by Marian Keyes
I was inundated with questions.
‘What’s the world like out there?’ Stalin wanted to know.
‘Is Richard Nixon still president?’ Chris asked.
‘Richard Nixon is president?’ Mike demanded. ‘That young whippersnapper? When I arrived here he was still only a senator.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Chaquie’s face was scrunched up in disgust. ‘That Nixon chap is long gone. It’s years since he was…’
She paused. Barry the child was semaphoring her.
‘It’s a joke,’ he said. ‘You know, a joke? Ha. Ha. Look it up in the dictionary, you dozy wagon.’
‘Oh,’ said Chaquie, dazedly. ‘Nixon. What am I thinking of? But with Dermot coming this afternoon I’m not really myself…’
To everyone’s alarm she looked as if she was going to cry.
‘Relax the head, missus,’ said Barry, hastily moving away. ‘You’re not really a dozy wagon.’
The room held its collective breath for a few tense moments until Chaquie’s face brightened.
As soon as we had the all-clear I regaled everyone with great tales of being under the knife.
‘Root canals?’ I scoffed. ‘No bother.’
‘But didn’t it HURT?’ Don wanted to know.
‘Nothing to it,’ I boasted, electing to draw a veil over the scenario of me crying tears of agony while in the chair.
‘And weren’t you ascared?’ John Joe asked.
‘I couldn’t afford to be scared,’ I said primly. ‘It had to be done and that was that.’
Which was almost true, I realized in surprise.
‘How much did it cost?’ Eddie asked the question that mattered most to him.
‘God, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Not very much, I’m sure.’
Eddie laughed darkly. ‘What shower did you come down in? You must have been born yesterday. Those dentists and doctors won’t even give you the time of day without charging through the nose for it.’
‘Eddie,’ I decided to take a risk, ‘do you know something? You’re a bit neurotic about money.’
40
And so to group.
Down the hall we charged, Eddie shouting after me ‘Just because I know the value of money…!’
Dermot and his wig were already there. Now that I knew he had one, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was so obvious. And big enough to deserve a chair of its own.
Dermot had dressed up in honour of being Chaquie’s ISO. He wore a double-breasted suit that tried and failed to bring his enormous stomach to heel. From the side, he looked like a big letter ‘D’.
Chaquie was perfumed and immaculately made-up, even more than usual.
I was curious and sceptical about what Dermot would have to say for himself. I believed Chaquie when she said that all she drank was a Bacardi and coke now and then with the girls. Chaquie was not Neil, and I was sure she hadn’t deliberately misled me about the extent of her alcohol problem the way he had.
In fact, I suspected that Chaquie, irritating and all as she was with her in-your-face right-wing views, had led a fairly blameless life.
I was surprised to find my attitude had changed since I’d first met Chaquie. I now had a strange grudging fondness for her.
Josephine arrived and we all straightened up and calmed down.
She thanked Dermot for coming and said ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell us a bit about Chaquie’s drinking.’
Idly, I stuck my tongue into my tooth. I couldn’t stop doing that. I was extremely proud of myself and my root canal.
‘She was always fond of drink,’ Dermot said, having none of Emer’s reticence.
Chaquie looked dismayed.
‘She was always giving me guff about having to have whiskey for a cold or port and brandy for an upset stomach or…’
‘Can I help it if I’m often not well?’ Chaquie interrupted, her accent posher than ever.
Josephine glared and Chaquie subsided.
‘As I said,’ Dermot sighed, ‘she was always fond of it, but she hid how bad things were until she’d got the ring on her finger. And then she started making a show of me.’
Chaquie exclaimed. Josephine silenced her with a frown.
‘What kind of show?’
‘I work very hard,’ Dermot said. ‘Very hard. I’m a self-made man and I built the business up from nothing…’
‘And you did that all by yourself, did you?’ Chaquie interrupted, her voice unexpectedly shrill. ‘Well, you couldn’t have done it without me. It was my idea, getting the upright sunbeds.’
‘It was not!’ Dermot said irritably. ‘I read about them in a catalogue long before you ever saw them in that place in London.’
‘You didn’t! That’s a pure lie. You didn’t even know how they worked.’
‘I’m telling you,’ Dermot emphasized each word with a chop of his midgety hand, ‘I read about them.’
‘Perhaps we could come back to this,’ Josephine murmured. ‘We’re here to talk about Chaquie’s drink problem.’
‘We could be here all week in that case,’ Dermot said with a bitter snort.
‘Fair enough. Please carry on,’ Josephine invited. He needed no second bidding.
‘I didn’t know how bad it was for a long time because she was drinking on the sly,’ he said. ‘Hiding bottles and saying she had a migraine when she was really going to bed with a bottle of drink.’
Chaquie’s face was bright red.
‘And feeding me a pack of lies. I found about twenty empty bottles of Bacardi at the end of the garden and she said she knew nothing about it and blamed it on some lads from the corporation estate.
‘And we had the bank manager and his wife over for dinner one night. I was trying to get a loan off him to extend the premises and Chaquie starts singing, “Happy birthday, Mr President, coocoocachoo,” like she’s Marilyn Monroe, wiggling her backside and giving him a faceful of cleavage…’
I flicked a glance at Chaquie. Her face was a picture of horror. I felt a shameful mixture of pity and glee.
‘… she’d been drinking all afternoon. But when I asked her about it, she lied and said she was stone-cold sober. When a child could have seen she was drunk. Then she went out to the kitchen to serve the smoked salmon roulade and never came back. We waited for hours, and I was highly embarrassed and trying to keep the conversation going with Mr O’Higgins. And when I went looking for her, where did I find her, only in bed, out cold…’
‘I wasn’t well,’ Chaquie mumbled.
‘Needless to say,’ Dermot said with satisfaction, ‘I didn’t get the loan. After that her drinking got worse so that she was langers every night of the week and most of the days too. I couldn’t depend on her for anything.’
‘You’ll never let me forget that business with the loan, will you?’ Chaquie exclaimed. ‘And it had nothing to do with me not being well. It was because the figures didn’t add up and I told you that before you ever went to O’Higgins with your stupid proposals.’
Dermot ignored her.
‘And all the time I was building up the business,’ he continued. ‘Working night and day to have the premier beauty salon [pronounced ‘premeer beauty salong’] in South County Dublin.’
‘I worked night and day too,’ Chaquie exclaimed. ‘And I was the brains behind most of the ideas. I thought up the idea of the special offers.’
‘You did in your…!’ Dermot paused. ‘You did not.
‘We do special offers, d’you see.’ He looked at Misty and me as he said this. ‘A whole day’s pampering, the works. An aromatherapy session, a mud-wrap, a go in the sauna, a pedicure or manicure, and a complementary danish pastry, all for fifty quid. A saving of fifteen pounds if you have the manicure or eighteen if you opt for the pedicure.’
Josephine opened her mouth, but she was too late.
‘We also cater for male clients [pronounced ‘clee-yongs’].’ Dermot was off with more of his salesman’s patter. ‘We’ve found that the Irish
man is far more discerning about his appearance and, while in the past a man might be considered a nancy-boy if he took care of his skin, nowadays it’s the done thing, really. I myself…’ he placed a tiny, pudgy hand on a broken-veined cheek ‘… use skin-care products and feel the better for it.’
Clarence, Mike, Vincent and Neil stared at Dermot stonily. John Joe, however, looked interested.
‘Dermot,’ Josephine said sharply, ‘we’re here to discuss Chaquie’s drinking.’
‘He’s always at that,’ Chaquie interrupted, looking at Dermot with hatred. ‘It’s so embarrassing. Once, at Mass, when he was offering the woman next to him the sign of peace, he looked at her nails and said she’d benefit from a manicure. In the Lord’s house! Did you ever?’
‘I’ve a living to make,’ Dermot said hotly. ‘If we were relying on you, we’d have gone bust a long time ago.’
‘Why is that?’ Josephine asked, guiding the conversation back to Chaquie’s failings.
‘I had to stop her working in the salong because she was jarred on the job and upsetting the clee-yongs. And getting things arseways and booking people in for sunbeds straight after leg waxes and everyone knows you can’t do that and that you’re running the risk of being sued and once you get a bad name, sure you’re sunk…’
‘Is that true?’ Josephine interrupted. ‘Were you drunk at work, Chaquie?’
‘Indeed, I wasn’t.’ She folded her arms and pushed her face onto her neck, which gave her a double-chinned look of sanctimonious outrage.
‘Ask any of the girls who work there,’ Dermot interrupted passionately.
‘Ask any of the girls who work there,’ Chaquie mimicked nastily. ‘Or one girl in particular, isn’t that right?’
You could feel everyone’s interest expand dramatically.
‘I know exactly what you’re doing, Dermot Hopkins,’ Chaquie went on. ‘Make me out to be an alcoholic, deny that I ever contributed to the business, get your girlfriend in to agree with you and leave me with nothing.’
She turned to the room at large. ‘We weren’t even married for a year before he started having affairs. He hired the girls in the salon not on their abilities but on…’
Dermot was trying to shout her down, but she shouted even louder. ‘… BUT ON THE SIZE OF THEIR CHESTS. And if they wouldn’t sleep with him he sacked them.’
‘You lying bitch.’ Dermot was shouting at the same time as she was.
‘And now he’s decided he’s in love with one of them, a little nineteen-year-old called Sharon with her eye on the main chance.’ Chaquie’s face was flushed and her eyes were glittery with pain and rage. She took another deep breath and shrieked ‘And you needn’t think she’s in love with you, Dermot Hopkins. She’s just looking for a cushy number. She’ll make a bloody eejit of you.’
Chaquie’s accent had changed. The surburban tones had disappeared and a rough Dublin accent had appeared in its place.
‘And what about your carry-on?’ Dermot’s voice was sopranoesque with rage.
‘What carry-on?’ Chaquie screeched back at him.
Josephine was trying to calm things down but she hadn’t a hope.
‘I know about you and the fella that put down the new carpet.’
Things got a bit confused after that because Chaquie leapt up and tried to smack Dermot. But from what we could gather, Dermot was implying that the new carpet wasn’t the only thing that got laid. Chaquie hotly contested his version of events and it was impossible to know who was telling the truth.
In disarray, the session ended.
And the first person to reach Chaquie and put their arms around her and ferry her off for tea was me.
41
Over the next couple of group sessions, in a scenario that I now recognized, Josephine delved into Chaquie’s psyche and pulled all kinds of rabbits out of the hat.
It became clear that Dermot, unpleasant and all as he was, hadn’t been lying.
Josephine pressed Chaquie and pressed her until finally she came clean about how much she drank. When she finally owned up to drinking a bottle of Bacardi a day, Josephine questioned her further until she admitted supplementing the Bacardi with brandy and Valium.
Then Josephine searched for reasons.
She worried away at two things – Chaquie’s obsession with her appearance, and her insistence that she was a good, respectable, upper-middle-class citizen. And, as usual, Josephine’s instincts were spot-on.
It all came out. Chaquie’s dirt-poor origins in an overcrowded corporation flat in a neglected area in Dublin. Her lack of education, the fact that she had cut off all contact with her family because she was afraid they’d show her up in front of her new-found middle-class friends and her terrible fear that she’d have to go back to that background of deprivation. It became clear that she had nothing except Dermot.
She relied on him totally and resented him bitterly for it.
Chaquie admitted that she had never felt at ease with her friends, that she was afraid they’d realize that she was the fraud she felt she was.
I looked at her, at her lovely skin and her golden hair and her perfect nails and was in awe of how successfully she had reinvented herself. I would never have believed there was so much pain and insecurity rampaging about below her sleek, glamorous surface.
Then Josephine questioned her about the carpet-man. And eventually, after a question and answer session that I found excruciatingly painful to listen to, Chaquie admitted that she had indeed christened her new carpet by having sex on it with the carpet-layer.
The details weren’t salacious and fascinating, they were simply sordid. She said she’d only done it because she’d been drunk and desperate for affection.
My heart bled with pity. I expected people my age to behave that way. It seemed far more pathetic and shocking for someone like her, of her age and station, to do it. With passionate force it struck me that I didn’t want to end up like Chaquie.
This could be you, my head said.
How? another part of me asked.
I don’t know, the first voice said in confusion. I just know it could be.
‘I wanted to die with the shame when I sobered up,’ Chaquie choked.
Not content with that, Josephine needled away until Chaquie admitted having lots of anonymous sex with anyone she could get her hands on, particularly tradesmen.
It was astonishing, especially in light of the judgemental, Catholic stance Chaquie had always taken. But then again, I realized, as I began to get the hang of this whole Cloisters thing, maybe it wasn’t astonishing at all. She desperately papered over the cracks of her shame by pretending to be the well-behaved, respectable person she wished she was.
I was staggered by it all.
On Friday evening, I noticed the awful grief that I’d had earlier in the week had lifted. Because it had returned.
‘The tooth didn’t distract you for too long, did it?’ Margot smiled at me as I sat at the dinner table crying buckets.
I should have thrown my plate of bacon and cabbage at her, but I just cried even more.
I wasn’t alone.
Neil was sobbing terribly. That afternoon in group Josephine had finally broken through his denial. Suddenly he saw what everyone else in the whole world could see. That he was an alcoholic who could rival his much-hated father in the atrocity stakes. ‘I hate myself,’ he sobbed into his hands. ‘I hate myself.’
Vincent was also in floods due to the examination of his childhood Josephine had subjected him to in morning group. And Stalin was bawling his eyes out because he’d got a letter from Rita saying that, when he got out of the Cloisters, he wasn’t to come home. She’d applied for a divorce.
The dining-room had so many weeping people in it, it was like a crèche.
‘She’s met someone else,’ Stalin bawled. ‘Someone else to…’
‘To break her ribs,’ Angela interrupted, her tiny, cupid’s bow mouth pursed even smaller in her fat face.
Oh
dear. Angela had been stricken by a dose of NIJ – New Inmate’s Judgementalness. Just wait until she had an Involved Significant Other who would tell her group about how she had broken her mother’s arm with a karate chop to stop her reaching for the last slice of Viennetta, or something like that. Then she wouldn’t be so self-righteouser-than-thou.
I felt sorry for her.
On Friday evening, as usual, the new list of team duties went up on the notice board. The minute Frederick secured it to the cork with a red thumbtack, we all surged at it, desperate to see our fate, as if it was a list of war dead. When I saw that I was on Vincent’s team and, worse again, that that meant breakfasts, I was very, very upset. OK, so I was upset anyway, but now I was really upset. So upset that I didn’t want to shout at anyone, I just wanted to go to bed and not wake up.
Chris approached me with a box of tissues.
‘Tell me things,’ I gave him a watery smile, ‘distract me.’
‘I shouldn’t really,’ he said, ‘you should stay with the pain and…’
I lifted my cup of tea threateningly.
‘Easy.’ He smiled. ‘Only having a laugh. So what’s up?’
‘I’m on Vincent’s team,’ I said, telling him the one tangible piece of misery I knew. ‘And I’m afraid of him, he’s so aggressive.’
‘Is he?’ Chris looked over at Vincent who was still sobbing his eyes out at the far end of the table. ‘He doesn’t look very aggressive to me.’
‘Well he used to be,’ I said doubtfully. ‘The first day I came here…’
‘That was two weeks ago,’ Chris pointed out. ‘A week is a long time in psychotherapy.’
‘Oo-oh,’ I said slowly, ‘you mean you think he’s different now…
‘But he was so threatening,’ I felt I should remind Chris.
‘People change in here,’ he replied equably. ‘That’s what the Cloisters is about.’
That irritated me.
‘Tell me how you ended up in this madhouse.’ I’d always been curious about Chris and his past and wished I was in his group so I’d know more about him. But I’d never before had the courage to ask him something so brazen.
