By ten past seven I was nearly ready. I picked up my hairspray to try and do a last-minute hold job on my errant locks. Or at least I thought I picked up my hairspray. What I had, in fact, picked up was my foot reviver spray. I realised this as the waft of mist drifted through the air and settled on my hair. It didn’t make that much difference, I suppose. But it meant that my head now smelled of peppermint and athlete’s foot lotion. I grabbed the correct spray, enveloped myself in a cloud of mist, and dragged my brush through my hair. I hoped that footspray and hairspray weren’t too incompatible. And then I picked up my bag and hurried out of the apartment.
It was twenty-five past seven when I got to the train station which was pretty good going. According to the board, the next train was in twenty minutes. It would be eight o’clock before I got to Blackrock; half an hour was a bit more than fashionably late. I’d been allowing for ten minutes of lateness. I could ring him, though. Everyone in Whizz-Bang had a card with staff mobile numbers on it. This was so that we could get called to some technological disaster day or night.
Does the phrase ‘total nightmare’ mean anything to you? It was a total nightmare when I realised that I’d left the card in my other bag. I was comforting myself with the thought that it didn’t matter, that he might in any event ring me, when I realised that I’d left my phone in my other bag too. The only things in the stupid bag I had with me were my purse (cash only, no credit cards – other bag of course!) and my make-up. (And the footspray. I had to wear high-heeled mules with the lilac dress and they were extremely uncomfortable. But they looked good. The footspray was a last-minute clever thought. Though not as clever as my phone would’ve been.)
Anyway, no more disasters. The train arrived, I got on, there were no weirdos ready to spill Coke or paint or whatever on top of me. The Dart slid into Blackrock at eight on the button. I jumped off the train, landed awkwardly, and fell out of my shoes. The shoe that stayed on the platform was fine. The shoe that fell beneath the train was squashed to a pulp as the train pulled off. I sat on the platform, nursing my ankle that was swelling alarmingly, and started to cry. There was a stupid part of me that thought that people would care about what had happened. And, in fact, a couple of them had stopped when I fell and asked was I all right. I’d said yes, yes, fine, as dismissively as I could because of course I wasn’t all right, I was mortified. They hadn’t realised that my shoe was being pulverised beneath the train. They didn’t know that the only difference between my ankle and a football – well, quite frankly, there wasn’t much of a damn difference. And so they all disappeared out of the station and left me sniffing on the platform as my hair fell in lank foot-reviver tresses around my face.
I couldn’t go to the bar now. I was late and I was a mess and I knew that some people might have been able to joke their way out of it but some people probably didn’t care that I’d had secret fantasies about a date with gorgeous Richard Clavin for absolutely months and that those dreams were now as shattered as my poor squashed shoe. And I couldn’t walk into a trendy bar with my face a mess, my hair still smelling of peppermint and athlete’s foot lotion, wearing one shoe and sporting a swollen ankle. Call me vain, but there you are. It clearly wasn’t Richard Clavin who was the fuckwit in this scenario.
I got to my feet and hopped toward one of the bright-green benches. I didn’t know what to do. The shrill noise from my bag made me jump with fright. It was at that point that I realised that ‘fuckwit’ wasn’t even half appropriate enough a word for me. I did have my phone after all. I’d shoved it into the little side compartment in the bag. But I still didn’t have the card with everyone’s phone number on it. That was in my credit-card folder and I knew that the folder was very definitely in my other bag.
I took out the phone and hit answer.
‘Where are you, Sadie?’ Richard Clavin asked loudly above the beat of a music mix. ‘This bar is crowded and you might be here but I can’t see you anywhere. And if you’re not here then you’re really, really late. And I don’t mind you being late but I do mind if you’ve decided to stand me up.’
I hadn’t managed to get a word in edgeways even if I’d known what word to use.
‘Um, well, actually—’
‘Is there a problem?’
‘Sort of,’ I said.
‘What?’ He wasn’t yelling now and I realised it was because he must have stepped out of the bar.
‘I had a bit of a disaster,’ I told him.
‘What sort of disaster?’
What sort of disaster did I want to confess? That I’d been late and had a cold shower and put cream and then footspray in my hair? That I’d fallen off the train like a gawky teenager and lost my shoe? Or that there had been a crisis at the office and I’d had to stay to sort things out and I was sorry for not having phoned him before now because I’d been so very busy but I’d meant to call him immediately I’d got a moment. Which of those things would make Richard Clavin like me and ask me out again?
‘Just a disaster,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Where are you, Sadie?’ he asked.
‘Look, it doesn’t matter, I can’t see you tonight.’
A train screeched into the station and drowned out my words. I thought about getting on it until I clicked that I hadn’t crossed the platform.
‘Are you on the train?’ demanded Richard.
‘Look, Richard, sorry. I’ll talk to you again.’
I closed my phone and shoved it back into the bag. I wondered would he ring again but he didn’t. I buried my head in my hands. I was a hopeless, useless fool of a woman who wasn’t safe to be let out on her own. And who clearly wasn’t mature enough to go for sophisticated evenings with men like Richard Clavin.
‘Sadie?’
This time I nearly jumped five metres into the air. Only the fact that I couldn’t actually move stopped me. I looked up.
‘What’s the problem?’ Richard Clavin was standing beside me, doubtless intrigued by my mascara-tracked cheeks, my bird’s-nest hair and my single-shoed state.
‘What’s the problem?’ I almost laughed. ‘What’s the problem!?’
‘There is, obviously, a problem,’ he said. ‘Otherwise you’d have left the station and come to the pub.’ He waved at Topsie’s which was only a few yards away and clearly visible through the rails. ‘I heard the train on the phone at the same time as I saw it go by and realised you must be here.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve had a shit day.’
‘I have those all the time.’ He grinned.
‘And I really can’t have dinner with you because I have athlete’s foot in my hair and no shoes.’
He looked at me in puzzlement. ‘Would you like to run that by me again?’
So I explained about working late and the mix up with the sprays and falling off the train, and I could see him trying very hard not to laugh and I wanted to curl up in a ball and die.
‘I guess Dan McCormack wouldn’t be too impressed if I brought a woman with a headful of athlete’s foot into the restaurant,’ he agreed.
‘Anyway, I’m not really your sort of girl,’ I told Richard. ‘This kind of thing happens to me a lot. I’m a walking disaster area. I split up with my last boyfriend because I reversed his car into a bus stop.’
This time he did laugh. It was gorgeous and sexy. Naturally.
‘Besides,’ I told him. ‘Everyone thinks you’re too good-looking to be decent boyfriend material.’
‘That’s a bummer,’ he said. ‘Besides, who said anything about boyfriends?’
I winced. He was a fuckwit. And so was I.
‘Can you walk at all?’ he asked.
‘I can hobble,’ I told him. ‘My ankle is sore. And I only have one shoe.’
He looked at me appraisingly. ‘We can make it as far as the car park,’ he said. ‘Which is where I’m parked. And then I’ll drive you back to my place and I’ll strap up your ankle and we can order a takeaway. If that’s all right?’
G
osh, I thought. How decisive. That’s probably why he was one of the top guys in the company. He didn’t mess about.
‘I don’t sleep with people on the first date,’ I said.
His deep blue eyes opened wider. ‘Neither do I.’
I winced again. I’d wanted to sound as decisive as him but maybe I’d just been a bit silly.
‘Can you hop?’ he asked. ‘Or do you want me to carry you?’
‘I can hop.’ Although the thought of being carried was pretty appealing.
He helped me into the car and then turned to me.
‘I thought you’d stood me up,’ he said.
‘I wouldn’t do that,’ I told him.
‘That’s what I reckoned.’ He smiled at me. ‘That’s why I like you, Sadie. That’s why I asked you out. You seem a really nice person.’
‘A bit of a walking nightmare though,’ I said.
‘Not so much of the walking.’ He laughed as he started the car.
He wasn’t an emotional wreck. He was gorgeous and funny and just plain nice. I wasn’t too emotionally wrecked either. I didn’t sleep with him on the first date. Because there were lots of other dates to follow. I didn’t try as hard for those and I didn’t have any disasters either (well, not major ones – there was the night when I thought we were supposed to be meeting in the Morrison whereas he’d said Morrissey’s but we sorted that out). There were other ups and downs, of course. He wasn’t perfect and neither was I. But we managed to work things out. Which just goes to show that sometimes the really gorgeous blokes are meant for people like me after all. And I mustn’t have been Cleopatra in a previous life. Maybe I was her assistant.
A Peaceful Christmas
The idea of going away for Christmas was enticing, but it was something that Jim and Laura couldn’t really afford. Adding to their debt wasn’t reasonable, Jim told himself as he read the ads on the back page of the newspaper, and he was usually a reasonable man. A few years earlier he wouldn’t even have noticed the cost of a couple of days away, but times were tougher now and nobody was spending money on stuff they couldn’t afford. Least of all people who had bought houses at the top of the market and were now firmly in negative-equity territory. Which was what they were.
Jim and Laura’s commuter town house (the developer’s claim that you could get into the city centre in forty-five minutes was still unrealistic, despite the fact that traffic had lessened during the recession) was worth about half of what they’d paid for it and was a millstone round their necks. They’d hoped to trade up eventually and move closer to the city, but that now seemed highly unlikely. Nobody wanted to buy houses in the commuter belt when there were plenty available nearer to town at knock-down prices. Every so often someone would bring out a report saying that property prices were on the up again, but Laura and Jim had a horrible feeling that they’d rise more in the areas they wanted to buy in rather than where they lived now. They felt stupid and cheated and angry with themselves, and with the bank too. But the way they looked at it, they had to keep going. There was no point in getting depressed.
Their bank manager had actually lost his job a few months previously, although Jim said it was through a redundancy programme and not because he’d lent them far more money than they could easily pay back. They wondered if he was struggling like them, but somehow they doubted it. They were living to the strictest budget they possibly could, in which every cent they spent was accounted for, which was why they should make a decision about spending Christmas with either Angela or Caroline and live with the consequences. The trouble was, thought Jim, that he wasn’t sure that living with the consequences would ever be worth it.
Laura agreed with him. The whole thing about Christmas was totally doing her head in, and it seemed to her as though everything and everyone was getting out of control: her parents, his parents and, most scarily, her relationship with Jim. Neither the stress of how to spend Christmas nor his solution to it was doing them any good at all.
Yet it was all so silly and needless! What was the point in putting pressure on them to spend Christmas in one house or the other when it was just one day in the whole year, and when they visited both sets of parents over the festive season anyway? But this year was different, because it was Kirstie’s first Christmas and both grandmothers seemed to think that it was a badge of honour to have the baby spend it in their house. As if, Laura muttered darkly to Jim, Kirstie would know anything about it. She was only six months old, after all! The problem was that Laura’s mother, Angela, and Jim’s mother, Caroline, had morphed since Kirstie’s birth from two apparently normal women into two of the most competitive grandmothers the world had ever known. The moment Laura had been allowed to have visitors in Holles Street hospital, both of them had turned up brimming with advice on the upbringing of their first grandchild.
‘For heaven’s sake!’ Laura had snapped at her own mother after she’d listened to a litany of do’s and don’ts. ‘It’s not an exam. I’ll learn. You did, didn’t you?’
‘It was different in my day,’ said Angela. ‘We weren’t expected to rush back to work. We had more help, too.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ said Laura, although she wasn’t entirely sure about that. She was feeling a bit sniffly and down but she didn’t want Angela to know. Angela was never down. She’d see it as a sign of weakness and use it as an opportunity to lecture her even more.
Caroline, who came in later, put her arms around her and gave her a massive hug. Caroline had never hugged Laura before, and the experience was unnerving (Laura had always suspected that she was second choice as a daughter-in-law as far as Caroline was concerned; she was sure Jim’s mother would have preferred it if he’d married his previous girlfriend, Samantha, a successful PR executive, instead).
‘I’m so delighted for you!’ cried Caroline. ‘Here. Let me take photographs for my Facebook page.’
Laura didn’t really want pictures of Kirstie on Facebook, or indeed on any of the many other social networking sites that Caroline seemed to use. As far as Laura was concerned, she was the only one who should be putting up pictures of her daughter anywhere. But when she said this to Caroline, her mother-in-law looked mortally offended and said that only her closest friends would be able to see them, and that Kirstie was her grandchild as well as Laura’s daughter . . . It had all got a bit heated, and Laura hadn’t been able to stop herself bursting into floods of tears. When Jim walked into the room and found her blowing her nose, he’d told Caroline to leave, which had left Laura feeling guilty.
‘You’re the most important person in the world to me,’ Jim had assured her when she eventually apologised for upsetting his mother. ‘You and Kirstie. Don’t worry about it.’
But she did worry about it. She worried about Caroline and she worried about Angela and she worried that she was caught between two women who’d lost the plot entirely. She worried that she was losing the plot herself. The grandmothers had taken to calling around to the house at unexpected times during the day to check on Laura and make sure that she was coping, which was driving her crazy. (Both of them felt – though they didn’t say it to each other – that Laura was suffering a bit from the baby blues. Well, Angela called it the blues. Caroline had taken Jim to one side, mentioned post-natal depression and given him a number of websites to check out. Jim told his mother not to be stupid, that Laura was perfectly fine, but he did keep a closer eye on her afterwards, just in case she started exhibiting signs of not loving their wonderful daughter.)
Laura herself knew she wasn’t depressed. She could cope perfectly well until Angela or Caroline arrived on the doorstep dispensing words of advice. Then she would get flustered and anxious and do stupid things; on one occasion she found herself changing Kirstie’s nappy after already having just changed it five minutes earlier. (Caroline had been there at the time, and reported back to Jim that his wife was very frazzled, poor love, and that he should consider sending her for a consultation. Just in case.)
‘I don
’t know what’s got into her,’ Jim told Laura later that evening. ‘You’re grand, aren’t you?’
‘Do you think there’s something wrong with me?’ demanded Laura. ‘D’you think I’m losing my marbles?’
‘Of course not,’ Jim assured her. ‘She’s overreacting, I know she is. And I’m sorry for even listening to her. ’
‘Oh, I don’t blame you,’ Laura said. ‘Both her and my mother are driving me bonkers these days, so I’m not surprised she makes remarks about it. Mum rang three times today because I told her that Kirstie had a bit of a cold. Every time I got the poor child to sleep, the bloody phone went off. I put it on silent eventually and then realised that I’d missed a call from my pal Bernie because of it!’
‘They’ll get things into perspective in a while.’ Jim tried to sound philosophical. ‘And I suppose it’s good to know that they’re both eager to help out.’
‘If only they didn’t give conflicting advice.’ Laura looked hunted. ‘I mentioned to Mum that because of her cold Kirstie was having trouble sleeping, which was why I was freaking out every time she rang up. She recommended vitamin C and taking her to the doctor for paracetamol or its baby equivalent if it didn’t clear up. Then your mother called and said it wasn’t a cold at all and that she was teething. So she had different remedies for that. But in case it was a cold she suggested some homeopathic stuff which in a million years I’m not giving her!’
‘Calm down.’ Jim could hear that Laura was getting agitated. ‘We both know she has a cold and it’s getting better. So you do whatever you think is right for her.’
‘Thank you.’ Laura leaned her head on his shoulder. ‘You’re a pet, really. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
Despite the presence of the grandmothers, Laura was enjoying being a new mum at home with Kirstie. But because of their financial pressures she went back to work as soon as her paid maternity leave was finished. Both Angela and Caroline offered to look after Kirstie while she was out all day, which threw her into another bout of panic. The poor child would be totally confused by their conflicting views on how she should be reared. She’d probably end up with all sorts of issues afterwards and it would be all Laura’s fault. If it had been an option she would have given up work and stayed at home, but that simply wasn’t possible.
From The Heart Page 2
