The Importance of Being Aisling

by Emer McLysaght

  ****

  It takes us nearly ten minutes to find a space in the Knock Garden Centre car park, such is the number of D-reg cars clogging up the place. But I’m relieved to see that the new café has a separate side entrance. I had visions of having to walk through the plant part with Mammy and being forced to stop and admire every geranium and hydrangea and peace lily along the way.

  As soon as I get inside the café I realise what the fuss is all about. Mother of God, there are cakes as far as the eye can see! Buns, pastries, fresh cream cakes – it’s heaven. I take my eyes off Mammy to grab a table and when I turn around I find her deep in conversation with none other than Una Hatton. Of course, I should have known she’d be here, being Protestant. She’d never let you forget it.

  ‘There you are, Aisling,’ she trills, rubbing Mammy’s arm. ‘Aren’t you a dote bringing your mum out for tea and cake.’

  Mum! I ask you. Niamh definitely didn’t lick it off a stone.

  ‘Hiya, Una, would you like to join us?’ I enquire dutifully. ‘We’re just about to order.’

  ‘Not at all, lovey. Don is just outside loading up the car. Now, how is everything going with you girls? Is there anything I can do for you, with the farm? Whatever you need, don’t be afraid to ask. We’re just across the road.’

  Mammy looks very interested in the lino all of a sudden. ‘Thanks, Una, but we’re … managing fine.’ Then she looks up. ‘We’re just finding our new routine, aren’t we, Aisling?’

  ‘We are,’ I say, smiling over at her.

  ‘Ah, you’re both great. Just great,’ Una says, giving us both a quick hug. ‘Don’t forget, a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips! Hahaha!’

  Mammy and I throw our eyes up to heaven in unison and proceed to a corner table where Deirdre Ruane’s little sister – the one on the county Under 16s camogie team – promptly takes our order for a pot of tea and two chocolate eclairs.

  Mammy sighs. ‘What am I going to get Cillian for his birthday at all, Aisling? Sheila says money will do, but I couldn’t arrive with nothing for him to unwrap. I’m his godmother, after all.’

  As cousins go, Cillian and I have always been fairly close, especially since himself and John started sharing the Drumcondra house. But the way Auntie Sheila treats him, you’d swear he was a child. It’s not just the way she cut the corners off his Mr Freezes until he was thirteen so he wouldn’t hurt his little mouth, or how she still insists he bring home his dirty clothes in a black sack every Friday to be washed – the latest is she’s throwing him a big thirtieth birthday party in the Mountrath in January, finished off with a dance in the Vortex. Mexican themed to celebrate his new infatuation with burritos. Sadhbh is going to come down for it, though, so it should be a bit of craic. She hasn’t been to BGB since the summer and I’m hoping this visit will be less dramatic. Mammy is under orders to nab all and any sombreros that come into the charity shop in the next week.

  ‘Jesus, I haven’t a clue, Mammy. Maybe a new check shirt? I can ask John to have a think if you like.’

  ‘Thanks, love. That would be great. Aisling, have you heard anything more about the place out the Garbally Road? The building site?’

  I’ve been meaning to drive out for a look at that, actually. Maybe it can be tomorrow’s activity. The Garbally Road goes out past Filan’s and Maguire’s at the top of BGB, quickly turning into sparse bungalows and waving fields and the small lake in the distance. The site in question is about three-quarters of a mile out that road, just before the turn for the long driveway down to Constance Swinford’s place, marked with a large brown gate and a horse engraved onto a beaten old plaque. The Swinfords have been raising horses there since I was a child. You could go for riding lessons on a Saturday morning if you wanted but Mammy wasn’t able for the notions.

  ‘Not a lot, Mammy. Like, there’s definitely something happening but nobody seems to know what.’

  ‘Tessie heard they’re knocking it down to build a Lidl. And Paddy Reilly said he heard a celebrity is after buying it – Donny Osmond or Rod Stewart or someone looking to make an investment and cash in on some Irish fresh air.’

  ‘I hardly think Rod Stewart is coming to BGB, Mammy.’

  She shrugs. ‘That’s just what I heard. And we’re very swish now that you can get gluten-free bread in Filan’s.’

  She’s right, I suppose. BGB is definitely busier than I’ve ever seen it and Knock is the same.

  ‘I was looking it up on Google Earth yesterday,’ she continues nonchalantly, and I must say I’m taken aback. I didn’t know she knew about Google Earth – although I have noticed she can get RIP.ie up on her phone these days with no assistance required. ‘It’s a grand size and has some nice outside space. Someone could do something lovely with it.’ She pauses. ‘Although new people bring new trouble.’

  I don’t know exactly what she means but I shush her as Deirdre Ruane’s little sister approaches us with two cakes piled with cream the size of our heads.

  ‘What do you mean, Mammy?’ I quiz her as the waitress runs off to get us some cutlery.

  ‘Well, I’m just saying that they opened those holiday homes outside Knock last month, and since then three bales of briquettes have been stolen from Tessie Daly’s garage and Breege Gorman had her wallet taken from her car.’

  ‘Mammy! Shush!’ The young Ruane one is headed back to us again and I don’t want it getting around that Mammy is some kind of intolerant crone, giving out about blow-ins.

  We tuck into our eclairs and there’s silence for a couple of minutes. ‘I don’t know, Mammy. Remember how suspicious everyone was when the Zhus opened Cantonese City, and Billy Foran swore blind he’d boycott it until the day he died? And now they’re practically running the Neighbourhood Watch and Feilim Zhu is dynamite on the Under 12s team, or so I hear.’

  Billy Foran didn’t bank on the arrival of the spice bag along with the Zhus and had to eat his words fairly lively – now he’s one of their best customers. Mammy pipes up again. ‘I just don’t want strangers coming up my driveway. That’s all.’ It hits me then. She’s worried. She’s worried about the house and herself. The few nights when she’s been on her own in the house since Daddy died – when I was in Dublin and Paul was on a stag in Athlone – she said she didn’t sleep a wink. I should be with her more. I decide to tell her.

  ‘I think I’m going to move home for a while,’ I declare, licking chocolate off my finger, barely pausing to gauge her reaction. ‘The timing is right. And like you said yourself, BGB is becoming very fancy and cosmopolitan. I won’t miss Dublin at all.’

  ‘Oh, Aisling, that would be nice, wouldn’t it?’ Mammy says, looking up from the remains of her colossal eclair. ‘Especially once Paul is gone back. It’ll be just lovely.’

  That’s that then. There’s no turning back now.

  ‘Come on and we’ll go before it gets too dark and cold,’ I say, looking out the window.

  As we turn on to the Knock Road back towards BGB and home, the first fat snowflakes are just starting to fall.

  Chapter 11

  ‘Will you come on! Paddy Reilly said it took them four hours to get five miles up the road yesterday. We have to get all the way to Dublin!’ It wasn’t too cold to snow, it turns out – it was just the right temperature, and the big, fat flakes fell for three days solid. And then the temperature dropped and the snow froze so that every road across the eastern part of the country is like an ice rink. There’s an Orange Weather Warning, Doctor Maher is flat out in BGB with sprained wrists and turned ankles and Filan’s have run out of salt. According to Paul, there was around €2 million worth of tractors parked outside Maguire’s last night, with determined farmers unwilling to forsake their precious pints. Mad Tom had a field day filling the cabs with snow and by all accounts all hell broke loose at closing time. People have been slipping and sliding up to Filan’s to get the essentials, but a panic went around the town yesterday evening that they were running out of bread. Mammy sent Paul out for some
emergency rations and he came back two hours later with a gluten-free seeded loaf and four hot-dog rolls. Mammy is planning to give them to the birds. The roads are still in shite, which is making the preparations to get to Dublin even more stressful. We should be grand once we get out onto the main road, but we have to tackle the road from our house into BGB and back out onto the Dublin Road first.

  It’s New Year’s Eve and Elaine and Ruby’s wedding day. Well, I say ‘day’, but they’re actually not getting married until 7 p.m. I checked twice to make sure it was the right time on the email but they’re just having a quick ceremony, no sit-down dinner. I had to make sure we had a feed before we left. Then there’s a party with vegan bits whirling around on plates, like the hen. Hardly a wedding at all but I’ll bite my tongue and leave them to it. If I can sneak some flip-flops into the bathrooms I will. Mammy’s been invited, but there were too many elements she couldn’t get her head around and she’s not really feeling up to it, so she’s opted to stay at home with Auntie Sheila to ring in the New Year. A wedding starting at seven and with no beeforsalmon or trio of desserts or best-man (or woman in this case, I suppose) speech about waking up in a baby’s cot in a hotel in Amsterdam on the stag? It’s a brave new world, that’s for sure. Mammy is wild about Elaine and has the wedding invite on the fridge, but saying goodbye to Paul will be enough upheaval for one day, I think.

  His flight back to Australia isn’t until tomorrow but he’s going to come with me and John now, just in case he can’t make it to Dublin in the morning in the snow. Tony Timoney has insisted he’s running the bus from BGB as usual and that he’ll drop Paul to the airport, but the last time it snowed he didn’t even make it out of his own driveway and had to be hospitalised for palpitations, so it’s safer for Paul to just come with us. It’s only 11 a.m. but I’m so anxious about missing the 7 p.m. kick-off and me a bridesmaid that I’m trying to hoof him out the door. Elaine has insisted that she doesn’t need me and Sadhbh to help her get ready. I was worried about who was going to pretend to put on Elaine’s veil for the pictures, or who was going to slide her shoes onto her feet, also for the pictures. Everyone knows a bride can’t do anything herself on her wedding day. She’s practically helpless. But Elaine has assured me she’s wearing a white trouser suit and she and Ruby are just going to take a few selfies, so I’ve dedicated myself to my limited bridesmaid duties of printing out the readings and making sure Elaine’s granny has a brandy in her hand at all times.

  ‘Will you come on, Paul!’

  I’ve been dreading this goodbye. Paul has been home so long at this stage that we’ve fallen back into our routine of almost constant slagging and regular bouts of war. I’ve also reverted to putting his dirty dishes on his pillow when he refuses to put them in the dishwasher. This led to a particularly memorable incident on Stephenses night when he came in steaming at 3 a.m. and got straight into bed with two bowls of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes residue and an upended plate of cracker crumbs. He came down the next morning saying something had been biting him all night and his hair was sticky. ‘Aisling! You wagon,’ he roared as I shook helplessly by the sink, trying to get the words out about what he’d been rolling around in. Mammy had to break us up as he tried to rub That Bloody Cat’s mitt into my hair. She’s taken to brushing the cat, Mammy has. It will be wearing a tie next.

  I’ll miss Paul all the same. We’ve only had one conversation about what’s going to happen when he’s gone.

  ‘Will she be okay, do you think?’ he asked me as we peeled potatoes together for dinner one evening. Mammy nearly had to fetch some smelling salts when she saw us, but we shooed her into the front room to watch some Christmas special with Graham Norton flipping old ladies off the red chair. I hope he put a cushion down for them. Mammy loves Graham Norton on account of his Irishness and his carry-on with Tom Cruise and the likes.

  ‘She’ll be grand. I’ll mind her,’ I told him.

  ‘I know you will. I feel a bit bad leaving you to do it, though.’

  ‘I’m happy to move home for a while. Just to keep an eye on things.’

  ‘Fair play, Aisling. I’d go mad, I think. I’m dying to get back.’

  ‘Well, someone has to do it. And sure look at you here peeling spuds. That’s earned you at least another two years in Australia.’

  And then he flicked a foot-long piece of peel into my face and I went at him with a tea towel and that was the end of our heart to heart. It felt strange, our grown-up talk. Like Mammy was the child and we had to provide for her.

  We’ve made Paul promise to keep up his weekly Skype calls. They’d become something of a highlight when he was away. He used to get an awful slagging from Daddy about his tan and his Aussie slang and whatever Sheila or Kylie had popped up in his recent Facebook posts. Daddy was well up on his lingo because of his decades of devotion to the lunchtime episode of Home and Away – perfectly timed for his dinnertime. Sadhbh and Elaine could never get their heads around me sometimes slipping up and calling lunchtime dinnertime. But Daddy always had a plate of chops and spuds in front of Home and Away at half one. Sure, he’d have been up since all hours. I’m a bit worried about the farm with Paul going back, to be honest. Paddy Reilly has been working away and I’ve been doing as much as I can, but Mammy is going to need to take on more long-term help if we’re to keep it going.

  Paul is finally dragging the biggest of his BGB Rovers kit bags down the stairs and through the snow and into the boot. My bridesmaid’s dress is hanging carefully off a hook in the back seat, and I’ve already instructed him to sit far away from it on the other side. John is already dressed in his wedding gear. He bought a new skinny-legged suit a few months ago and he’s getting the wear out of it, although I think it might have shrunk on its last wash. I’m not sure if either of us is ready for the outline of his bits to be visible through the crotch. I know it’s the fashion, but I feel like I could pick Conor McGregor’s mickey out of a line-up at this stage.

  Paul would be better off with a suitcase on wheels, of course, especially given the volume of sausages and black pudding Mammy has secreted in each of his shoes, but you can’t go to Australia without a club kit bag slung across your back and a jersey on. They’d hardly let you back in through Sydney airport. Mammy is standing on the doorstep holding out the scarf she bought Paul for Christmas. He’s been trying to leave it behind, given that he’s heading straight into the Aussie summer and has been talking of little else for the past few days but the sweating and the fights over the one fan they have in the flat. I wouldn’t be able for it at all. I start getting flustered in anything over twenty degrees and have to dash into bathrooms to run cold water on my wrists. I saw that trick on an episode of Xposé. They were in Marbella for a segment about sweating in fake tan. It was Glenda presenting, and I often switch off when she’s on because I find her very cold, but even Glenda warmed up a bit in the July Spanish heat.

  ‘Will you just take it?’ I hiss at Paul, eager not to make this any more difficult than it needs to be. John is already in the car. He’s not a man for scenes. Paul reaches out and takes the scarf from Mammy and she grabs his arm and pulls him in to her.

  ‘Mind yourself out there now,’ she gulps into his shoulder. ‘Don’t be letting anyone put drugs in your bag or baby snakes in your backpack.’ Mammy has been watching a lot of Border Force.

  ‘I won’t.’ Paul gives her a big squeeze and then pushes away, grinning. ‘What about all the cocaine in my wallet?’ She shrieks and shouts at him to get into the car, and when he does I notice him wiping his face with the back of his hand.

  ‘Bye, Mammy.’ I go in for a hug too. Hugging has become a big part of my life over the past few months. I was never much into it – it’s very invasive – but the girls up in Dublin are mad for it and Mammy seems mad for it these days too. ‘Go on,’ she says to me, straightening up her face with a steely resolve. ‘I’ll be fine. Auntie Sheila’s coming later with a bottle of Baileys.’ Oh Jesus. They’ll be swinging from the lampshades
by midnight.

  Chapter 12

  The occasional smell of the clutch burning is the only thing breaking the atmosphere in the car. It’s been a tense five hours and we’re still nowhere near Dublin. I’ve been trying to limit my sharp intakes of breath as John skids every now and then or gets a little too close to the car in front as we crawl along the N7. It’s half four, and with every second that passes I can feel the bridesmaid’s dress in the backseat calling out to me, ‘You’re late, you’re late, you’re late.’ I’m mentally cursing every other car on the road, and Paul’s running commentary isn’t helping. ‘Yes, I know you wouldn’t get this in Sydney,’ I snap at him somewhere near the Kildare–Dublin border.

  I haven’t seen snow like this since that winter a few years ago when the whole country shut down and even PensionsPlus was on hiatus for a few days. The state of the fridge when we eventually got back in – I had to put up extra signs in the kitchen to get things back on an even keel. So many unclaimed Tupperware containers. The thought of work makes my stomach sink, until I remember that I actually don’t have work to go back to. Well, not actual work. We have that big meeting and then I suppose I’ll find out my fate. I haven’t finished my CV yet but I’ve been keeping an eye out online for jobs – I saw a good one in another pensions firm, one in an insurance company and one in Facebook. The last one is a bit of a long shot but I spend enough time religiously looking through wedding photo albums and dutifully Liking holiday snaps of cocktails. Wouldn’t it be great to get paid for it? John has been telling me to relax and try to enjoy the break, but all he’s doing is annoying me. He’s mad if he thinks I’m throwing away my career in pensions – I got 475 points in the Leaving!

  It’s heading for five o’clock and we still have to drop Paul off at John’s and I have to get changed and put on my make-up and add another few layers of hairspray. A cold sweat rises up the back of my scalp. It’s unthinkable that I might not be there on time. A bridesmaid! I’d never live it down. I wish I had listened to Majella and gone with her and Pablo yesterday, but I wanted one more day at home.