In a fairer world, she would have been the one to enrol in the typing and shorthand course and not me, but that’s not the way it happened.
I was the only girl from my class at school who went to secretarial college. Apart from Gita Pradesh, who went to Physical Education college, everyone else either got pregnant, got married, got a job stacking shelves in Safeway, or a combination of the three.
I was quite good at school, or at least I was too afraid of the nuns and my mother to be a complete failure.
But I was too afraid of some of the other girls in my class to be a complete success either—there was a gang of “cool” girls, who smoked and wore eyeliner and had very developed chests for their age and were rumoured to have sex with their boyfriends. I badly wanted to be one of them but I hadn’t a hope because I sometimes passed my exams.
Once, I got sixty-three percent in a biology exam and I was lucky to escape with my life, which wasn’t really fair because the exam was on the reproductive system, and they probably knew a lot more about it than I did, and would have all got high marks if they had only turned up.
But every time there was an exam they brought faked sick notes from their mothers.
Their mothers were even more scary than they were and if the nuns cast doubts on the authenticity of the sick notes and administered punishment accordingly, the mothers—and sometimes even the dads—came to the school and caused an uproar, accusing the nuns of calling their daughters liars, and shouting wildly of “reporting” them.
Once, when Maureen Quirke brought three sick notes in one month, each of them asking for her to be excused because she had her period, Sister Fidelma slapped her and said, “Do you take me for a fool, girl?,” and within hours Mrs. Quirke arrived at the school like an avenging angel. (As Maureen said later, the funniest part of all was that she was actually pregnant at the time, although she didn’t know it when she wrote the notes.) Mrs. Quirke shouted at Sister Fidelma, “No one lays a finger on any of my children. No one! Except me and Mr. Quirke! Now get yourself a man, you dried-out old mickey-dodger, and leave my Maureen alone.”
Then she marched imperiously out the gate, dragging Maureen with her, and slapped Maureen all of the way home. I knew that for a fact because when I got home from school at lunchtime my father fell on me eagerly and said, “I saw that Quirke child passing up the road earlier with her mother, and the mother slapping forty shades of shite out of her. Tell us, what happened?”
So when I stopped taking antidepressants and went to secretarial college, my depression didn’t return in all its savagery, but it hadn’t entirely gone away either. And because I was terrified of being depressed again and didn’t want to take pills, I dedicated my life to finding out the best ways of keeping it at bay, au naturel.
I wanted to banish depression entirely from my life, but had to be content with just stemming it by constantly reinforcing my emotional sandbags.
So along with swimming and reading, fighting depression became a hobby. In fact, strictly speaking, swimming wasn’t really a hobby in its own right, it was more accurate to say that it came under the heading of Fighting Depression, subheading Exercise, category Gentle.
I read everything on the subject of depression that I could lay my hands on, and nothing raised my spirits like a good, juicy story of a famous person who suffered agonies from it.
Accounts of people who spent months on end in bed, not eating, not speaking, just staring at the ceiling, tears trickling down the sides of their faces, wishing they had the energy to kill themselves, thrilled me.
I was in very exalted company.
Churchill called his depression his “black dog,” but, at eighteen, that confused me because I loved dogs. However, that was before the media had invented pit bull terriers. Once that happened, I understood exactly what Winston had been getting at.
And every time I went to a bookstore, I pretended that I was just aimlessly browsing but, before I knew it, I had bypassed the new releases, the fiction, crime, science fiction, cookbooks, home decoration and horror sections, kept going through the biography section (pausing only briefly to see if any depressed person had recently published their life story) and somehow, as if by magic, always ended up at the self-help section, where I would spend hours reading through books that I hoped might fix me, that might have
the magic solution, that would take away, or even just ease, the corrosive gnawing that was nearly always with me.
Of course a lot of self-help books were so full of garbage that they could reduce the most happy, well-balanced person to despair. Nevertheless, I usually parted with money for a little volume that encouraged me to perhaps “feel the fear and walk through it” or maybe to “heal my life” or it mightn’t be a bad idea to “rediscover” my “child within” or asked me to consider “why I need you to love me before I can like myself.”
What I really needed was a self-help book to help me stop buying self help books, because they didn’t help. They just made me feel guilty. It wasn’t enough just to read the books. For them to work, I had to do things—like stand in front of a mirror and tell myself a hundred times a day that I was beautiful, which was called affirmation. Or spend half an hour every morning imagining myself being showered in love and affection, which was called visualization. Or writing lists of all the good things in my life, which was called writing lists of all the good things in my life.
I usually read the book and did what it suggested for about two days and then got tired, or bored, or caught by my brothers as I spoke seductively to my reflection in the mirror. (I never forgot The Great Scorning that followed that.)
And then I would feel depressed and guilty. So I would say that the hypothesis of the book must be fundamentally faulty because it hadn’t made me feel any better and then I could abandon the whole project with a clear conscience.
I tried lots of other things also—evening primrose oil, vitamin B 6, excessive exercise, subliminal self-help tapes that you play when you’re asleep, yoga, Pilates, a flotation tank, aromatherapy massage, shiatsu, reflexology, a yeast-free diet, a gluten-free diet, a sugar-free diet, a food-free diet, vegetarianism, a “lots of meat” diet (I don’t know if there’s a name for it), an ionizer, an assertiveness course, a positive-thinking course, dream therapy, past-life regression, praying, meditating and sunlight therapy (a holiday in Crete, to be precise). For a while I ate nothing but dairy products, then for a while I gave up dairy products completely (I’d misread the article the first time), then I felt that if I had to go another day without a bar of chocolate, I would be killing myself anyway.
And while none of my measures turned out to be the Final Solution, at least they all worked for a while and I never again got as depressed as I had the first time. But Mrs. Nolan had said something about help being available if I only asked for it. I wished now I’d brought a tape recorder into the room with me because I couldn’t remember exactly what she’d said. What did she mean?
The only thing I could think of was that maybe she meant that I should go for professional help, and see some kind of therapist or counsellor or psychologist something or other. The problem was that about a year ago I had seen a therapist, about eight weeks or so, and that had been a complete waste of time.
Chapter 6
Her name was Alison and I used to go to see her once a week where we sat in a bare, tranquil little room and tried to figure out what was wrong with me.
Although we had discovered all kinds of interesting things—like the fact that I still held a grudge against Adrienne Cawley for giving me a game that the box said was “suitable for two-to-five-year-olds” at my sixth birthday party—I didn’t seem to have learned anything more than what I had already managed to figure out for myself on many a sleepless night.
Naturally, the first thing that Alison and I did was the psychotherapy witch hunt called “Cherchez La Famille,” where we tried to hold my family responsible for everything that was wrong with my damaged psyche.
&n
bsp; But there was nothing funny about my family, unless normal was funny.
I had a perfectly normal relationship with my two brothers Chris and Peter—that is, I spent my childhood hating their guts and they reciprocated in traditional fraternal fashion by making my life a misery. They made me go to the store for them when I didn’t want to, they hogged the TV set, broke my toys, scribbled on my homework, told me that I was adopted and that my real parents were in prison for robbing a bank. Then they told me they were joking about that and that my real mother was actually a witch. And when Mum and Dad went out to the pub they told me that they had really run away and were never coming back and that I’d be sent to an orphanage. The usual sibling playfulness.
I told all of this to Alison and when I got to the bit about Mum and Dad going to the pub she seized on it joyfully.
“Tell me about your parents’ drinking,” she said, settling back in her chair, making herself comfortable for the great pouring forth of revelations that she expected to follow.
“I can’t really tell you anything,” I said. “My mother doesn’t drink.”
Alison looked disappointed. “And your father?” she asked, hopefully, realizing that all was not lost.
“Well, he drinks,” I said.
She was delighted!
“Yes?” she said, in her extra gentle voice. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Well, yes,” I said, confused. “Except there’s nothing really to talk about. When I say he drinks, I don’t mean that he has a problem.”
“Mmmmmm,” she nodded gently, knowingly. “And what do you mean by ‘having a problem’?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose I mean being an alcoholic. And he isn’t.”
She said nothing.
“He’s not,” I laughed. “Sorry, Alison, I’d love to be able to tell you that my father was drunk throughout my childhood and we never had any money and that he hit us and shouted at us and tried to have sex with me and told my mum that he wished he’d never married her.”
Alison didn’t join in with my laughter and I felt slightly silly.
“Did your father tell your mother that he wished he’d never married her?” she asked quietly and with dignity.
“No!” I said, embarrassed.
“No?” asked Alison.
“Well, hardly ever,” I admitted. “And it was only when he was drunk. And that was hardly ever either.”
“And did you feel that your family never had enough money?” she asked.
“We were never short of money,” I said stiffly.
“Good,” said Alison.
“Well, that’s not really true,” I felt forced to admit. “We were always short of money, but it wasn’t because of Dad’s drinking, it was just because we…didn’t have much money.”
“Why didn’t you have much money?” asked Alison.
“Because my dad couldn’t get a job,” I explained eagerly. “You see, he didn’t have any qualifications because he had to leave school when he was fourteen because his father died and he had to look after his mother.”
“I see,” she said.
In fact, Dad used to say an awful lot more on the subject of his unemployment but I felt strangely reluctant to tell Alison.
One of the clearest memories of my childhood was Dad sitting at our kitchen table, passionately explaining the faults in the system. He used to tell me that in the English workplace the Irishman will always get “the shitty end of the stick” and that Seamus O’Hanlaoin and Michael O’Herlihy and all the rest of them were nothing but a crowd of crawlers and “arselickers” because they sucked up to their English bosses, but that you should hear what they said behind their backs. And that although Seamus O’Hanlaoin and Michael O’Herlihy and all the rest of them might have jobs, at least he, Jamsie Sullivan, had integrity.
That must have been very important to him, because he said it a lot.
He said it an awful lot the time that Saidbh O’Herlihy and Siobhán O’Hanlaoin were going with the school to Scotland and I wasn’t.
I didn’t want to tell Alison because I was afraid that I might offend her, in case she took my father’s condemnation of his English would-be bosses personally.
I started to tell Alison about all the jobs my father went for and didn’t get, when she cut into my memories.
“We’re going to have to leave it there for this week.” She stood up.
“Oh, is the hour up already?” I asked, shaken by how abruptly the session had ended.
“Yes,” said Alison.
A wave of guilty fear overwhelmed me. I hoped that I hadn’t sounded disloyal about Dad.
“Look, I don’t want you to think that my dad wasn’t a nice man or anything,” I said desperately. “He’s lovely and I really love him.”
Alison gave me her Mona Lisa smile, giving nothing away and said, “See you next week, Lucy.”
“Honestly, he’s great,” I insisted.
“Yes, Lucy,” she smiled, not showing her teeth. “See you next week.”
And the next week was worse. Somehow Alison got it out of me about not going on the school trip to Scotland.
“Didn’t you mind?” she asked.
“No,” I said again.
“But why not?” She had sounded quite despairing at that point—the first time I’d ever seen her show any emotion.
“Because I just didn’t,” I said simply.
“How did your father react when it became clear that you couldn’t go?” she asked. “Can you remember?”
“Of course I can remember,” I said in surprise. “He told me that his conscience was clear.”
In fact, “My conscience is clear” was something Dad often said. And, “I can sleep easy in my bed at night” was another. And he was right. Very often he would sleep easy even before he got to his bed. That usually happened on the nights when he had a few drinks.
Somehow I ended up telling all of this to Alison also.
“Tell me about the nights when he…er…had a few drinks,” she gently demanded.
“Oh, you make it sound so bad,” I complained. “It wasn’t bad at all, it was nice. He just kind of sang and cried a bit.”
Alison looked at me without saying anything and to fill the silence I blurted out, “But it wasn’t sad when he cried because I knew that in a funny way he was glad to be sad, if you know what I mean?”
Alison obviously didn’t.
“We’ll talk about it next week,” she said. “Our hour is up.”
But we didn’t talk about it next week because I never went back to Alison.
I had felt manipulated by her into being mean about Dad and the guilt was awful. Besides, I was the one who was depressed so I couldn’t understand why two whole sessions had been devoted to my father and how much he did or didn’t drink.
In the same way that dieting makes you fat, I felt that analysis gives you problems. So I sincerely hoped that Mrs. Nolan hadn’t been suggesting that I go and see another Alison because I really didn’t want to.
Chapter 7
We would have all forgotten about Mrs. Nolan—the whole experience would have been consigned to some dark and dusty room somewhere in the attic of our memories—if a couple of things hadn’t occurred.
The first thing that happened was that Meredia’s prediction came true. Well, sort of…
The day after we had had our fortunes told, Meredia arrived into work waving something above her tie-dyed head in a triumphant fashion.
“Look,” she commanded. “Look, look, look.”
Hetty, Megan and I hopped up from our desks and went over to Meredia’s to have a look. The thing that she had been waving above her head was a check.
“She said I’d come into money and I have,” shouted Meredia excitedly as she attempted to do an ill-advised little dance, knocking nine or ten files off her desk and sending shudders throughout the entire building.
“Show me, show me,” I begged, trying to grab it from her. But, for s
uch a large woman, she was surprisingly deft.
“Do you know how long I’ve waited for this money?” she demanded, looking from one of us to the other. “Have you any idea how long?”
Mutely, the three of us shook our heads. Meredia certainly knew how to create a captive audience.
“Well, I’ve waited months!” she bellowed, throwing her head back. “Literally months!”
“Wonderful,” I said. “Isn’t that amazing?”
“Who’s it from?” asked Hetty.
“How much is it for?” asked Megan, asking the only truly important question.
“It’s a refund from my book club,” sang Meredia joyfully. “And you simply cannot imagine the number of letters I’ve had to write to get it. I was on the verge of going to Swindon in person to complain.”
Megan, Hetty and I exchanged puzzled looks.
“Your…book club?” I asked slowly. “A refund from your book club?”
“Yes,” said Meredia, sighing dramatically. “It’s been awful. I said I didn’t want the book of the month and they sent it anyway and—”
“So how much did you get?” interrupted Megan abruptly.
“Seven fifty,” said Meredia.
“Is that seven hundred and fifty or seven pounds fifty?” I asked, fearing the worst.
“Seven pounds fifty,” said Meredia, sounding annoyed. “What do you mean, seven hundred and fifty? The book of the month would need to be made of solid gold for me to spend that much on it. Honestly, Lucy, sometimes I wonder about you!”
“I see,” said Megan, very matter-of-factly. “You got a check for seven pounds fifty—a quarter of the cost of the reading from Mrs. Nolan—and you’re saying that her prediction that you would come into money has come true? Have I got that right?”