Something in Common

by Meaney, Roisin

  She put the half-empty bottle down gently and bowed her head to rest it on her knees. Her sobs shuddered from her and merged with the sound of the group on the street outside who had gathered with their collection buckets to sing about angels they had heard on high.

  1978

  Sarah

  ‘This is awful.’

  Neil made no response.

  ‘This book review, it’s horrible, really cruel. Here, have a look.’

  He glanced at the newspaper page but made no move to take it. ‘What’s the book?’

  ‘It’s a debut novel, a thriller, and Helen O’Dowd is tearing it to shreds. Imagine how he must feel.’

  ‘How who must feel?’ His eyes drifting back to the sports section.

  ‘The author, of course. I hate when you only half listen to me. Read it and see – it’s awful.’

  ‘I’m already reading,’ he pointed out mildly. ‘Or trying to. I’ll get to it later.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She dropped the newspaper onto the bed as Helen Reddy began to sing. ‘Oh, I love this, it’s so spooky.’ She reached out and turned up the radio before leaning back to lift his arm and slide under it. ‘I adore Sunday mornings, don’t you?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  She turned to look up at his face. The rectangle of the window was reflected in both lenses of his glasses. ‘You have a lot to put up with, don’t you?’

  He smiled, eyes still on the paper.

  ‘I never let you read in peace, do I?’

  ‘Nope.’

  She grinned as she settled into his chest. ‘But you married me, so you’re stuck with me forever.’

  ‘Or until divorce comes in.’

  ‘In holy Catholic Ireland? Not a hope.’ She eyed the newspaper section she’d just discarded, lying in a crumpled heap on the eiderdown. ‘I’ve a good mind to write to her.’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I feel like writing to Helen O’Dowd and saying I thought she was far too harsh.’

  Neil lowered his paper. ‘My dear soft-hearted wife, the woman is reviewing a book. It’s her job to tell it like it is, even if it’s not what you want to hear. If you had your way, nobody would ever say anything vaguely negative, in case someone’s feelings were hurt.’

  ‘But she’s being so cruel,’ Sarah insisted, reaching again for the page. ‘Just listen to this bit – If he wants to write so badly, let him keep a diary: that way, nobody else has to read it. Now you have to agree that that’s just downright nasty. It doesn’t add anything to the review. Stop smiling.’

  ‘It’s funny, though. Helen O’Dowd has a sharp tongue, you know that, but she’s also entertaining. She loves to court a bit of controversy – it’s what makes her interesting. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Well, I’ve read it now, and I think it’s too harsh.’

  ‘And have you read the book she’s talking about?’

  ‘That’s beside the point. Even if it isn’t much good, the review is still cruel.’ She folded the newspaper. ‘I’m going to write and protest. I think it needs to be said, even if I’m the only one saying it. It might make her choose her words more carefully in future. She can still tell the truth, but in a kinder way.’

  ‘Well, if you feel that strongly, go ahead.’

  ‘I will.’ She nestled into him again. ‘Imagine if it was my book she was talking about.’

  He laughed. ‘You’d be inconsolable – probably want to top yourself.’

  She slapped his arm lightly. ‘Don’t joke about that, it’s not funny. But I would be devastated. I’ll be terrified to even show it to a publisher, in case they turn me down.’

  ‘I know you will,’ he said, folding his page in two, ‘but let’s not worry about that until you finish it.’

  ‘No.’ She turned her head to see the clock. ‘Damn, I’d better get up. I hate working on Sunday. Why did I ever agree to it?’

  ‘Because they asked you to, and you’re incapable of saying no.’

  She sighed as she pushed back the eiderdown. ‘They said it was temporary, just until they replaced Austin.’

  ‘Of course they did, because they know you won’t complain.’

  She searched with her feet for slippers. ‘Well, they might be short of funds or something. I wouldn’t like to put them under pressure.’

  ‘Perish the thought that you’d ever upset them like that.’

  Standing in the shower, she imagined the book’s author opening his Sunday newspaper and discovering what Helen O’Dowd thought of his first book. Probably slaved over it for months, years even. His wife going out to work to support them maybe, both of them hoping he’d make it as a writer. The excitement when he’d got his publishing deal – they’d probably gone out to dinner to celebrate – and now this.

  Oh, she knew there were plenty of bigger things to worry about: the Lebanon torn apart by war, the IRA still planting their bombs, horrible racial prejudice in South Africa – but this mattered too, it mattered a lot to the author.

  She pictured herself in his shoes, her book out there for all the Helen O’Dowds of the world to say whatever hurtful things they felt like saying about it. She’d die – she’d be completely destroyed if a book she’d written was slated like that.

  Then again, at the rate she was going, Helen O’Dowd would probably have retired long before Sarah’s book got finished, let alone published. Over two years since she’d begun plotting it, and less than fifty thousand words written – about half as many as she needed, according to any writer’s guide she looked at. So hard to get it right, her plot constantly changing as she ran out of steam with a storyline, but she was determined to keep at it.

  She rinsed shampoo from her hair. She’d write to Helen O’Dowd when she got home from work, before she had a chance to forget. Her letter would probably be tossed into the nearest bin – book reviewers probably didn’t take kindly to criticism, despite being well able to dish it out themselves – but the act of writing it would make Sarah feel better. She’d have spoken out against an injustice; she’d have taken a stand.

  And starting tomorrow she’d get back to her own book, write for at least an hour a day, rather than hopping in and out of it at random. It didn’t even have a title yet – or, rather, it had had a succession of titles, all of which she’d rejected one by one.

  She towelled herself dry and reached for the talc, thinking of the five-hour shift that lay ahead of her in the nursing home’s stuffy kitchen. Sunday lunch of roast chicken for twenty-seven, roast and boiled potatoes, peas, mashed carrot and parsnip. Apple tart and custard for dessert, a batch of raisin scones for their tea later on, after their Sunday visitors had gone home.

  Poor Martina, the only resident with no visitors at all. She’d never married, never had children, but there had to be a niece or nephew, or a cousin maybe, who was aware of her existence. How sad to think that nobody in the world cared enough about her to come and see her. You could hardly blame her for being a bit cranky.

  On Sunday afternoons Martina steered clear of the two common rooms, where the others congregated to show off the sons and daughters and in-laws who dropped in with boxes of Double Centre and plastic bags of dog-eared magazines. Unless the weather was unusually warm, Martina generally stayed in her room – and for the three Sundays she’d been filling in for Austin, Sarah had paid her a visit.

  Martina would be sitting by the window where she always sat. ‘Is that you heading home?’ she’d ask, and Sarah would tell her no, not quite, she’d just taken the currant loaves from the oven and was letting them cool down before putting a bit of icing on them. And without waiting for an invitation she’d take the chair opposite Martina and stay for a quarter of an hour or so, and Martina wouldn’t seem in the least bit pleased to see her. But she had nobody else, and Sarah couldn’t bear the thought of her sitting alone there all afternoon.

  Back in the bedroom she pulled on cream cotton trousers and a navy top. Didn’t matter what she wore to work, with a
big white apron to throw over it as soon as she got there.

  Neil watched her from the bed. ‘You’ll be home about half five so.’

  ‘Yes, should be.’ She crossed the room and bent to kiss his mouth. ‘Try to behave till then.’

  His hand cupped the back of her head. ‘Only if I can be very bad afterwards.’

  ‘We’ll see about that.’

  She left the house and got her bike from the shed, smiling already at the thought of their evening ahead, just the two of them. Still wonderful to think of herself as someone’s wife. Engaged on her twenty-sixth birthday, a year after they’d met. Married the following September, just five months ago. Despite Christine’s predictions of the nursing home being a non-starter for meeting men, St Sebastian’s – and, of course, Stephen Flannery – had brought Sarah and Neil together.

  Poor Stephen had been so delighted with the engagement, so thrilled that he’d played his part. ‘Just call me Cupid,’ he’d said as Sarah had held his trembling hands in hers, the day they’d broken the news to him. Gone from them now, bless the man – a massive stroke three months before the wedding had denied him the chance to be her father-in-law.

  She wheeled her bike down the front path and set off. Still cycling to work, even though Neil’s house – their house – was five miles further from St Sebastian’s than her parents’. A round trip of fifteen miles wasn’t a problem for her: she had grown up on a bike, had cycled all over the county as a teenager. Rain and wind were challenges, that was all. And, of course, cycling that distance every day kept her figure trim – no mean feat when she had to cook and bake so much, and had so little willpower.

  Brian had taught Christine to drive when she was eighteen. Sarah remembered her crawling down the road behind the wheel of his battered blue Anglia, traded in since for a Morris Minor. He’d offered to teach Sarah too – and so had Neil, when they were going out – but she had no desire to learn. A bike would always be her transport of choice, no matter what the weather did. And since she’d moved house her route to work was different, so she no longer crossed the bridge where she’d met the woman in the sheepskin coat, the day she’d had the interview for St Sebastian’s.

  Three years ago now – where had the time gone? So much had changed since then, her life so much better now: she was in a fulfilling job and married to a wonderful man. And considering that she and Neil had met at St Sebastian’s, you could say that the day of her interview had been the beginning of a whole new future for her.

  She wondered if the curly-haired woman was any happier now. Was she still alive? Had she found peace of mind? Sarah hoped so.

  For the rest of the day, the letter she planned to write to Helen O’Dowd was on her mind. As she slit scones in two for the residents’ tea, phrases hopped around in her head. No need to have been so blunt … debut novelist, surely you could have given him a chance … very hurtful, after all his hard work—

  ‘I forget where the spare butter dishes are kept.’

  Eve was seventeen and not blessed with any great initiative, but she was all that was to be had on Sundays. Sarah indicated a press. ‘In there. Give them a rinse before you use them. They might be dusty.’

  Anyone else would have opened doors and found the butter dishes. But Eve was young, and no doubt resented that she was stuck in the kitchen of a nursing home when her friends were probably off enjoying themselves. Maybe there was a boyfriend on the scene: she’d be quite nice-looking if she smiled more often.

  ‘You can slip away a bit early if you want,’ Sarah told her, ‘as soon as the tea prep is done. I’ll manage the rest.’

  The rest was washing down the worktops, putting tea towels and napkins to steep overnight, planning tomorrow’s lunch menu and shopping list. Easier, almost, if Eve wasn’t underfoot, asking questions she really should be able to answer herself.

  And Neil wouldn’t mind if Sarah was slightly late getting home; give him a chance to sort his records alphabetically, like he was always threatening to do, T. Rex after Queen after Dylan after Bowie.

  ‘Cut the butter into narrower strips,’ Sarah said, watching as Eve thumped a solid half-pound onto each dish. ‘Some of the residents are a little shaky. They find it easier to manage the small bits.’

  She was briefly tempted to point out that this was at least the third time she’d issued that particular instruction, but she held her tongue. Kinder simply to repeat it, and hope that it eventually sank in.

  It was just as easy to be nice as to be nasty. Maybe Helen O’Dowd needed to learn that.

  Helen

  ‘Don’t play with your food.’

  ‘I don’t like it. It’s sour.’

  Helen took an orange segment from her daughter’s plate and ate it. ‘It’s fine. Anyway, there’s nothing else till I go shopping, so you’ll have to put up with it.’

  ‘There’s biscuits.’

  Helen sighed, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘Alright, you can have one.’

  ‘One is no good. Why can’t I have two?’

  ‘Because you shouldn’t be having any. And brush your teeth after.’

  Dramatic groan. ‘I hate brushing my teeth – it’s boring.’

  ‘Well, you’d hate the dentist more, trust me.’

  A battle every morning to get through breakfast, Alice fighting her every step of the way. Turned seven last week: what would she be like at seventeen?

  School was a different kind of battleground. Alice had been a reluctant student from the start, her teachers each year complaining to Helen of untidy work and disruptive behaviour. Her copybooks, within a week of use, dog-eared and torn, every margin filled with doodles of cats and elephants and horses.

  Since she’d gone into First Class in September, spelling and sums tests had become part of every Friday, the corrected tests being sent home for parental signature on Monday. Alice’s results in both subjects were invariably disastrous.

  ‘Why don’t you make more of an effort?’ Helen would demand. ‘Didn’t you get those for homework?’ and Alice’s only response would be a shrug – and Helen would let it go, knowing she was partly to blame.

  Other parents, no doubt, sat dutifully beside their children, making sure that the homework was presentable. Helen couldn’t imagine anything more boring, so her supervision of Alice’s homework was sporadic at best. Serve her right if Alice got three out of ten for spellings, and not a single sum right.

  Alice had Cormac’s dimple, tucked into her left cheek. She had his long limbs and pale skin and grey eyes – and, so far, not an ounce of his musical ability. Cormac had held her, aged two, on his lap at the piano that his grandmother had owned, and she’d slapped the keys with her flattened-out palms. Nothing much had changed since then.

  When Helen, eighteen months after his death, had found herself able to open the piano again and had plinked out ‘Oh Can I Wash My Father’s Shirt’ and ‘Chopsticks’, Alice had looked up briefly and regarded her mother solemnly before returning to the doll’s house Cormac’s mother had got her for her fourth birthday. Not musical, whatever about her possible artistic leanings.

  Becoming a mother a week after her twenty-ninth birthday hadn’t been an easy transition for Helen. Once the horror of the birth had subsided, she found herself confronted with a creature whose tiny bowel spat out disgusting emissions with alarming regularity, who belched and shrieked and farted, and slept when she felt like it, and spewed milky gouts onto Helen’s pyjama top; whose little red wrinkled face, just before tears, resembled a seriously annoyed Winston Churchill’s.

  The idea of breastfeeding repelled Helen: the sight of other babies clamped to their mothers’ nipples reminded her of nothing more than giant gorging leeches. It was not for her, despite the coaxing of the younger nurses, who promised it would help her get her figure back more quickly, and also help her bond with the baby.

  Helen hadn’t given a damn about her figure – before the pregnancy she’d never weighed more than eight and a half stone, despite eat
ing and drinking whatever she wanted. Alice hadn’t caused her to gain much more than a stone, everyone exclaiming how neat she was, her jeans still fitting up to the sixth month. She’d presumed she’d be back to normal in no time, and she’d been right.

  And as for bonding … she’d regarded the little downy head of her days-old daughter – for once, blessedly silent and emission-free. She’d run a finger along the ludicrously soft cheek, she’d cradled the tiny feet in one hand and conceded that, yes, there was some feeling within her for this small creature. Not the overwhelming, all-consuming love that Hollywood and magazines would have you believe came rushing in once the nightmare of childbirth had passed – not that flood of emotion, not yet anyway – but there was some positive connection that would in all likelihood grow along with the child.

  And it had, to a degree. Helen and Cormac had muddled along, in the manner, she imagined, of all new parents. They’d had good days and bad days, and Alice passed all the usual milestones. In due course she figured out how to roll onto her stomach. Eventually she sat up on her own. Then she crawled, and then she walked.

  As time passed, she learned to say mama and dada, she pointed to her nose when questioned as to its whereabouts, and she began to string words together, to form them into some semblance of a sentence.

  Of course there were times when her actions didn’t cause her parents to applaud. On one memorable occasion she emptied the contents of Helen’s makeup purse into the toilet bowl, where they lay unnoticed for several hours. Another time she covered the bottom half of her white bedroom wall in pink crayon scribbles, and once she poured almost an entire jar of honey into Cormac’s unattended, and much-loved, slippers.

  He was always ready to forgive Alice – She’s still a baby, she doesn’t know any better – or at the most issue a gentle scolding, but Helen would look at her little daughter and feel nothing but a strong desire to smack. She’d watch Cormac speaking quietly and lovingly to Alice, and wonder if whoever had put her together had forgotten to include a fully-formed maternal gene.