Making It Up as I Go Along

  Mortified.

  Even though it was a party, it was actually extremely nice. It was held at the Smithsonian Castle, which has a garden, and I got there early and bagsied a seat, a sort of park bench. I was very happy to have a seat, even though the anxiety that the hotel wouldn’t let me back into my room was gnawing at me like a toothache.

  A buffet was set up, and I hopped out of my bench and quickly got a plate of food – mostly cheese and crackers – and CRAMMED it into me because it’s impossible to eat at these things: as soon as you put a mouthful of food into your clob, someone asks you a question requiring a long, detailed, food-free answer.

  I was eating at high speed, covered with cracker crumbs – on my skirt, my face, in my hair. Then! I espy Dennis Lehane! I’m a big fan. Lovely Debbie Stiers (head of publicity at HC) says, ‘Oh, Marian, you wanted to meet Dennis, didn’t you. Dennis! Dennis! Over here.’ And I was frantically waving my hands to indicate that no, I didn’t want to meet Dennis Lehane, not while my mouth was filled with food and I was covered with cracker crumbs, but too late, he had arrived and I had to extend a crackery hand and mumble through a clobful of cheese that I’m his biggest fan. (He was v. gracious.)

  Also, John Connolly shows up (excellent Irish thriller writer, for those who don’t know him, but I presume everyone does) and it was very nice to see another Irish person and we laughed Irishly together, making jokes about potatoes and rainfall, then we linked arms and danced a jig. John knows Dennis. Maybe he might mention to Dennis that I’m not always covered in cracker crumbs.

  Because of Himself not being there, everyone was kindly and solicitous. Even big cheeses (pun) at HC kept checking in with me, including Michael Morrison. At one stage he says, ‘Notice anything different about me?’ and does that sweep with his hands that people do when they are proud of their new look.

  Although Michael is always friendly to me, he is a vay, vay powerful person and it is important to get this right. ‘You did something to your hair?’ I suggest weakly, and he says, ‘No! I’m BRONZED. I’m wearing the Clarins bronzer!’ And, of course, once he’d said it, I could indeed see that he was looking very sunkissed.

  Sunday, Seattle. (Hotel in DC did let me back into the room after I’d produced photo ID.) News reaches me: Watford have won the match! They are now officially Going Up. Everyone is THRILLED and I really must stop being a doom-mongrel. Next season will be wonderful, they won’t have the shit kicked out of them every Saturday and most Tuesdays, and they won’t be relegated.

  Monday, Himself reappears and has a present for me: a yellow memorial shirt of the match.

  Five fantastic events in Seattle, including one at Starbucks HQ, and at Third Place Books the woman who came from Hawaii officially wins the Person Who Travelled Furthest To See Me prize.

  Then back to Canada, to BEAUTIFUL Vancouver and BEAUTIFUL Vancouver Island, where CBC Book Club and Munro’s Books do fantastic events and I’m on telly four times in twenty hours.

  Then we go home.

  Previously unpublished.

  June

  Writing!

  Except I’m not!

  Let’s see. I got back home at the start of month and since then I’ve been trying to get back into a writing routine, which is not going well and is going, in fact, very, very badly.

  I had loads of articles to write, which was good, because it eased the terror of switching on the computer after a long time away from it. But eventually I ran out of deflection mechanisms and I had to face the horror of the novel.

  I tried to follow the advice which I give to other authors: put one word in front of another; do a small amount every day; ignore your crapness. I’m trying to be positive, to do my best, but the default setting in my brain is Negative, and the arrow always sneaks back there, no matter how hard I try to send it to Positive.

  Now and then I stand at the top of the stairs in my nightdress, my hair askew, and shriek at Himself, ‘I am creatively bankrupt!’ Then a gardener comes thumping in through the front door (yes, they’re still here, they will always be here, I’ve accepted it now), pushing a wheelbarrow of bark (or something), and I howl at him, ‘I am a spent force, a torn docket, a busted flush!’ (He puts his head down and hurries past with his burden, dying to get home that evening to tell his wife and family about what a lunatic I am.)

  Next I ring up all my friends and family and screech at them that the gig is up, that the game is over, that my career as a writer is at an end and do they know of any jobs I could do? Then everyone tells me to shut up, that I’m always saying that and that maybe I should take a little break and read some books and do something mindless. But I tell them not to be so silly, how can I take time to read books when I’m supposed to be WRITING one!

  (Although the garden still isn’t finished, it no longer looks like the Battle of the Somme; now it looks more like the foundations of a multistorey car park. The house – because we are terraced and all gardeners and their ‘stuff’ must come through our hall – looks like a building site. Filth everywhere.)

  Anyway, Big Brother is on – THANK GOD. It is a marvellous diversion. This has been the evening routine for the past month. 7.30–8.00: the lovely, lovely Dermot O’Leary (more of which, later). Then 8.00–9.00: Himself watches football between two bizarre nations (for example Upper Volta versus Luxembourg, because the World Cup is on) and I Do Other Things (not really sure what, remove make-up, sing tunelessly, that sort of thing. Also I do meditation, most days anyway, except – disaster! I time myself using Shaunie the Sheep kitchen timer (Shaunie from Wallace and Gromit). I put Shaunie in the bathroom so his relentless ticking doesn’t distract me from meditation – I’m perfectly capable of extreme distraction, left to my own devices. Anyway, one night I was sitting there and sitting there and sitting there and thinking, ‘Christ alive, this meditation lark is as boring as all get out! Will it ever end? Well, the short answer is no, not if I was depending on Shaunie to alert me to Time’s Up. For poor Shaunie was injured – his neck was stuck at thirteen minutes. Just stopped dead. It transpired I had been meditating for about six hours, and hadn’t known when to stop because Shaunie didn’t brrrrrring and let me know. (Like in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, when Leonardo DiCaprio stayed in the freezing bath because Johnny Depp went off with a woman and forgot to tell him to get out.) He hasn’t repeat offended (Shaunie the sheep, not Johnny Depp), but I am nervous around him now. The trust is gone.)

  Then at nine o’clock I fight my way through the rubble of the hall, the muck, the filth, the abandoned bananas and tabloids and two-litre bottles of Lilt, and return to The Room, where we watch Big Brother, until ten o’clock. When that ends we watch Russell Brand until 10.30. (Funny how everyone has radically rethought their opinion of Russell Brand just because a rumour did the rounds that he’d rode Kate Moss. Everyone now insists that he’s sexy, but many people pretend that ‘Oh, I always fancied him.’ I’ll be honest. I didn’t always fancy him. But I sort of do now.)

  At this point I go to bed and Himself watches the second half of the match (taped from earlier). A routine is nice. I’ve tried making a few new dinners – the Goan beef curry was a success, the hot Thai salad less so. But we must take risks in order to find out what works and what doesn’t, is that not so? When a risk fails – as it occasionally must, for then it would not be a risk – we must not be hard on ourselves. We must simply get a pizza out of the freezer and live to fight another day.

  What else? Well, you know the way me and Caitríona are bridesmaids for Rita-Anne, and you know the way I came up with a cunning plan to dress us in Missoni coats? As a way of j
ustifying purchase of Missoni coats? Well, plan has gone awry. But not in a bad way.

  Rita-Anne saw some lovely coats in Brown Thomas which she thought would do for us. The only thing wrong was that they weren’t Missoni coats. But they were the right colour and had detailing which echoed the detailing on her dress (I can say no more, I’m sworn to secrecy about her dress, I can say NOTHING which might give the game away). So I visited said coat and found it to be perfect. Immediately I informed Caitríona in New York, who did her best to track it down, and after many setbacks she located it, tried it on and pronounced it to be excellent, if slightly short in the sleeves. Done deal! Coats bought for a November wedding and it is still only June! I am such a swotty Virgo!

  I’ve only one slight gripe: they are excellent coats, but are from Moschino’s Cheap & Chic range, and while there is no denying that they are chic – no one could dispute that, mes amies – they were several light years from cheap. But beautiful, undeniably beautiful, and if we like we can sell them on eBay after the wedding. ‘For far more than we paid for them,’ according to Himself, who is an optimist. (And can be delusional on occasion.)

  My mammy has tried to book an appointment with a personal shopper in House of Fraser for her mother-of-the-bride outfit but they told her to get lost and try again in mid-October, that right now is way too early for autumn clothing.

  Frankly, I do not know how her nerves can stand it. If it was my daughter I would have had the mother-of-the-bride outfit bought before my daughter had even met her prospective husband. My mother waited until a mere six weeks before my wedding before deciding on her outfit. How can she do it? Clearly, she is a daredevil, a risk-taker, a knows-no-fear-and-laughs-in-the-face-of-danger-etc. kind of person. That’s Pisceans for you. (When she gets her appointment we are all going to go along. I will report.)

  Highlight of the month: I touched the flesh of Dermot O’Leary! (Only his hand, but all the same.) I was on Big Brother’s Little Brother on Friday 23 June. Thrilling! Himself and Suzanne came too, and as it was eviction day all the friends and family of the potential evictees were in the green room. Suzanne made many friends (that is her way, she is gregarious). She moved and shook her way through the friends and family.

  I had to maintain a dignified distance because I was about to slag off some of their nearest and dearest on national telly. Awkward, undeniably awkward. I saw Davina from a distance. I opened the window and shouted out, ‘I LOVE YOU, DAVINAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!’ I don’t know if she heard me.

  On the final day of June everything broke. Himself’s back – it ‘goes’ on him occasionally, but will he go to the doctor? No. Indeed no. He simply suffers through – you’d swear they had never invented painkillers. That’s men for you. My dad is exactly the same. Then the SkyPlus broke. Then the computer got a virus and had to be carted away – terrifying. We don’t know how bad the damage is, it’s very scary. Then I broke.

  I’d been wallowing in UNPRECEDENTED good health and hadn’t had a virus/ear infection et al in MONTHS. But this all came to an abrupt end on 30 June and now I’m enjoying balmy temperatures, aching limbs, cotton-wool brain and a conviction that an invisible person is hanging around me and jabbing a hatpin into my ear at irregular intervals.

  Previously unpublished.

  July

  A good month!

  Despite being made to go to the opera!

  A much better month than last month. To start with, my writer’s block has lifted and I was able to write a fair bit of the new book, which is v. v. heartening because I always feel worthless when I’m not being productive.

  I’ve been writing about a character called Lola Daly and I’ve come to a natural stopping point with her and now have to get into the mindset of a new character who was to be called Sive but is no longer called Sive because non-Irish people don’t know how to pronounce her name (when I tested subjects, some were calling her ‘Siv-ee’ and others were calling her ‘Sieve’ (small round things with many holes, used in cooking), when the actual pronunciation is Syve, sort of like Scythe (Grim Reaper’s tool) but with a v instead of a th.

  And let me tell you something funny, if I gave Sive her Irish spelling, she would be spelt Sadhbh, which would REALLY pose problems).

  The thing is, I find when I’m reading that if I don’t know how to pronounce a character’s name, I can’t really bond with her. Clearly Sive will not do. So now I am experimenting with Kate and Grace to see if either of those names will ‘take’.

  So what else? Went to England early July because my parents-in-law John and Shirley were celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Fifty years! Fair play. Cousins and old friends and the original best man and bridesmaids descended in droves upon Warwickshire, and Himself was the person in charge of organizing the celebratory lunch, which was for eighty people, and he was a nervous wreck.

  At one stage I turned and asked him how he was, and he was sitting bolt upright, his food untouched, a sheen of perspiration on his pale forehead, and he muttered through bloodless lips, ‘I just want it to be all over and for it to have gone smoothly.’ (Which instantly became our catchphrase – we are now saying on the slightest of pretexts, ‘I just want it to be all over and for it to have gone smoothly.’)

  For the most part, the anniversary party DID go smoothly, despite the shadow hanging over all of us (which I’ll get to).

  The day after the knees-up, we went with John and Shirley to Glyndebourne (place in south of England where opera goes on). Now, I will openly admit to not being an opera person. I’m just not. I just don’t get it. And at least I’m being honest about it and not faking being cultured and at the end I don’t lepp to my feet and bellow, ‘Oh bravo, Diva most fair, bravo, bravo! Tour de force!’ Instead I clap politely and eye the exit.

  This particular opera was Così fan tutte and it has the most stupid plot ever – two blokes decide (egged on by a friend who is a definite bad influence) to check if their girls were faithful/unfaithful, so they announce they are going off to war (as you do) and come back wearing very bad moustaches and pretending to be Albanians. Duped by the moustaches, the two girls don’t recognize their old boyfriends, and after a fair amount of shilly-shallying get off with the ‘Albanians’. Moral: women are stupid and duplicitous.

  Frankly, I was annoyed. No wonder the world is so weighted against women if this sort of propaganda is doing the rounds. And yes, I know, it’s all about the singing really and I shouldn’t get caught up in the plot, because all opera plots are shit, but still, I was annoyed!

  The day after the sexist opera, lovely Shirley went into hospital and had a mastectomy. She’d been diagnosed with breast cancer in June and the doctors allowed her to have her party before the operation.

  She was a superstar about it all. She came out of hospital thirty-six hours later and her only painkillers were paracetamol! If it was me, I’d have been on a morphine drip. Then the wait started for the results, to see if the cancer had spread. Two full weeks of a wait. A very tense, anxious time.

  Meanwhile, the war in Lebanon started and her doctor managed to get trapped there and it seemed she wouldn’t be able to get the results on the appointed day and things got even tenser. Anyway, we’ve just heard the news and it’s all pretty hopeful, so thank Christ. But she’s been totally, totally amazing. It’s incredible to me that she was so calm about it all and that there was no song-and-dance, no post-operation infections, no allergy to the hospital food, no catching of MRSA, no reaction to the painkillers, no demanding of strong opiates – all of which would happen to any member of my family who had an operation. She is a complete
trooper and an example to us all.

  Himself and myself went to London for a day and a half that week and managed to get bridesmaids’ boots – with me and Caitríona being bridesmaids at Rita-Anne’s wedding and wearing coats instead of meringuey dresses? Yes, well, we needed brown suede knee boots to go with the coats. And it was a real boon to track down the only size 35 brown suede knee boots in London (just in!), and my cup overfloweth when I managed to drag them up to my knees! Joy abounded! A second pair was bought for Caitríona and despatched to New York and yes – hers fitted her too!

  We’re going gangbusters on the wedding! Great progress is being made. Ema is flower girl and her dress has been bought, and Luka is ring-bearer and he’s getting kitted out for his morning suit etc. when he arrives in Ireland on 3 August! I CAN’T WAIT!!!!!!!!!!!

  Then, on the Friday of that week, me, Himself and Suzanne went to the Big Brother eviction. It was so great, despite the fact that Nikki (my favourite) was evicted. And you should see Davina (McCall) in real life – she’s even more beautiful, if you can possibly imagine such a thing. Her skin and her hair and her eyes GLOW, and although she is pregnant she still looks really chic (that is, of course, because she is half-French).

  Suzanne is very, very funny and even though it is puerile, every time an unattractive man walked past, she would nudge me or I would nudge her and say, ‘You gave him a blowjob in a hedge’ and ‘You had anal sex with him, then he broke it off with you and you called round to his house in the middle of the night, begging him to take you back’ just like we used to do in our twenties.

  Oh yes! The garden is finished!! It’s very nice and it hasn’t got a blade of grass (Himself’s stipulation, that mossy grass was killing him). It’s all gravelly and decky and granitey and that sort of thing. Plants though, also, just not grass. Pleased, yes, extremely pleased. Definitely worth all the mud and upset.