After I came out of the ladies’, I found the glittering room where the hooley was being held, full of glinting trays of champagne and tables bearing finger food. I took a glass of champagne and made my way through the tanned, glam throng to Emily, who was standing in a little knot with Anna, Kirsty, Troy and – surprise, surprise – Helen.
‘Weren’t those old velvet seats like totally grungy?’ Kirsty said.
‘I loved them, it’s a great theatre,’ Emily said and we all made noises of agreement.
‘Eeuw!’ Kirsty exclaimed, in elaborate disgust. ‘You’re gross! Don’t you think of all the butts that have been in them before you…’
I tuned out, and not just because I hated her; there was something weird going on with the food. The quantities were disappearing fast – each time I turned away from it, then looked again, it had diminished even further – but try as I might, I couldn’t see anyone actually putting any of it in their mouths. No one was visibly eating – except for my Dad, who was leaning against one of the tables, going for it – but he wasn’t eating it all. And turning around very fast gave me no clues, just got me a couple of funny looks. It was as if people were eating using something like the Vulcan mind-meld.
‘So howja like the movie, Short Stuff?’ Troy asked Helen, looking at her from under meaningfully lowered eyelids.
Christ, he already had a nickname for her! I almost felt sorry for Kirsty.
But was I jealous? I wondered anxiously. I so didn’t want to be, I’d been doing well on the emotions front and didn’t want a setback. So I had a good rummage through my feelings, and all I could find was a mild interest in what might happen. Perhaps I should have been protective of Helen, but I was sure she could take care of herself. I reckoned Troy was the one who’d want to watch out.
My pride in how well I was coping took a bit of a knock, though, when I saw who my mother had engaged in intense conversation – none other than Shay Delaney. That hadn’t taken her long. He was leaning his dark-blond head down to her level and his tawny eyes were fastened so attentively on to hers that I had a strange urge to laugh.
As though he knew I was watching him, he suddenly looked up and gave me a stare that went straight to my stomach. Mum craned her neck to see who he was looking at and, when she saw me, beckoned me over – and of course I went. Out of obedience? Politeness? Curiosity? Who knows. But I found myself standing beside him where, big and kind of shaggy and smiling and charming, he was being very Shay Delaney.
‘Look who I found!’ Mum was skittish and over-excited. ‘We were just reminiscing on old times. It only seems like yesterday that I had Shay Delaney sitting in my kitchen, eating… what were they again, Shay?’
‘Bakewell tarts!’ the pair of them said simultaneously.
‘You were the only one who ate any. None of my lot would touch them.’
‘I don’t know why,’ Shay’s eyes twinkled. ‘They were delicious.’
But he would have said that even if he’d gone home and promptly died of food-poisoning. He’d always been this way: full of compliments, and he went out of his way to make everyone feel good about themselves. Except for me. My look lingered on the golden stubble on his jawline and I swallowed a sigh.
‘And you’re married, I hear,’ Mum probed.
‘I am, six years ago, to a girl called Donna Higgins.’
‘The Higgins family from Rockwell Park?’
‘No, the Higgins from York Road.’
‘Malachy Higgins or Bernard Higgins?’
‘Neither, although she does have an Uncle Bernard…’
A brief detour to establish exactly which branch of the Higgins family Shay’s wife hailed from, then Mum was off again. ‘Margaret’s marriage is after breaking up, but sure these things happen. You’re no one these days if you don’t get married more than once. We have to move with the times, isn’t that right? What’s the point in having divorce if we don’t use it? Use it or lose it, as they say.’
With each passing sentence, my surprise stacked up until it became fully fledged shock. My mother is the woman who cried when divorce came to Ireland and said it was the end of civilization as we knew it. And how tactful it was of her to bring it up in front of Shay, considering his background.
‘And your wife?’ she asked Shay. ‘Is she with you right now or back… Oh, back in Ireland. I see. And you’re out here for work a lot? It must be tough when you don’t see that much of each other. Well, who knows, you could be one of the fashionable types who have more than one marriage, if you’re not careful!’
I thought I was too old to be embarrassed by my mother. Well, there’s a turn-up for the books.
‘It seems no length of time since you were teenagers,’ Mum said wistfully. ‘Where do the years go?’
Silently, Shay and I looked at each other and suddenly I was right back there, remembering one particular afternoon. Him lowering me into a patch of sunlight on his bedroom carpet. The heat, the light, the rare touch of his naked skin against mine. I’d been almost unable to bear the pleasure.
He remembered too, or something very similar, because the atmosphere thickened almost visibly.
I’d tried to keep my teenage romances secret from my parents. Naturally, they’d suspected when I first went out with Garv when I was seventeen. But at the time I never confirmed it – or that we’d split up. Nor did they ever know for sure that I went out with Shay, either. Not that I ever went out with Shay – all we did was have sex. What I remember of that time was the constant waiting and yearning for his mother to go out so I could slip into his house and out of my clothes. I was in a state of constant arousal and even when his mother and younger sisters were home, all we did was have sex, although a little more surreptitiously – we pretended to watch television while I had one hand in his jeans, one eye on the door handle and my pants under a cushion. Sometimes his nervy, beleaguered mother cracked under the constant badgering and let us go to his room to ‘listen to music’, where we had sex with most of our clothes still on: my skirt pulled up, his jeans pulled down, dreading the footfall on the stairs that had us leaping to our feet and hastily covering up our flushed skin. Even when we went to parties, it was just an excuse for him to lock me in a bedroom and screw my brains out on the pile of coats.
‘I’ll leave you two to catch up,’ Mum said with a warm smile, and promptly turned on her heel, pushing through the crowds. I hadn’t ever thought I’d see the day when my mother was pimping for me.
‘When did she get so liberal about divorce?’ Shay asked.
‘In the last ten minutes.’
I hated the pause that followed. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I was stripped of all conversational skills, which was a shame because there was so much I wanted to talk to him about.
‘Right,’ he said, and I knew what was coming next.
‘Time up, is it?’
‘What?’
‘You’ve talked to me on my own for more than five seconds, so it’s time you stuck out your hand and said, “Well, great to see you again.” Isn’t it?’
He didn’t like that. He seemed startled – because he’d been caught out not being perfect? I was rather startled myself; I’m not normally so forthright. But we’d once been so close that maybe I still felt I had the right to say anything I wanted to him.
‘It’s not like that.’ He stumbled over the words. ‘It’s… I mean… ‘He looked anxious, as if he was pleading to be understood.
But before we got any further, Dad spotted Shay and came running joyously. ‘Shay Delaney, as I live and breathe! It’s great to see someone from home!’
I swallowed another sigh. Dad had been away from Ireland less than two days. What is it with Irish people? Rachel, my sister, says we can’t even go on a daytrip to Holyhead without singing maudlin songs about how we were forced to leave the Emerald Isle and how much we wish we were back there. Do we share some sort of inherited memory, so that whenever we leave the country it triggers recollections of being
deported to Van Diemen s Land for stealing a sheep?
‘We’re all heading back to the hotel now on account of the jet lag, but I’m taking everyone out for their dinner on Friday night,’ Dad told Shay, ‘and I’ll take it as a personal insult if you won’t join us.’
39
On Thursday evening, Mum, Dad, Helen and Anna arrived unexpectedly at Emily’s. They’d gone to Disneyland for the day and I hadn’t thought they’d be home till midnight. Right away, I knew it wasn’t just a casual call because Mum had on her best cardigan and her ‘going-out’ lipstick, i.e. a ring of lipstick that was wider than her lips. She looked like a respectable clown.
‘Come in, come in,’ I said. ‘How was Disneyland?’
Mum silently stood aside to reveal Dad. Wearing a neckbrace.
‘Oh.’
‘That’s how Disneyland was,’ Mum said. ‘He stood up on that log thing again. He wouldn’t listen. He never listens. He has to know it all.’
‘It was worth it,’ Dad said, having to turn his entire body to glare at her.
‘Dad, when you came here with the other accountants, did you wear your suits?’
‘Suits?’ He sounded shocked. ‘We were ambassadors for our country. Of course we did.’
‘Did you have a good time at Disneyland?’ I asked Helen.
‘Yeah, because we didn’t go. We went to Malibu looking for surf gods.’
‘You’ve no car,’ Emily said to Anna. ‘How did you and Helen get to Malibu? Surely to God you didn’t… get the bus?’
But Anna shook her head. ‘No. Ethan and the other lads from next door drove us in their Dukes of Hazzardmobile.’
‘But you only met them last night.’
‘Tempus fugit,’ Anna said knowingly. ‘No time like the present.’
The whole room fell silent and stared, because Anna was the girl whose motto had always been, ‘Don’t do today what you can put off till tomorrow. Or preferably some time next year.’
‘Anna fancies Ethan,’ Helen said.
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘Do you really?’ Emily asked, agog.
‘No!’
‘She does,’ Helen insisted. ‘We’ll just have to torture her to get her to admit it. Emily, have you anything we can give her an electric shock with?’
‘Look in the kitchen. While you’re at it, bring out some wine and glasses as well, would you?’
‘Could you not just tell us, pet?’ Mum asked. ‘Electric shocks can really sting.’
‘I don’t fancy him!’
From the kitchen came the sound of rattling and rummaging in drawers. ‘Emily, all I can find is an electric carving knife,’ Helen called. ‘We could cut off bits of her.’
‘If you torture me, I’m going home,’ Anna said.
‘Leave it so. Just bring the wine.’
‘And what did you do today?’ Mum asked me.
I’d had a funny kind of a day, assailed by all manner of nostalgia, cast back in time to when I was seventeen and first involved with Shay. So much had come back to me, remembered with bitter-sweet pain…
Mum’s voice cut across my thoughts, returning me with a jolt to present-day Los Angeles.
‘Am I talking to the wall?’ she said sharply. ‘What did you do today?’
‘Oh, sorry. I washed clothes. Went to the supermarket.’ Got shouted at again by the raggedy man, something about a car chase with ‘Lala’ getting a bullet in the thigh. This time I didn’t take it personally. Bought loads of lovely food, then wondered why it is, no matter whether it’s in a supermarket in Ireland or one six thousand miles away in Los Angeles, that I always end up standing behind the Person Who Gets a Big Surprise When They Realise They Have to Pay. Their stuff is all packed in bags, which are sitting in their trolley to be pushed to the car, then when they get told the amount they act amazed, and only then do they begin patting their pockets or opening their handbag, looking for their wallet. Eventually paying either with a credit card whose swipe doesn’t work or counting out the exact amount in small change.
Then I went next door to the drugstore, bought a tongue-scraper and waited hopefully for my life to change.
‘And when I got home I helped Emily.’ Well, I’d made her a blueberry smoothie, given her another word for ‘growled’, and answered the phone to Larry Savage and told him that Emily was at her colonic irrigation person when she was just lying on the couch smoking and crying.
‘Last night was marvellous,’ Mum said. ‘Apart from the film. Shay Delaney hasn’t changed a bit, it did me the power of good to see him. And he’s going to come out with us all for dinner tomorrow night, Dad says.’
‘He won’t come,’ I said. ‘He was only being polite.’
‘He will come,’ Mum insisted. ‘He said he would.’
Dad had practically held a knife to his throat, of course he’d said he’d come.
‘I think he’s a bit creepy,’ Helen said. ‘He was looking at you, Maggie.’
‘He was looking at all of us,’ Mum said smartly.
‘No, I mean he was looking at her. Looking. With his eyes.’
‘What else would he be looking at her with?’ Mum snapped. ‘His feet?’
Before I could separate and label the clump of feelings this engendered, Anna said something surprising. ‘He wants every-one to like him.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ Mum asked. ‘Anyway, everyone does like him.’
‘I don’t,’ Helen said.
‘You’re just contrary.’
‘Go home, old woman, I’m tired and you’re annoying me.’
‘I’m going, but only because I want to. C’mon, you!’ Mum summoned Dad as though he was an obedient dog. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
‘Where are you off to?’
‘In next door to their fable-telling evening.’
When we’d all finished laughing, I said, ‘Why are you going if you don’t want to?’
‘Sure, what could I say?’ Mum said indignantly. ‘That Mike put me right on the spot the other night.’
‘Just don’t go,’ Helen suggested. ‘Let him fuck off.’
‘No.’ Suddenly Mum was all hauteur. ‘If I say I’ll do something, I’ll do it. I’m not the kind of woman who goes back on her word. We’ll go for an hour to be polite, then we’ll say we’ve another engagement.’
‘Say you’re going to the Viper Room,’ Helen suggested. ‘It’s oldies’ night.’
‘The Viper Room,’ Mum repeated. ‘Right you are. And if we’re not out in an hour and a half, come and get us.’
As soon as they’d gone, Helen said, all business-like, ‘Now, the bloke with the big schnozz? Troy? I find him strangely attractive.’
‘Take a number and get in line,’ Emily said, just like she’d once said to me. ‘Don’t fall in love with me baby ‘cos I’ll only break your heart.’
‘Fall in love,’ Helen scoffed, highly amused. ‘That’s a good one. So who’s slept with him?’ She looked eagerly at Emily. ‘Surely you have?’
‘Ask Maggie.’
‘OK. Who’s slept with him?’ I shrugged and Helen gave me a gimlet look. ‘You?’
‘Yes, me.’
‘But… you’re a lickarse, a good girl.’
‘Is that right?’
She gave me a mistrustful look, then pressed on, ‘But you and this Troy, you’re not an item?’
‘No.’
‘Well, do you mind if I have a go of him?’
‘Nothing to do with me.’
‘You might want to run it by his girlfriend.’ Emily sounded unexpectedly sharp.
‘Who? That ringlety one?’ Helen laughed softly. ‘I don’t anticipate any problems with her. Now tell me all about Lara. The lads were saying she’s a lesbo. I wonder what it’s like to have sex with a girl,’ she said dreamily – only because she wanted to cause a bit of a furore. ‘I wonder what they get up
to in bed.’
‘Ask Maggie,’ Emily said.
‘HAHAHAHA!’ went Helen. Then stopped as if she’d just driven into a granite wall. The colour vanished from her face. ‘I don’t believe you.’
I shrugged again. ‘Up to you.’ I was enjoying this.
‘When?’
‘Last week.’
‘I don’t believe you. I’m going to ask Lara.’
‘Ask away,’ I said equably.
Helen spent the next hour staring at me as though she’d never seen me before, then shaking her head and murmuring faintly, ‘Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ…’ She only stopped when Emily looked at her watch and exclaimed, ‘What about your Mum and Dad? It’s been nearly an hour and a half. Should we go and rescue them?’
‘Right, come on.’
We filed out, stood on the street and looked through the window into Mike and Charmaine’s front room. Mum was sitting majestically on a chair, while all the others were clustered at her feet. She was talking and smiling. Dad was propped on the couch, his head in his neckbrace, unnaturally still. He was smiling too.
I knocked on the glass of the front door and a slender, beardy type tiptoed over and held a finger to his lips. ‘It’s the story of Famous Seamus. How he won the love of the doctor’s daughter.’
Emily, Helen, Anna and I exchanged baffled looks, followed him in and took our place on the floor. Straight away, I was worried. Mum’s accent was more Irish than I’d ever heard it before and the ‘Musha’ and ‘Wisha’ hit rate per sentence was alarmingly high.
‘… Wisha, me prime boy Seamus could do it all. Reversing tractors, making reeks, and as for the dancing! Musha, he was the tidiest dancer you ever saw, he could dance on a plate…’
I was mortified, she was making such a show of herself. But a glance at the assembled faces gave me pause for thought: they were spellbound. Every person there was angled towards her as though she was a magnet and they were iron filings. You could have heard a pin drop.
‘He could jive, he could line dance, he could do an eight-hand reel. But he had brains too, musha, brains to burn! Great, he was, at the book-learning…’