‘But Rachel doesn’t have a problem with drink,’ protested Mum.
‘No,’ said Dad. ‘But they do a whole load of stuff in whatever the name of the place is. Drink, drugs, gambling, food. Sure you can get addicted to nearly anything these days.’
Dad bought a couple of the glossy women’s magazines every month. Ostensibly for Helen and Anna, but really for himself. So he knew about all sorts of things that fathers really shouldn’t: self-mutilation, free radicals, AHAs, Jean-Paul Gaultier and the best fake tans.
So Mum got on the phone and made discreet enquiries. When pressed she said that a distant cousin of Dad’s was showing a bit too much fondness for alcohol, thanked the woman for her concern and quickly got off the phone.
‘The Cloisters,’ she said.
‘The Cloisters!’ Dad exclaimed in relief. ‘It was driving me mad not being able to remember. I wouldn’t have got a wink of sleep, I would have just lain there all night racking my brain…’
‘Ring them,’ Mum interrupted tearfully.
3
The Cloisters cost a fortune. That’s why so many pop stars went there. Some people’s health insurance covered the costs but, as I’d lived away from Ireland for about eight years, I didn’t have any. I didn’t have any in New York either, come to think of it. I’d always intended to get round to it, some day, when I was mature and responsible and grown-up.
Because I had neither health insurance nor a penny to my name, Dad had said that he’d foot the bill, that it was worth it to sort me out.
But that meant that as soon as I arrived home and staggered in through the front door, jetlagged and depressed with a Valium and vodka hangover, Helen greeted me by yelling from the top of the stairs, ‘You stupid cow, that’s my inheritance money you’re using to dry out with, you know’
‘Hello, Helen,’ I said wearily.
Then she said in a surprised voice, ‘God, you’ve got thin. Emancipated looking, you skinny bitch!’
I nearly said ‘thanks’ but remembered in time. The usual scenario was that I would say ‘Really? Have I?’ And she’d say ‘No! Nah haaah! You fall for it every time, don’t you? You big thick.’
‘Where’s Pollyanna?’ asked Helen.
‘Out at the gate, talking to Mrs Hennessy,’ I said.
Margaret was the only one of us who spoke to our neighbours, happy to discuss hip replacements, grand children’s First Communions, the unusually wet weather and the availability of Tayto in Chicago.
Then Paul pushed into the hall, loaded down with bags.
‘Oh Christ, no,’ said Helen, still at the top of the stairs. ‘No one said you were coming. How long are you staying for?’
‘Not long.’
‘Better not be. Or else I’ll have to go out and get a job.’
Despite sleeping with all her professors (or so she said), Helen had failed her first-year exams in university. She’d repeated the year but, when she failed the exams again, she gave the whole thing up as a bad job.
That had been the previous summer, and she hadn’t managed to get a job in the meantime. Instead she spent the time hanging round the house, annoying Mum, badgering her to play cards.
‘Helen! Leave your brother-in-law alone,’ came my mother’s voice. And then she appeared at the top of the stairs beside Helen.
I’d been dreading meeting my mother. I had the sensation that there was a lift in my chest that had plummeted out of control to the pit of my stomach.
Faintly I could hear Helen complaining ‘But I hate him. And you’re always telling me that honesty is the best policy…’
Mum hadn’t come to the airport with Dad. It was the first time since I had left home that she hadn’t come to the airport to meet me. So I figured she was dangerously cross.
‘Hi, Mum,’ I managed. I couldn’t quite look at her directly.
She gave me a sad, little, martyrish smile and I felt a violent pang of guilt that nearly sent me groping for my Valium bottle there and then.
‘How was your journey?’ she asked.
I couldn’t bear the pretend politeness, the skirting round the really big issue.
‘Mum,’ I blurted, ‘I’m sorry you got a fright, but there’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t have a problem with drugs and I didn’t try to kill myself.’
‘Rachel, WILL YOU STOP LYING!’
The lift inside me was going haywire by then. I was getting the plummeting sensation so often that I felt sick. Guilt and shame mingled with anger and resentment.
‘I’m not lying,’ I protested.
‘Rachel,’ she said with an edge of hysteria to her voice, ‘you were rushed to hospital in an ambulance and had your stomach pumped.’
‘But there was no need for it,’ I explained. ‘It was a mistake.’
‘It was not!’ she exclaimed. ‘They checked your vital signs in the hospital, it needed to be done.’
Really, I thought in surprise. Was that true? Before I could ask she was off again.
‘And you have a drug problem,’ she said. ‘Brigit said you take loads and so did Margaret and Paul.’
‘Yes, but…’ I tried to explain. While simultaneously feeling a burst of explosive rage at Brigit, which I had to file away for a later date. I couldn’t bear it when my mother was upset with me. I was used to my father shouting at me and it didn’t affect me in the slightest. Except maybe to make me laugh. But Mum giving me all this ‘I’m disappointed in you’ stuff was very unpleasant.
‘OK, I take drugs now and then,’ I admitted.
‘What kind?’ she asked.
‘Oh, you know,’ I said.
‘I don’t’
‘Er, well, maybe a line or two of cocaine…’
‘Cocaine!’ she gasped. She looked stricken and I felt like slapping her. She didn’t understand. She was from a generation that went into spasms of horror at the mere mention of the word ‘drugs’.
‘Is it nice?’ asked Helen, but I ignored her.
‘It’s not as bad as it sounds,’ I pleaded.
‘It doesn’t sound bad at all.’ I wished Helen would go away.
‘It’s harmless and non-addictive and everyone takes it,’ I beseeched Mum.
‘I don’t,’ complained Helen. ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’
‘I don’t know anyone who does,’ said Mum. ‘Not one of my friends’ daughters has done anything like this.’
I fought back the rage that filled me. From the way she was going on, you’d swear that I was the only person in the whole world, ever, who had been out of line or made a mistake.
Well, you’re my mother, I thought belligerently. You made me the way I am.
But mercifully – Jeremy must have been having a rest – I somehow managed not to say it.
I stayed at home for two days before I went to the Cloisters.
It was not pleasant.
I was not popular.
Except for Margaret, who hadn’t got past the qualifying rounds, the position of Least Favourite Daughter passed from one of us to the next on a rotating basis, like the presidency of the EU. My brush with death ensured that I had toppled Claire from her position and I now wore the crown.
Almost the moment I was off the plane Dad told me that they’d do a blood test at the Cloisters before I was admitted. ‘So,’ he said nervously, ‘now, I’m not saying you will, mind, but if you were thinking of taking anything, and I’m sure you’re not, it’ll show up in the test and you won’t be allowed in.’
‘Dad,’ I said, ‘I keep telling you, I’m not a drug addict and there’s nothing to worry about.’
I nearly added that I was still waiting for the condom full of cocaine to clear my digestive tract but, as he wasn’t showing much of a sense of humour, I thought better of it.
Dad’s fears were unfounded because I had no intention of taking any drugs.
That’s because I didn’t have any to take. Well, no illegal ones anyway. I had my economy-size, family-pack of Valium but that didn’t coun
t because I got it on prescription (even if I had to buy the prescriptions from a dodgy doctor in the East Village who had an expensive ex-wife and an even more expensive smack habit). I certainly hadn’t been fool enough to risk smuggling cocaine and its illicit ilk into the country. Which was very adult and sensible of me.
And not actually the great sacrifice that I’m making it sound. I knew that I’d never go short of a narcotic while Anna was around.
The only thing was, Anna wasn’t around. From Mum’s terse little sentences, I gathered that Anna was as good as living with her boyfriend, Shane. Now, there was a boy who knew how to enjoy himself! Shane, as they say, ‘lived life to the full’. To overflowing. To bursting point.
Oddly enough, it wasn’t cocaine I missed. It was Valium. Not that that was surprising, I was shaken by the recent and rapid changes my life had undergone and the tension between me and Mum wasn’t pleasant. I would have appreciated something to take the edge off it all. But I managed not to take any of my little magic white pills because I was really looking forward to going to the Cloisters. If I’d had more time (and any money) I would even have bought new clothes in honour of it.
Such willpower! And they were calling me a drug addict? I ask you.
I slept an awful lot in the two days. It was the best thing to do because I was jetlagged and disoriented and everyone hated me.
I tried to ring Luke a couple of times. I knew I shouldn’t. He was so angry with me the best thing to do was give him time to calm down, but I couldn’t help myself. As it happened, I just got his answering machine and I had enough of a grip of myself not to leave a message.
I would have tried ringing him a lot more. I had compulsions to do so for most of my waking hours. But Dad had recently got a very large phone bill (something to do with Helen) and had mounted a twenty-four-hour guard round the phone. So any time I dialled a number, Dad tensed no matter where he was, even if he was four miles away playing golf, and cocked his ear intently. If I dialled more than seven digits, I would barely be started on the eighth when he would come barrelling into the hall to shout ‘Get off the fecking phone!’ Which ruined my chances of talking to Luke but was worth its weight in gold in the nostalgia stakes. My teenage years came rushing back to me. All I needed was for him to say ‘Not a minute past eleven, Rachel. Now, I mean it this time. If you keep me waiting in that car like the last time you’re never going out again’ for me to be fourteen all over again. Although why would I want to be that? You try being fourteen and five foot seven, with size eight feet.
Relations were even more strained with my mother. My first day at home, as I undressed for a post-flight snooze, I caught her staring at me as if I’d just grown another head.
‘Lord preserve us.’ Her voice was shaking. ‘Where did you get all those terrible bruises?’
I looked down and thought I was seeing someone else’s body. My stomach and arms and ribs were a mess of dark purple blotches.
‘Oh,’ I said in a little voice. ‘I suppose that must have been from having my stomach pumped.’
‘God above.’ She tried to take me in her arms. ‘No one said… I just thought they… I didn’t realize it was so violent.’
I pushed her away. ‘Well, now you do.’
‘I feel sick,’ she said.
She wasn’t the only one.
When I got dressed or undressed after that I avoided looking in the mirror. Luckily it was February and it was freezing, so, even in bed, I could wear long-sleeved, high-necked things.
During those two days, I had one horrible dream after another.
I had my old favourite, the There’s-someone-scary-in-my-room-and-I-can’t-wake-up dream. Where I dreamt – surprise, surprise – that there was someone in my room, someone menacing, who meant to harm me. And when I tried to wake up to protect myself, I found I couldn’t. The force got closer and closer until they were leaning over me and, even though I felt panicky terror, I still couldn’t wake up. I was paralysed. I tried and tried to break through to the surface, but I suffocated under the blanket of sleep.
I also had the I’m-dying dream. That one was horrible because I could actually feel my life force spiral out of me, like a tornado in reverse, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I knew I’d be saved if I woke up, but I couldn’t.
I dreamt that I fell off cliffs, that I was in a car crash, that a tree fell on top of me. I felt the impact every single time and jerked awake sweating and shaking, never knowing where I was or whether it was day or night.
Helen left me alone until the second night I was back. I was in bed, afraid to get up, and she arrived into the room, eating a Cornetto. She had an air of loose-endness about her that spelt trouble.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘I thought you were going for a drink with Margaret and Paul,’ I said warily.
‘I was. I’m not now.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because stingy bastard Paul says he’s not buying me any more drinks,’ she said viciously. ‘And where am I going to get money for drinks? I’m unemployed, you know.
‘That Paul wouldn’t give you the steam off his piss,’ she said, as she sat down on my bed.
‘But didn’t they take you last night and get you totally locked?’ I asked in surprise. ‘Margaret said you were drinking double Southern Comforts all night and you didn’t buy a single drink.’
‘I’m unemployed!’ she roared. ‘I’m poor! What do you expect me to do?’
‘OK, OK,’I said mildly. I wasn’t up to a row. Anyway, I agreed with her. Paul was as tight as a nun’s gee. Even Mum once said that Paul would eat his dinner in a drawer and peel an orange in his pocket. And that he wouldn’t piss on the road in case the little birds warmed their feet. Even though she was drunk when she said it – she’d had a quarter pint of Harp and lime – she meant it.
‘God, imagine!’ Helen smiled at me, as she settled herself on the bed and looked as if she’d be there for some time. ‘My own sister, a mentaller, in a loony bin.’
‘It’s not a loony bin,’ I protested weakly. ‘It’s a treatment centre.’
‘A treatment centre!’ She scoffed. ‘That’s nothing but a loony bin by another name. You’re fooling no one.’
‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ I tried.
‘People will cross the road when they see you coming,’ she said gleefully. ‘They’ll say “That’s the Walsh girl, the one that went mad and had to be locked up,” so they will.’
‘Shut up.’
‘And the people will be confused because of Anna and they’ll say “Which Walsh girl? I believe there’s a couple of them that are gone in the head and…”’
‘Pop stars go there,’ I interrupted, playing my trump card.
That stopped her in her tracks.
‘Who?’ she demanded.
I named a couple of names and she was visibly impressed.
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I read about them in the papers.’
‘How come I never heard about it?’
‘Helen, you don’t read the papers.’
‘Don’t I? No, I suppose I don’t, what would I want to read them for?’
‘To find out about pop stars going to the Cloisters?’ I said archly. I was rewarded with a sour look from Helen.
‘Shut up, you smart arse,’ she said. ‘You won’t think you’re so great when you’re bouncing around in your padded cell wearing one of those lovely jackets with the long sleeves.’
‘I won’t be in a padded cell,’ I said smugly. ‘And I will be hobnobbing with celebrities.’
‘Do pop stars really go there?’ Her excitement was starting to show, no matter how hard she tried to hide it.
‘Yes,’ I promised her.
‘Really?’ she asked again.
‘Really.’
‘Really, really?’
‘Really, really.’
There was a little pause.
&
nbsp; ‘Janey.’ She sounded impressed.
‘Here, finish this.’ She thrust the remains of the Cor-netto at me.
‘No thanks,’ I said. The thought of food made me feel sick.
‘I’m not asking you to take it,’ said Helen. ‘I’m telling you. I’m sick of Cornettos and no matter how many times I tell Dad to get Magnums at the freezer centre, he always comes back with bloody Cornettos. Except for the one time and what does he bring back? Mint Magnums. I ask you, mint…’
‘I don’t want it.’ I pushed the offending Cornetto away.
‘Well, on your head be it.’ Helen shrugged and put it on my bedside table where it proceeded to melt all over the place. I tore my thoughts back to happier things.
‘So, Helen, when I’m best friends with the likes of Madonna,’ I said airily, ‘you’ll be…’
‘Be realistic, Rachel,’ she interrupted. ‘Although I suppose that’s one of the reasons you’re going to the bin in the first place, because you can’t be realistic…’
‘What are you talking about?’ It was my turn to interrupt.
‘Well,’ she said, with a pitying smile, ‘they’re hardly going to put the famous people in with rest of you, are they? They have to protect their privacy. Otherwise the likes of you would go to the papers as soon as you’re out and sell their story. Sex in my cocaine hell and all that.’
She was right. I was disappointed, but not too disappointed. After all I’d probably see them at mealtimes and on social occasions. Maybe they had dances.
‘And of course they’re bound to have much nicer bedrooms and nicer food,’ said Helen, making me feel worse. ‘Which you won’t be getting because Dad’s much too stingy. You’ll be in the economy rooms while the celebrities will be living it up in the deluxe wing.’
I felt a burst of rage at my tightfisted father. How dare he not pay the extra for me to be in with the celebrities !
‘And there’s no point asking him to cough up.’ Helen read my thoughts. ‘He says we’re poor now, because of you, and we can’t get real crisps anymore, just yellow-pack ones.’