by Marian Keyes
I’ll keep you posted.
First published Irish Tatler, February 1998.
Scarlet Pimpernel Construction
Finally we got lucky (!)
S ome months ago I wrote about moving back to Ireland and trying to buy a house in these heady days of the Celtic Tiger and escalating-before-your-horrified-eyes house prices. Well, Himself and myself finally managed to find a house that we could afford, and it had the added bonus of having the full complement of walls, most of its windows and what would do for a roof until we could afford a new one. Even better, the house managed, by the skin of its teeth, to be in the greater Dublin area, and not – as we’d been resigning ourselves to – in a feeder town a small bit north of Calais.
Would you blame me for expecting the camera to fade out on a roseate picture of me jingling my keys and grinning like a relieved loon? THE END. But it wasn’t the end. It was only the beginning…
Seconds after the ink had dried on the contract and I was visiting the new house for the first time as my house, I finally realized what the term ‘north-facing’ meant. Of course, I’d previously tried to find out. ‘What does north-facing imply?’ I’d endeavoured to attract the estate agent’s attention. ‘Hello, hello…’ ‘Quiet, please,’ he eventually hissed at me. ‘I’m talking to your husband, man to man.’
But now, as I stood in my new, chilly, funereal front room, gazing in impotent confusion as the sun split the stones outside, I suddenly understood all about ‘north-facing.’ Just where the boundary of my barely purchased house ended, the air changed from dark-green gloom to drenching, dazzling, yellow light. As every other house in Ireland baked, the sun pouring through all their windows, I shivered and contemplated putting on the heating. Why? I wondered in frantic despair. Why do I always get it wrong? Why does everything I touch turn to crap?
My friend Siobhan tells me this is perfectly normal. ‘Oh yes,’ she said confidently, when I wept on her shoulder. ‘I had that too. It’s PPPB – Purchase Post-Partum Blues. You’re after tying up every penny you’ll earn for the next fifty years in this pile of bricks and mortar. It’s natural to have a twinge of doubt. I was pregnant when we bought our house, and every time I walked in there I nearly had a miscarriage.’
‘I hate it,’ I said bitterly. ‘It’s like a crypt. I want to sell it immediately, but who’d buy it? A pig in a poke like that. Oh, they saw us coming and no mistake…’
‘It’s grand,’ she reassured me. ‘You’re imagining it.’
Then things got worse, because builders entered into the equation. Scarlet Pimpernel Construction arrived, knocked down a couple of walls, told us we’d rising damp, ordinary damp, dry rot, woodworm, shaky foundations and a dodgy roof, then simply disappeared, more elusive than Shergar.
On the day we were supposed to move in, our house resembled the scene of a terrible earthquake. Dust and plaster everywhere, concrete walls, yards of wiring, exposed metal pipes skewed at weird angles, water sluicing down walls – barely recognizable as something people once lived in. Aghast, I stood and looked at the wreckage while a sombre voiceover in my head said, ‘Hope is running out of finding any more survivors.’
There was no way we could move in – the Red Cross would have arrived to airlift us out of the place. But the lease had ended on our rented flat. Basically, we were homeless. Luckily, my parents very decently let us move in with them, into their lovely (finished) house that had a freezer full of Magnums and a cupboard that strained at the sides with its cargo of Clubmilks.
While Himself turned into a gumshoe, trying to track down the various builders, throwing himself on their mercy, and attempting to get at least one room liveable in, I regressed to childhood. Sleeping in my teenage bedroom, yelling at my mother, ‘Is my white top ironed yet? Have you washed my jeans? What crap are we getting for dinner? Not chicken casserole? Awwww! Can’t we get McDonald’s? Can I have an advance on my pocket money?…’
And she was as bad as me. There was a big tussle anytime I tried to wear anything that hadn’t been aired for at least twenty-four hours.
‘But I never air anything,’ I protested.
‘While you’re under my roof,’ she threatened grimly, ‘you’ll live by my rules.’
‘Rub it in, why don’t you?’ I countered bitterly. ‘That you’ve got a roof.’
We stayed with my parents for three weeks and I’d still be there to this day except I’d put on about a stone from all the Clubmilks and Magnums and chicken casseroles and none of my nicely ironed clothes fitted me any more. Meanwhile, the builders had kindly finished one room – the bedroom – so, amidst great trepidation, we moved in.
We’d no kitchen, so all meals were takeaways – nothing new there (I can’t cook). Water for the kettle that stood on our bedroom floor had to be fetched from the outdoor tap. Brick dust was omnipresent: in the air, between our bedsheets, behind our eyes. There was no bit of floor intact enough to put our couch on. We seemed to spend a lot of time sitting on our dusty bedroom carpet, eating chips from the local chipper, seasoned with dust, and outdoing each other planning elaborate tortures for the builders. But at least they now showed up – spasmodically, at peculiar hours and without making any kind of obvious progress, but they were definitely there. I couldn’t walk out of the bedroom without being wolf-whistled at and hearing, ‘Nice pair, darling!’
They were always keen to tell us in elaborate detail why the job was three months late and 100 per cent over budget, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to them. Not because I hated them – although, of course, I did – but because I found the whole thing so tedious. I didn’t want to understand any of it, I just wanted it to happen.
But one day Himself had to go out, and he left a list of things I was to discuss with Eddie the builder when he turned up. ‘Don’t scare him,’ he ordered. ‘Try not to act womanly in any way. He’s a builder, it makes him nervous.’
‘Eddie – ’ I read from the list: ‘The hole beside the fridge is too small. The plug socket can’t fit.’
Indisputable.
‘Ah, but it has to be that size,’ Eddie insisted. ‘Do you see this?’ – holding up a wire – ‘Well, that needs to go through there and with the transformer lined up with the…’ Off he went, while I faded out and came to, faded out and came to. Words like ‘plinth… wiring… sockets… joists… kango hammer…’ floated at me, bounced right off and fell on the floor. There is simply nothing in me for words like that to hook on to. I’m a smooth surface and can’t retain them in any way.
So when Himself came back, I was hard put to explain why nothing on the list had got done. ‘Eddie, he said… words,’ I explained miserably, ‘and I just couldn’t bring myself to care.’
‘Ah, now,’ he complained. ‘We’ll never get this place finished!’
And so far he hasn’t been proved wrong.
First published in Irish Tatler, September 1998.
Get that Dustbin out of my Relationship Corner
Feng Shui – sure, haven’t I enough to worry about! You can’t open a magazine or turn on the radio without hearing all sorts of advice about the relationship sectors and prosperity corners of your home. In China they take it very seriously. On the telly the other day there was a programme about an enormous luxury block of apartments that’s just been built in Hong Kong. But there’s a huge, gaping hole, the size of four flats, in the middle of it. Not, you may be surprised to hear, as the result of shoddy workmanship, but put there deliberately. The reason: so that the ‘Ch’i’ – that’s energy to the likes of you or me – can flow through the hole from the mountains to the town.
Now, under normal circumstances, I’d be an ideal candidate for the whole Feng Shui malarkey – racing out to buy a sackful of wind chimes, painting my front door red or moving my entire flat four degrees to the south as required. I’m very gullible when it comes to signs and portents and presentiments and omens. I love the idea that you can heal your life by doing something outside of yourself. To that end, I have subliminal se
lf-help tapes. I don’t listen to them, mind, but I have them. I hold with aromatherapy. I know someone who had a chakra healing done and I wanted one too. I’ve had my aura read and I have plenty of truck with horoscopes and tarot readers.
But with Feng Shui they’ve just pushed me too far. It’s one worry too many in a world where they’re always inventing new things for me to fret about. And I usually do my best to obey – I’ve stopped drinking tap water, I don’t go out in the sun without being smothered in Factor Eighty, I feel guilty for drinking fizzy drinks because they allegedly cause cellulite, I don’t take my make-up off with toilet paper because it has wood shavings in it, I rarely brush my hair when it’s wet and I’ve stopped my daily asbestos rub.
But I’ve tried to close my ears and eyes to Feng Shui, because the nightmare that is my new house trundles on (sorry if I’m boring you), and I’ve enough tangible worries concerning it. Like, will the plumber ever come back to fix the shower? Or the fact that the paint looked like a lovely mature shade of clarety red on the chart, but as soon as I’d slapped it on to the shelves, it mutated into Barbie pink. Clashing so badly with the red couch that they go for each other regularly in hand-to-hand combat and have to be separated.
Right now, I’ve no time, energy or money to deal with intangible worries about the house. Hauntings, bad ley-lines, black streams etc. will have to wait a while. Nevertheless, I’ve managed to pick up enough about Feng Shui to feel very edgy. If I don’t want to shag up my life, it’s a veritable minefield of dos and don’ts, some of them heavy-duty.
For example, what if my dwelling place faces the wrong way? It’d be an awful lot of work to change my front door to where the back door is, not least because anyone visiting me would have to come via the house-behind-me’s yard and over the wall. Also, I have a horrible feeling that the optimum location for a house is beside running water. How am I going to manage that? Until I do, am I doomed to be a miserable failure? It was a happy day, I can tell you, when the men working on the road burst a pipe and water gushed past the gate for a couple of hours. I felt briefly at peace then, like I was doing everything right, for once.
I regarded it as a great achievement when I managed to get curtains up in the new bedroom so that the neighbours weren’t subjected to the sight of Himself’s dangly bits of a morning and driven to choke on their Fruit ’n Fibre. (Even if the curtains were old ones from our flat in London and consequently miles too short, so that they hung at half-mast like a pair of Bay City Rollers trousers.) But my warm glow of homemaking triumph quickly soured when I realized that my husband’s modesty may be intact but I still couldn’t tell my relationship corner from a hole in the ground.
For all I knew, I could be shaving my legs in that self-same relationship corner. Does that mean Himself will leave me? And I’ll have no one to blame except myself ? Or what if I inadvertently put my telly in the work corner? Does that mean that I’ll spend my days thrun in the bed, watching reruns of Hart to Hart and Hotel, rather than knuckling down and trying to write a book and thereby putting bread on the table? (Not that I would ever dream of spending my time doing such an indulgent, wasteful thing between eighty-thirty a.m. and nine-thirty a.m. and between one p.m. and two p.m. Monday to Friday, except on bank holidays when only Hart to Hart is on. God, no!)
And I’m not the only one tormented by anxiety. My friend Ailish had a sleepless night after she heard a Feng Shui expert say that ideally you’d need a pair of ceramic dragons at your front door to guard the house. ‘I’m worried,’ Ailish confided, ‘about where I’ll buy the ceramic dragons. Do you think that one of those shops in Temple Bar might have them? Or a garden centre, maybe?’
I can see her point. I’ve only been in my house-cum-building-site a couple of months and already I’ve been broken into. But what’s wrong with smashing a couple of bottles and sticking the broken bits into Polyfilla along the back wall, if it’s guarding you require? Or a ‘Beware of the Dog’ sign? All too prosaic, I’m afraid. Feng Shui is growing in popularity, and a consultation is almost as much a feature of moving into a new home as a nervous breakdown and a housewarming party.
Will Feng Shui become something for twenty-first-century children to make their parents feel guilty about? Like mothers in the sixties cringing with shame for giving their family shop-bought cake. Will teenagers of the future blame their sense of inadequacy not on the repression of the Church or the strictness of their parents – which was plenty good enough for my generation – but on the fact that their bed was at the wrong angle to the door, thereby ‘cutting’ good Ch’i?
In the end I had to do something, however tokenistic, to assuage my Feng Shui anxiety. Slightly sheepishly, I bought a wind chime and hung it by the front door to bring general good fortune to my home. And the next time I came in I forgot it was there and got a belt in the eye that nearly blinded me.
First published in Irish Tatler, October 1998.
Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Garden
Gardening is the new sex! Well, maybe not, but it’s certainly the new something. Once the sole preserve of oul’ wans and Protestants, gardening has suddenly achieved popular cachet, and has become – no really, there’s no getting away from it – it’s become sexy.
Out of nowhere, people that I envied for their style, panache, Ghost dresses and thin thighs have begun to enthuse about their ‘outdoor room’. So if these style warriors say gardening is groovy, then I suppose it must be.
Perhaps it was inevitable. Interiors were the thing, the new rock ’n’ roll or whatever. One minute it seemed that no one gave a damn about the colour of their walls, the next everyone was watching Changing Rooms and yearning for a sleigh bed. And now that things have progressed to the point where it’s perfectly acceptable for two straight men to have a discussion about which couch they’re thinking of buying, maybe the last bastion of fusty adulthood is set to fall.
Hmmmmm. I wasn’t convinced. Too fast to live, too young to garden. Tending plants was the most un rock ’n’ roll thing I could think of.
I had a normal upbringing – there was a smallish patch of grass at the back of the ancestral family home. Two or three flowers might show their faces every spring, because pollen had been carried on the breeze from someone else’s garden, but that was about the size of it. Gardens were places where you hung clothes to dry. Where you stored broken bicycles. And when the rows broke out about the cutting of the grass they became a battleground. You see – perfectly normal! My childhood was idyllically free of talk of ‘hardy perennials’, ‘mulch’ or ‘bedding plants’. Instead, ‘Cut the grass!’, ‘Cut it yourself !’ was the only gardening conversation that took place.
After I left home, I lived for many, many years in a series of grungy flats, where the only amenities that mattered were Fridge, Telly, Bed. If any of the flats had a garden, no one in their right mind would venture into the eight-foot-high grass, for fear of tripping over the rusting, abandoned cars, buried bodies, et cetera left by a succession of equally unconcerned previous tenants.
Then, about a year ago, I bought a house, and the house had a garden. Not that that concerned me initially. I was too interested in the fact that my new home was uninhabitable, thanks to Scarlet Pimpernel Construction, who’d enthusiastically knocked down lots of it, then shagged off before they’d put it back together again.
After several tortuous months, the house was pieced back together. We had a few halcyon days gloriously savouring the novelty of a roof over our heads, convinced we’d never worry about anything ever again. Then, in typical never-satisfied human fashion, we started to paw around for Other Things to Worry About. Which is where the garden came in.
I got the shock of my life when I realized that the green stuff beyond the window was my responsibility. And that it grew. Yes, yes, I know it’s elementary. I knew in theory that grass got longer, that weeds appeared in flower-beds, that hedges got out of control if they weren’t tended. I just never before thought that any of these facts applied to
me.
I was genuinely upset. I hadn’t time to get my own hair cut, never mind deal with a twenty-foot-square version of a head of hair. But there was more to it than that. I just didn’t want to be a person who gardened.
I cannot tell you the scorn I used to pour on people who cared about their gardens. They sent me wild with irritation, for reasons that I still find hard to articulate properly. Their stupid gloves, their ridiculous hats and, above all, the odd things they said. To my mind, it was as if they belonged to a cult or had their own secret language when they discussed ‘glads’ and ‘daffs’, or cooed hysterically over being allowed to take a cutting from someone else’s hedge, or slithered into a pit of gloom because the snails ate their roses. Cop on, there are people starving! I always yearned to say.
And one of the worst things that could happen to me was someone offering to show me around their garden. There they’d be, waffling on about this phlox and that sweet pea, lamenting the lack of rain, swooping to pluck greenfly from leaves, like people who brush away imaginary fluff from their clothes. Christ, what a nightmare. Talk to me about real things! I wanted to scream. Connect with me as a human being.
I found the whole thing repellently anal. And yes, flowers are beautiful. I love flowers. So much so that more than once I’ve initiated an argument with a loved one, and energetically reapportioned blame, just so I’d get an apology bouquet out of it. But as far as I was concerned, gardening had nothing to do with flowers. Proof positive – you weren’t let pick the flowers you grew in your garden. So what was the point?
Because Himself and myself are totally clueless, we tried to find some sort of gardener to try to keep a lid on things, and a friend of a neighbour yielded a plump, angry man who marched into the house and declared, ‘I’m no gardener, but I’m a learner. I want a cup of tea every hour on the hour, or else I’m off.’ (I’m not making any of this up, I swear.)
