by Sharon Owens
Next morning, Bill had gone to work by the time I woke up, my head throbbing with a massive hangover. My cardigan had been taken off and laid on the dressing-table chair. My lovely new boots were side by side under the bed. Not a mark on them after the day I’d had. I guess that shows you what top-quality boots they were. I was wearing my slinky black PJ bottoms and there was a big glass of water on the bedside cabinet. And a basin on the floor alongside a box of tissues and a couple of old towels spread over the carpet. Memories came filtering back to me slowly, very slowly. Oh, dear, I had asked for double gins the night before and I’d had five of them! Ten gins! And I’d been moaning about my woes to the barman like some middle-aged man having a mid-life crisis. What a madwoman, I thought with a flash of burning shame, before convincing myself that pub measures were tiny and therefore I’d had only about five proper gins. Which wasn’t too bad considering the pressure I’d been under in recent days. And I daresay the staff have heard it all before and they only half listen anyway. There was a note from Bill on the pillow beside me. Yawning, I opened it.
Bad news.
Gary had crashed his car on the way down to Galway. I really shouldn’t have told him like that, I thought, feeling a severe twinge of guilt. Luckily, he hadn’t been seriously hurt, though his leg was broken badly, with multiple fractures, and he’d had a spot of concussion. A lorry had pulled out in front of him and he’d hit a telegraph pole, swerving and ending up on his side in a field of potatoes. He’d phoned Bill from the hospital first thing that morning to let us know he was okay. I thought it was strange of Gary to phone our house, but most likely he wanted me to pass the message on to Julie. Poor Gary, still trying to make contact with Julie even from the misery of his hospital bed. He’d been taken to Drogheda General at the time but was soon to be transferred to Belfast by ambulance. The car was a write-off. Bill said he would leave it up to me whether Julie was notified or not. He seemed to think it would be a good idea to leave a message for her at reception in the spa, but he didn’t think we should get involved beyond that. I immediately phoned the spa and left a message for Julie and then, it being a Saturday, I crawled out of bed and ventured downstairs to see what my family were up to.
More bad news.
Alicia-Rose was dancing round the kitchen waving a letter in her hand. Singing a pop song by Men At Work. Turns out she’d secretly applied for a year’s studentexchange programme in Australia and had just been accepted. Oh, goody. One of my precious, gorgeous children was leaving home for the first time. The start of the end of my perfect family life. No, no, no! Suddenly, I stopped caring about Julie altogether.
11. A Souvenir from County Galway
Oh, Julie! Julie Sultana, what were you thinking of?
I mean, I’d almost stopped caring about Julie. Because of the shock and anxiety caused by Alicia-Rose’s proposed trip to the Land Down Under, any interest in my boss’s personal life from that point onwards was purely academic. Well, that was the plan anyway.
Get this.
Julie got my message all right about Gary’s car accident and in a rare fit of compassion she decided to come home to Belfast and make it up with him. For a while. Just until his leg mended. I couldn’t believe it when I heard. If Julie was ever going to leave Gary Devine, she should have done it that day. It made no sense at all for her to cosy up to Gary again when she’d cheated on him with Jay O’Hanlon with such energy and enthusiasm. After all the hoopla she made about me telling him it was over between them, I ask you! But no, Julie must have decided her life wasn’t complicated enough at that point. So, she made it up with Gary and he was delighted. According to Julie, she just felt too sorry for Gary to dump him when his leg was broken. But I thought that she knew, deep down in her soul, that he was the man for her. Anyway, they patched things up quite easily.
I mean, Gary didn’t know about Julie sleeping with Jay and he didn’t know that Julie had told me to break it off with him, so there wasn’t much explaining to do, really. Just an apology (over the phone) for taking off to Galway without him in the first place and another apology for not filling him in years ago on the ‘Charlotte and Sidney Marital Meltdown Roadshow’. But to add a little twist to the proceedings, Julie brought Jay O’Hanlon back to Belfast with her in the white Mercedes convertible and she installed him in the all-mod-cons apartment in the converted flourmill in Saintfield. A souvenir of her stay in Galway at the spa with the shocking-pink armchairs in the foyer.
As you do.
And then she drove on over to Gary’s house, had a lovely hot bubble bath and collapsed into their rustic-style bed, exhausted.
‘Love the hair,’ Julie said to me when she popped into the lighthouse to open her mail on the Monday morning. It was her first day back at work since meeting Jay.
‘Do you think I’m too old for a blue fringe?’ I asked nervously. Julie doesn’t flatter me, as a rule. She thinks I look like ‘a gypsy matriarch in mourning for her wildcard husband’, most of the time. But she doesn’t mind because I make her look so good, by comparison.
‘Na. Go for it, kiddo. Forty is the new thirty, Mags. Or, in my case, twenty-five! Oh, I shouldn’t tell you this but my thighs are so stiff I can barely walk. It’s not easy doing the splits on a glass coffee table. I’m telling you, those lighthouse steps nearly killed me this morning.’
Poor Julie.
She was so proud of herself.
‘We take naughty pictures of each other,’ she said then, winking at me.
I didn’t say anything. But I sincerely hoped she was storing the Polaroids in a safe place. We didn’t want a sex scandal on our hands, after all. It would have been very bad for business. Or maybe not, but then we can’t all be Paris Hilton.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I have about a million things to ask you about these latest bookings.’
And for a few blissful hours it was business as usual. Except with Jay safely settled in front of the flat-screen telly in the Saintfield apartment, and a giant pepperoni heating through in Julie’s formerly pristine designer oven. Julie had left her toy boy some money and a copy of the Yellow Pages and told him just to phone out for a takeaway whenever he was hungry. There was a video store nearby and a small supermarket where he could buy milk and bread, cigarettes and magazines. Julie had any amount of CDs and DVDs in the sitting room and a few pieces of gym equipment in the second bedroom. So, hopefully, her new lover wouldn’t be bored. Well, not a bit of him! Jay took to Belfast life like a duck to water. He must have thought he was in heaven as he’d recently been evicted from his digs in Galway and had been kipping on a friend’s (broken) couch. He knew how to turn on the power shower in Julie’s luxury bathroom and he knew where the pretty glass mugs and the Earl Grey teabags were kept. And he didn’t know a sinner in the city. So there was no way he could get himself into any trouble while Julie wasn’t there. So far, so good.
Then, after lunch, Julie popped into the Royal Victoria Hospital on the infamous Falls Road in Belfast and prepared to wrap Gary round her little finger. She bought him a huge bunch of pink roses and a heart-shaped box of chocolate and champagne truffles. She told him she’d been a bit silly, and yes, she’d flirted with one of the barmen at the spa in a fit of crazy desperation (related to her being forty-one and only just coming to terms with it), but nothing serious had happened between them. The engagement was still on and there was nothing to worry about. Which was amazingly brass-necked of Julie considering she still had bitemarks on her bottom from her latest Sharpe-inspired role-playing afternoon with Jay. That old military jacket was seeing more action in 2005 than it ever had in its heyday, I can tell you.
Poor Gary was so love-bombed in his hospital bed he said he would give Julie the benefit of the doubt and they’d say no more about it. She kissed him tenderly and said she would go straight back to the farmhouse after work and make sure it was all shipshape. Arrange some extended staff-cover for the horses and so on, as Gary wouldn’t be able to ride for
a while. Which she did do, I have to say, and then she nipped back to Jay for a quick spanking session on the corner sofa (during which he used her bare back as a plate from which to eat his leftover pizza) before spending the night at Gary’s house, alone. Just in case Gary rang her there on the landline. And he did indeed call her, eight times to be exact. Once an hour, on the hour. For fifteen minutes, exactly.
I suppose he was becoming paranoid.
Julie told me she was having the best of both worlds at that point in her life. She had Gary’s enormous bed all to herself every night and she was happily lying in it, watching Sex and the City videos and eating microwave curries, while Gary was safely confined to the hospital. And Jay was neatly tucked away in the exclusive apartment in Saintfield. Resting up his massive doo-da for the next instalment of Sharpe-inspired antics, no doubt. Jay knew about Julie’s plan to be nice to Gary for a while, but of course Gary was in complete ignorance of the cuckoo in his nest and, to be honest with you, I had no inclination to enlighten him.
As I said, I was far too busy having nightmares about my beautiful daughter being hurt or harmed in a foreign country, and I’d more or less washed my hands of Julie’s roller-coaster love life. Emma was still refusing to eat anything except fresh fruit and stinky raw fish (some celeb-inspired crackpot diet, I expect), and she and Alexander were arguing non-stop about their future. Her thirty-nine-plus boxes of stuff had been stored in the guest room for the time being but she said she wouldn’t unpack properly till the drawing-room bedsit had been finished. I was a little bit shocked at Emma’s eagerness to live with us in a self-contained ‘flat’. Even though it’d been my idea to begin with. But then Emma let slip that her own parents had given her bedroom to her sister’s twin baby girls. So she really did have nowhere else to go. And that rankled with me too, because somehow she made it seem like she was the one doing me a favour. If you know what I mean?
‘It won’t be a dream home,’ she said more than once. ‘But it’ll do for the time being. Once I get it fixed up and some of my own accessories on display, it could actually be quite nice.’
I suppose Bill was right (yet again) when he said they’d never stand on their own two feet while we offered them a cushy alternative. Bill and I still hadn’t decided exactly what to do about the bedsit plan at that point, incidentally: whether we’d apply for another bathroom and a fully operational kitchen and so on. And some top-notch soundproofing so we couldn’t hear our own son having noisy sex. There was a general feeling of restlessness in the house as a result of all these deliberations. I said we should give them the full Monty so Emma could feed and bathe the baby on her own. And hopefully learn some mothering skills early on, without me taking over. Bill worried about the rates going up and said we might be registered somewhere as taking in lodgers. And should we charge them a nominal rent to cover electricity and so on? And would they be allowed to use the phone without paying? It was all very complicated.
Meanwhile, Emma and Alexander were up and down the stairs like yo-yos. Fighting, slamming doors, making up, having noisy sex in Alexander’s room. Emma liked to moan at the top of her voice during these make-up sessions (it did actually sound as if she was being stretched on a rack and burnt with hot irons), which is all very well if you live alone in a detached house. You can articulate all you like if you don’t have a party wall. But they weren’t living in a detached house, or even on their own, and Andrew and Christopher were absolutely fascinated by their bedroom business. I overheard them talking about it in the kitchen one morning, wondering what Alexander was doing to Emma and how they could learn to do it too. Not to Emma, no, dear! To some other poor creatures they had yet to meet. Bill started playing The Last Man in Europe constantly and frequently went to bed wearing headphones. We never got around to celebrating the blue fringe.
In my ‘spare’ time, I prepared the most delicious meals I could think of. Caesar salad with the croutons tossed in a home-made dressing to soften them up. Honeydew melon slices served with cubes of cooked chicken and garlic potatoes. Fresh cherries (individually stoned by myself) and perfect ‘school-dinner scoops’ of vanilla ice cream. Emma rejected the lot with barely a flicker of her false eyelashes and Alexander was often cross with me for trying to force-feed her.
‘Stop it, Mum, you’re upsetting her,’ he would hiss at me on the stairs. ‘She’s on a special diet this week.’
What of, I wondered. Water and air?
Two weeks passed in this bizarre fashion. I could feel a massive sulk descending on me and I couldn’t stop it. It felt like a brick getting lodged in my windpipe and it hurt to breathe. People who never sulk don’t understand this phenomenon. True sulking is not a choice you make. Sometimes, the sulk is bigger than the sulker. It takes you over, much as I imagine class A drugs do. I decided I would just sit back and watch it all unfold with my fingers over my eyes, like I do when they’re blowing up a tall chimney on the television. I spent a lot of time in the bath and a lot of money on wine and downmarket gossip magazines. I’ll say this for the so-called Z-listers (poor mites), they do make you realize you’re not the only idiot in the world, and that’s a good thing. I was so disappointed, you see. I was still smarting that my efforts to help had only made everything worse, so I was keeping my mitts off and my gob shut.
I still hadn’t met Jay at this point and I was glad about that. I worried he might be some sort of alien come to earth to mate with ‘mature’ women and I was afraid he’d have hypnotic laser beams for eyes. But then Julie rang me from Gary Devine’s farmhouse on the first Monday morning in August and asked me to drop off some cash to Jay on my way home from work, so he could go shopping for food. She couldn’t go herself as Gary was getting out of hospital that evening and she was up to her eyes in homecoming preparations. Not to mention trying to cover up a bruise on her wrist (that pesky bondage again) with heavy make-up and a handful of bangles.
‘They use the euro, you see, in the Irish Republic while we Northerners still have the British pound,’ she told me.
‘Like, yeah, I know that, Julie. I’m not as stupid as I look.’
‘And poor Jay’s broke, in any case,’ she added.
‘Surprise, surprise,’ I muttered under my breath. ‘He ought to charge you for sex, then he’d be rich.’ But of course, she heard me.
‘What’s up with you, Mags Grimsdale?’
‘Nothing. Can’t he wait till you see him tomorrow?’ I said. ‘I’m too tired for a run out to Saintfield in the back of a taxi.’
‘No, Mags, he can’t wait! There’s no food in the fridge and no vodka either.’
Oh, dear, I thought. Can’t have Jay going without his vodka.
‘Look, do me this favour now and you can come into work an hour late tomorrow, okay? Please, Mags? My very dearest friend in all the world, pretty please with ribbons on?’
‘Oh, Julie!’
So I had no choice but to raid the petty-cash tin in the lighthouse and take a taxi out to the converted flourmill in Saintfield, and give it to him. As it were.
Interesting experience.
Jay answered the door with beads of water all over his olive skin and wearing nothing but a very small pair of black underpants. Light-reflecting Gigolo underpants. I was embarrassed for him, to tell you the truth. Clearly, he was just out of the shower. And yes, he did have a massive doo-da even when it wasn’t reporting for duty, Sergeant, if you know what I mean. And yes, he did look like Sean Bean when he was twenty-five, and yes, I could definitely see the attraction. I could kind of understand why Julie was risking everything to sleep with him, though I still thought it would end in tears. But I wasn’t hanging around to fall under the spell of those laser-beam eyes, and besides, Bill would have hit the roof if he’d known what was going on. Not that he’s a prude, you understand. But he doesn’t believe in pulling other people into your own difficulties.
So I explained the money situation to Julie’s lover and then I scarpered ‘pronto’, politely turning down his inv
itation to stay for coffee. He probably thought the lot of us were as promiscuous as Julie, I seethed inwardly. Us heathen Nordies with our loose morals, the direct result of the influence of King Henry VIII, don’t you know? No bother to us to casually drop our knickers and bend over the kitchen table for a two-minute quickie with a stranger from the South. Why, it passes the time till the coffee is stewed, don’t you know? And it’s easier than finding something to talk about in these days of political correctness gone mad. Anyway, it was very rude of Jay not to wear a robe, wasn’t it? I can’t be doing with people who walk about in the nip. Such total narcissism, it’s positively offensive.
I think I must have made a mean face at Jay O’Hanlon behind his back. In fact, I know I did – I realized with (mild) shame that he’d seen me in the mirror beside the front door. As I left the apartment we both knew I thoroughly disapproved of the whole situation. That was probably why he waved goodbye to me from the sitting-room window, standing up against the glass with his legs wide open. Really, that man could have made a fortune in the porn industry. Shameless isn’t the word. The taxi driver nearly reversed over a bollard with shock. I said, ‘Don’t mind him, he’s from Galway.’
As if that explained everything.
‘Things have fairly changed down South since they got the bit of money,’ he said quietly as we set off for town again.
I just nodded.
I didn’t bother telling Julie about Jay flaunting himself before me that day. That’s probably what he wanted me to do, I reckoned. Have a catty row and fall out with her. Then he’d have had Julie all to himself. The crafty weasel. But I was smarter than that. I’d read thousands of women’s magazines over the years and I knew the first thing a bully does is isolate his woman from her friends and family so she loses her perspective and becomes more submissive to his authority. Well, I had a thirteen-year start on Jay O’Hanlon and he wasn’t getting rid of me that easily. And I didn’t want to get into the whole ‘Are you after my fella?’ thing with Julie either. That’s another curiosity about people having affairs – they always think everyone else is lusting after their paramour, don’t they? No point in telling Julie I wouldn’t want Jay O’Hanlon in my bed if he was quite literally the last man in Europe. If there’s one thing that turns me off a man, it’s arrogance.
