Improper Order

by Sullivan, Deirdre; Slattery, Fidelma;

  ‘I am not going to lose you, Primrose,’ he declared dramatically, and gave me a withering look when I pointed out that since we were both in the kitchen, even should he lose me I would probably be incredibly easy to find.

  ‘Start at the larder, because that’s where the biscuits are kept,’ I offered helpfully.

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ he growled. ‘Stop distracting me from your problems.’

  I think I am going to be sent back to counselling. Which kind of sucks because I was pretty happy being normal and well-adjusted, apart from the odd bump. Fintan is a very silly man who is playing fast and loose with his money.

  Things got a bit yelly after that, especially when I told him that I couldn’t go for a one-on-one session this weekend because I was going LARPing with Joel.

  He was all, ‘No you’re not!’ and then, ‘What’s LARPing when it’s at home?’ Then when I explained he decided he needed to move the appointment up anyway because, ‘This is worse than I thought’

  That may have been a joke — he tried to make conversation about swords over dinner, which he actually cooked. I was having none of it, though. I am not talking to him. He is a large-nosed meddler who is always trying to control me. I will not be controlled. I am a wildflower, for goodness’ sake. None can prune me! Nor should they.

  He can go hang. That is a Grandma Lily saying, passed along through Ciara. Also ‘There is more than one way to skin a cat.’

  Welcome to the family, Hedda! Every day a new adventure. God. If I were Hedda, I’d want to stay the hell away from the both of us as well.

  I wonder does Dad meddle in her life? Also, who she will side with in the inevitable rows she will soon become a party to? I hope me, out of a sort of feminist solidarity. But I can’t be sure because she does like Dad as well, even if he is a creep who has considered trying to get her pregnant without her knowledge. He is the one who needs therapy, not me. All I do is get oddly clumsy and sometimes cry myself to sleep out of a sensible and rational despair because Mum isn’t around any more.

  And also sometimes because everyone hates me and no one understands me and I feel fat and my favourite pair of shoes are scuffed in a way that means I can’t really get away with wearing them any more.

  Mum would understand all these woes. Dad doesn’t. I mean, if I get him on his own he’ll listen and make clucking noises that are supposed to convey understanding, like some sort of badly assembled robot that has no idea what human beings are actually like. But even when Mum didn’t understand, she spent more time trying to than Dad does, asking the right questions and rubbing the back of my head as if I were a soft little she-rat who needed a calming massage at the end of a long day.

  Isn’t it weird that when I rub Roderick it comforts both of us? You’d think one of us would get more out of it than the other, but no. Look at him now, his little face all burrowed in the crook of my elbow, snuggling furiously as if his life depended on it. And who knows? Maybe it does a bit.

  I once read about an experiment this guy did on little baby monkeys, where he gave them a soft cuddly mum and a wire mother who had sharp edges. The wire mother had the food, but the little baby monkeys starved themselves rather than sacrifice their snuggles.

  I’m off again. Weep, weep, weep. It’s just …their little faces all wizened and brave-looking, like little brown-eyed hairy grannies. Roderick would have found a way to steal the food from the wire mother, I reckon. And then he and the cuddly mother would have broken out of that hellhole, never to be heard from again. Rats are highly intelligent creatures. Intelligent, acrobatic and whiskery. Fine qualities all.

  But weirdly, I’m really looking forward to LARPing now. There’s something about parental disapproval that makes things more exciting.

  Maybe I should get Ciara to ask Grandma Lily for advice about the whole Dad-getting-all-up-in-my-face thing. Only without mentioning his cutting theory because that is exactly the kind of thing that Ciara would overreact about, and I don’t need any more drama. At all. Ever. Unless it is boy drama, in which case, bring it on, world.

  CUT

  Grandma Lily had a stroke last night. Ciara wasn’t at school today. It’s kind of scary and horrible, even though she’s old and everyone was kind of expecting her to die.

  I hate sick people, dying people, reminding me how mortal we all are. I know it’s not their fault. Another thing I hate is funerals. It seems so forced, like we all have to be sad at this one place for this period of time and then we get over ourselves and get back to living.

  Grief — real grief — doesn’t work like that. It can’t -it won’t — be fettered. I hate funerals. Everyone wearing black and being sorry. No one is really sorry, though. No one wishes it had happened to them instead of you.

  She isn’t even dead yet, Grandma Lily, but Joel was acting as if it was only a matter of time, because his uncle Thomas had a stroke and died soon after and he was a lot younger and stronger than Lily. I kind of snapped at him about it because he was acting like it was no big deal, even though he’s met Lily and everything. He was way more interested in what we were going to wear to go LARPing and what the story was with my dad and Hedda.

  Joel is fascinated by the fact that my dad has a love life. It is probably because his parents have always been together his whole life. He kind of sees girlfriends/ boyfriends as things that teenagers are supposed to have but old people aren’t really. Also, he’s very into relationship problems because they make him feel better about not having a boyfriend.

  I am too. I mean, I’d be quite entertained if Syzmon and Ciara were to have some sort of dramatic bust-up involving cheating and a dashing new exchange student from Nordic climes (secret sexy Viking!). It would give me an opportunity to say things that people say in movies and magazine articles, like ‘The heart wants what it wants’ and ‘He’s not worth it; you’re way better off without him. I can’t believe he stole the chalices from your local monastery and burned it to the ground.’

  But when it’s your parents, it’s kind of different. Not necessarily with Mum, although sometimes I could get a bit cringey when she wanted to do boyfriend talk — not so much when I was at the embarrassing ‘boys are disgusting, except for Joel and sometimes even including Joel’ stage, but when I got to the even more embarrassing ‘boys are disgusting except for sometimes when I inexplicably get the urge to smell their hair’ stage. I’m still stuck on that, actually, but with a definite view to graduating to kissing and/or fondling sometime soon.

  is a FILTHY word, actually. If you break it up it sounds OK — something you might do to someone that you are fond of. But if I ever turned to Felix with a gleam in my eye and said, ‘Felix, baby (I call him baby because this daydream takes place in a dive bar somewhere in America), I want to you,’ he would probably block me on Facebook and then move house.

  Joel thinks Fintan is mad to want to have another baby with Hedda.

  ‘The only reason people have children is so they can boast about them to other people and eventually be taken care of when they get disgustingly old and need to wear adult nappies with names that try to sound dignified like “Absorbtimate”. If I had a line of them, I’d call them “Old Soaks” and make them in 1940s floral patterns.’

  ‘Ew. Anyway, that is not the only reason people have kids, Joel.’

  ‘It totally is. And you’re clever and will probably be nice to him when he’s old so you can inherit all his money.’

  ‘I’d be nice to him anyway. Probably. So, if that’s all kids are for, what’s the point of Marcus?’

  ‘I am the heir and Marcus is the spare, in case I go off and live in Panama or somewhere.’

  ‘Hmmm. Maybe another baby wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Also it would distract the two of them a lot and I could get up to mischief. I don’t get up to half enough mischief.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  It is sadly true; I don’t get up to half enough mischief. Considering how much Fintan gives out to me, you’
d swear I was a bratty teenage drunkard and not an embarassingly sensible girl of the nerdly persuasion.

  I don’t want Lily to die. She’s fun and Ciara loves her and she drinks gin of a Wednesday afternoon and giggles like a little bird when she is amused. Also, she does not wear Old Soaks, so she always smells nice. Kind of flowery.

  I don’t want Ciara to stop talking like a little old lady and knowing how to play gin rummy and bridge.

  When Fintan is old and I do have to take care of him, I wonder will I resent it? Because I have things to do as well. Ciara’s mum kind of resents having Lily in the house even though Lily is very careful not to tell her how to run her home because that would lead to friction. Lily is very big on a lack of friction, on keeping things running smoothly, powered by rosaries and flower-arranging classes at the community centre and daily doses of car-avoiding gin. I wonder what effect the stroke will have on the little life she has built here? Ciara says it is too soon to tell what will happen, but she might have to learn how to talk again or walk again or how to brush her teeth and write.

  JAPANESE LOVE MOTEL: A motel in Japan where you can rent rooms by the hour for the purposes of doing it. I read about them online and they sounded like something Karen would be into. For clone-sex and plotting my downfall.

  I can’t imagine having to re-learn how to write. It took so bloody long the first time. Especially joined-up writing, which is the work of the Devil and so is probably somehow Karen’s fault. Karen wasn’t in today because she was meeting Satan in a Japanese love motel for illicit fire-sex.

  The most disturbing thing about it is that she and Satan are THE SAME PERSON, so it was basically clone-sex, which is the worst kind of incest. Must remember to tell Joel about clone-sex. He will be thoroughly disgusted.

  PARTNER: What grown-ups call their boyfriends or girlfriends. Like ‘I live with my partner’ or ‘My Partner and I enjoy couples bowling and laughing at our own jokes’. (I enjoy laughing at my own jokes too, but only when they are funny. And I’m not, like, proud of it or anything.)

  Hedda is Dad’s partner and he is hers, even though I hardly ever see her any more. When they first got together, I used to see her about once a week. Since Dad proposed, it is kind of like she is avoiding me. Although I think she is also avoiding Dad so I’m not taking it personally. Well, I am a bit, I suppose. But if I had a problem that necessitated a grown-up woman it’d be Sorrel or Méadhbh or Mary or Anne I would ring before I’d even think of bothering Hedda. She is partners with my dad but she is not my step-mother figure at all.

  If I am ever someone’s partner, I will call them partner all the time like a sexily drawling cowboy. ‘Partner,’ I will say, ‘can you pick up a pint of milk on the way home?’ Picking up a pint of milk on the way home is a very partner thing to do. When teenagers are in a couple they hold hands, laugh at each other’s jokes and enjoy varying levels of sexytime. But when you’re an adult it’s all ‘pick up a pint of milk’. If I had a boyfriend, I would not care about milk or lack of milk unless I needed it to quench my thirst after some energetic hug-and-kissing sessions. I’m not super gone on milk anyway. I hardly ever drink it on its own, only in hot drinks or on cereal.

  TEN LESSONS I HAVE LEARNED FROM MY FATHER ABOUT HOW TO BE A GOOD PARTNER

  DON’T ASK HEDDA TO MARRY YOU.

  Well, not that I was planning to. But what I took from the whole proposal thing is not to ask someone to take a big relationship step unless you’re pretty sure they’ll say yes. Things like marriage should be mutual decisions, as opposed to needy attempts to sweep the less interested, more desirable party off his or her feet. Like, I would never ask a boy I was kissing if he wanted to be my boyfriend. I would just wait for things to move that way and hope he’d refer to me as his girlfriend at some stage.

  Not that it’s the boy’s job to do all of the running. If I were a boy, or a girl who liked girls, I think I would still be the same. The person who is not me should make more of an effort because then they will be slightly unsure of me and thus fancy me more with each passing day.

  DON’T MAKE YOUR GIRLFRIENDS RUN ERRANDS FOR YOU AS THOUGH THEY WERE SOME SORT OF PERSONAL ASSISTANT WITH KISSING DUTIES.

  Dad was a divil for doing this, getting Anna or Cynthia or whoever he was seeing at the time to pick up dry-cleaning, change sheets, wash up and pick me up from after-school activities whenever Mum couldn’t do it.

  Fair play to him for being such a hot commodity that otherwise sensible women are only too happy to be treated like slaves by him. People don’t take advantage of people they properly care about. If you’re taking advantage of the person you are going out with, you probably don’t properly care about them and should break up with them before you accrue a lot of really bad karma and need to get Sorrel to cleanse your chakras, lest the person you eventually really love begin to take advantage of you.

  Dad would never let Sorrel at his chakras but sometimes I think he should. I have no idea what chakras are but I think it is to do with bad energy and good energy. Making Cynthia file his tax returns created a LOT of bad energy because it was a mean thing to do. And eventually, if you do a lot of mean things, you become a mean person. And nobody wants to spend huge amounts of time hugging and kissing a mean person.

  IF YOU TAKE SOMEONE FOR GRANTED AND BREAK UP WITH THEM BY EMAIL, DO NOT EXPECT TO REMAIN ON GOOD TERMS WITH THEM.

  Dad seems genuinely perplexed when women he has been an ass to are irate and bitter about it post-break-up. He says things like, ‘She didn’t mind about that at the time.’

  Only she did. She just didn’t say anything because she didn’t want you to break up with her in a terse cliché of an email.

  IF YOU LIKE SOMEONE ENOUGH YOU WON’T ‘NEED SPACE’.

  IF SOMEONE PREPERS THE IDEA OF BEING WITH SPACE TO BEING WITH YOU, YOU SHOULD BREAK UP WITH THEM PROMPTLY.

  Space is not all that great. Unless you are an astronaut, and even then I imagine there are boring bits once you get used to looking out the window and being amongst the stars.

  I don’t think there are any Irish astronauts. Maybe I could be the first. Space suits look really comfy, like big mobile sleeping cocoons. If I were an astronaut, I would probably spend most of my time sleeping.

  IF SOMEONE IS WORKING LATE, DO NOT STORM INTO THEIR OFFICE ACCUSING THEM OF APPAIRS.

  This has happened to my father twice. I know, because I was hanging out with Sheila (my dad’s secretary) when Cynthia stormed in, ready for a big confrontation. Sheila told me it was not the first time. Dad’s girlfriends often suspect Fintan of cheating on them with Sheila, but that could never happen because she is thirteen years older than him and way out of his league.

  IF SOMEONE WORKS LATE ALL THE TIME, MAYBE THEY ARE WORKING LATE BECAUSE THEY DO NOT WANT TO SPEND TIME WITH YOU, AND MOST OF THEIR OVERTIME IS SPENT DRAFTING BREAK-UP EMAILS THAT USE PHRASES LIKE ‘IT’S BEEN FUN’ AND ‘I CAN’T GIVE YOU WHAT YOU NEED.’

  (Dad sometimes forgets to sign out of his email account.)

  DON’T FORGET TO SIGN OUT OF YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT IF YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE.

  I don’t think Dad has ever been caught out over this in a relationship. But it is a lesson I learned from him that would stand to me if I were ever to conduct a torrid Internet affair, possibly with a sexy knight I had met online one day when my sexy Viking was off pillaging.

  DO NOT SCHEME TO HAVE SOMEONE’S BABIES AS A LAST-DITCH ATTEMPT TO KEEP THEM.

  This rarely works, although in the event of it failing you do get a baby, so it’s not all bad. Unless you hate babies. In which case, you messed up.

  DO NOT PRESSURE SOMEONE TO DO THINGS THEY ARE NOT READY FOR.

  Dad is pressuring Hedda to commit. I suppose the comparable scenario would be if I pressured Felix to make sweet love to me right here, right now. I’m not ready for sweet love, though, and I have no idea if he is.

  But, like, if I was and he wasn’t, then pressuring him would be a really bad idea. Dad is in the process of learning th
is the hard way, but he is also teaching me a valuable lesson about how not to suck at being in a relationship. Thanks, Fintan!

  TEN LESSONS I HAVE LEARNED FROM MY MOTHER ABOUT HOW TO BE A GIRLFRIEND

  Mum was not as grown-up as Dad evidently is. She understood the creepy cowboy/businessperson connotations of the word partner. Actually, Dad would probably only LOVE to be a cowboy/businessperson. He’s already half of one.

  DON’T GET PREGNANT AT NINETEEN.

  I know that if Mum had followed this advice, her life would have been very different and my life wouldn’t have been, full stop. But maybe if she hadn’t let my dad knock her up when she was still in college she would still be alive today. I hope I do not get pregnant while I am still a teenager. Twenty-five is the youngest I want to have a baby at. The absolute youngest. Although I would like to have done the deed well before I am twenty-five, because I intend to have a slew of lovers so I can shock people when I am old by being full of mad and filthy anecdotes about what I got up to back in the day.

  I will get a sign made saying, ‘Will reminisce for gin’ and sit in the old folks’ home crocheting doilies. (One of my many lovers will run a sort of crafting commune and that is where I will be taught to crochet by a naked Slovakian playwright named Fatwa.) I will also be editing my memoirs so that the boring bits are few and the exciting bits are many. Perhaps my grandchildren will visit me and I will pass on sage advice. ‘Don’t get pregnant at nineteen like your great-grandmother did,’ I will croak wisely. And they will nod and be a little bit afraid of me and hope to God I don’t start in again on the story about how I learned to crochet.