Jumping in Puddles

by Claire Allan

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Published 2010

  by Poolbeg Press Ltd

  123 Grange Hill, Baldoyle

  Dublin 13, Ireland

  E-mail: poolbeg@poolbeg.com

  www.poolbeg.com

  © Claire Allan 2009

  Copyright for typesetting, layout, design

  © Poolbeg Press Ltd

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-84223-412-9

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.poolbeg.com

  About the Author

  Claire Allan was born and reared in Derry, where she still lives with her husband Neil and two children, Joseph (5) and Cara (ickle tiny baby).

  When she is not fending off the baby sick, she works as a reporter and columnist for the Derry Journal.

  Her addiction to handbags has been replaced by an addiction to pink dresses following the arrival of her baby girl.

  Jumping in Puddles is her third novel. You can find out more by visiting her website www.claireallan.com or her blog www.diaryofamadmammy.blogspot.com.

  Also by Claire Allan

  Feels Like Maybe

  Rainy Days & Tuesdays

  Published by Poolbeg.com

  Acknowledgements

  First and foremost, I want to thank my family. Balancing writing a book with morning sickness, hormone overload and then a new baby did not make me the easiest person in the world to live with. Thank you, Neil, for understanding and Joseph and Cara, my babies, you help me see the world in a whole new light every day.

  Thank you to my parents, sisters and brother. As always your support is overwhelming – from proofreading to attending signings with me and waiting in the wings. Thank you.

  To all the Davidson, McGuinness and Allan clans – thank you. It’s nice to have an inbuilt fan club.

  I’d like to thank my writer friends for their continued support, advice and encouragement. In particular I’d like to mention Sharon Owens for her wickedly wonderful sense of humour, Anne Dunlop, Clodagh Murphy, Trina Rea, Keris Stainton, Fionnuala McGoldrick and Emma Heatherington.

  To the management and staff of the Derry Journal and Johnston Publishing – thank you for support and free plugs aplenty. Special mentions go to Erin, Mary, Catherine and Bernie.

  Thanks to all the booksellers and journalists who have worked so hard to put my book out there and encourage people to read it. Special thanks to Eason, Foyleside and Hughes & Hughes Dublin Airport who have been amazingly supportive.

  Thanks to all the readers of my blog, diaryofamadmammy.blogspot.com, for their feedback and encouragement and thanks to Evie for suggesting the name Robyn for one of the characters. It really suits her.

  And to you, lovely reader, thank you for picking this book up!

  As always I want to thank those who believe in me enough to put my work out there. To my agent Ger Nichol and Niamh, Sarah and all the team at Poolbeg, with special thanks to Paula Campbell who steered this book in the right direction and who didn’t mind at all when I took a horrible bout of morning sickness at a very inopportune moment. Thanks also to Gaye Shortland who can see the wood for the trees.

  Finally, I can hand on heart say this book would not have been written without the support of several friends who dusted me off more times than enough and encouraged me to keep going. First of all to the ridiculously talented Fionnuala Kearney – thank you from the bottom of my heart for all your support and the kitchen island story. And secondly my VBF Vicki, who didn’t let me give up on it.

  For

  Granny McGuinness

  With much love and admiration

  1

  Niamh

  Things I hate about my husband:

  * He likes pea and ham soup – I mean, who in their right mind eats something which looks like snot?

  * He waits until he gets to work to shave, so that when he kisses me goodbye in the morning I get stubble rash.

  * He drives too fast.

  * He died because he drove too fast. Stupid bastard.

  * No one else has bought pea and ham soup from our local shop since he died. And I’ve no way of telling him I was right that he was the only person in Donegal who ate the blasted stuff.

  * He never said goodbye. And the last kiss we had was a stubbly one . . . and I had morning breath.

  * He makes me cry.

  * * *

  Things I hate about my ex-best friend:

  * Caitlin hasn’t spoken to me since Seán died.

  * She doesn’t answer the phone when I call.

  * She is a bitch.

  * She won’t tell me why she has become a bitch.

  * * *

  Niamh had doodled on the top corner of her page. It was a strange picture – her artist’s impression of a tin of pea and ham soup. She knew she was obsessed but if she stopped thinking about tins of soup she might just have to think about everything that was so terribly wrong in her life.

  Like the fact her husband was dead – and she was now a widow with three-year-old twins. And that her best friend in the whole world had turned into a psycho-bitch from hell precisely half an hour after her husband was buried in a graveyard in the arse-end of nowhere.

  And, of course, she now lived in the aforementioned arse-end of nowhere – their dream home, where it was all to begin and become fabulous. Except it hadn’t begun at all, it had ended.

  This was to be her Wisteria Lane. She was happy to leave the rat race of Derry behind and become a kept woman in their perfect home, with the porch swing and the designer kitchen island. But this wasn’t so much Wisteria Lane as Elm Street and her life was the nightmare. The fact that there wasn’t actually some psycho with knives for fingers ready to claw her to pieces in the middle of the night was no comfort. She would have quite liked that – at the moment.

  Niamh scored through the picture, looked up at three heads bowed over their own notebooks, writing furiously, and she fought the urge to push her pen through her nose till it hit her brain. She didn’t even know if it was a painless way to commit suicide, but looking around at her options she thought it might be worth a try.

  “Niamh, are you okay?” a ridiculously smiley woman in a long flowing skirt with, Niamh imagined, long flowing underarm hair, asked.

  Rolling her eyes like someone half her age in a teenage strop, Niamh nodded. She didn’t have the energy to answer that question any more and anyway she had very quickly learned that people didn’t really want to know the answer. They expected her to say she was fine. She could occasionally get away with “fine, all things considered” or “fine, given the circumstances” but no one wanted to know that at this stage, three months after her life had changed irrevocably and not in a good way, she woke up every morning seething with rage and confusion wanting to scream at the world and everyone in it.

  Nor were they particularly interested in her obsession with pea
and ham soup. Even Robyn, the new best friend who had stepped into the shoes of the psycho ex-best friend, had started to openly avoid all discussions on any kind of soup, never mind Seán’s favourite flavour.

  “I’m grand,” Niamh said, and went back to doodling, hoping that Detta O’Neill, the group facilitator, would leave her alone if she looked busy enough.

  She hadn’t wanted to come here. She’d done it to keep Robyn, her mother and her GP happy. All had been understandably concerned that Niamh had seemed to give up the day Seán died – putting her life on hold in a haze of grief and anger.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Robyn had said, almost afraid to meet Niamh’s eye, “but you should think about some form of counselling, or support.”

  “I thought that is what I had you two for,” Niamh said, looking at her friend and her mother as if they had betrayed her. Had they become tired of her grief? Should she have moved on by now? Surely three months was wee buns when it came to loss and longing?

  “Of course you have us,” her mother had soothed, “but, darling, we feel we can’t reach you sometimes. And it doesn’t help that we’re up in Derry and you are all the way down here.”

  “It’s only an hour away,” Niamh pouted.

  “That’s a long way when you are worried about someone,” Robyn said, “and you seem to have become a hermit since – you know – since. And you never get out and talk to anyone.”

  “These two keep me busy,” Niamh said, gesturing to the corner of the room where Connor and Rachel were playing contentedly with their Bob the Builder toys. “I don’t need anyone else.”

  “Of course you do,” her mother said. “You must be lonely.”

  It would, Niamh realised, have been churlish to reply “No shit, Sherlock” to her mother’s concern, but counselling wasn’t going to ease her loneliness – not unless the counsellor was planning on coming home and stroking her back gently each night in bed just as Seán had done. That kind of loneliness wasn’t going to go away.

  “Look,” her mum said, standing up and moving to switch on the kettle, “I’ve been talking to Dr Donnelly and she has given me the name of a woman here in Rathinch who is starting a support group for lone parents.”

  “But I’m not a lone parent!” Niamh shouted. How she hated that title. She was a married woman, who along with her husband had planned her family with scary precision. The twins were conceived in May, born in February, raised in Derry until they were two and then the family moved to their dream home on the Donegal coastline. It was a home she and Seán had designed together, built together and were ridiculously proud of. They had pored over interior-design magazines, taped every episode of Grand Designs and made their house the envy of the village. They had done it all together.

  Niamh hadn’t made any decisions as a “lone” anything and she shrugged off the title now. It was right up there with “widow” in her most hated terms in the world ever.

  “Look, we’ll leave you her number. She’s Detta and Dr Donnelly said she’s a dote. Think about it, pet. What harm can it do?”

  Niamh shrugged, walking out into the perfectly manicured garden and staring out at the grey sea at the bottom of the path. As the wind whistled around her, she hugged her cardigan and her grief around her.

  Talking to Detta couldn’t do any harm. After what she had been through lately, nothing could ever harm her again.

  And of course her options were limited. She knew her mother was like a dog with a bone and wouldn’t leave her alone until she was joining in nicely with village life and at least putting forward an impression of calm and happiness to her new neighbours. It was either the Lone Parents Support Group, Niamh had realised with a sinking feeling, or the knitting club. And Niamh didn’t do knitting.

  2

  Ruth

  Things I hate about my ex-husband:

  * He used to fart in bed and shout “Smell that!” as if it was something to be proud of.

  * He never bothered with the kids, not unless I threatened him with no dinner if he didn’t take them out for an hour.

  * I can’t remember the last time he told me I looked good. Occasionally he told me I looked nice and we all know “nice” means “Actually I don’t give a feck what you are wearing.”

  * He didn’t give a feck what I was wearing, because he was too busy worrying about what Laura was wearing.

  * He was shagging Laura. I would say “having an affair”, but we all know it was just shagging. The bastard.

  * And now they’ve run away with each other. Well, fair play to them, I hope they are very happy together and I really hope she likes smelling farts.

  * Oh, all that other stuff too. But we’ll not talk about that.

  * * *

  This class was going to be a new start for Ruth Byrne, she had decided earlier that day after Detta O’Neill had persuaded her to come along and join in. She’d had enough of moping about the house and wailing about the fact James had walked out for a new life with that slut down the road.

  The kids had become sick, sore and tired of her wandering around like a lost soul. When she told them earlier that she was considering coming to a confidence class aimed at lone parents, they had practically kicked her out the front door.

  It was strange, Ruth thought, or maybe not strange at all, that the children actually seemed that bit happier now that James was gone. There had been tears at first, admittedly, and a good deal of confusion, but now they just seemed to be getting on with things. If Ruth was honest with herself, she had noticed her three children laughing more recently. She didn’t want to think about what that meant about their relationship with their father.

  Their quick recovery from his departure had helped ease her guilt – the guilt that it must have been something she had done that pushed James into the arms of another woman. She must have been so bad that he didn’t even seem to think twice about leaving the home they had built together or the three children they had been raising together. Christ, Matthew was only eight. He needed his daddy, but Ruth – she berated herself – had managed to push her gorgeous son’s daddy away. And after all she had put up with too. She really must have been much, much more worthless than she thought.

  She felt tears prick in her eyes. Looking around the room, she wondered if the group could really be a benefit to her. Detta looked in her direction and smiled. Of course Detta knew her – they had gone to the same school all those years ago, before Detta had left for her new life in the bright lights of Dublin. Detta also knew all about James and his new woman. Then again, with a population of around 700, everyone in bloody Rathinch knew about James and Laura and their escape into the sunset.

  Her cheeks started to burn. She wasn’t sure any more that this had been a good idea. She looked around at the three other heads bowed over their notebooks and tried to reassure herself that each of them must be feeling as nervous as she was.

  Taking a deep breath, she settled herself and smiled back at Detta, who was talking to that poor critter whose husband had been killed in that awful accident. There’s worse off than you, Ruth, she said inwardly and continued to write, turning her thoughts back to her husband – sorry, ex-husband – and her feelings towards him.

  She wondered, if she did actually crack one day and beat him over the head with her frying pan, could anything she wrote within the confines of this group be used in evidence against her in a court of law?

  She made a mental note that she would talk to Detta afterwards and ask her if it could be an unwritten rule that anything that was said in the community centre stayed in the community centre. A bit like a hen or stag weekend, only with less drink and more chocolate biscuits.

  She would like to think this group would work. She could do with some friends. For a long time her life had revolved solely around James, the kids and home and her part-time job. She couldn’t say she’d had much time for friendships. She would watch programmes like Sex and the City and crave that closeness with a group of female fr
iends. She had to admit she was also quite jealous of all the rampant sex everyone but her seemed to be having. She was thirty-seven for the love of God – she was supposed to be in her sexual prime.

  Ruth choked at the thought that it had been at least five months since she’d had sex and, if that was her peak, she realised she might as well run off to the convent now.

  She blushed as she thought that, actually, if any of the sex she had had with James marked the best sex she would have in her life she would definitely be better suited to life in the cloisters.

  3

  Liam

  Things I hate about this fecking course:

  * I’m only here to keep my mother from sending the priest round to counsel me.

  * I’m the only man here. Now I know how Robin Williams felt when dressed up like that woman in Mrs Doubtfire. I’m one step away from support tights and fake boobs.

  * And there’s Ruth, James’s wife. Christ, I hope she doesn’t want to talk about the “situation”. I don’t want to talk about it to anyone.

  * I should be writing why I’m angry at Laura. I’m not – well, I am – but if she walked in here now and asked to come home I would let her.

  * I don’t understand why she left. I loved her from the day we met.

  * * *

  This just didn’t seem right. Liam considered himself very much a man’s man, so how on earth had he found himself in a room full of women talking about feelings, emotions and relationships?