“Yes, it really is me.” I smiled at her. “Sorry if I gave you a fright. But I was dying for a drink.” I went over to her and put my arms around her. It really was lovely to see her.
Anna looked a lot like Helen, little white face, slanty cat eyes, cute little nose.
But the resemblance ended there. For starters I didn’t want to kill Anna about twenty times a day. Anna was a lot quieter, a lot sweeter. She was very kind to everyone. She was also, unfortunately, very vague and very ethereal.
Well, I suppose I had better be perfectly frank with you. There’s no getting away from the fact that Anna was a bit of…well…a bit of a hippie, I suppose.
She got jobs intermittently. Usually in vegetarian restaurants. But they never seemed to last any length of time. Well, neither did the restaurants either, for some odd reason.
She went on welfare.
She, as I should have mentioned, sold drugs. But only briefly. And in the nicest possible way.
No honestly.
She never hung around school gates trying to sell high-grade heroin to eight-year-olds.
She just sold the odd bit of hash to her friends and family. And doubtless made a loss on it.
She made jewelry and occasionally even sold some.
A precarious kind of existence, but she didn’t seem too bothered by the insecure nature of it. Dad despaired of Anna. He called her irresponsible. And, of course, the blame for Anna’s instability was laid squarely, if not particularly fairly, at my door. Dad said that I had hightailed it (his word) to London at a time when Anna was at a very impressionable age and I had given her the idea that it was perfectly acceptable to give up a good job and go off and work as a waitress. What kind of role model was I? he asked me.
Dad had desperately tried to mold Anna into a responsible, tax-paying citizen. He managed to get her a job in an office working for a construction company.
Apparently someone owed him a favor.
It must have been a very large favor.
It was a mistake to try to force Anna to work in an office. Like trying to squash a round peg into a square hole. Or wearing your shoes on the wrong feet. Unpleasant, uncomfortable and almost certainly doomed to failure.
It was a disaster.
She lost track of the time every lunch hour because she had found a swan’s nest at the canal near the office and would spend ages watching the birds and cooing over the eggs. (And rolling and partaking of several joints also, if the rumormongers are to be believed.) But the day she suggested changing the filing system for the construction workers, so that instead of organizing them by their surnames, she would do it by their astrological star signs instead, Mr. Ballard, the office manager, decided that he had enough. Although Anna protested that really she had only been joking (she said, laughing, no doubt making things worse for herself, “Honestly, how could we possibly consider filing them by their star signs? I mean, we don’t even know their rising signs”), she soon found herself once more without gainful employment.
Dad was furious and mortified with embarrassment. “What goes on in her bloody head?” he thundered. “I’d nearly swear she’s on drugs.”
Honestly, for an intelligent man, there were times when he was alarmingly naive.
Once she had established that I wasn’t a psychic phenome- non, Anna, though disappointed, decided to make the best of the situation.
“Pour me a glass of that too,” she said, gesturing at the bottle of wine, so I did, and we both sat down at the kitchen table.
It was about five AM.
Anna seemed to find nothing remotely strange at the lateness or, more accurately, the earliness of the hour.
“Cheers,” she said, raising her glass to me.
“Yes, cheers,” I replied hollowly. I drained the glass in one gulp. Anna looked admiringly at me.
“So what are you doing here?” she asked conversationally. “I didn’t know that you were coming. No one told me…well, I think no one told me,” she said a bit doubtfully. “I haven’t been home in about a week.”
“Well, Anna, it was a bit of a sudden decision,” I said, sighing as I geared up for a long tortuous explanation of my tragic circumstances.
But before I could, she interrupted me abruptly.
“Oh my God!” she said, suddenly clapping a hand to her mouth.
“What?” I demanded, feeling very alarmed. Was the corkscrew hovering in midair? Had a banshee’s face appeared at the window?
“You’re not pregnant anymore!” she exclaimed.
I smiled in spite of myself.
“No, Anna, I’m not. Can you figure it out?”
“You’ve had a baby?” she asked slowly.
“Yes,” I confirmed, still smiling.
“Jesus!” she screamed. “Isn’t that fabulous!” And flung her arms around me. “Is it a girl?”
“Yes,” I told her.
“Is she here? Can I see her?” Anna asked, all excited.
“Yes, she’s in my room. But she’s asleep. And if you don’t mind I’d prefer not to wake her. Not until I’ve finished this bottle of wine, anyway,” I said morosely.
“Well, fair enough,” conceded Anna, pouring me another glass of wine, one alcohophile to another. “Get that inside you. I suppose it’s a long time since you’ve been allowed to drink alcohol. No wonder you’re knocking it back.” “Well, it is a long time since I’ve been able to have a drink. But that’s not why I’m so desperate to get drunk,” I told her.
“Oh?” she asked me quizzically.
So I told her about James.
And she was so gentle, so sympathetic, so unjudgmental and, in her own flaky way, so wise, that I slowly started to feel a bit better. A little bit calmer.
A little less weary. A little more hopeful.
I suppose the bottle of wine had also better get a mention on the credits.
It played a small but not insignificant part in the lifting of my spirits. But it was mostly thanks to Anna.
She murmured stuff like “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be” and “We’re all being taken care of, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time” and “There is a plan for all of us” and “Everything happens for a reason.”
Hippie-type talk. But I found it very comforting.
And at about six o’clock, just when the birds were starting to sing, we abandoned the kitchen, leaving the table strewn with glasses, the well-and-truly empty bottle, the cork, the corkscrew and Anna’s overflowing ashtray.
Dad would be getting up in an hour to make breakfast for himself and Mum. He would deal with the mess, we reasoned. He liked to do things, we agreed. He needed to feel needed.
We slowly climbed the stairs, our arms around each other, and I fell into bed, feeling sleepy and relaxed and calm. Anna spent a few minutes gazing in wonder at Kate and then insisted on getting the two helium balloons (which she had misappropriated from the party she had been to, along with the bottle of wine) and tying them onto Kate’s bassinet. Then Anna kissed me good-night and tiptoed out of the room. I went straight into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Kate woke me fifteen minutes later screeching for her breakfast.
I fed her and then staggered back to bed.
Just as I was drifting back to sleep I heard Dad getting up. A few minutes later I heard him pounding up the stairs shouting to my mother, “Your daughters are drunken pups!” (They were always her daughters when they lost jobs, didn’t go to mass, stayed out late and dressed indecently.
They were his daughters when they passed exams, got degrees, married ac- countants and bought houses.) “Drinking all night and lying in bed all day!
Am I supposed to clear up the mess in the kitchen?”
Dad had obviously discovered the remains of our little party.
Mum wailed plaintively, “Oh no, they’ve found the drink again. I thought they’d never find it out under the oil tank. Now I’ll have to find a new place
to hide it.”
After a while this commotion died down. Just as I was hoping against hope that I might catch an hour or two of sleep, someone started ringing at the front door. Naturally, this was quite alarming because it was only seven-thirty in the morning. I heard Dad open the door and engage in conversation with a man’s voice. I strained to hear what was going on.
Could it possibly be James? I felt such a surge of hope that it nearly hurt.
Then there was the sound of Dad running up the stairs. He shouted to my mother, “There’s a madman at the front door with a shoe. He wants to know if we own it. What’ll I do?”
There was a perplexed silence from my mother.
“I’m going to be late for work with all these interruptions this morning, you know,” Dad told her, as if it was her fault.
I started to cry with disappointment. It wasn’t James at the front door. I knew exactly who it was.
“Dad,” I called tearfully. “Daaaaaad!”
He stuck his head around the door. “Morning, love,” he said. “I’ll be with you in a minute. I’ll make you some tea. It’s just that there’s a lunatic downstairs and I’d better get rid of him first.”
“No, Dad,” I told him. “He’s not a lunatic. He’s a taxi driver. Wake Anna.
I bet it’s her shoe.”
“Oh, so she’s finally bothered to come home, has she?” shouted Mum from her room.
Dad went off to Anna’s room muttering “I might have known Anna would be involved in this.”
Anna was duly roused. And it turned out that the man at the front door was the taxi driver who had dropped Anna home in the early hours of the morning. When he’d finished his shift he found a shoe in the back of his car. And was now traveling, in the manner of Prince Charming, to all the houses of the young women he had delivered home during the night, trying to match the shoe to the young woman. Anna was indeed his Cinderella.
Anna gave effusive thanks. The taxi driver left. Anna went back to bed.
Dad went to work. I closed my eyes. Kate started to cry.
So did I.
six
Wet and windy and miserable. For the first two weeks that I was home it rained every day. Apparently it was the wettest February in living memory.
I would wake in the middle of every night to the sound of the raindrops cracking and spattering at the window, drumming and pounding on the roof.
The weather made everyone miserable. Luckily I was suicidal anyway.
In fact, the weather made me feel slightly better. It seemed like Fate’s way of evening up my miserable life with everyone else’s happy life, if you know what I mean.
Anna and Helen lounged moodily around the house, staring longingly out the windows, wondering if it would ever stop.
Mum talked gloomily about building an ark.
Dad tried to play golf while up to his knees in water on a flooded golf course.
I spent hours just lying on my bed, staring at nothing, Kate beside me, while the rain poured down outside, steaming up the windows, turning the garden into a quagmire.
My mother would bounce into my room each morning and fling back the curtains on another gray, sodden day, and say, “Well, what’s on the agenda for today?”
I knew that she was only trying to cheer me up. And I tried to be cheerful.
It was just that I was so tired all the time. She would then offer to make me my breakfast, but as soon as she left my room I would drag myself over to the window and close the curtains again.
I didn’t neglect Kate. Really, I didn’t.
Well, maybe I did.
To my eternal shame Mum brought her to the doctor for her check-up.
Mum drove to the supermarket and bought mounds and mounds of disposable diapers and baby formula and talc and bottle sterilizer and everything else that Kate needed.
In fairness to me, I didn’t abandon Kate entirely. I did take care of her in lots of ways. I fed her and changed her and washed her and worried about her. Sometimes I even played with her. I just couldn’t seem to do anything that involved leaving the house for her.
Getting dressed was such a huge undertaking that I never managed it.
On the rare occasions that I did get out of bed I put one of Dad’s golfing sweaters on over Mum’s nightgown and wore a pair of hiking socks. I would genuinely intend to get dressed for real. But later.
“As soon as I’ve fed Kate,” I would say.
But after that I would be so exhausted that I would have to lie down for a while and read a few lines of an article in Hello magazine.
After lying down for a while I might have to pee. I would spend about half an hour trying to summon the energy to go to the bathroom. It was as if I were made of lead.
Once I got to the bathroom it was all I could do to stagger back to bed again.
“I’ll just lie down again for five minutes,” I would promise myself, “and then I really will get dressed.”
But by then it would be time to feed Kate again.
And after that I would have to lie down again, just for five minutes….
Somehow I just never got around to it.
If only I was left alone to sleep forever I would be all right. That’s what I thought. But people kept bothering me.
I was lying in bed one afternoon (I don’t know why I say “one afternoon”—it’s not as though it wasn’t a regular event) when a Neanderthal-looking young man carrying a hammer strolled into the room. My initial reaction was that I had been cooped up too long and had started to hallucinate.
Then Mum burst in all breathless and anxious.
It turned out that the young man had come to install a baby intercom between my bedroom and the living room. Mum had watched him like a hawk downstairs but when she had gone to answer the phone he had escaped and made his way to my room.
Mum rushed over and forced me out of the bed as though it was the middle of the night and she was a group of secret policemen who were about to take me away and torture me. I still have her finger marks on my arms. My God, but she’d be lethal with an electric cattle prod. You see, she thought that I might give the intercom man impure thoughts if he had to work in close proximity to me while I was still in my nightgown, so it was a matter of acute urgency to get me moved as quickly as possible.
In addition to my displacement troubles with the intercom man, Helen never gave me a moment’s peace. Most mornings she would stand in the bedroom doorway and look at me lying prostrate on my bed, and bellow,
“Your breakfast is ready. And last one down the stairs is a big fat smelly pig!”
In an instant she would be gone, thundering back down the stairs to the kitchen, while I limply tried to tell her that I was a big fat smelly pig already.
Therefore her challenge meant nothing to me.
Well, I was big and fat, that was for sure. Very watermelonesque. Well, at least I had been when I arrived in Dublin. I couldn’t be certain now as I hadn’t looked in a mirror or tried on any clothes since the day I left my apartment in London.
I was most certainly smelly. There was as much chance of me climbing Mount Everest as there was of me washing my hair.
I did have the occasional bath, but only because my mother organized the whole thing.
A combination of persuasion and coercion.
She would fill the bath with steaming and fragrant bubble bath so that I would smell of kiwifruit and papaya. She would put huge soft towels on the heated towel rack for me. She would offer me a loan of her lavender body lotion (ugh, no thanks). She would threaten to report me to the authorities for being an unfit mother. Kate, she told me, would be put in a foster home.
So I would have a bath every day or so.
Grudgingly.
But perhaps I wasn’t a pig. I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten anything. I was never hungry. The thought of eating something scared the life out of me. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to.
I felt frozen. As if my throat was blocked up and I wouldn’t ever be able to swallow anything.
I couldn’t believe that this was happening to me—I’d always had a very robust appetite. When I was pregnant, it was better than robust, more like steel-reinforced. I spent my teenage years praying desperately to be anor-exic. I never lost my appetite, no matter what the occasion. Exam nerves, job interviews, wedding day jitters, food poisoning—nothing short of death made the slightest difference to my ability to eat like a racehorse.
Whenever I met a thin person who would trill, “Oh, silly old me, I simply forget to eat,” I would stare with ill-concealed bafflement and bitterness, feeling unglamorous and lumpy and bovine. The lucky bitches, I would think. How could anyone forget to eat? I had an appetite—what an untrendy and shameful thing to have.
Because when the world ends and we have shuffled off our mortal coils and we’re all in Heaven and time ceases to exist and we are pure of spirit and have eternal life, which we will spend contemplating the Almighty, I will still need a Kit Kat every morning at eleven o’clock.
But I would console myself with the thought that these skinny people were probably lying through their teeth. They were really raging bulimics or taking amphetamines or having liposuction every weekend.
The days dragged on. Sometimes I would get out of bed and take Kate downstairs to watch a soap opera with Mum. I would have a cup of tea with her and then I would go back to my room.
Helen continued to plague me. Three days after the baby intercom was installed she tiptoed very elaborately into the room. “Is that on?” she mouthed, pointing at the intercom. “What?” I asked crossly, looking up from my copy of a magazine. “No, of course it’s not on. Why the hell would it be? Kate is here and so am I.”
“Fine,” she said, “fine, fine.” With that she doubled over with mirth. She sat on the bed, shaking with laughter; tears ran down her face. I sat and stared at her with ill-concealed distaste.
“Sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes and trying to assemble herself. “Ahem, right, sorry, sorry.”
“What’s going on?” I asked as Helen sat up straight.