Locked Out of Heaven

by Shirley Benton

  “But it’s still out there for the entire country. You’re out there. I could drive down the country and stop at any shack of a corner shop in some valley off the beaten track and you’d be there in it, grimacing in your size 16 to 18 trousers.”

  “But it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference! Anyone who doesn’t know me won’t pay any heed to it. I’m just another fat woman in a magazine trying to lose weight.”

  “And does that make you feel good about yourself? Being just another fat woman in a magazine?”

  “Jesus, Susie, what do you want me to do here? At least I’m trying to sort myself out, both financially and otherwise.”

  “I just don’t see the point in this.” She prodded a finger on the magazine. “For all your talk of making money, you’re not getting a penny from it.”

  “I don’t have any choice but to try though, do I? I do need to lose weight anyway and this might lead to other opportunities by virtue of the fact that I have my name out there. I’m not getting a penny from anywhere else yet, either, may I remind you.”

  I still wasn’t eligible for social welfare’s One-Parent Family Payment because the three months of living apart from Terry weren’t up yet, although they soon would be. Even when I got that, there was no way I was going to be able to build up emergency money savings from it – although the rent allowance would hopefully allow us to get out from under Susie and Willie’s feet if we could find a suitable place to rent.

  As for Terry, he wasn’t lying when he said he hadn’t a penny left. He was haemorrhaging money left, right and centre and was so in the red he was turning fuchsia. I’d demanded whatever he had on him for the kids the last time I’d seen him and all he’d had in his wallet was five euros and twenty-seven cents in change. This from the guy who’d never be seen to give anything less than a fifty-euro tip in a restaurant whenever we ate out – something we always argued about and I always ended up being called mean for because I thought it was madness.

  “Oh, you don’t need to remind me of your pennilessness,” Susie said. “I suppose you being on a diet will cut down the shopping bill, anyway. Every cloud.”

  I flicked to the two-page article about me and my weight loss journey after Susie walked out of the room, muttering about how crap the cheap rice I’d been buying tasted and how the kids would get rickets or grow up as dwarfs from the malnourishment they’d inevitably suffer. There was of course an obligatory “fat picture” of me at my starting weight. The magazine’s plan was for me to lose three stone in three months and every week there’d be an update on how I’d done in the week that had just passed. I wouldn’t have anything as fancy as a dietician – budgets were tight – but I’d have a membership to a slimming club.

  “Big wow,” Susie said when I filled her in on the details. “You could do that yourself.”

  I pointed out that it would cost a tenner a week, which would pay for a lot of shitty cheap rice, so no, I couldn’t do that myself.

  I’d gone along the first week all of a quiver, wondering if I’d be the fattest person in the room, and if everyone would be looking at me and asking themselves the same question I asked myself: how had I let myself get into such a state? But nobody had given me a second glance. I’d been greeted warmly by the lady I’d signed up for membership with and then by the class leader, who’d herself lost five stone through the slimming club’s plan.

  I’d been dreading standing on the scales and the moment itself had been pretty ugly – I was five pounds heavier than I’d thought I was – but the class leader had reassured me that it didn’t matter because I was going to lose it anyway, along with the rest of my unwanted fat. I’d also been given a free gym membership by a city centre gym looking for publicity, on the condition that the magazine took a lot of photos of me working hard with one of the gym’s uber-glamorous personal trainers. This, in other words, involved pictures of me looking like a heifer while a beautiful colt crouched beside me, pert bum outstretched unnecessarily, supposedly motivating me to reach heights of possibilities I’d never dreamed were possible. Or at least, the first week’s pictures had, anyway.

  I shuddered in disgust as I closed the magazine. I could have sworn I saw my fat wobbling in that picture like some weird 3D image gone wrong. Well, no more. Things were going to change. I was determined to give the weight loss my best possible shot, not just because I was sick of being a pale Oompa Loompa (fake tan was on the “banned for being too expensive” list, too), but because I really, really needed some sort of sponsorship or employment opportunity out of this. It freaked me out to think I’d need to wait three months for it and even then it would just be a possibility, but at least I was trying to work towards something.

  Susie was right, though, when she said I wasn’t making any money from all this. If it wasn’t for me working with Moya, I’d be earning absolutely nothing – and even at that, I was giving Moya a very good rate. I really needed to up my game when it came to being a boomeranger, and fast.

  Chapter 19

  24 June 1994

  I know, I know. It’s been a while, Diary - yet again. I’ve been finding it hard to do anything really since Ricky died. It’s amazing how things still happen though, how life goes on for you even though you think it’ll stand still forever.

  Where to begin . . . ? Okay, I suppose I should start with Mum. One evening, I did a double take as Mum came downstairs fully dressed as I was tidying up the sitting room after dinner.

  “Your dinner is on a plate in the kitchen,” I said, the note of surprise in my voice obvious even to my ears.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said. “I came down to help.”

  She left the room again and returned with a bin bag.

  “You’ve done enough, Holly. I’m back now.”

  She moved to the mantelpiece, opened the bin bag and picked up each holy relic individually. She stared at each one for a long time before she fired it into the bag. When she’d finished with the mantelpiece, she reached up and took down the Sacred Heart picture that had tormented me for years with its eyes that followed you everywhere you went. I should have been happy to see it go into the bag, but I had to bite my lip to stop myself from crying as she hurled it in.

  She kept going until the sitting room was totally bare and the bag was bulging. I could do nothing but watch as another aspect of our old life died. Even after everything that had happened, I still believed that God existed. I had to in order to give me enough hope to face another day. But Mum had lost a child and I could understand why she no longer did.

  Mum came back to us after that day, but she was a different mum. Then again, we were all different people now. We’d been marked by where we lived. I looked out of the window every morning and used the view as my inspiration to work even harder that day at school than I had the day before. Girls my age on the richer side of the city don’t have their brothers taken away from them because of where they’re from. They have opportunities and a chance to have a good life. I’m going to have that, so help me God, I will. It’s the only thing that will justify Ricky’s death.

  Then there’s Cliff – he’s moved out. He found full-time work on a construction site in the city centre not long after Ricky died and moved out the day after I finished my Leaving Cert. He’d saved up enough by then to pay a deposit and rent. (I think the Leaving went well despite everything, by the way, but I’ll know when I get the results in August.)

  Even though he could have continued to cycle in and out to work from our place and lived at home on the cheap, he was determined to get his own place. As you’ve probably gathered from my previous entries, Cliff wants to distance himself from here – and dead right he is, too.

  It’s still the same auld shite in Blackbeg. All anyone around here seems to be interested in is where their next hit is coming from and he doesn’t need people like them dragging him down. Besides, they’d only rip the mick out of him for getting a job and trying to be all respectable. Who in their right mind worked when you
could get the dole?!

  Also, being here has been dragging his mood down a lot. It’ll always be the place where a family tragedy unfolded right in front of his eyes as far as he’s concerned. Mum doesn’t see it that way and is kind of taking his decision to live in the city personally. He’s twenty, Diary. She really needs to let go a bit. I think she’s feeling guilty, though, about the fact that Cliff never got much of a look-in when Ricky was around. Cliff’s not the forgiving type, though.

  Lastly, the strangest thing has happened at a time when I least expected it. I have a boyfriend. My first one ever. It all started not long after Ricky died. To be honest, I feel a bit weird about dating someone and enjoying myself after that . . . but it just happened. The last thing I expected to come out of our manky local shopping centre with was a man called Terry, I can tell you (or any man, if you want to get technical about my sentence structure).

  I was in the drapery section of one of the department stores with a few bags of groceries hanging from my arms when he walked by. He caught my eye for two reasons. Number 1, because he seemed to be looking at me, too – in fact, he almost seemed to be walking across my path on purpose, but maybe I was just imagining it. (I haven’t asked him about it because that would be so not cool.) And number 2, because he had even more freckles than I had. I’d never seen anyone so plastered with them, even in my own mirror, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  He was a lucky bugger. He had piercing blue eyes and a really strong jawline, and somehow, he could carry it off. But by Jaysus, he was a walking advertisement for a bath in factor 50 sun cream. I was about a 49.9 and really couldn’t talk, but moments like this were so rare that I couldn’t help but savour them. But when he was only inches away from me, I tripped over a dress that had fallen off its rail and skidded across the floor like a drunken ice skater, turnips, parsnips and carrots raining all over the place as the bags of groceries went flying.

  For a few seconds there was total silence. I stared at the floor tiles with my nose pressed to the floor and waited for someone to laugh. To add insult to possible injury, I was sure a vegetable had landed on my back. That’s what I got for congratulating myself on having less freckles than some other poor unfortunate.

  “Are you okay?”

  I turned my head sideways. “I think so.”

  “Here, I’ll help you up. And let me gather your shopping. I feel responsible for this vegetable extravaganza – you were distracted by me and weren’t watching where you were going. It was my good looks, I take it?”

  “What? No!”

  “My pointy hair?”

  “No! There was a great sale rail just beside where you were walking past—”

  “It was the freckles, wasn’t it?”

  He stared at me for so long that I eventually nodded. Then we both burst out laughing.

  “People stare at them all the time, but I’m totally oblivious to it at this stage. The only reason I noticed you staring was because . . .”

  “Go on, say it,” I said when he trailed off. “Because you have nearly as many freckles as I do.”

  “No,” he said, sounding genuinely shocked. “Because you’re gorgeous.”

  “Ahhahahaha!” That was meant to have sounded tinkling and sarcastic, but it had just sounded manic. “I bet you say that to all the girls who end up rolling around in vegetables in the supermarket.”

  “Oh, of course. It’s how I meet all the girls. This place is like my local disco.”

  “I’m sure you see a few girls falling around the place there, too. I should go there – I’d feel right at home.”

  “I never see anyone half as nice as you at the disco I go to.”

  I took the bag of groceries off him. “It’s okay – you can stop the lines to try to make the girl who tripped feel a bit better. Thanks anyway, though.”

  He looked a bit hurt then and didn’t say anything, which made me even more mortified about the whole thing, so I thought it was time to hit the road before I dug an even bigger hole for myself.

  “Anyway, em . . . what’s your name?”

  “Terry.”

  “Terry. Anyway, Terry, thanks for helping me up and all that. I’d better go now. Nice to meet you.”

  I walked off, doing a little hip swaggery thing that I hoped looked a bit cool – although if ever there was a case of too little too late, we’d just had it with the vegetables.

  “Hey, wait! I could buy you a drink in the pub beside the shopping centre to make up for what I did to you, if you like?”

  He blushed furiously after he said this, Diary. Like the kind of blush that would make you wonder if you should call for an ambulance because he looked like there was something seriously wrong with him. He even blushed his freckles into oblivion. I was a bit surprised, actually, because he’d been all debonairy and confident up to this point. I was so mortified for him then that I started blushing because I was the cause of his fecking blushing, so you can imagine the scene. Who needed the tomatoes in the bag? And the thing is, nobody has ever asked me out for a drink before. Oh, feck it, while we’re on the confessions, I might as well tell you that nobody has ever so much as kissed me before! Sure, how could they when I’m not allowed outside the door or to mix with anyone, either?

  And at school, everyone thinks I’m up myself, so none of the boys there even talk to me. Bottom line was that I didn’t have a clue how to deal with the situation with any smidgen of sophistication at all. So I just went “Ah no, I’m off the drink for Lent.” Even though a) Mum won’t let me do Lent any more because we don’t do religion any more, and b) it’s June.

  Now, this was meant to sound all nonchalant, the kind of voice someone who was always getting asked out would use, but it came out all helium balloony. The tomato rating shot up so fast that I was sure I’d blown the roof off.

  So I did what anyone with any sense would do. I ran off without even saying goodbye. Talk about excruciating. At that moment, I realised I’d be alone for the rest of my life. I’d started too late with boys and would never catch up on lost experience.

  About ten seconds later, I heard my name being called. Thing is, I hadn’t told him my name.

  “Forget the drink, Holly. I have a car. Do you want me to give you a lift home?”

  “How do you know my name?”

  A sheepish hangdog look came over him straight away.

  “I knew Ricky. I thought I recognised you earlier when I walked past you and I was wondering if it was you. I shook hands with you, you see, at the . . . funeral. The priest said your name during the Mass . . .”

  “How did you know Ricky?”

  “From the local chess club.”

  “Ah.”

  Ricky had been a huge chess fan and was brilliant at it.

  “God, it’s a wonder you’re still alive yourself. Ricky said there’d always be a gang of louts hanging around outside the community centre when the chess club ended, mocking the lot of you and threatening to kill you all for being such nerds.”

  “I’m well able for the louts,” Terry said.

  And I have to say, Diary, it was a bit of a swoon moment for me. Terry had the look of someone you didn’t mess with all right, chess or no chess. Then I remembered poor Ricky and felt guilty for having a swoon moment at all.

  “Are you okay about talking about Ricky? I didn’t know whether I should bring him up or not.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said, and it actually was.

  You see, nobody ever talks about him any more. Mum can’t mention him because she’ll get the crying fits. And Dad won’t mention him because it’s not pretty when Mum has the crying fits. He doesn’t know what to do with her, only to go painting the house or something, and we can’t afford paint, so what’s he meant to do? And Cliff has a complete veto on the subject of Ricky. If you dare to go there, he’ll walk out of the room. Nobody challenges him on it because we’re all too worried about him to risk pushing him even further away than he’s gone by himself.


  It’s as if Ricky never existed sometimes and it’s all quite fucked up, if you ask me, but nobody ever does. And it wasn’t until someone had mentioned him that I realised just how much I wanted to talk about him, just to acknowledge the fact that he’d existed.

  Terry shuffled around the space directly in front of me.

  “He seemed like a nice guy. I’m really sorry about what happened to him.” He stuck his hands in his pockets.

  I said the only thing that made sense to say at that time.

  “He was. How about we go for that drink after all and I can tell you a bit more about him? As long as you don’t mind if my vegetables come, too.”

  So we did. It turned out that Terry’s from Towerhill, the area next to ours on the way into town. It almost has as bad a name as Blackbeg. I feel like I’ve found the male version of myself, you know. Terry wants more from his life than Towerhill and all who sailed in it. He’s studying Hospitality and Tourism in Dublin Institute of Technology, and works part-time in a hotel bar in town both to fund his education and to give him direct work experience of the industry he wants to crack when he graduates.

  He moved into town to get away from friends who didn’t want anything more from their lives than sitting in a darkened pub all day and throwing a few darts when they were sober enough. He was looking for success and if that meant dropping friends along the way, so be it. I could have pointed out that at least he had friends to drop, but that was another story.

  So we’ve been going out for a few weeks now and here’s the most incredible bit . . . Mum met Terry at the weekend and she actually likes him! I thought she was going to freak out altogether when I told her I’d met someone so soon after Ricky’s death, but do you know what she said, the auld wagon wheel?

  “Hmm. Well, you are eighteen now, so I suppose it’s about time for you . . .” Closely followed by, “Bring him over here straight away so that we can see if he’s good enough for you.”