‘For what?’
‘Sleeping with all your friends. I won’t do it again.’
‘You can sleep with who you like. It’s the bad atmosphere when it doesn’t work out that I don’t like.’
‘I won’t be sleeping with anyone else. I was off the rails and out of control, but I’m OK now. I’m sorry. It’s back to being clean-living Maggie – I’m just not cut out for anything else. I might even join an enclosed order.’
Emily shook her head. ‘Some sort of middle ground might be nice.’ Then she added, But thank Christ you knocked that lezzer lark on the head before the arrival of Mammy Walsh. Else we’d have all been in the soup.’
I heartily agreed.
35
After the second miscarriage, I cried for four solid days. I know people often say things like ‘I cried for a week,’ when they mean they cried on and off for a few days, but I really did cry non-stop for four days. I even cried in my sleep. I was hazily aware of people coming and going, tiptoeing around my bed and whispering to Garv, ‘How is she now?’
By the time I stopped crying, my eyes were so swollen I looked like I’d been beaten up and the surface of my face was white and crusty like those dried-out salt lakes that you see in the desert.
In the past, when I’d heard about women having miscarriages, I couldn’t imagine their sadness, because I suppose I wondered how you could miss something you’d never had. I could identify with other losses – if one of my friends got dumped by their boyfriend, I felt lonely, rejected and humiliated for them. Or if someone belonging to a friend died, I could go some way to understanding the shock, the grief and the very weirdness of death, even though my grandparents were the only people I’d loved who’d died.
But I hadn’t been able to imagine the grief of losing a baby. Not until it had happened to me. Not until it had happened to me twice.
And the funny thing is that in ways, it’s similar to the other losses. I felt as lonely, rejected and humiliated as if I’d been dumped – lonely for the person I’d never get to know, rejected because they didn’t want to stay in my body and humiliated by my very defectiveness. And I also felt shock, grief and weirdness, like someone had died. But there was an extra dimension to my sadness, something that went to the very essence of my humanness. I had wanted a child, and the longing was as visceral and inexplicable as hunger.
Throughout it all, it was as though a pane of glass separated me from the rest of the human race, so isolated was I. I felt almost no one could understand the exact nature of my pain. Those who’d miscarried would – although I didn’t know anyone – and those who were unsuccessfully ‘trying’ for a baby, and maybe some people who’d already had children would. But the vast majority wouldn’t get it. I intuited that, because for a long time I’d thought the way they did.
The one person who truly shared my loss was the one person I could barely look in the eye – Garv. Having to go through it all with him made it worse and I couldn’t figure out why. Until I realized that I couldn’t stop thinking about something that had happened when I was about twenty: a child from the neighbourhood had run out from between two parked cars and been knocked down and killed by a motorist who hadn’t had a hope of stopping in time. The parents of the dead boy were devastated, of course, but there was also a lot of sympathy for the man who’d been driving. I overheard several people say, ‘My heart goes out to the driver – the poor man, what he must be going through.’
Well, I was the same as the driver. I was responsible for Garv’s grief – it was my fault, and it was horrible living with it.
But Garv coped a lot better than I did. In the fortnight after the miscarriage he kept the household running, monitoring my visitors, replacing my Mother and Baby magazines with Vanity Fair, and ensuring I ate. I flailed around, failing to reclaim normality, and refused to talk about what had happened. I couldn’t even use the word ‘miscarriage’ – when anyone started on about it, I interrupted and called it a ‘setback’. And when they said, ‘OΚ, setback,’ and continued trying to probe me, I’d say, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ I was so resistant that even the most dedicated of friends kind of gave up.
Then someone came up with the idea that Garv and I should go on holiday. All of a sudden, everyone was in agreement that a holiday was a great idea, and it felt like everywhere we turned there was another spooky face intoning, ‘It’ll dooo yooou the world of gooood.’ Or A few days lying by a pooool reading a crappy booook and you won’t knoooow yoooourself.’ It was like a horror film. ‘You yourself were conceived on holiday, Margaret,’ Mum said, accompanying this information with a wink and a disconcerting leer. ‘Don’t tell us, for God’s sake, don’t tell us,’ Helen begged.
In the end, Garv and I felt we’d no choice. I had no energy to resist everyone’s urgings and the idea of staving off real life for another week was too tempting to resist.
So off we went to a resort in St Lucia, spurred on by visions of silvery palm trees, powder-white sand, hot yellow sun and goldfish-bowl-sized cocktails. Only to discover that three days before we’d arrived, they’d had a hurricane – even though it wasn’t the hurricane season – and their beach had fallen into the sea, along with most of their palm trees. Not only that, but my bag, crammed with gorgeous, newly purchased beachwear, never turned up on the airport carousel. Salt was rubbed vigorously into the wounds by the JCBs which commenced work rebuilding the beach every morning at seven a.m. outside our window. And the icing on the cake was the fact that it pelted rain, and no, it wasn’t the rainy season either.
But the cherry right on the very top of the icing on the cake was the attitude the hotel staff took to my missing bag. No matter how hard I tried to convince them that I wanted my stuff urgently, it didn’t seem to cut any mustard. Every morning and every evening Garv and I made enquiries as to its where-abouts, but nobody could ever give us any hard information.
‘They’re so laid back here,’ I complained.
‘Laid back?’ Garv said grimly. ‘They make the Irish look as hard-working and efficient as the Japanese.’
On the fifth day, it all came to a head when we showed up, once again, at the front desk. Even though we’d gone through the whole missing-bag thing with Floyd every morning for the previous four days, Garv had to explain it all afresh to him.
Unconvincingly, Floyd pressed a couple of keys on his keyboard and looked at his screen. I twisted my head trying to get a look at it, because I harboured a suspicion that the computer wasn’t even switched on.
‘Be comin’ tomorrow,’ he drawled.
‘But you said that yesterday,’ my jaw was clenched, ‘and the day before.’ I thought of Garv having to wash my T-shirt and shorts in the handbasin again tonight and me having to put them on damp in the morning and be laughed at by the other well-dressed girls there. Then I thought of my bag, filled with jewel-coloured bikinis, flower-splashed sundresses and, worst of all, my new unworn sandals, and I became a little hysterical. Even now, when I think of those sandals my gut twists with pain. Not because I’m a shoe junkie – my first love has always been handbags, really – but because Garv went to so much trouble to get them for me. I’d seen them in a shop in town the week before we’d come away. I’d even tried them on and was all set to buy them when into the shop came a woman with a baby. It was tiny, clearly a newborn, its delicate eyelids fluttering with sleep, its marshmallow hands curled into fists.
I had to leave. I’m not exaggerating, I had to leave, or I would have lost it and started crying again – and once I started I found it very hard to stop.
At home, I collapsed on Garv. ‘It wasn’t just the baby,’ I said. ‘I know it’s stupid, but it was the sandals too. They were perfect, they would have gone with everything. And I left them… ‘I hovered on the brink of a great crying torrent.
‘I’ll get them for you,’ Garv offered, and a muscle leapt rhythmically in his jaw. ‘Where were they?’
‘No, it’s OK.’ Anyway, I couldn’t remem
ber which shop – all I knew was it was in Grafton Street. Next thing I know, Garv is placing a pad in front of me. ‘Draw them,’ he says. ‘Put down colour, size, everything you know about them.’
I tried to talk him out of it, but he was insistent. Which only made me feel worse. It was a sign of how bad things were, of how close we were to toppling over the edge, if he had to employ such extreme measures to try to make me happy.
Like a private eye, he pounded the pavements in the centre of Dublin, armed only with my diagram. He went into shoe shop after shoe shop with the folded bit of paper, asking people, ‘Have you seen these shoes?’
He tried Zerep, who didn’t have them, but thought that Fitzpatrick’s might. Fitzpatrick’s hadn’t seen them either and tried to send him to Clarks. But Garv said I wouldn’t have been in Clarks, that their shoes were too comfortable, so they suggested he try Jezzie. Who tried to fob him off with a pair that were too low and didn’t have a ridged sole. Off his own bat Garv tried Korkys, and though the staff couldn’t help, a customer – a shoe aficionado – overheard and insisted that the sandals were in Carl Scarpa. And sure enough, paydirt was hit in Carl Scarpa.
‘I just hope they fit,’ Garv said, opening the bag when he got home.
‘They’ll fit.’ I was quite prepared to chop my toes off, if necessary. I was so appalled at the trouble he’d gone to, especially in view of my unworthiness, that I wouldn’t have been able to admit to anything being wrong.
He held them up. ‘Are they the right ones?’
I nodded.
‘Your ruby slippers,’ he said, handing them over. And though they weren’t ruby – more of a turquoise, really – or slippers, I put them on, clicked my heels together three times and said, ‘There’s no place like home.’
Tightly we held on to each other and for a while there I thought we might make it. Isn’t it strange that sometimes the memory of an act of kindness can cause more pain than the cruel stuff?
Meanwhile, Floyd just didn’t give a damn whether the bag containing my sandals and everything else ever turned up.
‘Where is it?’ I begged. ‘It’s been lost for nearly a week now.’
Floyd fixed me with a dazzling melon-wide grin. ‘Relax, mon.’
And maybe in other circumstances I would have. Perhaps if I’d had a proper night’s sleep in the previous month, if my nerves hadn’t been stretched see-through, if I hadn’t hung so much hope on this holiday. Instead I heard myself shout, ‘No, I won’t fucking relax.’
Garv put his hands on my shoulders and firmly marched me to a pretty white bench. ‘Sit here,’ he ordered. Resentfully I sat while Garv leant over the desk at Floyd. ‘Now listen to me,’ he threatened. ‘That’s my wife. She hasn’t been well. She’s come here to feel better. There’s no beach, the weather is shite, the least you could do is find her bag.’
But despite his macho intervention, the bag didn’t turn up till the final day and our mood didn’t turn up at all.
At the airport coming home, the pall of depression that hung over the pair of us could almost have been photographed. We’d thought the holiday would heal us, but it had only highlighted the divisions. Not only was I not pregnant but we were further apart than we’d ever been.
As I thought about all the terrible things that had happened with the weather and the bag and the food poisoning (oh yes, two gippy tummies, one overworked bathroom, let’s not go there), I wondered if Garv and I were jinxed. Then an unexpected terror got me as I understood that the disasters had actually been the best thing about the holiday – because they meant Garv and I had had things to talk about. The only times we’d been animated or in agreement had been when we were venting about what a kip it was or when we were planning the various tortures we’d inflict on the JCB drivers or Floyd or the chef who had given us the dodgy swordfish.
For the first time ever, as far as I could remember, Garv and I were running out of things to say to each other.
36
The exity bit of LAX, where the recent arrivals emerge, was choked with people waiting. As well as the Dublin plane, a flight had recently landed from Manila, and another from Bogota, and it looked like thousands of relatives had turned out to greet the passengers. I’d already spent almost forty minutes standing with a stretched neck, being jostled and shunted by the vacuum-packed throng. Every time the glass doors slid back to reveal yet another family group, a happy wail went up from somewhere, and a fresh heave had me stumbling all over my neighbours as people sought to burrow through to their visitors.
The more time that passed without my lot appearing, the more lighthearted I became – they must have missed the plane. Great, I could go home to Ireland. What a pity I hadn’t thought to bring my stuff with me, I could just have left there and then. But at the exact moment I’d decided they definitely weren’t coming, my senses pricked up and my hopes slid away. I still couldn’t see them, but I knew they were about to show – not thanks to any sixth sense, but because I could hear them, their voices raised in disagreement.
And then they appeared. Mum with a mysteriously orange face – the mystery was explained later when I saw the palms of her hands, also a browny-orange colour. She’d been at the fake tan again. No matter how many times we told her she just couldn’t handle it, she wouldn’t listen.
I caught a quick glimpse of Dad, almost invisible behind an overladen trolley. He was wearing khaki shorts. Fetchingly accessorized with varicose veins, argyle socks and black laceups. Behind him came Anna, and I got a surprise – actually, a shock – when I saw her. She’d had her hair cut – styled. She looked great. And then came Helen, her long, dark hair glossy, her green eyes sparkling, her mouth curved in a contemptuous smile as she surveyed the waiting multitude. Even from a distance, I could see what she was mouthing: ‘Where the fuck is she?’ With a sigh, I positioned my elbows outwards, like I was about to do the Birdie Song, and prepared to push.
The reason for the delay? One of Anna’s bags hadn’t turned up, and only after they’d filled out the forms was it spotted taking a twirl for itself on the Bogota carousel. Also the trolley wasn’t helping. Capricious and unpredictable, it had caused skinned ankles and bruised calves all round. Put it this way – if it was a dog, you’d have muzzled it.
But I was happy to see them, happier than I’d expected, and I had a moment of feeling protected – Mum and Dad were here, they’d mind me. But something about Dad’s thin, white and blue legs was telling me it wasn’t fair to expect to be taken care of. Instead, because I’d been in LA for three weeks already, I’d be responsible for their welfare – even though I hardly felt able to take care of myself, never mind the four of them.
With much barking of knuckles I got their huge amounts of luggage into Emily’s block of flats and, under a blue, blue sky, we headed for the freeway to Santa Monica while they discussed my new look.
‘Your hair hasn’t been that short ever.’
‘It must have been short when she was born,’ Helen said.
‘No, it wasn’t.’
‘How would you know? You weren’t there. I have to say, Maggie,’ Helen mused, ‘you look great. Your hair really suits you that length and you’ve a gorgeous tan.’
I waited for the catch. However, the trap wasn’t for me, but for Mum.
‘A gorgeous tan,’ Helen repeated. ‘Nearly as gorgeous as Mum’s. Hasn’t she a great colour?’ she asked unkindly. ‘Yeah, lovely.’
‘I’ve been sitting out in the garden at home,’ Mum said.
‘Between showers,’ Helen twisted the knife.
‘The Irish sun can be very strong,’ Mum persisted.
‘Must be, if you can get that sort of colour when it’s pissing down.’
The sniping continued until – a mere six blocks from Emily’s – we got to the Ocean View hotel. To my surprise, it was accurately named: you could actually view the ocean from it. All that separated it from the vast, twinkling expanse of the Pacific was a road, a line of palm trees and a cycle path. br />
‘Look,’ Anna said, all excited, as two six-foot, toffee-tanned, pony-tailed blondes rollerbladed past. ‘Welcome to California.’
Inside, the hotel was nice and bright and had a swimming pool and the advertised umbrellas, but Mum seemed edgy and distracted, moving around her room, opening drawers, touching things. She only relaxed when she discovered that they hadn’t hoovered under the bed. She’s a bad housekeeper herself and she hates feeling out-cleaned.
‘It’s quite nice here,’ she finally conceded.
Helen was less impressed. ‘We came this close,’ she held up her thumb and forefinger, ‘to staying in the Chateau Marmont.’
‘She told me it was a convent,’ Mum said indignantly. ‘If it wasn’t for Nuala Freeman, who told me the kind of place it really was –’
‘Glamorous,’ Helen interrupted. ‘Full of the stars of screen and stage. It would have been great.’
One of the reasons they – at least Mum and Dad – had come to LA was out of concern for me, and they hadn’t even unpacked before I was called to provide an account of my emotional health. Somehow, Mum had backed me into a corner, thrust a concerned (and orange) face at me and asked softly, ‘How’ve you been these past few weeks, since… you know?’ Up close, her neck was streaky, but her eyes were kind and I wondered where I should start – ‘I found out for sure that my husband has someone else, then I had mild bondage with a big-nosed man who didn’t call me, then I ran into Shay first-cut-is-the-deepest Delaney again, who did his best to ignore me even though we’ll always be linked, at least in my head, then I had sex with a woman with breast implants and she rejected me too. I’ve been to very dark places and behaved so out of character that I’ve scared myself, and I’m still no wiser about what’s going to become of me and my life and my future and my past.’ So which bit should I tell her first? I mused. The lesbian sex? Being tied to Troy’s bedpost?
‘I’m fine, Mum,’ I said weakly.