Under the Duvet

by Marian Keyes

  Anyway, a while ago I decided to have a party. A proper party, with invitations and catered food and what-have-you. So I made a list and was pleasantly surprised to find I knew so many people. Next I constructed an invite on the computer, sent it out and started deciding how much drink and food to buy. I even – more fool me – started to get excited.

  But over the next two weeks I got an alarmingly high number of refusals – people going on holidays or having babies or getting married and all sorts of other unreasonable excuses. If I heard the words ‘Any other weekend and we’d have loved to come’ once, I heard them a hundred times. And even though the invitation said RSVP, not one person had respondez’ed to say they were coming.

  The cold hand of fear began to stroke me and all of a sudden I was sorry I’d ever started this. Then I bumped into an invitee in the street and he said that of course he’d be there. He even said he was looking forward to it! I tentatively took it as a good omen and decided to stop feeling like Norman No-Mates. If I hadn’t had a definite no, then it meant yes.

  And so to purchase the jar!

  Being a dyed-in-the-wool Irish person, I asked the man in the off-licence how much drink we’d need for a hundred people (the anticipated number of guests). And when he told me, I said, ‘OK! Double it!’

  ‘Double it?’ Himself asked anxiously.

  ‘No! You’re right! Triple it!’

  Next, the food. We’d decided on canapés because we didn’t feel able to cope with plates: no point trying to run before we could walk. But the cost came as a big shock. ‘No, no, I’m talking about mini-quiches,’ I explained to the girl, thinking she’d misunderstood my request. ‘Not full-size ones.’ But there had been no misunderstanding and I was baffled as to how they could cost so much. I mean, they’re tiny. Mini, actually – the clue is in the name. Besides, no one eats them: instead they throw them at people they fancy, then grind them into the carpet when the object of their desire spurns them.

  But we bit the bullet and paid up.

  In the final week before the big night, the cancellations continued to pour in. I was in the horrors at the thought of no one, no one at all turning up. I started going through old Filofaxes and ringing long-disconnected numbers or having conversations that went, ‘So he’s moved to Argentina? Six years ago? Doesn’t time fly? Anyway, I don’t know you, but you sound nice – would you like to come to a party on Saturday night? Please.’

  In a desperate attempt to people the party with bodies – at this stage I didn’t care who they were – I rang all my friends and begged them to bring everyone they’d ever met. In a moment of inspiration I told Tadhg – a young man who knows how to enjoy himself – to bring all his friends. He studied me carefully and asked if I knew what I was getting myself into. I assured him that I did. ‘Well, on your head be it…’ he murmured.

  The day of the party finally dawned and I took stock: the situation was bad but not unsalvageable. There were still seventeen people from the original list who hadn’t cancelled. Tentatively hopeful, myself and Himself went out to collect the food and arrived home to find seventeen last-minute refusals blinking on the answering machine.

  It was my darkest hour. I was desperate to cancel the whole horrible, misconceived idea, but couldn’t. I looked around at my food-filled kitchen and felt like all the mini-quiches were laughing at me.

  The invitation said nine-thirty. On pain of death, my closest friends were there at nine. At a quarter to eleven it was just me, them and the despair. We’d got in a load of Red Squares for the ‘young’ people, but the thirty-somethings started milling into them with the enthusiasm of the very miserable. Fuelled by vodka and taurine, someone half-heartedly suggested that we could all have a good time anyway. Someone else told her to cop on.

  Suddenly, at ten to eleven, the gloomy silence was shattered by the doorbell ringing; it was a man I couldn’t even remember inviting, bringing six others with him. Seconds later the bell rang again and it was someone who’d cancelled (‘the wedding’s off!’), also trailing a small entourage. They made straight for the kitchen and began flinging mini-sesame toasts at each other. I began to relax. This was starting to look like a party.

  The bell rang again and when I opened the front door, the garden was filled with a veritable sea of people – Tadhg had arrived, with fifty-seven of his closest friends! I stood on the step feeling like me laddo in the Sermon on the Mount, and welcomed them in. ‘The Red Squares are that way,’ I pointed. ‘Oh, sorry, they seem to be all gone.’

  The bell went again. And again. I decided to leave the front door open. I tried to get into the kitchen but couldn’t because of the volume of people crammed in there, eating, drinking, laughing their heads off and flicking ash on my wood-laminate floor. In the hall, a girl in a gold lamé halter-top called a girl in a fake Pucci dress ‘a minger’. Apparently they were fighting over a dotcom contract. One of the thirty-something Red Square enthusiasts puked. Another one of them had Tadhg in a headlock and was telling him how she’d always fancied him. Things were looking good!

  At half-twelve, a neighbour from a few doors up arrived. Funny – I didn’t remember inviting him, he was one of the few people in Dublin that I hadn’t invited. But he hadn’t come to partake of the knees-up, he’d come to tell me that he was calling the peelers if I didn’t keep the noise down. It was then I really relaxed. This party’s a hit.

  First published in the Evening Herald, May 2001.

  ALL GROWN UP

  Ten Housework Laws for Men

  1 Throw away Quentin Crisp’s Guide to Housekeeping. (Quentin Crisp is the person who famously said that if you stop dusting, the squalor doesn’t get any worse after the first four years.)

  2 Scrub all empty Cornflakes bowls IMMEDIATELY, before the little bits get the chance to set diamond-hard.

  3 Wash the windows – and stop telling us that grimy glass is an economical alternative to blinds.

  4 If you’re not going to do your own ironing, then be very careful about what clothes you buy – there is a better chance of getting the wrinkles out of a bloodhound’s face than out of 100-per-cent-linen shirts.

  5 When you finish the Weetabix, put the empty box in the bin – and not back into the cupboard, where it masquerades as food until someone is very, very hungry and very, very disappointed when they discover that it’s not.

  6 Cooking a delicious meal involves many essential tasks. Making the smoke alarm go off is not one of them.

  7 Towels are not as delicate as they look. They can stand being washed more than twice a year.

  8 Ditto sheets.

  9 Stop pretending that you think that women have an automatic kinship with people who come to the door (milkmen, coalmen, poolsmen, travellers, door-to-door artists, bob-a-jobs, government-training-course drop-outs offering to trim your hedge, escaped criminals, et cetera). You fool no one by standing nervously in the hall shouting towards the shower, ‘Er, there’s someone at the door – come down, would you? I’d go myself only you’re good at this sort of thing. Are you there? Hello?’

  10 I don’t know either where the camera/Nurofen/letter from the insurance is – look for things yourself once in a blue moon. And write a hundred times, ‘The womb is not a locating device. The womb is not a locating device. The womb…’

  First published in the Irish Independent, June 1999.

  Gilt Trip

  Once upon a time, I didn’t care. I didn’t give a damn. I would no more spend money on the hovel that I inhabited than I would go to a classical concert. My home was a rented flat in London, and it was a haven of hand-me-downs – towels by Mammy, dralon couch by Oxfam, bed by the same person who built Noah’s Ark.

  And then – seemingly overnight – it all changed. One minute I was refusing to buy any blinds and having to flatten myself against the wall to get dressed without the occupants in the house opposite getting a ringside view of my bits, the next I was weighing up the merits of ash slats versus rice-paper. The momentous day came wh
en I’d only enough space on my credit card to buy a pair of flared-heeled, rubber sandals or a three-wicked candle the size of a dinner plate – and the candle won. Truly this was the instant that I crossed into adulthood!

  And then I took a look around my flat – and the shock nearly killed me. I couldn’t believe I’d ever thought that the Laura Ashley flowery cast-off duvet cover that even my mother didn’t want was better than no duvet cover at all. The scales fell from my eyes, I saw the error of my ways and slowly I tried to rebuild my life.

  I painted – creams and beiges (with heavy post-modern irony, of course), with the occasional strategic panel of colour. I saved up and purchased: Arne Jacobson kitchen chairs (well, close copies anyway), a glass and chrome coffee table (on sale) and, pride of place, a Loge chair. (I couldn’t bring myself to sit in it for the first month, so great was my respect.) I precision-placed: a white vase, a stainless-steel-framed mirror, a lamp made mostly of coat-hangers.

  But attempts to put my style-free past behind me and move on with my life were hampered by my relatives. When I told my mother that the so-busy-they-could-trigger-a-fit curtains that she’d palmed off on me were on their way to that great drapers in the sky, she said anxiously, ‘But they’re good quality. And lined. It would be a shame to waste them.’

  Quality? Quality? What did quality matter? She was speaking to the woman who was thinking of dumping her boyfriend because he didn’t quite go with the dusty grape she’d painted one of her bedroom walls.

  ‘You’re obsessed,’ said Mammy. Perhaps I was.

  But things got worse. My Great Auntie Eileen and Great Uncle Mikey got wind that I was doing up my flat and decided to help. By arriving on my doorstep with a great big lump of a curlicued gilt mirror. ‘It was your granny’s,’ they chorused. ‘We’d love you to have it.’

  If only there wasn’t such a thing as manners. If only I was the type of person who could say, ‘Are you out of your mind? It’s completely hideous, I wouldn’t be able to sleep under the same roof as it.’

  Some people can do that – the same kind of mythical people who can downsize their lives. They may, of course, cause a family rift that endures for decades, but what do they care?

  Instead I stood aside and let them heft it into the hall.

  ‘Right!’ said Great Uncle Mikey, wiping sweat from his brow. ‘I’ll just get the table.’

  Table! There was a table? Yes. A gloomy, mahogany chunk. Apparently it was the first thing they’d bought when they got married, and was steeped in sentimental value.

  Too late, I tried protesting that it was very thoughtful of them, but I’d no room.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ they said, surveying my (much-laboured-over) light, bright, white, airy space. ‘You’ve nothing here!’

  My first instinct was to shove the unwanted furniture in the attic. Except I didn’t have an attic. Basement flats usually don’t. Then I wondered if I could look on this as an opportunity and do something with the invading stuff – other than just chop it up for firewood? Couldn’t I paint the table white, perhaps? Although what would happen when Eileen and Mikey called around unexpectedly? I’d have to do some swift scrubbing with methylated spirits to restore it to its original glory(!).

  How about hiding the things behind my bendy wooden screen? But I realized wistfully that I’d plans for that screen. Where else was I going to put my (barely used) badminton racket, boots that need heeling, the broken chair (I should have paid the extra for proper Arne Jacobson) and all the other crap I’d been hoping to throw in the corner and mask with the calming blankness of a protective screen?

  Luckily, though, we live in fortunate times. Burglars! Where would we be without them? And if you’re one of those unlucky few to have been overlooked by the redistributors of wealth, why, you can always pretend! And all I have to live with now is my guilt…

  First published in Living etc, September 1999.

  The Agony and the Ecstasy, but Mostly the Agony

  A few years ago, I left London and moved back to Ireland, and was having a whale of a time until I realized that everyone was expecting me to behave like an adult and buy somewhere to live. This was written mid-hunt.

  For the past five months my life has been acute misery. Living hell. A torment of exquisite anticipations, followed by crushing disappointments. I haven’t had a Saturday afternoon to myself since last May. By now you’ll surely have deduced that I’m trying to buy somewhere to live. I had hoped that through a combination of eternal youth and acute poverty I’d never have to indulge in this terrible practice – but the gig is up.

  I’m a purchase virgin, and while I’d been told that my first time would be painful, nothing prepared me for the extent of the agony.

  The drill for the past five months has been as follows: I find a house in the paper that’s just about affordable and off I go to see it, and if it’s anyway half decent, I want it with a terrible needy desperation borne of the fact that every stick of furniture I own is languishing in a crate in a warehouse on foreign soil. (Himself sold his shoebox in London, and the house we had our eye on in Dublin fell through. I mean, literally fell through – the bedroom floor into the kitchen below. Think twice before buying old houses.) Suddenly, all the other people strolling around the property become my mortal enemies. I give them hunted looks and find I’m receiving identical hunted looks in return. The world of house-buying is a dog-eat-dog one and with each property there can be only one winner. With sidelong, anxious glances I try to assess whether they like the place and, more importantly, if they’ve money or not. I can hardly stop myself from snarling at them, ‘Get out, you usurper, this house is mine.’ Instead, I force myself to murmur in their earshot, ‘Christ, what a kip, you’d want to be mad to pay good money for the likes of this.’

  Then my mother told me that 90 per cent of people who view houses only go for the crack. They have no intention of buying, they’re just there because there’s nothing good on telly.

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ I said. ‘What kind of poor, sad eejit spends their spare time doing that?’

  ‘Some people quite enjoy it,’ she said, a bit tersely.

  This gave me great comfort until the next time we looked. I walked into a bedroom to hear a sleek woman say to her equally sleek fella, ‘This could be Sebastian’s room and Cressida could have the other one.’ Tearfully I turned to Himself. ‘We haven’t a hope of getting this one. They’ve got children called Sebastian and Cressida. They must be loaded!’

  We’ve actually gone to auction on a couple of places, and both times we’ve been pipped at the… well, I was going to say post. But it’s not true. I’d have been delighted if we were pipped at the post. Instead we were pipped before we were even out of the starters’ blocks. Outbid by miles, so we didn’t even have the consolation of being able to leave the auction room with a ‘I coulda been a contender’ swagger.

  But the real problem with trying to buy somewhere to live is, of course, the estate agents. I hate estate agents. I know I’m probably preaching to the converted here, but I’ve never had experience of them before, so please humour me. I loathe them with a passionate intensity. Some of the women aren’t the worst, in fact one woman called Dorothy is very nice, but I hate the men.

  It’s not just that they are breathtakingly patronizing, stunningly insincere liars, although of course that helps. It’s the fact that men estate agents can’t actually see me if I’m not accompanied by a man. I become invisible if I go in the front door of a property on my own. While the spawn of Satan takes other people’s details, I loiter, totally ignored. When I try to help myself to a brochure, he absent-mindedly slaps my hand away, the way you would to a small child trying to grab a box of matches. But when Himself appears by my side, after parking the car or whatever, Mr Estate Agent suddenly glides forward, so unctuous he could do himself an injury, greasy paw proffered for the customary dead-fish handshake. ‘Have a brochure,’ he offers, flicking hard-shark eyes over Himself, trying to gaug
e his annual income to the nearest fiver.

  ‘It’s your one you should really be talking to.’ Himself good-humouredly indicates me. ‘I’m unemployed, she’s the breadwinner.’ Mr Estate Agent recoils in horror. Then there’s a frantic scrambled attempt to wrest the brochure from the unemployed person’s hands – no job, no piece of paper covered in lies – and a hasty attempt to make restitution. ‘Well, if your wife would like to…’

  ‘I’m not his wife,’ I often find myself saying, even though I am.

  But last Saturday I suffered the worst indignity to date. The viewing was due to start at two-thirty, but we got there slightly early. We idled in the car for a while, but after I’d searched in the glove compartment and the side pockets and failed to find any sweets, I got tired waiting. ‘Come on,’ I said at two-twenty-eight, ‘We’ll chance it.’

  But as we advanced up the path, the front door of the house opened and a twelve-year-old in a confirmation suit poked a narky head out and angrily shooed us away. ‘We’re not ready for you yet,’ he shouted.

  I turned to Himself. ‘The rude little brat,’ I gasped. ‘I’m going to tell his mother.’

  ‘That’s not a child of the house,’ Himself said. ‘That’s Ernest Conner from Patronize and Swizz, the Estate Agents.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ I was stunned. ‘I’m not buying a house from someone whose balls haven’t dropped yet.’

  However, I’ve learnt a lot from it all. I know now that people really do fall in love with their abusers. Because, despite everything, as soon as Thursday rolls around again there I am, buying the paper to see if the perfect house has miraculously materialized within its pages, then planning my strategy to get round as many places as possible on Saturday…