by Sharon Owens
‘But why?’ she would moan. ‘Why, Sidney?’
‘Because I felt like it. That’s why!’
And off she would go, bawling again. Lying on the carpet like a sick cat, sobbing her lungs into spasms, while Sidney calmly read the newspaper and Julie cowered in her own bedroom eating custard creams. A monster in beige polyester slacks, that was Sidney Sultana Esquire. And Charlotte was a gutless drip of a woman who didn’t have the brains to get the hell out of her sham marriage before her only child was emotionally damaged for life. Like I said, a couple of out-and-out nut jobs.
They do say fact is stranger than fiction.
You must be in despair for Charlotte by now and I wouldn’t blame you one bit. A lot of these battered wives are asking for it, you might even dare to suggest. Whimpering like a dog in the corner, letting him get away with it over and over. Clearly, she was stressed to the point of madness. But what Sidney hadn’t reckoned on, and this was the bit you couldn’t make up (you’ll enjoy this), was that Charlotte was a devout Catholic who simply couldn’t countenance divorce let alone the mortal sin of suicide. And that if she were to go to her own family solicitor to see about procuring a divorce or to step discreetly in front of a train, then she’d go straight down to the fiery furnace. And she’d never see St Peter and the pearly gates. So Charlotte wouldn’t leave Sidney despite his best attempts to make her life a living hell. Besides, she had nowhere else to go, I daresay, and no career with which to support her child. She didn’t want to admit to her family that she had made a dreadful mistake and she didn’t want to become one of those stoic lone parents waiting in line in the post office for a government handout. But the main reason was definitely religious. So she stayed put in the big house and did her best to keep out of the firing line.
By 1970, however, Charlotte felt worn out. Julie remembers the very day her mother finally abandoned all efforts at keeping up appearances. She said it was like a light going out in Charlotte’s eyes. The wretched woman stopped crying and she stopped speaking to her husband altogether. She didn’t cook for him any more, didn’t clean the house, didn’t answer the phone, nothing. She reckoned the sin of sloth would be worth only fifty years in Purgatory and she was willing to suffer that much to spite Sidney Sultana, she told Julie. Dust piled up in the corners, newspapers toppled off the armchairs and the milk turned rancid on the doorstep.
Sidney tried to weather the storm. He wore his clothes for weeks without washing them, then he buried them in the garden and bought more. He ate burgers and chips from the local fryer and he heated up Fray Bentos pies in the oven. He drank Lucozade and brown lemonade if there were no teabags left in the kitchen. He was livid with rage but he didn’t know what to do with this silent wife who would not look him in the eye. He invited people home to dinner (squads of them) in an attempt to embarrass Charlotte back into domestic servitude but she stayed in her room and wouldn’t even come downstairs to say hello. She gave him nothing but the silent treatment. And he couldn’t hit her, you see, even though he threatened to, because then she’d have had the bruises as evidence of cruelty and she could have got him arrested and banned from the premises altogether.
And Charlotte couldn’t kill Sidney. Obviously, she couldn’t kill him, though she often told Julie she wanted to, because that would have been a mortal sin of the very worst kind. No, Charlotte was lining her heavenly nest with the feathers of pain and suffering. And cold-blooded murder would have put the mockers on all of that, big time. And Sidney wouldn’t hire a housekeeper to cook and clean for the three of them because then Charlotte would have got away with lying about, officially doing nothing all day long, and he wasn’t having that. It was therefore a classic case of stalemate.
Well, then the balance of power suddenly shifted irreversibly. It was hard to tell what exactly happened and of course Julie was only a child and can’t be expected to remember the details with any perspective. But she told me that one day in 1972, when her mother was getting ready to go to the shops, she hesitated on the doormat for a few moments and then she put down her shopping basket on the hall carpet and went straight back to bed.
‘I’m tired,’ Charlotte said quietly. ‘So very tired.’
Julie was left sitting on the bottom stair, wondering when her mummy was going to get up again after this strange afternoon nap. And as the evening wore on, Charlotte did indeed trail out of bed to prepare a shepherd’s pie out of some leftovers for herself and Julie. But she vowed never to leave the house again until the day either herself or Sidney died. She stayed in her room for the best part of three years, ordering groceries and household supplies over the telephone and leaving the money for them in a neat row of small brown envelopes on a marble half-moon table in the front porch.
When Sidney eventually realized (and it took him several months to work it out, he was that selfish and stupid) that he had taunted and tortured his own wife into a state of chronic and profound depression where she was emotionally dead inside, he was afraid. Very afraid indeed. But he couldn’t go calling in the doctors, do you see? Do you understand the pickle he was in? Never mind the dust now, to hell with the dust and the rancid milk. Charlotte had become Belfast’s answer to Mrs Rochester. The shameful mad wife to be hidden from society at all costs. A shadowy figure pacing the house at night so that Sidney was afraid to go to sleep in case she opened him up with a carving knife. He’d pushed her too far and he had run out of ideas.
Even then, in my humble opinion, it was not too late to salvage the Sultana family – on an individual basis, obviously. Sidney could have told all to his G P, got Charlotte some professional help and fled to England or somewhere far away from the whole sorry saga. Julie could have been fostered out to some sensible middle-class family and the three of them could have begun to live again. Even a halflife would have been better than the conveyor belt of misery they were all seemingly strapped to. But no. Sidney Sultana had dug a hole for himself and he was determined to go on digging. He couldn’t get the psychiatrists and the Social Services in on the act because then he would have to tell the world what a wicked man he’d been. They’d probably arrest him and try him for cruelty. He couldn’t let Charlotte go and he wouldn’t let Julie go. He was trapped in his big back-to-front house with a zombie wife and a silent child and there was nothing he could do about it. Sidney Sultana, hoist by his own petard. It was the most delicious revenge, though Julie paid dearly for her parents’ stubbornness with the loss of a happy childhood. We mustn’t forget that.
To summarize, Sidney had collected his ten thousand pounds, married a toff and was handed a plum plot of land beside the sea. He’d fathered a pretty daughter who would care for him in his dotage, and he’d gained a ticket for life into Belfast’s polite society. Such as it was. (Or still is.) Sorted.
What he got instead was a wife who jumped at the slightest noise, who hoarded tins of corned beef and novelty teapots in her bedroom. A resentful daughter who hated him so much she bit his hand in front of the bishop one Cemetery Sunday when he tried to pat her head in church. And the knowledge that all his mates in the poker club pitied him and looked down upon him. Even his painted-up floozies deserted Sidney in the end when they thought Charlotte might be committed to an asylum, and the scandal would explode around all of them like a volcano. Sidney Sultana had always been a loose cannon but when he became a social leper as well (and even the small-time gamblers would not drink with him lest they say the wrong thing and offend him) it drove him over the edge altogether. He became almost as much of a recluse as Charlotte. He sat downstairs in the lounge for weeks at a time, watching horse racing on the television and phoning out for Chinese takeaways, while Charlotte stayed in her room sipping endless cups of tea and nibbling on cooked ham slices. Julie pottered about on her own, forging her parents’ signatures on school notes and doing her best to look clean and presentable. She never spoke to her father except to wish him well on his birthday, when she would present him with a home-made card featuring a car she�
��d drawn using felt-tip pens. Sidney couldn’t prove it but he always did think that Julie’s glitter-car was shaped rather like a coffin. She could see the suspicion in his eyes, she told me.
‘Will you look after me when I am old?’ he’d ask Julie from time to time, apparently yearning for a wicker chair and senility. And Julie always told him she would like to take care of him, certainly, but Charlotte would probably need her more. He couldn’t fault that reply, could he? It was only the truth.
And so Sidney’s ruined life stretched ahead of him like an endless ribbon of pain and sorrow until one stormy night in 1975 when he decided he could take no more of it. He was fifty and losing his hair, it has to be said. And he was developing that peculiar figure some men get, when their stomach bloats out like a Space Hopper and their hips disappear altogether. He had to buy braces to hold up his beige polyester slacks, it was that bad. The floozies laughed at him when his once-pert posterior began to sag and then caved in completely. Charlotte literally wouldn’t look at him even when he threw the hall table out onto the driveway one day, scattering brown envelopes right and left. And his own daughter was giving him drawings of coffins for his birthday. The relentless diet of Chinese takeaways had caused a bleeding stomach ulcer that refused to heal; and he had no friends left in the whole wide world. Sidney Sultana realized far, far too late that being an evil bully and a cruel beast has its downside. Loneliness and despair.
What happened next?
Well, you might ask.
He died, of course. What do most bullies do when they have run out of victims with whom to amuse themselves? He expired in a puff of black smoke and a ball of red and orange flames on the very stroke of midnight. Like the devil he was. Julie, the poor waif, was only ten years of age when Sidney Sultana topped himself. Drove his big fancy saloon car straight into a landmark oak tree on the road back from Portstewart. He’d been seen earlier that day walking along the beach by several day-trippers. Just walking casually on the beach, they said, eating an ice-cream cone with two big Flakes sticking out of it. A chocolate V-sign, if you will? They remembered him because he’d been wearing a showy overcoat and talking to himself about novelty teapots.
It was gruesome, so they told Charlotte afterwards. The crash scene was ‘well and truly fierce’. Firemen did what they could to cut Sidney out of the wreckage but he was a dead duck and no mistake. Car was in bits. Pity about that beautiful car, when you come to think of it. Leaping off a cliff would have been more environmentally friendly. And besides, he might have hit another vehicle on his nocturnal suicide-mission. But that’s just me being practical again. Maybe he didn’t have the guts for a cliff-top leap? I’d say hitting that old oak tree head-on was a quicker way to bow out.
The police came to the door of the Sultana residence in the middle of the night and Julie answered it in her bright red nightgown with ladybird buttons down the front. (Charlotte had stopped answering the door years before.) A strangely calm Julie summoned Charlotte to the hall, and then the tragic child proceeded to make tea and hand out chocolate biscuits individually wrapped in bright green foil, to the small party that sat beneath a hideous painting of some famous racehorse, executed (so to speak) in oils with a palette knife. The police told Charlotte the sad news with suitable gravitas and she promptly hung her head and cried her eyes out. With sheer relief rather than genuine grief, it has to be said, though the coppers weren’t to know that.
‘You’re quite sure it was him?’ she kept asking them. ‘You’re quite sure there’s been no mistake? A short, stocky man with a heavy sheepskin coat and two gold sovereign rings on his left hand? And he’s officially dead? He’s not only been brought to the morgue and left there till morning? A doctor has definitely signed the death notice? Do you have any actual proof of the death, about your persons?’
You couldn’t make it up.
Yes, it was definitely Sidney Sultana, Rest in Peace. Dead at last. Dead as a Dodo. Thanks be to God.
Julie said she would never forget the change in her mother’s face that night. The ten years of lunacy and misery just seemed to fall away and Charlotte’s narrow green eyes became bright and animated. Sidney’s widow danced on the kitchen table when the policemen had taken their leave. Kicking up her heels and fluttering her fingers like a cheesy cabaret star.
‘Dat-a-dat-a-dah!’
Picture the scene.
‘Don’t you worry about me hating your father,’ Charlotte said to Julie in a breathless rasp. The sudden bout of exercise had fairly taken it out of her, I expect. ‘I won’t go to hell now,’ she said, stamping her feet on the wooden table top. ‘I can always tell it in Confession and get absolution. I couldn’t go to Confession before, do you see? Because I wasn’t really sorry for hating that horrible man. And God won’t forgive you if you’re not truly sorry, and God knows every thought in your head so there’s no use pretending. But now I can be sorry and mean it because my husband’s stone dead and he won’t be coming back. Hip, hip, hooray! Oh, the shopping I’ll do now! I’ll shop till I drop. Till the two legs buckle beneath me in Anderson McAuley’s. I might even open my own shop! I’ll get away from this hateful house and all the years I’ve wasted in it.’
‘Yes, Mummy,’ said Julie.
Doolally, all the way.
Poor Julie, can you even begin to imagine what that night must have been like for her? And the child still at primary school? So you’ve got to make allowances for the woman, haven’t you?
Anyway.
You’d think Sidney Sultana would have done the decent thing at the end and made it look like an accident. Wouldn’t you say that was the least he could have done after what he had put them through? So that Charlotte and Julie would be well provided for by the life insurance? But no, the vile and twisted little snake had left a goodbye note pinned to the wall of the office in one of his betting shops. And he’d left most of his money to charity, for reasons which escaped everyone who knew him. So Charlotte got nothing in the heel of the hunt but a lot of averted eyes at the funeral service.
Charlotte didn’t care about the neighbours, though. Couldn’t have cared less about any of them at that point in her life. Her depression was instantly cured and she had quite a portfolio of property to sell, what with the house and the betting shops, so she was going to be fine financially. Despite the house being built the wrong way round and the betting shops being located in slightly dodgy areas. Her heart was yelping like a randy rooster under those black widow’s weeds and she couldn’t get the mourners shifted out of the mansion fast enough when Sidney was finally planted. She practically ripped the paper plates out of their hands and shoved them through the double doors of the mansion, their mouths still full of egg mayonnaise.
Later that day Charlotte took a taxi (with Julie in tow) back out to the grave and, with the aid of a litre of petrol, set fire to the bouquets the undertakers had left on Sidney’s plot for the sake of respectability. (She hadn’t ordered any.) In their place, she dropped a cardboard box containing his Hank Williams records, his bronze bust of Johnny Cash, his brown-glass ashtray that was shaped like a vintage car and his awful oil painting of the racehorse.
‘Goodbye, Sidney,’ Charlotte said softly to the burnt-out fake grass covering the grave and then she spat on it for good measure. ‘And good riddance to bad rubbish.’
It was the only time Julie had ever seen her mother spit. Charlotte always used to say that the government should reintroduce the death penalty for spitters as a clever way to rid society of all idiots and perverts (who were spitters to a man), so it was quite a shock for Julie to see her dear mater pucker up with such unfettered gusto.
Yes, marriage is a curious thing.
Which is why I didn’t quiz Julie in the Café Vaudeville that day when she told me she was leaving Gary. You can’t really blame Julie for not wanting to marry Gary, can you? Even though he was gorgeous in every way and even though he treated her like a princess. As they say nowadays, Julie has some ‘serious issues’ wh
ere marriage is concerned. I mean, I’ve seen Julie blanch visibly at the mere mention of Savoy cabbage. And she won’t travel in a dark blue BMW, no matter who’s driving it. And we don’t use brown envelopes at Dream Weddings. At the time in question we had pale blue and pale pink ones printed up specially with our logo on the top-left corner. Every cloud, mind you.
Julie’s a magnificent wedding planner, the best in the business. Why? Because she thinks weddings are a complete and utter waste of time. She thinks any woman who wants to get married is soft in the head.
‘Half of all marriages end in divorce,’ she says, ‘and most of the marriages that do survive are like those dried-up Cheddar cheese sandwiches. Dreary but better than an empty plate. Well, I won’t be stuck with a dried-up sarnie, Mags, no way. I want a lifetime pass to the gourmet buffet table.’
May I remind you those are Julie’s words, not mine.
I reckon guys like Sidney are few and far between, and that most men are only doing their best. But that’s why Julie never gets flustered if the cars are late, never gets in a twist about the flowers or the catering arrangements. Because at the end of the day, she just doesn’t honestly care about weddings. She does a good job for her clients, I’m not saying she’s an absolute maverick. She does care about the reputation of Dream Weddings and she works long hours and most of the time the brides are delighted with our services. But she retains enough cynicism to stop herself from getting completely obsessed with the subject. And I don’t think anyone in her shoes would be any different.
Shame about Gary, though. I wasn’t looking forward to that little chat, I can tell you.
5. The House on Eglantine Avenue
I had a great life as a teenager. Oh, boy, did I enjoy myself or what? In the space of about six months when I was eighteen I discovered liquid eyeliner, the coolest group on the planet (Bauhaus), the unbeatable combination of Pernod and blackcurrant and the sensuous caresses of my husband-to-be, Bill Grimsdale. Every night of the week, or so it seemed, I was down at the Limelight Club pushing and shoving my way through a sea of rock fans, cigarette smoke and raging hormones. I got kicked in the face once by a crazy mosher high on adrenaline and possibly drugs and I didn’t even care. The music was so loud it interfered with my heartbeat and sometimes I forgot to breathe if there was a really good song on. I loved the Pixies, the Banshees, the Fall. Basically anything that was loud, outrageous and exploding with emotion and angst.
