by Marian Keyes
Her phone chirped and she jumped—sleep deprivation was playing merry hell with her nerves—and sent a pink replica service station, with miniature pink petrol pumps, clattering to the floor.
It was Naomi. “Katie, where are you?”
“Toy shop. Want to get something to say thanks to MaryRose.” Slowly, she retrieved the station from the floor.
“Will I be getting a present too?”
“Haha.” The Richmonds didn’t give spontaneous presents. It might smack a little too much of kindness. “So what’s up?”
“Just checking in. Making sure you’re not still obsessing about your one chocolate a night. You can bring your own chocolate, you know, on your lezzery holiday. Or you can come away with me and Ralph and the kids.”
“I’d rather go with the lezzer.”
“Well, feck off so.”
“Not like that, Naomi. It’s that single-person thing. I don’t want to be an add-on to other people’s holidays, like they’ve taken pity on me. Imagine you and Ralph, all sun-kissed and having your grilled fish and carafe of sangria, and me sitting at the table with the two of you, like a big, interfering romance-wrecker. At least the lezzer would want me there.”
“It’s not like Conall ever took you on holiday.”
That wasn’t true, as it happened.
“And I wouldn’t mind having you along. Ralph would be less likely to badger me for sex if you were there. In fact—” Naomi was suddenly excited—“you and I could share the double room and we’ll stick Ralph in your single bed.”
“Grand. That’s all set. I’ll cancel my trip to Chartres cathedral, so. Hortense will be disappointed.”
“Never mind her.”
“She’s already bought the guide book and she’s really stingy.”
“She can go on her own. Anyway, she shouldn’t be preying on the likes of you, you’re straight.”
“Listen . . .” Katie was bursting to tell all about Conall’s visit, even though she knew she shouldn’t. But how could she stop herself? “I’ve a slight update on events.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Conall called around in the middle of the night.”
“Booty call? Cheeky bastard. Doesn’t surprise me, though. Highly sexed. God, what a nightmare. Although I wouldn’t mind so much if it was him who was on top of me instead of Ralph—”
“He asked me to marry him.”
“What? Whhell!” Naomi sounded wildly impressed. “You’re the wily one, playing the long game, calling his bluff by breaking it off with him, all the time holding out for the big prize.”
“I’m not the wily one.” Whatever that was. Hortense might know. “I wasn’t calling anyone’s bluff.”
“. . . You mean . . .?” After a long, shocked pause, Naomi said, “Christ on a bike, Katie, don’t tell me you said no.”
“He didn’t mean it, Naomi. He was a bit pissed and he hadn’t brought a ring and—”
Naomi began to wail. “I don’t believe it, I do not believe it. What do you want, jam on it?”
“He didn’t mean it. He’d have sobered up and changed his mind.”
“Why would he have asked you if he didn’t mean it?”
“Because he doesn’t like losing. Even when he doesn’t want the prize.”
“Right, that’s it. I can’t talk to you. I’m too upset. But think on this, Katie, how can I help you if you won’t help yourself ?”
Noisily, she hung up, and it felt like an assault. Suddenly, Katie couldn’t think straight, everything around her was too fecking pink.
For a few seconds she shut her eyes, and when she opened them again she stepped away from the toys. Anyway, MaryRose, being a short-of-funds single mother, needed practical stuff. This new canyon of goods featured buggies and blankets and baby gadgets. Katie picked up a white plastic something, but when she couldn’t identify it she shoved it back on the shelf. The sheer volume of baby paraphernalia was starting to overwhelm her. She should just ring MaryRose and ask her what she wanted, but baby instructions got very complicated. MaryRose would say something like: Not the one with the pale blue attachment, but if it’s red it’s okay. And it must say MM. Got that? MM. It means medium medium. Ordinary medium won’t do. They’ll tell you that ML is the same, but it’s not . . .
Retreating to the baby toy section, she picked up another random object. What on earth was this? Some sort of animal . . . Oh right, a hedgehog, a multi-textured one, to introduce the baby to different surfaces. And this squeezy flower here made eight different sounds. And what was this little device? According to the packaging, it would reproduce the vibrations of the womb. Katie fell on it and clutched it to her chest. She was buying this one. For herself.
Then, reluctantly, she replaced the little gadget. It couldn’t help her. Even when she’d been in the womb her mother had probably said things like, “Sit up straight, stop kicking, don’t stick out so much, no one likes an attention-seeker.”
Day 38
First thing in the morning, I popped in to see how Matt and Maeve were getting on and, yes, I admit it was my fault. Maeve was lying in bed, waiting for Matt to bring her coffee, and I suppose I got a little too close, just trying to see if I could get in there, you know? Maybe winkle something out of her, find out some of her secrets, because of all the people in Star Street, she was the one putting up the most resistance to me, and it was driving me mad. I swirled my way around her head—and she felt me . . .
Suddenly everything in Maeve was going at ten times its normal speed. Her heartbeat went into overdrive and her blood was pumping hard and fast through her arteries, bottlenecking at the other end, anxious to get back into the heart and get going again. Her body was flooded with adrenaline and her skin was prickling with the need for fight or flight. She clambered to a sitting position, her back against the wall, her head jerking from corner to corner, her eyes scudding wildly, trying to see everywhere at once, patroling for all possible danger. She began to sob with terror. It was happening all over again. Something was wrong with her chest, a terrible weight pressed on her lungs and she could barely breathe. Air was being pulled in through her open mouth, making an awful creaky sound, and her eyes bulged with fear. She had to call for Matt, who couldn’t be far away, he’d only gone to the kitchen, but she was paralyzed, held in a never-ending spasm, like one of those nightmares where you know you’re sleeping but you can’t wake up. “Wake up and smell the—Oh Christ!” Matt dumped the two cups on a shelf and rushed to Maeve. “Breathe,” he urged. “Just breathe. You’re okay, you’re not going to die. It’s just a panic attack. Just breathe.”
He squeezed his arm around her shoulders, so she could have the comfort of physical contact but without her airways being blocked. “In through the nose, out through the mouth, that’s it.”
In the past, Maeve had tried to describe the terror that overtook her during an attack. “Imagine being locked in a car trunk with a dog, one of those horrible fighting ones, and he’s been given speed. Imagine how scared you’d be. That’s what it’s like.”
“Keep breathing,” Matt urged. “You’re okay, you’re safe, you’re not going to die. In through the nose, out through the mouth.”
After ten or fifteen minutes of wheezy inhaling and exhaling, Maeve said, “I think I’m okay now.” Then she promptly burst into tears. “Oh Matt, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay, don’t be sorry.”
“It’s been ages since the last one. I thought I was better.”
“It’s probably just a one-off,” Matt said.
“You think?”
“I do.”
He didn’t.
Day 37
Lydia could see that Ellen’s slide had a tame enough beginning. One night, about a year and a half ago, Ellen had rung Lydia and went into great detail about a local funeral: the widow’s elegant black shoes, the fanciness of the coffin and the confused old priest who kept referring to the deceased by the wrong name. It was what passed as entert
ainment in Boyne while they were waiting for the building permit for the cinema and, only half listening, Lydia had let her chatter on. The following day Mum had called again—an unusual enough event in itself; normally, they didn’t speak more than once a week—and while she chatted away, Lydia downgraded her attention and began to paint her toenails. She was paying so little notice that it took her a while to realize that she’d already heard this conversation.
“Antoinette O’Mara,” her mum was saying. “Yes, even on this, her saddest day—because she and Albert loved each other no matter what people said about him and that woman from Trim—she was turned out like a fashion plate. Her shoes, Lydia, her beautiful shoes—”
“Wait, I know—”
“—black, of course, they had to be, but the softest-looking leather and a good high heel on them. You might have thought she’d have picked something more practical for a funeral but she’s a lady to the tips of her fingers. And—”
“I know—”
“—even when that old eejit Father Benedict kept calling poor Albert by the wrong name, she didn’t flicker. “Our brother Horace has gone to his reward.” The whole church was looking at each other and saying, “It’s all very well for this Horace, whoever he is, but what about poor Albert O’Mara? Has he got any reward at all?”
“I know, Mum, you told me all this last night.”
“When last night?”
“On the phone last night.”
“I wasn’t on the phone to you last night.”
That was the start of it.
Except, of course, it wasn’t. It had being going on for a while—Lydia wasn’t sure how long, maybe two years, maybe even longer—but it was the first time she’d noticed and, all of a sudden, memories of other odd things bobbed to the surface: the time she’d found Mum’s watch buried deep in the sugar bowl; the way Mum kept talking about “the thing you use to clean the inside of your mouth” because, inexplicably, she couldn’t remember the word toothbrush; the times when Mum called her Sally. (Sally had been Mum’s younger sister, who’d died at the age of twenty-three.)
Each of those episodes had made Lydia exasperated and mildly touchy, especially the Sally thing—“Stop it, Mum, you’re freaking me out. She’s dead!”—but this was different. This time Ellen had forgotten an entire conversation and it caught Lydia’s attention.
“Mum, you can’t have forgotten! We were on for ages.”
“Lydia, I don’t know what to say . . . You must be thinking of some other time . . .”
“Oh, you mean the other time Albert O’Mara snuffed it and his fancy woman from Trim turned up at the graveyard wearing a black hat with a polka-dot veil.”
“How do you know about that?”
“Because you told me. Last night. On the phone.”
“. . . I . . . ah . . .”
Mutual incomprehension fizzed on the line.
I am the daughter, Lydia thought, oddly wounded. You are the mother. It is my job to neglect you and to forget to phone you for weeks on end; it is your job to be thrilled to see me, to get chocolate in especially for me, to tickle my feet and to never, ever worry me.
Eventually, Lydia extended an olive branch. “Were you drinking at the funeral, Mum? Maybe you don’t remember ringing because you were scuttered.”
“I wasn’t scuttered.”
“What did you have at the do?”
“Two Baileys.”
Lydia was inclined to believe her. Ellen was an amateur drinker who got flush-faced and giddy after a couple of glasses. Then Lydia had a dreadful thought. Perhaps Ellen was necking tranquilizers. “God, Mum, you haven’t started on pills, have you?”
“For the love of the lord, I don’t even take aspirin.”
Quite true and, more to the point, Ellen was a steady stoic who had endured thirty years of marriage to Auggie Duffy and his radio and his ambitious, disastrous schemes. Her central nervous system was made of cast iron. A Valium wouldn’t have known what to make of it; it would have lain down and cried.
“Right, I’ve had enough of this,” Lydia said. “Next time I talk to you, try not to be so mad.”
She hung up and promptly forgot about it.
But she remembered it again, during brief breaks in time when she was stuck too long on a red light or having her arse bored off by a particularly tedious fare. The watch in the sugar bowl. The milk in the microwave. A hole in her memory where a conversation about Antoinette O’Mara’s funeral shoes should be.
What did it mean?
Tentatively, Lydia asked her brothers, “Do you think Mum’s losing it a bit?”
“Mum? Do you mean Ellen Duffy? Ellen Duffy our mother? She’s as sharp as a tack and she’ll outlive us all!”
And then came the first phone call from Flan Ramble.
“Who? Oh, Mr. Ramble, a few doors down from Mum?” Lydia’s heart plunged. Flan Ramble hated her, always had done, since she was a little girl who laughed at the hair that grew out of his ears, so he was hardly ringing for a neighborly catch-up.
“I won’t beat around the bush, Lydia. Your mother went walkabout last night. She was found on the Mullingar road in her nightie. The guards brought her home in the squad car.”
“. . . She was sleepwalking?”
“That’s one way of putting it . . . except that she was awake.”
“Awake-walking?”
“She was confused.”
“. . . I . . .” It was too weird. Even though she’d half-expected a call like this, Lydia felt, well, surprised. Her mother wasn’t normally a selfish person who caused trouble.
“Lydia, is it the sauce?”
“No.”
“She’s losing it, so.”
But Mum was only sixty-five, far too young to be going in the head. And Lydia was also too young for this aged-parent business. At some time, far, far away in the misty future, she knew that Mum might go a bit quavery and shrunken. On the very rare occasions that she even considered such a possibility, a picture of a little pull-out seat in the shower would appear in her head. A man would have to come and install it. But that was fecking decades away!
“If she’s going soft,” Flan Ramble warned, “she shouldn’t be driving that taxi.”
“Our mother is the most capable woman I’ve ever met.”
“She used to be, Murdy, but not any more. This is what I’m trying to tell you. Things have changed. She’s not well. She’s gone in the head.”
“She’s grand,” Murdy said.
“She’s grand,” Ronnie echoed, when she eventually ran him to ground.
Maddened with frustration, she rang Raymond in Stuttgart, who said, “She’s grand.”
“She went wandering the streets in her nightdress!”
“So did half the town. It was Good Friday, drink was taken.” Then he went smoothly into his chortley, I’m-telling-a-funny-story voice. “Did I ever tell you about the time I got locked out of a hotel room in the nip in the middle of the night? I’d thought I was going to the john and I ended up out in the hallway, the door slammed behind me And this Italian couple got out of the lift and saw me, me tallywhacker swinging free and easy for all the world to see, and the woman, a well-made specimen too so she was, says—”
“Christ, would you shut up?”
“All I’m saying,” he sounded wounded, “is it’s the same sort of thing with Mum.”
“It isn’t. She needs to see a doctor.”
“Work away.”
Ellen begged Lydia not to bring her to Dr. Buddy Scutt, GP of Boyne. “You’ll only offend him and I’ve to live in this town.”
“I won’t offend him.”
“You will. It’s your way. You can’t help it.”
“Come in, come in, come in!” Dr. Buddy Scutt greeted Lydia and Ellen with what Lydia considered to be unprofessional bonhomie. (Ellen and Buddy played on the same team on Thursday night’s table quiz at the Condemn’d Man.) Buddy dragged a chair around to the public side of his desk and the trio sat in
a little circle, their knees almost touching. Way too pally for Lydia’s liking.
She cleared her throat and tried to create a more somber atmosphere. “I’m sure you heard, Dr. Scutt, about the guards having to bring Mum home in the middle of the night.”
“Sleepwalking,” Ellen said. “Buddy, I went sleepwalking.”
Buddy nodded at Ellen, flashing a message: “Let’s humor the little missy, then I’ll make short work of her.”
“But there’s other things. She puts the milk in the microwave, she forgets conversations—”
“And you’re perfect, are you?”
“No, but—look, sorry, Mum,” Lydia said. “I’m really sorry.” She didn’t know if Ellen minded being humiliated like this but it was a surprise to find that it was killing her to do it. Unfamiliar emotions—compassion, a tender painful love—were squeezing the breath out of her. “Could you refer her for a scan?” Lydia’s internet research recommended it. “An MRI scan?”
“What for? MRI scans cost a fortune and there’s nothing wrong with your mother.”
“I’ll pay.”
“That’s not how it works. You can’t go round having MRI scans willy-nilly. There’s a huge demand. Only sick people should have them.”
“But she is sick. Sorry, Mum!”
Buddy Scutt shook his head. “There’s not a bit wrong with her. I’ve known this woman all my life.”
But what did that mean? “So if you’ve known a patient all their life they can’t get cancer?”
“Have I cancer, Lydia?”
“That’s not what I meant, Mum. You’re just a bit . . . senile or something.”
“Senile, my sweater!” Buddy interjected. “When I need to catch a train, who do I call? Ellen Duffy.”
“Look, about the taxi,” Lydia said awkwardly. “I’m not sure she should be driving at all.”
This was the hardest thing Lydia had ever said. If Ellen stopped driving, someone else would have to become responsible for her financial upkeep. It opened up a whole new world of worry.
