Locked Out of Heaven

by Shirley Benton

  I thumbed through the papers. I couldn’t help wondering where all of this had come from, Diary. I was a bit perplexed by it all.

  “You sound like you know the layout of this place well.”

  “I’ve taken several tours there as a prospective buyer, yes.”

  Now I really was shocked. This was sounding less like an idea he was mulling over and more like a concrete deal he was about to embark on.

  “Terry, please don’t take this the wrong way, but . . .”

  “Go on.”

  “This place might be a dump, but a dump in that location isn’t going to come cheap. How can you possibly afford it? Surely a few years of saving isn’t going to cover the costs involved in this?”

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  For a second, I have to admit that I didn’t like the sound of that question. Did a secret mean that something dodgy was going on? But as soon as the thought crossed my mind, I dismissed it. Terry had never displayed any signs of being dishonourable in the time I knew him and even to entertain the notion that he might be up to something just made me as guilty of judging people on where they came from as everyone who’d ever judged me. I berated myself for even thinking of it. And I hope you don’t think badly of me for thinking it, either, Diary.

  “Of course I can. But I’m hardly going to say no, am I? Nobody ever does!”

  “I have to ask. I don’t want too many people knowing my business and I know people will be asking questions about how I was able to buy a pub, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be answering those questions. They can speculate all they want. But I don’t mind telling you. I think we have something special going on here, Holly. I don’t trust many people, but I think I can trust you.”

  I nodded, still feeling a bit ashamed of myself.

  “Thanks, Terry. I trust you, too.”

  He rifled through his documentation and handed me a bank statement.

  “That’s how much I have to spend,” he said, pointing to a figure.

  I gasped. “How . . . ?”

  “It was an inheritance. Remember I told you my uncle Billy died a while ago? He left this to me. He was my father’s only brother. They had no sisters and were very close to each other. He moved to London in the seventies and did very well for himself. He was just an ordinary Joe Soap with very little education, but he had plenty of cop on and knew how to use it.

  “He started off just pulling pints in pubs, but it wasn’t long before he was running a place himself. But he was just doing that to get the initial cash for what was to become a very lucrative sideline: buying property, doing it up and selling it off at a profit.

  “He made a fortune on property from the seventies right up until he died. But the poor bugger never settled down or had any children. He got paranoid that every woman who got close to him was only interested in him for his money, so eventually he just stayed away from them altogether.

  “He used to come home every second weekend – not a problem for someone with as much money as he had. He’d always stay with us in our grotty spare room, even though he had enough dosh to stay in the best hotel in Dublin every single time. He was very fond of me. When he died, he divided up his money between Dad, Mum and me.

  “My auld ones don’t know what to do with the money, though. They’re refusing to move out of the place where they were born and reared, so the dosh is just sitting in a bank account building up interest. We’re not allowed to tell anyone about it – you’re the first person I’ve told. God love them, it’s like putting a kid with no teeth into a sticky toffee factory. As for me, though, I know exactly what I’m going to do with my money. I’m going to build up my empire.”

  “And how much of your money will you have to spend to buy this pub?”

  “Most of it really, between buying the pub and doing it up to the spec that I want it to be. It might be a hovel, but it’s in the most prestigious area of Dublin.”

  “But this money is your entire future. What if this pub is a total flop?”

  “If Billy had thought like that when he was investing all of his life’s savings in the first house he’d bought, he’d never have got anywhere.”

  “And will your parents help you out if it does all go tits-up?”

  “They would if I asked them, but I won’t, no matter what. I’m going to make my own future.”

  “Sounds to me like you’ve made up your mind about this place.”

  He nodded. “Almost, but I wanted to get your opinion on this before I made my final decision. You’re a lot more cautious than I am and I need your input. What do you reckon? What would you do?”

  “What I would do is use that money to buy a really nice family house for myself in a classy area so that if I ever had kids, they wouldn’t grow up thinking the way people in my area do. But that’s me and that’s not what I think you should do.

  “You’re somebody who needs to achieve things in life, because that’s what you thrive on. I’m someone who needs to achieve things because I want the security of not living in a drug-addled area with no hope. If I make enough money to buy a small house in a nice area and to be able to send my kids to a decent school, that’s enough for me.

  “But you, you’re driven by something completely different. So if you’re asking me what I think you should do, I think you should go for it. If you fail, which I doubt you will, you’ll learn from it and use what you’ve learned to make sure your next venture is a success. Do it and never look back, Terry, that’s what I reckon you should do.”

  Terry beamed. I felt proud that my opinion meant so much to him. He was so dynamic, so fearless – everything I wasn’t, and yet he seemed to respect me so much.

  “That’s that, then. Looks like I’ll be visiting my solicitor,” he said, getting up to hug me. “Holly, will you come with me when I sign the papers to buy this place? I have a feeling that with you by my side, this is going to work out better than I’ve ever dreamed of.”

  So we’re going to sign the papers tomorrow. If this all goes wrong, I hope he doesn’t blame me. But you know something – I don’t think it will go wrong. I’m still reeling at the amount of money he has, though. I’m dating a very rich man and I didn’t even know it. But after all, I suppose we’ve only been together a few months, Diary. When it comes down to it, how well do we know each other really?

  Chapter 28

  “No, Terry, I don’t want to meet up for a drink.”

  I held the phone out from my ear while Terry ranted about how I wasn’t even trying to fix our problems.

  “That’s because they’re not fixable,” I said in a calm tone of voice that I knew would drive him crazy, but I didn’t care. Crazy was what he deserved.

  When he started ranting again, I hung up. I was shaking with anger at how Terry always felt he had the right to control everything that went on between us. Some of it was my fault – I’d let him have his own way far too easily over the years. It was second nature to him now to try to dominate our decisions. The kids were my domain and I revelled in having one area of our lives that was mine to control – although things often went to the other extreme, whereby I’d end up doing everything for them. Because of this, that fateful day Terry had betrayed me had been the first day I’d ever left him on his own with Oran.

  I’d been nervous doing so, although I feel terrible even admitting that – he was his father, after all. But Terry hadn’t adjusted to being a father of four as well as he’d thought he would, truth be told. He’d been beside himself with excitement when we discovered I was expecting a boy and had driven me to distraction for the remainder of my pregnancy with “when our son is here . . .” talk.

  He’d spent the first few hours of Oran’s life in a state of bliss, staring at him in disbelief and at me like I was magical for having created this perfect creature. Things changed when we brought him home. I’d decided to breastfeed Oran, something I hadn’t done with my other children – but they’d all been sick a lot as babies and I hoped breastf
eeding might help with immunity this time round. It took a while for us to get our latching groove on and during that time he was constantly hungry and crying incessantly. A few weeks later, just when things had settled down on the feeding front, he developed colic. And that was when the fun really started.

  “I didn’t think it’d be like this,” Terry said one evening after the pair of us had walked Oran around the house for three hours, taking turns at winding him ineffectively.

  Our back-patting efforts never seemed to bear fruit, but we did it anyway to make ourselves feel like we were doing something for him.

  “Like what?” I snapped.

  “Like . . . this hard. It wasn’t like this with the others.”

  “The first few months of a baby’s life aren’t easy on any parents,” I said as calmly as I could. “Some babies just cry a lot. At least we know why he’s crying.”

  “I don’t know. Breastfed babies aren’t supposed to have colic, are they? Isn’t that supposed to be one of the big advantages of breastfeeding? Are you sure it’s not something in your diet that’s causing this?”

  “We’ve been through this a million times before with the doctor,” I said wearily.

  Although I ate huge portions to keep me going, my diet couldn’t have been plainer. It generally consisted of a few bowls of porridge for breakfast, millet bread for lunch, plain rice or pasta with no sauce for dinner and cottage cheese several times a day as my snack (far, far too much of it, unfortunately). The pasta was usually a few bowls. Freshly cooked plain pasta was deceptively nice when you were constantly starving, as I seemed to be since I started breastfeeding, but the portion sizes were my issue to deal with and shouldn’t have impacted on the baby.

  All these foods were on the recommended anti-colic diet for a breastfeeding woman. I’d tried not eating all of these foods too, substituting them with other foods from the recommended diet (in equally large portions), just in case the baby did have a reaction to any of them, but that hadn’t done any good, either. Oran was determined to have colic and that was that. I wished Terry would just let him get on with it.

  “We don’t seem to be able to enjoy him with all this crying going on. I don’t even know what to do with him when he starts. I walk in this door, hear the crying and feel this dread descending on me because it’s another day of screeching. I don’t know how you cope, being here all day listening to constant crying.”

  “Terry, do you have any idea how lucky we are? He’s a perfectly healthy baby! Don’t talk about him like he’s some sort of burden!”

  “I don’t mean it that way, Holly! I’m just saying that you’re very resilient, that’s all.”

  “No, Terry. The parents of seriously ill children are resilient. This is just colic and it’ll pass. I’m just doing what any mother would do and getting on with things.”

  “And I’m just telling you what’s going on in my head, Holly. I’m not trying to be unsupportive. I just thought it was better to be truthful with you.”

  He walked out of the room.

  Truthful. What a joke.

  A few days before it all kicked off, Terry came home with flowers and chocolates and a big smile on his face. I recognised that smile.

  I said nothing. I didn’t want to give even a sniff of encouragement to what he was trying to get out of me. It had been another one of those days where he’d left first thing, promising to be home at six. It was now ten o’clock at night and all I wanted was to hand the kids over to Terry for a few hours while I had a shower and took a much-needed cat nap before Oran woke in a few hours to be fed again. It had taken hours to get him settled and I was exhausted. I was just glad Terry had come home at all – some nights he was stuck in the pub until well after closing time and I didn’t even hear him come in. He’d sleep in one of the many spare rooms so as not to wake Oran or me.

  “Thanks, Terry,” I said as he walked in from the hall to the sitting room. “Well, I’m assuming they’re for me.”

  “Course they are, gorgeous. Sorry I’m late.”

  He leaned in for a kiss as he handed them to me. I gave him a quick peck before taking the flowers out to the kitchen.

  “You’ll have to eat the chocolates yourself, though,” I said, pouring flower food into the bottom of a vase as Terry followed me out to the kitchen. “I can’t eat chocolate when breastfeeding in case it makes the colic worse, remember? But thank you so much for the thought.”

  He leaned against the door frame, frowning. “Well, you can keep them until after you stop breastfeeding, if you want. I mean, I’m sure you’ll be stopping it soon, yeah?”

  I stared at him sharply. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  He shrugged. “He’s not a newborn any more and the doctor said the colic should stop in the next few weeks. He’ll be fine on formula now, if you want to give up the feeding.”

  “But I don’t, Terry.”

  I gave him another sharp look before filling the vase with water.

  “Okay. Fine. I’ll eat the chocolates, so.”

  He pushed himself away from the door frame and wandered back into the sitting room.

  A wave of exhaustion hit me as I cut a few inches off the stems of the flowers. Beautiful and all as they were, and despite my appreciation of Terry’s gesture, the last thing I needed was to have something else to do before I could go to bed.

  When a particularly stubborn stem refused to give way to the scissors, I nearly cried. Then I realised that I’d been trying to cut into a particularly gnarly bit and had to fight even harder to stop myself from crying – this time at my sheer stupidity. I just couldn’t think straight any more and hadn’t been able to do so for months. The thought of even having to spell my name felt like an insurmountable task.

  Eventually, I completed the flower-cutting. I hoped Terry would be settled on the couch when I got in, ready for a night of TV, but he was just standing in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets, waiting for me. He was smiling that smile again.

  “No,” I said immediately.

  “What?”

  “You have no idea how exhausted I am. There’s no way I’m in the mood for sex tonight.”

  He stared at me for a few seconds. I knew he’d be weighing up whether or not to pretend that hadn’t been what he was thinking about.

  “Just like every other night, then,” he said in a low voice.

  Plumping for not, then. Feck. I’d been hoping we could just park the conversation there. Every second of talking was eating into my precious sleeping time. I’d had the grand total of three hours’ sleep the previous night and hadn’t had the opportunity to grab a single nap that day. I was hanging.

  I explained as much to Terry. He wasn’t so much unsympathetic as indignant.

  “So what’s the story, then? You’re never going to sleep with me again because you’re always going to be too tired? Oran’s ten weeks old and you haven’t come near me once since he was born.”

  “Yes, because I was torn to bits and trying to recover from the birth for over a month, then he got colic and we both know how things have been since! Terry, do you honestly think my head or my body is in the sex zone at the moment?”

  “So is this a problem, then? Is it low libido or something?”

  “It’s called trying to survive when you get little or no sleep for three months after giving your body over to another person for nine shagging months! For the fourth time!”

  I took a deep breath, trying to stay calm. I didn’t want Terry to feel rejected, but I was struggling to keep going and I really didn’t need guilt about not being the perfect sex kitten wife on top of all the rest of it.

  “And anyway, it’s a biological fact that when you’re breastfeeding, your body suppresses your libido because it doesn’t want you to get pregnant again when you’re supporting another child.”

  If I’d taken up a manual and looked up the wrong thing to say to your husband when you won’t have sex with him after having a baby, I couldn’t ha
ve got it more right.

  “Here’s a thought, Holly. For the sake of your libido and our marriage, would you not give up the breastfeeding? What happens if you decide to feed Oran until he’s seven?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “But where does this stop? If you have no intention of giving it up now, then when?”

  “I’m not going to put a definite time frame on it! It’s working out great—”

  “For you, maybe. You know something, Holly? You never asked me for my opinion on whether or not you should breastfeed. It was something you wanted to do. What about if I want to feed him a bottle? You won’t even express it and let me feed him, because it’s handier for you to feed him directly!”

  “I’m just trying to do what’s best by my baby, Terry!”

  “Your baby? Did I play no part in creating him?”

  “You know what I mean! I gave birth to this child and I want to feed him myself.”

  “Oh, come on. We fed the other three formula and they ended up perfectly fine! It’s not a poison! I don’t know why you changed your mind about breastfeeding this time round.”

  “I told you, I’m hoping it might help his immunity! And I just felt it was something I should try now that I have more experience with managing babies.”

  “Yeah, right. You let yourself be bullied into it by the hospital from what I saw. Anyway, don’t you have to give Oran vitamin D drops or something because breast milk doesn’t produce it? Formula would take care of that problem and it’d be one less thing for you to do.”

  “You’re not going to tell me I’m wrong for wanting to feed my child myself. I’m not some Nazi breastfeeding mother! I just want to feed him and not have to be answerable to anyone about it.”

  I walked away, but Terry wasn’t in the mood for stopping the argument yet.

  “But, Holly, that’s the thing. There’s a ‘we’ here. Why is it all about what you want? This isn’t just about sex. You choosing to breastfeed has excluded me from doing a lot of things with Oran. And while I’m happy to support you on this, all I can see are the disadvantages.