I couldn’t concentrate on work because I was afraid of forgetting to make his hourly cuppa. Then, every time I took it out to him, he kept me in conversation for thirty minutes, while I became more and more hysterical as work piled up undone. The last straw was when he told me that a certain plant was sage and that I should put it in my stews. Only the fact that I’m as enthusiastic a cook as I am a gardener saved us from being poisoned. Because the plant was lilac.
Wheel on gardener number two, a Canadian, who appeared to be a man of the earth. He certainly promised us the earth, definitely charged us the earth, then we eventually came down to earth when, despite the wedge we’d handed over for bulbs, spring yielded about ten daffodils. Talk about feeling like an eejit!
Gardener number three was very keen. At least, we think he was – we never actually met him. He kept promising to come, but after about a hundred phone calls there was still no sign of him.
Gardener number four, all the way from Italy, did a bit of landscaping, then ran for the hills when called upon to do the maintenance he’d promised (and been paid) to do.
Nothing left but to do it ourselves. I’ve planted a little yoke called a campanula (I think). I water it every day. I’m following its progress with interest. I can’t believe this is happening to me…
First published in Irish Tatler, August 1999.
Driving Along in My Automobile
As if buying a house and starting to garden wasn’t enough…
I’m learning to drive. I know it’s no biggie, that I’m probably the only mid-thirties person in Ireland who can’t yet drive, but I think I’m it. I’ve spent most of my life being a right scaredy-cat, having to cadge lifts off those normal people who’d felt the fear and done it anyway. So I finally decided to cop on to myself, and on a recent bank holiday I repaired to the Sandyford industrial estate with my husband and his Mazda.
We parked in a nice, quiet cul-de-sac, and I got into the driving seat. My first time behind the wheel I was literally trembling with terror. Then I looked into the rear-view mirror and it was like being in a parallel universe.
Himself explained the rudiments of driving and away we went. But the second I got the car moving forward I was appalled by the power of it and instantly slammed on the brakes. Then I reversed, and once again hit the brakes as soon as any movement was detected. Forwards we screeched again, then backwards. This continued for a very long time and when I finally finished I looked at Himself. He was doing his best to seem calm, but his clenched knuckles were the palest green. I decided I’d better get proper lessons.
I was warned that driving instructors could be a bit weird. Everyone had a story for me – that their instructor had been lecherous or racist or good, plain, old-fashioned bonkers. I thought they were only trying to cajole me to go ahead with the lessons, but to my great delight my instructor was awful! He was a sour-faced old boy who had no platitudes along the lines of ‘Lep in behind the wheel there, sure we’ll have you driving to Clare in no time, heh, heh, heh.’ He didn’t even introduce himself, just barked that he was taking me to a quiet road where I could do some driving without doing much damage. In an attempt to bond, I asked him how long he’d been a driving instructor. ‘Too long,’ he snapped, then we both lapsed into silence.
As we drove to the quiet road we passed a coloured gentleman, and me laddo beside me piped up, ‘Sure, that fella would be more at home pulling coconuts out of a tree.’
I looked at him in astonishment. Was he having me on?
‘I’m not racist,’ he said defensively. ‘I’m only saying.’
But minutes later, when we passed a crowd of young Asian people, your man chortled, ‘Mind we don’t drive into them. We’ll be having Chinese takeaway for tea.’
It was then that I started looking around for the hidden camera.
Once parked on the quiet road, I was itching to actually do a bit of driving with the safety of dual controls. But nothing doing. Instead he sat me in the car (the passenger side), and for forty minutes he bored and baffled me with hand-drawn diagrams of a car’s engine. There was much talk of something called a ‘biting point’ and the importance of finding it. Finally, with only fifteen minutes left of the lesson, I was allowed into the driving seat.
‘I’m nervous,’ I admitted.
‘Sure, what do you want to be nervous for?’ he spat.
Next thing I knew I was driving! Certainly I was wobbling all over the road, we were moving at two miles an hour and when I braked we nearly went through the windscreen, but I was delighted. Your man, however, went mental. He began shouting, literally shouting, about how awful I was. And it struck me that there was something awry here – if I’d wanted to be shouted at I’d have got one of my relations to teach me.
When I tried to remind Mr Instructor that it was my first time actually driving, he was having none of it. Off we went again, with me jerking and screeching up the road in stop-start fashion, as I acquainted myself with the accelerator. Once again he went bananas, shouting about how he wanted something called ‘ladylike acceleration’ from me.
‘What if I was a man? Would you want ladylike acceleration from him?’ I asked. I’m normally pathologically meek, but he was so unpleasant it was almost a joke. It was easy to stand up for myself.
The funniest thing of all was that at the end of the hour he expected me to sign up for a course of lessons with him. I told him to shag off. (Actually, I’m only showing off now. I mumbled something about having changed my mind, then fled.)
Then I got myself a woman instructor. A lovely, placid woman who barely winced when I came within an inch of taking the side off a row of parked cars, who hardly twitched when I slammed on the accelerator instead of the brakes. All the same, whenever she was late I used to pray that I’d got it wrong, that I didn’t really have a lesson at all.
Since I’ve started driving my right hand has curled up into a type of claw. I grip the wheel so tightly that when I park and switch off the engine, it takes me ages to unpeel my hand. The mark of the steering wheel is now permanently embossed on my palm. And after a short time in the car, no matter how cold the day, the sweat is pouring off me.
And my language, colourful at the best of times, has gone to hell entirely. I live in terror of hurting anyone and any obstacles make me freak with panic: parked cars, moving cars, buses, suicidal pedestrians, horses and carriages, and worst of all, cyclists. In theory I approve of cyclists. I think they’re cool because they’re not adding to the pollution or traffic problems. But as I drive behind them all I can think of is how fragile and vulnerable they look. I’d never overtake them except for the mile-long row of cars crawling in my wake, beeping and threatening to kill me. So I gather up all my courage and veer out and overtake the cyclist. Then seconds later I’ve to stop at a traffic light and the bloody cyclist whizzes up on the inside, and as soon as the lights change I’ve to try and overtake them all over again.
But things have improved. At least people are now allowed to speak while I’m driving. In the early days even the sound of my passenger breathing was enough to put me off my stride. And the nightmares are fewer. At the start, I spent every night driving in my sleep and waking up, sitting bolt upright in the bed, my heart pounding because I’d had yet another dream of the car veering out of control.
A few months ago I bought a Nissan Micra and I’m besotted with it. I almost feel like a grown-up. Fishing around in my handbag, unable to find my car keys, is one of the most empowering experiences I’ve ever had!
First published in Irish Tatler, February 2000.
Reversing Around Corners
Some time ago I wrote about how I was learning to drive. I wasn’t very good but I was doing my best, so when Barbara, my driving instructor, suggested that I apply for a driving test, I decided I might as well. Anyway, the waiting lists were so long I’d somehow managed to convince myself that driving tests – like being abducted by aliens – only happened to other people.
Until one da
y a couple of months ago a manila envelope arrived for me. Unawares, I opened it, thinking it was probably just another narky letter from the tax office. But one glance at the page in front of me changed everything. I saw two words: ‘Driving’ and ‘Test’. Suddenly I heard a roaring in my ears. The page fluttered from my fingers. Everything went black and I knew no more.
When I came to, I appeared to be in considerable distress and yelling about being ‘picked on’. I had every intention of cancelling the test. Faking a broken leg or something. Then I faced facts – I was going to have to do it at some stage, it might as well be now. ‘You won’t pass it,’ Tadhg confidently assured me. ‘But it’ll be good practice for you.’
Right.
I hadn’t been a bad driver over the preceding few months. But from the moment I knew I’d be sitting my test four weeks hence, I turned into a quivering disaster. I stalled every five yards. I forgot to take the hand brake off. I turned on the windscreen wipers when I wanted to indicate.
And everyone I spoke to had a test horror story.
Julie, the girl who waxes my legs, told me about a friend of hers who’d knocked down and killed a dog during her test. ‘Isn’t that awful?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Did she pass?’ She didn’t.
Someone else had done their three-point turn on a road where they were cutting down tree branches, and got half a tree tangled up in their undercarriage, which caused the car to cut out. They didn’t pass either.
Goaded on by my fear of failure, I signed up for hundreds more driving lessons. I managed to get Barbara. I liked her and she seemed to like me. Just as well – we were going to be seeing an awful lot of one another.
Unfortunately, I’d managed to pick up loads of bad habits: cruising in neutral the last hundred yards or so to the traffic lights; never ever using my rear-view mirror because I was only interested in what I was driving towards and had no interest at all in what was behind me. And another side-effect of the forthcoming test was that I totally lost the ability to distinguish between left and right.
‘Take the next left,’ Barbara would say.
‘Right you are,’ I’d reply heartily, flicking on the windscreen wipers and moving into the right-hand lane.
I had lesson after lesson, and some days I thought I detected an improvement and other days it was clear I’d been hallucinating. It was the reversing around a corner that was nearly the death of me: I either mounted the kerb or ended up on the other side of the road with no idea of how I’d got there. More than once I pounded the steering wheel and cried with frustration at my own crapness.
Barbara was patient and encouraging, and one of the pieces of advice she gave me was to check that I’d got the date and time correct for my test. Which I did a couple of days before the big day. I was on the phone at the time and fiddling with stuff, you know the way you do. Multi-tasking. I can talk and rub funny stains on the table at the same time. Holding my own in a conversation about (as I seem to remember) the merits of Matthew McConaughey over Ben Affleck, I eased my test notification out from under a pile of bills. And my heart nearly stopped.
I had the date right. I even had the time right. But the location was wrong. Somehow, in all the fuss when the notification had arrived, I’d come to the conclusion that I was being tested in Churchtown – which was why I’d spent every waking moment of the previous three weeks driving the highways and byways of Churchtown. So much so that if I missed a day people began to worry that they hadn’t seen me. However, I’d got it wrong. I wasn’t sitting my driving test in Churchtown, I was sitting it in Rathgar. Rathgar – of which I knew nothing. Not one tricky roundabout, not one unexpected sliproad, not one difficult right turn.
The letters danced before my eyes, then stood still just long enough for me to realize the full extent of the horror, then off they started skipping again with nah-nah-nah-naaah-nah glee. Somehow, stutteringly, I managed to sustain the conversation while the sweat poured off me in buckets. Eventually I slammed the phone down, turned to Himself and screeched, ‘Come on!’
‘Come on where? It’s half ten at night.’
‘Come on, we’re going to Rathgar to practise the test route!’
The day before the test I had a dress rehearsal – which was a disaster. My hill start was a non-starter and my three-point turn ended up being a twenty-three-point one with me ricocheting off each kerb like a tennis ball. Both Barbara and I were very subdued. Barbara had the decency to pretend that she had a leak in her bathroom on her mind, but I knew it was my fault. Who could blame her for being disappointed – all those lessons and would you look at the state of me?
Then the dreaded day dawned and Himself came with me to provide moral support. I’d barely slept – really, I mean it, it was six in the morning before I’d nodded off, and I was up again at eight. I was certain that I was going to fail, never more certain of anything in my life.
The test centre was what I imagine Hell’s waiting-room is like. Everyone was grey-pale and dumb with terror. And then my name was called…
I’d been led to believe that driving testers were barely human. That they were forty-five-year-old men who still lived at home with their mammies, that they wore anoraks teamed with suit trousers which exhibited a permanent crease and that they carried clipboards even on their days off. But to my great surprise, I got a girl. And she was nice. Well, not nice nice, like someone trying to sell you lip-gloss, but not a desocialized weirdo either.
We sat in a little cubicle and she asked me questions – who can drive on a motorway, when can you overtake on the left, what my favourite colour is (actually, maybe I imagined that bit). It all went OK, but that wasn’t the part of the test I was worried about. And the next thing, feeling like I was dreaming, I was walking towards my car with her.
When we were both sitting in the car I tried licking up to her by asking if she’d like the heating on, but she just said nicely but firmly, ‘Don’t worry about me. Just drive the way you’d normally drive.’ I resisted the urge to throw my head back and cackle hysterically. And then we were off.
The whole thing was like an out-of-body experience. My heart was pounding, my mouth was as dry as carpet, my head was light and I could feel the blood pulsing through me. Left turns and right turns and traffic lights and roundabouts all happened in a faraway haze. The hill start seemed to go all right. The reversing around the corner wasn’t one of my best, but I didn’t mount the kerb or somehow end up mysteriously on the other side of the road. My three-point turn ended up being five points, but with an absence of kerb bumpage. As we finally headed back to the test centre I wasn’t aware of having done anything heinously wrong, but you never know. One person had told me they were failed for taking their left hand off the steering wheel to scratch their leg. Another for having her hands in a quarter-to-four position instead of ten-to-two.
After I’d parked, she announced that we would go back inside to get the results. I couldn’t understand why she couldn’t tell me in the car, but apparently it’s because there’s a danger that they might be attacked by a disappointed candidate. I trooped inside after her, and when we sat down in her little cubicle she declared, ‘You have passed the test.’ Immediately I burst into tears and she wasn’t a bit fazed. It obviously happens all the time.
I waited to suddenly feel grown-up – everyone had promised me that I would. But nothing happened. Looks like I’m going to spend the rest of my life convinced I’m still sixteen and waiting for my exam results.
I skipped back out to the waiting-room, where the next batch of people waiting to do their tests were sitting like the souls of the damned. Mindful of their nerves I grabbed Himself, waved my bit of paper and hissed triumphantly, ‘I passed, I passed, I passed, I passed!’
Two days later I drove my car into the gatepost.
First published in Irish Tatler, July 2000.
The Pissed is a Foreign Country, They Do Things Differently There
No one sets out to be an alcoho
lic. It certainly wasn’t part of my life plan, but it happened anyway. Luckily I was one of the fortunate ones. At the start of 1994 I got help and was able to stop, which was when the real business of growing up began.
I was nine years old, standing in the kitchen, when suddenly I was assailed by a fierce urge for something. My body literally spasmed with it. It was far more than a desperate emotional yearning; this was a panicky physical need. Thirst to the power of a million. My head raced through my usual panaceas – fizzy drinks, chocolate – but none of them would have quenched this raging desire. The same raging desire that was my constant companion twenty years later. I was a precocious child who knew about alcoholism, and a little voice inside me went ‘Oh oh.’
There was nothing in my upbringing to indicate that by the time I was thirty I’d be drinking on my own, mired in denial, living in the wreckage of a ruined life. I came from an ordinary family and had loving parents, who were moderate drinkers. There was no childhood trauma or disaster that I could hang the blame on.
But from an early age there was something definitely adrift with me – feelings of crippling self-consciousness and self-loathing. I felt as though I’d been born without life’s rule book. I was so out of step with the world around me, I sometimes wondered if I was from another planet.
Feelings of impending doom tormented me. I became convinced that our house would burn down during the night, so I took to filling up basins of water in the bathroom every evening, for speedier fire-fighting when the time came. I went through a phase of wearing my nightdress over my uniform because I was so terrified of being late for school.
So when I had my first drink in my teens, I thought I’d found the secret of the universe. The fear disappeared and all at once I felt as good as everyone else. There and then I decided that I would never again do anything difficult or painful without this wonderful substance, alcohol. Why turn my back on help?