‘Going for the last time. Sure you don’t want to try some?’ Jack softly probed Ashling, his eyes refusing to relinquish hers. Stiffly, Ashling shook her head, and returned to her ham and cheese sandwich, feeling relieved, yet curiously deprived.
Lisa was pleased when Ashling pushed off. She was enormously enjoying this intimacy with Jack, not to mention impressed with the way he used his chopsticks. Expertly, stylishly, as though he was born to do it. You could take him to Nobu and he wouldn’t embarrass you by asking for a knife and fork. She was quite good at wielding chopsticks herself. She should be. She’d spent many evenings in training in the privacy of her own home, with Oliver laughing at her. ‘Who are you trying to impress, babes?’
Thinking of Oliver squeezed her with pain, but it would pass. Jack would help.
‘I’ll trade you my eel sushi for a California maki,’ Lisa offered.
‘The eel too gross for you?’ Jack enquired.
Lisa began to protest, then admitted with a smile, ‘Yeah.’
As predicted, Jack was happy to eat her piece of raw-eel sushi. Raw eel was going too far, even for a sophisticate like her. But men – they’d eat anything, the more revolting the better. Rabbit, emu, alligator, kangaroo…
‘We must do this again,’ Lisa suggested.
‘Yeah.’ Jack leant back in his chair and nodded thoughtfully at her. ‘We must.’
45
‘You’ll never believe it!’ It was Thursday night and Marcus had just arrived at Ashling’s, a video under his arm. His eyes were ablaze with excitement. ‘I’m supporting Eddie Izzard on Saturday night.’
‘H– how?’
‘Steve Brennan was meant to be doing it, but he’s gone into hospital with suspected CJD. What a result! It’ll be a huge gig.’
Ashling’s face darkened with disappointment. ‘I can’t go.’
‘What?’ Marcus said sharply.
‘Remember, I told you, I’ve to visit my parents in Cork this weekend.’
‘Cancel.’
‘I couldn’t,’ she protested. ‘I’ve put them off for so long that I just can’t cancel again.’
They’d been so excited when she’d confirmed that she was finally coming that the thought of telling them otherwise made her break out in a sweat.
‘Go next weekend.’
‘I can’t, I’ve to work. Another photo shoot.’
‘It really matters to me that you’re there,’ Marcus said evenly. ‘It’s a big show and I’m trying out some new stuff, I need you there.’
Ashling twisted, trapped by conflicting emotions. ‘I’m sorry. But I’ve psyched myself up to going to see them, and it’s been ages… I’ve bought my train ticket,’ she threw in.
As his expression became hurt and closed, her intestines snarled themselves into a tight knot. She hated herself for letting him down, but it was either disappoint him or her parents. She liked to oblige, and this was the worst situation she could find herself in, where whichever way she manoeuvred, she was going to displease someone.
‘I’m really sorry’ she said, with sincerity. ‘But things with my parents are messy enough. If I didn’t go it would only damage relations even more.’
She waited for him to ask exactly in what way were things messy with her parents. She’d tell him, she decided. But he just looked at her with wounded eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she reiterated.
‘’s OK; he said.
But it wasn’t. Though they opened a bottle of wine and settled down to watch the video he’d brought, the mood was plastered flat. The wine behaved as though it was non-alcoholic and Ardal O’Hanlon had never been less funny. Guilt subdued Ashling, so that all her conversation start-ups drove straight into a wall. For the first time since she’d started seeing Marcus, she couldn’t think of anything to say.
After a strained couple of hours brought them to ten o’clock, Marcus stood up and did a pretend stretch. ‘I’ better get going.’
Terror plopped a rock into Ashling’s stomach. He always stayed the night.
A whole new terrifying vista opened up: perhaps this wasn’t just a fight, maybe it was The End. As she watched Marcus make his horrifyingly speedy progress to the door, she found herself frantically reconsidering her options. Maybe she could change her visit to Cork. What difference did a couple more weeks make? Her relationship with Marcus was way more important…
‘Marcus, let me have a think.’ Her voice wobbled with panic. I might be able to visit them in a few weeks’ time instead.’
‘Ah, it’s all right.’ He managed a ghost of a smile. ‘I’ll cope. I’ll miss you, though.’
Relief only lasted an instant. It mightn’t be all over, but he was still leaving her flat. ‘We could see each other tomorrow night,’ she suggested, anxious for the chance to mend things. ‘I don’t go until Saturday morning.’
‘Ah, no.’ He shrugged, ‘Let’s leave it until you get back.’
‘OK,’ she conceded reluctantly, afraid that if she pushed, it would simply cause a bigger rupture. ‘I’ll be back Sunday evening.’
‘Give me a ring when you get in.’
‘Sure. The train is supposed to get in at eight, that’s if it doesn’t break down, then there’s often a queue for taxis, so I don’t know what time I’ll get home but as soon as I do I’ll call you.’ The desire to oblige made her voluble.
A quick kiss–not long or passionate enough to calm her down–and he was gone.
Like an alcoholic who goes back on the sauce as soon as they hit a rocky patch, the first thing Ashling did was reach for her tarot cards. She’d sorely neglected them lately and if it hadn’t been for Joy’s constant consultation in the wake of Half-man-half-badger’s departure, they’d have been covered in dust. But the noncommittal selection gave her no comfort.
Edgy and agitated, Ashling was immersed in familiar resentment of her family. If only she’d had a normal one this wouldn’t have happened. She thought for a moment about Marcus. She didn’t blame him for being insecure. How he got up on a stage and did what he did was beyond her.
Rancour and regret generated insomnia: she had to talk to someone. But Joy wouldn’t do, and not just because her current sole topic of conversation was the ‘All half-men-half-badgers are bastards’ one. It had to be either Clodagh or Phelim, because both of them knew all there was to know about Ashling’s family. They’d understand and come through with the desired sympathy. But Phelim’s Sydney answering-machine picked up, so, despite the lateness of the hour, Ashling had no choice but to ring Clodagh. After apologizing for waking her, Ashling ranted her way through the sorry story and finished up by exclaiming, ‘And I wouldn’t mind, but I hate having to visit them.’
However, the required words of comfort didn’t issue from Clodagh. Instead she said sleepily, ‘I’ll go and see Marcus if you like.’
‘No, I didn’t mean…’
‘I can go with Ted.’ Clodagh’s tone woke up, as the idea became a possibility. ‘Ted and I will go instead of you, and we’ll provide moral support.’
This made Ashling feel much worse. She did not want Clodagh and Ted bonding. ‘But what about Dylan?’
‘Someone has to babysit.’
‘I don’t even want to visit my parents,’ Ashling repeated, keen to get her quota of sympathy.
‘But your mum’s much better now. It’ll be fine.’
There’s no one in charge here, nine-year-old Ashling had realized, before the end of that strange, horrible summer. She took to standing on the corner at the bottom of the road on Friday evenings, looking into the distance for her dad’s car, a churny sickness in her belly. While she waited, she muffled the terror that he would never come by playing games with herself. If the next car is a red one, everything’s going to he fine. If the second car’s reg plate ends with an even number, it’ll all he OK.
Eventually the Monday morning came when she asked her father not to leave.
‘I have to.’ He was terse. ‘If I lose my job, I don’t know how we
’ll manage. Do your best to keep an eye on her.’
Ashling nodded gravely, and thought to herself, He shouldn’t have said that to me, I’m only a little girl
‘… Of course, Ashling’s very responsible. Only nine, but very grown-up for her age.’
There was muttered talk amongst the adults. People came to the house, conversed in low tones and fell silent whenever Ashling came near. ‘… his parents are elderly, they couldn’t cope with three lively children…’ Strange new words began to be mentioned. Depression. Nerves. Breakdown. Talk of her mother ‘going in someplace’.
Eventually her mother did ‘go in’, and her dad had to take them with him, as he worked. They drove long distances, car-sick and bored, Janet and Owen sharing the back seat with a display vacuum-cleaner. Ashling sat in the front like an adult as they criss-crossed the country, stopping at small electrical shops in small towns. From the very first appointment she absorbed Mike’s anxiety.
‘Wish me luck,’ he said, as he grabbed his folder of brochures. ‘This fellow wouldn’t spend Christmas. And don’t touch anything.’
Through the car window, Ashling watched her father greet his customer on the forecourt, and saw him mutate from irritable and worried to carefree and chatty. Suddenly he had all the time in the world for a chinwag. Never mind that he still had eight more calls to make that day and was way behind schedule due to their late start. Over he went to admire the man’s new car. A lot of leaning back, inspecting from all angles and congratulatory shoulder-slapping. As he talked animatedly to his customer, full of smiles and good-natured slagging, Ashling was visited with an awareness that she was much too young for. This is hard for him.
As soon as Mike got back into the car, the airy smiles dissolved and he changed back to being abrupt.
‘Did he order stuff, Dad?’
‘No.’ Mouth tight, reversing fast, getting the car back on the road, screeching to his next appointment.
Sometimes people ordered goods, but it was never as much as he’d hoped, and every time he climbed back into the car and drove away, he seemed further diminished.
By the end of the week, Janet and Owen were crying almost constantly, agitating to go home. And Ashling had managed to pick up an ear infection. Something which continued to recur at times of stress throughout her life.
After three weeks of incarceration, Monica re-emerged devoid of any obvious improvement. The anti-depressants she’d been prescribed made her irritatingly dopey and slow, so she changed to another type, which didn’t agree with her either.
And despite her on-going interaction with pharmaceuticals and Ashling’s increasingly elaborate rituals, things never really got better. Monica’s grief could be triggered by anything, from a natural disaster to a small random act of cruelty. A schoolboy being bullied out of his pocket-money could unleash the same torrent of weeping as an earthquake in Iran which killed thousands. But the days of silent, mostly bed-bound weeping were punctuated by fits of screaming, violent rage, directed at her husband, her children, and most of all herself.
‘I don’t want to feel this way!’ she used to shriek. ‘Would anyone want to feel like this? You’re lucky, Ashling, you’ll never suffer like me because you’ve no imagination.’
Ashling held on to this fact as though it were a shield. Lack of imagination was a great thing, it stopped you from turning into a nutter.
So volatile was Monica that Ashling spent large parts of her teenage years practically living at Clodagh’s.
Occasionally, amid the torpor and hysteria, there were pockets of normality. Which weren’t really normal at all. With each shirt that Monica ironed perfectly, with every meal that she served up on the dot of six, Ashling’s nerves stretched that little bit more, waiting for the time when it would all slip again. And when it came it was nearly a relief.
At seventeen, Ashling left home and moved into a flat. Three years later, Mike got a job over a hundred miles away in Cork, and their subsequent move meant Ashling rarely saw her parents. During the last seven years Monica had stabilized: the depression and rage departed as unexpectedly and as unheralded as they had arrived. Her doctor said it was linked to the end of her menopause.
‘She’s not so bad now.’ Clodagh’s voice brought her back to the present.
‘I know.’ Ashling exhaled wearily. ‘But I still don’t really want to be near her. That’s an awful thing to say, I know. I love her, but I find it hard to see her.’
46
Ashling was due to arrive in Cork at lunch-time on Saturday, and she was getting the five o’clock train home on Sunday. So the ‘weekend’ was really only twenty-eight hours long. And she’d be asleep for eight of those hours. Which only left twenty hours to talk to her parents. No bother to her.
Twenty hours! Clutched by panic she wondered if she had enough cigarettes. And magazines? And her mobile? She must have been insane to say she’d come.
As she watched the countryside rickety-rack past, she prayed that the train would oblige and break down. But no. Of course not. That only happened if you were in a desperate hurry. Then the train would spend several unexplained half-hours loitering in sidings. Then you’d all have to change to a different train, then you’d all have to get off the new train and on to a waiting, freezing bus, and the original three-hour journey would end up taking eight hours.
Instead Ashling’s train arrived in Cork a galling ten minutes early. Naturally her parents were already there, waiting, looking determinedly normal. Her mother could have passed for any Irish mother of a certain age: the bad perm, the nervous, welcome-home smile, the acrylic cardigan draped about her shoulders.
‘You’re a sight for sore eyes.’ Monica was about to burst into proud tears.
‘You too.’ Ashling couldn’t help feeling guilty.
Then came the hug – Monica’s uncertain cross between ladylike cheek-to-cheeking and full-on body-slamming ended up being more like a scuffle.
‘Hi, Dad.’
‘Er, welcome, welcome, welcome!’ Mike looked uncomfortable – would he too be required to indulge in affection? Luckily he was able to grab Ashling’s bag and busy all available arms with that.
The drive to her parents’ house, the discussion about what Ashling had eaten on the train, and the debate over whether she’d have a cup of tea and a sandwich or just a cup of tea, took up a good forty minutes.
‘Just a cup of tea is fine.’
‘I’ve Penguins,’ Monica tempted. ‘And butterfly buns. I made them myself.’
‘No, I… oh…’ The talk of home-made butterfly buns poleaxed Ashling. Monica opened a biscuit tin, displaying small misshapen buns, each with two sponge ‘wings’ arranged in a blob of cream on top. The cream was sprinkled with hundreds and thousands and as Ashling swallowed a bite – a wing, actually – she discovered she was also swallowing a lump in her throat.
‘I’ve to go into town,’ Mike announced.
‘I’ll come with you.’ Ashling catapulted up.
‘Oh, will you?’ Monica looked disappointed. ‘Well, make sure you’re back in time for your dinner.’
‘What are we having?’
‘Chops.’
Chops! Ashling almost sniggered – she hadn’t realized that such a foodstuff still existed.
‘Why are we going into town?’ she asked her father as they backed out on to the road.
‘To buy an electric blanket.’
‘In July?’
‘It’ll be winter soon enough.’
‘Nothing like being prepared.’
They exchanged a smile, then Mike had to go and ruin it by saying, ‘We don’t see you much, Ashling.’
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
‘Your mother’s delighted to see you.’
Some response was called for, so Ashling settled on, ‘How, um, is she?’
‘Marvellous. You should come and see us more, she’s back to being the woman I married.’
Another silence, then Ashling heard herself ask a question
that she had no memory of ever asking before. ‘What was it all about, that terrible time? What made it happen?’
Mike took his eyes off the road to look at her, his expression a grisly mix of defensiveness and determined innocence – he had not been a bad father. ‘Nothing happened.’ His joviality seemed unexpectedly pitiful. ‘Depression is a sickness, you know all this.’
As children, they’d had it explained to them that it wasn’t their fault that their mother was a basket case. Naturally, none of them had believed it.
‘Yes, but how do you get depression?’ She struggled for under-standing.
‘Sometimes it’s triggered by a loss or a – what d’you call them things? – trauma,’ he muttered, the car full of his ghastly discomfort. ‘But it doesn’t have to be,’ he continued. ‘They say it can be hereditary.’
That cheery thought knocked all talk out of Ashling. She rummaged for her mobile phone.
‘Who are you ringing?’
‘No one.’
He watched Ashling continue to press buttons on her mobile phone. Affronted, he demanded, ‘Do you think I’m blind?’
‘I’m not ringing anyone, I’m checking my messages.’
Marcus hadn’t rung her since he’d departed her flat on Thursday night. In the two months that they’d been going out – not that she was counting – they’d slipped into a routine of ringing each other every day. She felt his absence of contact keenly. Holding her breath, she yearned for a message from him but, once again, there was none. Disappointed, she snapped her phone away.
That evening, after her time-warp dinner – chops, mash and peas from a can – she decided to ring him. She had a good excuse: wishing him luck with the Eddie Izzard gig. But she got his answering machine – again. She had a horrible vision of him standing in his flat, listening to her message but refusing to pick up. Unable to stop herself, she tried his mobile: it went straight to message service. Mercury is in retrograde, she told herself. Then she reluctantly admitted, or maybe it’s just that my boyfriend’s pissed off with me.
Plainly, he was hurt by her visiting her parents, but just how bad was the damage? For a moment she considered the possibility that it was irreparable, and the accompanying squeeze of terror left her weak. She really, really, really liked Marcus. He was the closest to Mr Right she’d met in a long time. She was dying for Sunday evening, because he’d asked her to call him then. But what if he still didn’t answer the phone… ? Christ!