by Alex Coleman
I’d never seen him in Cleo’s before – I assumed he’d started going during my leave of absence. He was with a bunch of his mates and, oddly enough, he wasn’t looking his best. Nothing about his physical person had changed since the last time I’d spotted him (coming out of an off-licence, carrying a bottle of whiskey), but he looked … uncomfortable. Out of place. That didn’t stop me staring, though, and while I was staring, it occurred to me that looking out of place in a dive like Cleopatra’s was not necessarily a bad thing. One of the guys he was drinking with was a neighbour of ours named Brendan Hunt. For a brief period around the previous Christmas, he had been my sister’s boyfriend. I wasn’t quite sure why it had ended, but I doubted that it was anything Brendan had done. He’d always struck me as a decent enough sort of bloke. When he caught my eye, he visibly flinched, so I smiled to let him know there were no hard feelings. Then, to my surprise, he beckoned me over. We chit-chatted for a few minutes. Turned out it was one of their number’s birthday. He’d insisted on going to Cleo’s, to the horror of his friends, all of whom considered themselves above such things. Eventually, Brendan plucked up the nerve to ask about his ex. I was halfway through an elaborate lie about how Melissa had seemed a little down lately when Gerry appeared at his shoulder and asked him if he wanted a drink. Brendan declined. Gerry turned in my direction and looked me over, head to toe. What about me? Was I old enough to drink? I would be soon, I told him. Seven months later, we were married with twins on the way.
CHAPTER 4
If anyone had told me when I was eighteen that one day I’d be living in a house worth half a million euros, I would have said, “What the hell is a euro?” Then I would have said, “Wow”. Sadly, half a million didn’t buy you an awful lot of house, not in Ireland in 2006. Ours was a bog-standard – nice, but bog-standard – three-bedroom semi on the Dublin side of Ashbourne, County Meath. Its best feature was the kitchen, which was surprisingly large. Its worst feature was the bathroom, which was only just big enough to accommodate the bath, the loo, the sink and one thin person standing stiffly upright. The bathroom had only recently risen, or rather sunk, to the worst feature position; the previous champion had been our old windows. They were seriously grotty. The frames were half-rotten and a lot of the glass was splattered with paint. Two of the smaller panes were badly cracked and all of them seemed to be permanently dirty. We’d tried to make the best of a bad lot by hanging net curtains everywhere but had only succeeded in making the place look old-fashioned and shifty. I was beside myself with delight when we finally got PVC replacements in 2001. As soon as they were in, I practically danced round the house, ripping down the nets and proclaiming a bright new day. I did worry, at first, about the front room being exposed to the street, but given our location at the end of the last cul-de-sac in the estate, I decided it wouldn’t be a serious issue. And it wasn’t. Not for the first five years or so. Even then, I was the one doing the looking in.
My first reaction on catching my husband in the act of infidelity was to wave. In my defence, I didn’t know that he was being unfaithful at the time. That information didn’t arrive until approximately three quarters of a second later.
It went like this: my headache had advanced so rapidly and so dramatically that I’d thought better of driving myself home and had ordered a taxi. When I got out at the house, I barely noticed that Gerry’s jeep was in the drive. He was supposed to be shooting a wedding in Kildare and I presumed it had been cancelled at the last minute. Such were the depths of my misery that I wasn’t even excited by the prospect of finding out why. I’d only taken a few steps up the path when I saw him through the front-room window and waved; he didn’t see me. At that point, my thought process went as follows: There’s Gerry. What’s he at? He looks like he’s running on the spot. No, wait – he’s shagging Lisa from next door. She was so far bent over the sofa that I couldn’t see her face, but there was no doubt that it was her; I would have recognised that beautiful blonde hair anywhere, even when it was hanging the wrong way. I didn’t faint or scream or throw up or simply run away. I didn’t do anything. I just stood there with my hand still raised in greeting. Gerry was wearing a tie, which he sometimes did on a whim, and it had found its way over his shoulder. That, coupled with the expression of grim determination on his crimson face, made him look as if he was tackling a potentially tricky bit of DIY. His lips were moving as he thrust back and forth and I found myself desperately wanting to know what he was saying. Was it something like “That’s right, take it all, you little slut!” or was it more along the lines of “Oh Christ, I shouldn’t be doing this, poor Jackie would die if she knew”? It was probably neither. In all the time I’d known him, Gerry had never had much to say during sex apart from “Yeah … yeah … yeah” and an occasional “JESUS!” After a few seconds, I found myself shuffling, zombie-like, two steps forward and then two to the left. Now I was standing right in front of the window. I wasn’t sure if I was trying to let them know that I was there or simply positioning myself to get a better view. Either way, Gerry still didn’t see me (Lisa couldn’t, of course, not in that position). I opened and closed my mouth a few times, but nothing came out. Then I took another step forward and placed my hands against the glass. Gerry raised his head, but his eyes were now shut tight. I guessed he was in the home straight and that seemed to snap me out of it at last. My throat, which felt as if had closed over completely, suddenly opened and a roar came belching out of me. I made fists and slammed them hard against the glass. Gerry jumped about a foot into the air, looked me right in the eye and then put both hands on top of his head, as if I was a cop with a gun. I was grateful for the fact that he didn’t move to either side – at least I was spared the sight of his old man bobbing about like a fisherman’s float. Lisa took a moment to get herself upright. When she finally succeeded, a series of looks passed across her face. I thought I understood what they meant. The first seemed to be mere embarrassment: someone had been watching her having sex. The second was definitely shock: the someone was me. The third was the one that made me want to get in there and slap her gorgeous face off. It wasn’t a grin or even a smile, but there was a flicker of something that told me she wasn’t entirely horrified by this turn of events. Maybe she was already imagining the anecdote she’d have to tell. Gerry ducked down behind the sofa at that point and reemerged doing up his trousers. He said something to Lisa and whatever it was, it wasn’t a compliment. Her response was loud and angry, but I couldn’t make it out through the glass. It occurred to me then that it was high time I stopped roaring and got in there, so I stepped back from the window and across to the front door. I was still fumbling for my key when Lisa came tearing out and brushed straight past me. My instinct was to run after her and make my first ever attempt at a rugby tackle, but she was halfway down the street before I’d even drawn breath. I stared at her back, unable to think of anything sufficiently awful to scream, until she disappeared round the corner. Then I went into the house to have a word with Gerry.
He wasn’t in the front room, which surprised me; wherever he’d gone, he’d gone there very quickly. I stomped through to the kitchen, feeling like a stranger in my own house – a stranger on my own planet – and found it just as empty. Then I heard a noise coming from above. When I was halfway up the stairs, I realised that it was Gerry puking his guts up in the bathroom. He sounded like one of those new- style heavy-metal singers that Robert and I used to row about: “Rorrrrrr … huhhh … rorrrrrr!”. I paused, mid-step, then hurried on to the landing, just in time to catch him moving on to the dry heaves. Without planning to do so, I found myself lashing out and kicking the bathroom door. The shock caused Gerry, by the sound of it at least, to choke on a gawk. For a moment I thought I’d killed him. Then I heard movement and skipped on into our bedroom. I sat on the end of the bed and rubbed my hands over my face, trying to make myself feel something (apart from the nails in my head). The toilet flushed. Gerry appeared in the doorway a few seconds later.
&n
bsp; “Jackie,” he said. His voice was hoarse and broken. I kept on rubbing my face.
“Jackie,” he said again.
I managed a reply. “What?”
As dialogue went, it wasn’t great.
Here it was, the most dramatic moment of our marriage and all we could manage was Jackie?/What?, as if we were parked on the sofa watching the telly. He stepped into the room and I shot him a look through my fingers. He stopped dead.
“Jackie, we have to talk about this.”
I dropped my hands from my face and snorted. “What are you going to say? It wasn’t what it looked like?”
“No. I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say … I don’t know what I was going to say.” His chin dropped and his shoulders heaved. Gerry didn’t cry when his beloved dog Buddy died. He didn’t cry when his mother had her stroke and went into the home. He didn’t cry when the home burned to the ground with her in it. He did cry when the twins were born, but I took the mickey about it so much afterwards that he practically stopped talking to me. So that made this only the second occasion on which I got to see my husband’s tears. There wasn’t much of a comfort to be had in that fact.
“I’m sorry,” he sobbed. “It was just this once, once, I swear to God. It will never happen again. I don’t even like her.”
It took a moment, but I found my voice. “You cheated on me … with someone you don’t even fucking like?”
“Yes. I mean, no, I –”
“You looked pretty fond of her from where I was standing.”
“Jackie, please, don’t … don’t …”
“Don’t what? Give you a hard time about banging one of the neighbours?”
He broke down completely then, fell to his knees, the works. I watched him rocking back and forth for a while and then I got to my feet. Slowly and deliberately, I went to the wardrobe and hauled down the suitcase that had been perched on top of it since the previous summer.
“What are you doing?” Gerry croaked.
“I’m packing,” I said. “What does it look like I’m doing?” “Where are you going?”
I gave it some thought. It was a good question. “I’m going away,” I said.
There was a rhythm to all this that made me think his next question would be “Can I come?” But he didn’t have a next question. He watched in silence (bar the odd sniff) as I got my stuff together, marched down the stairs and out the front door. If he’d looked out of the bedroom window, he would have seen me realising that I didn’t have my car before sneaking back in to the hall table to nick the keys to his. Headache be damned, I was getting out of there as quickly as possible.
I didn’t drive very far. Half a mile outside town I pulled in at a petrol station and yanked the handbrake so hard it made an alarming twang. As I sucked in some deep breaths, or tried to at least, I realised that I had no memories of the journey – none. The last thing I remembered was swiping Gerry’s keys, and even that seemed distant and hazy, like a dream I’d had weeks ago.
I got out of the car and walked around the forecourt in a tight circle. All of a sudden I felt an overwhelming urge to smoke a cigarette. I hadn’t had one for almost a decade (and it had been hell to quit), but I didn’t even argue with myself. I turned and marched into the shop where I bought ten Silk Cut Blue and a lighter from a sour-faced teenager who barely looked up from his magazine as he completed the transaction. As soon as I was outside again, I tore open the packet and planted a fag between my lips. It felt like such an odd thing to do – but it felt good too. I lit the end and sucked hard. For two, maybe three seconds, all of my troubles receded; even my headache seemed to turn down a notch. I thought, I can’t believe I gave this up, and meant it.
“Idiot,” someone said.
I looked to my right. A fifty-something man with an extravagant beard was staring right through me as he filled his car with petrol. He looked like one of those Open University professors from seventies TV.
“Sorry?” I squeaked.
He shook his head as if he was genuinely saddened to see that people like me were walking about in broad daylight. “It’s not a very good idea to smoke cigarettes at a petrol station, is it?” he said. He was having to speak quite loudly to make himself heard over the din of the pump.
I looked down at my smouldering ciggie. It looked back at me accusingly.
“You can read, can’t you?” the man said, tossing his head around. “There are signs all over the place, especially for idiots like you.”
This was an exaggeration, but I didn’t feel like pointing that out. It was only about twenty minutes since I’d looked in through the front-room window. My brain was still bouncing around in my skull.
The bearded man stared at me for another few seconds and then muttered something under his breath. Next thing I knew, I was moving towards him. His eyes widened and he stepped from foot to foot, gearing up for whatever was coming next.
“What did you say?” I asked when I was still ten feet away. The man stuck his chin in the air. He was trying to hang on to the role of sensible citizen, but I could tell that his confidence was heading south.
“Never mind,” he said, in a voice considerably smaller than the one he’d been using up to that point.
I was beside him by then and I leaned against the side of his car, just to annoy him.
“No, go on,” I said. “You mumbled some comment. Don’t tell me you’re too much of a coward to mumble it to my face.”
He finished pumping and slotted the pump back into its holster.
“Never mind that,” I said. “I asked you a question.” “Look, I’m just trying to fill the car up, I’m not trying to start anything, so why don’t you just –”
“No. You mumbled something and I want to know what it was.”
He shrugged and tutted.
I stepped closer still and took a huge drag on the cigarette. Then I threw it in the general direction of his petrol tank. It bounced off the car about an inch from the opening and rolled away across the ground. The man’s entire body went into a spasm, as if someone had just hooked him up to the mains.
“What …” he spluttered. “You stup . . . are you …”
“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do,” I said slowly and quietly. “I’m having a very bad day.”
He replaced his petrol cap and shook his woolly head at me. “You’re a bloody nutter,” he hissed. “You should be locked up!”
I sneered at him and started back towards my car. The realisation that I had indeed behaved like a complete moron hit me like a bucket of ice water. It was closely followed by the realisation that, while behaving like a complete moron, I could have killed us both. For a moment I thought I was going to have some sort of freak-out and would indeed end the day locked up. But the moment passed. I threw the remaining cigarettes into a bin, got in the car, and drove away.
CHAPTER 5
In the normal course of events, I would have headed straight to Nancy’s. She had been my next-door neighbour but one in the first proper house that Gerry and I ever lived in. For a good few months, our only real contact was on the footpath outside our front gardens, where we would talk about the weather or the incredibly noisy family on the other side of the street. Gradually though, we started to infiltrate each other’s kitchens and, more importantly, to have genuine conversations. Nancy scared me a little when I first got to know her properly. It wasn’t just that she was more than a decade older than me – she seemed to have done so much with her life. Voluntary work in Africa, a couple of years in London, another couple in New York, even a brief stint in Tokyo. She’d worked, at various stages, as an air-hostess, a night-club manager, a fact-checker and a hand model (I didn’t even know what the last two were). The only thing I had done that she hadn’t was have kids, and even that was more to do with youthful carelessness than pluck. Her progress from neighbour to friend to best friend was so gentle that I almost didn’t notice it. But in 1994, when she finally made good on her long-dangl
ed threat to move the fifteen miles into Dublin, I cried for a fortnight. One of Nancy’s best qualities, alongside her fearlessness, kindness, sense of humour and absolute refusal to take crap from anyone, was her ability to think clearly in a crisis. There were any number of examples – the time I somehow locked myself out of the house during a chip-pan fire, the time Robert sliced his hand open with the carpet knife, the time Chrissy drank a nice tall glass of fabric softener … Nancy was always on hand to talk sense and take action. On this occasion, however, she was firmly out of reach. She’d recently acquired a “toy-boy” (David was forty-nine to her fifty-two) and they’d gone to Paris for a few days. If I’d known the name of her hotel, I would have been on the phone – or possibly a plane – like a shot. Since I didn’t know it, and since Nancy refused to carry a mobile, I had to think of something else.
Several options came to mind. I could have called my old pals Cathy and Helen or my current next-door-but-one neighbour Mags (a sort of Nancy-Lite, perfectly reliable in her own way). I could even have sprung Veronica from work. But I did none of these things. Another idea occurred to me.
Right throughout my childhood, Melissa was a world-class big sister. She joined in all of my little doll tea-parties and accompanied me on my many fairy-finding – or at least fairy- hunting – trips into the woods behind our house. When my friends complained about their monstrous elder siblings, with their practical jokes and their cruel comments, I could only look at the floor and count myself lucky. (I sometimes wondered if Melissa treated me so well because we weren’t actually sisters at all. We certainly didn’t look anything alike. Her hair was dark, mine was either dirty, sandy or mousey blonde, depending on who you asked. I was sallow-skinned, she was pale as a stone. She towered over me, always. And then there was the wild disparity in our body shapes. I was a robust little girl, sometimes verging on the plump. Melissa was a bean-pole when she was a baby.) Her finest moment, without doubt, came when I was six and she was nine. At the time my mother had a small collection of porcelain figurines, which on no account – that was her constant refrain – were we ever to touch or, if we could help it, look directly at. I broke this golden rule on one occasion only and, of course, managed to drop (and decapitate) the six-inch-high Edwardian lady that I had decided was my new best friend. The feeling that swept over me was a potpourri of unpleasantness. It contained not just fear and panic, although both were well represented; there was a kind of self-loathing in there too, a sense of having done something that was so awful as to verge on outright evil. Melissa discovered me in my bedroom with the Edwardian lady’s body in one hand and her pretty little head in the other. Naturally enough, I was having a nervous breakdown (a very quiet one – Mum was in the kitchen directly below). Melissa listened, hugged, listened again and finally planted a kiss on the crown of my head. Everything would be all right, she assured me, before taking the broken pieces and calmly walking out. I assumed that she was going to march into the kitchen and take the blame, and was filled with gratitude and awe. But Melissa had a better plan. She did something that would never have occurred to me – she walked to the end of the street and dumped the Edwardian lady in a builder’s skip. Later that night, she asked me a very good question: when was the last time I had seen Mum actually looking at any of her figurines? I admitted that I didn’t think I’d ever seen her looking at them. Mum didn’t collect figurines so she could look at them, Melissa explained. She collected them so she could have something that was hers and hers alone, nothing to do with us or Dad. The whole point of them was that no one was allowed to touch them. That was what they were for. She’d never notice that one was missing, not in a million years. I was stunned by this display of insight. And Mum never did notice. All that was left was my debt to my sister, a debt that she never called in.
