If I try disclosing my cholera-style anxieties to Himself, he just laughs and tells me to cop on. Himself, you see, almost never gets sick. And when he does, I take it very badly. You'd think that after all the running up and down stairs, bringing toasted cheese, that he does for me, I'd be prepared to repay the favor. But actually, no. I hate it when he 's not well because it doesn't fit in with the way we 've shared out the characteristics between us. I get sick and he fixes things. I put black wine gums over my teeth and pretend to be a seventy-year-old farmer chatting up an eighteen-year old and he cuts the grass. If he starts crossing over into my territory and getting viruses, there 's a danger that I might have to migrate over to his and start being useful.
On the rare occasions when he does succumb to illness, I go into denial. Wait till I tell you how mean I am. We were on holiday in a lovely resort in Thailand and he got food poisoning. (It was kind of funny, we ate at street stalls in Bangkok, even Vietnam, without any harm befalling us, and now in this fancy-dan resort he was after getting poisoned.) Anyway, we woke up one morning and he was sweating and gray and had terrible stomach pains, so first I said that that was what it was like every month for women and now he knew what it was like. Then I asked (sarcastically, of course) if he wanted me to get a doctor and I got the fright of my life when he said yes. Right away I knew this must be extremely serious—because men just won't go to the doctor. Even if their leg falls off, they go, "Ah, I'm grand, I never really used it anyway." And, if you persist, they go, "For God 's sake, leave me alone, I'm FINE. Stop BADGERING me. It 's only a leg, okay?"
I belted to the reception desk and although the resort didn't have a doctor, it had a nurse. She 'd be with us in ten minutes, I was promised.
Sure enough, ten minutes later the bell rang and I opened the door to find a sloe-eyed, blossom-faced babe waiting outside. The nurse.
She was like a nurse from a porn film. She wore a tiny short white outfit and a ridiculous little hat perched atop a head of long, swishy, blue-black hair. She tiptoed over to Himself, took his paw between her tiny soft hands and whispered in a gentle voice, "I will make you better."
He gazed at her with unblinking adoration, like she was some sort of angel, while I watched, sour-faced, from the door. She produced a dinky bag (which just looked like a stripagram prop to me) and produced all sorts of great stuff—painkillers, antibiotics, rehydrators and detoxers, which she helped him take by holding a glass of water to his mouth and supporting his head with her tiny hand. Then with a final soothing touch on his forehead, she floated fragrantly out, promising to return to see him later.
Three hours later, a great improvement had been wrought in him. He was thrown in bed, watching CNN and smoking moodily, looking well on his way back to full health. Then the doorbell rang. "It 's her!" He sat bolt upright in bed, switched off the telly and waved frantically, trying to disperse the cloud of smoke. Then he rearranged himself back on his pillows, deliberately trying to look wan and pitiful.
All smiles, in she tiptoed, and we had a repeat performance of the head supporting and hand holding and when she said she would visit again later, I got in before him. "He 's fine!"
"But—" (From him.)
"You're fine," I told him, then turned to her. "He 's fine."
See, I'm horrible. Could I not just have let him enjoy being sick for a while? After all, it happens so rarely. Which brings me to a very important point: there 's a myth that men are stoical. But actually, men aren't stoical. Men are healthy. Women get sick a lot so we 're quite comfortable with it. But men have no practice so when they do get ill, they make a right song-and-dance about it.
Like the time my dad went into hospital to have his hip replaced. It 's a straightforward enough operation, even though it sounds gruesome as anything—the patients are conscious so they get to hear their bones being sawed. (Even writing this, I'm getting twingy stabs in my hips.) Naturally enough, before Dad went in, he wasn't exactly in the best of form and he had a good old shout at my brother Tadhg warning him not to drive his car while he was incarcerated. (Tadhg had only just learned to drive and was tooling around in a rusty pile of junk, the four-wheeled version of my immune system. He 'd been looking forward to taking to the roads in Dad 's shiny, upmarket wheels but Dad was terrified that the boy racer would damage them.)
Anyway, Dad had the op, and it was a relief to hear that it had gone fine and he was recovering nicely. (We decided it would do him no good, no good at all, to know that Tadhg had found where he 'd hidden the car keys and was driving the pride-and-joy all over Dublin.) But the following day, when Himself and myself went to collect Mammy Keyes to go to visit Dad, Mammy was looking ashen.
"What?!"
Her words were like a staple gun to my heart. "Your father's after taking a terrible turn for the worse. It 's very serious. He 's asking for a solicitor, he wants to change his will."
Through numb lips, all I could mumble was, "Where will we get a solicitor?"
"What about Eileen?" Mam asked.
Eileen is my friend. She is indeed a solicitor, but she handles huge, multimillion-dollar company mergers, not some small-time will. All the same, with shaking fingers, I put a speedy call in to her—she was at a meeting—then we drove like the clappers to the hospital, rushed upstairs and raced down his corridor, but when we reached Dad 's room, we slowed down, then stopped. We were afraid to go in. What if he was dead already? The door was ajar, so I put my fingers on it and pushed lightly. It swung open, so I swallowed hard and forced myself to go in. And there he was. Sitting up in bed. Not dead. Not even slightly.
No, instead of being dead he was tucking into a big "dinnery" dinner—I was dimly aware of mounds of mash, some sort of chops and loads of peas.
What the . . . ?
"Dad," I said, almost irritably. "We thought you were dying."
"Oh right," he chortled, through a mouthful of mash. "It was the painkillers."
What about them?
He was allergic to whatever they'd given him—they'd "upset his stomach." But as soon as they changed the prescription, he experienced a miraculous recovery.
"Well, great," I said. But without conviction. Myself, Himself and Mammy Keyes were a little thrown and found it hard to be nice to Dad for the first few minutes. I mean, as hypochondriacs go, I'm bad, I admit it. I'm one of the worst you'll find but even I wouldn't confuse an upset stomach with my imminent death. For a few happy days I felt wonderfully unneurotic.
(As a P.S. to this story, the reason Dad was asking for a solicitor was that in a fit of deathbed enlightenment he 'd decided to leave his lovely car to Tadhg, but in a gorgeous cosmic juxtaposition, hadn't Tadhg crashed the car only that very morning.)
First published in Marie Claire, March 2005
Hair-brained
Ihave a crush on my hairdresser. I'm pitiful, I know, and you might think that this doesn't relate to you in any way, but read on . . .
I'd been going to my regular fella, Jimmy, for a long while, and he did a perfectly fine job. But one day he wasn't there—one of the usual excuses: resitting his taxidermy exams/rescuing his sister from the Moonies/running for governor of California. But, said the receptionist, they had another fella just as good, who'd do me. Immediately all my antennae were on Gom Alert.
I am the kind of person who gets fobbed off with goms, a lot. I have a round, trusting face, and everyone from hairdresser receptionists to airline check-in staff think about me, She 'll never complain. Not only has she a round, trusting face, but she 's overweight, and shame about that keeps her self-esteem low. I can actually see their thought processes. And they're right—I never do complain. I simply swallow my rage and burn holes in the lining of my stomach instead.
I resigned myself to getting the worst hairdresser in the place and sure enough, this vision approached me. Whippet-thin, dressed entirely in black, his eyes obscured with dark glasses, wearing three-foot-long winkle-pickers, so pointy the last six inches were actually invisible. From visit
ing the salon I knew him to see. He did his snipping and blow-drying still wearing his dark glasses and danced gracefully around his clee-yongs, like he was doing speeded-up Tai Chi. In other words, the biggest gom on the planet. Feckin' great!
True to form, I pushed down my fury, gave my incipient ulcers another shot in the arm, and stapled a smile to my round, trusting but miserable face. Then Gomboy opened his mouth and spoke. " 'Allo Marrrrrreeeeannnne. I am Chrrrrrristian."
French! He was French! Not a gom at all! In an instant everything changed.
Before we go any further, I have to say that I'm not one of those women who go wild swoony over Frenchmen. I think I must be the wrong age. The likes of my mammy would be mad about them, but my generation laughed scornfully at their smary accents and cliched, overblown compliments masquerading as charm. All I'm saying is that Christian's rock god get-up suddenly made sense and I was relieved.
We sat, knee-to-knee, and he treated me with as much concern and tenderness as if he was giving me a cancer diagnosis. I told him how I'd like him to do my hair, then—and this is unheard of—he did exactly what I asked for. Even with the best hairdressers, this never happens. I blame myself. Clearly there is a gap between the vision in my head and the words I used to convey it. It doesn't work even when I bring a picture and ask for an exact re-creation. But Christian, like he had a psychic transmitter in the toe of his winkle pickers, accessed and downloaded the file in my imagination and reproduced it precisely.
I was thrilled, but next time I needed my hair done I went to Jimmy, because you have to, see? (This is the kernel of my dilemma.) However, about a month later, Jimmy was once again MIA and hastily, before the receptionist allocated me elsewhere, I requested Christian.
Again, he was fantastic. It had become clear that if I asked him to blow-dry my hair into a perfect scale model of the Statue of Liberty, he would, no questions asked. Then—and this is where it gets good—midway through the blow-dry, he paused, removed his dark glasses (revealing beautiful dark eyes) and said, "I 'ave 'ad you before? A monz ago, perhaps?"
I chortled that he had indeed "had" me before and that he had a very good memory. With that, his eyes held mine in the mirror, a fraction too long, and he murmured meaningfully, "Only somezimes."
It had been so long since someone had flirted with me that it took me a moment to realize that that was what was actually happening. As soon as I got it though, a great redness roared up my chest, neck and face, rushing to the tips of my ears and the roots of my hair, like a damburst. It was almost audible. But he wasn't being slimy or sleazy, he was just . . . nice . . .
All of a pleasurable dither I hurried home and told Himself about the encounter. "He made me feel beautiful."
In the next few days I told everyone about Christian. He was so life-enhancing that I wanted everyone I loved to do themselves a favor by experiencing the delights of his attentions. Eventually I made Himself go. He was almost crying as I dispatched him; he 's afraid of hairdressers at the best of times. But when he returned— with lovely hair, I must say—he seemed quietly pleased. For the next couple of hours he spent an unprecedented amount of time looking at himself in the mirror, then suddenly exclaimed, "I never saw it before but I'm quite good-looking, aren't I?" Shamefully he admitted, "I prefer him to Jimmy."
Which brings me to my problem. How do you break it off with your hairdresser? There is no etiquette in the Western world for cleanly and unequivocally ending a relationship with anyone other than a lovair. Has anyone ever sat down with a same-sex friend and said gently, "It used to be great, but out-ofnowhere you're boring as fuck. All you talk about is your children. I'm looking for someone who cares about shoes and Big Brother."
Likewise, there 's no mechanism for ending it with a dentist, an optician or, in my case, a hairdresser. What can you do? Give them the "I've met someone else" speech? The "it 's not you, it 's me" riff ? They'd think you were mad.
My only option was subterfuge. I deliberately began to make appointments on Jimmy's days off. "Oh Jimmy's not in then, is he not? That 's a shame. Well, er, would Christian be available instead?"
The day came, of course, when Jimmy caught me. I'd been becoming more and more careless. You could almost say I wanted to be caught, that all that dishonesty and sneaking around was getting too much.
It wasn't pleasant, how could it be? Jimmy, though he hid it well, was hurt and humiliated, and Christian and I were wretched with guilt.
Even now, occasionally I still catch Jimmy watching me with wounded eyes. But Christian is officially my hairdresser, everyone knows it. All the angst and anxiety, well, it was worth it.
First published in Cara, December 2003
Mirror, Mirror
Iremember the first time I discovered my face didn't fit. I was six and had a smiley, chubby-cheeked little brother and a toddler sister who was a dark-eyed angel, a real beauty. A distant cousin of my mother, who was about to get married, met us and decided my exquisite sister would make an adorable addition to her wedding party. Train bearer perhaps, or mini-bridesmaid. However, on account of not being exquisite, I wasn't required. Until the distant cousin discovered that my sister was not only beautiful but dangerously strong-willed (they often seem to go together. Does plainness make us meek?) and mightn't be relied upon to march up the aisle at the appropriate time. So a token position was created for me (flower girl, as I recall, although what I really was was a bouncer) to be on hand to keep my baby sister under control. Of course I should have told them to get lost. But hey, I was six, there was a long dress involved, my hair was going to be "up," I got to carry flowers . . .
This episode, although terribly upsetting, didn't come as a complete shock. Even before then I'd always hated having my photograph taken and used to make horrific faces for the camera on the questionable pretext that if I made myself super-ugly they wouldn't notice the ordinary, workaday ugliness lurking beneath.
God only knows where such neurosis comes from. I've been over my life with a fine-tooth comb, searching for trauma, for that one moment when I began to hate myself and, to my great disappointment, I've found nothing at all. I had a stable, perfectly ordinary upbringing, and whatever notions I've developed about my appearance, I've got to take responsibility for myself.
I carried this self-hatred though my teenage years (aarrghh!) and into adulthood, where it sometimes got easier but never went away. Okay, it 's not all my fault. We live in look-tastic times and are bombarded with unreachable standards of beauty. Unformed adolescent girls are used to sell clothes to thirty-something women. Images of models are photographically enhanced so their skin is inhumanly translucent and their bodies drastically elongated and thinned down. Indeed, Cindy Crawford was quoted recently as saying, "Some mornings even I don't wake up looking like Cindy Crawford." On my good days I know none of it is real, but even on my best days I can't help trying. Or at least having the decency to feel wretched when I fail dismally.
I've never met a woman who was entirely happy with her appearance, there always seems to be at least one thing they'd change, but—and it shocks me to admit it—I like almost nothing about mine. Not that I waste time raging against it, at least not all the time—just when I've PMS, or need to buy an outfit for a wedding, or meet someone I was in school with who's had three children but is still a size ten . . .
Over the years I've done enough therapy and picked up enough pop psychology to know that none of this is about what I look like, but how I feel about myself. I've learned that most "ugliness" is in the head, that even people who objectively speaking are dazzlingly beautiful have it, but actually there are tons of things that really are wrong with me. Kicking off with—tricky ears. People sometimes complain of having big, sticky-out ears. In fact, a good friend of mine (a babe, always was, always will be) had a spell of cellophane taping her ears to her head every night for about a month when she was twelve. Then she stopped, coming to her senses at the same time as she ran out of cellophane tape. But I don't have sticky
-out ears. No, it 's worse. I have sticky-out ear.
That 's right, just the one. The other ear is small and neat and flat against my head. I discovered the disparity when I was fourteen and examining myself in the mirror (I was a teenager, I did little else). Suddenly the horror dawned, Where did my other ear go?
As a result I can't have short hair or wear my hair off my face because my great aural lopsidery becomes laughably obvious. In fact, during another intense teenage inspection, I discovered that my entire face is assymetrical. I can often get away with it in real life if I keep talking animatedly and never let my face settle into stillness. But in photographs when I'm frozen in place the horrible truth becomes evident and I look like something Picasso painted in his cubist period. (And I'm not looking for your pity here but in my line of work I have to get my picture taken a lot and I can't tell you how many hours of my life have been wasted with photographers faffing about with lighting and lenses and angles but no matter how much they faff, the end result is always that I end up looking like Dora Maa in Picasso's painting.)