It's Got To Be Perfect

by Claire Allan

  “Right,” was all he said, before looking towards the bedroom and almost whispering, “She’s in there.”

  Fionn had composed herself and the firey look was back on her face. I knew she wouldn’t be impressed with me pussy-footing around my sister as if she was the wounded one.

  “I’ll sort this,” I said to her and then, to placate her further, added, “I’ll get her to say sorry.” I gestured towards the living room, thinking it would be safer for her to wait there instead of coming into the lion’s den.

  She nodded and left me to it.

  I felt a shudder as I walked towards the bedroom door. I half-expected it to be locked or barricaded.

  I rapped on the door gently, but there was no answer. So I whispered Darcy’s name. Then said it. Then almost shouted it. I heard a grunt in return which I took to mean “Oh, hello, lovely sister. Please do come in and talk to me. I feel the need to unburden myself on your wise ears.” Or something.

  Gingerly I opened the door and saw her lying on the bed watching Coronation Street. “Do you think they drink a lot in Corrie?” she said. “I mean it feels as if they go to the pub every day – a couple of times a day. I would be pissed as a fart if I drank as much as they seem to do. And did you ever notice how cheap the drink is? You wouldn’t get a glass of wine for that price at Searsons. But then, do you know how fecking lucky you are – up there in the North with your cheap drink and your cheap food and cheap everything?”

  “You couldn’t wait to leave it,” I said gently, sitting down beside her and watching a scene unfold with Rita and Norris in Roy’s Rolls.

  “Aye, but I miss it sometimes.”

  “Like a hole in the head.”

  “Maybe,” she said, turning to face me and muting the telly. “Was I a complete bitch today?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Not a complete bitch. No. Maybe a ninty-nine per cent bitch but certainly not a complete one. You need to say sorry to Fionn. You were out of line.”

  She cringed visibly, curling her knees up towards her chest. “Oh God. I’m sorry. I’m not usually so godawful. Am I?”

  “No. No, you’re not,” I said, lying back on the bed beside her and brushing her hair from her eyes. “What’s wrong, Darcy? And please don’t tell me nothing because I know something is up. You’ve been acting out of sorts for a few weeks now and I heard you and Gerry talking last night. Not all of it, mind. Just some of it. Enough to know that something is really quite wrong.”

  She half-laughed and half-cried a response. “It’s wrong and it’s not wrong. Oh but Annie, I envy you and your eye on the prize. I envy how you’ve always known what you wanted and gone for it and never once shifted the goalposts. Your Life Plan? I need me one of those.”

  “But you have a great life. Gerry loves you,” I said, my eyes pleading with her to tell me that he still did. “You have this amazing flat with its perfectly proportioned rooms and a job that most people would kill for.”

  She nodded sadly. “But it’s not enough, Annie. Don’t you realise that? It’s just not enough.”

  Darcy was more maternal than my mother. My mother was lovely – don’t get me wrong – but she was one of those women who wanted to be best friends with her daughters rather than mother them. So Darcy mothered me. She made sure I had the right-sized bra, wore clean underwear, had a decent packed lunch and did my homework. She listened when I cried about the fact that Jason Donovan was never, ever going to love me and she encouraged me to go to university when a decent enough proportion of my school friends were getting jobs which paid actual money. She even subbed me when I wanted to go out with them and my grant had been frittered away on luxuries such as rent and food and textbooks.

  But even at that, she was never maternal. She never wanted children. That was something she was one hundred per cent certain about.

  Until now. Now, everything had changed.

  “I know you think I’m an eejit. I know you think I could never do it anyway. I know that I probably would crack under the pressure but I can’t help it. I want a baby. My baby. Our baby. And I’ve been trying to ignore it because it was never in the plan – not for either of us. I mean, one of things which drew me to Gerry in the first place was that he didn’t want kids. He never treated me like a freak for not having the desire to procreate. He was too busy feeling relieved. But then, you know, as time went on it started to creep in. I’d see a pram and think ‘I want one’ and at first I thought it was just because the pram was particularly stylish but then I started to see the babies in the prams and think ‘I want one’. Something. A child of ours. Part of me. Part of him. And I realised that when I said I didn’t want children, the truth was I hadn’t wanted children. I could never see myself as a mother. Not until I met Gerry and I realised I didn’t want just any child. I wanted his child. But he doesn’t, you see. He’s happy with things the way they are and, Annie, I don’t think I’m going to be able to talk him round and that terrifies me. Because I can’t imagine life without him or without our baby.”

  Of course I should have immediately been able to say something witty and reassuring and supportive and all those other things which sisters are supposed to do. But truth was, I didn’t have a baldy notion what to say. The thought that my sister – my Darcy – could ever want to have kids was alien to me. She spent so much time mocking my Life Plan and my ideal of one of each sex that I just assumed she would always be the auntie and never the moaning mammy. Seeing her face, crumpled and filled with misery, everything made sense. What she was facing was just simply unthinkable. Whatever way she played it, she wasn’t going to get what she wanted. My heart sank and at the same time broke just a little which left me feeling really quite sick to the stomach.

  “Oh Darcy, why didn’t you say? Why didn’t you talk to me about this before?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “It only got bad recently. Until then I wrote it off as me being peri-menopausal or something – ya know, my biological clock having one last laugh before it stopped ticking. I thought it would go away and Gerry and I would be happy carrying on just as we were – but it didn’t go away. It just got stronger till I was contemplating poking holes in condoms with a pin or flushing my pill down the toilet, like Fionn said. But I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. I didn’t do it. I was just contemplating doing it. Gerry would have had a blue fit.”

  “And he’s not for changing his mind?”

  “The boy is not for turning,” she said sadly. “I just can’t believe that I may have to walk away from him. That we may have to split up because we can’t work through this.”

  “Darcy, you’re thirty-six. You have years left in you.”

  “It really doesn’t feel like it. There is a part of me screaming out that I need to do this and I need to do it now. I know,” she said with a wry smile, “you’d never have thought it of me, would you? Me that was always so bloody against breeding and was always happy with my life. God, I was such a smug cow when I met Gerry and realised he felt the same and I wouldn’t have to explain to him that I was going against nature and had no desire to procreate.”

  “If you can change your mind, he can change his,” I offered – not sure if I was saying the right thing and helping or saying exactly the wrong thing and making things worse.

  “I wish I could believe that, but I know. In my heart, I know.” She lay down again and sobbed and all I could do – bar saying the wrong thing again – was to lie down beside her and hug her while she sobbed. My heart hurt perhaps more than it had ever hurt before. I could deal with my own feck-ups, but to know that my sister was hurting and that there was nothing I could do – that killed.

  “Have you spoken to Mum?” I asked eventually and Darcy spluttered loudly – a mixture of a big dirty cry and a raucous laugh.

  “Now what exactly would that achieve? You know Mum – she’d have a blue fit if I so much as told her I was considering making her a granny – never mind if I told her I was thinking about leaving Gerry to do it.”r />
  I knew she was right of course. Mammy was not the person you turned to in a crisis. She generally was the crisis. I imagined that was where I got my own penchant for creating a crisis or two from – which made me think. If Mum was off bounds in a crisis and I was just as likely to be causing one myself, then who did Darcy turn to when she was feeling like the world was falling in on top of her? I guess I’d always assumed it was Gerry – but he was clearly not available for support on this issue. She must have felt so utterly alone.

  “He doesn’t want to lose me,” she said eventually. “He said he loves me like he has never loved anyone else in his entire life but a deal is a deal and no matter how much he wants to, he can’t change his mind. It’s complicated.”

  “I wish there was something I could say,” I offered.

  “Don’t worry. I know there is nothing.”

  I lay there with Darcy for another fifteen minutes or so and then she did a typical Darcy thing and stood up, straightening herself out and heading to the bathroom to freshen up her face.

  “You go on through,” she said. “I’ll follow you when I’ve thought just how on earth I can apologise to Fionn for being such a godawful fucker.”

  I wondered how I would walk back into that room, back into Gerry’s company, and not immediately get an urge to knee him straight in the knackers. Or, alternatively, not drop to my knees and beg him to reconsider and impregnate my sister and make her happy again.

  But I did it. I walked in and smiled and told him Darcy would be out in a minute. But he looked at me and he knew. He knew that I knew and he blushed a little while Fionn chatted on about the Westbury and how absolutely fabulous it was.

  “Tell him, Annie. Tell him about the baths. Tell him how deep they are. And tell him about the beds and how big they are and the champagne and how –”

  “Nice it is?” I finished and she nodded.

  “I’m waffling, aren’t I?” she said.

  “Just a bit.”

  Gerry smiled. “It’s okay. I know how you yokels like to be all impressed by the big city.”

  And I wanted to slap him – even though I was a self-confessed yokel – and tell him to stop being smug and laughing and having a bit of craic with me and my friend when he was being so utterly, utterly selfish with his sperm. Fecker.

  And I hated that I was cross with him. Up until now I had really, really liked him. I mean, if I had to choose a brother-in-law (in a non-married way) out of a big catalogue I would have picked Gerry. Tall, but not too tall, with the kind of rugged good looks owned only by trendy Philosophy lecturers. Drunkenly I had once told Darcy that I thought Gerry had a very nice arse, which she had delighted in telling him and we couldn’t look at each other straight in the face for several months after.

  He was smart, funny, and, up till now, caring, and he had sparkly green eyes. I could understand why the majority of his undergrads had a crush on him and why Darcy loved him so much. But I couldn’t really understand how, if he loved her as much as he said he did, he couldn’t just give her the one thing that would make her happy. The fact that they had initially both agreed they didn’t want it was neither here nor there.

  I did a half-grin, half-grimace thing which I imagine was not at all attractive and I think he read the signs.

  “I think I’ll go out for a pint in Searsons,” he said. “Sure you girls can join me in a while if you feel up to it.”

  “Sure thing,” Fionn said with considerable enthusiasm.

  But he looked at me – his eyes kind of pleading – and all I said was “We’ll see” as if he were an errant child being promised a possible treat if he behaved. Which was ironic, really, given the circumstances.

  He picked up his jacket and keys and said his goodbyes, while Fionn turned her gaze to the floor, increasingly aware something very, very bad was happening. When the door slammed she turned and asked me just what exactly was going on, and I was just about to launch into it when Darcy walked into the room, looking suitably abashed.

  “Fionn,” she said, “I’m not going to try and justify what happened. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I was a bitch from hell. I can’t say more than that,” and she burst into tears.

  Fionn looked at me, more than a little alarmed. First she had seen Darcy shouting like a madwoman and now she was crying, equally like a madwoman.

  “You can tell her,” sobbed Darcy to me. “Sure you can tell everyone. It’s no big deal. I’ll be okay.” But the look on her face said she was definitely not going to be okay.

  25

  Back at the Westbury I buried myself under the duvet of the gigantic bed and listened to Fionn gently snoring. I couldn’t sleep – my head was buzzing. It certainly wasn’t because the bed was uncomfortable or the room wasn’t dark enough or all those usual distractions which would normally keep me awake. It was because I couldn’t stop thinking of Darcy and trying to find a solution in my head.

  We had stayed with her for two hours after Gerry had gone out and I had told Fionn exactly what had been going on.

  “Annie knew there was a reason you were acting like such a godawful bitch,” she said to Darcy and I felt myself tense. But my sister just nodded and gave a half-smile.

  “If the shoe fits,” she said. “I’m sorry. There isn’t really an excuse but if you really want to know, Fionn, then, yes, I’m jealous of you and Alex and Emma and your readymade happy ending.”

  “Ah, but I’m the Wicked Stepmother and the Fairy Queen is waiting the wings. There is no guarantee at all that I’ll have my happy ending.”

  “But you already have it,” Darcy said, sitting down opposite us. “You and Alex. You want the same things.”

  Fionn sat there, silent for a moment. “You’re right, and you’re not right at the same time. It’s more complicated than that.”

  “Isn’t it always?” I sighed.

  “Hey, don’t you be getting all bitter on me, Mrs Happy Ending,” Darcy said to me. “You have your Life Plan. You know what you want.”

  “Correction, I had a Life Plan and I knew what I wanted, Now, I haven’t a clue.”

  “Oooh,” Fionn said, sensing possible juicy gossip. “Tell me about the Life Plan? Did it involve celebrity chefs or hairy men or anything else intriguing?”

  “It was laminated and everything,” Darcy said, stifling a giggle while my face blazed.

  Fionn looked incredulous. “Laminated?”

  I nodded slowly. “I wanted to keep it good,” and at that moment it sounded ridiculous to me too. I mean I was grown woman – in her thirties with a mortgage and a job (albeit one that was going to absolute hell at the moment) and all sorts of adult responsibilities like too much credit-card debt, a car with a slightly dodgy habit of breaking down when I absolutely needed it not to and perhaps too much of a fondness for white wine.

  “Tell me about it? Do you still have it? Can I see it?” Fionn pleaded and I blushed harder as I explained how I had burned it in a fit of pique over my relationship breakdown with Pearse and my growing belief that I would end up on the shelf.

  “And don’t tell me that ending up on the shelf is okay and that I’m a modern woman who shouldn’t worry about such things. Don’t tell me that as a feminist I’m a damned disgrace to crave my day in a white frock and my big romance, because I don’t actually care if that makes me weak or pathetic or just a sad oul’ boot – I want it. I’ve always wanted it.”

  “Ending up on the shelf is okay,” Fionn said while Darcy snorted, “but getting the big white dress is nice too. It’s okay to want those things, you know. But,” she added with a wicked grin, “I’m not so sure it is okay to make a book about it and laminate it.”

  “Oh feck off,” I grimaced, but then I couldn’t help but smile.

  “I’d love to get married,” Darcy said, glancing at me, no doubt checking my jaw for its inevitable dropping action.

  Darcy had never wanted to get married. She took immense joy out of teasing our mother that she would always live in s
in – even when she was eighty-seven. At the age of sixteen she had insisted that every single piece of mail which ever arrived at our house for her was addressed to Ms Darcy Delaney – none of your “Miss” nonsense for her. Mum just couldn’t understand it, but Darcy would go into one about the repression of women and a bit of paper not being worth anything and how a wedding ring was as oppressive as if you had been branded with a red-hot poker.

  So here she was, talking about getting married so I should have been shocked. But then, she had not that long ago told me how she also wanted to have children so I was, by this stage, far beyond shockable and I recovered quickly from her announcement.

  “Would I be bridesmaid? If so, then I’m not wearing pink. Or peach. Just so as you know.”

  “I don’t think there is much chance that you will get to be bridesmaid, because there is feck all chance I’ll actually get to be a bride. But all I’m saying is that I would like it. I can see the appeal now. And it’s not just about the big dress and the party – I like the idea of being someone’s wife. Does that make me sound very 1950s?”

  “Well, if you are then so am I,” I said.

  “And me too,” Fionn added.

  We sat in silence for a moment or two before Fionn looked at me again. “So the laminated Life Plan? Did it have pictures and everything?”