by Hazel Hayes
Theo unzipped my dress and kissed me on the back of the neck.
‘Tonight was perfect,’ he whispered. ‘You’re perfect.’
I smiled and turned to kiss him, then unbuttoned his shirt. As he pulled his arm out of one sleeve he banged his elbow on the wall, then almost shouted ‘Fuck!’ but caught himself and mimed it instead so as not to wake Isaac. I covered my mouth to stifle a laugh.
‘We need to move,’ he said, rubbing his elbow and frowning.
A few weeks later we had our own place – twice the rent and only slightly bigger in size. It wasn’t perfect but it was ours, and the freedom was glorious; I no longer had to get dressed to go to the toilet in the middle of the night, or worry about finding milk curdling on the counter, or keep quiet during sex – I’m not even particularly loud during sex, but I really went for it during those first few months, just because I could. The walls were so thin we could practically hear our neighbours breathe, and every so often I’d squeeze past them on the thin stairwell outside and think, You’ve heard me having many, many orgasms. I wondered if they were thinking the same thing.
Every morning and evening Theo and I travelled to and from work together – I’d spent months searching for jobs at London-based magazines, newspapers and publishing houses to no avail, and in the end Theo had wangled me a job writing press releases for the company he worked for. The accounts department was based in a different building from my team, so we didn’t see one another all day, but sometimes we’d eat lunch in Soho Square together if the weather was good.
I abhor press releases; they are the very antithesis of what I want to write – soulless, exploitative, forgettable nonsense – but it turns out I’m really very good at them. Within months I was promoted and given my own client list. I began attending weekly strategy meetings, where phrases like ‘up and to the right’, ‘move the needle’, and ‘negative growth’ were commonplace. I soon learned it was not possible to simply ‘talk’ to one’s clients: one must always ‘reach out’, ‘touch base’, ‘take it offline’, or of course, ‘push back’, if needs be.
It was in one of these meetings that I met Maya, who had just joined the company the day before. We locked eyes during a particularly painful presentation on mission-critical objectives and key results from our boss, Chetna. In an instant we were both twelve-year-old schoolgirls again, desperately trying not to lose our shit at some dumb thing our teacher just said. I believe it was the phrase ‘next-generation mission-critical sweet spot’ that finally broke Maya. She tried to disguise her laughter as a deep, hacking cough, but her efforts were in vain. When Chetna asked what was so amusing, Maya told her she’d just remembered a funny meme she’d seen earlier. I had to bite down on the inside of my cheeks to keep from laughing.
‘What a pile of wank,’ said Maya on our way out of the door. These were her first words to me.
As it transpired, Maya had been given the vacant desk next to mine, but after two weeks sitting beside one another, she was moved to the other end of the department – Chetna said our ‘constant banter was causing a disruption’ and even though I tried to argue that it was good for morale, she wasn’t having any of it. Our colleagues couldn’t believe we had actually been separated like a pair of kids in class, but Maya and I were secretly quite proud of it. From then on we spent most of our days messaging over the company’s internal chat system. You could tell when we were doing this because our laughter alternated back and forth across the department like a tennis match.
My favourite ever interaction, which I have since printed out and framed as a birthday gift to Maya, was the following:
11.53 a.m. MAYA: I just farted
11.53 a.m. ME: ok
11.53 a.m. MAYA: But I’m wearing headphones so I can’t tell if anyone heard
11.53 a.m. ME: oh
11.53 a.m. MAYA: I’m gonna take them off and do it again to check
11.53 a.m. ME: good idea
11.54 a.m. MAYA: yeah they heard
My birthday present that year, which Maya and Theo both pitched in on, was a voucher for a ten-week writing course. They gave it to me over dinner one night and the mixture of thoughtfulness and practicality was almost too much to bear.
‘We don’t want you to forget how good you are,’ said Theo, as he handed the envelope across the table to me.
‘You’re too fucking good for press releases, that’s for sure,’ added Maya. I looked at her with tears in my eyes and instantly she began to cry. Her new boyfriend, Darren, stared on as we held one another and half laughed, half cried into each other’s hair.
‘You’ll be seeing a lot more of this if you decide to stick around,’ I said to him over her shoulder, ‘so you’d best get used to it.’
Darren did stick around, and after that the four of us started spending more and more time together; we even held our first Fakemas that winter, before heading home for the holidays. Maya and Theo cooked a turkey with all the trimmings, and I tried to bake a pudding from scratch but failed miserably and was relegated to keeping everyone’s drink topped up. We all returned to London several days later, exhausted from having spent a short amount of time with our respective relatives and happy to be back with our chosen family instead.
On New Year’s Eve we snuck up to the roof of our apartment building and downed innumerable bottles of Tesco’s Finest champagne as fireworks exploded in the distance, illuminating the cluttered expanse of rooftops and chimneys that stretched out before us. For the first time since leaving Ireland I felt tethered to a time and place, like a ship moored to shore.
Sometime in late January, Theo and I were walking to Trinny’s house for a games night when he got a call from his mother. It was a bitingly cold day, and I remember he had to take one glove off to answer the phone. The instant he did I could hear Jocelyn wailing on the other end. I couldn’t make out what she was saying but the pitch and cadence reminded me of the desperate, agonised sound my nieces made when they’d badly hurt themselves or had a precious toy stolen from them. I placed a hand on Theo’s arm and searched his face for a clue as to what was wrong, but he just took my hand in his and kept walking.
By the time we arrived at Trinny’s almost twenty minutes later, Theo was still clutching the phone to his ear, his bare hand shrivelled and turning bright red from the cold. When Trinny answered the door he walked straight inside and sat down on the stairs.
‘It’s okay, Mum,’ he said into the phone. ‘It’ll be okay.’
Trinny silently asked me what was going on but I just shrugged, so she hugged me and left us alone in the hallway, cutting off the sound of chatter from the next room as she closed the door softly behind her. I sat down next to Theo and rested my head on his shoulder for a while.
‘Listen, Mum,’ he said, ‘I’m at my friend’s house now, so I need to go.’
A pause.
‘Trinny.’
A pause.
‘Probably not tonight, but I’ll come home in the morning, okay? We can go and see her together.’
A final, long pause.
‘Okay. See you tomorrow, Mum.’
As soon as Theo put the phone down I took his frozen hand and sandwiched it between mine, rubbing it gently and breathing hot air onto his fingers to thaw them out. I waited for him to speak first.
‘My gran’s been moved to a nursing home,’ he said, finally. Theo’s grandmother, Augusta, had been living alone since her husband passed away over a decade ago.
‘What happened?’ I asked, still bracing myself for bad news. ‘Is she okay?’
‘Yeah, she’s fine. Just getting old and forgetful, I think.’
‘Right.’
I couldn’t believe it. Based on what I’d just heard, I was convinced that Jocelyn had found Augusta dead at the bottom of the stairs, or at the very least that she herself was standing in a pool of blood somewhere with a limb hanging off.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m glad your gran’s all right.’
Theo dropped his head
and began rubbing his temples with his free hand.
‘Jocelyn seemed pretty upset,’ I said, careful not to sound judgemental.
‘Of course she’s upset. Everything is different now. She can’t just walk round the corner and see her mum any more. She’ll have to visit her in a nursing home, which is a forty-minute drive away, and full of strangers, and it’s not cheap, either. Where are they gonna get the money from?’
I’d never heard him speak like this before. He was parroting his mother. Even the tone of his voice sounded more like her than him.
‘How do you feel?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘That would be funny if it weren’t so sad,’ I said with a sympathetic smile, but he just looked at me quizzically.
‘I mean how do you feel? Are you okay?’
‘Oh. I’m fine. Just worried about Mum.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But she’ll be all right. She’ll adjust. And so will your gran. Augusta’s a tough old bird.’
He lifted his head then and rested his forehead against mine. I could sense the tension drain from him a little.
‘This is probably for the best,’ I continued. ‘She was living in that rickety old house all by herself. It’s better that she move out now than wait for something bad to happen.’
‘You’re right,’ said Theo. ‘Thank you.’
I took his face in my hands and kissed him lightly on the forehead.
‘Now let’s go play silly games and forget about the real world for a bit,’ I said.
‘Good plan,’ he said, standing up and helping me to my feet.
We were a great team that night. We always were. So much so that after winning five games of charades in a row, Trinny split us up and made us captains of opposing teams. She insisted we were using some kind of secret code.
‘We can’t help it if we’re really good at charades,’ protested Theo.
‘Nobody is that good at charades,’ Trinny replied.
‘I am,’ I said. ‘I was the Irish Charades champion three years in a row.’
Trinny looked at Theo sceptically.
‘No way,’ she said.
‘It’s true,’ said Theo, ‘she competed internationally.’
Trinny’s head whipped back towards me as a big, goofy grin spread across her face.
‘Really?’
‘Really,’ I said, dramatically staring off into the middle distance. ‘I’d be world champion now if those blasted Russians hadn’t slipped a laxative in my drink.’
Theo nodded solemnly.
‘I still can’t believe you shat yourself on stage,’ he said wistfully.
At this everyone in the room started chuckling, except for Trinny, who threw her eyes to heaven and sighed.
‘You’re both banned from all future game nights,’ she said with a scowl, at which point I threw my arms around her and begged for forgiveness until she started laughing in spite of herself.
That night in bed, Theo drifted off with his head on my chest and me stroking his hair. I offered to go with him to visit his gran the next day, but he mumbled something about Jocelyn only wanting family there. Truth be told, I was relieved; as much as I wanted to support Theo, I also wanted to keep my distance from his mother, who remained the only difficult part of my life in London.
In the previous ten months or so everything had come together – Theo and I were happily cohabitating and still sickeningly in love, I’d made new friends and was getting along well with his, I was earning a decent wage doing a job that required minimum effort, I was writing again, and I’d even stopped taking sugar in my tea – my life felt like a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces magically fall into place, and Jocelyn was the one piece that just wouldn’t fit.
I’d finally met Jocelyn on a trip to London one weekend, when I was still living in Dublin. I was delighted, of course, taking it as a sign that our relationship had just levelled up, but I was also scared shitless; I stopped several times on the walk from the Tube station to her house just to gather myself. I kept asking Theo if he was sure this was a good idea. What if she didn’t like me? What if she hated me? What if I blocked up her toilet? Or accidentally mentioned the IRA? Or said the word cunt a bunch of times?
These all seemed like very reasonable concerns at the time.
I didn’t know much about Theo’s family then. He’d been reticent about them – about his father in particular – and being someone who understands what it’s like to not want to talk about your own father, I never forced the issue. What I did know I had pieced together from fragments of conversations: his mother came from a wealthy family but her brothers had lost a lot of money on bad investments. She married young and had two children – Theo and his older sister, Octavia, who moved abroad when she was twenty-one. Theo’s father was an abusive drug addict who left when Octavia was nine and Theo was only six years old, and aside from a few compulsory visits as a child, Theo hadn’t seen him since. As it happened, Theo’s father also cheated on Jocelyn with an Irish woman, and Theo had often joked about how much his mother hates the Irish as a result. Suddenly this sprang to mind.
‘You were joking about her hating Irish people, weren’t you?’ I asked, stopping for the fifth time on our short walk.
‘Kind of,’ said Theo.
‘Kind of?’
‘She probably didn’t mean it.’
‘Probably!?’
I have since found out that when Theo told his mother he was dating an Irish girl, she broke down in tears. Jocelyn told me this herself, as though it were a funny anecdote.
‘Look,’ he said, taking my hand again, ‘I’m sure she will meet you and love you and everything will be fine.’
He was right. Everything was fine that day. Jocelyn was warm and welcoming and I felt like a fool for ever worrying about her. Theo told me she loved gardening so I stopped one last time to buy her some pink peonies, which she planted in her flower bed while Theo and I drank tea on the patio. Afterwards she gave me a tour of the garden, explaining which flowers and fruits and vegetables were planted where, and when each one would come into season. That day was perfectly pleasant, and we’ve never had another one like it.
The next time I saw Jocelyn was after I moved to London. On that visit she was so cold towards me that I wondered if I had only imagined that day in the garden. Since then, she has made a concerted effort to put me down – making snide remarks about my looks, my education, even the way I hold my knife and fork – delivering each blow with just enough force so that I feel it, but to everyone else it looks like a joke. She constantly references Theo’s ‘other girlfriends’, all of whom she seems to like more than me and all of whom, I’m sure, she treated with equal contempt while they dated her son. She even calls me by their names occasionally, always insisting afterwards that she did so by mistake.
Assuming that Jocelyn no longer considered me good enough for Theo, I tried to counteract this by always looking my best around her and speaking pointedly about my ambitions and achievements. But that only made things worse: the term ‘glamorous’ got thrown about like an insult and as for my ambitions, Jocelyn views medicine, law and whatever-job-her-son-is-currently-doing as the only worthwhile professions. Writing, she says, is for children in school.
I once asked about her favourite books and films, and tried to make the point that they were all written by somebody, but she doesn’t read books and ‘films are written by people in Hollywood’ apparently, so that knocked that on the head. She states each one of her opinions as though it were a fact, and seems not to understand the difference between the two, which makes it both impossible and pointless to try to reason with her.
All the while she dotes on Theo, calling him every day, insisting he bring his laundry home to be washed and even cutting the crusts off his sandwiches – I wouldn’t have believed this last one if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. I personally find her particular brand of love a bit suffocating, but Theo seems to like it.
&n
bsp; Things came to a head one evening after a family dinner at Theo’s aunt’s house. We were all sitting around watching the news when a report came on about a lesbian couple who had been attacked on their way home from a nightclub. The woman being interviewed had a black eye and stitches in her bottom lip, and her girlfriend was still in hospital in critical condition.
‘Pair of lezzers,’ Jocelyn muttered under her breath.
Maybe the family didn’t hear her. Maybe they were just pretending not to. Either way, I couldn’t let it slide.
‘What was that, Jocelyn?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ she mumbled, sipping on a can of cider.
A few moments passed and the report concluded with an appeal for any witnesses to come forward.
‘I think it’s really sad that those women were attacked,’ I prodded, ‘don’t you?’
‘Jesus,’ said Jocelyn, ‘it’s not like I attacked them!’ Then she drained the rest of the can and went to the kitchen to get another. Once she’d left the room Theo threw me a reproachful look, as though I was the one who had behaved inappropriately. When I tried to talk to him about it afterwards he said there was nothing to talk about.
I realised two things that night. Firstly, that Jocelyn is the worst kind of conservative – a common bully who fears what she can’t understand and who simultaneously believes that she is both oppressed by and better than everybody else – and secondly, that when asked to side with his mother or his girlfriend, a man will always choose his mother, no matter how awful or irrational she is. Jocelyn’s behaviour was normal to Theo, like a dark spot in his vision that he was accustomed to looking past.
After that, I decided to stop calling Jocelyn out on her bullshit. I would be quiet, and excruciatingly kind. I would give her nothing to grip onto. And she’d be left scrambling for purchase, like a rock climber on a perfectly smooth wall. Eventually, I thought, she would go too far and Theo would see what I saw, but until then, I would spend as little time with her as possible, in order to reduce the probability of an altercation.
So far, my plan had been working quite well.