If This is Paradise, I Want My Money Back

by Claudia Carroll

  Fiona looks at me, puzzled.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ she eventually says. ‘Where the fuck are we, Wisteria Lane? Or make that Hysteria Lane. So, what’s going on, have you brought me here so I can dream about tomorrow night’s episode of Desperate Housewives?’

  ‘Shhhhhh.’

  ‘I mean, I like the TV show all right, but not that much. Couldn’t you have taken me somewhere with a bit more . . . pizazz? Like . . . I dunno . . . the Ivy in London, so we could celeb spot. Or the “reduced to clear” rack at some big discount store in New York, so I could see what I’m missing out on . . . or . . . well, pretty much anywhere except here, really.’

  ‘Be patient, will you?’

  ‘I just want to point out that right now, particularly after the last dream I had about you, I’m almost expecting a baby grand piano to fall down on my head, like in a Laurel and Hardy movie.’

  ‘Fiona, just watch, listen and learn.’

  ‘Good coming from you. When did you ever watch, listen or learn?’

  ‘If you don’t shut up, I’m taking you out of this dream and back to your sofa, and it’ll serve you right for not trusting me. This is for your own good.’

  ‘OK, OK.’

  Just then, a black Range Rover jeep comes gliding smoothly down the road and pulls up right outside the house, only a few feet away from where we’re standing. The door opens and out clamber two gorgeous little girls, very alike, same height, same long, swishy fair hair. It’s like they’ve just come back from the matinee of a panto or something; one is dressed like Belle from Beauty and the Beast and the other one is in a Hermione from Harry Potter rig-out. They’re both wearing tiaras, and are laden down with magic wands, popcorn, bags of chocolate and jellied eels from the sweet factory.

  ‘That pair must be twins,’ says Fiona, absent-mindedly. ‘Aren’t they little cuties? How old would you say they are? Four? Maybe five? I always find it hard to tell, speaking as a non-parent . . .’

  She breaks off, as the penny slowly begins to drop.

  ‘Hang on a second, Charlotte, they’re twin girls of about five . . . and . . . if I’m not very much mistaken, we both know someone who, by an incredible coincidence, also has twin girls of about that same age, which begs the question, why did you bring me here to spy on them . . . ?’

  She’s interrupted by the driver’s door opening, sees exactly who it is that emerges, then immediately ducks behind the tree, grabbing me with her.

  ‘Merciful hour, what exactly are you trying to do to me? For Jaysus’ sake, look! It’s him! Tim Keating!’

  ‘Shh, will you calm down, it’s absolutely OK, he can’t even see us . . .’

  ‘I do not CARE, now get back behind this tree or I’ll chain you to it. Why are you putting me through this, Charlotte? Is it punishment for borrowing your good Karen Millen black dress and getting vomit stains on it? Because I’ll happily buy you another one, I’ll do anything if you’ll just beam us out of here, like . . . NOW.’

  ‘Will you just stop rabbiting on and take a look at what’s happening? Quick, you’re missing the sideshow.’

  Her back is to the tree, and she’s slumped up against it, arms splayed, like an eco-warrior trying to prevent it from being chopped down.

  ‘Don’t suppose there’s a chance I’m free to leave at any time, is there?’ she hisses at me.

  ‘Another two minutes, that’s all I’m asking. For God’s sake, you’ve spent longer on the phone trying to vote on X Factor.’

  ‘Charlotte, PLEEEEEEASE!’

  ‘Why won’t you trust me? Just take a look behind you, one little peek, that’s all I’m asking.’

  ‘When I wake up on my lovely warm sofa, you are veh veh dead. Just so you know.’

  I think nosiness eventually gets the better of her, though, because, a second or two later, she pokes the tip of her nose cautiously around the edge of the tree. And then she sees.

  Sees Tim to be exact. Ex-love of her life. Except she sees him as he is now, slamming the jeep door shut with an expensive clunk, and striding in that lanky, long-legged way he always had towards the front door.

  ‘Sweet Baby Jesus and the orphans,’ says Fi in total shock, unable to take her eyes off him. ‘It’s Peter Pan with a bald patch. Look at him, he’s taken a coup de vieux, as the French say.’

  ‘Sometimes you’re just too schoolteachery for me, hon; a coupe de what?’

  ‘I just mean . . .’ her voice breaks off a bit here, like she’s starting to choke up. ‘He looks so grey. Grey and washed-out and tired. That’s not the Tim I knew. Not by the longest of long shots.’

  It’s a pretty good way of describing him, actually: he does look grey in the face. It’s hard to imagine, but only a few short years ago, Tim was really something to look at, a head-turner, but in a couldn’t-care-less kind of way. There wasn’t an ounce of vanity in him: he only shaved because if he didn’t, he’d end up looking like a caveman, and the only time he ever looked in a mirror was to put in his contacts. Tall and super-skinny with unruly black curls that nearly came to his shoulders, like a seventies footballer. Black eyes that danced at you as he made you nearly pee with laughter at one of his gags, or at some bit of messing and devilment he’d been up to. Back then, he always used to wear these mad T-shirts with slogans on them that said things like, ‘My Mother Is a Travel Agent for Guilt Trips.’ Or ‘At My Age, I’ve Seen It All, Heard It All, Done It All. Just Can’t Remember It All.’ Then there was my personal favourite, and the one he wore to his twenty-first birthday party, ‘I Just Do What the Voices Inside My Head Tell Me to Do’. Once, for Fiona’s birthday, he even bought her one that said, ‘Princess, Sufficient Experience With Princes, Seeks Frog.’ Now a more high-maintenance woman would have told him to shove his T-shirt up his arse and go to the nearest jewellers to buy her a proper, decent, more boyfriendy type of present. But Fiona loved it so much, she even slept in it. Mind you, this is a couple whose song was ‘Pretty Vacant’ by the Sex Pistols. Not the most romantic, but there you go.

  And now . . . now it’s beyond weird to see him be-suited and bespectacled, looking so conservative and so worn-out and so, so old. Like The Picture of Dorian Gray, only in reverse.

  ‘Jesus,’ snaps Fiona, ducking back behind the tree again, ‘he’s rung the front doorbell. Suppose someone answers it and sees us?’

  ‘Just look, will you? It’s important.’

  ‘Why? So I can describe it in court when I’m hauled up for stalking and harassment of an ex-boyfriend?’

  ‘Hauled up by who, exactly, the dream police?’

  ‘I’m too fragile for community service, I wouldn’t last a wet day . . .’

  ‘Watch, will you, you’re missing all the action!’

  This time, our two noses peek out from behind the tree, just in time to see the door opening and . . . drum roll for dramatic effect . . .

  ‘Shite, shite, shite,’ snaps Fiona. ‘It’s her, Ayesha, the wife!’

  ‘Ex-wife, I’ll think you’ll find, love.’

  Fiona looks at me, and for a second, I think she might actually throw up into the rose bush that’s behind us.

  ‘Are you telling me . . .’

  ‘Separated since January. I sounded it all out for you. And there’s more, take a look. See for yourself.’

  Ayesha is standing on the doorstep now, in a Juicy Couture powder-pink tracksuit, still with her permatan, still stick thin, and with flashing nails that are far too long to be natural; no, those babies just have to be acrylic.

  OK, I should bring you up to speed a bit.

  Ever since Ayesha and Tim got married, her career has not exactly been the glittering, stellar success she had told everyone it was going to be. Turns out (I’m quoting Fiona here) that to fulfil her ultimate career goal and be a newsreader on Sky, it’s a prerequisite that you have to actually be able to read, so that was the end of her. Then at around the same time they relocated back to Dublin, she got one of her mates in PR to do a huge, blanket-coverage me
dia splash about how she was the ‘hot’ new thing to arrive in town, and would be taking RTE by storm any time soon.

  ‘Ultimately, I’d like to host my own chat show,’ I remember her announcing in some magazine interview. ‘Everyone in London said I was a natural. I love, love loooooove meeting people, and you know? That TV show Xpose would be so perfect for my talents. I just feel I have so much I want to share with the Irish public. My role models in life are Oprah, Conan O’Brien and of course, Miriam O’Callaghan. For God’s sake, my cat is even called Tubridy.’

  Not long after that, Fiona and I started celebrating every day that she wasn’t on telly. Because if she had ever ended up with her own TV show, I think Fiona would have ended up sitting in a darkened room taking tablets. Now, you can read Ayesha’s hard-hitting showbiz column in the Bray People and, having exhausted her luck with TV, she’s apparently trying to crack into radio.

  ‘Well, that should suit her down to the ground,’ Fiona said when she first heard that particular update. ‘It’s important that the ugly presenters should have somewhere to work.’

  Ayesha, as you see, brings out a very bitchy side in our Fi.

  ‘Please can we leave now?’ she pleads with me. ‘Can’t you . . . throw water or something on my face to wake me up? An average night in hell couldn’t be as bad as this.’

  ‘One more little surprise for you before I’m letting you off the hook. Watch.’

  Just then, from behind the hall door, a guy appears, wearing a Leinster rugby shirt and hovering proprietorially right behind Ayesha. Voices are wafting back to us across the lawn, Tim calmly handing the kids over and arranging to take them out to a movie night at the weekend. No one even asks him inside for a cuppa tea, nothing.

  ‘I do NOT believe this,’ hisses Fiona. ‘It’s like watching a real-life soap opera unfold . . .’

  ‘This is no soap opera, it’s as real as you or I.’

  ‘Don’t tell me . . . is Ayesha actually going out with that jockstrap behind her?’

  I nod. ‘What’s more, he’s moved himself in, lock, stock and barrel. Into that house which Tim, by the way, is still paying the mortgage on. And your man had no problem doing it, either.’

  She turns to face me, her face the colour of gazpacho.

  ‘So . . . then, if all this is true . . . what about Tim?’

  ‘Living in the International Financial Services Centre, in an apartment the approximate size of your average downstairs loo. All he can afford, now that he’s forking out so much in maintenance for Fern Britton there.’

  Fiona has her back slumped against the tree now, and honestly looks like she might need to breathe into a bag.

  ‘OK,’ she says, slowly, slowly, slowly. ‘I’m starting to feel like someone just reached into my small intestine and pulled it out through my mouth. This is . . . this is . . . just so awful for Tim. What I mean is . . . he was always such a family-orientated person, to be a separated dad now must be killing him.’

  Right then. I’ve waited long enough for this moment, might as well just go for it.

  ‘Call him,’ I say, eyeballing her. ‘Don’t think about it, or over-analyse it, like you always do with fellas, just do it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s lonely, you’re lonely, and I’ll bet you there’s not a single day goes by that he’s not thinking about you.’

  Now she looks confused.

  ‘Oh, come off it, Charlotte, you have to be kidding me. After all these years? Suddenly for me to just contact him out of the blue? Wouldn’t I look like a complete saddo? I mean, come on, even desperados like me have to draw the line somewhere.’

  ‘And you have the nerve to wonder why you’re still alone?’

  ‘What have you turned into, anyway? The ghost of relationships past, present and future?’

  Not quite, I think, keeping my mouth shut.

  But if she doesn’t do exactly what I tell her, she’s given me a great idea for next time I visit her.

  Chapter Thirteen

  KATE

  Aka, my single greatest angelic challenge. The one that has me bashing my head off the wall in sheer frustration. After I leave Fiona for the night, I pop in to see Mum, who’s out for the count, hairnet and Ponds cold cream on, in the same fluffy peach dressing gown she’s only been wearing for about the last twenty years or so. There’s a novena printed out on a worn scrap of paper on her bedside locker, to Saint Clare, her desert island favourite saint, who she swears never lets her down. I know right well that she’s doing the novena for me, and it’s all I can do to fight back the tears and not give in to the wave of pain that comes over me every time I see her tired, worn-out face.

  There’s so much I’m bursting to talk to her about, and it’s maddening not to be able to communicate with her properly, because I’m too upset to. I’m dying to tell her about James’s disastrous meeting today, and how . . . dare I even think the thought . . . how, if I were a producer, I would have handled it so much differently. Like, ooh, I dunno, pitched Sir William Eames a half-decent idea for starters. In fact, after sitting in on their big meeting, now I find myself thinking . . . sure I could have done that. I could easily have followed my dream and been a producer myself, instead of constantly listening to James telling me I wasn’t enough of a risk-taker, then letting him pinch half my ideas and pass them off as his own. Frustrating to think that I actually mightn’t have been that bad at it, after all. And I would have loved it. The only thing that’s stopping me now is that I’m dead. Which kind of puts the kibosh on things.

  Then there’s the news about Tim Keating being newly separated, and how I’m trying to cleverly engineer him and Fi back into each other’s arms. Times like this, I almost wish Mum wasn’t so religious, because then maybe I could chat to her when she’s dreaming some night, and maybe even convince her it would be a great idea to go to a seance. And I wouldn’t be one of those wishy-washy spirits, either, the ones who short-change you by only giving one knock for yes and two for no; none of that crap. In fact, the medium wouldn’t be able to shut me up. I’d tell Mum how much I love her and miss her and watch over her every day and how every time I see her, it breaks my heart all over again. And how sorry I am that I never even got to say a proper goodbye to her. And most of all, how I would have lived my life so differently if I’d known it was all going to be snatched away from me, aged twenty-eight.

  She’s put a photo of Dad and me on her bedside table, one that was never there before. It was taken after our school Christmas play, when I was about ten or so; we did Cinderella and I was an ugly sister. Typecast, Kate had said at the time, leading to much whingeing on my part, and much accusing her in later years of effectively squishing any latent vocation as an actress I might have had. But then, that’s sisters for you.

  I stay with Mum for the whole night. Just watching over her, that’s all.

  Early the next morning, the phone on the bedside table wakes her, and I know before she even picks it up that it’s Kate. Let’s face it, only a relative or a telesales caller would dare ring at this hour.

  ‘Yes, oh hello, love.’ God, even hearing her voice makes me realize how much I’ve been missing her. Even though I can only hear this side of the chat, I gather that Kate’s having a good old giving-out rant about Perfect Paul. At least judging by the amount of times Mum keeps saying things like, ‘But sure, he has to work, love. And it’s not his fault his band is always playing in the west, now is it?’ Then, just as I’m racking my brains wondering what in hell I can do for Kate, the breakthrough comes.

  Mum is in the middle of giving her a shopping list for stuff she wants back from Lidl, and is just wondering whether to get rashers and white pudding, her favourite, or if she should try to be healthy and go with the wholegrain bread instead, when out of nowhere she says, ‘Kate, you don’t have to do this, you know. No, not the shopping, I need you to do that, love, and you know what a great help it is to me. Although if you bring that disgusting low-fat spread again, I’ll
send you straight back with it. Full-fat butter or nothing, thanks. No, I meant, you don’t have to stay with me today. Not if you’d rather go down to Galway to be with Paul.’

  Bingo, I think, looking at her, amazed. Exactly what Kate needs. Quality time with her fella, away from all of the stress and worry and grieving. I’m willing her to say yes, thanks a million, wait till I just pack the sexy La Perla underwear, and I’ll be in the car in five minutes, but she must put up a bit of a fight because Mum has to keep reiterating, ‘Yes, of course I mean it,’ over and over again, getting firmer and firmer each time. Eventually she insists, telling Kate that it’s not like there’s anything that she can do by being here, and that she’ll only be on the other end of a phone should Mum need her urgently. After all, Kate will only be going for an overnighter and, most importantly of all, Mum’s pal Nuala is staying with her for the entire day, so she won’t be all alone, if she gets upset and needs someone.

  Which makes me choke up all over again. Just at the thought of what poor Mum must be going through. I can’t even bring myself to think of how unbearably painful it must be for her, so I do what I always do when confronted with this nightmarish thought. Tune out, tune out, tune out. Focus on all the miracles I can work for everyone from this side of the fence. Stay blinkered, eye on the ball.

  Sorry, but I really am that much of an emotional coward.

  ‘It’s been a terrible time for all of us,’ Mum finally says to Kate in her best, firmest, ‘I’m hanging up now’ voice. ‘And you need the break, love, so take it while you can, and I’ll see you when you’re back tomorrow.’

  Ooh, this is working out far, far better than I ever could have hoped. An hour later, we’re on the road west, with me sitting beside Kate in her nippy little Mazda convertible, which was, I’m not joking, a thirtieth-birthday present from Perfect Paul. Honest to God, if I didn’t love her so much, the jealousy would finish me off entirely, especially seeing as how James, who is rubbish with important dates, forgot my last birthday, then remembered at the last minute and ended up running to the garage across the road to buy me air freshener for the car, a family-sized tub of Cadbury’s Miniature Heroes, and a packet of condoms. Three items on every girl’s wish list, har di har, is probably what went through his warped, deluded brain. He made up for it afterwards, giving me a beautiful, guilt-purchased necklace, but the sting remained. Bear in mind, this is a man whose idea of a perfect romantic Valentine’s Day gift is a tin of Roses without a dent in it. Then, the birthday before that, he actually managed to remember it, but only because I had a party in the house, and he presented me with . . . two goldfish called Little James and Little Charlotte. Which he subsequently forgot to feed when I went away on a girlie holiday with Kate, and when I came back, they had mysteriously disappeared. Flushed down the loo, Fiona and I reckoned. Romance, thy name is James Kane.