Something in Common

by Meaney, Roisin

Helen felt helpless in the face of her friend’s anguish. What could she offer, other than useless jars of cream and equally useless words? But maybe Sarah was glad to have someone to write to; maybe that helped in some tiny way. And surely, eventually, she’d manage to hang on to a foetus for nine months. Time enough, she was still only thirty-two.

  Helen left the bathroom and crossed the landing to Alice’s room. She opened the door and stepped over the trail of crumpled garments to pull the curtains apart and push the window open.

  ‘Time for school.’

  A muffled groan from the humped shape in the single bed.

  ‘Five minutes, and bring those clothes down.’

  A week away from twelve years old: on the cusp of her teens but already fully qualified. Sulky, monosyllabic, doing as little to help around the house as she could get away with. Helen ignored as much as she could, insisting only that Alice kept her room moderately tidy and did the washing-up after dinner. It wasn’t as if housework came top of her own agenda, so she could hardly blame her daughter’s lack of interest.

  But school was another story. Alice isn’t trying was the continuing mantra at the parent-teacher meetings, Alice can be disruptive was the variation. Alice’s dog-eared copies were littered with doodles and deletions and the red biro marks of her teachers, and comments like disappointing and could do better. Alice’s test marks hovered in the bottom quarter of the class.

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ Helen would demand, after another teacher had taken her through the catalogue of Alice’s failings. ‘You could be top of the class – you have brains to burn. Why don’t you use them, for Christ’s sake?’

  And Alice would shrug and twirl her hair around a finger and wait for her mother to finish ranting, and Helen would use all the self-control she could muster not to grab her daughter’s skinny arms and shake some sense into her. Eleven going on teenage nightmare, eyelashes catching in the muddy blonde fringe she refused to cut, frayed ends of her jeans trailing the ground, soaking water up to her knees when it rained. Nails bitten to the quick, just like her mother’s.

  Helen walked downstairs and lifted the newspaper from the floor in the hall. One of her few luxuries since becoming a journalist, having it delivered five days a week. She pushed open the door that led into the poky kitchen; unchanged, like the rest of the house, since Cormac’s time. Helen couldn’t care less about the brown Formica worktop, the gas cooker in the corner, the rickety steel-legged table pushed up against the geometric-patterned yellow and cream wallpaper, the narrow cheap presses whose doors had hung crookedly for as long as she’d known them, the cracked brown lino that Cormac’s grandmother had chosen. Décor had never interested Helen – what difference did the colour of a wall make?

  The toaster popped as Alice slouched in. Without a word she took the slice and brought it to the table and began to butter it.

  ‘Plate,’ Helen said, not lifting her eyes from the newspaper. Alice sighed loudly and took one from the stack that sat on the worktop.

  ‘Did you bring down those clothes?’

  ‘Forgot.’

  She crunched the toast, drinking nothing. Helen had long since given up trying to coax juice or milk or any liquid into her.

  Duran Duran sang on the radio. Upstairs a toilet flushed. Alice looked accusingly at her mother. ‘He’s here again.’

  Helen went on reading.

  ‘Isn’t he?’

  ‘If you mean Oliver, yes, he is.’

  Alice bit into her toast. ‘Fuck,’ she said, mouth full.

  Helen looked up sharply. ‘Watch your tongue.’

  ‘You say it all the time.’

  ‘And if I stepped off a cliff you’d do it too?’

  Alice mumbled something that Helen didn’t catch: probably wishing her mother would do just that: disappear out of her life, tumble over the edge of a cliff, never to be seen again. Helen wondered what reaction she’d get if she lowered her newspaper and said I nearly jumped off a bridge into a river once. You were three, your father had just died and I was a mess. That might wipe the sulk off Madam’s face for a few minutes.

  Helen thought of it, on the rare occasions that it crossed her mind, as the turning point: the day she’d gone out to kill herself and come home alive. She remembered taking the kitchen scissors and cutting off her hair that evening – her first step forward, she’d realised later. Her first attempt to claw herself out of Hell, to leave the nightmare behind.

  Of course, it had been several more months before she’d found the strength and inspiration to begin writing about the experiences of a shopgirl, but she believed her recovery had begun that night, after the blackest day of her life.

  And it had been writing that ultimately saved her. Discovering something she was good at, and that paid the bills, had been her redemption. With each subsequent article she’d begun to inch her way further out of the darkness. It had taken her till her mid-thirties to find her vocation, and now, nearly eight years on, she couldn’t imagine making her living in any other way.

  Where did the years go? Cormac, dead eight years last month, his daughter growing up so fast. Time galloping on, stopping for nothing, and today Helen was forty-one, like it or not. No doubt her mother would be around later with the usual little birthday remembrance, and they’d drink coffee and pretend that even one of them wanted to be there.

  Her father had retired from the bench four years earlier, working right up to his seventy-second birthday, and since then her parents had been on a Caribbean cruise and two extended holidays to the south of France. Making the most of their free time, plenty of money to spend on whatever they chose. In fairness, they’d offered to finance a holiday for Helen and Alice, and Helen had thanked them for the offer and said sometime, maybe.

  She and Alice still called once a week, still made conversation for an hour in her mother’s immaculate kitchen, still exchanged gifts at Christmas and birthdays. And still Helen felt a gulf between them, a distance that she could never imagine closing.

  The kitchen door opened again and Oliver walked in. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt, and his feet were bare. ‘Morning,’ he said to Alice, who pushed back her chair and walked past him out of the room, leaving her half-eaten toast behind.

  ‘I’m still flavour of the month then,’ he said, taking up the toast and biting into it, cocking his head at Alice’s angry stomps up the stairs. ‘Good to know.’

  Helen sipped her coffee, watching him fill a mug from the percolator. ‘I thought you were going to stay in bed until we left.’

  ‘Oh, come on, she’s eleven years old.’ He put his coffee on the table beside hers and dropped onto his haunches beside her chair. ‘You can’t let her dictate what you do,’ he said, opening the top buttons of her shirt to slide his hands inside and cup her breasts. ‘You’re the adult, she’s the kid,’ he said, squeezing gently.

  Helen ignored the desire that flared into life at his touch. He only had to look at her, damn it. ‘I’d rather keep my private life private, that’s all,’ she said lightly, drawing out of his reach and gathering plates and cups. ‘Help yourself to breakfast. There might be eggs.’

  ‘Coffee’s fine.’ He leant against the table and crossed his arms. ‘You are one sexy lady, you know that?’

  Helen put the crockery into the sink and did up her buttons. ‘So they keep telling me.’

  She hadn’t mentioned her birthday. They’d met three months earlier, at the welcome reception of a press convention to which Helen, out of curiosity, had wangled an invite.

  ‘Oliver Joyce,’ he’d said, in a voice as dark as cocoa, looking her over with lazy cat-green eyes. ‘I like your writing.’ He wore an open-necked black shirt under a grey suit, and shoes with no socks, which she’d never seen before. Dark hairs poked out from the open V of the shirt. He had a dangerous feel to him.

  ‘Any connection to James?’ Helen had asked, swimming pleasantly after a generously poured free whiskey on an empty stomach.

  He�
��d lifted one shoulder. ‘I’ve read Ulysses. Does that count?’

  It did with her. They’d sneaked off to his hotel room an hour later, gone out afterwards and eaten oysters, and washed them down with Guinness before making their way back to his room for the rest of the night. Picking Alice up from her parents’ house the following evening, Helen had felt bruised and exhausted and wonderfully satisfied.

  He was thirty, recently escaped from a six-year marriage, and living on the far side of Dublin with one of his brothers. He wrote for a variety of publications, reporting mainly on Ireland’s music scene: the phenomenon that was U2, the new Celtic punk sound of the Pogues, the family from a Donegal Gaeltacht who were bridging the gap between Irish traditional music and pop rock.

  He didn’t own a tie. His hands were always warm. He claimed to be a quarter Spanish on his mother’s side. Helen didn’t give a damn about his ancestry, or his fashion sense. He was insatiable, and he knew his way around a woman’s body – not that he limited himself to women, if you could believe him. He was the first man she’d brought to her bed since Cormac.

  Her parents would have hit the roof if they’d known – bringing a man home with Alice in the house – but Helen had little choice if she wanted his company at night.

  Not surprisingly, Alice objected.

  ‘I don’t like him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He smells. And he calls me Allie.’

  ‘It’s aftershave, and tell him you prefer Alice.’

  But Helen kept them apart as much as she could. He wasn’t permanent, she knew that. And he certainly wasn’t husband material, which was fine by her: she wasn’t looking for another of those, too afraid of the possibility of pain that love and marriage second time around would expose her to. Oliver was a diversion, no more than that. He’d leave her when somebody younger caught his attention, and she’d let him go with no regrets, or not many.

  Her life had settled into a comfortable routine, very different from the wild early years with Cormac. Mornings were generally spent researching in the library or meeting up with interviewees while Alice was at school, afternoons and evenings were for writing up articles and reading.

  Once a week there was usually a visit to the theatre to check out a play she’d been asked to review, Alice left in the capable hands of Anna, her long-term babysitter who thankfully still lived across the road. Oliver occasionally accompanied her to the plays, but more often than not she went alone.

  Maybe she’d mention him to Sarah in her next letter. She hadn’t said anything yet, sensing that the happily married Mrs Flannery wouldn’t approve. If Helen was sure of anything, it was that Sarah had saved herself for her wedding night. She could imagine her getting undressed in the bathroom, pulling on a long white nightie before presenting herself, blushing, to her new husband.

  Talk of promiscuity of any kind would probably scandalise her – but maybe it would also serve as a diversion, give her something else to think about, however briefly. And she must be used to Helen’s outspokenness by now.

  She found her car keys and opened the kitchen door. ‘Alice,’ she called, and The Smiths stopped singing upstairs. The Smiths were one of the very few things mother and daughter had in common, much to Alice’s disgust.

  ‘Have a good day,’ Oliver said, topping up his coffee. ‘I’ll give a shout, yeah?’

  No arrangement, no plan. He never made a plan. For all she knew, he was going straight from her bed to another.

  ‘It’s my birthday,’ she said to Alice, as they drove to school.

  Alice turned to her. ‘Is it? You never said.’

  ‘I’m saying now.’ Helen took her place behind a line of cars waiting to turn right. ‘Anyway, you know it’s a week before yours.’

  ‘Is that why he stayed over?’

  Helen inched forward. ‘He has a name.’

  No response.

  ‘I’m twenty-one again,’ Helen said. ‘Isn’t that great?’

  ‘Whoop-de-doo,’ Alice replied, waggling her fingers at a boy who was pedalling past them on a bicycle. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘he’s eating icecream in the rain, the dope.’

  ‘Ice-cream for breakfast,’ Helen said, not looking.

  Sarah

  ‘Thanks for replacing the tyre,’ she said to Neil.

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘The bike is much steadier now.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he said, and that was all. They’d stopped talking like they used to, and it was her fault. She’d pushed him away when he tried to get close, kept pushing until he’d stopped trying. In the six weeks since the miscarriage they hadn’t once made love. Her fault, completely hers.

  ‘Neil and I are drifting apart,’ she told Christine, over the phone. ‘We never talk now.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it – Aidan, leave him alone. Sarah, hang on a sec.’

  She heard wailing in the background, and more sharp words she couldn’t make out from Christine. She waited, watching a woodlouse making its careful way across the floorboards.

  ‘Sorry,’ Christine said, returning. ‘I wonder if Rolf Harris would like his two little boys back.’

  ‘You’re busy.’

  ‘Not at all – they’re just acting the cod, as usual. What were we saying? Oh yes, Neil. Listen, you’ve been through a rough patch, it’ll pass.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  ‘Of course I am … Sarah, you know that woman in Kildare I was talking about?’

  ‘Yes.’ The woman in Kildare had been brought into their conversations at least once a week since the miscarriage.

  ‘I told you, did I, that Dorothy Furlong went to her last year after her husband died, and she said she helped her a lot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would I just give you her number? I can easily get it from Dorothy. I’ll be meeting her on—’

  ‘No, don’t do that,’ Sarah said quickly. ‘If I decide I want to talk to someone I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Promise you’ll think seriously about it?’

  ‘I will.’

  But she didn’t want a counsellor. She couldn’t bear the thought of some stranger, however highly recommended, picking apart her grief, feeding her tissues as she cried for her lost babies. Stirring it all up once a week, sixty minutes of regurgitated sadness in some drab little room with framed certificates on the walls, and maybe a photo on the woman’s desk of the children she’d had without any bother at all.

  Better to get on with things. Better to go to work each day and fill her mind with recipes and menu plans. Better to chat as usual to the nursing-home residents, who looked at her so pityingly each time she went back to work after a miscarriage – all except Martina, who treated her exactly the same as she’d always done, for which Sarah was profoundly grateful.

  ‘You’re back’ – her only comment when Sarah had returned the last time, and that had been it, apart from asking, somewhat accusingly, if Sarah had lost weight. Bless Martina, who didn’t force her to keep saying she was fine, honestly.

  She checked the time on the kitchen clock. Five minutes before she needed to leave for work, enough to refill her cup and read Helen’s latest letter, which had just arrived.

  Lashing rain here. I’m looking out at my neighbour clipping his hedge with a plastic bag stuck on top of his head, silly man. Thinks more of his precious garden than he does of anything else, apart from his scruffy old cat. He’s the one who bangs on the wall when I play my music – I think I’ve told you about him. Bet you’re thanking your lucky stars you don’t live next door to me: I’m not what you’d call ideal-neighbour material.

  Sarah smiled. Helen’s letters were such a tonic. She wouldn’t put it past her to have invented this next-door character just to have something entertaining to report. Plastic bag on his head, indeed.

  She turned the page.

  Now, brace yourself: I have a confession to make. I’ve taken a lover – isn’t that what they say? And get this – he�
��s thirty. Yes, I said thirty, which makes him even younger than you, and all of eleven years my junior. (Forty-one yesterday, hurrah.) I met him a few months ago at a press thing, and we’ve been an item ever since. It won’t last, of course, but I have to say I’m having a whole lot of fun. He knows what’s what in the bedroom. Let’s leave it at that, and spare your blushes. We’re both free agents, Missy, so stop judging.

  Alice isn’t impressed, needless to say, but these days nothing I do would find favour with her. She’s turning twelve next week, one step closer to her teens, God help us all.

  Hope you’re not too shocked: I know you’re a much better-behaved person than I am. What can I say? I have needs, and he’s fulfilling every one of them.

  Helen had a lover, a man eleven years younger than herself. She was having sex – lots of sex, by the sound of it – with a man she barely knew. He wasn’t her husband; he hadn’t committed to her in any way. On the contrary, it sounded like their relationship, or whatever you’d call it, could come to an end at any minute.

  Sarah wasn’t shocked, not really. Everyone seemed to be at it: every problem page she read had letters on the subject of sex, both inside and outside marriage. Sometimes she wondered if she was the only adult female on earth who wasn’t planning to have more than one sexual partner in her lifetime.

  But Helen had lost her husband when she was still a young woman, and this was the first mention of any kind of romantic attachment in all the time they’d been writing to one another. Maybe no man had shown an interest in her since she’d become a widow, maybe this thirty-year-old was the only one. Who could grudge her the chance to be physically intimate again, even for a little while?

  And if they were both free agents, like Helen said, they were presumably hurting nobody – except poor Alice, who seemed to be affected by this new development. Hopefully, she didn’t realise he was sleeping in the same bed as her mother; surely Helen was being discreet in that respect. But even so, to be introducing a man into their home, when the chances were he’d be gone in a matter of weeks, or months, didn’t seem right to Sarah.