by Ciara Smyth
I half expected her to respond that she was high on life, but she politely pretended that she hadn’t heard. You can get away with a lot when you’re old.
“How come you girls are here on your summer holidays helping an old man learn how to cook?” Morris asked as we waited for our pie to cool enough to take a slice. It looked golden and flaky and I had perfected a scalloped edge that made the teacher almost wet herself with glee. I had high hopes. Perhaps Dad’s cooking curse had not been handed down to me.
“Saoirse wanted to learn a life skill and I want to help out at home,” Ruby answered.
“Aren’t you a good girl. None of my kids ever cooked a day in their life when they were at home. Spoiled rotten. Well, that was my Anna’s fault. She doted too much.”
Ruby and I exchanged looks. I’d already assumed Morris was recently bereaved given he was here learning to cook by himself, but I hadn’t wanted to bring it up.
“What was she like?” I asked gently.
“Anna? She was a grumpy old sod. But she made me laugh. Always f’ing and blinding about one thing or another. It was just her way. But she was a devoted mother.”
“How did you two meet?” Ruby asked, poking the pie crust to see if it was still too hot.
“We met at a party. I think it was 1962. A friend of mine. I can’t remember his name now. I was nineteen, she was seventeen. She was the prettiest girl there. I was no slouch myself, you know.”
That was not what I expected. Somehow I couldn’t imagine Morris at a house party knocking back beers. Maybe he meant like a dinner party?
“Did you ask her to dance?” Ruby asked dreamily. I could tell she was picturing some black-and-white movie scene.
“What? No. I’m a terrible dancer. I couldn’t let her see that. No, no. She got drunk and kissed me and I had to carry her home. The next day I brought her a seltzer and some aspirin and we were married a year later.”
“That’s . . . er . . . so romantic.” Ruby faltered. She would not look me in the eye.
“How many kids did you have?”
“We had twin boys about six months after that. And now you know why we got married so quick.” Morris tapped his nose.
I couldn’t help it. I snorted.
“I didn’t believe in soul mates before I met her. But you know, we didn’t spend a night apart from the wedding until the day she passed. Sometimes life knows what you need better than you do.” Morris fell silent then. Ruby coughed and busied herself with clearing up and I thought she was trying not to cry. A second later the moment was broken by Janet’s giddy voice.
“All right, class. Your pies should be cool enough. Let’s find out how you did. I for one simply cannot wait another second.” She rubbed her hands together and made a beeline for one of the kiss-ass couples. I noticed the couple in front of them rolling their eyes at each other.
“Moment of truth,” I said, and hovered a sharp knife above our glistening, glazed pie. Then I cracked. The pressure was too much.
“I can’t do it, you do it.”
Ruby ignored the knife and stuck a fork into the center of the pie. She swallowed a mouthful. She chewed. I waited. She swallowed.
“Um . . . it’s . . . Did you forget anything?”
“What, no? What’s wrong with it?” I took the fork from her hand and took a piece of the pie for myself.
It wasn’t horrible. It wasn’t really very nice either. It was nothing. It tasted like nothing.
“The curse. The curse got me. I am genetically incapable of making food that tastes of anything,” I lamented.
Ruby rubbed me consolingly on the back. “It wasn’t just you. I made it too.”
“My powers are so great they even canceled out your input.”
“It’s OK. We’ll try something easier next time,” she continued, patting me on the back as I slumped onto a stool. “Like soup. From a can.”
I laughed a sad little hiccup laugh and peered over Morris’s shoulder at his pie.
“How did yours turn out, then?”
“Do you think your presence ruined his too?” Ruby nudged me, grimacing.
“You can’t try mine,” he said, shielding it protectively, “I need it for tonight.”
I forgot about my terrible pie skills and my heart ached for Morris, alone at home with his pie.
“My date is going to love this,” he said.
“What?” I said, lifting my head. “You have a date?”
“Morris, you old dog.” Ruby laughed.
“My Anna’s been gone five years, girls. Do you really think I would stay on the market long?”
“You said she was your soul mate,” I said.
I didn’t mean it to sound like an accusation but it did, and Ruby hit me on the arm to tell me to stop making the old man feel guilty for not spending the rest of his life in mourning.
“She was,” Morris said, surprised. “I think there’s another one out there and I’m going to find her. And the searching is good fun.”
“You don’t get more than one soul mate,” I said, annoyed. Morris was clearly just a dirty old man.
“Says who?” He didn’t seem angry with me for berating him. He just laughed a gentle wheezing laugh. “Girls, I don’t often go around giving advice to wains because I think you have to make your own mistakes in life, but I’ll tell you one thing. I don’t believe there’s one right person for everyone, and I spent fifty-one years with the same woman. But I do believe there’s a right person for you at different times in your life. Whether that relationship lasts a week or fifty years is not what makes it special.”
25.
The last night before the move, Ruby and I set up camp in my old room one last time to watch the only half-decent romantic comedy with lesbian characters, Imagine Me & You, surrounded by junk food and twinkly lights. It was a little weird knowing Dad was in the house, and he made his customary contraception jokes. But after the dinner, having her over didn’t seem like such a big deal. They’d both had their chance to be nosy about one another and I’d asked her to come over late enough that they wouldn’t really have time to interact. Besides, she had insisted on helping us move the next day because she is an angel. An intrusive kind of angel who doesn’t take No, seriously you don’t have to do that for an answer.
If I was being honest, I kind of liked the idea of spending my last night here with her. Dad suggested we spend the last night watching a horror film and eating our weight in Jaffa Cakes, but that picture in my head came with Mum somewhere in the background tutting about our terrible taste in cinema and food. Memories of my childhood haunted this house and I did not want to spend my evening with ghosts.
In my head, this evening with Ruby would look like something from Pinterest, where I would get loads of fairy lights and build a makeshift fort out of bohemian blankets. In reality, I could not figure out how on earth you were meant to make the blankets stay up. I tried using the boxes, but I didn’t have any big enough throws; the whole structure kept sagging in the middle. I didn’t have any fairy lights either so I got some from the pound shop, but then when I went to put batteries in them I remembered I’d packed the batteries with other junk drawer stuff, and I was not going back out to the shop. Instead, I put all the pillows I could find on my bed, pushed the stacks of boxes and bin liners full of crap to one side, and set my laptop on a chair.
“There’s like no kissing in this movie, you know,” Ruby pointed out. “What kind of romantic comedy has barely any kissing?”
We were squished together on my bed and she was curled under my arm. She had a little pile of Maltesers resting on my stomach, which was periodically depleting.
“A gay one. The bit at the football match where she teaches her to scream at number nine? That should have been a kiss moment. At least in this she doesn’t go back to men in the end.”
Hard side-eye to Kissing Jessica Stein.
“Sure, but there had to be a man in there somewhere. Even though Matthew Goode is adorable, I
want one where the character isn’t realizing she’s gay because of the cute girl she met. I mean, she’s thirty—are you telling me she’s never met a girl before? Never even thought about it? She seems so shocked by the whole thing.”
“That happens in real life, though,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, I know, but I wish there was a big Hollywood movie about girls who already know they like girls. There are no blokes in the way and preferably it stars Kristen Stewart. Yes, she has sexual tension with every woman in every film, but I want it to be there in the script, you know?”
“You feel very strongly about this,” I said. “Maybe that’s your future career.”
“What?”
“Write scripts. You don’t even have to wait for university to start doing that. You could be the gay Nora Ephron.”
Ruby raised her eyebrow. “Nora Ephron?”
“I know stuff now,” I said defensively. At least I was capable of googling.
“That does sound really cool. Everyone thinks I should be a nurse because I have a disabled brother. Like that means I want to be a nurse or a doctor or a medical researcher.” Ruby rolled her eyes. “People always want to limit him and tell him what he can’t do. He doesn’t listen to that and I won’t either. If there’s more to my brother than his disability then there’s more to me too.”
“Is that why you’re still trying to figure it out?” I asked, thinking of the many career options Ruby had pounced on.
“That’s why I’ll consider anything. I don’t want to be pigeonholed into something. Don’t get me wrong, I love that I’ve been able to be there for him. I want to do everything possible to help with his rehab too. But I want to see what else I might be good at if I just get the chance to try it.”
I could understand that. Teachers who knew about my mum would sometimes suggest the same thing to me, social work or nursing. You could help more people like your mum. Even Dad had mentioned it when I was picking my A levels. I looked after Mum because she was my mum, not because I’m some kind of Patron Saint of Dementia. I wanted to tell Ruby this, to let her know I understood her.
“How is Noah?” I asked instead.
“He’s doing really well. Mum called me this morning at like half two. She doesn’t seem to grasp time differences, or more likely she doesn’t even think about it, but I got to talk to him too. He sounded really happy. He said he missed me. I really miss him. I’m used to spending most of my free time with him.”
I squeezed her closer.
“He’ll be back soon. It’ll fly in.”
It occurred to me that if Noah would be back soon, that also meant our time would be over soon. Our eyes met and I wondered if she was thinking the same thing. Then she grinned at me and sucked a handful of Maltesers into her mouth.
“What about you?” she said with a mouth full of chocolate.
“What do you mean? You know how I feel about Oxford.”
“Right, but you’ll still do something. What were you planning to study at Oxford?” She did a fake posh voice when she said Oxford.
“You realize you don’t have to fake an English accent? You have one,” I joked. But really I was thinking that I hadn’t considered anything other than Oxford for university. Sure, I’d filled in forms for Irish colleges and universities, but only because the career guidance teacher wouldn’t let it go. Oxford to me represented the whole university experience. When I said I didn’t want to go there, I meant I didn’t want to go anywhere. Yes, it was in England, which was an added disadvantage now that I wasn’t trying to run away from Hannah. But what would be the point of any degree? I was still likely to end up in a home at fifty. Maybe earlier because I wouldn’t have a family to take care of me.
“Yeah, but it’s not posh. And don’t change the subject.”
“Law, I think.” I vaguely recalled my reasoning being that maybe I’d make a ton of money and I could spend it on one of the really good care homes for Mum.
“What made you pick law?”
“Nothing in particular,” I said, getting testy. “I don’t want to talk about it. What bloody difference does it make anyway? One course is the same as the next. You go study, you get a job, and you die.”
Ruby looked taken aback at my sudden detour into nihilism.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” she said quietly.
I rubbed my face. I was being an asshole. It wasn’t her fault she didn’t know how much I wanted to never think about this topic. That for me it really didn’t make any difference what I learned because I’d forget it all anyway. She didn’t know that the only reason I’d worked so hard to get into Oxford was because I was under some misguided idea that it would make my mum proud. Except the day I told her I got my conditional offer she said, That’s great, and then a few minutes later she forgot. It wasn’t some kind of bond we had, some connection over a shared future. The real bond we shared was shitty genetics. What good had all her degrees done for her?
“No, I’m sorry. It’s just stressful not knowing what to do. I shouldn’t snap at you, though, it’s not your fault.”
“I get it. I probably sound like your parents. What are you going to do with your life, etc.” She made a face.
I did not deserve so much understanding.
“You don’t have to know right now,” she continued. “I bet anyone who’s sure what they’re going to do now, for the rest of their lives, is probably wrong anyway. I have no idea either.”
She was right. But it wasn’t comforting because it wasn’t the same for me as it was for Ruby. I wasn’t going with the flow and falling in love with a hundred different options. Ruby needed somewhere to funnel her energy and enthusiasm. I didn’t have any. I was lost. I’d spent most of the last few years taking care of Mum or centering my life around visiting her. Before she got really bad, my life was centered around Hannah. Look how that worked out.
Sometimes it occurred to me that I might not end up like Mum, that I could spend decades waiting for the disease to take hold and it never would. I wouldn’t know if I’d wasted half my life until it was too late. Which was worse?
“I know. It’ll be fine. I’m sure when I get my results I’ll know what to do,” I lied, trying to sound breezy. “I’m just glad I escaped school alive. Now I just have to escape Dad and Beth and their constant mauling the face off each other.”
I’d walked in on them playing a game of “how to traumatize your teenager” yesterday when they were supposed to be making a seating chart. Thankfully they’d only got to level one: kissing with slobbering sound effects, but I was still going to have to wash my brain in acid.
“You must miss some things about school? I was so sad on my last day because I knew I wouldn’t get to see my friends as much.”
“Trust me, I’m not going to miss anyone,” I joked. “I stopped talking to my old friends long before school ended. I’m glad to escape them too.”
“Sounds like you have a lot of things you want to run away from,” Ruby said seriously. “What do you mean you stopped talking to your friends?”
Oops. I hadn’t meant to say that. Or rather I hadn’t remembered not to say something like that.
“Oh, nothing. I fell out with some friends a while back. And then I was stuck in school with them for another eight months. Awkward.”
“Why did you fall out?” Ruby said, undeterred by my attempt to make light of it.
An itch at the back of my neck started to bother me.
“It’s stupid. Seriously. Girl drama, that’s all.”
“So tell me,” she said. It felt like a test. I’d already messed up once that night.
“A relationship broke up. Sides were taken. It was all very dramatic.”
“A relationship? Whose?”
“Mine,” I said, my throat feeling tight.
“OK . . . with who?”
“No one.”
Ruby huffed. I could imagine smoke coming out of her nose if I didn’t come forth with a few more details.
“And what? Your friends picked her side?”
“Yeah, well, our best friend. Izzy. They were friends first, I guess. She really got the jump on me those first two years of primary school.” I tried to laugh, but it came out bitter.
“You were all friends from year three? And she dumped you as a friend because you and Hannah broke up?”
“Yeah. Sort of,” I lied again.
I could feel the pity about to pour out of her, but I chose that over telling her the truth. The words rattled around in my brain. I dumped Izzy because she didn’t tell me Hannah was going to break my heart. I dumped her because I was embarrassed that I’d gushed about how Hannah and I were going to spend the rest of our lives together, that we were soul mates, and she’d known that Hannah didn’t feel the same way. I dumped her because she chose Hannah and I felt like I didn’t matter. I couldn’t say those things out loud. She wouldn’t get it.
“Don’t worry, I got over it. It’s not that big a deal.”
Ruby seemed to struggle with what to say next.
“Do you want me to kill them?” she said finally.
Relief flooded my body.
“Let’s watch the rest of the film and decide after. It’s so hard to do homicide when you’re stuffed full of Maltesers.”
She arched her neck to kiss me and soon we’d left the film behind in favor of a haze of heavy breathing, soft skin, and eyelashes that fluttered against my cheek when we kissed.
Ruby spent the night and if you really must know, we didn’t do anything that involved taking your pants off. After she fell asleep I tossed and turned and it took me ages to get to sleep. I kept thinking about her saying that there were a lot of things I wanted to run away from. It sounded like something Mum would have said. I thought of all the things I’d wanted to run away from this summer. Thinking about what I’d do with the rest of my life, thinking about what the rest of my life might look like if I inherit Mum’s dementia, Dad and Beth’s wedding, thinking about leaving Mum behind. I’d filled up all that space with Ruby. What was I going to do in a few weeks when she was gone and I had to face all of those things by myself?