The Mystery of Mercy Close

by Marian Keyes

  As well as novels, Marian writes short stories and articles for magazines and other publications. She is also involved with various charities – she contributed to a multi-authored book, Yeats is Dead!, where all the royalties were donated to Amnesty International. She has published two collections of her journalism, titled Under the Duvet and Further Under the Duvet, and donated all royalties from Irish sales to the Simon Community, a charity which works with the homeless. More recently, Marian wrote a beginner’s baking book, Saved by Cake, which gave an extremely honest account of her battle with depression.

  Marian was born in Limerick in 1963 and brought up in Gavan, Cork, Galway and Dublin; she spent her twenties in London, but is now living in Dún Laoghaire with her husband Tony. She includes among her hobbies: reading, movies, shoes, handbags and feminism.

  Q: On average, how long does it take you to write a book?

  A: I’ll tell you how long! A couple of years ago on a book tour in Australia, I had the great privilege of sitting next to a woman at lunch who asked me how many books I ‘churned out’ a year. ‘Three?’ She suggested. ‘Four?’ ‘Oh God no,’ sez I. ‘Twelve. One a month. Only it doesn’t take me the whole month to churn it, it only takes about a week and I spend the other three weeks at a top-notch spa having lymphatic drainage on my thighs.’

  No, sadly, mes amis, I said no such thing. I only thought of that fabulous reply several sleepless nights later. Nor did I enact scenario number two and tell her to ‘fuck off’. No, what I did was stammer apologetically that actually it took a full two years for me to ‘churn out’ a single book.

  Q: Do you ever base your characters on real people?

  A: Christ alive, are you mad! No. No, no, no. That would be so cruel – and I’d end up with no friends. But that doesn’t stop people assuming that I’ve stuck them in a book. I was told a great story about an ex-boyfriend who, when he heard I’d written my first book, leapt up from the pub where he’d heard the news, abandoning his pint, ran down the street to the nearest bookshop, rattled the shut door and begged the security guard to let him in so that he could get his hands on the book because he was convinced I’d written all about him and his unusually small mickey. Which of course I hadn’t (his mickey wasn’t even that small, certainly no worse than average). But really, it’s far more fun to just make people up

  Q: Do you have a particular method or approach to writing?

  A: I always start with a character and really work on them until I know them: as I said, they’re never based on real people but maybe have attributes of a number of different people. And I generally have a subject I’m thinking about – and then I put the two together. That sounds so simple, but it isn’t.

  I used up my own life in the first three books (although they weren’t autobiographical), and I’ve had to do research since. I find research very difficult as I have to ask people impertinent questions, which makes me very uncomfortable.

  I never have the whole book planned out – I feel I’d lose interest if I did.

  Q: Who or what was your biggest influence in deciding to become a writer?

  A: I’m not sure I did decide to become a writer. I started writing short stories as an escape, and to entertain myself and my friends. I would have been terrified to call myself a writer – it was only a couple of years later when I gave up my day job that I realized that that was what I was. In terms of storytelling, my mother was a big influence; her family had a great oral storytelling tradition.

  Q: Do you have any tips for aspiring writers?

  A: Keep backups. Also: firstly, stop talking about it and start writing it word by word. Formally set aside time to write – respect your book enough not to try to fit it in, in bitty gaps, around the rest of your life. Better still, try to write at the same time every day; this seems to trigger the subconscious into readiness.

  Don’t be surprised if your first efforts are shockingly bad – indeed, expect to marvel at the gap between what you want to say in your head and how it appears on the page. But persevere: chances are it will improve.

  Beware of setting yourself up as the ‘new’ Maeve Binchy or the ‘new’ someone else; it’s always cringingly obvious. Instead, write in your own unique voice and be proud of it.

  Write what you know – and if you don’t know it, be prepared to research it.

  Finally – enjoy it! If you enjoy writing it, chances are that people will enjoy reading it.

  Q: What are your favourite books?

  A: I read quite widely, but thrillers are always a favourite. Sometimes I get fixated by writers – I had a spell when I read everything Alexander McCall Smith has written, and wondered how he would take it if I called round to his house and asked if I could move in, and live with him like a household pet. At the moment I’m mildly obsessed with Michael Connelly. I also had a Dennis Lehane spell. I’m also very fond of non-fiction, especially any accounts of those who have suffered ‘My drink and drugs hell’. The gorier the better.

  I’m also trying to educate myself about – God, I’m not sure of the right word – feminism? ‘Women’s issues?’ Anyway, whatever it’s called, I’ve been trying to read seminal feminist books because my generation were never encouraged to do so – we were told that the battles of the sexes was over and we were all equal now. But I sort of couldn’t help noticing that women are still second-class citizens and, you know, it really annoyed me but I didn’t have the language to articulate how I felt, so I decided to educate myself in the subject.

  Q: When you’re not writing, how do you pass the time with your family?

  A: Doing good works amongst the deserving poor.

  Also, lying on the couch watching Big Brother, and if not available counting the days until it comes back.

  Hanging around shoe shops.

  Looking at net-a-porter on the Internet and complaining about the prices.

  Wondering why my fingernails always split when they reach their optimum length.

  Sometimes I make curries and buy socks.

  There’s this woman I know from bridge, Mona Hopkins, a lovely woman she is, even if I must admit I’m not that keen on her myself, and she said a great thing the other day. I was expecting her to say, ‘Two no trumps,’ but instead she comes out with a saying about her children. She says, ‘Boys wreck your house and girls wreck your head.’ Isn’t that a marvellous bit of wisdom? ‘Boys wreck your house and girls wreck your head!’ And God knows it’s the truest thing I’ve heard in a long time. I should know. I have five girls. Five daughters. And let me tell you, my head is wrecked from them.

  Although, now that I think of it, so is my house …

  There’s Claire, my eldest. She was born to myself and Mr Walsh in 1966, the Swinging Sixties, although we had no truck with ‘swinging’ in Ireland and nobody minded one little bit. Why would we ‘swing’ when we had praying? Also we were after getting our very own Irish television station, RTÉ, so there was plenty to keep us occupied. Not that we knew what ‘swinging’ actually entailed – wearing short dresses and false eyelashes, we suspected. We were delighted with Claire, of course, although I suspect Mr Walsh would have preferred a boy. She was a high-spirited child, a cheeky imp, if you want the God’s honest truth, and I found her hard to handle, always with the backchat and the opinions. But if I’d known what I’d be getting further down the road with Helen, I’d have been on my knees every day, thanking God for my good little girl.

  For a while it looked like Claire was going to do things my way – she went to university and got a degree, then she married an accountant. But then it all went ‘tits-up’. (Is it okay for me to say that? I never know which slang is acceptable for a woman of my age and station to use and which isn’t.) Yes, everything went ‘tits-up’ for Claire, because her husband left her the day she gave birth to their first child, but she’s a born survivor and she’ll tell you all about it herself in Watermelon.

  In 1969 Margaret came along, and I know a mother can’t have a favourite child, bu
t if I was to have one, it would be Margaret. A good, good, good girl. Obedient, truthful, all of that. A small bit dull, if we’re to be completely frank, but no one is perfect. And I wouldn’t be mad on her ‘look’ – like, would it kill her to put on a lipstick, I sometimes think. The funny thing is that her ‘style icon’ is Kate Middleton, who is so highly groomed and ‘pulled-together’. I too am a great admirer of Kate Middleton – her hair is ‘stunning’ and I saw nothing wrong with those wedge espadrilles.

  Margaret never caused me a moment’s worry. I thought I had that daughter parcelled away nicely, until, out of the blue, she left her lovely reliable husband, Garv, and ran away to Los Angeles – where her friend Emily lived – and got up to all kinds of high jinks, the half of which I do not know and do not want to know. (That’s a lie. I’d love to know it all. I hate when they don’t tell me things, but Helen says the shock would kill me. Anyway, the full story is in Angels, if you’re interested in finding out yourself.)

  Rachel, my middle child, was born in 1970, shortly after Mr Walsh’s job took us from Limerick to Dublin. Rachel, I’ll come clean, was a funny child, by turns defiant, then sensitive, then defiant again. It didn’t help that Claire and Margaret had formed a rock-solid ‘alliance’ and wouldn’t let Rachel play with them.

  Then something happened in 1974, a few months after Anna was born, which might have ‘affected’ Rachel. My father died and even though there’s no such thing as depression, I will admit I went a bit ‘odd’. Claire and Margaret had each other, and my sister Kitty came to mind baby Anna because Mr Walsh had to go to Manchester for a while for his job, and I suppose that between the jigs and the reels, Rachel didn’t get all the attention she needed.

  But she made up for it later in life. In spades, as they say! (Or do they? Are we allowed to say ‘spades’ any more? Sacred Mother of Divine, all this ‘PC stuff is a minefield. There I’d be, saying a word I’d been saying all my life and suddenly everyone would be looking at me like I’d just murdered someone. Did you know you can’t say ‘Oriental’ any more? All of a sudden, that’s banned! It’s ‘Asian’ now. But Asia is huge. How can you know what part of Asia the person is from just by them saying ‘I’m Asian’?)

  Rachel spent a while living in Prague then she moved to New York, and somewhere along the line, didn’t she get addicted to drugs! There was some sort of a botched suicide attempt and she ended up having to go to rehab. (She’ll tell you about it herself in Rachel’s Holiday.) Those were the days when no one went to rehab. Nowadays, of course, the dogs in the street ‘check in’ every five minutes. In fact, you’re more likely to be shunned if you haven’t gone to rehab, but at the time it was an awful shock and I was very ashamed of her.

  So, like I said, in 1974 Anna – another girl! – came along and I just ran out of energy. I stopped trying to mould my children to be like me. Feck her, I thought, she can do what she likes. So she lived in her own little world. A sweet little thing, I’m not saying she wasn’t, but very vague. Away with the fairies is the best way of putting it. Feet planted firmly in mid-air. Obsessed with tarot cards and fortune tellers and mysticism and all that codology. And the clothes on her – long, streely, floaty, hippie things. One night she nearly burned the house down, tie-dyeing a coat in a big saucepan on the hob. Another night, her father’s beloved golf trophies were nearly stolen because she’d come home, out of her ‘box’, and left her key in the front door, for any passing burglar to open and pop in, which one duly did. If it wasn’t for the fact that Mr Walsh got up early that morning, his trophies would have been pawned, along with the telly and the microwave.

  But! And I’m holding up my index finger here, like the wise old woman I am! I had Anna pegged all wrong. Anna did the biggest recovery curve of them all. For years, she was bloody useless, never earned a penny, couldn’t hold down a job to save her life. Then she moved to New York and, in a series of moves (she’ll tell you herself in Anybody Out There), got The Best Job In the WorldTM, working as a publicist for a world famous cosmetics house. Never give up on a person, is what Anna’s story tells me.

  In 1978, in a last-ditch attempt to get a boy for Mr Walsh to play with, along comes Helen. And where do I start? When they made Helen they broke the mould – and at least we can be grateful for that. There’s only one of her in the world to handle. All I can say in her favour is that she has a good job – she’s a private investigator. And sometimes, when she needs a hand, I help her out. My favourite is when she has to search a person’s house – I love to have a good gawk around another person’s house and paw through their stuff when they’re not there. I would give every penny I own to be let loose in the Kilfeathers’ house. (They’re our next-door neighbours. Lovely people. We are terrific pals, of course. And yet, I find that I very much hate Mrs Kilfeather. I can’t explain it any better.)

  Mr Walsh is called Jack and I will tell you all about him under U (Useful). (He does the hoovering.) (And earns all the money.) (Not that I let him have any of his own. He’d only spend it. I’m in charge of that end of things.)

  A is for Alcohol. Neither myself nor Mr Walsh is a ‘big’ drinker. Naturally, I’d take a spritzer or two if I was out for a ‘drink’, and of course Mr Walsh is allowed to have a pint of Smithwicks in the clubhouse at the end of his round of golf. So obviously I don’t know where any of them get it from, because they certainly didn’t learn it from us (although problem drinking does exist in the ‘extended’ family), but the minute they became teenagers, they all started it (except for Margaret, of course).

  I had a lovely drinks cabinet, full of lovely bottles of drink. Now and again I’d dust them. Those were the days when neighbours brought you back bottles of drink if they were lucky enough to go on a foreign holiday, so I had Ouzo from when Mrs Hennessey went to Greece. My sister Kitty brought us Vermouth from the time she went to Rome and met that married man, but the less said about that, the better. Mr Walsh’s secretary (you were allowed to say ‘secretary’ in them days, not like now, when it’s personal assistant this, personal assistant that) used to go to the oddest places and brought back a bottle of Hungarian Slivovitch. Anna won a bottle of some funny-looking yellow stuff at the Vincent de Paul raffle. The thing is, no one drank any of this stuff, no one was meant to drink any of this stuff. They were ornaments, fine glittery ornaments, in the same way my beautiful Anysley vase was an ornament, until Claire threw it against the wall and smashed it, the time her husband left her for their downstairs neighbour, Denise. Or the way my beautiful ‘Crying Boy’ painting is an ornament.

  Anyway, when Claire was about fifteen, doesn’t she start this lark, secretly going from bottle to bottle, taking a little pour from each of them, until she’d filled up a lemonade bottle, then drinking the lot. The Lord alone knows what it tasted like, but she didn’t care. All that mattered was that she got inebriated. Or scuttered. Or stotious, mouldy, spannered, locked, poluthered, crucified, twisted … They say the Eskimos have a hundred words for snow, but we Irish seem to have at least a hundred for the state of being intoxicated. Gee-eyed, that’s another one I’ve heard them use. So, without me knowing one screed of it, Claire was getting ‘gee-eyed’ on a regular basis, using my drink from my lovely drinks cabinet, and over time the levels on my beautiful bottles started dropping. So what does the bould Claire do? She starts topping them up with water, that’s what she does. And kept topping them up with water. And kept on topping, until some bottles – most importantly the vodka – was one hundred per cent water.

  In the normal run of events I might never have found out, except that one Saturday night we had visitors over, our neighbours Mr and Mrs Kelly and Mr and Mrs Smith. (The reason we invited them was because the Kilfeathers next door had had a ‘do’ the previous week and had invited several of the neighbours, but they snubbed us and I suppose I wanted to show them that we had friends too. The ‘cut’ and ‘thrust’ of suburbia can be a savage thing.)

  So in they came, the Smiths and the Kellys, and the thing is that,
even though we hardly drank, these were the days that the few times anyone did drink, they were expected to drink spirits. Not like now when it’s Chardonnay this and West Coast Cooler that and if you order a brandy and port, they bundle you into the car and they deposit you at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Myself and Mrs Kelly were ‘on’ the Smirnoff, but Mr Walsh, Mr Kelly and both Mr and Mrs Smith were drinking real alcohol and they ended up getting scuttered, stotious, poluthered, etc. and, to my eternal shame, doesn’t Mr Walsh admit that he’d found some loophole to avoid paying all our taxes! I was scandalized! (At people knowing, I mean.) (I was quite pleased with him for holding a few pounds back from the ‘taxman’.)

  Then the Smiths ‘upped’ the ‘ante’ by telling us that Mr Smith had had an affair the previous year! Everyone was red-faced and in convulsions, laughing and roaring crying, except for myself and Mrs Kelly, who were sitting there stone-cold sober and far from amused. And then it dawned on me what had been going on …

  Of course, I couldn’t forensically test the vodka there and then; I had to get the scuttered people out of my home. But the next day I established what my ‘gut’ had already told me. So what do I do? I moved my lovely collection of bottles out of the drinks cabinet and into a cupboard with a lock, that’s what. But within days, one of them – I suppose it was Claire, it was hardly Margaret – had managed to pick the lock, and this kick-started a kind of guerrilla warfare. I kept moving the drink – under beds, out behind the oil-drum, I even rang Mr Walsh’s sister, who, handily enough, happens to be an alcoholic, and she recommended the cistern in the toilet – but they kept finding it!

  Even today, I can’t keep drink in the house. None of my daughters are living at home at this precise moment. But it’s only a matter of time before another of them has a crisis in her life and moves back in with myself and Mr Walsh. It’d annoy you – we don’t feel able to fully savour our ‘Golden years’. What if we wanted to up sticks and sail round the world? (Frankly, I can imagine little worse than being stuck in a confined space on the high seas, with no access to my ‘shows’.) (And if anyone was going to have the bad luck to be kidnapped by Somali pirates, it’d be us.)