‘NO.’ I looked away.
‘Then why are you blushing?’
‘I’m not.’
‘You totally are. Blushing is a social cue. I have been trained to notice these things.’
Ella sometimes goes to social-skills classes to learn how to read people. She treats it like a science and could probably be a world-class poker-player if she had any interest in cards at all. Sometimes I wish I could go to social-skills class. It sounds dossier than therapy and if I were more clued in to how to behave around people maybe I could briefly trick Felix into thinking I was cool.
Sorrel picked me up from Ella’s and drove me home. She was ostensibly over to do some ironing (Dad hates ironing), but Dad ended up talking to her for ages as she tended to his house. Dad doesn’t think that cleaning is woman’s work exactly, but he certainly has no trouble employing women to do it for him. Mum was worried, when she was engaged to Dad, about what being a wife would mean. If she would have to change her life to suit Fintan’s. (The answer to this was yes.)
Hedda broke up with Dad because she didn’t want to marry him and he wanted to marry her. This is apparently a reason that grown-ups have for breaking up. Teenagers don’t have to worry about wanting to marry their boy- or girlfriends. Because it is a truth universally acknowledged that teenage weddings are creepy. It WOULD have been creepy if Dad had actually gone through with marrying Mum. He didn’t call off the wedding because of creepiness. But it must have been on his mind.
It wasn’t really on hers. She was more focused on the growing-a-human-being-inside-of-her aspect of the whole affair. And also whether or not he was cheating on her the whole time they were together. Awkward questions tend to make Dad flail around a bit and then buy me things. Unless he’s grumpy, in which case he just snaps at you and turns up the telly.
Dad’s been watching a lot of historical documentaries recently. Maybe because he is old. My father is an old, old dude. An old, old dude who liked young, young women once upon a time. I suppose he still kind of does. It’s just that now they’re young compared to him as opposed to fresh out of secondary school and ripe for corruption and impregnation.
We’ve booked a wedding band! This is really happening! My parents are not necessarily delighted, but their relief has been translated into something approaching delight and that will do for now. I have decided to be excited about this. I need something to be excited about. The baby isn’t cutting it, as yet.
Quote from Peim’s mum’s diary
aroline is stupid. She keeps listening to me. I’m supposed to find this soothing or something, I think. She then usually asks a question with no question mark to it, like, ‘Tell me about school,’ and then just waits and I hate pauses and, I mean, she’s nice even though she’s stupid and I like to please people so I fill the spaces in the air with all these words but they don’t necessarily mean all that much, if you get me. Sometimes I sigh and look at my hands.
I told her about making up with Joel and she didn’t even say how great it was. She smiled at me and nodded her head, like, ‘Tell me more.’ I can’t believe it is properly a job to get all up in people’s business and have them pay you for it. It seems more like a cruel trick. Not that Caroline is cruel. I mean, she does interact with me sometimes and it’s not like I don’t like the sound of my own voice, it’s just in the room alone with her, listening to myself, I sound different. Sort of broken. Sort of off. And that is the last thing that I want to seem to people and normally I don’t think that I do. Seem that way, I mean.
Caroline is dearer than Triona, my old therapist, was. Evidently, Dad decided to bust out the platinum card when it came to me actually self-harming as opposed to just being sad for a very good reason, like when I went to Triona for bereavement counselling. Triona was dreadful. Caroline is miles better than she is. She helps me come up with plans to make things better. Like I keep a ball of string beside my bed now, and when I want to cut I make a cat’s cradle instead and then my hands are too tangled and busy to get up to any devilment. Cat’s cradles are very innocent things. Real childhoody. I miss being a kid. Instead of a ‘young lady’.
Nineteen is way more grown-up-sounding than eighteen. So I’m glad my birthday comes before the baby. Also, a baby is quite a grown-up thing to have. I mean, you can’t have a baby and not be a woman. I wish I were older. I can’t quite get my head around being someone’s wife. Or someone’s mum. Jesus Christ. I am really trying to stop swearing. When the baby comes, he or she will not benefit from a sweary mother. Whoops a daisy. Fairy-cakes. Mother of pearl. These are functional alternatives, I think. I hope. Christ on a bike is Dad’s favourite exclamation. That and Jesus Wept.
Quote from Prim’s mum’s diary
am going to take up crochet. I think. It will be something else to do with my hands when I get fidgety. My cat’s cradle string keeps tangling in a frustrating manner and I think it might be full of germs at this stage. No-one told me how often to change my string of notslicing. And it’s not the kind of question I can ask in therapy without Caroline worrying my mind scabs with her tongue. I don’t need any more scars on my legs or stomach. I only have, like, five, but I don’t need any more. They’re kind of purple. I think that they would have faded better if I wasn’t such a ridiculous scab-picker. I wonder, when I have a proper, sexy-times boyfriend, if he’ll ask me what they are. Will I tell him the truth, remind him what his business is, or lie?
I was mugged by a tiny person. Possibly a vicious child. They had a blade and slashed at me a few times when I wouldn’t give them my phone. It was pretty hardcore.
I fell foul of a particularly savage feral cat. One-eyed Tom was his name and he sliced at me with his magnificent claws one cold November Eve as I was perambulating about the town. I still hear tell of One-eyed Tom sometimes, and bear him no ill-will. Were he a man, I would probably have fallen for him.
I cut myself shaving. My legs and stomach. I had a weirdly hairy stomach a while back but it isn’t hairy any more because I’ve had extensive electrolysis on it. Dad paid for it after I cut myself shaving.
These are stretch marks from the secret baby I had, once upon a time. *stares into distance in a wistful manner* (This one raises more questions than it answers, but I think it might work, because what kind of demented individual would lie about a secret baby? THIS ONE RIGHT HERE, YO. I also need to work on being less enthusiastically shouty, because my future boyfriend might not like the near-constant deafening that is part and parcel of this sexy little package. I also need to become a sexy little package. Maybe I should join a gym.)
Crochet involves hooks and wool and you can make small animals out of the wool by using the hook. This is called amigurumi, and I think I might make an amigurumi life-cycle of Roderick. A kind of IN MEMORIAM-type-dealy. A small rat, like he was when I first got him, then a gawky adolescent rat, then a splendid fellow that I could dress up in top-hats and things and, finally, an aging fogey who weighed almost nothing because his muscles were wasting away.
Isn’t it odd that a marvellous way to remember my rat would be a REALLY creepy way to remember my mum? I look at photographs of her a lot. At different ages. I worry, though, that that could be quite dangerous. That when I’m remembering a thing, there’ll all of a sudden be a photograph super-imposed on her face. I want to remember her in motion. A human, not an image.
I thought about getting Roderick taxidermied way back before he got sick, but Fintan was very against the idea. He hates stuffed animals. He once took me to the natural history museum, and after a while he had to let me wander around alone while he went for a reviving cup of coffee. My father is a very strange man. Who should have been nicer to my back-in-the-day mother. But you can’t change the past. If I could, I’d be a busy girl, always erasing past mistakes. Like Kevin. Who is still with Siobhán.
Ciara says that Leona said that Siobhán said that she is in love with Kevin. Good luck to her. I am not in love with Kevin, but I do feel a certain ownership of him, seeing as
how I had him first and everything. Robb with two bees is not the same as Kevin. Wouldn’t it be weird if Kevin started spelling his name with two vees, just to be cool like an absolute prat? Kevvin, like? I wish he would. And I could be Primm and Joel could be Joell. Joell is a bit too close to the girl’s name Joelle, though. Don’t think he’d be too into that.
I’m not very pro-God at the moment. Seeing as how he saw fit to have Fintan knock me up. We’ll get married in a church, though. Because that’s what’s done. Whoops a mother of pearling daisy.
Quote from Prim’s mum’s diary
obb with two bees wants to go to the cinema with me. I think this might mean that kissing will happen. Cinemas are great places to do first kisses because it’s dark and if the kissing doesn’t work out no-one will see you and there will be a movie to watch and talk about afterwards, while you wait for your lift home. I have never kissed a boy with two bees before. Kevin didn’t even have one bee. Also Robb is objectively pretty hot. He has a mean face, but in a handsome way. His bottom lip is really full, so it looks like he has a permanent case of the sulks. His bottom lip is a big pillowy part of the reason that I want to kiss him even though I don’t fancy him. I don’t think I do want to kiss him, but if he kissed me I would probably do some kissing back. I wonder what that would be like. I’ve only ever kissed Kevin and this random guy called Barry at a party Syzmon had.
Kevin was a better kisser than Barry. Oh, wait! There’s Joel as well, who was probably my worst kiss because it wasn’t expected or consensual. I don’t really count it as my actual first kiss. He was only doing it to prove to this guy Liam that he wasn’t gay or something. It was more of a lip-mash than a kiss. And afterwards, we had this massive bust-up and he told me I kissed ‘like a bullfrog’ and, sometimes, when I kiss a boy I wonder if I am doing anything bullfroggy. I do have quite a wide mouth, like a frog. But I’m not, like, catching flies with my tongue or anything like that. And what did Joel even mean? I mean it’s not like he has any vast experience with frenching bullfrogs.
Isn’t ‘frenching’ a weird term? It comes up in books about old-timey high-school and I’m kind of wondering if I should bring it back, because shifting isn’t the nicest term there is. It kind of sounds like something you’d do to a reluctant cow. I normally say ‘making out’, which is another Americanism, but it covers a multitude and sometimes you do want to make it clear that only kissing was involved in a given situation. Same goes for ‘hooking up’. Because sometimes that means sex, and you could really hurt someone’s feelings by going around the place implying that you had had sex with them when you really hadn’t. Frenching is peculiar said out loud but I think I could get Ciara on board with it. She’s very into old-lady-isms because of Grandma Lily.
I have asked Joel about the bullfrog thing a few times, and he said he was only saying it to hurt me, but the things that are the best at hurting people are the things that are kind of sort of true as well as mean and I worry that it was one of those ones. I don’t want to kiss like a bullfrog. I want to kiss like someone who is good at kissing. And I definitely want to be better at kissing than stupid Karen, who has shifted about fifty boys and that’s before she turned into a lesbian. Maybe she is only a lesbian because she shifted all the boys in Ireland and now there are no boys left and it was either switch to women or emigrate. That was a pretty homophobic comment. I’d never make a comment like that about Joel or even about Duncan, the adult lover of young boys. I’m only a bigot when it comes to Karen and that is because she deserves it. I can’t imagine wanting to kiss her on her stupid evil face and am very nonplussed as to why she gets more action than me when my face is clever and not evil. She is prettier than I am, though. And Good at Make-Up. I would like to be Good at Make-Up. I’d blame it on my mum not being around any more, but she wasn’t too gone on make-up and I doubt she would have schooled me in the womanly art of it to any great degree. I wonder if there are exercises you can do to make yourself a better kisser? If there are, I bet they are pretty embarrassing.
Being pregnant is weird. At what point do you stop being one person and start being two?
Quote from Prim’s mum’s diary
t’s weird, reading my origin story from the source documents. On blue-lined pages. How I came to be, laid out in ballpoint pen and smudges. Some of them were tears. We learned about all the different types of evidence that you need to do historical research in first year and I had to revise it for the exams this summer. It didn’t actually come up or anything, so I suppose I didn’t ACTUALLY have to revise it at all, but I did anyway. I think Mum’s diary is a primary source, because she was there at the time, in the throes of it. But if you were going to write an essay or something about Mum (and why wouldn’t you? – she was amazing) then my diary, if you could get your hands on it, would be a secondary source. Because I only really started keeping it regularly after she died. If you were writing an essay about me, my diary AND Mum’s diary would both be primary sources. But I’m a bit crap, so I think that maybe your essay would have a limited audience.
Dad tried it on with other girls, probably even when he was engaged to her. He wasn’t exactly smitten. Even she knew that and she was smitten with him. A suspicious kind of smitten, where she kind of knew it wouldn’t work out well but hoped it would. I wish it had, while reading it. I wish that she had fallen for a less crap person than my stupid, gormless dad. He basically had no gorm at all when it came to her. He’s not very good at romantic relationships. Maybe I get that from him. Although I could have tons of gorm. Never having had a proper boyfriend, it is hard to gauge how much gorm I do or do not have from a relationshippy point of view.
It must have been hard for Dad to read back over Mum’s diaries. To see it all laid bare in blue and white what a horrid disappointment he had been. If he had given the diaries to me the year that Mum was killed I really think it would have broken me. Because I hated him for ages out of loyalty to Mum and also out of contempt for his parenting ineptitude. And I could muster up some hatred for him even now, only I’d still be stuck with him. My dad is all I have that will not leave me. Unless he dies or something, which could happen because he is an old dude. Fintan is fifty-three years old. Which isn’t, like, super-old. But it is old enough that he has to take those tablets for his cholesterol and things.
The biggest thing my mum’s death taught me is that parents aren’t for ever. Their impact is, but that is not the same. Anyway, it wasn’t fair the way he treated Mum, but how he’s treated me since she died has been kind of nice with intermittent screw-ups. Or not so intermittent. Maybe it is because he has lived on his own for so long with no kids or womenfolk to guide him, but Dad is basically a teenager himself in a lot of ways. Only with wrinkles instead of acne and without even a modicum of cool. I’d like to see him meet somebody nice. Because when I go to college he’ll probably regress to his before-I-lived-with-him levels of crapness. Only problem is, who’d have him? He’s not the nicest boyfriend and is not getting any younger.
He does have LOADS of money, but the kind of lady who would be attracted by that wouldn’t exactly be good to Dad, I reckon. He’d go back to buying ties that cost €250 and denying his farming origins. He never used to see his brother Patsy before I came to live there. Now we see them about twice a year. Which isn’t loads, but it’s definitely better than nothing. I’m always nice to them, because Mum’s family are all dead and I have it at the back of my mind that if anything happened to Dad they’d be stepping up to mind me. I wouldn’t like to have to move to Mayo. Two more years and then I can stop worrying about that, because if Dad died then, I’d be all by myself and have no-one minding me. I don’t feel like I’ll stop needing minding in two years’ time. Maybe I will always need some level of minding.
OK, so there is this thing where the baby lives and it is called the amniotic sac. Which you think is revolting, until you hear tell of the mucous plug that stops the waters breaking and is basically a plug. Made of mucous. The human body is
a mysterious and disgusting thing. Sorrel and me had to put the baby book under the sofa because we were both so creeped out. I don’t know what I’ll be like when I actually have a baby. But on the plus side, when the baby comes I will no longer be filled with amniotic sac and mucous plug. And placenta. Oh God, placenta! A placenta is basically an extra liver you grow around your womb to nourish the baby. Well, not exactly a liver, because then it would be called an extra liver. But big and meaty and able to break down things like a liver. Sorrel says she read about people in America who eat it once it comes out because it is filled with nutrients. We can’t decide if this is more or less gross than the plug made of mucous. Probably more, but there’s something about the word ‘mucous’ that makes it worse. I think when the baby comes, I will probably love it right away because I will no longer be pregnant and full of disgusting miracles. People look at me in the supermarket. At my big fat pregnant belly. I’m really glad of my engagement ring, which I wear whenever I leave the house to stave off eyebrows and moues of disapproval. I have an essay due on different translations of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. I do not have time for this.
Quote from Prim’s mum’s diary
o, loads has happened.
I met Duncan for one thing. And the cinema visit with Robb was interesting. The kind of interesting that warrants three little dots in front of it. An ellipsis-y kind of interesting. But I’m going to start, not at the beginning because that would be predictable, but with what is, arguably, the biggest piece of gossip.
Ciara and Syzmon are no more. SHE BROKE UP WITH HIM. My hand actually had trouble writing that down because it feels so much like a lie. But it is the truth. She rang me, crying. I had never really thought of the dumper being sad when they dumped someone. I wonder if Dad was sad when he dumped Mum. I bet he was, a little. A sadness spiced with selfish. Like: ‘I regret having to do this, but it was the right decision for the both of us,’ or ‘I could have handled that better.’
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