Hopes & Dreams

by Claudia Carroll

  Me (in the middle of hoovering): ‘Why Maggie, how lovely to see you too. How kind of you to inquire so politely about my day. I’ve been out riding unicorns in Never Never Land. Can’t you guess?’

  Maggie (lighting a cigarette and sprawling herself out on said armchair, like an uncoordinated hippopotamus): ‘Listen, you. I work for the Inland Revenue. I’m in the suspicion business. And right now, I suspect that you spend the whole day sitting on your bony arse watching my DVD box set of Dancing on Ice.’

  Me (knowing I shouldn’t rise to the bait, but not able to help myself): ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve actually spent most of today changing your bed sheets, washing your industrial strength tights, then picking up the empty tins and pizza boxes that you left strewn all over the floor last night. Now, I’m sure that you meant that last remark to be brimming over with gratitude and deep appreciation, so I’ll just assume that some of it got lost in translation.’

  You’d want to see the pair of us squaring up to each other. Honest to God, we’re like a full-length episode of Jerry Springer just waiting to be Sky-Plused. But then, as I constantly remind myself to prevent me from losing my temper and flinging a scalding hot iron into her face, my stepsister has a heart condition. She doesn’t have one. I’d also like to add that, in my defence, I only did her disgusting gusset washing job once and then only because I was out of my head on the Zanax. But never again. Because, come on, even desperados like me have to draw the line somewhere.

  Anyway, back in my old life, I would change outfits a minimum of three times a day. Funky designer jeans for work, something dressier for lunch and then I’d pull out all the stops for a night out with Sam. Which usually ended up being approximately six nights out of seven. Now I find it’s far easier to stay in my pyjamas all day. And if it gets chilly, I just throw a sweatshirt over them. Practicality and comfort all in one. In fact, if they made giant baby-gros for adults, then I’d just stay in one of those all day. Yes, the garage is stuffed full with bin liners and boxes full of clothes that I could shoehorn myself into if I wanted, but I frankly couldn’t be arsed. Waay too much effort involved. Besides, who sees me now anyway? So, in other words, this season the devil’s wearing Primark.

  In my old life, I was rarely home except to sleep, change, then run out the door again. On and on with the never-ending whirlwind. Now, I’m starting to think there’s agoraphobics out there who have better social lives than me. I hate this horrible house, I hate the polka-dot wallpaper, I hate the elephant ornaments on top of the TV, I hate the patterned cream Axminster carpets everywhere, I hate the peach festoon blinds in the revolting kitchen and I reserve special hatred for the people who live in it, but the funny thing is … I can’t bring myself to leave.

  Weird, that this place I despise so much has now become my hideaway and sanctuary. So weird in fact, that I sometimes wonder if I’m suffering from depression. I even run a check list in my head just to be on the safe side. But no, I don’t feel like self-harming, and I don’t think that life’s not worth living any more. I’m just deeply sad, irritable and so, so unaccountably tired all the time. Like having flu but with no symptoms. Anyway, going outside the front door = meeting people = exposure to comments such as ‘Didn’t you used to be someone?’ = more misery, humiliation and heartache. No, total isolation from the outside world is a far, far better idea.

  In my old life, my house was so ridiculously, ludicrously vast, that I had whole rooms dedicated just for storing all my shoes/handbags/coats etc. Now I’m reduced to having a sofa to sleep on and, get this, my own shelf in the fridge which Maggie allocated to me, telling me in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t allowed to touch anything on anyone else’s shelf. Like I’m a flatmate that they’re all dying to get rid of. Her exact words, I recall, were, ‘Ever wondered what it would feel like to live somewhere where no one wanted you? Well, now you do know!’ Dear Jaysus.

  Funniest of all though, is that in my old life, even though I made TV for a living, I never watched it. Ever. I’d see Jessie Would on tape, of course, but only a few days after a broadcast and always on a big TV monitor in the production office, along with Emma and Liz Walsh. Then the three of us would critically analyse every little detail of the show to flush out any gaps where there might be room for improvement, notebooks on our knees and constantly hitting the freeze frame button. But somehow that only ever counted as work, never entertainment. But now that I’m living in a house where the shagging TV is never off, I’ve become a complete addict. It fills a void. And frankly anything that stops me obsessing about Sam can only be a good thing.

  By now, my days have settled in a kind of pattern, entirely revolving around the TV schedule. It usually starts at about 7.30 a.m., when Maggie comes into the living room and wakes me up by switching on breakfast TV while she eats a brekkie fit for a builder, wolfing it down in seconds. A truly astonishing sight to behold, take it from me. Then, she flings my day’s instructions at me, but the minute she’s out the door I drift straight back to my second sleep of the morning, thinking, Great, only another two hours to go until Jeremy Kyle. By mid-morning, Sharon and Joan will usually have surfaced, depending on how late Sharon’s shift was the previous night and how sozzled Joan was when she staggered home from the boozer. Sorry, I mean the ‘wine tasting’. Then we move on to the morning repeats of last night’s soaps, which to be honest, I’m actually starting to get hooked on. So, after they’ve both left for work and when the bulk of my chores are done, it’s on to all the afternoon shows, magazine programmes aimed at a target audience of grannies, that kind of thing. Grannies or else people on sedatives like me. Not forgetting Oprah, which is fast turning into the highlight of my whole day. Then as soon as Maggie gets in, we watch the evening shows like Xpose and repeats of Friends which at this stage I’ve seen so often, I’m starting to say the words along with Jennifer Aniston.

  What passes a lot of the time too is working out all the mini-civilisations that go on within families. Take Joan for instance. From the minute she stumbles down the stairs each morning, wearing the kind of fluffy dressing gowns that Barbara Cartland used to wear on her book covers, it’s a crap shoot trying to predict what her mood will be. You might as well try to predict the Euromillions lottery numbers in next Saturday night’s draw. Some days, she’s actually great company and will cook a big fry-up breakfast for myself and Sharon, while chatting happily away about whoever is on the cover of this week’s Heat magazine, required reading in this house. Well, that or else her second favourite topic of conversation: the neighbours on our street and whatever gossip happens to be going on with them.

  ‘I ran into Mrs Hayes from across the road, Jessica,’ she said to me over brekkie the other day, when she was in one of her better moods, ‘and she was wondering why you still haven’t called in to see them all yet? Hannah’s just had another baby you know. Apparently herself and the article she married have moved into a house only just a few streets away. And you know that brother of hers, Steve, has been back from the States for a few years now. I don’t know where he’s living these days or what he’s at, but apparently he heard you’re back here again and wants to come and see you.’

  My heart sank. Last thing I’d be able to do, go out and face people. Particularly ones who I used to be friends with in times gone by, but then drifted away from. Far too many explanations and apologies involved. Sorry, but I can’t do it. No energy. Way too much to ask.

  It’s interesting to hear that Steve is back in town though. Suddenly I get a flashback to when Hannah and I were in school together and I was permanently hanging around their house. He was older than us by about three years and when we were about fifteen or so, Hannah always swore he had a crush on me, backed up by the fact he’d go bright purple in the face and his stammer would get far worse if I as much as said hi to the poor eejit. He used to call here to do odd jobs for us too: mowing the lawn and general handy work, that sort of thing. But he stopped coming after a while, not only on account of how horrible M
aggie and Sharon were to him, but because Joan rarely, if ever, remembered to pay him.

  ‘Oh, I know what Steve Hayes is doing,’ Sharon piped up, between gobbling down mouthfuls of leftover pizza, which she always microwaves the morning after the night before. ‘He’s playing in a band now. They’re called The Amazing Few and I hear they’re shite. Bono’s job is safe.’

  ‘Don’t say shite, say manure,’ said Joan.

  ‘Jeez, excuse me, your highness. Manure.’

  ‘How you do know all this about him anyway?’

  ‘He comes into Smiley Burger for the Smiley Fries.’

  ‘How can he be in a band with that awful stammer?’

  ‘The stammer’s gone now. Anyway, he’s the guitarist. He doesn’t have to sing. Oh and by the way, Ma, if he does call here, for fuck’s sake don’t let him in. We still owe him money.’

  Anyway, those are the good days in Joan-land. Other days, it’s frost over Whitehall and she’ll nearly cut the snot off you for even daring to ask her something as innocuous as whether she enjoyed herself last night. Once I even made the cardinal mistake of asking her if there was a good crowd at the bingo the night before? ‘I was at bridge, not bingo,’ she hissed back at me. Even though I happen to know that not only is she a regular at the bingo, but she’s always winning cash prizes too. But bear in mind that underneath the over-polished veneer this is a woman well in touch with her inner shrew. With the result that I constantly feel like I’m treading on eggshells with her. In a banana skin factory. In a hurricane.

  Sometimes, on the nights when she’s been out, she’ll teeter home on her high heels with bags of chips fresh from the chipper for everyone, brimming over with good humour, all chat and gossip about who’s making moves on who, who got the most drunk, who got barred down the local at one of her ‘wine tasting’ soirées. Other times, she’ll thunder in, having, I can only guess, drunk enough to knock the pennies off the eyes of a dead Irishman, and clatter her handbag down so loudly on the hall table that the ornamental elephants on top of the TV all rattle. Then she’ll pick a row out of thin air with whatever unfortunate happens to be sitting nearest to her on the sofa.

  ‘Look at the bloody useless state of the three of you,’ was one particular gem she spat out at us last weekend. ‘It’s a Saturday night and not a fella to show between the lot of you.’

  Well, it was all I could do to throw her a dead-eyed look. Because my survival mechanism in this house is to never, ever let the taunts get to me. And believe me, there are many … Anyway, her eye caught mine and she back pedalled a bit, realising what she’d just said.

  ‘I’m leaving you out of this, Jessica, on account of you getting so spectacularly dumped only recently and on the principle that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’

  ‘Where did you get that quote from, Ma?’ asked Sharon, sucking on a fag. ‘OK magazine?’

  ‘I don’t know who said it and I don’t care. Celine Dion or someone. But my point is, here’s Jessica going around the place like the zombified dead because she can’t figure out how to hang on to her fella—’

  ‘Joan,’ I interrupted, not sure how much more of this I was able for in, shall we say, my frail emotional state. ‘I’d leave it there if I were you. Or else …’

  ‘Or else what?’ Maggie sniped across the room at me. ‘Or else you’ll trash her in your memoirs?’

  ‘I was going to say, “Or else I might start howling over the TV, thus interrupting your enjoyment of this episode of Little Britain, which you’ve only seen about two hundred times before,” but what the hell, yours is better.’

  Like most bullies, Maggie is always bested when you give back as good as you get. Tell you what though, it sure as hell sharpens your wits just being in the same airspace as her. The only downside is that I’m fast becoming every bit as horrible as her.

  ‘So what I want to know is,’ Joan continued on with her rant, turning to glower at Maggie and Sharon, ‘why can’t you bloody useless pair get your arses off the sofa for a change and start acting like normal young ones? Why can’t one of you come home married or engaged or at least pregnant? Look at Mrs Foley across the road, with seven grandchildren already and only one of her daughters ever got married and even she’s separated now. But at least hers are out knocking around with fellas at night instead of sitting in staring at the telly night in, night out. Plenty of other mothers would have a seizure if their daughters had boyfriends staying overnight in the house. Me? I’d gladly cook up fried breakfasts for them the next morning if I thought at least one of you was getting a decent shag every now and then. For feck’s sake, when I was your age I had buried your father and was already back out dating again …’ She was working herself up to a crescendo by then as we all stared dully at her, waiting on the grand finale. ‘Why in the name of God,’ she snapped, ‘didn’t I have girls who took after me? Or better yet, why didn’t I have sons? Look at the pair of you; the elder disappointment and the younger disappointment.’

  I couldn’t help noticing that neither of her daughters reacted to this tirade; their eyes never as much as flickered away from the TV. Which made me think that this must be a regular occurrence in this house. Then the minute Joan was out of the room, Maggie, queen of the one-line put-down, piped up, ‘As soon as she dies, I’m burying her in a drawer.’

  ‘As soon as she dies? Are you kidding me?’ said Sharon. ‘That one will outlive Styrofoam.’

  Which neatly brings me to Sharon. Right then. Now while she’s every bit as silent and grunty as Maggie, stop the presses, but I did happen to make an interesting discovery about her only last week. One of the many jobs on my To Do list was to give her bedroom a good dust, polish and hoover, so up I went at a convenient gap after Judge Judy finished and before Oprah started. She now sleeps in what was my old room, so it was beyond weird seeing it as it is now, decorated in Joan’s OTT taste, all Laura Ashley flowery patterns and matching bedspreads that nearly make you feel like you’re on hallucinogenic drugs. Anyway, I was just about to start dusting the shelves and was trying hard not to gape at a particularly horrible photo of Sharon and Maggie taken when they were about six and seven, where they’re dressed identically and look exactly like the two little girls from The Shining. But then something else caught my eye: Sharon’s entire DVD collection is made up of romantic movies. Every single one of them. Gone with the Wind ,Rebecca, Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally all here. Plus she has a DVD of just about every film that Hugh Grant has ever made, even the really shite ones. Then, when I get to her bedside table, I find it’s stuffed full of romance novels. Each one of them pretty well thumbed too, I can’t help noticing. Mills & Boon books with saccharine titles like The Duke and I, Barbara Taylor Bradford, there’s even a few Danielle Steels in there.

  I’m not passing any comments, I’m just saying it’s surprising, that’s all. I wouldn’t have had her down as someone with a happy-ever-after addiction. Anyway, as chance would have it, a few days later I had a chance to ask her about it. A proper conversation, that is, as opposed to the monosyllabic grunts that I normally get out of her. She had some kind of bug and she wasn’t making it up either, I knew by her face that she was genuinely ill. The giveaway was that Sharon loves nothing more than to talk about the food she’s going to eat, while already eating. But this particular day, she physically turned green at the sight of me opening the fridge and producing the leftover pizza from last night, which would be her normal breakfast.

  ‘Do you want me to ring in sick for you?’ I offered.

  She look at me, surprised at my being nice to her. ‘Jeez, would you mind? It’s not a word of a lie either. Look at the state of me, I’m sicker than a plane to Lourdes.’

  So I rang Smiley Burger for her and over-egged it, as you do on these occasions, making it sound to the sixteen-year-old junior floor manager that she was in stage four of swine flu. ‘Well, if she’s that unwell, she can have the day off,’ he said. ‘But no more. Back
to work tomorrow, Saturday, no excuses.’ So, all delighted, Sharon settled onto the sofa for a twenty-four-hour TV marathon.

  Now it so happened that particular Friday was the very day Sam was due to travel to Marbella with Eva and Nathaniel, so I was on double doses of Zanax and moving around the house at quarter speed. I really did try my best to get through my list of jobs, thinking that hard work and manual labour was just what I needed to distract me, but no such luck. Sure, how could it? By then I was clutching at straws thinking, maybe, just maybe, he didn’t go on the trip at all. Maybe he figured he’d only miss me too much. Which of course was immediately followed by the tacked-on awful, aching thought, So if that’s the case, why hasn’t he just picked up the phone to call me? OK, I decided, enough with the housework. Need a distraction. Need telly. So I plonked down on the sofa beside Sharon. But, as bad luck would have it, she was watching one of those glossy holiday magazine programmes about Spain, full of sandy beaches and sangria and fabulous tapas bars. Where I should have been headed to with my boyfriend, right there and then. Suddenly, it was just all too much for me and next thing I was howling, really wailing from the bitter depths like I hadn’t allowed myself to do in weeks and with nothing to wipe my nose in, only a J Cloth that smelt of Mr Sheen.

  Sharon looked over at me, puzzled and confused, not knowing what to do with me, without back-up. If Maggie was here, she’d cut me down with some one-liner and they’d both snigger at my expense and that would be that. But Maggie wasn’t there. It was just her and I, alone.

  ‘Ehh … Jessie, what’s wrong with you? Is this about me asking you to dust my room?’ she asked tentatively, clearly uncomfortable with all overt displays of emotion.

  ‘No,’ I wailed back at her. ‘It’s just …’ But I was too choked to finish the sentence, so I just waved the J Cloth vaguely in the direction of the TV instead.