Three Little Truths

by Eithne Shortall

  Martha was suddenly self-aware. It was very unlike her – the old or the new her – to be so forward with personal details.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, smoothing down her coat, ‘I’m going to check out the mattresses.’

  The mattress section was expansive and Martha read through the differences between pocket spring, innerspring, memory foam and pillow top. She didn’t have much of an opinion either way, though Robert was very vocal in his preference for a hard mattress. The one they’d brought from Limerick was fine, she thought, but he was convinced it had gone soft in the middle. ‘Nothing fancy,’ he’d said that morning, excited by the possibility of ‘a good night’s sleep’ and his wife miraculously returning to the person she once was. ‘Just something with a bit of structure.’

  Still wearing her coat and shoes, Martha lowered herself on to the most expensive mattress and spread her arms and legs like a starfish.

  Helen and Audrey had sent a photo from their weekly Abbyvale hike yesterday. She supposed they thought it was the right thing to do, to show they hadn’t forgotten about her. Greetings from the summit! the text read. Martha had stared at the photo for several minutes, then she’d put it away without replying.

  She felt a presence to her right and opened her eyes. A man in a short-sleeved uniform shirt was leaning over her.

  ‘Worth every euro, isn’t it? The softest sleep you’ll ever have.’ He patted the mattress with such gusto that Martha found herself rocking. ‘Like dozing off on a cloud. These bad boys are an extra five hundred at Bed City. So you’re saving already.’

  She closed her eyes again.

  ‘What do you reckon? Are you tempted?’

  She forgot about the salesman and pictured Robert’s reaction when he felt how soft it was and saw the price.

  ‘I’ll take it.’

  ‘You . . .? Brilliant. Excellent choice, ma’am. It comes with a two-year warranty, you know, and a mattress protector . . .’

  Martha’s eyes stayed shut. Why was he still there, selling? The deal was done.

  ‘Excellent. Really excellent. You won’t regret it. I’ll go and get the delivery form.’

  He scurried off and she tried to erase his greedy stare. She used to enjoy that side of being attractive – men turning in the street, women looking her up and down – but now she found it mildly distressing.

  She was worried the girls weren’t coping as well as she’d thought. Yesterday, Sinead had arrived home from school taunting Orla about the possibility that she might have worms and that she was always hungry because they were wriggling about her stomach sucking up her nutrients. The two of them were always arguing but this one had clearly been going on a while. Orla was on the point of tears and, more troublingly, Sinead was relishing it.

  Martha told Sinead to take it easy but it escalated into an argument where her eldest daughter got so mad her face and neck became blotchy and she was yelling that Martha didn’t care about them, that she was a coward, that she had ruined everything. Martha had let her yell and scream and stomp up the stairs.

  Sinead was right. She hadn’t phoned the guards since before Christmas. She hadn’t checked in once. How could it be that she – who had harangued sports coaches over keeping her daughters on the bench, and fought with the county council until the Abbyvale bin collection was made weekly – just did not want to know?

  There was a loud crash and Martha’s hand went to her chest.

  Her eyes sprang open. ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Sorry, sorry.’ Carmel was a few metres away, reaching down to pick up two porcelain containers. ‘Diffusers,’ she said, holding them up. ‘You burn incense in them. We had a sewerage leak last year and they worked wonders.’

  Martha took a deep breath and waited for her heart to calm down. She never realised how close she was to the edge until the most innocuous thing gave her a nudge. ‘What are they for this time?’

  ‘Oh, they’re for your house,’ said Carmel. ‘Maybe it doesn’t smell any more, and I’m not accusing you of anything so don’t look at me like that, but when Mrs Ryan was in the place . . . Jesus! The stink.’

  Carmel dropped the diffusers at the end of the mattress and the thing almost swallowed them up. It was like a cloud. She’d give the salesman that.

  ‘There was a bit of a smell,’ Martha conceded. ‘But I think we got it. The garden is trickier.’

  ‘Oh, I know. Many a child was reduced to tears when their ball went over the lane and into Mrs Ryan’s nettle forest. She never once gave back a ball. And if a kid knocked on her door looking for it, she’d go and complain to their parents that they were harassing her. A battle-axe of a woman.’

  ‘I take it she’s not missed, then?’

  ‘I’d say they buried her upside down in case she tried to dig herself out.’

  Edie and Robin came towards them, with the salesman not far behind.

  ‘Good afternoon, ladies.’ He handed a clipboard to Martha. ‘Free delivery is included with this mattress, so you’re saving yourself sixty quid there. And we’ll take away your old one, free of charge. That’s usually forty quid, so another saving for you.’

  Martha read through the form, took the pen from the holder and filled in her new address.

  ‘You’re buying this one?’ exclaimed Carmel, reading the sign for the luxury mattress. ‘Fifteen hundred euro!’

  ‘That’s the amount saved, Mam.’ Robin put her finger on the large red figure and then slid it across to the smaller black one.

  Carmel looked at her, aghast. ‘Martha! Four thousand euro?’

  Edie peered over Carmel’s shoulder. ‘You could do up a whole bathroom for that,’ she said wistfully.

  The salesman gave Carmel the indulgent smile people generally reserved for small children. ‘It’s an excellent price for a life-changing mattress.’

  ‘It’d want to do more than change your life,’ exclaimed Carmel. ‘It’d want to be making me money while I sleep on it for that price.’

  Martha handed back the form. ‘I’m going to take a couple of pillows as well. Soft ones.’

  ‘We have a buy-two-save-twenty-euro-on-a-third offer currently running.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Excellent! I also wanted to let you ladies know about our daily deal. We’re offering an Ultra Safety 3000 house alarm for four hundred and twenty euro. That’s a saving of more than fifty per cent on the system. You’ll also save on installation fees, which we offer for just twenty euro – a saving of eighty euro. And it should save you another forty quid every year on your home insurance.’

  ‘Does it come with garda call-out assistance?’ asked Edie. ‘Or is that separate?’

  ‘No, it’s built in. So, you’re saving on that too.’ He looked around at the group, clearly delighted with his sales pitch. ‘Any questions?’

  Carmel raised her hand.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is your annual bonus dependent on how many times you can get the word “save” or “saving” into a conversation?’

  The man turned his attention back to Martha. ‘The Ultra Safety 3000 is fool proof. Any hint of an intruder and the police will be notified.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘It’s not fool proof. No alarm system is fool proof.’

  The man smiled, nodding, like he was on Martha’s side but also had so much to teach her. ‘It’s unbelievable but it’s true, and, all in, you’d be saving about five hundred euro.’

  ‘It’s like a cult,’ muttered Carmel.

  Did these people go through customer service training? The customer is always right – and in this case she really was. Martha had real, lived experience. What did this slippery little upstart have? What did he know, except how to maximise his commission by taking vulnerable people for idiots?

  ‘It’s not true,’ snapped Martha, a familiar flash of anger coming over her, heat rising in her body. ‘So please, stop saying it.’

  The salesman gave a small awkw
ard squeak of a laugh, like when someone stood on Oscar’s chew toy. ‘Pardon me, ma’am, but it is.’

  ‘I had that system in my last home and it didn’t work.’ The flash of rage was slower to leave this time. It burned up her arms, on to her shoulders, spread all the way around her neck. ‘Five men broke into my home without that alarm so much as beeping. So don’t you tell me, or anyone else, that it’s fool proof. That’s false advertising and I won’t hesitate to report you. I will make an official complaint to the consumer protection agency.’

  His smile dropped. ‘I’m sorry. It’s what we’re told . . .’ He glanced down at the form Martha had filled out. ‘I’ll just go and get this processed.’

  The young man left and Martha brought the back of her hand to her throat in an attempt to cool it. She felt a rim of sweat forming along her hairline. Just as she went to sit back down on the mattress, she remembered the other three women.

  ‘Your house was burgled?’ said Robin, watching her.

  ‘By five men?’ whispered Edie.

  Martha pulled her handbag from the end of the bed and hauled it up over her shoulder. ‘Four or five,’ she said, pushing her hair behind her ears. ‘I can’t fully remember.’ Lies. She was just like Robert now. ‘They came in one morning just before the girls went to school.’

  ‘In the morning?’ echoed Edie, then quieter: ‘Who breaks into a house in a morning?’

  ‘Did they take anything?’ asked Carmel.

  ‘No.’ Martha looked her in the eye, to show she wasn’t lying, that she wasn’t like Robert. ‘They took nothing.’

  ‘That’s unusual,’ mused Edie. ‘What were they after, I wonder?’

  She shouldn’t have mentioned it. She should have kept her mouth shut.

  ‘Still, you must have gotten a fright.’

  Martha shrugged. ‘These things happen.’ She snapped her bag shut. ‘It’s just part of life. Right. I’ll pay, and we’ll hit the road.’

  ‘Is that why you moved?’

  She hesitated. It was more than Robin’s appearance that made her think of herself. What was it?

  ‘Like I said, Robert got a promotion.’

  A half-truth was still a lie.

  She threw her bag over her shoulder and headed for the register. Her heels clip-clopped along the pristine tiles, and she heard their sharp rebuke.

  Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies.

  *** Pine Road Poker ***

  Ellen:

  I highly recommend everyone read Bernie’s EXCELLENT column in today’s Independent if you haven’t already done so. Obviously, they’re all excellent, but today’s might just be life changing.

  Bernie:

  Thank you, Ellen. I’ve had some great feedback on it already. It’s gotten a few robust debates going on Facebook, to say the least.

  Ellen:

  I’m sure it has! I’ve been arguing with myself over it all morning!

  You should really consider entering it for some awards.

  Ruby:

  I hear the Pulitzer is looking for entries ...

  Ellen:

  I know you’re being sarcastic, Ruby, but it really is that good.

  Fiona:

  YASSS KWEEN!!!

  XXX

  Ruby:

  Go on so. What’s it about? They only get the FT into our office.

  Bernie:

  It’s an examination of plastic box versus paper bag in terms of the best way to package a school lunch. I look at retaining freshness, environmental impact and which is easier to clean.

  Ellen:

  It’s absolutely ground-breaking.

  If anyone wants to borrow a copy, I have two.

  EIGHT

  Edie put the key into her front door and pushed. She wasn’t singing any song in particular, just a general hum of giddy contentment. The excursion had been a total success for reasons that had nothing to do with shopping. She hadn’t bought a thing, actually, which should show Daniel he wasn’t the only one who took their finances seriously. Although she still didn’t think having children was as expensive as he made it out to be. Her mother said that until a child was two, you could basically have them sleeping in a drawer.

  She dropped her keys into the Waterford Crystal bowl on the hall table that Edie didn’t like but felt bad about regifting because it had been a wedding present from Daniel’s aunt.

  ‘Daniel? Bae?’ she called into the silent house. Still at work. Good. She opened the door to his office and did a little shimmy of excitement.

  Edie had been too distracted by the company to think about buying anything. Robin actual Dwyer had followed her into the bathroom department just to chat!

  Robin had been two years behind at school but of course Edie remembered her. While she’d been a late bloomer, and a generally unremarkable teenager, Robin had been top of the class, gorgeous and impossibly cool. She wasn’t quite the knockout she’d been a decade ago – her face was a little thinner, its edges harder and her wavy hair not as full – and she didn’t seem to have done much with her academic ability. Edie wasn’t sure if she had a job at all. But she was still beautiful and cool and, essentially, a dream target friend.

  And today, Edie had hit that target in the bullseye.

  Robin had come looking specifically for her. She’d asked Edie about her job, and the people who stayed at the hotel, and Daniel. All of which was obviously a promising sign that Robin at least didn’t hate her. But then, as they were going in search of Carmel and Martha, Robin had invited her to go for a drink. Just like that! Edie hadn’t made a proper friend since school, but she was pretty sure that was the grown-up equivalent of knocking on someone’s door and asking if they wanted to come out to play.

  They were going out Sunday night. It wasn’t a lot of time to decide what to wear – Edie always found ‘casual’ more difficult than ‘formal’ – but she’d figure it out. Robin actual Dwyer!

  ‘To the Fern, for one or two,’ the target friend had said as they’d made their way through the mattresses.

  ‘Cool, yeah,’ Edie had replied, doing her best to mirror Robin’s free-and-easy, one-shoulder shrug. ‘Cool.’

  Of course, if everything went according to plan with Daniel, Edie wouldn’t be able to drink on Sunday night. Maybe just the one Chardonnay, but that was it. She’d have Sprite Zero. She’d read a lot of conflicting opinions on message boards about whether or not it was okay to drink in that limbo period between trying to conceive and finding out if you were pregnant. But she didn’t want to take any chances.

  She and Daniel were supposed to have started trying last year. They’d talked about it on their honeymoon: six months of marital bliss, then down to business. Daniel had been as excited as her. He kept pointing out all the cute kids on the beach in Cancun. Even before they were married, they’d talked about kids a lot and it was always ‘when’ not ‘if’. She hadn’t imagined that. But then the summer came, and a new garage opened in Glasnevin, and Daniel felt the hit. He was relying on some big contract to save him in the autumn, and to pay for their bathroom renovation, and when that fell through, he was properly stressed. For the first time, he ended a quarter in the red. He started stressing about money, became convinced that they didn’t have enough for a family. He stayed up late watching TV because he couldn’t sleep and got a prescription for sedatives. Edie tried to reassure him; they didn’t earn a lot but how many couples in their twenties owned their homes outright? But when Daniel was stressed there was no talking to him. Business picked up a bit before Christmas, but he didn’t seem any less worried. It had shaken his sense of himself as dependable, responsible, prepared. Any time she mentioned kids, he either shut down the conversation or started up about how financially precarious they were. It gave her a sick feeling in her stomach. Like maybe money was just a handy excuse.

  But it was fine now. Absolutely fine. They hadn’t started trying last month because they’d gotten into a thundering row about it – she tried not to dwell on the overlapp
ing of her ovulation windows and their fights – but they were trying this weekend. That was what they’d agreed. Friday to Sunday was going to be wall-to-wall sex at number nineteen. What man could have a problem with that?

  Edie powered up Daniel’s computer and wandered over to the window as she waited for the machine to come to life. She looked from the cupid statues in Ellen Russell-O’Toole’s front lawn – it was Valentine’s Day next week – down to Martha Rigby’s more unkempt garden. It was ironic, if that was the right word, because Martha herself was so beautifully put together. Edie often wondered who these women were that looked good in Cos dresses. Well, now she knew. Martha Rigby pulled it off. She was so elegant. She was stylish and confident – and she was generous. She’d given Edie an unopened interiors magazine without her even having to ask.

  When they arrived back to Pine Road, Edie had helped Martha to carry pillows into the house – the mattress was being delivered the next day – and she’d spied the publication lying upside down on the hall table.

  ‘Take it,’ said Martha, following Edie’s gaze to the glossy magazine still in its cellophane wrap. ‘I don’t know why I brought it with us. I never even open the things. I finally cancelled the subscription when we moved.’

  Edie sat down at Daniel’s computer and typed in the password: Daniel4Edie. She pulled the magazine from her bag and did another excited shimmy. The only thing better than a real-life mystery was one that came with a clue.

  When Martha said her old house had been burgled, Edie’s first reaction was sympathy. Honestly. But then her detective instinct had kicked in. And when Martha said they’d broken in in the morning – not the early a.m. but the actual morning, just before the girls went to school – and that there had been five of them . . . Well, she wouldn’t be human if her interest hadn’t been piqued. Five men, daytime, and they took nothing? Edie’s brain had gone full Nancy Drew. She’d had to yammer on about the Pine Road rat infestation all the way home just to keep herself from demanding more information.