She maintained her positive mood for the rest of the journey and arrived in Doonlara at just after four o’clock. She turned off the town’s main street and continued along the small side road where her parents’ house was located. (Town was, of course, overstating things, she reminded herself. Doonlara was just a jumble of houses, a few small shops, three pubs and a petrol station.) Pat and Alice’s house, about five kilometres past the garage, was a picture-perfect bungalow. It nestled in the shelter of low hills, backed by purple mountains and with views towards a navy-blue lake that glittered under the afternoon sun. Brightly coloured flowers, in both carefully tended flower beds and glazed ceramic pots, were a striking contrast to the whitewashed walls and slate roof. The front door, beneath an arched porch, was pillar-box red.
Sheridan could hear the barking of the dogs before she rapped on the enormous brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. When her mother opened the door, Sheridan had to pat and greet Cannon and Ball, the two excited terriers, before she could even say hello to the trim woman standing in front of her.
Country life suited Alice, who was wearing a pair of fawn jodhpurs and an emerald-green polo-neck jumper. The vibrancy of the curly red hair, which Sheridan had inherited, had faded over the years, but Alice’s eyes were as clear and sharp as ever and she looked far more energetic than Sheridan herself currently felt. She hugged her mother, then patted the dogs again as she followed Alice into the kitchen at the back of the house.
The sun slanted through the Velux windows in the kitchen roof and gave natural warmth to a room that was surprisingly modern. The floor was tiled in ivory marble and the units were high-gloss gunmetal grey. The table was dark wood, with brushed metal surrounds. Sheridan sat on one of the high-backed chairs and looked through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the garden beyond. Like the front of the house, it was a patchwork of colour against the darker mountains. She could still see the lake too. It was, she thought, spectacularly beautiful. But the space made her feel almost agoraphobic. She was used to being surrounded by buildings and roads. Wide-open country unnerved her.
Alice opened the patio doors and shooed the dogs outside, where they barked in protest but then settled down in a pool of sunlight to gnaw at a couple of ham bones.
‘Your dad’s up at the golf club,’ she told Sheridan as she brought a pot of tea to the table. ‘He’ll be back this afternoon.’
‘Are you still working there?’ Sheridan took a Jaffa Cake from the tin that was already on the table.
‘Of course. It’s a handy number for me, three days a week.’
‘Does it mean you can fiddle his handicap?’ asked Sheridan.
Alice looked shocked and her daughter laughed.
‘Only joking,’ she said.
‘You don’t joke about things like that,’ said Alice sternly. ‘Now, come on, tell me how you’re getting on. Have you sent your CV to everyone who matters?’
‘Of course I have,’ said Sheridan. ‘I’m not stupid, you know.’
‘I never said you were,’ Alice told her. ‘But sometimes people don’t think outside the box about things like this.’
‘Mam, I’m so far outside the box I’m catching pneumonia,’ said Sheridan. ‘There isn’t anyone in the media who hasn’t seen my CV by now. But all the newspapers are struggling because so many people want their news over the internet for free. Even though I’ve also sent my CV to loads of radio stations, I’m useless at broadcasting. Remember when I did that match report for the radio station? The stuff of nightmares!’
Sheridan had been covering a League of Ireland soccer match in Limerick and had been asked to do a report on air for a local station. But she’d stumbled her way through it, uncomfortable with speaking instead of writing, thinking that her words sounded stupid and contrived.
‘It was your first attempt,’ said Alice.
‘And last,’ observed Sheridan. ‘They never asked me again.’
‘Well that doesn’t mean you won’t be asked in the future.’
‘Maybe not, but broadcasting is under the cosh a bit too,’ she told her mother. ‘It’s an industry in a state of flux.’
‘Perhaps you should think of something else.’ Alice got up and took an ironing board from a built-in cupboard. She set it up and plugged in an iron. Then she brought in a basket of dried clothes from the utility room beside the kitchen. ‘That’s what I mean by outside the box.’
‘I’ve been racking my brain,’ said Sheridan. ‘But I’m not sure what else I’m good at.’
‘You’re talking like a loser.’ Alice banged the iron on to a jersey. ‘I can’t believe a daughter of mine is talking like a loser.’
‘Not like a loser,’ protested Sheridan. ‘God knows, I haven’t been brought up that way. But I’ve got to be a realist.’
‘Listen, if I was a realist I wouldn’t have put money on the Doonlara team to beat Killorglin last week,’ said Alice. ‘I wouldn’t have backed Ireland against France in the World Cup qualifiers. I wouldn’t have bought tickets for the All-Ireland final because I’d’ve been afraid Kerry wouldn’t make it.’
‘Ma – I hate to break it to you, but Kerry didn’t win that final. And Ireland lost against France.’
‘But Doonlara beat Killorglin,’ said Alice in satisfaction. ‘And a great game it was too.’
‘One out of three isn’t exactly a storming result,’ remarked Sheridan.
‘The Ireland–France was from the heart, not the head. But I put the money on Kerry before the season even started. So they had to win a lot of matches to get to Croke Park in the first place. Losing the final was irrelevant in the end.’
‘It’s not the same thing,’ said Sheridan.
‘It’s a winning mentality,’ Alice told her. ‘I have it. Your dad does too. So does Con. And Matt. But you – you’re afraid of losing, and that’s why you don’t always win.’
‘For crying out loud!’ Sheridan looked at her mother in exasperation. ‘Everyone else in the whole world thinks I’m a winner, except you.’
‘Listen to me,’ said Alice fiercely. ‘You’re in competition with everyone else who’s unemployed and you’re trying to win a job and you can’t take any prisoners. You’ve got to go out there and beat off the competition and not be afraid of losing.’
‘I’m not afraid of losing.’
‘Of course you are. You always were.’
‘That’s nonsense.’
‘It’s the truth.’ Alice folded the jersey and started on another.
‘It’s bullshit.’ Sheridan found, to her horror, that her lip was trembling. She certainly wasn’t going to cry in front of her mother. That would mark her as a loser for sure.
‘Watch your language, Sheridan Gray.’ Then Alice’s tone softened. ‘I just want what’s best for you, that’s all. I don’t want you to undersell yourself.’
‘I don’t,’ Sheridan told her. ‘But I can’t work miracles either.’
She brought her bag into the guest room and sat on the bed, staring out of the window at the dark mountains. She knew her mother was trying to be helpful, but sometimes, she thought wearily, helpful mothers gave you nothing but grief.
When she went back to the kitchen again, Alice had finished the ironing and was sitting at the table, a laptop open in front of her.
‘I’m working on some stuff for the golf club,’ she told Sheridan. ‘I’m nearly finished.’
Sheridan had brought her laptop with her and she opened it too. ‘Take your time,’ she said. ‘I’ll check my emails.’ She was hoping that someone would have contacted her about a job so that she could prove her winning status to her mother, but her inbox contained the usual amount of spam, chain mails and jokes. She busied herself with clearing it out in an effort to look like she was doing something useful.
‘Any job offers?’ asked Alice.
‘Not this time.’
‘We have to come up with a plan,’ Alice told her.
Sheridan said nothing. It wasn’t as thou
gh she didn’t have a plan of her own. It wasn’t as though she’d given up trying. She kept her eyes fixed on the screen as her fingers flew over the keyboard. But she was simply hitting random keys and not doing anything useful at all.
Alice made fish pie for dinner and it was ready when Pat finally came home. He left his golf gear at the back of the house and walked into the kitchen in his stockinged feet.
‘Your ma loves her tiles,’ he told Sheridan as he gave her a hug. ‘It’s more than my life’s worth to walk on them with my golf shoes. She never worried about stuff like that in Dublin.’
‘These tiles were very expensive,’ Alice told him, her eyes twinkling. ‘And you’d have them ruined if I didn’t keep an eye on you.’
Pat and Alice joked with each other while Sheridan watched them. There was no doubt that they were still as much in love with each other now as they’d been when they’d married over thirty-five years earlier. She asked herself if it was possible these days to love the same person for such a long time. If she and Griff had married, would they have stuck together for thirty years or more? Of course, she would have gone into it expecting it to last for ever, but how realistic was that? She shivered suddenly. Until that moment she’d been feeling as miserable about losing Griff as she’d felt about losing her job, but now she was relieved. She’d loved him, sure. But did she have ten years’ worth of love for him? Twenty? Thirty? Was breaking up with Griff the first blessing in disguise of her unemployed state?
‘So how’s the job-hunting going?’ asked Pat as Alice served up the fish pie.
Sheridan told him the same as she’d told her mother, and Pat, too, started talking about plans and how to make herself stand out among everyone else who was looking for a job.
‘I do know all this, Dad,’ she said.
‘Yes but you’ve got to put it into practice,’ he told her. ‘Fail to prepare . . .’
‘. . . prepare to fail,’ Sheridan finished. She knew the phrase well. It was one that both her parents had used incessantly when she and her brothers were smaller. The idea had been drilled into them.
‘Success isn’t everything . . .’ Alice continued.
‘. . . you can learn from failure.’ Sheridan completed another of her mother’s favourite sayings. ‘But you know what, Mam, there was nothing I needed to learn from being made redundant.’
‘You’re having to learn how to fall back on your own resources,’ said Alice.
‘Hum. And that’s good, why?’
‘It’s always good to learn how to fend for yourself,’ Alice said. ‘Your team might let you down but you have to keep going. You have to have a fallback plan. Your flatmate, Talia, did. She was out of the stalls quickly. Smart girl. You should’ve had your eye on the ball like her.’
‘I thought I had.’
‘That won’t happen to you again. And so you’ll know to grab whatever opportunity you get in the future and use it to make a name for yourself again.’
‘I was sure I had made myself a name,’ said Sheridan. ‘The problem is that it clearly wasn’t good enough.’
Pat looked thoughtful. ‘You did well at the City Scope but you didn’t build on it. If it had been Matt or Con, they’d probably have moved on after landing a few exclusive interviews.’
‘Dad! It was a good job. It was a good paper. It still is a good paper. There was no need to move on.’
‘Y’see, you want to get ahead, you want to do well but you’re always a little behind the game,’ said Pat. ‘I don’t know why that is.’
‘Everyone at the Scope thought I was competitive and hard hitting,’ Sheridan told her. ‘It’s only in this family that I’m considered soft and useless.’
Neither of her parents rushed to correct her, which made her sigh in exasperation.
‘I’ll get a job,’ she told them. ‘I know I will. When I first went into journalism, I wanted to be a crime reporter. I need to look at those possibilities again. And other areas too. I was concentrating too much on sport, but there’s much more to journalism than that.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ said Pat. ‘That’s a Gray speaking. And I bet you’ll find a great story to catapult you to the top.’
‘I’ll do my best. Now, can we stop talking about me and my lack of work and concentrate on something else instead?’
‘Of course,’ agreed Alice. ‘But just one more thing – what does Griff have to say about your situation?’
Sheridan kept her voice as even as possible as she told her parents about her split with him. Alice frowned and Pat’s eyes darkened.
‘Well, I know things are different these days, but I’m glad he didn’t move in with you if he’d no intention of marrying you,’ said her mother. ‘Girls are so foolish now. They let men have what they want and then the man gets bored with them and moves on. The rules of the game have never changed as far as fellas are concerned.’
‘Mam!’ Sheridan felt herself blush. Alice was outspoken and didn’t care what she said in front of Pat. But Sheridan really didn’t want her dissecting her love life as well as her career in front of her father.
‘It has to be said.’ Alice ignored her daughter’s pained expression. ‘Eventually most women want to settle down with a decent guy. But all this moving in together, drifting along doesn’t help things. Because there’s always a time when he gets itchy feet, and unless there’s something to fight for, he can just walk away.’
‘Did you get itchy feet, Dad?’ Sheridan turned to Pat, sudden amusement in her eyes.
‘In fairness, I was very lucky with your father,’ Alice conceded, while her husband grinned. ‘But men can be foolish, and there were always potential opportunities for him to make a holy show of himself. Fortunately for him, I was at his back. His team manager, keeping him on the straight and narrow.’
Pat guffawed and Sheridan couldn’t help laughing.
‘Is she right?’ she asked her father.
‘Ah, look, I like to let her think so,’ Pat replied. ‘The manager likes to think she’s in charge. But she’d be nothing without the talent.’
Alice threw a cushion at her husband, who ducked so that it bounced harmlessly on to the floor. Alice was smiling as she picked it up. And Sheridan knew that her parents had a unique relationship. She doubted hers and Griff’s would ever have been as strong. But, dammit, she would’ve liked him to have wanted to try.
Chapter 8
The apartment seemed very empty when she got back from Kerry. Other times when she’d been away and returned, she’d have come back to the lingering aroma of the Indian food that Talia loved but she didn’t, and which her friend always had when she wasn’t around. Talia would’ve left clothes or papers or various bits and pieces around the place, which would have given the apartment the feeling of being lived in. But now, as Sheridan stood in the living room and thought about the possibility of becoming a crime reporter, she felt very alone.
The next few days were difficult. She tried to tell herself to make the most of her days of freedom, but she was worried that her career was over and that people considered her a has-been. The Irish Journal had contacted her to say that they had nothing at the moment but that they’d keep her information on file. She’d got a similar response from other places to which she’d sent her CV (although most of them hadn’t bothered to reply at all, which was very disheartening). She constantly reminded herself that it was important to be motivated and enthusiastic and to scan the newswires and the internet for possible stories to chase down, yet she was finding it difficult even to wake up. There didn’t seem to be any urgency to her life any more. She wanted to be out there and doing something. But couldn’t summon up the energy. And there was nobody to pester her about it either.
She was running out of money and allowing herself to fall apart, and she had to do something about it, she thought as she lay in bed a few mornings later. Her mother would be right in thinking that she was a loser. She was allowing the loser mentality to catch hold of her. Just becaus
e things weren’t going to plan right now didn’t mean that they wouldn’t in the future.
Today, she told herself as she pulled on a T-shirt and jogging pants, today will be the day that something brilliant comes up. Or something quite good. Or even something adequate. Or, she thought, as she tugged a brush through her wiry hair, anything at all that would make her feel like a useful human being again.
It had been a while since she’d gone for a run, and the exercise calmed her. When she got back to the apartment she sat down and edited her CV, making herself sound like the sports-writing equivalent of Carl Bernstein. By the time she’d finished, she reckoned that only a fool wouldn’t employ her. For the first time since she’d been made redundant, she felt as though she’d done something useful with her day. She saved all her files as PDFs and then sent them as emails to the sports editors of every newspaper she could think of. Then she sat back and waited for the phone to ring.
She was playing World Cup football on her Wii when finally it did. Her heart jumped with excitement, and then she realised it was Talia. She took a deep breath and switched on her bright, optimistic voice.
‘How’s it going?’ asked her friend.
‘Grand. How are you?’
‘Och, fine.’ Talia had already developed a bit of a northern twang to her voice. ‘It’s very different, but I like it. Miss the Scope – and Dublin, of course – but it’s not too bad here.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. We miss you in the big smoke too.’
‘How’s the job-hunting coming along?’
‘Still looking,’ Sheridan said lightly. ‘I’m putting together some new material and I’m going to pitch some possible stories to editors. I think I’ll end up freelancing, it’s the way the whole industry is going. Nobody seems to be hiring right now.’
Better Together Page 9
