. If I’m honest, I’m always too tired to argue with Mammy. She always wins, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred it is with good reason.