Jumping in Puddles

by Claire Allan

  They had all gone, en masse, to the Country Kitchen where Ruth and the rest of the mammies had tea and scones while the children had ice cream. It should have all made her happy – especially the scones. They were light and fluffy and covered in a rich cream and deliciously sweet strawberry jam but she had felt the disquiet growing.

  Poppy had sat on her knee. It was clear she was tired out from the previous night’s excitement. Ruth had hugged her close and enjoyed chattering with her and sharing a bit of craic but at the same time she was aware that by keeping quiet she could be exposing Poppy to the same things her children had been exposed to.

  Not that she thought they had seen too much. She had done her best to keep James’s temper under control when the children were around and, for all his faults, he had been oddly obsessive about not hitting out in front of anyone. Strange, how she had seen the good in that.

  Sure, he was a grumpy beggar with them – and he was strict. There was no way Eimear would have got away with her shenanigans with her dad still in the house. There would have been no late nights and definitely no drinking. And as for Ben Quinn, should he have so much as held her daughter’s hand James would have been out to threaten him with castration should things go further.

  He ruled their house with an iron fist – mostly aimed in her direction.

  She shuddered as she recalled the time he had held her over the stairs and threatened to throw her down. She sort of knew he wouldn’t do it – a lot of the time the threat was enough – but for a split second she had imagined crashing down the stairs and landing in a crumpled heap at the bottom where her children would find her.

  Much as she hated Laura – and much as Poppy was not hers to be concerned about – she felt a wave of guilt and worry wash over her. The scone didn’t look so appealing any more and she pushed it away.

  “Are you not hungry?” Niamh asked, pushing her blonde hair back from her face.

  “Must have had too much to drink,” Ruth replied.

  “Well, once we’re out of your hair, why not have a lie down or go for a walk along the beach and clear your head? It’s a lovely day.”

  Ruth had nodded. Crawling back into bed, after she had cleaned, of course, seemed like a good idea. When she was sleeping she couldn’t be thinking about the mess she was in.

  * * *

  When she was a teenager, Ruth had been obsessed with romance and wild romantic novels like Wuthering Heights. She would tie her dark permed hair on top of her head, wear her longest most flowing skirt and go for a walk along the coast where the wind would whip around her and she would feel like Cathy. She was always looking for Heathcliff.

  James wasn’t exactly dark and brooding, but he was mad about her in that same all-encompassing way Heathcliff was obsessed with the fair Cathy. It was almost obsessive and she was flattered by it. He wanted to have her all to himself and she didn’t mind. It was nice to be wanted and, being young and foolish, when he made arrangements so that she rarely spent time with her family and friends, she lapped it up.

  She didn’t feel suffocated back then. She liked that she was so deliriously in love that they could spend all their waking and sleeping hours together, and by the time the children came along she was too busy to chase up her old friends anyway. She raised her family, got her part-time job and chatted to everyone nineteen to the dozen.

  To the outside observer she was a lucky wife and he was the perfect husband and their children were just gorgeous. But Heathcliff, as every Brontë reader knows, was a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic and now Ruth could see that James always had been too.

  * * *

  Laura waited in the car when James dropped the children off. She didn’t wave, or look in Ruth’s direction. She didn’t look downtrodden and beaten though. Her hair was perfect and she had the glow of someone whose top layer of skin had been scrubbed off with a fancy rock-salt concoction.

  Eimear had a similar glow, and eyebrows that were at least half as thin as they had been when she left. Her nails were painted a pale pink and tiny gems were studded on her thumbs. Her hair was swept back in a new pair of distinctly designer-looking oversized sunglasses and she walked past her mother as if Ruth were a desperate groupie looking for an autograph.

  Thomas looked at her and smiled and walked in while Matthew ran into her arms, squealing with delight.

  “Mammy, Mammy, it was brilliant! And I got new toys! Ben 10 toys. I love them. Do you want to see them? Daddy says I’m a great boy. Can we have pizza for tea? I’m hungry!”

  Ruth couldn’t help but smile. She said a silent prayer of thanks that things had at least gone well and that James had obviously kept his temper. Of course it would be a complete pain in the arse to compete with his super-daddy powers now – but maybe this was nothing more sinister than a sign that he was changing.

  Maybe away from her he wasn’t the violent monster she knew him to be. Maybe it was just her that brought out the worst in him. Maybe she was the useless creature he told her she was, but then again, if she were, would she be coping so well on her own? Maybe they were just wrong for each other and just better off on their own.

  “Thanks,” she said to him, and she meant it. “It looks like they had a great time altogether.”

  “They did,” he replied, a hint of a smile on his face.

  “It’s nice that they got to spend some time with you.”

  “I spend plenty of time with them,” he said, his voice edgy.

  “That’s not what I meant. I just meant, it was nice for you to take them away and all. You and Laura – you know.”

  “They’re my children. Why wouldn’t I take them away?”

  Ruth didn’t like where this conversation was going. If this were a cartoon, huge warning signs surrounded by bright lights would burst into life just above her head and some weird bird-like creature would sound a huge warning klaxon: “Turn back now. Do not pass go. Do not collect £200. Do not get involved in mind games with a man who has a limited ability to use his brain instead of his hands.”

  Then again, he wasn’t likely to completely throw the head in front of Laura. Still, she wasn’t sure she wanted to take the risk.

  “No reason, none at all,” she said, realising any confrontation would take the sheen off the weekend for everyone and from the corner of her eye she could see Matthew watching with a worried look on his face.

  And she realised James didn’t actually have to hit her to hurt her any more.

  30

  Liam woke at ten. He blinked, a feeling that something just wasn’t quite right washing over him. He ran his fingers through his hair and stretched in the bed. It was quiet. Too quiet. His brain felt fuzzy and he was almost tempted to roll over and fall back to sleep. He had been drinking – he knew that from the fact his mouth felt like the inside of one of his socks after a long day on the site.

  Poppy. She wasn’t here. It came into focus, as did the memory of walking Detta home the night before, and singing the theme to the A-Team over in Ruth’s house.

  He hoped, with every fibre of his heart, that he hadn’t made a complete eejit of himself. The combination of the fireworks, the beer and the bit of craic had made him act just that little bit less reserved than he was used to.

  In fairness he couldn’t remember the last time he had been out for the night. Laura hadn’t really liked him going out with the lads on their Friday evening sessions so he tended only to spend time in the pub with them when it was absolutely necessary. He always took them out for a good drinking session for Christmas and St Patrick’s – the rest of the time he had waved them off sorrowfully from his desk on Friday afternoons as he trudged home to Laura and Poppy.

  But he’d loved going home to Laura, he reminded himself. He put his head in his hands, trying to get his brain to catch up with the rest of his body and wake up. Of course he loved coming home to Laura, how could he think it had been any other way?

  It would have been nice, though, to have joined the boys in the pu
b. He wasn’t a party animal – a couple of beers in one of Rathinch’s cosier pubs would have finished off the week just nicely. God knows he worked hard enough and at the weekend he always made sure he was available to take Laura where she wanted to go or run his mother up to Letterkenny for her shopping, or take Poppy to her riding classes at the Equestrian Centre.

  Yes, by week he was a rugged builder commanding a team of weatherworn and testosterone-filled men in proper manly man’s work and at the weekend he might as well have cut off his dangly bits and handed them to the three women in his life on a plate.

  Detta would let him go to the pub for a drink, he thought. Damn it, Detta would probably meet him there and drink pints with him and the boys and not once scold him for swearing or roll her eyes when he suggested stopping off at the chipper for a fish supper on the way home.

  And he knew Detta wouldn’t run off and leave him and his daughter in the lurch.

  Walking downstairs he switched on the kettle and opened the curtains to let the bright autumn sunshine flood in. Very quickly, he closed them again. His eyes were not ready for bright autumn sunshine – they were not even ready for murky autumn sunshine or light of any description.

  Lifting a mug from the cupboard he knocked a plate to the floor and it crashed at his feet, splinters of porcelain bouncing off his toes.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” he swore, slamming the cupboard door so that all the other plates and cups wobbled precariously.

  Leaving the broken plate on the floor, he walked around the breakfast bar and sat down on the sofa. He felt unsettled and grouchy and hung-over to hell but most of all he felt as if a big cloud was lifting from in front of his eyes and he felt angry. He felt like punching a hole in a wall, or a door, or James’s face, but then, he acknowledged, his anger wasn’t with James. It was Laura who had left him and it was Laura who had made him feel like it was all his fault when, he realised with a start, that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

  Agnes would say Laura was the kind of person who had ideas above her station. “Fur coat and no knickers,” Agnes would say, whispering the word “knickers” of course because, as we all know, God does not like references to pants.

  It hadn’t surprised Liam that Agnes and his wife had never become best friends. His mother had taken against almost every woman he had ever brought through her front door – not that there had been many. But Agnes’s dislike of Laura seemed to go deeper than a mother’s protective instinct for her son. It could almost be described as hate, except of course, God didn’t like the word hate either so Agnes never used it.

  They had bristled off each other from the first time they met. Liam had brought her over for tea, and they had stopped off at Mrs Quinn’s shop first for some French Fancies, even though he hated French Fancies. They looked as if they tasted nice but they made his teeth shudder with their sweetness. Agnes, however, liked them so he bought the packet and gave it to Laura, telling her she should hand them over when they arrived.

  He so wanted this meeting to go well. He wanted the two of them to hit it off because he knew he loved her already, even though they’d only been going out for a month. But then he had loved her from the first time saw her – or more accurately from the first time she smiled back at him and acknowledged his existence. She had asked him out – and he liked her ballsy attitude. She knew what she wanted and how she was going to get it and Liam was delighted that she wanted him and knew just how to get him. That plan, of course, involved lots of passionate sex, home-cooked dinners and her parading around his house in his football shirt with her hair hanging loosely around her shoulders and her legs bare, tanned and lovely.

  He couldn’t resist her and while he knew, or sincerely hoped, that Agnes wouldn’t be interested in her long legs and silken hair, he wanted his mother to see her for the amazing person she was – with or without the help of French Fancies.

  Laura had sighed when Liam handed her the box of buns. “I’m sure I don’t need these to impress your mother,” she said, with more confidence than she felt.

  “My mother is like Tesco,” Liam laughed. “Every Little Helps.”

  “I’ll do my best and she can like me or lump me.”

  “But I like you and I’d really like to lump you too,” he replied with a waggle of his eyebrows.

  Laura laughed – her gorgeous full-bodied giggle that made him weak at the knees and hard at the crotch. She threw her hair back and the sunlight glinted through it. It was just like one of the slow-motion moments in films where the leading man falls even more in love with the leading woman as the sun catches her at just the right angle. This was the kind of thing The Carpenters sang about in “Close to You”.

  “I promise you can lump me later, but preferably far away from your mother’s house. I don’t think any amount of French Fancies would endear her to me if she knew we were at it.”

  Liam nodded, because Agnes would have a hissy fit if she knew about the way Laura walked around his house so brazenly in the football shirt. And she would be for the coronary ward had she known what exactly they’d got up to on his kitchen table that morning. She’d have been round like a whippet with a lethal combination of Holy Water and Domestos to give the place a thorough cleansing.

  When they arrived at Agnes’s house – a place which felt as much like a shrine as it did a home – Laura had clutched her box of French Fancies to her and smiled politely.

  Agnes had regarded her with a look that left little to the imagination. It was the same kind of a look you reserved for those blasted chuggers who try to make you as enthusiastic about their charities as they are paid to be, or small yappy dogs that try and pee up against your leg.

  “It’s lovely to meet you,” Laura offered, reaching out her hand.

  “Yes, indeed. Come in. Liam, take her coat and let’s have some tea.”

  They had walked through to the good front room and Liam had instantly noticed his mother had her best wedding-present china out, complete with her favourite little cake stand adorned with enough French Fancies to sink a small ship.

  “Why don’t I be mother?” Laura offered, lifting the teapot to pour for them all.

  And it was at that exact moment that Agnes determined that the pair of them would never be friends.

  They had clashed at almost every meeting since. When it came to the wedding Laura had very definite ideas about what she wanted: a quiet affair with immediate family only. Agnes had been almost apoplectic with anger. “But what about my sisters and Liam’s cousins? And his great-aunt? She won’t be happy about this, no way. Are you shunning my family?” she had raged.

  Laura had stood firm and when Liam tried to act as a go-between, begging her to sneak a few extra people onto the guest list, his wife to be had been able to wrap him around her little finger – much to Agnes’s chagrin.

  “It’s our day,” Laura said, “And this is what I want. I don’t care about your aunts, or cousins, or my aunts or cousins for that matter. I only care about us.”

  She had batted her eyelids and Liam had eventually agreed to her requests. Agnes hadn’t spoken to him for a week after that and when she cried through the ceremony he knew they weren’t tears of joy.

  The next major clash came with Poppy’s arrival.

  “Sure, that’s not an Irish name,” Agnes had sniffed as she cradled her newborn granddaughter.

  “No, but we like it,” Laura had smiled.

  “Is it even a saint’s name?”

  “Not sure. Haven’t really thought about it.”

  “But babies have to have a saint’s name,” Agnes has said, her voice rising an octave.

  “Not these days, they don’t. Anyway she suits the name Poppy, so Poppy she is.”

  “Would you even give her a middle saint’s name?”

  “Actually we were thinking of Lola.”

  Agnes blessed herself and her new granddaughter. “But, that’s a – a – stripper’s name!” she blurted out eventually.

&n
bsp; “Nonsense. We think it suits her,” Laura had answered while Liam just sat there thanking his lucky stars that should blood be shed they were at least already in the hospital. Not even a king-size box of French Fancies from the cash and carry would get him out of this one.

  If Liam was honest with himself he had spent the last eleven years of his life living in his very own no-man’s land between the two of them, waving his flag every now and again to call a truce.

  If he was even more honest with himself he had enjoyed not refereeing their battles over the last couple of months. Sure he listened to them individually tear shreds off each other, but it was much preferable to sitting with them over the dinner table worried about the very real possibility that someone could get stabbed with a fork at a moment’s notice.

  Life with Laura, he realised, had perhaps not been the bed of roses that he had thought it was. His rose-tinted glasses were developing a distinct crack.

  31

  “You look happy,” Lorraine said, looking up from her magazine as Ciara pushed Ella and her pram through the front door.

  “I had a good night, Mum.”

  “I hope you weren’t drinking?” Lorraine asked, raising her eyebrow.

  Ciara blushed.

  “Well, not too much anyway,” Lorraine added, putting her magazine down and lifting her granddaughter from the pram. “You did have this one to mind.”