I’m very partial to a nice umbrella. You know the way some women collect Dresden china? Or husbands? Well, umbrellas are my ‘thing’. I no longer buy dear ones because ‘sod’s law’ says I will leave it on the bus on its first outing. But I get given gifts of them. When people go on holidays to foreign parts they will often bring me back a novelty umbrella. I have quite a collection at this stage. When I die, I don’t mind if it’s donated to the ‘V’ and ‘A’. For free.
V is for … Funnily enough, the only word I can think of is ‘vagina’, and the less said about that the better. Will we move on to W? No, hold it, hold it, I have a word …
V is for Vajazzling. It was Helen who first mentioned it to me – oh take her to know about it. Apparently Claire gets it done all the time, the vajazzling. If you ask me – although no one ever does – Claire seems to spend her entire life doing ‘maintenance’ on her appearance.
There was one day that Helen called in to me and Claire was expected also – I can’t remember what we were meant to be doing, but we were meant to be doing something together. Maybe going to the garden centre? Although I don’t know why I said that because I’ve never been to a garden centre in my life. I see other families on the telly doing it and I wonder why we don’t, but we don’t …
Oh yes! Now I remember what we were meant to be doing. We were going up to Shanganagh – that’s the graveyard – to book a plot for myself and Mr Walsh, for when we ‘kick’ the ‘bucket’. It might sound ‘morbid’ but you’ve got to box clever these days – you can’t just up and die and expect a plot to be waiting for you, nice and handy. There’s high demand for good plots. You’ve got to think ahead.
For some reason, Claire and Helen had decided to accompany me – ‘for the laugh’ to quote Helen.
Helen had arrived and Claire hadn’t so I took my life in my hands and asked Helen, ‘Where’s Claire?’ Then I waited to get my head bitten off – ‘How would I know where Claire is? What am I? Her keeper?’ – the usual ‘blah’.
But Helen surprised me by addressing me civilly. ‘Claire will be a bit late,’ she said. ‘A couple of spangles fell out of her vajazzle, she’s getting them glued back in.’
‘Vajazzle?’ says I. ‘What’s a vajazzle?’
Once again I expected to be ate without salt, but Helen said, ‘Vajazzling? Have you been hiding under a rock? Yeah, look at the state of you, you have been hiding under a rock. Okay, I’ll tell you what vajazzling is.’
So Helen explained. Do you know about it? Well, you get all the hair on your ‘lady region’ waxed away and then you get little glittery things glued on instead to make a pattern, like a little red heart, or a flower, or a butterfly, or whatever you want.
At first I was suspicious. I thought it was another one of those things Helen tells me that aren’t real, just to make mock of me, but she produced her phone and showed me ‘articles’ and even a few photos.
At that stage I believed her but I was a bit baffled by the whole business – why would a person go to so much trouble? – and then I ‘got’ it.
‘Sort of like a tattoo?’ I said. ‘A form of body art?’
Helen scrunched up her forehead and said, ‘Body art? What do you know about body art, old woman?’ (That’s right, that’s what she calls me – ‘old woman’ – have you ever heard such disrespect?)
‘Don’t scrunch your forehead like that,’ I said. ‘You’ll get wrinkles. And fyi –’ (I really enjoy saying ‘fyi’) ‘I know about a lot of things.’
‘You didn’t know about vajazzling,’ Helen said, because she can never let a thing go.
But still, we were ‘getting on’ well and we had an ‘in depth’ chat about all the things you could get vajazzled onto your ‘area’. ‘You could get an arrow,’ I said. ‘Pointing to “down there”. So he’d know where to put it, like.’
We had a good old laugh – she can be a great laugh, Helen, if you get her on the right day – and I said, ‘Do you get vajazzled?’
And she said, ‘Sometimes.’
Then I said, ‘Does Margaret get vajazzled?’ And well! We ‘fell’ around the place laughing! It was mean, I know, but if you knew Margaret … She’s really not that sort. She’d shave her legs now and again, if you put a gun to her head, but that’d be the extent of it.
‘Does Anna get vajazzled?’ I asked.
‘’Course!’ Helen said, emphatically. ‘She works in the beauty industry and she lives in New York City! It’s the law!’ (That was a joke, the ‘law’ bit.)
‘Does Rachel get vajazzled?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know …’ Helen said, thoughtfully. Because you wouldn’t know with Rachel; she can be quite serious since she got those qualifications in being an addiction counsellor, and maybe it’s the wrong thing to say, but there are times when I think she was more fun when she was still on the drugs …
Then Helen and I both went very quiet because we were thinking of showing our vajazzle to Luke Costello. Well, I was anyway.
After a few seconds I wiped the sweat off my forehead and, to lighten to mood, I declared, ‘Do you know something? I think I’ll get a vajazzle myself!’
‘Why not?’ Helen said gaily – too gaily, and I knew for sure she’d been thinking of Luke Costello too. ‘What would you get done? Padre Pio?’
‘Maybe,’ I said, ignoring the fact that she was trying to ‘rile’ me by being disrespectful about Padre Pio. ‘Or maybe a Cornetto. Or –’ and I was laughing away to myself at this point – ‘to lure your father, maybe I’ll get a golf club.’
Suddenly Helen was frozen still and she stared at me like she’d seen a terrible car crash, and she said, ‘That image is going to stay with me for ever. I’m scarred for life.’
‘Yes,’ I said, making right sport at this stage. ‘I think I’ll definitely get a golf club. To get your father … In. Ter. Es. Ted.’ And I said it slowly, the way I’ve just described – In. Ter. Es. Ted. – to sound ‘saucy’.
‘I’m going to get sick.’ Helen clapped her hand over her mouth and raced out to the downstairs cloakroom, and the next thing I hear all these gawking noises.
I knew she wasn’t really getting sick; she was only dry-retching for ‘dramatic effect’.
‘Your generation think you invented sex,’ I called out to her.
‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘Shut up!’
‘You want me to have never had sex!’
‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘Shut up!’
‘How do you think you were conceived?’
‘Shut up,’ she shrieked. ‘Shut up!’
‘When you think about it,’ I said, happy as you please, ‘I must have done it at least five times!’
And that was the end of that; no more was said about the vajazzling.
But I still think about it from time to time.
V is also for Vonnie. Let me tell you about Vonnie! Helen has a boyfriend called Artie. A fine-looking man. Fine-looking. I accidentally saw some nudie photos of him and, believe you me, he is a fine-looking man. My feelings about Artie are, as they say on the Facebooks, ‘complicated’, and one of the reasons they’re so complicated is that Artie was once married to a woman and her name was – yes, you have it! – Vonnie. I don’t know – short for Yvonne or Veronica or something.
The reason that Artie and Vonnie are no longer married is because Vonnie ran off with a youngster in a pork-pie hat. So naturally you’d assume that, like normal people, they’d hate each other, and bad-mouth each other to the children (they’ve three). But, oh no, Vonnie is best friends with Artie. Artie who is my daughter’s boyfriend. Do you get me? Do you see what I’m driving at? Oh great pals, Vonnie and Artie. Vonnie is forever over at Artie’s house, throwing barbecues, doing jigsaws (yes, you heard right! Jigsaws!), acting for all the world like a married couple.
To make things worse, I can see that some men would find this Vonnie alluring. She’s small and skinny, skinnier than her fifteen-year-old daughter, and has no shame about displaying her uppe
r arms. She goes round in flip-flops and faded jeans and cheesecloth tops falling off her shoulders. And although I don’t like admitting it, she’s a bit of a beauty. Not only that, she’s a ‘good laugh’, and great company and very accomplished.
I worry about Vonnie. More to the point, even though Helen is the toughest thing on the planet, I worry about Helen. When I say my prayers at night I always ask the Lord, ‘Please make Vonnie go away. Not die or anything bad like that, but maybe you could get her a job in Antwerp.’
W is for Work. As in ‘work’ being ‘done’ on ‘yourself’. And the funny thing is that there are two different types of work you can have done on yourself. You can have the work that Claire has done on herself – Botox round her eyes and at the sides of her mouth to make her smile (as she says, and I’m quoting, ‘With my shitty life, what have I to smile about?’), Restylane to fill in the lines on her forehead so that she doesn’t look like she’s frowning all the time (‘With my shitty life, I’ve plenty to frown about!’), and collagen injections into her cheeks to give her youthful plumpness (‘With my shitty life, is it any wonder that I’m old before my time?’).
(I would never say this to her face because she’d eat the head off of you as soon as look at you, but Claire’s life doesn’t seem at all ‘shitty’ to me. She’s got that Adam, who thinks the sun shines out of her rear end, and they’ve a fine house and she’s always getting her highlights done and having barbecues and parties and getting ‘scuttered’.)
But back to the Botox et al… . Although I enjoy extraordinarily youthful looks, especially considering the life of worry I’ve had with the five of them, I would ‘never say never’ to the idea of that kind of work. But not until I need it, of course. You hear of some girls of twenty-three having ‘work’ ‘done’ and you think, ‘Why would you be getting it done so young?’ Well, it’s the same for me.
Then there’s the ‘work’ that Rachel has ‘done’ on herself, and that’s another kind of work entirely. That’s all head-shrinky stuff, psychotherapy and ‘the talking cure’ and whatnot. You can’t scratch your chin without Rachel reading something into it.
It’s a load of bloody nonsense all that psychotherapy business – and there’s no way on God’s good earth that you can trust these ‘therapists’ to keep their clobs shut. A few glasses of wine at a dinner party and shur, they’d be regaling everyone with stories of all their clients’ secrets – affairs and abortions and cross-dressing and incest and shop-lifting and anything else you care to mention.
I don’t blame these people – I know in my heart of hearts that I’d do it myself. It’s human nature, isn’t it? If you hear a good juicy secret, how can you help but blurt it out? It’s like eating Pringles: you can’t stop yourself.
(Not priests, though. Priests are different. Whatever they hear within the confines of the confession box stays secret. They are blessed with divine clob-shutting abilities.)
And what if one of these therapists fell on hard times? Well, they’d be straight down to the nearest ‘red top’, looking for a fine big handful of money in exchange for secrets.
I would never go to one of those people. Even if I had any ‘issues’. Which I haven’t. Issues! It’s a load of codology and you could buy a new skirt every week with the money they charge you.
In this kind of ‘work’ they make a big thing about getting ‘closure’. Everyone has to get ‘closure’ on everything these days. If you drop a cup, you have to get closure on it. If you miss the bus, you have to get closure. If you open a drawer, you have to get closure (that was my little joke there).
In my day, there was no such thing as closure. If something ‘bad’ happened to you, say like a man ‘exposing himself’ to you on the bus, and you went a bit funny in the head and started running round the house in the middle of the night, screeching and yelling that you couldn’t take it any more, Father Cormac would be brought in to pray over you and that would be the end of that.
It wouldn’t make any difference, of course. The middle-of-the-night running and screeching and yelling would carry on, but no one would pay any heed. Closure, my eye!
X is for Xylophone. Although I don’t play it and neither does anyone in the family. In fact, I’m proud to say we’re an entirely unmusical bunch. Would there be anything more tiresome than being a musical family? Shur, you’d never get any visitors!
‘Oh no,’ people would think, ‘I’m not calling in to see that crowd. You’re barely in the door before they’ve their melodeons out and they’re banging the spoons agin their thighs and batting their feet off the wooden floor, and you’re expected to join in and do a recitation of your own or something. No, we’ll give them a steer. We’ll visit the Cullens instead; they’ve a bouncy castle.’
The Walshes are no good at anything, to be perfectly honest with you. We’re not sporty. (Margaret was good at camogie about a thousand years ago, but she let it slide.) We’re hopeless at charades. We’ve no talent for the am-dram (apart from the time Mr Walsh had a small part in the Blackrock Players’ production of Oklahoma! and he had us all driven mad with his ‘method’ acting. He ate nothing but beans for ten days and he spoke Oklahoma-ese – ‘y’all’ this and ‘y’all’ that and when he thought something looked nice he said it was ‘mad purt’. Up the wall, he had us driven, up the effing wall.)
But I can’t think of anything else for the letter X … No, hold on! I spoke too soon …
X is for X-rays. There was this time that Anna broke her finger. (How? I hear you ask. In a skiing accident? Falling off a bus in a state of ‘scutteredness’? And the answer is: No. She broke her finger while she was rooting round in her wardrobe looking for her blue shoes.)
I ask you! What sort of story is that? I told her to ‘embellish’ it, so now she says something about catching it in a revolving door.
Off she goes to the hospital and her broken finger is x-rayed from two different angles and it’s found that it is indeed broken, so they put it in a splint and send her home. But they also give her her x-rays – do not ask me why! And she was thrilled with them. She kept holding them up and admiring them and bringing them close to her face, then zooming them out as far as her arm would go.
The next thing you know, her fella gets them framed and mounted on the wall, with their own personal uplighters, like they’re the Mona Lisa. So when people come into her pretty little apartment you can see them looking around admiringly and nodding at the pot plants and cushions, and then they see the two x-rays hanging on the wall and you watch them do a double take and look again and you can see them thinking, ‘What in the name of all that’s sacred are those two things? Art, is it? Is it art I’m looking at? Because what else could it be?’
Y is for Yoghurt. Specifically Plain Yoghurt at Room Temperature. Margaret and her sisters were playing a game in which they were saying what each of them would be if they were food. Claire would be a green curry because she’s fiery; Rachel would be a jelly baby, not because she’s sweet but because Helen likes to bite her head off; Anna, if I remember right, was a selection of nuts; Helen was a durian fruit because she’s so offensive she’s banned in several countries. And poor Margaret was Plain Yoghurt at Room Temperature – the most boring food they could think of.
But they’re wrong about her. There’s a lot more to Margaret than meets the eye. Yes, she lives within her means! Why is that a crime? Yes, she might have a savings account! Again, why the scorn? She simply doesn’t have the ‘diva gene’ that Claire, Rachel and Helen have. When things go wrong for them, they stomp around and shout and sometimes throw something (usually one of my good ornaments) at the wall. Whereas when things went wrong for Margaret – and for a while there they went terribly wrong – she curled in on herself and, if you weren’t paying attention, you mightn’t have noticed at all that something was up.
In her defence, she can be neurotic. She has a disorder – she suffers from shopping bulimia. She buys clothes, then agonizes about them and wonders whether she should ta
ke them back, and then sometimes she does and she has to fill out a form giving her reason and has to say things like ‘Makes my knees look funny’, and that goes to Head Office.
I will admit that, for a good long while, we didn’t like Margaret’s husband, Garv, because the first time we met him we thought he didn’t stand his round, and as everyone in Ireland knows, not standing your round is the worst thing a man could do. You’d get a more sympathetic audience if you murdered someone. Margaret insists that Garv tried, but that everyone shouted at him and yelled right into his face that they were getting it, that he was insulting them by even suggesting it. Garv even went as far as the bar, where Mr Walsh was trying to get the barman’s attention, but Mr Walsh shoved him away.
Of course the correct protocol is that Garv should shove Mr Walsh back and perhaps tuck Mr Walsh’s head under his oxter while yelling at the barman that he was paying for this one. But Garv didn’t do that. Margaret said he wouldn’t have felt right laying his hands on his prospective father-in-law. He just didn’t know the rules, that was all.
But it played out badly for him. For a long time, rumours circulated that he was so mean he’d peel an orange in his pocket. Anyway, that’s all in the past and we’re fond of him now!
You know what food Margaret actually is? She’s plain yoghurt all right, but with a layer of sweet fruit purée in the bottom. Margaret will surprise you, is what I’m saying.
Y is also for Yaris. I drive a Yaris. Helen says that only old people drive Yarises. She says that the government issues them to everyone as soon as they turn sixty-five. She says a Yaris is a ‘piece of shit’. I say that a Yaris is a fine, handy little car. It’s nippy and small enough for easy parking. You couldn’t get a better car than a Yaris. But if I had one day left on earth, I’d like a ‘go’ in a Porsche. A Porsche 911, if I’m to be precise. I’d find a big empty road – maybe the M50 in the middle of the night – and drive at 200 kilometres an hour.