by Marian Keyes
When she’d mentioned it to Ferdia, he’d said, ‘She’s not just some freak show.’
‘I never said she was.’ Christ, she couldn’t open her mouth to him.
‘Oh, look, we’re white and middle-class, let’s gather round and poke a stick at an asylum-seeker.’
‘I’m poking a stick at no one, Ferdia. I’m just giving the woman her dinner. But you’re studying sociology. You’ve a social conscience.’ Allegedly. She never saw much evidence of it. ‘I thought you might be interested.’
‘Johnny,’ she said now, ‘did you find any Syrian music?’
‘Found. Downloaded. Ready to go.’
‘Do you think it’ll be okay if we drink? Like you, me, Liam and Nell?’
‘She doesn’t drink?’ Johnny asked. ‘Right! Of course. Maybe we shouldn’t either. Do us no harm to give it a miss. Or is that being condescending? I’m way out of my comfort zone here.’
‘Johnny, babes … I’m kinda dreading this.’
He laughed out loud. ‘Oh, Jessie, you and your randos. Come here.’ He gathered her in a hug and she let him.
‘Do you think she smokes weed?’ Jessie asked, leaning against him. ‘Could we get some from Ferdia?’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Jesus, I dunno. I just want her to have a nice time …’
The doorbell rang. Dilly and TJ thundered down the stairs, claimed Kassandra and ferried her off. It was all so easy for kids. Nell, who’d mysteriously come without Liam, had to put up quite a fight not to be dragged along with them.
Perla presented a small box of strange East European chocolates. They’d clearly been bought from a cut-price outlet like Dealz and it broke Jessie’s heart. ‘Come in, come in, come in.’ She led the way into the living room and sat Perla down.
She was a small-framed, serious-eyed woman in loose, drab clothing and Jessie had to resist the urge to put a blanket across her knees.
Out of nowhere, Ferdia appeared. Well, that was nice. Jessie did the introductions, then asked Perla what she’d like to drink. ‘We have water, apple juice, Diet Coke …’
‘White wine, please,’ she said.
‘Oh! … Sure! What do you like? Dry? Sweet?’
‘Do you have a Sauvignon blanc?’
‘Indeed we do!’ Johnny was almost bellowing with relief.
Perla accepted the glass, took a sip, closed her eyes and sighed. ‘Wine, I’ve missed you.’ After another mouthful of wine, bigger this time, she looked around at the startled faces and said, ‘I know you have questions. Please ask them.’
Jessie, Johnny and Ferdia were silenced with embarrassment.
‘Okay.’ Perla took another gulp. ‘I’ll start. Why am I drinking?’
‘Sorry for presuming,’ Jessie said. ‘We thought Muslims weren’t allowed.’
‘I’m not a Muslim. Although lots of them drink.’
‘Are you a Christian?’ Jessie thought there might be a Christian community in Syria.
‘I’m not an anything.’
‘Okay.’ Jessie was meek.
‘Secular.’ Perla gave a smile. ‘People like to label us. Asylum-seekers, I mean.’ She was halfway through the glass of wine, and a more relaxed, sparkly woman was emerging. ‘I just thought I was middle-class.’
‘R-really?’
‘I know.’ Another smile, more twinkly this time. ‘You think we all lived in stone huts and I had to wear the burqa. But I am a doctor.’
A doctor!
‘My husband worked in IT. We had a beautiful air-conditioned apartment in Damascus, two cars, a holiday home. On weekends we went to the mall and bought stuff we didn’t need. There were lots like us.’
Right. Well. That was them told, thought Jessie. ‘How come your English is so good?’
‘Lessons as a child.’ Perla shrugged and smiled. ‘And I’ve been living in Ireland for five years.’
‘So what happened?’ Ferdia asked. ‘That you ended up here?’
‘The war. When the fighting in Damascus got too dangerous, we moved to Palmyra, a smaller city. Temporarily. I got a job. There was no work for my husband, but he took care of Kassandra. And we waited for life to get back to normal.’
‘I’m guessing it didn’t,’ Johnny said.
‘One morning we woke up to black flags and bearded men with machine-guns. They came to our home.’
‘Jesus,’ Ferdia muttered.
‘They didn’t like me being alone with men in my consulting room.’
Ferdia shook his head. ‘So they told you to stop?’
‘They told my husband to stop me.’
‘Like he was your controller?’ Ferdia tightened his lips. ‘And did he? Stop you? No. You’re brave.’
‘We needed the money. I stopped going to my clinic, but people visited me at home. In secret. But somebody informed.’
‘And did they … hurt you?’ Jessie asked.
‘Me? No. But my husband … They took him to the square and … they killed him.’ She swallowed. ‘Eventually.’
‘What happened?’ Jessie asked, in a near-whisper.
Perla dropped her eyes.
Ferdia glared at Jessie, who quickly muttered, ‘Sorry. Sorry. I’m so sorry.’ After a period of respectful silence had elapsed, Jessie said gently, ‘We’re so sorry for all that you’ve suffered. Let me get you more wine.’
‘Thank you, Jessie.’ Perla gave a small smile. ‘More wine would be very, very good.’
Unexpectedly, they all got quite drunk quite quickly.
‘Maybe we should eat now?’ Jessie suggested. Before they were entirely incapable …
The younger kids joined them for the starters, before losing interest and asking for ice-cream.
‘What about the special Syrian lamb?’ Jessie demanded of them. ‘It’s coming now.’
‘No,’ Bridey said. ‘We’ve had enough. We’re kids, we don’t need as much food as adults.’
‘Kassandra wants ice-cream,’ Dilly said.
‘Fine.’ Jessie was too tipsy to care. ‘You know where it lives.’
Jessie, followed by Johnny, went into the kitchen to fetch the lamb dish.
‘Fond of the wine, isn’t she?’ Johnny said, getting another bottle from the fridge.
Jessie rounded on him. ‘Wouldn’t you be?’
‘I wasn’t saying … I only meant it’s good. It’s normal. She’s normal.’
‘Sorry. I’m a bit pissed.’
Everyone oohed and aahed at the smell of the lamb but Jessie insisted Perla taste it first.
She took a forkful, chewed, swallowed and paused. ‘Who made this?’
‘I got the recipe from the internet,’ Jessie said. ‘Is it all right?’
‘It’s so good.’ Alarmingly, Perla began to cry. ‘It reminds me of home.’
‘Oh, now, now, now.’ Jessie clucked around her. ‘Ah, I’m crying too.’
‘And me,’ Nell said.
‘And me,’ Johnny said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Perla said. ‘I’m just a bit drunk.’
‘Cry away,’ Jessie urged. ‘No one here minds. Cry your heart out. Is it awful being an asylum-seeker?’
‘Mum!’ Ferdia said. Then, to Perla, ‘I apologize on behalf of my mother.’
‘No, don’t. People tiptoe around my situation and it is good to speak. I am happy that Kassandra and I are alive but, yes, it is awful being an asylum-seeker.’
‘Is it true that you have to sleep in a dormitory?’ Jessie asked. ‘That you get terrible food served in a communal canteen?’
‘All true. The food is usually disgusting.’ She swigged from her glass and almost smiled. ‘There is no privacy, ever. People from eleven different countries live in the dorm with us. We all have different manners, so it’s a challenge … But what truly kills any joy in life are the countless small indignities.’
‘Like what?’ Jessie asked tentatively.
‘Like …’ Perla eyed Johnny and Ferdia ‘… I apologize to the men for saying this, I do
not mean to embarrass. But not having the money for tampons is particularly depressing.’
Johnny began an intense staring competition with his knees. Ferdia swallowed hard but remained steady.
Jessie looked appalled and said, ‘I never even thought of that.’
‘No money for soap, no money for paracetamol, no money for new socks for Kassandra when the old ones fall apart. The relentlessness of the struggle makes me want to go to bed and never get up.’
‘Why don’t you work?’ Jessie asked. ‘Ireland’s crying out for doctors.’
‘Mum!’ Another explosion from Ferdia. ‘Asylum-seekers can’t work.’
‘But there was a Supreme Court decision. I read about it!’ Jessie was sick of being made to feel stupid.
Ferdia interjected, ‘They have to pay a thousand euro for a permit –’
‘And there’s a list of sixty jobs they can’t take: hospitality, taxi driving, cleaning …’ Nell said.
‘The kind of jobs that people with language difficulties can usually get.’
Ferdia and Nell did a one-two exposition on the sneaky ways the government had effectively blocked asylum-seekers from working.
‘God, that’s awful. I didn’t know …’ Jessie said. ‘I’m sorry for not knowing.’ By way of an apology, she filled Perla’s glass again.
THIRTY-NINE
… while maintaining the basic psychoanalytic paradigm, K. Horney draws attention to the fact that the girl grows, knowing that the man for the society has a ‘heavy price’ in the human and spiritual terms, and thus the cause of masculinity complex in women should look at individual and …
Jesus, he’d literally nearly nodded off there. The two weeks Ferdia had been at this job felt more like two years. All he’d done was read long, teeeeeeedious reports and reduce them to one-page bullet points for the directors. He was studying sociology because he wanted to make an active difference to people’s lives. A trained monkey could do this shit.
But he couldn’t walk away. Johnny had as good as got him the internship because, according to the boss-lady Celeste Appleton, she used to be his girlfriend. Earlier this week, Johnny had actually showed up at the office, giving Ferdia a moment of extreme confusion. Taking Celeste for lunch. ‘Old friends,’ he’d said. Trying to let everyone know that he’d once doinked Celeste, the pathetic old melt.
‘Less of the old,’ Celeste had said, applying a perfect mouth of red lipstick without a mirror – that was kind of cool.
A lot about Celeste was kind of cool. She was hot in a porny, office-ballbreaker kind of way. She stalked around in spiky shoes, silky blouses and narrow skirts, wearing sexy black-framed glasses.
Her hair was beautiful, some sort of shiny dark colour, and she wore it gathered in a heavy bun at the back of her neck.
Sometimes, part way through most of the tedious reports he had to summarize, he fantasized about opening Celeste’s hair-slide just to watch that hefty weight of hair tumble slowly down her back, like a molasses waterfall.
Thank God it was Friday. Wow. Did he really just think that? How quickly he’d become a serf.
Today they’d let him come in early and work through his lunch hour so he could leave at three to catch the train to Westport, a concession they made probably because of Johnny. It was insane making him go to Mayo for Nana and Granddad Casey’s wedding anniversary – they weren’t even his granny and granddad. But his mum had begged him to come. She was tragic, her need for a fakey happy family. She should give it up, because he would never like Johnny and Johnny would never like him.
Saoirse didn’t feel the same, probably because she was too young to remember Dad. She seemed quite happy to be part of a big Casey clan.
Ed was okay, though. Ed was sound.
Liam, on the other hand, was a clown, literally worse than Johnny.
The only reason Ferdia was going to Mayo this weekend was that Barty and Sammie were coming too. Barty was one of the most important people in the world to him. They even looked alike – Barty was a shorter version of Ferdia; people often thought they were brothers. They drove each other mad, but they were literal family.
And Sammie? Sometimes it felt like an odd relief that it was almost over. He was twenty-one now, nearly twenty-two. A man. Which filled him with cold fear. His future was unknown, but whatever it was, he didn’t feel equipped for it. Like, what did actual grown-ups do with their lives? Some high-achievers in his faculty, still a full year out from graduation, were already assured of positions in big banks or accountancy firms – but to do what, exactly? Some sort of murky workings, manipulating capitalism, making even more money for organizations that already had obscene amounts of it while simultaneously accruing a personal fortune.
Even if he’d had the stomach for that sort of work, Ferdia didn’t think he was smart enough.
His grades were okay, slightly above average. Jessie said if he made more of an effort, he’d do better. She was wrong. Even if he killed himself working, he’d never be up there with the alphas. Others in his year – a small, earnest group – planned to be social workers. Their dedication was admirable but he wanted to help on a bigger scale. However, last summer’s stint counting barrels of cooking oil in the Philippines had shown him the reality of working for a big charity. It had been ridiculously boring, and in no way gave him the good feeling he’d been expecting.
Would he be different if his dad hadn’t died? Less afraid of the future? Who knew? And what did it matter? All he could do was play the hand he’d been given.
FORTY
Jessie barely noticed the sun-drenched greenery of Westmeath as they whipped past in their people-carrier. Everyone in the car was subdued by the misery leaking from Johnny. Canice never missed a chance to tell him he wasn’t up to running the family business. Which wasn’t true. Johnny just hadn’t wanted to be a solicitor, doing wills and conveyancing, in a town so claustrophobic it made him feel as if bricks were being piled on his chest. As for Rose, she seemed incapable of love. Except when it came to clothes: she was a valued customer at Monique’s, Beltibbet’s fanciest boutique. And it really was fancy – Jessie had been staggered by the prices, while recognizing none of the labels. Most of their dresses featured robust internal corsetry. It was a whole other world.
What amazed Jessie was how much pride Canice took in Rose’s appearance. He was always given a chair outside the dressing room, and whenever Rose emerged, he made comments and suggestions, genuinely engaged. Jessie had no memory of her own mother ever buying new clothes and it was laughable to think of her dad even noticing. They’d run the general store in their small town in the wilds of Connemara. Because they lived right next door they were always on duty. The shop was open seven days a week but, even so, a knock on their window late at night or very early in the morning was commonplace, people looking to buy emergency matches or milk or a short length of rope. Dilly Parnell had lived in a flowery apron. Jessie supposed she didn’t have the need for anything else. Maybe she hadn’t had any interest. Both her parents had been humble, quiet people – old-fashioned but very loving.
They’d encouraged Jessie every step of the way and had been fit to burst with pride in her. It was nearly twelve years since her dad, Lionard, had passed – he’d had dementia and just faded away, like a picture left in the sun. His death had felt like a soft landing.
Not so when her mother died. Granny Dilly had come to live in the granny flat in Jessie and Johnny’s back garden, a gentle, undemanding presence, loved by the children. Nine years ago, when she’d died, Jessie was devastated. TJ was only six months old but Jessie decided that the only thing that could save her was another baby. Which was how Dilly – named after her granny – had come to be.
Jessie still cried for her parents, but mostly from simple gratitude for her good fortune. They’d been decent, kind people. Very different from Canice and Rose.
When Jessie and Johnny had gone to Beltibbet to inform them that they were getting married, polite conversation was
made in what Rose called the ‘drawing room’. Jessie thought it had gone okay.
It was only as they were leaving that Rose gripped Jessie’s wrist, stopping her progress. ‘My son is nobody’s second choice,’ she’d said, in a low, pleasant voice.
Shocked, Jessie acted as if she hadn’t heard. In retrospect, that had been the best approach: if she and Rose had had words, they would never have got past it. But Rose’s hostility had caught her on the hop. Especially because Rory’s parents, Michael and Ellen, had been lovely. She began to wonder if Rose’s enmity was her fault. She had been married to Johnny’s best friend – perhaps Rose was only being protective of her first-born. But Cara had been welcomed into the Casey family with the same icy hostility. There was no intel on Rose’s first encounter with Paige. But Jessie had been there when Rose said to Nell, ‘Another daughter-in-law. Lord.’
Christ, she was dreading the next forty-eight hours.
Her suspicion – never far from the surface – that no one really liked her, hit her once more. Her closest women friends – Mary-Laine and Annette – were from the Women In Business network; they tended to exchange wry identification rather than secrets of the heart.
As for Ed and Cara and Liam and Nell, if she didn’t offer spensie outings, would she ever even see them? You have to rent your friends. Where had that awful thought come from? But it was true, wasn’t it? If she didn’t shell out loads of cash, she’d be totally alone.
She had to stop thinking this way. But it just showed what proximity to Canice and Rose did to her, to them all.
At least they were staying in a beautiful place. She’d hired three holiday cottages, outside town, within walking distance of Bawn Beach and the bracing Atlantic waves. The letting agent was a regular at the PiG cookery school. She’d given Jessie a cut-price rate in exchange for two free tickets to Hagen Klein. Jessie, Johnny and the four girls were in one house, Ed, Cara and their boys in another. The third she’d dubbed ‘the young persons’ house’. Liam and Nell were there, along with Ferdia, Sammie and Barty.
