by Marian Keyes
That evening I went to a work thing and did something I don’t usually do at work things – I got drunk. Messy drunk, so bad that on one of my many trips back from the loo, when I met Stuart Keating, I ended up lunging at him. Stuart worked in another department and he’d always been nice to me; I can still see the surprise on his face as I zoomed in on him. Then we were kissing, but only for a second before I had to disengage. What was I doing? ‘ Sorry,’ I exclaimed and, appalled at myself, I returned to the party, picked up my jacket and left without saying goodbye to anyone. From across the room Frances watched me, her expression unreadable.
When I came home, Garv was waiting bolt upright, like an anxious parent. He tried to talk to me, but I mumbled drunkenly that I had to go to sleep and lurched to the bedroom, Garv in hot pursuit. I stripped off my clothes, letting them lie where they fell, and climbed between the sheets. ‘Drink some water.’ I heard the clatter as Garv put a glass on my bedside table. I ignored it and him, but just before I sank into the merciful oblivion of sleep, I remembered I hadn’t taken out my contact lenses. Too tired, drunk, whatever to get on my feet and go to the bathroom, I slipped them out and plopped them into the handily placed glass of water, promising myself I’d rinse them good and proper in their solution in the morning.
But when morning came, my tongue was superglued with dryness to the roof of my mouth. Automatically, I stretched out my hand for my glass of water and gulped it in one go. Only when the last of it was racing down my throat did I remember. My contact lenses. I’d drunk my contact lenses. Again. The third time in six weeks. They were only monthly disposables, but all the same.
And the following day, as luck would have it, I lost my job.
I wasn’t exactly sacked. But my contract wasn’t renewed. It was a six-month contract and since I’d moved back to Dublin from Chicago it had already been renewed five times. I had thought renewing it again was a mere formality.
‘When you first started here,’ Frances said, ‘we were impressed with you. You were hard-working and reliable.’
I nodded. That sounded like me all right. On a good day.
‘But in the last six months or so, the standard of your work and commitment has dropped dramatically. You’re often late, you leave early…’
I listened, almost in surprise. Of course, I’d known that in my head stuff hadn’t been great, but I’d thought I’d done a pretty good job of presenting a convincing business-as-usual façade to the outside world.
‘… you’ve been clearly distracted and you’ve taken ten days’ sick leave.’
I could have leapt to my feet and given a speech telling Frances why I’d been distracted and where I’d been on my ten days’ sick leave, but I remained sitting like a plank, my face closed. It was no one’s business but mine. Yet, paradoxically, I felt she should have seen that something had been very wrong over the past months and made allowances for me. I’ve been more rational, I suspect.
‘We want people who care about their work –’
I opened my mouth to protest that I did care, until I realized, with a shock, that actually I didn’t give a damn.
‘– and it’s with regret that I have to tell you that we are unable to renew your contract with us.’
It was years since I’d been sacked. In fact, the last time had been when I was seventeen and babysitting for a neighbour. I’d smuggled my boyfriend in when the children had gone to bed, because a house with no adults in had been too much to resist. But the horrible son – appropriately enough called Damian – spotted me smuggling my boyfriend back out. I’ll never forget it: Damian was standing at the top of the stairs, and his expression was so malevolent that the Old Spice music began playing spontaneously in my head. I was never asked to babysit there again. (To be honest, it was nearly a relief.)
But since then I had never been fired. I was a pretty good worker – not so good that I was ever in danger of winning the Employee of the Month Award, but fairly reliable and productive.
‘You want me to go?’ I asked faintly.
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘Now would be good.’
Oddly enough, it was losing my job that finally made me decide to leave Garv. I don’t really understand why. Because, you know, it’s not easy to leave someone. Not in real life. In fiction it’s all so cut and dried and clear: if you can see no future together, then of course you leave. Simple. Or if he’s having an affair, then you’d be a total idiot to stay, right? But in real life it’s amazing the things that conspire to keep you together. You might think, OK, so we can’t seem to make each other happy any more, but I get on so well with his sister and my friends are so fond of him, and our lives are too interwoven for us to be able to extricate ourselves. And this is our house, and see those lupins in our little back garden? – I planted them. (Well, not planted planted, I didn’t actually put them in the ground with my own hands, it was a narky old man called Michael who did, but I masterminded the whole thing.)
Leaving someone is a big deal. I was walking away from a lot more than a person, it was an entire life I was saying goodbye to.
But the shock of losing my job had triggered the conviction that everything was falling apart. Once the door to one disaster had opened, the possibilities for catastrophe seemed open-ended and I felt I’d no choice but to go along with my life as it unravelled. Losing a job? Why not go for broke and lose a marriage as well? It had suffered so many body blows during the past months, it was over in all but name anyway.
By the time Garv came home from work, I was in the bedroom, waist-high in a pathetic attempt at packing. How anyone manages to do a midnight flit is beyond me. Most people (if they’re anything like me) accumulate so much stuff.
He stood and looked at me, and it was like I was dreaming the whole thing.
He seemed surprised. Or maybe not. ‘What’s going on?’
This was my cue for the dramatic exit lines people always deliver in fiction. I’m LEAVING you! It’s OVER. Instead, I hung my head and mumbled, ‘I think I’d better go. We’ve tried our best with this and…’
‘Right,’ he swallowed. ‘Right.’ Then he nodded, and the nod was the worst bit. Such resignation in it. He agreed with me.
‘I lost my job today.’
‘Christ. What happened?’
‘I’ve been distracted and taken too much sick leave.’
‘Bastards.’
‘Yeah, well.’ I sighed. ‘The thing is, I mightn’t make this month’s mortgage, so I’ll give it to you from my Ladies’ Nice Things account.’
‘Forget it, forget it. I’ll take care of it.’
Then we lapsed into silence and it became clear that the mortgage was all he was planning to take care of.
Maybe I should have been angry with him and Truffle Woman. Perhaps I should have despised him for not jumping into the breach and promising me passionately that he wouldn’t let me go and that we could work it out.
But the truth was, right then, I want ed to go.
3
Maintenance level dysfunctional. That’s how I’d like to describe my family, the Walshes. Well, actually, that’s not how I’d like to describe my family. I’d like to describe my family as the prototype for the Brady Bunch. I’d like to describe my family as the Waltons of Waltons’ Mountain, only more lickarsey. But alas, maintenance level dysfunctional is as good as it gets.
I have four sisters, and the credo that each of them seems to live by is: The More Dramas the Better. (Sample thereof: Claire’s husband left her the day she’d given birth to their first child; Rachel is a (recovered) addict; Anna doesn’t really do reality; and Helen, the youngest – well, it’s kind of hard for me to describe…) But I’ve never been fond of chaos and I couldn’t figure out why I was so different. In my lonelier moments I used to entertain a fantasy that I was adopted. Which I could never truly relax into, because it was obvious from my appearance that I was one of them.
My sisters and I come in two versions
: Model A and Model B. Model As are tall, wholesome-looking and, if left unchecked, have brick-shithouse tendencies. I am a textbook Model A. My eldest sister, Claire, and the sister next in line to me, Rachel, are also Model As. Model Bs, on the other hand, are small, kitten-cute and gorgeous looking. With their long, dark hair, slanty green eyes and slender limbs, the two youngest sisters, Anna and Helen, are both clear-cut examples of the genre. Though Anna is nearly three years older than Helen, they look almost like twins. Sometimes even our mother can’t tell them apart – although that’s probably as much to do with her not wearing her glasses as their appearance, now that I come to think of it. To make it easy, Anna – a neo-hippy – dresses as though she’s been rummaging through the dressing-up box, and Helen is the one with the air of psychosis.
Model As share the common characteristics of being tall and strong. Not necessarily fat. Not necessarily. Indeed, Model As have been known to look willowy and slender. If they’re in the grip of anorexia, that is – not as unlikely as it sounds. It’s certainly happened, although not, sadly, to me. I’ve never had an eating disorder – apparently I didn’t have the imagination, Helen told me.
I mightn’t have had an eating disorder, but I suspected I had a mild problem with another form of bulimia – shopping bulimia. It seemed like I was always splurging on stuff, then trying to return it. In fact, it had recently caused a huge row that involved most of my family. Helen had been lamenting on how hard it was to live on what she got paid as a make-up artist, and she suddenly rounded on me and accused, ‘You’re good with money.’ This happened a lot; they referred to me as clean-living and sporty – even though I hadn’t played any sport since living in Chicago – and painted a picture of me that was years, probably decades, out of date. My parents were wholly in approval of this sepia-tinted version of me, but my younger sisters – affectionately, mind – treated me as a figure of fun. Most of the time I humoured them, but that particular day I suddenly baulked at being – albeit affectionately – depicted as life-crushingly dull.
‘In what way am I good with money?’
‘Not living beyond your means. Thinking carefully before you buy stuff, that sort of thing,’ Helen said, scathingly. ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be, hahaha.’
‘I’m not good with money,’ I said sharply.
‘You are!’ they chorused – my parents with admiration, Helen without.
‘She’s not,’ Garv said.
‘Thank you,’ I turned briefly to him.
‘You are so! I bet you’ve a huge stash of used fivers in a biscuit tin under your bed.’
‘She wouldn’t keep it in a biscuit tin,’ Dad defended me against Helen. ‘You don’t get any interest in biscuit tins. She has her savings in a high-interest account.’
‘What savings? I don’t have any savings!’
‘Don’t you?’ Mum sounded confused. Upset even. ‘Didn’t you?’ used to have a post-office book? Didn’t you pay in 50p a week?’
‘Yes, when I was nine’
‘But you’ve a pension fund?’ Dad asked anxiously.
‘That’s different, that’s not savings and you don’t get it till you’re sixty. And I’m always buying things I don’t need.’
‘Then you bring them back.’
‘But they don’t always give refunds. Sometimes they only give credit notes, so that’s the same as spending money.’ My voice was rising. ‘And sometimes they go out of date before I use them.’
‘No!’ Mum was appalled.
‘Well, I bet you pay your credit card off in full every month,’ Helen persisted.
‘I DON’T pay my credit card off in full every month.’ They were all slightly open-mouthed at my unexpected fury. ‘Only SOME MONTHS!’
‘Oh, rock’n’roll.’
I knew it was a little strange to be having this argument. I knew people argued about money – but usually they were being accused of spending too much and insisting that they didn’t, not the other way round. So overwrought was I that eventually Mum made Helen apologize. Then she murmured to me, ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of, earning good money and putting some by.’
It was at that point that Garv made me leave, raging that they’d upset me so. (You know the way Garv sees the good in most people? Well, he suspends such altruism around most of my family.)
On the drive home, I said anxiously, ‘I know everything is relative and I know I’m not in their league, but I am neurotic, aren’t I?’
‘You are, of course,’ he said stoutly. ‘Don’t mind them!’
However, I’m not dwelling on my family in this manner to provide background colour, there’s actually a reason for it: it’s because I’m about to resume living with them. I could have moved in with Donna, except she’d recently managed to get on-again-off-again-I’ll-just-get-my-head-out-of-my-arse-if-you’ll-give-me-a-second Robbie to live with her, so I wasn’t sure she’d welcome the presence of a third party. Or I could have asked Sinead, except Dave had kicked her out and she was currently even more homeless than me. And I could have tried my best friend Emily, who has plenty of room. The only problem is that she lives in Los Angeles. Not exactly handy.
So, cap in hand, I’ve to return to the bosom of my family. First, though, I have to tell them, and I’m dreading it.
Perhaps it’s never easy to disappoint your mum and dad, but in my case it feels extra difficult. I’m the one who married her first boyfriend, and they’ve been so heartbreakingly proud of me and of the ticks beside almost every item on the checklist: the marriage, the house, the car, the job, the pension plan, the robust mental health.
‘You’ve never given us a moment’s worry,’ they’ve often said. ‘The only one who hasn’t.’ Then would follow a baleful look at whichever of my sisters was giving them grief at the time. Now, after successfully avoiding them all those years, it was my turn for the baleful looks.
I paused at the front door before letting myself in. Just taking a moment. Filled with a fierce need to run away, leave the country, avoid facing my atrocious failure. Then, with a sigh, I shoved my key in the lock. I couldn’t run away – I’m responsible and conscientious. In a family where several black sheep are jockeying for position, being the sole white sheep isn’t much fun.
There was a racket coming from the television room and it sounded like all those currently domiciled in the house –Mum, Dad, Helen and Anna – were actually present. Helen, at twenty-five, still lived at home because of her on-off relationship with gainful employment – she’s had many career changes. Two or three years were spent wasting time at university, and after a spell of unemployment she’d tried to be an air hostess, but couldn’t manage to be pleasant enough. (‘Stop ringing that fucking call-bell, I heard you the first time,’ was, I believe, the sentence that ended her high-flying career.) More unemployment followed, then she did an expensive course as a make-up artist. She’d hoped to work in theatre and film, but instead ended up doing wedding after wedding after wedding – mostly the daughters of my parents’ friends. But Mum’s efforts to drum up work for Helen weren’t appreciated and, in high dudgeon, Mum told me that Helen had sworn that if she ever had to make up another six-year-old flower-girl she’d gouge her eyes out with her taupe eyeliner. (It wasn’t clear whether she was talking about her own eyes or the flower-girl’s.)
Helen’s problem is that she’s burdened with high intelligence coupled with an unfeasibly short attention span, and she has yet to find her true calling.
Unlike Anna, who has yet to find any calling, true or otherwise. She’s resisted any encouragement to embark on a career path and has eked out a living waitressing, bartending and reading tarot cards. Never for any sustained period, mind; her CV is probably as long as War and Peace. Until she and her ex-boyfriend, Shane, split up they’d lived a hand-to-mouth, free-spirited existence. They were the type who’d pop out for ten minutes to buy a KitKat and the next time you’d hear from them they’d be in Istanbul, working in a tannery. Their motto was ‘God will
provide,’ and even if God wouldn’t, the dole did. I’d envied them their devil-may-care existence. Actually, that’s a complete lie. I’d have hated it – the insecurity, never knowing if you could eat, buy exfoliator, that sort of thing.
The thing about Anna is that she can be acutely, almost shockingly perceptive, but she’s not great on practical things. Like remembering to get dressed before leaving the house. There was a time when we felt her sweet, absent nature was down to her fondness for recreational drugs, but she knocked that on the head about four years ago, around the same time that Rachel did. And although she’s possibly a little more lucid than she used to be, I couldn’t say for sure.
She’d moved back in with my parents a few months before, when she’d broken up with Shane – though she hadn’t been given the same sort of grief as I expected to get. One, because she hadn’t been married and two, because they seemed to expect her to be unreliable.
Cautiously, I opened the lounge door. They were clustered on the couch watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and pouring scorn on the candidates.
‘Any thick knows the answer to that,’ Helen threw at the screen.
‘What is it, then?’ Anna asked.
‘I don’t know. But I don’t HAVE to know. I’m not about to lose ninety-three thousand pounds. Oh, go on then, phone your friend, for all the good it’ll do, if he’s as thick as you –’
Why did they all have to be in? Why couldn’t it just have been, say, Anna? I could have told her, then slunk off to bed like a coward, leaving her to break the news to everyone else.
Then Mum spotted me at the door.
‘Margaret!’ she exclaimed. For years I’ve been telling her that my name is Maggie, but she’s in denial. ‘Come in. Sit down. Have a Cornetto.’ She elbowed Dad. ‘Get her a Cornetto.’
